On december 1 2019 my niece Vackshfump was watching “ralph breaks the internet” Yessir this 5-year-old really needs to see a cartoon full of comedy celebrities talking about loot farming and ebay. I was only near it twice and was vividly reminded of this foxtrot strip except imagine it cost 175 million dollars and bill amend owned toaplan and taito.
“all your base are belong to us” is one of the earlier meme “phenomenons” before people described it with the terminology “meme.” Bill Amend was lazily referencing it in this comic strip for nerd credibility despite it already having been considered old at that point and this not really having any angle on it other than to observe that it exists, and of course it takes 6 weeks for newspaper comic strips to get published, or at least did for most of their existence.
And what is my problem, then? The ralph movie is even older now than the all your base joke was then. But I am not doing this for credibility! If I was going to have any I would have gotten it a long time ago. I was never going to watch this cinemagony on purpose when it was new, much less pay for the right so that I might offer a timely criticism. Having a small child in my life is bringing along with it a great deal of unfortunate media the likes of which I would greatly prefer to not be aware of, because it does THIS to me. I don’t have time to write these things, do you have time to read them?

You can say “WELL it’s not FOR KIDS just because it’s a CARTOON!” but it shows up in the netflix “kids” mode that hides countless other mildly to substantially less stupid things, and also prominently features the official non-parody disney princesses which exist primarily to extract money from parents of this specific captive audience, with the aim of turning those kids into willful captives and likewise captors when they produce their own children.

also on netflix kids, Jerry Seinfeld IS “The Bee Movie,” Adam Sandler’s entourage in Hotel Transylvania and Alec Baldwin as the only character he plays now inexplicably drawn as Boss Baby, all three brightly colored celebrity wank jobs devoid of kid-comprehendable content (plus numerous other equally ugly items I am glad have not been put on in my presence yet). I don’t think bee movie even has one kid character. Of the four I have named, only bee movie my sister refuses to put on, and i don’t understand where this line is drawn. I acknowledge that seen here is boss baby the spinoff baldwin-less netflix series, but I know the full film is there also because I had to deal with that last year. It was boring and pointless but not an exercise in brand awareness disguised as something other than that. The trash culture fetishizing of hotel transylvania is deplorable and its character designs only seem bearable in the proximity of minecraft but I will admit the animation itself is occasionally funny-looking, which I can’t say for the others I have mentioned. I think Trolls the movie is a crime against humanity and demi-humanity but it is unmistakably a children’s film and not visible here so citing it would not aid my cause.

if you are curious about the netflix kids setting, this is how customizable it is. You can’t tell it to include or exclude certain titles. You can’t personally select and omit every movie that has excessive belching or flatulence in them, for example, and I presume there are a surprising number that don’t. Of course as a parent have the power to NOT put on a movie you don’t like, but when kids are bred from birth to want disney-y trash and you are granted no means to tune it out you end up having to fight your own child to avoid it.

and maybe you deserve it if you cede the authority to a moneymaking business to decide what is “age appropriate” and harbor absolutely no other categories of appropriateness.
If I was the parent I would browse it myself in advance and choose some things that weren’t too horrible but most people aren’t like me and netflix specifically isn’t really big on giving users control anyway. it automatically plays trailers for whatever is selected including whatever it suggests to you first and complacently refuses to let you disable that.

As indicated, I was near it twice; two days later, ralph was on again! it is legitimately upsetting to me. I don’t know how to co-exist in a world where this is considered valid entertainment. It makes me depressed. I can’t have happiness if this is what people want. if i have consolation it is that it made ONLY half a billion dollars and that is now considered a disappointment to the Disney organization so there probably won’t be a third, but everything is like that now to some/many degrees so it isn’t going to stop.

everything i guessed about it is not only true, it’s twice as bad. the princesses aren’t in the whole movie but they are in much more than I was expecting. they show up about the same length into the film that optimus prime does in the transformers movie and get about as much screen time. (incidootily my least favorite part about 2006 transformers was also the unnecessary pandering references to the internet) This movie cannot stand on its own, and nobody cares. imagine if “meet the spartans” made much more money and put a curse on mentally-challenged movie critics to say nice things about it. that series got killed when writer producer jackasses seltzer and freberg became too greedy and decided to distribute subsequent movies themselves and suddenly couldn’t get into theaters. That is not a reliable circumstance for me to hope for with disney.

in this movie websites are places, otay. this one is called “ohmyDISney” and the character who says it pronounces the heap out of the DIZ. it is supposed to be a disney fan site because this communicates that consumers also accept that star wars and marvel just ARE disney, not established worlds with their own identities that disney simply purchased relatively recently within our lifetimes. and also this isn’t corporate excess this is what WE the proles WANT. Like this is MY fault.

that’s “oh my disney” as in “oh my god” without the god because plainly there isn’t one but that doesn’t mean you can’t receive doctrine and arbitrary commands in its name and worship it. Also it has its own hotels because of the allegory of an internet as a physical place that looks like a real place and real places have hotels and EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS MOVIE IS MORONIC

I don’t consider pixar in the category of stuff disney just bought and assimilated because pixar’s public identity has always been synonymous with disney, and in many ways the current disney was assimilated by pixar. The same sap morality, fake comedy, california/celebrity worship and computer graphics addiction, and also John Lasseter has been in some way involved with every disney movie since way too long and was only kicked out after he, like every entertainment media figure who gets held up as incapable of error, turned out to be a sexual predator. Since that occurred people other than me have been complaining about disney movies again, which I can only hope means disney is actually getting better, but the Lion King bookended both sides of the Lasseter era and I hate it in any case. it’s still d-d-DIZney, turning a profit targeting schmucks, even if its hypnotism of the reporting media is slightly less complete.

Anyway this whole segment of the ralph movie is just to remind you that disney owns stuff and intends to mash it up in disgusting ways, it must be stated that all the specific video game references in the film are 20-40 years out of date or generic, but the oh! my disney segment includes real brands and absolutely reflects whatever disney wanted to project of itself in 2018. The princesses all know and get along with each other and wear contemporary slob fashions despite coming from different time periods and countries and don’t exhibit any traits that could be perceived as negative, because blind complacency is never treated as negative.

The climack scene with the princesses saving Ralph, their proprietary musical themes playing as each appears, is the biggest i have mouth-painfully-agaped since the animaltopia preview. When moana ducked into the frame and smugly said “you’re welcome” I wanted to scream. I don’t talk about moana on this website, I hate everything about it so much without reservation and I already did that too much with the lion king, and now moana, and more importantly irritating references to the most irritating song from any disney product can just be in any other property that they manufacture. That whole thing, it almost made me cry. I wasn’t just annoyed, I was depressed. Because this has been out almost two years and I have never seen a word of complaint or displeasure about this. Everybody who has seen this film thinks this is acceptable, and would presumably be comfortable with disney owning every commercial property there is and making every movie a potential cross-franchise rule-free orgy of pandery idiocy that pretends it is smashing through once unbreachable cultural barriers.

whaaaaa? how did BART SIMPSON get into this AD for DISNEY PLUS to deface it? That is so SUBVERSIVE and actually not criticizing disney in any way and disney incidentally owns the simpsons now and it hasn’t been subversive for decades! It continues to exist for the same reason that the lion king remake took in over a billion dollars even though everybody i know who saw it didn’t like it and would probably go pay to see lion king remake part 2; brand loyalty that supersedes all reason for products that will never stop coming and has no incentive to get better.
also: if oh my disney is synonymous with oh my god then disney + can be seen as disney christ. The major difference in divinity is that it was possible to kill Jesus, at least for a little while.

A major thing that bothers me about Kevin Smith movies is how often characters are loitering around talking about other movies, but at least in that case they aren’t movies that Kevin Smith has a financial stake in, and if you skipped those parts, the other parts would still function as well as it was going to.

it’s like those sketches on saturday nuhlive where the actual person being parodied walks into the sketch and oh ho ho how droll aren’t we all having good fun NO it isn’t a real parody if the victim is in on it. You need to be able to criticize it in a way that it would not criticize itself, that its owner would not permit to be criticized.

also if you will only criticize a public figure without permission via special guest stars who are themselves beneath contempt and not even cast members then that doesn’t count either.
Gosh why even watch the show? It is much more satisfying to read a sycophantic summary of how “hilarious” the opening 20 minute parade of smirklejerk “woke” celebrities and applause breaks is. also my use of “woke” doesn’t mean right wing conspiracy schmucks are controlling me, it means a force beyond my control finally invented and agreed on a word for something i have been screaming at for what feels like centuries.
I had a tragic falling out that he is not aware of with stephen colbert over the shift from comedy to this “woke”ness but gosh at least he is devoted to his own show, whatever that show may be, and too busy to do stupid trash like this. James Corden’s show isn’t even in new york.
I don’t even hate Paul Rudd but he happened to get named in that headline and I don’t think he will suffer for it.

Also! Immediately before the rescue scene, Ralph falls through another character’s rescue vehicle, and rather than expressing alarm or anything organic, the character, who is unmistakably voiced by Saturday Night Live handoff Bill Hader, just talking normally, despite Hader’s greatest talent being to disguise his voice, emotionlessly states “wow that didn’t work.” Yes obviously it didn’t work! You saying that doesn’t make the fact that it didn’t work funnier! I really miss the laugh track convention from bad old sitcoms because I knew I wouldn’t hear it in a feature film, but smugly reacting on my behalf can be and is in everything. And why does disney bother buying ABC and FOX if it inherits all its actors and writing conventions from NBC? Because NBC is owned by Viacom which probably doesn’t want to sell it, but if dismey makes itself synonymous with nbc there is no NEED to buy it. It is [currently still] illegal to own all competitors in a field anyway, but not to indenture them. Although copyright law was changed specifically to let Disney keep owning mickey mouse so maybe it will get a law changed to let it keep owning more networks as well, and then another law changed to ban technology that increasingly makes tv networks irrelevant.

and this over here: note that it says “the muppet show” despite that predating disney’s definitive ownership of the characters by 30 years because despite all the muppet products since then The Muppet Show is still the last one that doesn’t come across as attempting to cash in on how popular the muppets USED to be. I did say I liked the muppets most wanted film but i wasn’t aware –first of all, how ubiquitous and tiresome the tina fey brand of comedy would become within a few years when all other american comedy had morphed into diluted imitations of it– and worse of the disgraceful “viral”-ready videos of

muppet versions of bohemian rhapsody and the like being made to promote the film. I am able to believe that the “brinksmanship” that got steve whitmire fired in 2016 from controlling kermit involved him protesting and blocking as much degenerative disney energy as possible (and maybe not, because he also performed and CREATED rizzo the rat which only got more tiresome and inclined to steal time from more interesting characters INCLUDING kermit as it went along). If you haven’t seen it, good. this was another of Vackshfump’s fixations about a year ago. it is “only” just under 5 minutes long but each lame muppet video connects you to more lame muppet videos, usually with obnoxious teasers built into them that show about 20 seconds out of context and then you see that again when the video actually goes on.
and i can’t say “jim henson wouldn’t have allowed this” because he allowed muppet babies which i hate most prominently and also thought selling to disney was a good idea, but at least those were cartoon non-“real” muppets so nothing they did actually happened.

It shouldn’t make a difference to a little kid what song the muppets are singing along to, yet the content is so moronic that I, a non-kid, feel embarrassed being near it. And that Bohemian Rhapdoder was chosen specifically so that adult children my age or older, who all this stuff is really made for, would recognize it and be taken in by the woah hey remember wayne’s world remember the 90s quotient. Even though the song is from 1975, 20 years earlier, i definitely never heard it before wayne’s world but heard it loads after that.
I remember in fourth grade a kid who had the song on a tape and would get other kids to do his bidding by saying “i won’t let you listen to my bohemian rhapsody” in the event they did not comply, and that WORKED

This video, it is so bad. It takes a song that is already overexposed and irritating from tired fake parody homages, and covers it with ancient muppet-related nongags lifted straight from that muppet show without any context. Context is VERY important to me. The entire first section is sung in earnest with unchanged lyrics by Gonzo, and Gonzo is not good at singing. The “joke” is that gonzo is accompanied by three chickens who are worse singers and maybe that is funny to somebody for about 5 seconds and it goes on for a minute. ha ha ha haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. the lyrics only change at the part about mama killing a man because the muppets are disney and family and disney doesn’t kill people except villains and parents. Then instead of “we will not let you go” the elderly hecklers say, in unison, “we do not like your jokes” to fozzy bear because see they DON’T like fozzy bear’s jokes and therefore it is funny for them to say that just for no reason amidst this song that otherwise does not concern fozzy bear or jokes or fozzy bear’s jokes.
It reminds me of the ten year period where i hated the muppets because of stupid trash like that and apparently that never actually ended.

AND you can say that the muppet show itself was largely comprised of muppety covers of existing songs. It was, but the intent was not to shoehorn in as many disparate muppet gimmicks as possible. They often featured original or unnamed puppet characters that had nothing to do with the established trademarked ones. They were content to be themselves without desperately trying to remind anyone of themselves. Also disney didn’t own them!

Anyway I don’t believe any muppets actually appear in Ralph’s movie beyond Kermit’s enormous disembodied inanimate head but obviously just the logo is enough to get the point across to somebody such as me, possibly only me, that muppets equals disney, and it all happens in about three seconds. None of this has plot relevance to Ralph since there is no plot to be relevant to. True enough to the title’s promise of wrecked internet, it is sort of like watching the moronic video content of a wrecked system sapped of its potential by soulless opportunists and corporate synergy, except there isn’t a perky brain-damaged narrator’s enormous hands taking the characters out of eggs while the words “here i am here i am how do you do” echo in the distance.

Maybe this dumb frog wearing a bow tie would find it acceptable.

12-31-2019 104am
I just rediscovered this page from nearly ten years ago that I wrote after seeing Avatar and How to Retain your Dragster, in which I make loads of the same complaints. For the sake of my own free time and the few people who don’t yet think I hate them because I hate everything they like, I absolutely need to become less aware of new crummy movies. Even without media influences and truly shoddy friends encouraging these things at me I am not safe without working at the avoidance, and that would be less work than writing another page like this! I could drop dead at any time and I don’t want to risk there being a picture of Josh Gad on my screen when it happens and whoever finds my body weeks later thinking I wasn’t thinking something condemnatory because they definitely aren’t going to read any of this!