An all amelican Tintin movie has been threatened. I suppose this is in response to my occasionally stated indifference to the massive collection of garbage forgettable feature films made about potentially slightly less forgettable tv shows from previous decades. The opportunity to make a big public show of messing up something I like rarely presents itself. Something specific, I mean. Not like music or cultural identity.
If the movie is popular, it might lead to American popularity for the comics. And that might lead to others of its sort being translated to English and adequately distributed outside India. Although supposedly the Tintin was popular in Britain, so I guess the popularity would have to exceed that, and given Amelican’s distrust of anything over a year old plus the French, that happening strikes me as unlikely. Of course Tintin is Belgian, but Americans also distrust distinctions made regarding nations they don’t trust.
I read that Tintin (2009 film) will be neither actor-acted nor cartoon-animated. It will be some strange motion-capture hybrid of the two.
Weh, I just hope it doesn’t end up looking like SKYLAND, and that if it does there won’t be any dance scenes.
(I don’t really know what Skyland is beyond that this is a scene from it and that it was unsettling when I witnessed it.) Even still it won’t be as creepy as Cars. Fichus, I wish I’d put this up when I wrote it because I don’t want to start thinking about those cars again. I’ll be nice about the [newer] robot movie and [presumably first of many] rat mov[ies] but those cars are nasty.
I also hope Tintin isn’t “updated” to fit current technology and fashion and linguistic trends. Though author Hergé was good about always having Tintin in a current make of automobile, airplane or water-traversing vessel, I don’t trust anyone else, much less politically and commercially-conscious Americans to take on the task of deciding how far that ought to go. That’s the sort of thing that’s almost never done well. I don’t want Tintin to have an iPhone or to make jokes about myspace, that’s what I’m saying. That didn’t ruin the Iron Man movie, but definitely a couple seconds. And it’s rather hard enough to take Optimus Prime seriously when he’s not talking about E-Bay. But by virtue of being magical gimmicky robot-men, they’re more inherently updatable anyway. Tintin stories rely a lot on travel taking a long time and people not being able to look things up on the internet and finding suspicious crab tins when they get out to crank their Model-Ts or whatever.
Co-director Peter Jackson is from New Zealand, yes, but one of his standard contract stipulations is the creation of a role involving Andy Serkis clambering around semi-erect and grunting which doesn’t fit in here at all unless we’ve really modernized Tintin and Captain Haddock’s relationship.
Not that I delude myself with the notion that homogayality is anything new, but I like to think those two would go about it in a more dignified manner. Tintin, after all, got his start in Le Petit Vingtième, a Catholic-themed newspaper supplement for children, so it follows that Tintin would be very repressed in certain matters. What is modern is just the common occurrence of blatant gays characterized primarily by the fact that they are gay. Or the public perception that any amiable male characters of fiction who coexist without apparent female love-interest not only must be gay, over each other, but must have this pointed out regularly. Aside from any of that, I think if anyone, the Captain is in love with Professor Calculus.
The Calculus Affair indeed!
*I’m told there was a later installment on the playstation with the exact same perogatives except in 3-D, as if the sprite animation wasn’t the only thing they got sort of right.
On the subject of Peter Jackson, perhaps I may expect good things. His movie King Kong reminded me of a Tintin book, specifically Flight 714, because of the considerable amount of time spent on the ship and then the disappointingly quick wrap-up, sudden skimming-over of details and forgetting of certain characters because whoopth! Almost outta time! As for what the enormous gorilla was expecting to do with the lady he was carrying around, if he’d revealed himself as a space alien (who needed an ultra high point to launch himself into space from), the plausibility could only have improved. As it was, it made about as much sense as
Here’s some more stuff that doesn’t make sense, helpfully highlighted to assist you in avoiding it.
Also, apparently that’s a flower bed.
This is why I could never be successful. I’d worry too much about consistency and feasibility to try anything grand and in the end someone would complain that I depicted a non-existent variety of sock anyway. How would I ever recover from that?
In summary, I have serious Tintin issues which I have no one to discuss with. Obviously.
Oh, to share something special with someone!
Because I suspect this topic requires further investurgation.
Additional reading: Tintin contre Batman, cbz format, completely unofficial, 99% not English.
While I was away from the computer… -actually, I was right next to it but it was off, and then I went outside and lay against a car hood in the rain because I’m a broken human- I remembered that the script writer is allegedly Uklandish. But they’re not all perfect, either. They invented Teletubbies, Battletoads, Mad Cow Disease and Chip Butty, after all. That’s right, they invented mad cow disease. Every Blitish person came together to put on white lab-jackets and bifocals and poured colored liquids between funny-shaped glass bottles until something exploded and then they invented mad cow disease because they were fed up with all the bovine indifference to their brilliant masterful taunts.
Here, the MadTV rips off public domain artwork web comics in which generic looking people say things they look like they should not be saying. And not especially well. The internet is better for this because it has no restriction on content –not just profanity-wise, but also Rupert Murdoch ideology poisoning; Mad TV will never suggest President Bush is anything worse than a lovable befuddled scamp– and material can be delivered rapidly. If you don’t like one, zippidee-doo, clickety clibbledy, there’s another! The sequence this came from took about thirty seconds to display, including a graphic announcing what it was, and it led into a commercial break at its closing.
The main thing television people have going over a single pseudo cartoonist is that they can, without embedding a big ugly rectangle or redirecting me to another page, employ motion and sound, and in this case they do neither because all they’re doing is ripping off and they seek to do no better, like that guy who copies other people’s mediocre mass marketable misanthropic merchandising morons plus whatever else and puts them on his own tacky overpriced Hot Topic dumpster destinators (though he’s supposedly a phillionaire and Mad TV’s lack of a budget is legendary).
Ehhh, the only thing worse than bringing legitimacy to the please-be-offended rabbit’s rubbish through buying it is making your own.
Also, instead of giving the clip art segment any sort of a name to be known by, like “Jerk City” or “Hi and Lois”, M. Tiv just calls it “fun with clipart,” so you know exactly what’s coming. Mad TV has no respect for its audience, and never lets them not know what’s coming. I tell you all these things because I trust you to have the sense to not watch television like this. I’d suggest you be glad I don’t watch professional wrestling anymore, but I should have to work harder than that to impress you, shouldn’t I?
Mad TV does not rip off well, in general. When it started trying to rip off Saturday Null’s cartoon segments, in particular the ones which themselves ripped off actual cartoons, it did that poorly also. In part because rather than trust some writers to work with what really just passes for an animation studio and deliver cartoons at occasional intervals, Mad TV had a production assistant download a bootleg copy of Macromedia Flash 5 and toss some virtual popsicle stick puppets together the week they needed it* because they saw on the internet that it’s possible to get by with less. The mad also does poorly creating royalty-free music for song parodies and having child actors pretend to cry over things actual kids would just sort of stare at in disbelief and dubbing ridiculous applause over the sudden appearance of recurring characters who were already hyped before the ads. It makes me mad. It should be Mad TV, not Mad ME, am I right? I’ve already reserved that for the letters I get from addresses containing ME that make me mad.
*true! Probably. Also, as a bonus for seeking out my asterisk before completing that sentence, I’ll tell you: do not look at that link.
It should have occurred to me that most of the audience reactions are faked; –not just prompted responses to light up signs, but 100% Harry and the Hendersons-issue absentee spectator laugh track– but it didn’t really sink into my mind muck until a show aired during the writer strike, comprised entirely of pre-taped material that was originally intended to appear between stage sketches or perhaps not be used at all. That’s sleazy enough, but somehow these all had laughter and spontaneous applause in them, which means the fox people either brought in an audience to look at a screen, or there was no audience. They just think I’m that dumb I won’t realize the show that’s usually meant to be funny is still meant to be funny if I don’t hear invisible ghosts guffawing the whole time, and that I don’t know there’s a strike going on. Whatever benefit this served the network, to have an “ALL NEW!” Mad TV in the midst of a very obvious writer walkout which had already seen three months of reruns was pointless because once the new guild contract was made, it was another six weeks after the three “new” episoids before the simple sketch show could return to air, because in addition to whatever else, its entire backup sketch arsenal needed to be replaced, having already been used on nights when no reasonable person would have expected to see it. If November buffoonery would have seemed “dated” by March, it was dated in February, too.
And those weren’t even full episodes. They had “classic” sketches filling space, too. I mean, what is this, Season 5? Oh snapadoodle. I want to go to sleep.
I’ve been watching Thundarr the Barbarian, too, but if I have complaints about that they generally don’t involve apathetic imitation of the internet.
Ah gomp, I’m turning into Emu-Lmao!
I don’t know what’s in “Life Water,” but whatever it is it’s also in Imoxicillan, akadoko “the pink stuff.” My first experience with “vitamin enhanced water beverages” was seeing discarded Vitamin Water bottles constantly fallen, defeated, in the parking abyss outside Gateway Community College. Vitamin Water: It’s Baby-Makin’ Fuel.
I wondered what would draw people to an imbibable with such an unsettling name.
“Juice” sounds nutritious and decent tasting, “soda” sounds a bit empty but not disgusting. “Vitamin Water” sounds like how an alcoholic in denial describes the contents of a liquor bottle to a small child.
“Kool” Aid at least admits it’s something not quite natural, possibly made from cigarettes, and Sunny Delight‘s name is adequately Orwellian that sensible people know to keep away. Combined with the appearance, Vitamin Water just makes the stuff seem like there’s something wrong with it, but for some reason only to me! Water is clear, vitamins are clear, why is this goop pink? Something horrible must have happened to make this name obviously no longer applicable, but in the absence of any other identifier you no longer know what it is. And then that white and black big bland font label, it looks like something somebody would drink on an episode of Roseanne. Except on that show it would be peanut butter and bacon water.
But anywaw, this is not vitamin water. This is Life Water, which is even vaguer, creepier and lyingier. This is not water that brings forth life. You cannot revive Benjamin Franklin with it. This is not magic potion. Do not drink this if your red heart-count is low. Sure, it claims to have “100%” Vitamin C if you only drink 8 ounces of the contents, but so does a bowl of Froot Loops. Would you drink a bottle of Froot Loops? If it tasted like medicine? It is worth noting that I wasn’t aware of the “serving” tomfoolery, despite my past scuffles with it, and probably gave myself haemochromatosis by taking in 250% vitamin C within a single day. Yesh, I drank it all. This was just tolerable enough for me to not cry when tasting it so I had to finish it. I know, at least, that humans have the power to process it. I wouldn’t want to dump it out a window and poison some poor stray armadillo.
I should have known just by the awfulness of the associated advertisement –featuring yet another tired, exhausted lamo parodoy to the zombie dance from Michael Jackson’s Thriller, with the sequence being additionally creepy in a way that I guess zombies just couldn’t manage– that the drink would be bad. However, I did not associate the ad with the fluid until I tasted it and realized it was awful and suddenly remembered that the Sobe company typically represents itself with a lizard and there recently was a horrible ad with lizards in it which may or may not have featured a bottled substance instead of car insurance irrelevant to the primary horribleness.
White backgrounds are bad news. Computer generated characters are bad news. People dancing for no reason are bad news. Advertisements are bad news. Advertisements which think they are cleverly spoofing something are worse news. When you put all that bad news together, I wish you hadn’t. I should not forget to mention, this wasn’t but some effortless robotchickeny meme-enabled jerkwork on the internet; this cost many dollars to make and millions more just to debut, I’m told, during some major sporting event or another earlier this year. This is how our masters talk to us now.
If you had asked me in 1993 if I thought allegations of molesty behavior against Michael Jackson would affect his ability to license out his music for awful unfunny over-budgeted ripoffs, I would have asked you what “molest” meant. I was ten years old, I didn’t need that in my life. If you had asked me the same question in 2003, I probably would have pointed out to you that it hadn’t much mattered in the decade leading up to then. You ask dumb questions.
I don’t think I have many entries like this left in me. That can only lead to improvement.
Maybe you wondered (or more likely never thought about at all) what my problem was in this entry with SIMPSON-ZU, since it actually improves upon the original artwork and was more complicated than the standard art-site character posing against no-background. Because it only does so for the sake of looking artificially japanese. I think the artist may even be Japanese, and I still find the whole thing a bit contrived. It was not an earnest artistic choice, it was just a stupid gimmick. And without that, what is it? Just a bunch of someone else’s characters loafing around looking at a television set. Nothing interesting is happening (I doubt what they’re watching is, either. I can’t think of anything I could or would view with every person I know, so the set is most likely off). All it’s done is swap one ugly commercially mandated “style” for another. My discontent has nothing to do with jealousy this time, surprisingly. Very often I see an insipid example of nothing going on get beloved just because the perpetrator does that all the time and weak people love it and I get mad but that’s as far as it goes. This was more sinister, I felt. Whether or naw the artist set out to have it be so.
A mere fortunate coincidence is that both the pictures were approved by the same master judge, grave accent animator. Why should I be bothered by the opinion of somebody who draws awful large-mouth disney-standard-unquestioning duckface people who otherwise appear totally human? When I hate duck-face-people more than almost all awful animal people? Maybe I just like being bothered. It’s probably not that big of a deal, actually. But I definitely hate duck people. They are ruthless.
Verily, they lack ruth.
But regarding the universally accepted deviation, the proponent of ruthlessness admitted that this was already an overexposed piece of trash by the time it got official acknowledgment, so why’s it even need that? Just because the office said so. It is Simpson Week, after all. And what is that? I didn’t know the fourth week of July 2007 was simpson week, and I was there! Ah, that must have been the week when the Simpson movie was released. Everyone was “going yellow.” Cowards.
It was the same week we saw a googly-eyed burger king and this jaundiced overbiting puffy cheeked round toothed myspace moron, who it’s easy to imagine not enjoying a sandwich, which this whole thing is the inescapable mass-marketed equivelant of. I assume other companies got involved but I won’t go looking for them. By suggesting that it really had no choice in playing along with such a corporate holy week, the Deviant Art makes clear that it has not a skrimpf of integrity, had it ever. The original object of issue might as well be fifty discarded mcdonald’s bags standing around a couch staring at a bottle of coke.
Hey, according to, I’m told, former Coca Cola Company president Donald Keough on the subject of a less successful business stunt I’m not old enough to have been affected by,
That is also a dumb reason. Doesn’t anybody buy anything because they want it anymore? Oh oh oh and of course the website isn’t cokerewards, it’s mycokerewards, because they think that will make me think I like it. Guess what: I don’t think I like it!
It seems there is no smart reason to buy soda.
Unless you’re Duke Nukem, and you probably aren’t. But I was complaining about a picture of The Simpsons.
It’s not Mona Lisa Simpson on a toilet, but it doesn’t have to be. Whenever you draw these characters, just for the sake of drawing them, you are in a sense also drawing every other tacky picture of them. That’s how it ends up to me, anyway. Maybe it doesn’t matter to you. That’s why you didn’t complain about it on your page. Sometimes I feel like I do everything around here.
I didn’t get a good shot of this because I was afraid someone would see me taking it and think I liked it, but this sums up what the Simpsons are, as purely two-dimensional (note the absence of any logical appearance of depth) images, without scripts to make them funny, without the best animation FOX can buy distracting us from how ugly they are, without Hank Azaria’s 2 or 3 distinct voices making them seem worth staring at the endlessly plopiting mouths of: just another greeping “institution” getting airbrush-painted on a piece of wood at some life-draining tourist dump in Florida, with Elvis Presley, Betty Boop, the perennially dead and talentless Marilyn Monroe, The Beattles dressed as mandarins or something, Snoopy flying a doghouse, ugly jerk-worshiped cars and enormous ghost heads threatening to devour us all. The only reason Mickey Mouse isn’t in it is because the Disney people have a history of suing anyone who puts that on a wall in public. I wish I could sue for that, too. That happened in 1989 and doesn’t seem to have happened since, but this picture is probably almost that old. If this was made today it would definitely have Dale Ernhardt and the Geico skink in it. “This is why not to become an artist,” I thought when I saw this in 2006’s November, long before “Simpson Week.”
On the subject, sort of, why, on The Simpsons, are white people drawn yellow, but brown people are still brown? Couldn’t they be orange?
Ey, why are Simpson Halloween episodes still called tree-houses of horror? Is the tree-house still a major location on the show? I know Bartholomeau was the central character when I first watched it, but he wasn’t by the time I stopped,* and I can’t even recall with certainty that he had a treehouse. I suppose nuclear power plant of horrors or scum-sustaining tavern of horrors or Rolling Stones guest voice contract of horrors would seem redundant.
*unlike apparently every other whinist on the internet, I wasn’t counting to see what season that was. Oops.
There’s nothing else there.
And they think I’ll shorten Saint to St and Petersburg to Pete, but I won’t.
Ha ha huhhhhhhhzzzzzjzjgbjb.
Not just Scared Guy, but I just generally hate the idea of “Guy” as a last name. People are always calling themselves guys because… because… because because because because becawwwwwse… don’t know why! I had hoped elongating the previous sentence would have given me time to think of the reason, but it didn’t. All I can come up with is that they’re obsessed with being male and defining themselves by single characteristics. Or they’re just stupid whores who copy each other. It’s not all that interesting. That’s why I had to bring it up.
(note: don’t click any of these) Allow me to introduce Mustacheguy! He likes mustaches, has a mustache, or IS a mustache! Ooh, watch out for Sarcasticguy! He’ll burn ya! Don’t listen to Stupidguy! Every one of his opinions is totally invalid by his own admission, and he has no intention of changing! I wonder if Linuxguy likes Linux? I wonder if he would regularly make that quite obvious in conversation regardless of his name? I wonder if he knows his website is a dot-biz? Hark, it is the call of Filterguy! The one who sings the high notes in every R&B song! Brrrring. Brrrring. Hello? Oh no, Potatoguy! He’s not human! Is that Quarterguy? I don’t know, he’s only one fourth complete!
I wonder if there’s a Lawnmowerguy? Of course there is! Every one of the guys I mentioned and most of the ones I didn’t turned up member profiles for the pertinent guys. Not only is there a Bastardguy, he’s registered at a site with “rant” in its name. His profile is empty because he’s already told you everything he wants you to know. Curtainguy plays a keyboard, naturally. Scarfguy Saltguy Pieguy Popeyeguy Beanguy, and there are more Guyguys than any of them. And there are more active Deadguys than Guyguys somehow. Enough with the guys!
So many people prefer to be known by identityless descriptions rather than names. I feel like they should be fighting Megaman. Excuse me, Megaguy, the thirty three-eth level Briton Infiltrator.
Or maybe this Guy.
Possibly even this Guy, and he’s in a wheelchair.
“Guy” at the end is really no better than a random number, and plenty less mysterious. I suppose for some people it is homaging the animated televisual series Familyguy, and doing that online never gets embarrassing.
I’m also not especially fond of Guy Gilchrist, but that’s a story for another day. Presumably a day occurring after the other another days I’ve referred to stories being for.
One unusual exception to the guy rule was the one time I encountered a person only known as “Star Tropics Man.” Curiously enough, his avatarian-image depicted Luigi (the Mario brother) and he had a website about Battletoads. I may possibly have combined several persons into one within my mind, but that’s not important. What’s important is that there are people in the world who like Battletoads.
Studies have shown that I rarely end with a picture.