Well that was quite a week, wasn’t it!

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No this is about something else!

I had a half-hearted complaint about fox television [back in September] and realized I hadn’t posted this where I said the same stuff better. It’s old but time increasingly has no meaning to me.

from the creators of arrested development comes another ugly, ugly, vulgar lecherous cartoon. Usually they can say from Mike Judge or Seth McFarlane or Matt Groening, established ugly cartoonists who just happen to have had success in the field. Arrested Development was not an ugly cartoon. Why, if they were to transition into animation, would they choose to have their product be ugly if the possibility existed that it did not have to be? Footooraba at least has some competent background design work, even if it’s no less derivative of 1950s science comics than any live action shows of the 1980s. THIS, if I am accurately informed uses no background design at all and just swaps in photographs. It appears to take place at an academic institution of some sort, if I had to guess, and I do because I’ll never watch this advertisement with the sound on or again, I’d say it’s a High School, because America[‘s broadcast masters] can’t get enough high school. I’ve been avoiding tv shows and movies set at high schools my whole life. There have been so many, that I could watch a few regularly and still miss enough to claim to have avoided them.
After a bit of reading I probably definitely shouldn’t have bothered with, I discovered that far from creating this, Mitchell Hurwitz merely copied the idea from ANOTHER show from Australia and then pitched it to networks after the American The Office got popular, and it was only the Fox channel in the end who demanded it be a terribly drawn cartoon. The character designs, incididdly, are by Mo Willems, of whom this page claims “His illustrations, wire sculpture, and carved ceramics have been exhibited in galleries and museums across the nation” Of COURSE they have.

Somewhere there’s an exclusive club made up entirely of multi millionaires who had absolutely terrific times in high school and want everyone to know it.
Glee, I saw the first episode, and no more. Maybe that’s not long enough to form a proper judgment but it should be long enough to make me want to watch again and I didn’t even want to finish. It was a mildly entertaining rehash of the same old high school-themed junk I’ve been sick of/utterly unable to relate to for most of my life. It didn’t do nearly enough to bring me back for a second show, but the dorkwash of praise around it was plenty adequate to keep me away. That stuff is 100% market research. People will watch anything if it has high school or kids singing at the screen in it.

I simply have no interest in people playing sports and falling in love and losing sports but then winning sports and going to classes sometimes in highschool, regardless of whether they’re the first black anything. No part of high school for me was easy and definite enough that I would let it pass in a montage. This was related to some movie that came out a few years ago that I almost wrote about but I can’t remember what it was, but it’s worth saying, because they make that one a lot. I don’t suppose anybody wants to watch a television program about filling in worksheets, twice daily hour+ long busrides, or a year long speech strike resulting in expulsion, including me, and my situation(s) are so unusual that I shouldn’t expect anybody with money to know, much less care, much less gamble a pilot on it. But what they show instead is such a fallacious fantasy that after a few tries loses its novelty value and we realize it’s not meant to be novelty value but they think that’s reality.
I’m sick of “anti-hero” nerds. I’m at the point where The Most Unlikely is always exactly who I expect it’s going to be. Being a nerd must rule. You actually understand course material and there’s an established clique of like-minded gorkachus who share your interests. To date the only depiction of high school I’ve seen that I relate to that I recall occurs in Billy Madison, one of the least realistic movies ever made, even by Adam Sandler stadards, assuming he has any, in which at one point Billy starts yelling out the corny lines (Chlorophyll? More like bore-o-phyll!) that made him popular in grade school the week before and suddenly nobody thinks he’s funny anymore. Thankfully he only had to be in high school for a month. Forrest gumping Gump got through high school and college in about three minutes evidently without any stress or emotional crises, dropping only some narration of the length it time it took in non-montage time, five years, that’s supposed to make him seem like a twit for not realizing that’s longer than it’s supposed to take… I’ll be lucky to do it in six, not including the four year break in the middle! Clearly I’m not going to find fictional underachievers more pathetic than myself unless I invent them.

How is this at all fair? Even they get to have a dumb club.

Golly goopity I typed “gleek” into google to get a picture of that dopey blue monkey so I could post it here and pretend I was confused, not expecting gleekitude was an actual THING that people have taken upon themselves. I can’t tell if the television marketing ad executives invented it or if the viral marketing ad executives invented it, but it’s awful enough for either. Ha ha look we are proud to call ourselves an insulting name! We are very fond of labels! Please sell us official authorized merchandise with this word on it!

Alfight so I wrote most of that last year… by now this trope processing plant’s been on television for about a year and a half and it already has [at least] seven albums –depending on whether the two christmas albums are included in that total– presumably all covers, performed by the exact same people. I don’t even think Now that’s what I call an album title that’s annoying to use in a sentence was chudding them out that fast, and they weren’t presumably also producing a quasi-weekly and one imagines scripted national broadcast at the same time. Why indeed even make the television show? Glee Christmas II: Return of Durant has twelve songs on it. Unless the program has already degenerated to the point where every week is a christmas episode, it seems most likely a majority of the recordings were produced exclusively for the album, which unlike the TV show people have to pay for in currency apart from their souls and I am meant to think they do. Maybe the price is worth it to be able to imagine the singers aren’t in tv high school.

My theatre class ah teacher let’s say pronounced me a “gleek” when I stated that Michael Crawford from the film edition of A funny thing happened on the way to the Forum went on to play the Phantom of the Opera, after she posed the question of what Crawford was best known for. First of all, if I’m anything, it’s because I know Michael Crawford starred as Phineas in the London West End production of Barnum in 1981 and while I admire his linguistic speed and ability to walk across a fleeping tightrope while singing I still prefer Jim Dale’s official Broadway cast album version of the same songs because his put-on American accent sounds less like Regis Philbin.
But second, I object to having my awareness of things that predated my existence summed up in terms of a tacky sponsor expo that’s younger than my external hard drive. If I’m older than Glee but share some of its passions then perhaps glee is a meek. Ha uh oh no.

If this smarm mill is for establishment nerds who aren’t cool enough to like Kidz Bop, the muhponies of a few weeks ago may be for those not cool enough to like Glee. Whether or not that is true it lets me transition into the next bit which isn’t looking to be relevant again soon.

I can’t tell if this is a gag or not. I no longer have any concept of what’s funny and what’s serious to these people (“these people” being the users of the website with that or similar layouts or other websites used by them dissimilar in appearance). If you’re unacquainted with the orange-horned albinos that’s well enough but they tend to manifest their presences in the exact same way as the diminutive equines. This person isn’t against obsessive fans; just obsessive fans for other properties. Although I suppose merely having a ripoff character that you represent yourself with is a long way from the extreme of obsession, and this person has a considerable list of obsessive traits that he does not possess. So I am instead concerned that he possesses an obsession obsession. I am concerned because I saw what that affliction did to me.

However, is there a club for me if I’m also anti-random tough guys with mustaches? Must I align myself with the Ice Road Truckers to express frustration with something? Must I stand behind Animal from the Legion of Doom to have a say in this?

By Skipper I don’t feel safe in this company. Gleek’s not going to be any help against the Legion of Doom; the Wonder Twins were cut from that series!

Whatever am I going to do about pink-shirted, booted men in gargoyle poses flying through space by their own power?

No, not compose an ode of praise!

A more important question, perhaps: does this make me an obsessive Superfriends fan? If it’s possible to ask the question, to be in my presence without this becoming immediately apparent then we probably don’t have to argue about it.

Furries, glecowafers and their ilks are very much like the people in Flatland, a book about a world that exists entirely in two dimensions (there’s an inaccessible bit for my math class), in that they are incapable of looking at matters as a non-furry would. They can’t be “against” any overpromoted entity for breeding monotony because they’ve never been “for” anything that didn’t.
But I was here to talk about Glee and the gleek army specifically, right? (sort of) Well good news I’m done. They may live and do as they please.

But good news for whom?? Oh deef. Well I hope somebody managed to learn something from all this.

I also look forward to next year’s means of being dumber than this one.