-
Matrix re-write
2002-07-30 02:16:22
Just had this thought while I was driving home from weekly anime showing and I thought I'd share it with y'all while I'm waiting for my hair to dry.
Everyone knows about "The Matrix," the movie starring Keanu Reeves that overcame this obstacle and ended up being pretty damn cool all-around. I did like the movie, although the increasing frequency with which I hear its virtues extolled and its constant mention in general media as the ultimate-this-or-that is slowly driving me away.
Anyway, although the movie had exciting fight sequences and ass-kicking action figures in PVC clothing, most people will admit to the science being not only wrong (forgiveable for the sake of entertainment) but dumb. Not the general idea, mind, just the "science" they use to back it up.
In the flick it's said that the world-spanning computer has entombed all of mankind in goey pink phlegm in order to use them as living batteries to power itself. The problem with this is the second law of thermodynamics. The food they have to put into each human to keep them alive is far in excess of that which the computers could get out of their "bio-electric field." Like a couple dozen orders of magnitude more. They'd do better just to burn the food. Thus put a lot of energy in to get very little out. Feeding the humans their dead wouldn't loop the process as humans don't store the energy they've consumed for their entire lives in their tissue, and not even mamalian digestion could be 100% efficient. So the computers would never get anything out of this arrangement except for thousands of tons of shit. Second, we're told that the Matrix is a program run through the humans' heads so that they could percieve a regular reality and not fuck up their "bio-electric fields." Plainly made-up as a plot device for the movie to hinge on, it really ends up sounding kind of hokey. In addition, what it means for Neo is that at the end of the first film he has struck a blow against the Technarcracy by reaching out with his reality-altering powers and destroying their Nintendo. Huh. Kinda lame, really, and doesn't do anything about the billions of humans living in phlegm. They're still captives with no way out, but now they KNOW that their lives suck. (Setting aside the plot point that no one over a certain age (Neo excepted) has survived detachment from the computer. Genocide anyone?) Even if they don't wake up, now they're just running the Nintendo system. Big deal.
However, I had a thought about an essential re-write that might have made the movie make more sense on several levels. What if the computers weren't holding humans as a power source, but as a computation source? The logic would then follow that A) The computers require an incomprehensibly immense amount of computational power either in order to maintain sentience, expand its understanding of the universe, or for some other nefarious end. B) The human brain contains immense computational power, although the exact manner of its workings are unknown in enough detail to replicate. Further, much of the brain is not used regularly. C) The easiest way to create a human brain is to create a human. (Hell, ANYONE can do that...) D) To keep a human brain running properly, it requires the proper enviroment (a human body), proper stimulus, and a lack of improper stimulus (like, say, disembodying it for easy storage).
Therefore, the computers, needing more computational power, grow babies in vats and plug them into the system. They put in food, and they get out data, farming out all the pieces of its computation like those people with NASA screensavers donating extra computer cycles to the SETI project. The calculations run in the background of normal brain function, in the subliminal space or during sleep cycles. To keep the brain functioning properly, hitting a nice level range of activity (the theme of conformity as complacency to the computers from the film), a fictional world is generated for the brains and run for them until their deaths.
Now even "the chosen one" begins to make sense. What would happen if the computational data started leaking into the brain's concious thoughts, or a person was able to control their subconcious? First, they could start controlling the Matrix. How? Well, presumeably the computations for generation of the Matrix is part of the data running through their subconcious. (3D rotations take up a lot of cycles.) It's your brain...you can choose a 1 to be a zero if you know you have the choice. Big whoop? Wait, think about it. Yes, the fiction running through their heads is only important to the other humans, but the calculations the computers are running is ALSO running through their brains. With further work, they could start fucking with the data streaming through their heads and REALLY start messing with the computers, messing with them but good. Now we'd ACTUALLY be doing something more akin to "hacking," and by messing with the data running through YOUR head, you can affect the Matrix running through other people's heads. Now it would make sense why the computers would be so adamant about hunting down someone breaking their precious screensavers. Suddenly, waking up the humans is much more significant, as the ability to mess with the Matrix and, subsequently, the computational data, would actually damage something important to the computers, possibly even reducing their intelligence and sentience. Now Neo CAN destroy the computers through his messing around in their Nintendo system, and his actions actually become significant.
Actually, this makes so much more sense with other events in the film that I wonder if was something written out of the story at a late date. Hmm.
Enough geeking out... -
"I have been chosen....by the great metal hand in the sky..."
2002-07-24 23:50:15
Neglect neglect neglect. On the positive side, very little has been happening around here to talk about, outside of work, which I don't want to talk about.
THERE's a good start. Bleh.
Bleats and blogs and reviews'll be in short supply here for a while as I really need to knuckle down at work and get my life in order. And I bought Warcraft III. Dammit.
I've finally come up with a solution to my arctic roomates by taping a big, magnetic American flag over the vent in my room. (I need the tape 'cause the vent's aluminum.) The change is remarkable. No more waking up curled into a ball for warmth and hacking up a lung. No more condensation on the outside of my windows. Small victories.
Anyway. If you haven't already checked it out, go here:
http://www.improvisation.ws/mb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=4475
Someone else here blogged it today (I'm really sorry, but I've forgotten who.) and I read the whole damn thing at work. See my note on work above. It's only two pages, but that first one is massive. Set aside some time. (I also found that EK had blogged it on her own page after the fact.)
What it is, is "True tales of a porn store clerk." Naturally not for the faint of heart, but surprisingly uniformly good stories and well written throughout. I may write more on it another time when I'm feeling more inspired. However, I think everyone here should note that one of her (the author's) favorite groups is Aqua, specifically "Happy Girls and Boys." It may come a bit out of the blue, but someone should point her to a copy of Alvin T. Chang's video. Something tells me she'd love it.
Oh, and in the "people aren't nearly as crappy as most people think" category, her latest entry said, in it's entirity;
"Management found out about this journal and the NPR piece over the weekend.
I am not fired."
It's nice to see that some buisness owners aren't power hungry enough to try and stamp down on anyone that might criticize them.
Believe it or not, I have a tangent to follow from here. A friend of mine worked the counter at a peepshow for a summer, it being the only reasonably well-paying job she could find. Her attitude toward the job was almost exactly the same as the journal writer above, although she told me that having a woman behind the counter freaked a few long-time customers outta the shop. Apparently dealing face-to-face with a woman (taking the cash) when they'd just finished watching one through a one-way mirror or on a tape (from what little I remember her telling me, it was sort of a "viewing room" arrangement with either live or taped entertainment) was too much for them to deal with. S'pose it didn't help that she was something of a goth, though, of course, without the trappings at work. Her main job was shooing out the under-agers with fake IDs. She told me that it gave her a unique perspective on exactly how far she would go for money. See, there's one thing that a rental shop really doesn't have to deal with that a peepshop does, leaving us with an entirely new job description.
The most strapped for cash guy in the store was the one with the mop. Yeah. Jiz-mopper. Perhaps the lowest tier job in the world. Every single booth had to be mopped out after every use in a sort of limp-wristed effort to alleviate any AIDS fears. My friend told me that she always regarded him with a mix of respect and abject disgusted horror. The money was much better than her counter job, but it was never even a consideration.
I kinda wonder what's happend to Molly after all this time. I haven't seen her in several years. Her mom got terminal pancreatic cancer, and Molly just sorta drifted away from any sort of social life (that -I- knew of...I'm not exactly a "man about town") as her mom got sicker. Last I heard she was heading over to teach English in a German school. (German major in college. First met her coming out of a class. Four days later she came up to me in Oxford Comics in full goth regailia and launched into conversation with me. I had no idea who she was. Two weeks later it struck me. Damn. And I though it was my winning personality.) She'd been in Germany before, which lead to another interesting job for her. See (I'm reciting this from memories over four years old) there's apparently a few fairly large pockets of Irish immigrants in some places in Germany, and she found a pub run by an Irishman, serving that English-speaking population. Molly, having the last name of McKee, but being a fourth-generation American, got hired on as a bartender. One night, one of the older regulars who hadn't been in since Molly'd been hired walked in and saw her. Calling over the owner of the pub, he said:
(Bear with my atrocious attemtps at typing in dialect)
"'Ere now. 'Oo's that at th' end o' th' bar?"
"Oh, tha's the new girl. 'Er name's Molly."
"Molly? Wha's 'er las' name?"
"Mc'Kee."
(Shouted across the bar)"MOLLY MCKEE, WHERE YA' FROM?"
*pause*
"Uh...Dubli'n!" (Ancestral family originally hailed from there.)
"Dubli'n! Me da's from ther'!"
Apparently she kept the accent up for all of five minutes until...
"Y'ur not Oirish, are ya' Molly?"
"No, I'm Ameryican."
Believe me, it's funnier to hear her do it properly. She can pull off the Irish brouge so that only a native can find her out.
Let's see, other stuff. I don't normally go into personal politics here, as it would be nearly impossible to carry on a proper conversation or discussion in this format without me reading more widely and carefully than I do (can't be sure someone in a journal I don't read is refuting me), but I thought I'd make an exception here. I characterize myself as slightly right of center (and getting futher right with every revelation of imbecillic actions by the extreme left). This piece:
http://warnow.blogspot.com/2002_07_21_warnow_archive.html#79249986
Is much further right than I, but makes interesting points nonetheless, pointing to how the political axis and world perspectives have shifted in just the past five years. Scroll down until you get to "A thought experiment" (or just do a find for "experiment" on the page...lotta content there).
On a more innocuous point, I was flipping channels a few days ago and encountered the cartoon Disney channel (college cable gets the weirdest stuff) right as a show called "Kim Possible" started up (sound it out). Utterly generic fare for a Disney show, mid-to-late teen cheerleader star is actually a secret agent stopping mad scientists from taking over the world, etc. etc. etc. To give you an idea of how typical the writing was, the episode I caught was the "brain switch with side-kick" episode done so many times before in so many other Disney cartoons. (Rescue Rangers and Tailspin jump to mind.) The animation was actually rather impressive, with overly-styilized characters on a fairly simple level of detail, but with great attention paid to motion and momentum and stuff like that. Lotsa involved (funny) fight scenes, etc. etc. Similar level to Lilo and Stitch, although without the cool backgrounds and with simpler characters. Flavor of Fred Perry's Gold Digger in there pretty strongly. (Here, check it out yourself: http://disney.go.com/disneychannel/zoogdisney/kimpossible/site/index.html)
The thing that got my attention, though, was that her laughable sidekick has a pet, fulfilling the "cute animal sidekick" category. Except that it isn't cute. I couldn't tell what the hell it was supposed to be. Maybe a weasel with buck teeth, or an extruded beaver. (Checking on the website tells me that it's a "naked molerat" named "Rufus.") I can tell, however, that it has not a single hair on it's pink body. Someone help me, I couldn't stop thinking "OH MY GOD! IT'S CHOO-CHOO BEAR!" http://www.somethingpositive.net/sp01162002.html
If you don't read Somethingpositive, you should. (Oh, and don't worry, Davan warms up to Choo-Choo Bear.)
Well la-de-frickin'-da. I've lost my notes on the Powerpuff Girls Movie. Dammit. Yeah, I eventually gave in to my curiosity and saw it. Frankly, I think that the PPG are the best thing that Cartoon Network has come up with on its own. I mean, Space Ghost: Coast to Coast and Birdman: Attorney at Law are really irregular in quality, Johnny Bravo and Ed Edd and Eddie were continuous regurgitation of the same theme, Cow and Chicken managed weird (and largely ass-centric) without the funny, Dexter was aimed distinctly lower than I was willing to stoop, and the Brak show....OK maybe the Brak show gives them some competition, but PPG always managed to just be funny. Either it was parody, or self-parody, or self-self parody, or slapstick, or, hell just all the lines Mojo got, the ones which he spoke, the words assembled into complex thoughts for him to recite under the direction of the film producers; were always funny. And it was a fairly generic kind of funny that ten-year-olds would get as well as the adults. Well, the adults who like cartoons anyway. It's sorta the same fun everyone has at a Godzilla movie, appropriately enough.
That made this movie something of a problem case. See, I'm working off of very little info here, but if I understand it correctly, once CN approached the voice actors about the possiblity of doing a PPG movie, the stars all wanted to be paid like...well...like stars. CN refused to pay anything more than scale, which, if I understand correctly, is very little for a project this big. So CN got voice doubles who would work for scale and told the TV VAs to go blow. PPG and CN: When your best friends get in a fight. I don't even know who was in the right on the debate, so I'm not gonna comment on that.
Now, I spoke in the past about the stigma of going to see a kiddie cartoon alone. It's the same thing that kept me from considering seeing that "Spirit" movie despite all the brilliant reviews it ended up getting. Well, it is there. Most of the people in the theater were there with at least one kid under twelve, although there were about four others in the teen-early twenties range, not counting me. My advice for seeing this film is to come in late (you won't miss anything...see later in the review) and sit in the back or bring a group of five or six like-minded individuals and pick an obscure showing time. Hunching down self-conciously in your seat will detract from the movie-watching experience.
Anway, the movie doesn't even start with PPG. There's first a 12-15 min Dexter cartoon where he gets the chicken pox. (Brace yourself, the following is disturbing.) When you raise the budget on a Dexter cartoon slightly, it becomes Ren and Stimpy. Really. Dexter runs around in his briefs covered with red bulbous protrusions that we get LOTS of CLOSE ups OF. Basically, the whole thing reminded me why I never liked Dexter's Laboratory. (Other than the one where he gets a talking dog.)
The movie proper. Everyone knows this is going to be the origin story, right? So we're expecting a good long windup to the actual mix of sugar and spice and everything nice and CHEMICAL X, which will bore all the little kids and put the adults to sleep, right? Wrong. That's taken care of during the OPENING CREDITS. As usual, Craig McCracken cuts right to the chase. Three minutes later, we've established that the girls have super powers and there's a monkey lurking in the background. No, see, this movie is about A) how Townsville learns to love the Girls (awwww) and B) how the girls learn to beat the everloving shit out of the bad guys. (Second revelation courtesy of Buttercup.) Only three of the familiar old villans appear in this film, and Fuzzy Lumpkins and the Gangreen Gang are only really there in cameos. The main villan, naturally, is MoJo JoJo.
The best part of the movie, by far, are the two action sequences. Near the very beginning the girls, in their first day at school, get into a game of tag that pretty much destroys the city. The animation here is just beautiful fun. Explosions. Stylized little cars being thrown through buildings. Stupidly-fast-paced runs through the skyscrapers reminiscent of the cycles in Tron. Spinning and weaving and dodging and buckled pavement and holes through buildings, etc. etc. The seams where CG and...uh...whatever method animates the girls, is plainly evident, but we really don't care. It's just too funny. This is what you need the group of like-minded friends for. The cartoon is a lot funnier with a laughing audience. Mojo befriends the girls (being, at this point, a sad bag-monkey) and convinces them to help him fix up Townsville with that active volcano in the middle of town. The second action sequence is when MoJo's plan goes into action, and then it backfires on him, and then the girls beat the crap out of everyone, and then ANOTHER of MoJo's plans goes into action and the girls beat the crap out of THAT, and Townsville forgives the girls because - in the words of the Ancient from Invader Zim - "because it was cool." The action scenes really are why you're watching. Most of the fast-paced, utterly absurd humor is there with side comments and running jokes and the bang and the smash and the "OW OW OW." What more could you want?
Well, we could want the original VAs back. I'm placing my ears on the line here if the original VA's actually resolved their differences, but the voices do sound different. They're all really close, but the impression that something's slightly "off" does grind in to you by the end of the show. The writing's a bit off as well. All of the jokes are stretched out and telegraphed a bit more than we're used to. Even Mojo doesn't get his charactaristic tripartate speech impediment until near the very end. That one really puzzles me, as I'd have thought they'd have more room for that sort of thing, not less. Hmm. The audience does get thrown a few bones, though. There's a Proboscis Monkey (http://www.mered.org.uk/saraweb/animals/proboscis%20monkey.htm) that does a snazzy imitation of Jimmy Durante, an old vaudvillian that no twelve year old would have ever heard of. Think about it, how many kids would even get the whole "barrel" joke, since it's a reference to the toy? (On another note, the monkey that whipped up the "tomado" on a wheeled hot-plate is obviously supposed to be someone. Can anyone tell me who? I can't figure it out.)
Even if the ending is a bit lame (a speech about responsibility) this movie is worth it just to see all the stuff they could do with the animation style once it got a little money. Any animation nut worth his salt would want to see these scenes a few times, although the slightly-off nature of the voices and the less snappy jokes may reduce the watchability for pickier viewers. Hell, it's barely an hour and a quarter. (Not counting the Dexter short.) What have you got to loose?
(No spellchecking. Tired.) -
"It's ALIVE!!!! ALIVE!!!"
2002-07-22 16:30:48
Computer's back and fixed! Whoo hoo! Probably way too late to consider finishing my barely-started AMV in time for AWA pro, though. Turns out that I managed to half-blow the power supply in the machine so that there were enough functioning fuses to run LEDs and the case fan, but not enough to spin up the drive and establish a connection to the monitor. Leave it to me to find a unique way to break my box.
Just the quick note. At work now. -
"Sittin' down town in a railway station / One toke over the line..."
2002-07-20 12:26:12
You know, I left a whole section of my last entry out. The part where I explain why all this makes baseball distinctly American, that I think the US is obsessed with heroes and all their trappings more than "causes." Oh well.
doki doki: Uh, you did catch that I was kidding about the po' folks thing right? -
"To hit away..."
2002-07-19 21:38:04
EK: GAHHHHHH! Musical Mental Image! (MMI) Must purge brain! Must...fight...back...with...reference...to...the finish of Robin William's HBO special....but....can't bring myself to...do...it....
Referencing another part of your post, your "Man in Black" video always reminded me of a three-minute intermission I happened upon on VH1's "Storytellers" series featuring Willy Nelson and Johnny Cash. I flipped on to them just as they'd hit a lull between songs. Willy Nelson looked over and started studying all the different drinks that had been piled up for them on a nearby table.
Willy Nelson: Let's see here...we got bottled water...tea...decaffeinated coffee...milk...apple juice...and Coca-Cola......Johnny, I think we're in serious danger of becoming uncool.
Johnny Cash": Well....I think we'll be OK so long as we keep wearing black...
Anyway, wasn't actually expecting any replies to my little dental spiel last time, as it was mostly rhetorical. Thanks everyone (and thanks for another check-in as a reader, Mechaman!)
iserlohn: I am duly shamed for my negligence in not checking out your journal earlier. You can be certain I'll be keeping an eye upon it now, as anyone who can make me feel smarter by making me realize I can still read German (even though I can't write it) definitely gets my attention. Where exactly is Strobl? (And how on earth do you do umlauts and "ess-tsets" in the journal?) When I was on the exchange program to Germany we briefly passed over into Austria during the final leg of the program. We went up the Zugspitze (my GOD I have never been so frightened in a cable car. I swear the whole thing was going straight up!), got drunk off our asses at a Hofbrauhaus (2 maBes apiece...for 16 year-olds), and managed to get lost in the backstreets of Salzburg for two solid hours at 1:00 in the morning while leading a girl on a leash. (Don't ask. In fact, forget I said that last bit.)
In other news, I think God is trying to tell me to stop seeing silly children's animated films. That's the only real explanation I can come up with. I wanted to go see the PPG movie yesterday (YOU SEE! YOU SEE WHAT HORRIBLE STIGMAS I'M WILLING TO GO THROUGH JUST TO PROPERLY SATE YOUR NEVERENDING THIRST FOR MOVIE REVIEWS? THE STIGMA OF GOING TO SEE A KIDDIE MOVIE ALONE! Besides, it looks funny.) and I get there at 7:00 only to find that there wasn't a single movie in ANY of the theaters scheduled until 10:15. Odd. Turns out that the AC had gone out for the theater, and they refused to show anything until late at night after the building cooled down. *Sigh* I might try again on Sunday.
On the positive side, the student center here at Tech has been showing "The Natural" on the TV near the pizza place.
Best. Baseball. Movie. Evah.
Needless to say, I've been eating a lot of pizza this week.
You know, I hate sports. I really do. I would regard it as a pleasant diversion and a show of home-team pride if it weren't for the fact that the "trading" that is now such a key aspect of every team lineup has erased any sincerity out of "fighting for the home team," and the ludicrous assertion that the players should be paid more than the GNP of several small nations in order to do a job that anyone true fan would PAY thousands of dollars to do for a single game strikes me as sinful excess. You're playing a fucking GAME here! It has no significance! It creates nothing! It advances humanity not one iota! You are a vicious cycle, feeding only on the self-importance funneled into you from dilapidated and depressed idolizing homebodies, dissatisfied with their lives and living vicariously through you, who revere you only for your ability to glean admiration from thousands like them. How can you possibly justify STRIKING for MORE MONEY when you're already going to be multi-millionaires after you retire? You should be happy to be making a living wage out of it!
And yet, if you put a gun to my head and made me follow a sport, I'd choose baseball. "Baseball?" I hear you say, "That's the most boring sport there is...short of golf, maybe. Why on Earth would you want to follow that? Soccer has fast-moving action non-stop until the players drop. Football has behemoths colliding before your very eyes and tearing at one another with their ham-like fists. Tennis...well, OK, we'll give you tennis. Why baseball?"
Because it's the great American pastime.
Wait, let me explain. It's not out of some misplaced, corporate-sponsored nationalistic pride that I like it, nor out of a jingoistic "made in America" stamp, although my love of things turn-of-the-century means that there's a bit of the tradition and history of such patriotism attached. It's also not because my Grandfather used to take me to Brewers' games (although that doesn't hurt). It's because the game itself is uniquely American in culture and aspect. (Yes, I know it's big in Japan and Cuba, give me a minute.)
The simple format of the game, and it's rough analogs in Cricket, kickball, stickball, and the like, is intensely individualistic. Sure, there are two-person games where one will and skill is pitted against another, but when you walk up to home plate with a bat on your shoulder and stand ready for the pitch, you are standing dead center in the realm of the enemy. No one out there is on your side, no one is standing ready to back you up.
And the entire other team is against you.
Baseball is really a game designed for heroes. Sure, you can have great quarterbacks, or receivers, but they are always dependent upon the rest of the team to block for them. Any victory is a team victory, an individual never stands alone. Basketball may be unbalanced at times, with a single star making 90% of the baskets, but they couldn't manage that without the rest of the team running interference. Soccer and Hockey depend so thoroughly on the strategies of exact passing that the same is true of them. In those sports you cheer for teams, not players. Baseball, though, is the place where individuals shine. Everyone has their base to guard or field to cover. You screw up, and there's no one to blame it on. When you're at bat, any accomplishment you manage is entirely yours. Any failure, the same. A game for heroes to prove themselves at.
Baseball is also a game of instants. I dislike the ludicrous number of stats they keep on the game, as this tends to cloud the issue (unless you merely regard the stats as the accumulation of a series of instants rather than a progressive building of a legacy). By this I mean that there is no "history" to the events of the game. Your attempt at the plate in the 3rd inning is the exact same as that in the 9th inning. The same at the first strike as at the third. Every time someone steps up to the plate, it's the same chance over again. There's no difference in position on the field or angle of attack based on the previous batters (OK, beyond the strategy involved in hitting someone home, which, you must admit, is minimal), nor is there a plan of attack from the field. Everything is made up on the fly. Because of this aspect, baseball is the game best lent to iconographic moments. A photograph of the batter in full swing with the ball flying off into left field really tells the whole story. He knocked the hell out of it. As proof of this aspect, consider that fans judge players on these moments, and not on their histories. A truly spectacular hit will always be a truly spectacular hit, regardless of how much the player had sucked for weeks before. Again, the perfect setup for a hero. (Everyone loves it when they redeem themselves.) Take Nolan Ryan. The guy won only 31 more games than he lost in his entire career, but he was still a shoe-in for the hall of fame, because everyone knew he was a great pitcher. They judged him on all those times he succeeded, despite all the times he failed.
Public obsession with these "heroes" (amplified by most of them being home-town boys) meant, at least in the sport's infancy, that their personalities actually became an integral part of the playing. Not surprisingly, a lot of them turned out to be total assholes. You didn't have to be a nice guy to catch, throw, or hit a ball, but the audience would know it if you weren’t. Some of the most phenomenal bastards and simple thugs ever seen cycled through the ranks of baseball and even came out with records and acclaim, much of which has been curtailed by the PC squads as of late, blending everyone into careful, non-offensive blanks. The concept of fining a manager for an anti-Semitic or otherwise racist remark in the beginning days of baseball would have been laughable. Jackie Robinson would have been much less a hero if it weren't for the violently hostile environment he entered into. Hell, go back far enough and you'll find a time when "spiking" was still a common occurrence. In the days of sharpened metal cleats, a common strategy among the dirtier players was to slide feet-first into base and aim to sink the 3/4 inch spikes into the baseman's lower leg. It was a good and dirty way to remove a good player from the game. A couple of fairly famous (and likely many not-so-famous) players had their career cut short along with their hamstring.
Some of the most famous games from those early days were the first time these complete assholes would meet simply superior players and the crowd was there to see which would win, honest sportsmanship or dirty tricks? Crowds loved to hate players almost as much as they loved to cheer them.
This concentration on the individual, this over-inflation of personality to epic levels, this is what makes it so distinctly American...or rather distinctly American as it was understood 50 or 60 years ago. I've a theory that the decline in baseball in the public eye correlates not so much to the rise of other, alternate sports, but to the decline in the idea of the individual as the promoter of accomplishment (you can be anything you want to be) and the advancement in the idea of teamwork being superior to the individual (you need to learn to be a team player). Thus the rise of more "team-accomplishment" sports.
Anyway, "The Natural." Man what a great movie. Each of the shots Roy Hobbes (Robert Redford) makes are just iconographic to the extreme. The lightning strike. The destruction of park property. The crack of the bat. (Actually, I see this film and think that there really isn't an onomatopoeia strong enough for the sound of the bat hitting the ball. It feels like the ground should shake with the collision.) Those few notes on the trumpet in the background. (Absolutely perfect.) And, of course, that final scene with the shower of sparks parodied so many times since. (We know they kid...because they love.) And, of course, Hobbes himself. A man whose youth was stolen from him, and which he feels he has to fulfill just once. This film surrounds him with so many of the heroic trappings he's almost Arthurian. (A specific reference is made to Lancelot at one point.) All the way from the beginning where he strikes out (what's obviously supposed to be) Babe Ruth, one of the more notorious braggarts and all-around assholes of the game. At one point, Hobbes confesses he loves this game more than anything. How much does he love it? He gives up really great sex for it. Nuff' said.
And, of course, the gambling aspect. Baseball fans know this as the absolute scummiest, lowest depth to which a baseball player can crawl. Ever since it came out that the 1919 world series was thrown by the White Socks (later nicknamed the Black Socks from the scandal) to the Cincinnati Reds, the strictures against betting in Baseball have been stronger than in any other sport, a betting player being forever refused entry into the Hall of Fame.
I've been thinking about this film for a while, and, until I say different, I'm gonna have to rank it as my second favorite movie of all time. To be honest, though, I've only gotten a chance to watch it 40 min at a time over the last week. Still teared me up pretty bad at the end, though.
Go see this movie if you haven't before. By the end you'll understand what I see in baseball.
Now, the movie review. (Hah! Bet you thought you just read my review for the post! Well, I'm making up a bit for my absence in the last few days.)
This time a little diversion into old toons. There's a number of "Cartoon Crazies" DVD titles out there, and they're all REALLY cheap. Curious at what could be on a $3.00 DVD, I picked up the "Famous Animators" one based on a couple of titles I recognized from the listing on the back.
The DVD covers three or four offerings for each animator from the vaults, mostly from Fleisher Studios. Fleisher studios was the old competition for Disney and gave both Disney and WB a run for their money over time. Fleisher owned the animation rights for both Popeye and Betty Boop, as well as later producing the Superman shorts, cartoons recognized the world over as some of the best ever made. You've probably seen a couple of these that ran for a while on Cartoon Network, but a lot of the older offerings from Fleisher have pretty much disappeared from the public eye.
Some of the cartoons from this DVD demonstrate exactly WHY they've been forgotten, whereas others it's really more of a pity. The three artists on the DVD are Seymour Kneitel, Myron Waldeman, and Tom Palmer. I'll have to keep this a bit short, as I can't watch this while I write about it (at work, ya'know.). The first few on the disk are Myron's and they, frankly, aged the most, both figuratively and literally. The first three are "funny animal" stories attempting to be so wretchedly cute (and failing so utterly) that I was afraid I'd bought a disk of an old studio unloading some of it's old licenses. What, exactly, was considered so funny about donkeys back then? Hmm? Oh boy, a momma donkey is trying to teach her baby how to bray properly. This oughta be ear-splitting. And if that's not enough, how about a musical with ants so high-pitched they sound like the CHIPMUNK's chipmunks. The prints on the first few were pretty bad as well, with oversaturated color bleeding all over the place and frames where the paint had literally been scraped off. Fortunately, the rest were pretty clean. The last offering, though, was a "Little Lulu" cartoon, a character I'd only ever HEARD of before. It was surprisingly entertaining. She's sort of like a cleverer, non-stuttering Porky Pig from the old black and whites where Porky could star alone. (Lulu's in color.) Skips school, learns her lesson, etc. Well drawn, well painted, good print. Things looking up.
Tom Palmer was the one I really bought the DVD for, as he was one of the animators behind "Toonerville Trolley," a cute, very well animated (for the time) cartoon based on an old (and I mean OLD, 1920's or so) newspaper cartoon, utterly dated by it's subject matter. I remember seeing one or two of those cartoons as a kid in our public library along with some Felix and the like. The trolley is a (comically) little rail-trolley that runs from the train station out to all the little isolated country towns not big enough to warrant a station of their own. It's run by a little old man who's married to an ENORMOUS, HERCULEAN Swedish woman named "Katrinka" who can pick up the whole trolley with one hand, or idly toss a charging bull into a tree. Invariably the trolley gets into some trouble, and Katrinka has to come running. This cartoon is followed by another lost star, "Molly Moo-cow" with a blackface scene and do-wop-ing cannibals that wouldn't pass muster today, and finally a Felix cartoon "Bold King Cole" where we learn that ghosts have a really terrible save vs. lightning. Felix is considered historic as he was the first character created specifically for cartoons (as opposed to previous cartoons that used characters from the newspaper funnies, etc.), but his cartoons are typically fun enough to stand on their own.
Finally, there's Seymor Kneitel, who must rank as something of a superstar among the classics. His first cartoon is a popeye piece. I really think Popeye gets something of a bum rap from most animation fans. His cartoons got a bit preachy and kiddie-concious near the end (look for color), but the early ones where it was just him and some guy beating the hell out of each other I always thought were hilarious. The trick with Popeye cartoons is not to listen to the main dialogue, but to all the stuff that Popeye says under his breath during the cartoon. Puns, wordplays, jokes, sarcasm, all the best writing is hidden in there. Oh, and if you don't read the online comic "Elf Life," you might want to check out the current storyline. The author has worked in a retelling of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" using Popeye characters into his story. (Including the Sea Hag, a character most kids've never heard of, but who got nearly as much play as Bluto in the old newspaper comics.) Anyway, the cartoon is Popeye and Bluto fighting over whose penny arcade (flip-book shows mounted in ornate mechanisms arranged like video games and penny-coin-operated) Wimpy should attend. Wimpy ends up selling tickets to the fight of the century.
The next cartoon was a Betty Boop. I personally like Betty because she's been the focus of two of the most ridiculous actions ever involved in animation. Her cartoons were always musical and even guest starred Calb Calloway on more than one occasion (the old guy who sang Minnie the Moocher in the first Blues Brothers' movie. Sang the same song to Betty at one point.) through the "modern technique" of rotoscoping. However, all was not well in pictures. The Hayes Commission, otherwise known as the Film Production Code, had been put into action. Basically, it was an attempt at self-regulation by the Hollywood film industry (IIRC) in an attempt to keep the government from stepping in at the request of tittering old biddies. What? You say this sounds familiar? Comics Code of Approval? Explicit Lyrics labels? You don't say....
Anyway. The Hayes commission moved in around 1935-36 (Betty got her start in '31) and told the animators....get this....that Betty's skirt was too short. (I'll spare us both by eliminating the rant here.) Word was that she'd better lower her hemline and cut out all that sexy-talk or she'd be out on the street. Pretty much tamed the character down to the point where she'd lost her personality, but still hung on for a few more years. (A recently released box set lists 109 cartoons starring her.) The second was a full-blown legal action brought against Boop. Originally Betty had been based on the look and attitude of a songstress Helen "Boop-a-doop" Kane. (Yeah, the catch-phrase too.) The years had not been kind to Mrs. Kane, as she gradually fell from public favor for years after the high point when Betty had been cribbed from her visage. At the very tail end of her career, Helen Kane decided she deserved a piece of Betty's pie. A very LARGE piece, since, as Helen viewed it, all the fame Betty had gotten was due to her imitation of the starlet Kane, and the animated character had just been riding her coat-tails ever since. In the end, the judge ruled in favor of Betty, when it was established that, whereas everyone knew who Betty Boop was, practically no one knew who Helen Kane was anymore.
Ouch. Way to end a career.
Anyway, the BB cartoon was a fairly fun recreation of the Cinderella story (with a cameo for the prince). There were some especially odd backgrounds in there that have me completely stymied. They aren't standard backgrounds, but I can't figure out what they are. Rotoscoped? Dunno. Fairly unremarkable (although Betty gets a bit racy for the times) except for one scene where the six mice, two lizards, and pumpkin do a little song and dance to express how EXTREMELY FUCKING HAPPY they are to be turned into horses and footmen. REALLY, REALLY HAPPY. FREAKY WEIRD.
The final cartoons are rather unremarkable. There's some excellent live-action of model rockets substituted for animation in "Dancing on the Moon" (Oh honey, why would you take me to the moon for our honeymoon? The place has no atmosphere! *Ba dump bump*), and some interesting multi-layering of backgrounds in "Song of the Birds."
In conclusion (geez! look at the time!) it's a good collection, but if there's any other way to collect these, I'd suggest that instead. Fans of any individual cartoon would want to try and find more of that BB or Popeye or Trolley, and these aren't the way to do it. Too much random crap thrown in to empty out the vaults that would only be of interest to bigger animation nuts than I. Good selection for the money, though, in case you were just curious what I was talking about and wanted to see a trolley or Little Lulu cartoon to decide for yourself. Otherwise, look for box sets (like the 10-tape Betty box...wish I'd grabbed that when I had the chance) compilations and the like.
JOURNAL: MCWagner (Matthew Wagner)
Current server time: Jan 10, 2025 17:03:32