When the movie Dragon Train
This movie also lacks my own arbitrary childhud fixations, the green floaty diamond-shape logo and Sireaganol. The famous Sireaganol.
At one point the bear puts on a different silly costume than usual and approaches the king and introduces himself as that. I didn’t hear “Sir Reginald,” some ordinary noble figure of no import. I heard Sireaganol, one word, some great and powerful name whose significance is never explained, but it must belong to someone important, maybe just BECAUSE it isn’t explained; I really ought to know who it is already. He’s so great that he can wander out from behind some bushes like a tramp, approach a place of royalty without being accosted by guards, announce that he is Sireaganol and sit next to the king. This is particularly notable for being the only scene without swords or bows in it that I had any interest in as a small child, just because of Sireaganol. I had no idea what he was talking about to the king nor why, but Sireaganol is not bound by necessity. Sireaganol and I have much in common, although I dislike mustaches for myself and I wear my monocle on the other side, and only when watching 3d movies.
I often take issue with neologisms, because issues are what I take. Who decided that misheard bits of speech are “mondegreens?” ONE person did, and now everybody has to call it that. Why don’t we call them Sireaganols instead? Because I may decide that it is I who heard correctly, and everyone else who is wrong.
My mondegreen quarrel is similar to my tiff with tv tropes, another baffling website that doesn’t need my help (and won’t get it), in which one infallible oaf arbitrarily decides that a supporting character who wears a gauntlet is a The Quacksmash Sammy and any time somebody makes a sandwich with boomerangs instead of breaded chicken cutlets that’s called Dancing With the Hamburglar and a story about a hunt for treasure that no one gets to keep is a Big Bird Bar Mitzvah. No! I refuse to call them that! I’m also not going to read the three hundred exception-riddled examples of these occurring that all happened to be from shows aimed at five year-olds as analyzed by people two decades outside the target demographic. No spriggety, Fairy Oddlyparents is full of lame cliches because it’s not meant to be watched by people who already have a quarter century of cartoon viewing experience. Anyway, back to talking animals in a medieval England devoid of death, disease and monarchs who actually live in France.
It’s curious that even with my own spelling of Sireaganol is so close to “Sir Reginald” I didn’t quite make the connection until somewhere around twice as old as I was then or half as old as I am now. Even after that I continued to keep it in my memory. At the time when the thing I call nemitz was “Chesterfield Snapdragon McFisticuff,” I imagined that the thing I now call elpse might have been “Sireaganol Rumpole McFisticuff.” I reneged on this because I remembered that anything related to or inspired by Disney, whether they did it deliberately or otherwise was and is evil, and also that nobody liked green chesterfield anyway and thus a grand name the likes of Sireagonal would be inappropriate even if it hadn’t been invented in a Disney movie, and I’m never going to stop using Ms DOS based operating systems. You might also detect by the repetition of McFisticuff that I intended for the characters to be related. I did. I’m not sure if they still are. Possibly. I’m certain they’re not really really Scottish, however. I know they’re a bunch of uneducated bog-dwellers, but the mere thought of the annoying exaggerated accents they would need to have if I made a cartoon version forbids that.
One thing I am certain of which I discovered today is that the governess hen in the movie is named Klucky. With a K. Although the obvious error in Sireaganol’s name above and
“hand her a bouquet” being transcribed as “under a bookcase” may give me reason to doubt the accuracy of the captioneer’s work, I cannot deny that I heard something very much like “Klucky,” which is reason for alarm whatever consonants are involved.
If anything that’s Miss Klucky to you. The discreetness with which you conceal your ears does not distract me from your obvious lack of discipline.
Regarding the floaty green diamond-shape thing introduction sequence, I linked to the one I did because I like how defiantly the symbol freezes on the screen for about thirteen seconds, just long enough for you to resign yourself to standing up and seeking out the fast forward button because your vcr didn’t come with a remote control object only to have it end abruptly once you initiate action, followed by the longest youtube comment quasversation about absolutely nothing and without any racism I’ve yet encountered.
The thing I remembered so fondly was an old even then, and I now realize incredibly cheap “Disney Classics” home video line logo. It is commonly referred to as the “black diamond logo,” but both of us can see it’s clearly blue, so let’s not argue about that. Despite my familiarity, I never owned a copy of Robin Hood on VHS. Although I must have made my parents rent it enough times to cover the cost, I now realize that if they had bought me a copy it could only have been of the later edition, which I would not have tolerated, and as someone with two younger siblings who had their own favorite movies that we DID own copies of, I reckon if I’d had such easy access my own older brother would have hated me a few years earlier than I actually turned retarded around 9 or so.
I couldn’t read, but the cassette itself always had a tiny version of the pertinent logo printed on its label, so I KNEW before it even went in the VCR. Dangerous times. The later version of the tape had a different opening which featured a blue speck leaving a stain in the shape of the ol’ Walter’s name, flying off from the presenting hand of an immobile Mickey Mouse dressed like a druid. I already owned tapes with that logo on it! Unsatisfactory. Of note is that the green, cheap logo’s appearance features several blatant backward ‘S’es, things that would taunt me in successive years, but I did not notice them then; I was too preoccupied with what an entertaining anecdote this all would make twenty years later. I may even mention it twice. In fact, this was such a great story I don’t even feel like transitioning into the me-not-liking-normal-people’s-music themed material I threatened you with last time. Golly!
But speaking of dragons,
I am not afraid of this one. In fact, I’m generally not impressed by any gold thing that I can buy for five dollars. You will serve ME. You will do MY bidding! And you will also deliver my seller feedback.
The wimp isn’t even as big as that dumb bird! It’s so ashamed that it wants to vomit. Hey bird, how would you like to come work for me? I’ll pay you $7.50.
The only thing that could be cheaper than golden dragon is…
OH NO, FLAPSAIL
I apologize in advance if FLAPSAIL does not attain the same cult status within my mind as Deadly Armor.
I still don’t hear a D in Sireaganol.
Speaking of backs, I will be on Monday, but for now I must go. Oh, ho ho die.
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Good old Mxy “Maxwell Yezpitelok” Frebunkulus of the Bizarre Webcomic had a clever thing which he wrote posted on the website of the apparently now solvent crack’d. You may pretend some of the half million or so views on that were due to my pointing it out.
Speaking of dragons, because I was last time and just put that other note first because my leech sense tells me to mention people I sort of know who get exposure on popular websites although not that time Bridgeport Cat did it because she was writing under a pseudonym although that’s also a pseudonym and in any event AAAAACH I’VE BEEN PICKLED
speaking of dragons, I’m not, because this is at the end of the entry, but originally it was at top, and I did go on to say something about them dumb lizards, but I took too long getting there so I re positioned this at the end, where it is currently.
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I’ve been awake too long.
Right, so I saw that avatar movie. I wrote something pretty mundane about it but I discovered I referred to it in what I wrote about another movie I saw more recently so I may as well put it here. Unless you have a better idea. If you do you’d better tell me quickly! No, too late. I doubt I’m the first person to make an Ultima joke in reference to it, so may I please be the last?
I like weird looking plants, but they are nothing new to me. I growed up seeing them all over the place, in a very similar context: inside big rectangles I could not enter.
Rygar had floating islands, Chrono Trigger had floating islands, Legend of Dogoon that I SLAMMED last week (in February) had floating islands. I like floating islands but James Cameron didn’t invent them. I found the Spindizzy Worlds more engaging than Pan Dora. It may have helped if my glasses and / or left eye had been calibrated properly; the whole film was blurry. I could see layers, but they were like viewmaster layers; some things stood out but they stood out by uniform amounts, and if they were near an edge of the screen they looked weird. Also, no attempt seemed to have been made to compensate for the darkness caused by the polarizing lines on the spectacle lenses; everything was just a little bit dark. No, excuse me, not EVERYthing…
the bright green EXIT signs on both sides of the screen were at full luminance and at least one was visible to me the entire time. Also, lights on the floor and behind me to the left.
The presentation itself was alright. Nothing that will change my life or that I’ll always remember. As any amount of people have mentioned the story and the characters are nothing new. The angry guy among the pure people who hates outsiders for good reason but that has to be proven wrong is especially played out, to me, though I must admit I liked that character better than some others. You can’t go wrong with bad science men vs good forest men. Maybe I’ll have an easier time siding with the forest men when they’re not all enormous, hostile Captain Planets.
I don’t mind the navies as long as they are presented exclusively as space aliens, with no allegorical implication that everybody would be better off living that way. The na-vi have no art, no individuality, no curiosity for that which they do not know. That suits them fine, but it does not suit me. Although that’s just as well, as anyone with a physical or mental defect is liable to be beaten to death or left to starve in a culture like that.
I think the 3-d may actually have detracted from the experience, to me. Without that I could have viewed the thing at full brightness, without stupid glasses, and without the picture being blurry. I found myself wanting to close the less accurate eye, a lot. A question struck me: do I normally do that? Do I view most films with the less good eye closed? Does being prevented from doing that for fear of losing part of the “experience” actually do more to ruin things for me? If I closed my left eye, the right’s vision was clear (but dim). I could have watched the whole movie like that, but I kept hoping I’d suddenly figure out a way to make the full picture less blurry, and so I kept both vision orbs in use for nearly the entire time. I’ve long suspected my actual vision was less than perfect with regard to things lining up in both eyes. If I really pay attention to a thing, I notice that there are two slightly different versions of it front of me. I assumed that was normal. Maybe it isn’t! It works alright for me, because I know nothing else, and nobody has suggested that a certain aspect of it is supposed to be a certain way (aside from when I’ve been accused of being colorblind), because it’s normal and nobody thinks there’s anything to say about it. However, once I start looking through a preconfigured mode of alternate vision, my alternate mode of function becomes clear. I may need to have a special corrective monocle made for myself that I only use when viewing three-dimensional films. I can squeeze my less good eye a certain way to make it focus properly, but I fear that will damage the thing further, and the eye is difficult to access with a plastic frame in the way, besides.
The film was filled with scenes – more than I can remember seeing in any other film – that I have watched – whose only purposes were to show off stuff. Unfortunately, if it looks blurry to you it gets annoying and you want it to hurry up and be done. Don’t you understand, I WANTED to like that. I wanted it to be the greatest thing I’d ever seen, but it wasn’t because I’m a broken human. I am doomed to enjoy less things than others and to be alone while I do it. This makes me sad.
And so I saw the dragon film. I don’t think I told you about the time I watched avatar, so I posted my contextless summary above here… The 3d worked better for me this time because I was closer to the screen, but it still wasn’t perfect. A pity I couldn’t get an imax screening. One person at whom I described my D-related woes after both these movies responded both times “you might need glasses.” Well I was already wearing glasses, they were just dorky 3d glasses. As for NORMAL spectacles, I don’t NEED them if the only thing I can’t see and only on one side properly are 3d movies that use the polarization method. And besides either way the thing would still be dim the whole time.
I noticed that the main human, Wesley or Herbie or whoever his name was didn’t have perfect teeth. Obviously the fat frubby Scotch Norsemen who comprised the bulk of the figures in the movie wouldn’t, but I was surprised that the thin characters were allowed to get away with it. They also were allowed to get away with talking in standard American accents. I’m not about to accuse that overweight people are intentionally made to look funny and sound funny in comparison to “normal” thin people because I honestly didn’t consider that until now and look we’re not even half way through this. So I’ll just imply it for the moment.
The movie did its job. It developed characters, it featured non-developed semi-characters which could be merchandised, progressed plot and waited to bore out most of its plot holes until the height of tension, when I would feel least inclined to consider them, and such and such. It did this without any pop culture references or overt sex innuendo and kept bad-smell-based “humor” to a minimum, which I didn’t know was allowed in animated movies these days. At least nothing bad enough that I felt compelled to make a note reminding myself to complain about it. And so I will complain about another thing.
The music was nice. A pity, since I’d have love to watch this in silence with closed captioning rather than hear the voice acting. Maybe I can get a version dubbed into Chinese with English subtitles. The technology exists, though it needs work before it can be employed without launching abysmal internet memeys. The kid, what was his name, Danny or Milo, he sounded completely bored the whole time, even when he was doing stuff that had my eyes been properly configured to see through 3d lenses would look fairly exciting.
One thing I like about watching cartoons from other countries is that there’s very little chance half the characters will sound like people from Saturday Night Live or Glee or whatever dominant white-people entertainment was hot at the time they were cast. Just in the previews I heard Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Steve Carrell and Jack McBrayer, and I saw Will Ferrell and Tina Fey’s names threatened in letter credits for something or another that I was too busy cringing at to hear the vocal accompaniment to. Three minutes into the actual movie, which was a good 45 minutes after I entered the theater, hey here’s a fat dwarf who sounds like Craig Ferguson, who never even worked for NBC. All these people are on or have been on major tv shows. They’ve made their money. Why do they agree to go along with this? None of them are voicing the characters; they’re just talking in their normal tv voices so that I recognize them. It’s nothing new but I’ve always hated it and I still do, whether they’re people I dislike or the alternative. I merely resisted any pressure to go and see one of these productions until now, and the previews tend to be targeted at whoever the audience is expected to be, in this case children, accompanied by adults, because every movie has to be at least PG, thus more ugly computer graphic movies, thus more boring human voices coming out of bright and shiny animate people. “But Mike Myers is doing an exaggerated SCOTTISH accent and he is CANADIAN!” but even that’s a Scottish accent he’s done before this role, and if we pretend he hasn’t, Shreck trash alone has made it more ubiquitous than his actual voice, and this voice has been imitated by people in other movies (this one, for example) and terrible gum commercials.
In the credits for what I did see, I was informed that Kristen Wiig had talked for someone or another. She was also on Saturday Night Live, and while I was able to find some sketches she was tolerable in before I stopped watching, there was nothing remarkable about the way she spoke. I certainly didn’t hear “her” when I heard the voice in the movie. I just heard A voice that I didn’t much care about, whoever it was. Why cast someone like that? Another character was Jonah Hill, and instead of thinking “oh Jonah Hill I like him in contemporary emotionless stoner movies that are utterly disconnected from this” I spent the entire movie trying to figure out if it was Jack Black, who would also have been distracting. However, I shouldn’t have had to think any of these things because the character was neither of them.
Every movie advertised in the lobby was a remake or a sequel. Again, nothing new, and again nothing I’m content with, either. The one thing that is new is that I neglected to bring my camera into the building and so have no dark and/or blurry pictures of unnecessary things. The previews that I alluded to reflected my lack of excitement or mere optimism for things to come. As these tend to come in superficially similar pairs (Bug Life and Antz, Shark Tale and Finding Nemmy, echt), two of them movies were about “so bad, I’m good” bootleg I M Meens without Warwick Davis in them. One was a blue alien (who ever heard of such a thing?) that reminded me a lot of that horrible alien that gets beaten up by the dogs for crashing into the fire hydrant, except instead of being typical and uninteresting for three minutes we get, I assume, thirty or so cycles of it. These clods have nothing on The Smoggies. Also, please don’t make a Smoggies movie.
The color in these computer movies is always the same. Everything is perfectly lit. The rate of movement, the force of gravity and pacing and such are also always the same. I feel like I’ve seen all these places before. Much like with video games, once they went “3d,” –in the rendering, not necessarily the projection– particularly after 256 color palettes were dropped, everything looked monotonous to me. Plus most of the plasma and spread orb guns turned into regular dumb old army guns. Yes, sure, all ye olde Hanna Barbera street corners looked the same and one Disney castle courtyard is like any other, but I challenge you even to identify but a graphic department by its backgrounds these days, much less a specific film (and if you can give me a day or so to acknowledge it because writing this made me tired). And while they’ve had 14 years to find an appealing way of showing computer cartoon humans, nobody’s done it yet. I hate their big chests and little legs, but I also hate them with realistic proportions. I hate them with huge blobby heads, I hate them with conservatively sized mannequin heads. I hate them with little eyes really close together, I hate them with big eyes that allot space for a nose. In short, I hate. I also hate in long. I’m just as bitter and unpleasable as I ever have been, but I’m getting more specific. Once I’ve identified every problem I will bring my findings before the council and they will abolish things I don’t like.
After a decade and a half of solid regurgitation of stuff from before we’re now starting to re-puke up the stuff we already puked up and re-ate. We’ve already HAD a “new” nightmare on elm street. We’ve already had a “next” karate kid. Toy Story 3 reminds me too much of The Brave Little Toaster for comfort. To be fair, I am rarely comforted by brave toasters of any size, nor little toasters of any demeanor. Even when they have wings.
I am in the process of re-evaluating some of the stuff that I allowed myself to be revolted by in the 90s now that I see it under attack by forces yet less meritorious, and this does, alarmingly enough, include that blasted toaster. I also have it on no authority less than a youtube comment itself that some of the toaster people went on to be involved with the Pixar people, but that doesn’t make the Toy Story any less creepy than it ever was. This one has Kens and Barbies in it. Although the apparent Mattel buy-in likely spares us any overplayed “Ken is a closeted homosexual with no genitals who doesn’t realize he’s gay because he’s the only man in town but he couldn’t act on his urges even if they became relevant” jokes, I think the writers should have the right to include such things should they deem it prudent, rather than to be bound by strict licensing codes of conduct. And you know me well enough to understand that I’d find a way to be annoyed even if Mattel granted Pixar a temporary “Ken is gay” license because I already implied I was comedically disaffected by that. I may just be annoyed at the money flow involved, and it goes both ways, surely, with getting existent products into works of fiction that serve to promote them without doing anything that a free non-licensed stand-in couldn’t. Although in this franchise the stand-in itself would be marketed as an original product and I don’t think I could take that, either. I don’t find “toys doing stupid stuff” funny unless they’re MY toys and I’M making them do the stupid stuff, besides.
You think I have any control over this??
We’ve already flipped and dissected every “stupid,” “hokey,” or “sincere” thing about our dominant consumer generation’s youths. My mother was 35 when that The Brady Bunch movie came out. I’m no fan of the Smurfs, nor was I ever, but I’d love another 8 years to not have Hollywuh pretend it knew smurfs were stupid all along and act like that’s news to ME. It could even be argued, by me, regardless of anything to base it on, that the avatarts were space smurfs who just happened to be bigger than Gargamel. Frimbip, Robot Chicken’s been showing action figures acting uncivilly toward each other ever since Seth Green found web pages from 1998 and realized he could rip them off for free but get paid for it. MacGuyver doesn’t even get THAT honor; it gets, “MacGruber,” a movie about a one joke non-parody of itself, with its origin, shockingly enough, being Saturday Night Live. That may even be a less reprehensible approach, but I’m far from optimistic about it.
I personally can’t stand the Robot Chicken mouth(s), particularly the banana shaped tooth kayak that shows up in every character’s talk cycle and
the bright white square teeth that they alternate scenes with depending on circumstances I don’t care to investigate. Yes, I pay way too much attention to the teeth of animated characters. It’s obvious more time is spent matching the mouth to every syllable than any other aspect of the animation, so who can blame me for noticing? I meant that for this series specifically but it’s true in general. Also, the low-budget amusement which should come from such apparently cheap production values is rent asund when they incorporate realistic explosions, bullet physics and blood (and there’s usually blood). Clearly somebody is spending thousands of dollars on this junk and should be held to higher standards than you-tubewits. Robot Chicken is the inexplicably legalized, advertisement selling television equivalent of bootleg Calvin shirts. Except it actually had a bootleg Calvin sketch, except Calvin was actually called “Calvin” and was a murderer and nobody cared. If I put a picture of Calvin acting in a comparatively courteous manner on this website that I do for free, however… again nobody will care because the Universal Press Syndicate gets its property violated a lot more often than the Shipyard Brewing Company does.
That is, I expect whoever is selling bootleg calvins out of a not necessarily mobile storefront on a main street in the nation’s capital is getting taken down before I am. The only reason Eli Co didn’t thank me for alerting non-yacht owners to the existence of their product is because when we spend $3.50 on 12 ounces of soda we expect to get six cans of it.
Thinking back… Starsky and Hutch, Miami Vice, Inspector Gadget, Dukes of Hazzard, Underdog, The Cat in the Hat, Land of the Lost, Bewitched… has there been one year since this rue wave started that there hasn’t been a nationally distributed hip, new, cynical, utterly off-the-mark take that ultimately nobody cared about on an old concept? (And how many of these had Will Ferrell involved? (the last two (if we don’t include Curious George, which I didn’t get the impression was cynical (oh (yes (stop it (when I feel like it (how about now (I’m considering it)))))))) Even the “original” new movies are full of this intolerable attitude. “Guys, guys! Nah. Nih-nah. Nah, ya caaaan’t… nah. Yeah, no…” I’m tired of every movie having Hal 9000 in it. The movie Hal was IN didn’t have as much Hal in it as one Ben Stiller movie despite being an estimated 4 days long and Hal being the single most referenced concept about it. Nobody ever says “hey, remember that movie where the guy floats through space silently for 30 minutes and then turns into a baby for no reason?” Besides the point.
Nobody can crash into a wall, fall off a bicycle, slip on a potato or otherwise suffer a public indignity without this type of character providing an understated “ooh, ouch.” or “gotta hurt.” “Awkward.” “Busted.” If THAT jackass can tell it hurt, shouldn’t I also have the right to? This is why people [on internet forums] hate Garfield. Garfield tells us what’s funny about something kwazy in the most disinterested way possible. Looking DOWN on me for finding humor in the writer’s work. DARING me to laugh at it. You thought THAT was funny? That ain’t NUTHIN oops out of space. I do this sometimes, but I don’t have an editor, much less a staff of them plus ghost-artists who can redraw a joke that I messed up by liking it so much that I couldn’t RISK you not getting it, even at the alternate risk of making you hostile toward it.
Even the music in these things tends to be judgmental. It likes to stop abruptly when something deliberately stupid occurs. “A little help…?” It’s not enough that the character failed, the soundtrack has to let me know a failure occurred by itself failing. It’s just like a “record scratch” sound effect except the sound people finally realized that by pretending they used analog sound equipment they implied that non-digital technology was adequate and the companies pushing expensive new projectors and audio systems on all the theaters wouldn’t like that. At least somebody finally cleared all the crickets out of here.
I tell you, those things are malevolent.
I’m afraid we have to go with your first response.
AXE ARMOR. Now that is something I can use. You can never know when you’ll meet a lumberjack with a loose grip or an angry dwarf who mistakes you for a kobold.
However, I don’t know that I necessarily require “messy look paste.”
WHATEVER.
What I NEED is ARMOR ARMOR. To protect me from
Treet? No, something far more deadly…
DEADLY ARMOR! Who even needs weapons when the armor ITSELF is DEADLY?
You are obsolete! Swords are SUPPOSED to be deadly! Nobody expects
DEADLY ARMOR! I ain’t afraid a no sword no mo.
Kee kee keeeeee! You’ve not seen the last of meeeeee!
I’m not even afraid of LETHAL ARMOR now. Despite my research team’s findings that lethal and deadly are synonyms, the fact that deadly armor requires neither weapons nor heads to do me in is quite frightening. Lethal armor was too complacent. It was NOT PREPARED for another dangerous form of protection on the block, and thus it was bewildered. Plus off-guard. Armor, GUARDING is what you DO, even when you’re NOT lethal/deadly. You know what the problem is? I think you’re YELLA.
Oh, uh oh. Somebody’s sensitive, huh? Who’s this new friend of yours you’ve brought in? Am I supposed to be afraid of this guy? He’s not wearing armor at all! Nor much of anything, for that matter. Although he DOES have a cape. A baby-excrement-green and jaundice-flesh colored cape. He rubbed that green on [by] himself, judging by the hands. So just because you’re friends with a sick naked unwashed executioner who smears his human-skin-made accouterments in human waste bye.
I said I was going! Don’t pretend it was your idea!
We shall continue this later.
Or maybe we won’t.
SMEDLEY SNORKEL!
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I am one of the most boring people in the world.
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I think I will be witnessing that dragon movie tonight after all. It had a month to get out of theaters but it’s still showing through the week. What else could it be waiting for but me? The last full length cartoon I saw in a theater, if you don’t count Star Wars: Attack of the Clones was Pokemon: The First Movie. This would have to be more coherent than that, I think. For one thing, its title lacks a colon.
Above everything else I’ll finally know if this person on a horrible website who considered one of my asinine aliases a name worth dropping meant it as an insult or not.
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Howdy. I will see about Wednesday.
No? How is Thursday, then?
It is a regrettably widely-perpetuated myth that deserts do not receive much rain.
For the title I also considered “Desert Storm” and “Fall Festival,” but they didn’t sound stupid enough when I said them.
Remind me to tell you about raisins sometime sometime.
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Can that detection system truly be at all reliable if this shady character can climb right through the not-allowed symbol without anyone noticing? Clearly this is not the service to protect your mailbox with.
Now nobody’s safe. Even the trees are after our mail.
Our precious frozen mail crystals. This stuff is important!
Our top story: a snowflake done showed up!
Well it SHOULD. These laws are outdated and irrelevant! The international community is doing NOTHING to address the threats of modern times.
After them, you fools! Are you truly going to let them get away with it? He can’t possibly hit ALL of you with his ninja stars! Arrgh, they think they’re so cool!
Once again it’s up to the blessed corporations of the world to make the best of a bad situation.
Now all that’s left is to proofread this to make sure it forms a coherent narrative. So hopefully I’ll get to that one of these days.
I can’t access bimshwel.com at the moment, so that means I can’t… oh, hey, what do you know. Dee, I wish I’d noticed that sooner. Well maybe I’ll write something tomorrow, then!
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On the subject of corporate attempts to de-evolve internet video, here are some more ads I’ve seen while dealing with that. Yep.
“Double pits to chesty,” which is about the worst name I’ve ever seen for anything, and also
This, I don’t understand. Always in the capital letters, like it’s important or a thing otherwise worth being said. Clearly, none of these elaborate constructions do anything but fall apart as they are being pushed into a river. Why would anybody participate or watch this? Much less for free? Why work to build something that just breaks? This is like something that only drunken morons would watch, yet Red Bull has no alcohol in it. The company has patented a liquid stupidity with no intoxicating effects that it can market to kids without pretending it isn’t. Like the beverage equivalent of Christian rock: all the shoddy lack of merit as before with a side of self-righteousness. This self righteousness has not, to my knowledge, been put into use by anybody, but I know they’re thinking it.
And these fluggity things, it’s not as if they are all that INTERESTING to watch break; I’ve been seeing related advertisements for a few years and for all I know it’s been the same footage every time, because it’s just the same thing happening over and over. It’s like any athletic competition, except it’s not athletic or competitive. It’s just morons pushing heaps of wheels and papier mache into water, and, I presume, leaving it there.
Supposedly there are judges who rate things and the objects are required to be made of “environmentally friendly materials.” Well I still don’t like it! My remarks to the contrary of the data I just supposed were secondary to my main point that I dislike the advertisements and the impression they give me of the thing they are promoting. And twenty [or so] years of America Idahhhhhhh in my business haven’t convinced me that the presence of judges proves that garish freaks are committing entertainment.
I’m not above posting a dreadful image and telling you how dreadful it is, but nobody will be paying me for the privilege of recapping it later and I’m not pretending I think what I do is about anything but myself. Ooh there’s not even a joke on that one, that must mean I’m serious!
If I said that nobody would care because any idiot can say that, and I’d literally be any idiot. I strive to be the main idiot, and I am serious.
But I am feeling better now.
That suggests the caption only applies to one of them, and the chances are I won’t even be in the picture, since I’m a psychotic introvert in addition to my other qualities.
You have to be the center of attention, don’t you!
You know where to find me, guy. And also orange hats.
page 38 of this. Does it look to you like 80 hours of work?
I like the fur-style of the second nemitz. So why did I draw it like a werewolf in the rest of them?
I fear 20+ years of stupid side-scrolling video games has caused my skill at staging multiple characters to develop in an odd fashion.
Also, sometimes the things I do as meaningless gags mess with the things I intend for people to remember.
My inking really ISN’T getting any better. Every time it’s miserable at first and then I start to like it better toward the end. THIS time, though, there’s no excuse for that eleventh frame. Peff. I will use bigger paper next time. That will either make things slightly easier or a lot harder for a variety of unrelated reasons.
I like to think I’ve improved a little bit in eight years.
February 23: first loud, distracting power tools of the season! There’s still snow on the ground and I can’t walk outside without my coat, but if the calendar says spring it’s time to start making shrill noises that have no end.
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Well, now you know why I’ve been so slow to update this site.
Also, I acknowledge in advance that a lot of this is generalizations and assumptions. The fact that I’m writing at length about frozen pizzas should tell you that I am a less than cultured individual.
What we have here is a deceased German medical doctor trying to sell an Italian product to Americans. It would be like if Yakov Smirnov started selling Yorkshire pudding to Indonesians. And you can say “uh actually Yakov Smirnov is still alive.” First of all, watch the attitude. Second, truly?
Then why, recently, on the television program 30 Rock[efeller Center], a show fond of pointless, improbable cameos, when it came time to cast in a brief role a bearded Europy-looking guy named Yakov with a funny accent who appeared to be in his 50s, did they choose… someone else? I checked his name in the credits but neglected to make a note of who it was. Whoopth. I am a student of counterfeit Yakovs, but hardly an authority. I wish my name was Yakov.
As long as I’m buying a pizza from a German doctor born in the 19th century, I might as well buy it from a German World War I fighter pilot with a historically inaccurate mustache.
So many decisions to make! Incidootily, I used to eat Red Baron pizzas, specifically the “deep dish” variety, all the times, until my mother stopped buying them because they cost the same as bigger frozen pizzas. When I finally had one again, I didn’t like it because I reminded me of the “pizzas” sold at the Saint Vincent de Paul school cafeteria I had eaten within a few times. The same size, the same weird cheese that will come off in one piece if you bite it the wrong way, the same bright red weird sauce, and most importantly, the same weird crust that when you bite into it appears to be comprised not of a crispy mass of expanded dough, but several flimsy white layers of a thing I cannot describe. I had somehow developed a revulsion to the sight of those layers and had difficulty finishing. Only my trusty red pepperoni cubes, the one aspect the school version lacked, kept me going. I would eat those, but not actual pepperoni disc slices. It has today been revealed to me by the internet that the Red Baron pizza brand indeed got its start as a school supplier, and only became called that when somehow the things were popular enough to justify supermarket expansion, at which point, compared to “Schwan’s School Cafeteria Pizza-like-object,” calling it Red Baron made an adequate quantity of sense. Kids will eat ANYTHING if you say it’s pizza, though. I thought I was more mature and wiser, but I wasn’t, because I then reverted to my interim Jeno’s brand pizzas, which had the exact same cheese, tomato sauce and cubes. The only difference in the actual product was the absence of the creepy layer-things. The bread-product itself wasn’t of any higher quality, it was just narrower, so that I couldn’t see how it was constructed. So easily I was taken in once more! I tell you, these things’ll be the death of myself.
I’ll show them: I’ll have my body cremated. My initial plan was to have my body fed to dogs, but after a lifetime of eating frozen pizzas, particularly one ended by that, I don’t think I’ll be very nutritious.
Back to my first non-point, the problem is that “Italy” is a stereotype. The populace at large assumes –or is assumed by advertisers to assume– that Italy is still lost in the 17th century renaissance and all food is prepared for days at a time by old ladies mixing tomatoes and garlic and that green stuff in pots and such while children chase chickens through the streets which no cars drive over constantly. In fact, Italy today is fundamentally indistinguishable from any other post-industrial nation. There are paved roads, security cameras, giant buildings and McDonalds’. The number one frozen pizza title means as much there as it does here, where I am told the leader, by a huge margin is DiGiorno, despite depicting its customers as naive oafs who can’t tell the taste of a frozen pizza from a real pizza.
The sort of person lazy and devolved enough to buy a pizza from a specially programmed remote control button, with devolved taste-buds to match. The Pillsbury people claim Totino* pizzas and not DiGiorno are the highest selling, so clearly this is a thing that anybody can claim. However, Totino’s, despite having the power to taste like both a cheeseburger and a taco, never claims to taste like a pizza and in any event does not have special deals with the satellite company, so I will not be buying their product.
As to what’s being ORDERED here, obviously you’re not ordering the pizza to be delivered to you off of the television. “It’s not delivery,” after all, and if it was you could do much better. No, you merely press select to ORDER your WOMAN to bring you your FROZEN PIZZA on a FROZEN PIZZA-SIZED WOODEN PLATTER, because YOU like PIZZA and BURGERS. You know, MAN FOOD. The signal goes through the tv to your lady’s punishment helmet, administering shocks until she gets up and does her domestic duty.
WLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH! Eat that pizza! Eat it! Eat it while I scream at you from your home torture chamber! Sure, don’t even look! You didn’t have the torture chamber built right next to your kitchen with a convenient view window because you wanted to make eye contact with your victims, did you? You are the master of all: your television, your domestic propertner, your hostages. If you eat lousy pizza, it is because you CHOOSE to.
Anyway
No doubt there are classical cities in Italy that have managed to retain or restore their old timey touristy appeal but… just imagine if everybody there imagined us Americonians all lived in Colonial Williamsburg and ate beans and grits every day. That’s what it would be like. And then we walk 2000 miles to Texas and hang around in saloons comparing mustaches.
Why would this fictional, frozen in time, Brigadoon-esque Italy give any dignity to the idea of frozen in grime pizza at all, much less rank them? Do we even have any idea what is considered good pizza in Italy? Do they ever EAT pizza in Italy? Does it bear any resemblance to the sort of pizza we eat here? Specifically, the sort we eat but that isn’t pictured in this site entry?
What is the quintessential “American” food? A hamburger? The number one selling hamburger almost certainly comes from a major chain, and even people who eat them will often gripe about the quality. According to a vague memory of mine I cannot substantiate the validity of, 7-11 sells more hot dogs than anywhere else. I’ve never even been IN a 7-11, much less associated the thought of the place with my occasional hunger for weird sausage with weird bread.
Hey, you, idiot off to the right: stop lifting that one slice out of the pizza before we take the picture! I don’t give a
pucky o’hare if somebody already cut around that one slice but not the rest of the pizza. Leave it alone!
But yes, Dr. Oetker pizza seen alongside another thing that should not exist: Mystic Pizza, precooked, frozen and mass produced.
Really? I think rather the movie made the pizza famous. Nobody would care, otherwise. This is not outstanding pizza. It just happened to come from a joint in a town that somebody thought would make a good setting for a forgettable romantic comedy. It could also be that I go into these places looking for my deluded idea of an Italian pizza when the people specialize in the Greek style. What they should say is “warning! we do not make Italian pizzas well!” but they don’t and present all the standard tomater sars/mozzarillo cheese options, knowing full well they cannot be trusted.
I’d like to go to Italy and eat some pasta, because I don’t like the store bought product so much, unless it has meatballs with it. Real Chinese food, however, does not need to come into my life.
As you may have figured, I will not, at this time, be ordering a Dr. Oetker pizza, Italy’s number one frozen pizza. Who eats frozen pizza while in Italy? The immigrants, evidently. And I would be if I went there, but I haven’t gone yet!
Oetker. With a name like that he should be selling snake oil or fighting Spiderm-An. True enough, more than a few supposedly competing American frozen pizzas are actually produced by the SCHWAN food company, including the famous baron (as well as Tony, who I am afraid searching for media relevant to will prolong this entry beyond a reasonable length), so perhaps I should praise the doctor for his honesty. But I won’t, because he says “ristorante” when babelfish assures me he means “Gaststätte” and an actual German speaker who left a comment on this entry tells me he just means plain old “restaurant.” Additionally, I recently started buying pizzas by Palermo, who assure me they aren’t owned by any of those other crumbumpanies. They make pizza and nothing else.
*Totino’s and Jeno’s are both Pilsbury brands that produce nearly identical products but go to different stores, a fairly common occurrence. However, they are both purported to be named after actual people, so it seems reasonable to assume one resented the other.
Yes, I actually did it. I screwed your brains out I bought the 30 ounce JAR of Utz snack mix. I know it says “party” mix, but I don’t go to parties, and when I do there’s never stuff like this there. This is what I stay home and eat while other people have parties. This is my meth. That may not even be so far from the truth; Judging by the way it is sealed, this stuff is apparently prescription strength. Although the side label professes the presence of 30 servings, one per ounce, I reckon I can have this finished in under a week. Hopefully I won’t have to. I will give it my list of demands in short time.
Officially, it is a “barrel,” but anybody who’s played enough video games knows that barrels often contain life sustaining, fully cooked, nonrotting foodstuffs (occasionally on plates), and while edible, what I have is not quite food. Beside that, suggesting that I can eat the entire contents of a BARREL makes me seem like a fat glutton. My metabolism is too fast for that. I am a moderately skinny glutton. I have a physical appearance accurately described as “salvageable.” Come back when I’m thirty [years old]… If I’m still there, eating utz party mix alone, stop me.
Donkey Kong would not throw Utz Party Mix at Mario. Monkey Donkey would not… no, actually we could be on to something. It is a shame that the only web page documenting this phemonemonemon is over ten years old. Clearly it is a relevant, pressing, depressing issue.
Look at that, just while I was here talking to you. I would weigh the remnants, but my scale is broken. No, not because I stood on it, narf narf. I was merely incidentally mentioning that I own a scale which does not function. Why don’t I throw it away? Why don’t you throw it away? Am I on trial here? Fleeps, lemmelone!
This jarrel, though very orange inside, does not contain cheeseballs. Tell us about the cheeseballs, Utzy.
I reckon you’ll pay more attention to the weather once acid rain starts pouring out of those bright orange clouds.
Those are not the famous Planters Cheez Balls… I know Planters’ are famous because one person uploaded this picture to the flickr and google images turned up the exact same picture of the same obsolete package design with the same sickly, faded colors and the same dented paper on numerous sites that had ripped it off, sometimes with site logos and bonus jpeg artifacts, most not bothering to have searched the “all sizes” link and just went with the 280×500 pixel preview. Somebody had even re-uploaded the smaller one to a different flickr page (to make it even flickier). To distinguish my own ripoff from the others I will put it through a really stupid series of filters that I have never once used seriously in a decade of owning Paint Shop Pro 6.
The only way to make this classier would be to scroll the text.
But that is not important. What is important, to me, about Cheez Balls, is that they have Mr. Peanut pictured on the cans. MR. PEANUT CONTAINS NO CHEESE. Neither do cheez balls, but MR. PEANUT ALSO CONTAINS NO CHEEZ. Mr. Peanut is not qualified to act as spokesman for any cheez product, balls or otherwise.
I could make a childish remark about how the most common cheez incarnations are the ball and the doodle, but I wouldn’t be able to commit to it and would present it as a shameful yet courageously suppressed inclination and pretend it was your fault instead. You should work on that.
Cheez is also frequently seen in the form of the -it, about which the less said, the usual.
According to legend, the planters phased out Cheez Balls because they didn’t sell anymore they were unhealthy. You don’t get into the snack business is to sell people cheap to manufacture trash which they don’t need to be eating. Because you’re a nitwit with no head for business matters. But I tell you, there are worse things in this world than cheez.
I give you chiz. And you’re welcome.
Some people, as in: more than one, talking about cheez balls on the internet, say the balls were discontinued in 2006. Suddenly! A page from 2008 documents a person finding them in a store! Great piggly wiggly! But, you know, they’re CANNED. And the cans are sealed. Those things are probably from 1998. There’s a reason people fill their bomb shelters with cans apart from being lunatics. Even if the balls are NOT fresh you’ll never know because those things will make you sick under any circumstances. Not that one needs the help with this visual accompaniment. I can tell you that if there IS a nuclear war… and the only things in your shelter are cheez balls… then you probably caused the war by hoarding them! I can’t believe you sometimes!
In my family, there is a traditional act done at the end of a year to ensure good fortune in the next. Only my father insists it be done and he doesn’t know it exactly as historical record (the internet) says it’s actually supposed to be done, but I go along with it anyway. A person must be locked outside the house before the year ends and request to be let in once the arbitrarily designated point in time passes. The person outside must come inside with a bread-based product, a bottle containing an alcoholic substance, and “money in your pocket.” It is imperative that the money be contained within pockets. As anyone in the world can tell, the last few years I have done this, with disastrous results. In fact, I think we might all be better off if I did not do it at all. Yet here I go once more. Enjoy your continued recession and the next installment of livestock inspired illness media hypage.
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In the coming twelve month period I resolve to not draw those poorly planned interior and exterior areas of nipfolm hospitarium dome in my stupid comic any more.
Hey, what do you know, the last time I expect to need them, on Page 35 of this!
But if they are called for in the future, ideally I will be at the point in my artistic growth-regression cycle where I don’t put the accuracy of backgrounds that don’t need to be accurate before every possible other thing, because even when I do, the light sources make no sense and sixish story buildings appear to be one half in size from the outside.
Is it a sign of a psychological disorder on my part that elpse (the green character) seems to switch between having a vaguely masculine and feminine physique at random? Before you answer, I should inform you that yes. However, it is not deliberate; It may well depend on what pose I want to use and how much space there is in the frame. It merely has happened and I have not seen any reason to correct whichever one is inaccurate, now that I’ve noticed; in fact it I think it’s funny. This is good, because I used to fear elpse was being perceived as boring and unlikable, and such weirdness distracts from that. This is of additional benefit to everyone, as according to my script there are pages and pages of just walking and saying stuff coming up.
That was so weak, pointless and stupid, 2010 has no CHOICE but to seem like an improvement.
Howdy. I type “howdy” a great deal more frequently than I say it.
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Why does every store I go into have “boogie-woogie santa claus” on its custom mix loop? That’s easily the fifth most embarrassing Christmas song.
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Obama asks moms to clap their elbows together. Previously I identified this motion as “weird turning situps,” ever the brilliant wordsmith, forgetting –and I can’t think why I’d want to forget such brilliant marketing– that at no point in the sequence does the woman sit up. She just does the horizontal chicken dance ad infinitumptious. Which is ironic, since chickens don’t have teeth. We will see that teeth are vitally important in this matter soon enough.
Note that this crummy, deteriorated, cropped gif file is a full 20 kilobyes bigger than the full flash animation, which uses jpeg-compressed frames. These fine advertisers UPGRADED to bring us superior quality of needless, inexplicable animation loops.
Get with the program, Home owners! First you gave that baby epilepsy and now you’ve ruined this citizen’s teeth. You’d better hop to it before a problem arises that has not yet been solved through use of a secret technique discovered by a mom in a different banner ad about awful teeth, or before Obama asks that mom to return to school.
Home owners versus teeth round 2. By now they’ve weirded out all their roommates, family members and hostages with their weird teeth (even if it IS good dental work for Alabama) and have taken to living in their cars. But does this guy REALLY know what he’s talking about?
Will Wright, inventor of Simcity, Simant, The Sims and Chlamydia, at his regular job often has no helpful advice for me. I don’t think that’s actually him but I always imagined he looked like that and would put himself in his own game for some reason. Either way, he’s on the town council and making me uncomfortable. Now I really AM in Creep City. “No no no, you do what you want, and I’ll complain if it isn’t what I would have done.” I feel like we’re married OOH GOTCH YA, marriage!
He used to have a beard, but he shaved it off
and gave it to this fellow, who was so happy he proceeded to launch several homemade fireworks he built in his shoes.
But hark! I hear the sound of another picture approaching.
Howdy is never a good sign.
“Dr.” Bennifer Ankle Wright, economist, lawyer, and actor, chief contributing editor of 20eh’s worldwide financial clowndown. The whole family was in on it. See the full story in my upcoming book, Oh oh ah uh oh, the Wright Stuff, coming swoon from Gorbo publications. Thank you and goodwelcome.
Tue’s day: I just realized I forgot to do the “alarm” color overlays as I did last time. Eh.
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page 34 of Aw Beans: A Beet Street High Seas Adventure Starring Lorna Doone and Dinty Moore
This one features some of the worst inking I’ve ever done. I’m really not getting any better at it. However, I am getting very good at wasting time/ink adding needless black shadow-lines that I have to remove after I scan the deal because it makes everything look burnt once it is converted from gray to black-and-white and actual color gradations are added. Whoopth.
The dimensions of that room and its relationship with the hallway continue to change. I grow weary of its rebellious ways and will tolerate them not much longer.
My scanner needs to be fixed/replaced, but this sort of thing hardly seems worth the trouble.
Ha, I finally get people to look at this page and then I disappear for a week and a harf. Ha, I laugh at my own remarks that aren’t even jokes. You will believe there are still moderately expensive hotel rooms in this country without easily accessible internet. You will also believe that I never needed an excuse that good. Here, have a fox at war. Nevermind why, for the moment.
You may be pleased to know I actually had this done last Tuesday but couldn’t be bothered to make even as lazy an update as this out of it. Also, I only realized now after printing this out and giving it to a fellow that there was a big pink streak from where I had moved the edge of the tank bullet (that’s what the large shiny thing is) and forgot to fill in the vacated space. And then I fixed it and for the first time ever saved the little internet version COMPLETELY over the big version that I make prints from right just now. I can restore it from my flash drive duplicate, but it’s the botch that counts. Thankfully, that is not the most disgraceful thing I allowed to happen over the week-end and surrounding territories. That would have been a disappointment, I think. I always bring enough gaffes for everyone.
Some people insist on enjoying themselves anyway.
Much like last month, I soon will go somewhere that I need to prepare for and am horrible at preparing for. As far as I know I have no such place to travel to next month, which means I will be very unprepared.
Evidently Stop & Shop has further to go on its journey to not be Brand X than I thought. This doesn’t even come with RIP.
I say, what a GYP. Gyp, incidentally, I was surprised to learn does not have its origin in racism or prejudice.
The Guaranteed Value squad I thought for certain would win the blandness war. It found a way to make carrots less exciting. Isn’t it kind of neat that they come from the GROUND, growing out of a tiny little SEED? It would be if it didn’t take months to happen. Yef, that’s right, I’m on to you, CARROTs. Somebody finally had the courage to stand up to root vegetables. I know you’re in this with the beets. Soon I shall send my champions to destroy your stronghold.
We really are in trouble, aren’t we.
I thought this entry was longer than this. Whoopth. Does anyone have suggestions for lengthening it?
Nobody? Goodnight, then.
Have you ever thought “gosh, I wish EVERYTHING I saw seemed like it was through broken venetian blinds?”
After taking this picture, I found out without wishing to from people I came across without wishing to that supposedly Kanye “my first name is in pig latin” West wears glasses like this, which makes them marketable. I wish an emulated-beyond-reason celebrity would take up a seriously bizarre bit of fashion. No more of this wrong colored band aid business, I’m going to wear a propellor beanie or a cardboard Burger King crown in public.
SPEAKING of cardboard burger king crowns…
First of all, skulls again! But at least they sort of make sense in the context of hats. That’s about the only thing they can wear besides glasses. But more importantly, on the left: I can’t tell if this is a retro trendy throwback $20 Hot Topic Burger King crown, or a free one that a recent classy mall diner just forgot about. Or perhaps an actual king on a really tight budget mistakenly left it here.
Tah! KING GRAHAM! Liege of Daventry, lore’s most destitute fictional monarchy. Despite owning a magical treasure box that CREATES gold (and leads to massive inflation, but we’ll discuss that some other time), a magical shield that is impervious to all perils, and a magic mirror, that, one assumes, he can see his own reflection in, King Graham still dresses like the Men without Hats (despite having a hat; this may just be to prove that he also can’t read) and regularly incurs fatal abuse in really stupid ways without much resistance. Sure, he always comes back to life, but that is a skill also common among many digital heroes who aren’t kings. Additionally, it is my guess is that through some means it will come about that Graham can’t win the game without his meat monarch crown, but he won’t realize that until much later.
It FIGURES King Graham is in league with dopes. But I tell you this: I download no roms from no dopes. I only went there for turbografx cd ISOs. The dopes were none the wise, much less wiser.
There is a reason nobody wears those anymore.