Our World

The Zombie Movies of George A. Romero

noreply@blogger.com (Captain Video) — Sat, 10 Oct 2015 03:59:00 +0000

It's October! Time to celebrate the Halloween season with this article I've been working at off and on since April! Join me as I detail the rise and fall of the man who invented the zombie as we know it.

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

What's curious about the influence of Night of the Living Dead is that its production values have become just as definitive as its content. The very concept of the living dead was born from budget restrictions, which set the theme for the entire production. This was a movie shot with whatever Romero could get his hands on, and for that reason the whole affair remains grounded in a terrible reality no matter how surreal the proceedings get.

Johnny and Barbara

Night of the Living Dead does more with less than any movie I can think of. The entirety of the film (minus footage shown on TV) takes place inside of perhaps one square mile. We start with a car pulling up to a cemetery, where a brother and sister (who don't much care for each other) leave flowers on a grave of a relative they don't seem particularly interested in. Johnny realizes that being around so many dead people scares Barbara and picks on her before being assaulted by a zombie. Barbara runs.

All of this unfolds in less than ten minutes. We've been introduced to a setting and three characters (not counting a snippet of radio broadcast), and yet we've been given a sense of both what this world is like and that something very unexpected and wrong has just happened. All of this spools out in black and white, a production decision I believe was born of the same budget restrictions that inspired the zombies themselves and would lead to the use of chocolate syrup in lieu of blood later on.

Bill Hinzman, the first Romero zombie

The first zombie in the cemetery, Bill Hinzman, is incredibly iconic, which is why it's so strange that he acts almost nothing like Romero's later zombies. Remember that the people making this film had never seen what we'd consider a zombie movie because those types of movies didn't exist yet. Despite the fact that Romero zombies are considered "slow," since the mode of locomotion most associated with them is a kind of shambling shuffle, Hinzman runs, in a strange, loping gate that suggests both of his legs have gone to sleep.

Babara's escape is remarkable in and of itself for how many cliches it contains. We get the rumble of thunder and the flash of lightning as Hinzman looks up from the fallen form of Johnny, even though it never rains or even continues thundering. We get to see Barbara screw up her escape by slipping out of her shoes and falling down. She gets to the car and then can't start it, because Johnny had the keys, so she lets the parking brake out and rolls down the hill into a tree. Finally, she makes it to a nearby farmhouse just as the sun sets. (And the sun sets hard, going from midday to twilight to night in the space of perhaps a minute. As noted in the Rifftrax - see below - "the sun didn't set, it crashed.")

The farmhouse

The rest of the movie unfolds at the farmhouse, where a strange ensemble arises (a number of people turn out to be hiding in the basement). Barbara meets Ben, who rolls up after nightfall just as her nerves hit the breaking point. Barbara is one of the most helpless women ever depicted on film - she spends the rest of the movie semi-comatose in shock - but Romero almost makes up for it in Ben, who is black.

The part of Ben, who is the closest thing Night gets to a hero, wasn't specifically written for a black man; Duane Jones was just the actor who impressed Romero most with his audition. And it's interesting to watch the movie with that in mind, because it is never actually mentioned that Ben is black, trapped here in a farmhouse full of scared white people in 1968. This is important, because much of the movie's second act is a series of arguments between Ben and an older man named Harry Cooper, and it's never really clear if Cooper dislikes Ben because he's black, because he's young, or simply because Cooper is naturally a dick to people.

Ben (top) and Harry Cooper

Night of the Living Dead thrives on the things it doesn't pin down. The biggest one is why the dead are returning to life. Some speculation, shown in an emergency TV news broadcast the survivors watch, is that it has something to do with a probe to Venus that was destroyed on reentry to Earth because of anomalous radiation. The probe doesn't get mentioned a whole lot, and isn't mentioned at all in any of the sequels, because Romero's guiding thought in creating zombies was actually quite simple. According to him (in an interview in Birth of the Living Dead, see below), zombies were simply a representation of what would happen if things suddenly changed.

Famed as the birthplace of the modern zombie, Night is just as important for what it doesn't establish: the zombie apocalypse. The film's ending is so incredibly bleak that one could be forgiven for forgetting that the humans are actually shown winning at the end. Night of the Living Dead basically invented the zombie genre, but in doing so never really gets the chance to inhabit it. That honor would fall it its sequel.

If you liked Night of the Living Dead, try....

An excellent primer exists in the form of Birth of the Living Dead, a 2013 documentary on the film's origins and production history. It's a good place to start if you've already seen the movie and want to know more.
Considering its status in the public domain, it's a shame that Night has never received a proper comedy dub. An effort was made in 1991's Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Terror, but not much of one. The (very loose) premise is that the zombies are actually disgruntled workers just getting off shift, and the survivors pick somebody to go outside in search of pizza. The humor is too harsh and rambling to really make for an effective theme comedy; a good example is a running joke that goes nowhere about Barbara (dubbed in falsetto by a man) hearing a duck in the distance and being unable to locate it.

Still, one spectacular joke almost makes it worthwhile. When the sheriff comes up to the burned-out truck in the film's closing minutes, he eyes it considerately and sagely mutters, "I've seen this kind of thing before. It's a truck."

A somewhat-better stab at comedy comes in the form of the RiffTrax cover, but considering its pedigree (RiffTrax is run by many of the former stars of Mystery Science Theater 3000, as its website's header text helpfully explains) I had hoped for better. This one is basically Mike talking to himself, alone, which is a downer so big I was never completely able to enjoy the jokes. Movie mockery is supposed to be a group activity, dammit.

Dawn of the Dead (1978)

Dawn of the Dead has one of my all-time favorite movie openings, magnificent in its garish simplicity. The camera opens up on a section of carpet that is so orange it is nearly fluorescent. Viewers' eyes get perhaps a second or so to adjust to this, and then there is a loud synth power chord as the movie's title comes up. Welcome to the end of the world. It's 1978.

Frannie, swaddled in the comfort of 1978

Romero has a strange relationship with continuity. It isn't that he doesn't care - there's a great sequence of a zombie getting murdered with a screwdriver in Dawn that only exists to explain why a character is wearing a jacket in some (already filmed) shots and not others - but Romero decided not to pick this fight. Night of the Living Dead looks entirely like 1968, and Romero decidedly to simply accept that a decade had passed between it and this first sequel, trusting that audiences would do the same.

As covered in Birth of the Living Dead, George Romero's career immediately before becoming a filmmaker was in television. He shot segments for Mister Rogers' Neighborhood (of all things) and did commercials. As such, it's kind of appropriate that Dawn opens in a TV station (that hideous red-orange carpet is actually on the walls). The first character we meet is Frannie (Gaylen Ross), who awakens to find that civilization is disintegrating.

It's hard to say whether more of the madness in the studio of WGON is unfolding in front of the cameras or behind them; the impression we get as Frannie walks out into the control room is that regard for order has completely lapsed. Production people are arguing with on-air talent. Curse words, strangely absent in Night, abound. Nobody knows anything and everyone is mad about it.

A WGON emergency broadcast

The only real clue to a timeframe we get comes in this scene; we hear a man yelling about the situation of "the last three weeks." This seems about right, even if Night takes place explicitly in the spring and Dawn implicitly in late fall. The zombie problem is clearly causing people to doubt the structural integrity of civilization, and even as she watches people in suits tear each other down verbally, Frannie is taken aside by Stephen (David Emgee), her boyfriend and the station's helicopter pilot, and told to meet him on the roof for escape later that evening. The only person who overhears this conversation, a blase camera operator, tells her that it's fine if she goes because the station will switch over to an emergency feed at midnight. "Our responsibility is finished," he tells her with chilling disinterest.

Again, Romero's economy of style is deceptive: We've just gotten a very visceral feeling for the zombie apocalypse without ever seeing a zombie or, in fact, leaving the confines of the TV station. Suitably primed, we change venues to a tenement block being cleared by the National Guard elsewhere in the city.

The first zombie in Dawn of the Dead

As Romero reiterates many times on the DVD commentary, the zombies in Dawn - which are first encountered in this tenement building - look the way they do in part because of lighting. Despite consistent application of gray makeup, the zombies photograph as blue or green or pallid white depending on the conditions, making for a good thematic match with the lurid fake blood used. Strangely, the first zombie in this movie - a bloody mess in contrast with Hinzman - is both more shocking and less memorable, appearing only briefly, thrashing around on a linoleum floor. One guardsman tells another to shoot the thing; the first guardsman instead shoots himself.

James A. Baffico, who plays a guardsman named Wooley elsewhere in this scene, delivers what is probably the most kinetically bad performance I've ever seen committed to film. Wooley's dialogue is a wall of fast-paced racial slurs and general put-downs spat out with near-unvarying disgust. There is nothing even remotely real about Baffico's performance, and yet it works, fitting the frenetic action perfectly. The body count in this scene is staggeringly high, showcasing what an easy thing humanity is to lose.

Roger (a SWAT member and a friend of Stephen's) has seen enough. By the end of the raid, he and another cop, Peter, know that the fight is unwinnable. They join Stephen and Frannie in an escape into the Pennsylvania night.

The main cast (from left); Fran, Stephen, Peter and Roger

Peter (Ken Foree) is black, and unlike Ben his blackness is part of his character. Romero says on the commentary that he specifically wanted to create another strong black character, and in Foree he found an actor who could play strength with nuance. Peter is both the smartest and the most self-aware of the four. Though the three white leads are never hostile to him, there's a feeling, as he boards the helicopter with them, that they don't know how to interact with a black person, and that he's been in this spot before. The awkwardness is mostly brushed away, though, and they carry on.

Low on fuel, they land the following day on the roof of a massive, deserted shopping mall. Although their stop is initially supposed to be temporary, the survivors end up finding the mall too good a prize to give up. They set up a living area in a storage space and get reports on the disintegration of the outside world. The revolution is, in fact, televised.

Stephen, watching a Civil Defense broadcast on a modest portable TV

The second half of the movie unfolds with ever-slowing pace. This is the part of Dawn that's entered to popular consciousness: sitting out a zombie apocalypse like it's a snow day. Dawn of the Dead is consumer satire at its most blunt: the survivors while away the hours as the days run together. The characters end up subject to ennui, with the unspoken paradox that their lives are both extremely precious and yet entirely meaningless.

The consumerism-skewering angle is helped by how badly all the physical goods have aged. The group's living space ends up adorned with the ritziest gear around, but that just means things like a top-loading VCR and a futuristic chair that gets sat in while still in the packaging. Their TV is a huge-for-the-era CRT model with all the design flare of a microwave oven. The clothes aren't much better, especially when being shown off by dead-eyed mannequins.

Dr. Rausch, on a much nicer color TV

On TV, Richard France (playing a man who is credited as "Scientist" in the film but sometimes externally as "Dr. Millard Rausch") keeps up the call for urgent action, but he's met with the same in-studio resistance as in the opening scene. (Oddly, we never get a good idea of where he's broadcasting from; his final transmission appears to be coming from a storage room of some kind.)

Dawn presents Romero zombies in their platonic form: recognizably human yet unsettlingly alien. The fear they generate is more intellectual than primal. I'm not knocking fast zombies, but Romero's are scary because they are slow, not in spite of it. The very humanity they still exude is what makes them dangerous; they prey on our weaknesses.

Dr. Rausch spends his time on TV railing at those around him to steel themselves and make tough calls. Nobody wants to listen to him, and after the TV transmissions stop coming, what happens to him is an open question. Still, somebody must have taken the call for research to heart. This thread takes us past the fall of civilization, to a scientific base conducting a mission that may not matter anymore...

If you liked Dawn of the Dead, try....

The 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake gets a bad rap from classicists, but it's worth seeing if you're prepared to enjoy it on its own merits. Effectively folding Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead into one movie, the narrative is less political than the original yet still charged with the same social unease, updated for the War on Terror. This was the feature-length debut of director Zack Snyder, who made a name for himself with his next movie, 300. His famously overwrought style is comparatively subdued here.

Interesting note: Snyder and Romero both made commercials for TV before moving on to features. It's something to watch for when viewing their films.

Romero has a fascinating tendency to reuse actors in a few movies apiece without ever forming a standing ensemble. This makes his body of work a bit more than the sum of its parts, because you get the chance to see (invariably obscure) talents inhabit multiple creations of the same directorial mind. For this reason, I recommend 1973's The Crazies as an interesting midpoint between Night and Dawn. It features actors from all three classic Dead films, including Bill Hinzman (Night), Richard France (Dawn), and Richard Liberty (who went on to a superb turn as Dr. Logan in Day).

The Crazies got its own remake in 2010, into a surprisingly fast-paced modern horror film that does a respectable job of marrying Romero's cultural talking points to current film conventions. By this point, the social concept of the zombie had lapped the source material, and the filmmakers note in the DVD extras that they had to go out of their way to avoid making the infected look like zombies.

The Fossil Aerosol Mining Project, a music group strange even by the standards of plunderphonics, has a nine-track album called If You Enjoyed Dawn of the Dead. While hard to classify as music, the pieces have all the assertiveness of a bad dream and are stitched together largely from audio snippets in Dawn of the Dead. (Exception: Track three, "Earthbound Emergency," is made of clips from Night).
Outside of the director's commentary, the best behind-the-scenes look you can get is probably from the film's script. It's most interesting to read for the scenes that weren't shot (or, at least, not included in the American release), Romero's fascinating scene notes, and a drastically different ending.
Scott Reininger, who plays Roger, has one of the most fascinating Wikipedia pages I've ever seen. Well worth the three minutes it will take you to read.

Day of the Dead (1985)

Deep into his second decade of feature work, Day of the Dead represents Romero at his peak strength, though it's rarely recognized as such. It has the most coherent plot, the tightest script, and the best characterization of any of his zombie films. Why, then, doesn't feel like more than that when you watch it?

The civilian team on the lift

Probably the most important thing to understand about Day of the Dead is that it's where the well ran dry. Night established the concept of the zombie apocalypse, Dawn refined and codified it, and by the time Day rolled around there wasn't a whole lot left to be said. Humanity had been tested and found unfit for survival in combat with a new version of itself. By the time the opening credits roll, mankind teeters on the verge of extinction and civilization is a memory.

In fitting with the series' lack of new ideas, Day is also its most claustrophobic, doubling down on known quantities. Set almost entirely underground in a sprawling, partially flooded complex that is at turns knowledge repository, junkyard and laboratory, Day feels intensely oppressive. This is despite the fact that the Seminole Storage Facility, as it is officially called, is much larger than either the mall from Dawn or the farmhouse from Night.

The Seminole Storage Facility

All this is not to say Day is a bad film, or a deficient work of horror. In fact, Day of the Dead might be one of the purest horror movies ever made, in terms of fealty to the concept. From its opening on the ruined streets of a Florida town, to the surreal underground base the survivors return to when their search for other living humans is again unsuccessful, the sense of fear is close and always growing closer.

Day is also the movie with the best characterization and the strongest acting, by a wide margin. The humans of Romero's zombie films are always trying to remember the lives they used to have, and by Day those memories are so faded that little remains of social structure. The Seminole Storage Facility is inhabited by a research team trying to get to the bottom of the causes and mechanism of zombism, accompanied by a military team that's supposed to assist and guard them (Perhaps someone listened to Millard Rausch after all). They were placed there in a hurry under orders from Washington, but their radio communications have broken down, a number of people have died, and throughout the movie there is never any evidence that any other humans are alive anywhere.

Sarah (far left) storms away from Captain Rhodes (standing at table)

It's the most recent death, at the beginning of the movie, that ends up destroying the group. Major Cooper, the military leader, has died, and authority has passed to a man named Captain Rhodes. The field researchers, led by Sarah (Lori Cardille) return from a fruitless helicopter trip to a dead city to find a new marker in their makeshift graveyard. They then ride a massive utility elevator into the ground, and it's the last we see of the sun for a very, very long time.

Captain Rhodes is played by Joseph Pilato, which (if I'm not mistaken) makes him the only person in the classic Dead trilogy to appear more than once as something other than a zombie. He'd previously appeared in a very brief sequence as a dock guard in Dawn. (If you're watching the movies: Not the guy who asks if anybody has any cigarettes. The other one.) He wastes no time taking charge, immediately making the scientific team (Sarah and Dr. Fisher, played by John Amplas) worry about the future.

Their third half, however, is blissfully ignorant of trouble. Richard Liberty plays Dr. Logan, who is known as "Frankenstein" among the military personnel. He spends his time holed up in his laboratory doing grim research on the undead. Romero's movies dance around an explanation for the zombie plague, but basically: If you get bitten, you die. If you die (bitten or otherwise), you come back. Only destruction of the brain will actually kill a zombie for good. So when we see Dr. Logan arm-deep in an undead cadaver's torso, it's deeply disconcerting, but there's never any indication he'll get infected.

Sarah, with Bub in the background

Sarah, Rhodes and Logan are all creations in existing Romero patterns, but they're also the best of their types. Sarah is a strong woman who nevertheless has realistic emotions and weaknesses, a more evolved form of Frannie. She has nothing of Barbara's hysterical tendencies (even if Barbara was neither the only female character in Night nor ever quite as incompetent as she's come to be seen). Romero says in the commentary for Day that Sarah was a continuing apology of sorts for Barbara, and the apology feels sincere.

Rhodes is probably the single best-defined character in any Romero zombie film, and Pilato plays his grandstanding authoritarianism with gusto. He's an elevated form of Wooley from Dawn and Cooper from Night - the man who feels he should be in control of the situation, but isn't. Something subtle enough that it only becomes clear through multiple viewings is that Rhodes doesn't know what to do with his power. He knows how to make people afraid of him, but not how to lead. This deficiency, which he seems to sense indirectly, only makes him angrier.

Doctor Logan

Dr. Logan represents a third archetype, the dangerously deluded, with a lineage descending from Barbara and half a dozen peripheral characters in Dawn. He is so unaware of the danger Rhodes presents that he is also the only person who will stand up to him. Rhodes is an annoyance, not a threat, and in a really fantastic confrontation perhaps halfway through, Logan cracks just a little, and we get to see how tenuous his grip on sanity really is.

Logan's character is the first one in the series to produce some definitive results on the undead, and the implications of his findings are fascinating, even if the stakes are low at this point (the people who tasked him with this research are almost certainly dead by now). Decay in the undead is slowed but not stopped, and he believes (it's never clear what his calculations were) that they outnumber the living by 400,000 to 1. The dead are also trainable, as he shows off in his prize specimen, Bub, who is basically a pet.

The state of the state of Florida

The zombies in Day are the first to look genuinely inhuman, with extensive decay, better injury prosthetics and the subtle removal of eyebrows all contributing to a genuine ghoulishness. Bub (Sherman Howard) is the first zombie in the film since Hinzman to get substantial dedicated screen time, and Howard manages to do a lot with such a limited role. It's possible he did too much: Romero would return to the theme of zombie intelligence in his next Dead film, Land of the Dead, with markedly diminished results.

Dr. Logan gets Bub's attention

Day plays out over several days, as opposed to about 12 hours for Night and several months for Dawn, but feels the most tightly plotted. The rapid deterioration of what might well be the last human society unfolds at a breakneck pace, emphasizing the claustrophobia all the more.

The end of Day feels definitive, if not entirely satisfying. Without getting into spoilers, it ends up underscoring the same conclusions at the end of Dawn, a far more enjoyable, if less technically proficient, film. And, for another 20 years, that was the end of the Dead movies. Then zombies came back and, with them, Romero.

If you liked Day of the Dead, try....

Most zombie stories seem to start out at this stage, neatly skipping over the fall of humanity to concentrate on scavengers fighting zombies in a dead world. Heretical as it must sound, I don't really find this part that interesting, and can't give any strong recommendations. The Walking Dead - both the comics and the TV show - take place here, and are probably the most popular work in the Day stage of the zombie cycle.
28 Days Later (2002) is a fantastic film set in a Day-style London. It doesn't quite count, though, since the second half of the film deals with the survivors' hopes that civilization has survived outside of the plague that has decimated the United Kingdom.
The original script is definitely worth a read, if you liked the movie. It differs from the finished product far more than the Dawn script does. Romero ended up having to rewrite it when the budget he was asking for ($7 million) got cut in half. The finished movie is far tighter, both thematically and structurally, than the dystopian compound he'd imagined. Had it been shot as written, Day of the Dead would have looked a lot like the later Mad Max films, with such bizarre sights as (poorly) trained zombies and a prison camp for those deemed unworthy by the government. Most, if not all, of the characters in the finished movie appear in this version of the script, but often in notably different forms.
The Left 4 Dead games are pretty great, but when the best tie-in material you can recommend for a film is a first-person shooter, the movie has problems.

Later works (2005 - 2009)

If Day ended up repeating Dawn, Land of the Dead (2005) ended up repeating Day, although somewhat more literally. Romero was never able to get the funding he needed to produce his original script for Day (linked above); the finished film was substantially scaled back. When the zombie market opened back up again in 2004 with Shaun of the Dead and the novel World War Z, Romero got a chance to go home.

It would be nice to say Land of the Dead was a return to form, but it isn't. Something about the slickness of big money didn't go with the bootstrap nature of Romero's best works, and on top of that corners were cut in weird places (CGI fire, ugh). Still, even if it had been great, nothing could have changed the fact that little about Land makes sense.

The human compound in Land of the Dead

There's almost no continuity skip between Dawn and Day; the ruined cars we see scattering the roads are almost all models that would have been present if the world had indeed ended in 1978, and clues pretty much dry up there (an exception is the presence of a more recent Stephen King novel). Land is set far enough after Dawn that the young men and women in the survivors' compound only vaguely remember the apocalypse as something that happened when they were children; it wouldn't have been too hard to stick with the 1978 aesthetic. Except they don't; now it looks like the world ended in 1995.

The film is set at a large, fenced-in enclosure surrounding a residential complex known as Fiddler's Green. This location has none of the surrealism of living in a mineshaft or a shopping mall, and instead the film often looks like a portrait of inner-city homelessness (with zombies). Romero's scripts are rarely strong enough to stand on their own; there needs to be an element of unreality to sell the dream-logic of the events. Night accomplishes this with black and white film; Dawn and Day do it with location. Land just looks grimy.

Land makes an additional mistake in being about the zombies themselves. The trick to Night and Dawn is that they aren't actually about the zombies, they're about people's reaction to the zombies (something Romero says himself in Birth of the Living Dead). Day started to separate from that by focusing on Dr. Logan's "trained" zombie, Bub. That doesn't actually subvert Romero's original goal, though, so much as cloak it: Dr. Logan is revealed by degrees to be a man going out of his mind, and Bub is the focal point of this.

Big Daddy

This trend of shifting interest leads us to Big Daddy, the zombie character who vies with actor Dennis Hopper (playing an exceptionally generic bad guy) for being the most interesting part of a very uninspired movie. Big Daddy (Eugene Clark) is this movie's major black character. Romero's decision to make race a running theme in the series is one of the few few aspects of the films that got steadily better as the films went on, but that stopped here.

At first blush, the idea of making a lead zombie a minority seems like the most intriguing kind of dangerous idea. Give it 30 seconds, though, and there's a good chance you'll question it. Why are we supposed to sympathize with the zombies? Are we supposed to sympathize with the zombies? And why are they getting smarter? What's going on here?

Land of the Dead never really answers these questions. Aside from how the zombie populace is now markedly more intelligent, Land feels in every way like a revisit of Day with all the tension stripped out. The human protagonists are members of a security force guarding a compound where a microcosm of everything wrong with America has been allowed to persist. The intense social stratification offers up a lot of good opportunities for commentary that simply never happen. Romero's political edge is gone; the best he offers up is a scene where the humans distract the zombies with fireworks while they raid a deserted store. The zombies are too mesmerized by the bright lights to notice the survivors.

Diary of the Dead (2007) is, quite simply, a mess. Romero winds back the clock to the beginning of the zombie outbreak, only to discover that he has nothing important to say anymore. The structure of the film manages to be dead linear and inexplicably confusing at the same time. The plot puts Romero squarely in the role of "cool grandpa" who knows how important social media is to his college-aged protagonists. He puts so much thought into this (as well as making the zombie deaths memorable) that there's no time left to make sure the story works.

Rewatching the movie with the director commentary on and listening to Romero point out how he wanted to show stuff like the actual uploading of a video just made me sad. Romero always had two contradictory strengths: Attention to detail, and the ability to say interesting things bluntly. In Diary, attention to detail won out.

There is a third 21st century zombie film - Survival of the Dead (2009) - but I haven't seen it, and probably won't anytime soon. The reviews were almost universally negative, and after Diary I didn't want to subject myself to more of the same torture.

Instead, I decided to subject myself to a different kind of torture, where I tracked down some of Romero's more obscure movies and watched those instead. They'll form the basis for a companion piece to this article, "The Non-Zombie Films of George A. Romero."

Civilization V

noreply@blogger.com (Captain Video) — Mon, 09 Mar 2015 01:38:00 +0000

Bismark appears before me, shoulders up, hands behind his back. Lights pours in through the windows in the matte painting backdrop which, confusingly, has some embedded DirectX elements, such as the oil lamp on his desk. He addresses me in German. I can't speak German. Fortunately, there are subtitles.

He wants to know if I am interested in renewing an agreement for open borders. His civilization and mine are on separate continents, and he doesn't get out much because of all the wars he and the Greeks and the Americans have going on amongst themselves, but I always renew the agreement anyway. He gestures with his right hand while continuing to speak a language I don't know, as if to emphasize just how open these borders will be. He is pleased when I accept.

It is 77 B.C. I am Queen Elizabeth I, and half the world answers to my will. All Civilization games are turn-based, with the turns across the eras representing shorter and shorter increments of time. In a normal-speed game a player will blow through the B.C.s in the first hour or so of gameplay, but I've installed a mod that starts the play earlier and slower in a prehistoric age not found in the base game. Because of this I am now researching radio, and will probably have rockets by the time Jesus is born.

Washington calls up, wondering if I want to do another research agreement. Washington speaks English, which is nice, but the game designers elected to give him a southern accent. This is not unreasonable - he is from Virginia, after all - but it's somehow persistently unsettling. It's probably because he sounds almost exactly like Bill Clinton, except more awkward. We conclude business with an "Alright" on his part, and he makes a small motion with his right hand, as if to indicate a door just off-screen. He has been wearing the same clothes for almost five thousand years.

Behold the majesty of the English Empire, so vast it can't all be simultaneously displayed on this ridiculous 5:4 monitor I bought from work.

My civilization began on the shores of the larger of the game's two randomly generated continents. I shared it with two other great powers: the French, led by Napoleon, and the Ottomans, led by Suleiman. Both of them attacked me early in the game, when warfare was decided by the prehistory mod's cave-dwelling combat units. I eventually sued for peace in both wars but never forgot the slight, and went back later with bigger men and sharper sticks. I took control of both fledgling empires so fast that it took me centuries to fill in the gaps between cities on the map.

Time has been good to England. I have drained the vast swamps that once lay inland from London and subdued the last of the remarkably persistent barbarians, who spawn on tiles outside a player's line of sight. A fleet of workers have done such an unnervingly thorough job of improving the terrain tiles that when a new technology reveals a new resource - coal or oil or aluminum - it often pops up beneath an unrelated tile improvement, which must then be torn down to get at the resource.

Civilization V uses a hexagonal grid base, unlike the previous four games, which all used squares. This makes the various features superimposed on the grid look a little more natural - the way rivers flow, for instance - but it also makes planning things like road layout or troop movements slightly more counterintuitive. The latter problem is compounded by the fact that most units can no longer stack (as they could in earlier Civ games), and I've had armies tripping over themselves on the way to crush a foe.

There's a spot of oil I can't get at because it's underneath a Landmark. I don't want to destroy the Landmark because they can only be created by Great Artists, a class of Great People who only appear in cities occasionally. Great People are consumed when used to create a tile improvement, and they're also the only units in the game to receive proper names. In this case I think Duke Ellington might have died to make this monument happen, and I don't want to destroy his legacy.

I call up my advisors, who occupy info boxes adjacent to one another, like the Hollywood Squares. The Foreign Advisor, a woman with a Mediterranean complexion and a dress with a fold attached to her left wrist, tells me I need to bolster our alliance with Monaco. Monaco is one of a number of city-states, small powers new to Civilization V. They ally themselves with the greater empires and will go to war alongside them if sufficiently motivated. The British continent holds five such states, of which I am allied with three. Destroying them is an option, but so is paying them to stay on their good side, and picking a fight with somebody that small makes me feel bad. They don't even have visible leaders who pop up when I negotiate with them.

The Military Advisor, who occupies the square one up and to the right of the Foreign Advisor, is a bearded Caucasian man who seems loosely modeled on Ulysses S. Grant. He points out that the Germans don't have much of an army, something I saw firsthand when I sent a unit to explore that continent's interior. Conquering the world is absolutely an option in Civilization V, but I've done so in a recent game and I don't see the entertainment in doing so again so soon. Besides, I feel really bad whenever I crush another civilization and its leader pops up, for the last time, to sadly congratulate me. Napoleon took it well enough, but Suleiman looked positively heartbroken, and I feel terrible about that. Even if he was a jerk to me. Even if it was three thousand years ago.

The Economic Advisor, in the top-right quadrant, informs me that we are making money. She is a Caucasian woman presently dressed like a cross between Scarlett O'Hara and Princess Peach; their outfits all vary depending on what era I'm in. The Economic Advisor's functions are substantially simpler than those of her direct ancestor, the Domestic Advisor from Civilization III, who also handled city happiness and productivity. Those functions still exist, but are now assigned to a menu for each city.

Truthfully, although different social structure options exist, the game is totalitarian and autocratic. The president of the United States - or the queen of England, for that matter - can't really tell a certain town to build a granary, but Stalin could have. If this game is any indication, being Stalin should have been a blast, but there he was, killing half the Soviet Union to make an example to the other half. Some people just don't know how to have fun, and unfortunately a disproportionate number of them become world leaders.

The last of my four advisors, the Science Advisor, a black man with trim spectacles, informs me that York could use a library. As God-Stalin, I - and only I - can make one happen.

With world domination off the table, a few options exist for me to beat the game. I can win the Space Race, which is done by completing the Apollo Project - a National Wonder - and then building the necessary spaceship parts to colonize a new world. This was my preferred way to win in Civilization IV, the Civ game perhaps best remembered as the one where Leonard Nimoy read quotes whenever you unlocked a technology.

There's also a Cultural Victory. In Civilization V, this means completing five policy branches and then building something called the Utopia Project. I've never done this before, but I'm going for it now. With an entire continent to myself and military worries long allayed, I build cultural building after cultural building across the empire, museums and opera houses and temples. I've snagged a few World Wonders as well. These actually appear on the terrain, albeit in tiny form. The game does a pretty good job integrating them into the grid tiles, but for some reason when I finished Stonehenge it appeared several miles out at sea. I'll have to make sure not to hit it with one of my many, many boats.

For the hell of it, I pull up the menu for York and then the purchase screen. A library would be 400 gold. The Economic Advisor is correct, though; the empire is rich. I purchase the library and go back to the advisors. The Science Advisor now tells me that a university would be a wise investment. I return to my duties, and wait for Bismark or Washington to call again.

Brian Williams

noreply@blogger.com (Captain Video) — Sat, 14 Feb 2015 08:15:00 +0000

Not that long ago, I worked in journalism. I worked for a newspaper, and before that a different newspaper, and before that (skipping over a stint at Sears) I was a journalism student in college. Although it hasn't come up that much in my professional career (I mostly did layout and copy editing, with some reporting thrown in), I remember vividly a class on ethics in journalism. Although it placed an unswerving focus on telling the truth, most situations are more complex than doing just that. Ultimately, the point of the class was that each of us has to make our own calls; there are very few hard-and-fast rules in ethical reporting.

And that's part of why I feel more than a little defensive of Brian Williams, the embattled face of NBC's news division. Unlike, I think, most of his ersatz detractors on the Internet, I actually watch his program with fair regularity and have for years. (Full disclosure: I'm subtracting out the years where I couldn't afford cable and lived in locations where antenna reception wasn't possible.) I saw the broadcast that got him in so much trouble, and I saw it live. And I don't think he should lose his job over it.

Let's cut to the chase and assume the worst is possible, as NBC has already done by putting Williams on a six-month suspension. The report in question was about him reuniting with a veteran he'd previously met on active duty in Iraq. Most of the report was Williams thanking this man, and there was video of the two of them appearing at a sporting event together. The part that may end up costing Williams his job: He claims to have been in a helicopter that was hit by rocket fire. Members of the military chimed in and said they remembered it differently. In a recanting of the story that aired a few days later (which I also saw live), Williams said it was a helicopter ahead of his. This too is being challenged. The truth or something like it will probably out eventually.

To assume the worst is to assume that Williams lied deliberately to make his participation in the event seem more exciting. (To be clear, this is an assumption; Williams maintains it was a mistake as of this writing, to the best of my knowledge.) So what?

Whether deliberate or accidental, this is a grave lapse in journalistic rigor. However, if one scrutinizes it based on ethics, it's virtually meaningless. The worst-case scenario, based on current available facts, is that Brian Williams juiced up the backstory for a news piece about honoring a veteran.

For context, the last major scandal in network news was "Memogate," which destroyed Dan Rather's career in 2004. Memogate started with a piece on CBS' 60 Minutes in which longtime news anchor Rather presented a series of documents purporting to show that then-President George W. Bush had been a substandard member of the Air National Guard in the 1970s. The problem was that the documents were almost obviously fake (click the link and you'll be taken to the relevant Wikipedia article, where a two-frame GIF shows how the purportedly vintage documents clearly use the same default settings as Microsoft Word.)

Rather got fired for failing to research a very big story, which in my book is the best reason to fire a journalist. The piece was aired less than two months before the 2004 election and cast aspersions on the character of a sitting president - those are extremely high stakes, and they weren't treated with proper caution. Right now, the charges against Williams are much less significant. He wasn't trying to take on a world leader. He was, at worst, trying to make himself look too significant in a story about somebody else.

I might feel defensive, but I'm not defending Williams; what he did was wrong. That's a question of what kind and how much, distinctions that matter a lot. However, even if it's concluded that the error was deliberate, I don't think Williams should lose his job for this. Making yourself seem closer to the action in a war story is a far cry from trying to bring down a president.

If you've read this far, please consider reading this article - from improbable hard news bastion Cracked - that discusses the subject further.

External blogging: Locks on Target

noreply@blogger.com (Captain Video) — Sat, 14 Feb 2015 01:18:00 +0000

Michael Lee Lunsford, author/artist of the fantastic webcomic Supernormal Step, started a joke blog about hair in video games called Locks on Target. It's open to submissions, so I wrote a piece about photorealistic Robotnik in Sonic '06, something regulars to Kuurion's streams will be quite familiar with at this point.

Michael Lee Lunsford, author/artist of the fantastic webcomic Supernormal Step, started a joke blog about hair in video games called Locks on Target. It's open to submissions, so I wrote a piece about photorealistic Robotnik in Sonic '06, something regulars to Kuurion's streams will be quite familiar with at this point.

Actual contents of briefcase on last day of work

noreply@blogger.com (Captain Video) — Fri, 30 Jan 2015 02:53:00 +0000

Today was my last day of work at the TV station. This is a Samsonite briefcase that I purchased at a yard sale for (I believe) $3 either last summer or the summer before. It contains the following things brought home from work:

Assorted paperwork
Non-functioning portable hard drive
Two pens

One multicolor: red/green/blue/black
One multicolor: lavender/pink/cyan/lime

Three hardcover books

Against the Grain: An Autobiography, Boris Yeltsin, 1990
The August Coup: The Truth and the Lessons, Mikhail Gorbachev, 1991
Television Production Handbook, Third Edition, Herbert Zettl, 1976

Three-ring binder containing black-and-white 35mm photo negatives from college
Parakeet Training Record, 78 rpm, undated
Two pendants on lanyards

Nametag, plastic, bearing my name and employer's name
Cross-section of tree branch, bearing the words "THUG LIFE" in red crayon

USB extension cord
Ball peen hammer

It was a good job. I'll miss my coworkers.

Review: The Magic Voyage

noreply@blogger.com (Captain Video) — Mon, 12 Jan 2015 22:07:00 +0000

Here's the second of two movie reviews I wrote in 2012 but haven't published until now.

The Magic Voyage

Dom DeLuise is the voice of Christopher Columbus in a retelling of his voyage to the New World in which he is best friends with a talking woodworm voiced by Corey Feldman. Yes. That is a thing that happened, and evidence of it still exists in this realm.

Director: Michael Schoemann, 1992

I am a member of the second and final generation to grow up with stores that rented videos. Once a week, we'd go down to the local tape rental and I would select a movie based on what the back of the cardboard sleeve said. In retrospect, most of what I saw was crap, and I simply didn't have enough experience to recognize the difference between good and bad. I don't even remember the names of most of the movies, but when I recognized one of them at the thrift shop, I decided to compare past and present impressions.

Sure, he's mad now, but his hair appears to be clapping, and how long can a man with clapping hair stay mad at anything?

"The Magic Voyage" is a partially singing, crudely animated, not-quite-all-star cast interpretation of Christopher Columbus' trip to the New World. That it takes liberties with the story is to be expected, because a children's story needs good guys and bad guys, not a bunch of pro-and-con arguments about how one guy might have totally ended up ruining two whole continents for everyone who was already living there. History is complicated. Cartoons are not. Thus, "The Magic Voyage" presents Columbus as an affable stooge who believes the world is a cube. He is voiced by Dom DeLuise. He is the Columbus we deserve.

The movie opens with a bunch of seagulls fighting over a fish in a port, interfering with a dock worker and causing him to drop a crate full of books. Out of one of the books comes our protagonist, Pico the Woodworm, who shoulders a tiny bindlestick and sings to the fourth wall about how he used to be a bookworm. He's then set upon by one of the seagulls and escapes up a mooring line to a ship. Here we encounter Christopher Columbus, angrily consulting his charts and oddly shaped globes before throwing them out the window. He mournfully consults the last one, the cube, before Pico introduces himself by chewing all the corners off of it, making it sort of a sphere.

The two immediately form the sort of classic man-xylophage friendship that inevitably leads to a shared musical number.

So, time to take stock. It's just over six minutes into the film and we've been introduced to square-Earth-Columbus by narrator Mickey Rooney, who never returns; we've watched a singing woodworm outwit a seagull by drilling through its beak; and we've heard Dom DeLuise say "My mappa, she sure stinka." Gird your loins. There are 76 more minutes of this.

When I was a kid, I'm not sure I ever saw a cartoon I actually disliked, but the flip side of that coin is that I got too lost in bright colors to actually appreciate quality. In other words, I - and God knows how many other children who are now old enough to drive, vote, and take out crushing student loans - liked seeing animation so much we didn't register any of the aspects that make it good or bad.

Pictured: Bright colors. Not pictured: Squash and stretch. Bonus: The woman in green is actually gyrating pretty quickly for no apparent reason.

For instance, one of the tenets of good animation is "squash and stretch," often summed up in as an animated loop of a bouncing ball. When the ball hits the floor, it deforms on impact before popping back up and resuming its original shape. The technique of squash and stretch is key to making things that change shape look realistic, and "The Magic Voyage" does not have this. The finished project has lines with all the squash and stretch of overcooked spaghetti, causing faces to billow and collapse and bodies to twitch and shuffle. On the plus side, Corey Feldman is a talking woodworm who does his own singing.

Columbus did not pay for that pie.

Columbus and Pico drive to the castle in town, where they plan to shop Columbus' ideas on navigation to King Ferdinand. In doing so, they (and passers-by) share in a musical number where the refrain is "All because I met a fella like you," which sounds like something a down-on-his-luck Tarantino villain would say while spitting blood.

They then arrive at the hall of inventors just in time to watch King Ferdinand and his henchman, Stupedo, throw a man in a flying machine out the window. He is saved from certain death by landing in a tree on the way down, but the other inventors are spooked enough to run away, leaving only Columbus.

I'm sure this is completely historically accurate.

Ferdinand doesn't take well to Columbus or his chewed-up globe, but the incredibly hammered Queen Isabella does. They are voiced by Dan Haggerty and Samantha Eggar, who sound like they're in a sporting contest to see who can be more ridiculous. Columbus gets invited to eat dinner with them. Isabella fawns all over him to the point that Pico gets disgusted and leaves, while Ferdinand sits at the other end of the table and breathes angrily through his mouth. It's a hard thing to watch your wife, who already looks like a partially deflated blow-up doll, hit on a man with a child's-coffin-shaped head.

Outside, Pico climbs up a tower with a light in the window, where he meets Marilyn the fairy (or "firefly," as the tape case insists), who tells him her tragic story. She was originally from the land of Terrible Analog Effects, where all the firefly-fairies live, but was kidnapped by the Swarm. The Swarm is a huge swirling cloud of insects that wanted the firefly-fairy magic for itself, and didn't believe Marilyn when she said it couldn't be used for evil. So she's locked in this tower.

Trying to drive here at night is hell.

Marilyn is voiced by Irene Cara. If you don't know her by name, she's the singer of "What a Feeling," which she also co-wrote, from "Flashdance." In case you were wondering what happened to the refugees of the 1980s once all the leg warmers were buried, now you know. Pico naturally wants to help her escape, but he only succeeds in alerting the Swarm to his presence, and Marilyn is spirited away across the ocean. Well, damn.

Fortunately, King Ferdinand gives Columbus some ships to be rid of him and the next day they're off. En route, Pico is attacked by some ship rats (formerly harbor rats his got to leave him alone there by telling them there was food on the ships) and Columbus' crew finds out he's friends with a woodworm and starts to turn on him.

This picture gets even better if you try to imagine Dom DeLouise singing "Down with the Sickness." Seriously, just take a minute and try that.

Columbus then breaks out his accordion and tries to whip the crew into a not-killing frenzy with a song about seamanship. It is easily the best song in the movie. Consider this sample from the chorus:

Oh,
The life of the sea is the life for me,
No lovers of land are we;
La la la la, la la la la,
La la la la la la

I wish I could say that the crew strung him up right then and there ("The Magic Voyage" has a LOT of strangling and strangling-type violence), but the tune actually placates them long enough for Columbus to turn in for the night. No, what actually prompts the crew to drag him out of bed and hang him is the sight of a derelict Viking longboat manned by skeletons. As they're hauling him up, Columbus spots land off in the distance and tries to tell them, but they don't listen. And it is at this point that the Swarm attacks.

This Swarm, here.

The Swarm is really the only part of this movie that held up to the expectations of my eight-year-old self. The idea of a cloud of insects that can think and act as one, as well as use the voice of Dan Haggerty, is objectively terrifying. Smile all you want from your black and white headshot on the back of the tape sleeve, Haggerty, but you are the voice of childhood terror. And also King Ferdinand, from earlier, but mostly childhood terror.

All the animation problems that undermine the rest of the film actually make the Swarm look that much more fearsome. Wobbliness and the whole squash-stretch problem look, if anything, appropriate in a huge cloud of flying insects. It shape-shifts from one pissed-off form to another as it attacks them, a huge cloud of angry, angry pencil scribbles. It's like some kind of childhood entertainment elemental, as though the medium of animation had summoned a champion to cull its own ranks.

"Well, that's animation school, folks. You can all go as soon as you can draw yourselves diplomas freehand."

As the swarm departs, having thoroughly trounced the crew, the ship abruptly runs aground. Columbus originally had three ships when he left Spain, but now we're somehow down to one. Columbus, wearing only his boxers and the noose, lasts long enough to plant the flag for Spain on the beach before passing out.

In a nearby Mesoamerican pyramid, the Swarm wakes Marilyn from her prisoner's sleep inside a solid gold idol to tell her that Pico is dead. Pico is not actually dead, although he is floating face-down in a puddle on the beach. There he is rescued by the last and most ridiculous major character, Bob the Beaver, whose house the ship ran over.

Bob meets up with Pico, who he drags out of the puddle, and the two remaining rats. As the rats pull themselves free from the wreckage, one comments to the other that the third one was knocked out cold. (They do have names, but their weird voices prevented me from understanding them.) This point always intrigued me: Did the guy who voiced the third rat die or quit the movie halfway through voice recording or something? I suppose I may never know.

"Well, the last thing I remember is throwing the stereo into the pool."

Those of you who know virtually anything about North American wildlife probably just asked yourselves why you've never seen a beaver in a documentary about tropical wildlife, and the answer is, of course, that they don't actually live quite that far south. And that would be the end of it, except that this is the one thing in the entire movie that they actually tried to explain. Not the loss of the other two ships, or why the king and queen of Spain were living on the coast when the capital city at the time was 200 miles inland in every direction. No, one of the rats asks Bob what he's doing here, and he explains that he was working on a dam that collapsed, and he woke up here. Sure.

Bob, Pico and the two rats march off into the jungle towards the temple. Columbus expresses fear of whatever "jungly-wungly things" might be out there, but, after looking over his shoulder for the requisite forest-full-of-eyes shot, runs after them.

There's something about this picture that really just sums up the entire Internet for me. For truly, are we not all climbing giant honeycombs in our boxers?

When they finally make it inside the temple they encounter a huge honeycomb, with the Swarm swirling around the top of it, guarding Marilyn and the idol. Columbus, blind with gold-lust, clambers up the side of the comb while Bob chews through the bottom. Pico drills up through to rescue Marilyn.

Having reached the top, Columbus sticks his hand into the Swarm but yanks it back, thinking for a moment that his fingertips are gone before remembering to unfold his hand. (The problem with this gag has always been that you can't fool both the character and the viewer with it; only one of them is going to see it from the proper perspective.) So he whips up a rag puppet out of the tattered Spanish flag he's been wearing as a cape, gives it a pep talk, and sticks it into the Swarm, which is moving so fast that the puppet catches fire.

Columbus battles the Swarm (mostly by dodging and being strangled) while Pico and Marilyn escape and Bob chews the rest of the way through the bottom of the honeycomb. The whole thing collapses, bringing Columbus and the idol down on the Swarm, smushing it flat.

Still less racist than Disney's "Peter Pan."

Then the temple collapses too, because why not, and the protagonists ride a nearby river to safety. They encounter some natives... who are actually grateful to Columbus for squishing the Swarm. They allow him to keep the golden idol, and everyone is happy.

There are a few additional points of context that should be shared. "The Magic Voyage" was originally released in German. Lord only knows what their versions of the musical numbers were like. I like to think it was all done by Rammstein.

"Du hast?"

Additionally, "The Magic Voyage" was, according to the IMDb, the most expensive animated film ever made in Germany at the time, costing $14.5 million. That's the perfect opening for more jabs at the production values, but I think I've made my point and can ease up. Truthfully, the character designs, however poorly executed in the animation, are quite good, and the quality of the backgrounds is as good as anything from the classic age of Disney, which was no doubt the intent.

In fact, everything about this movie suggests that a group of people watched a whole lot of Disney without understanding any of it, from the poorly spaced musical numbers to the excessive use of talking animals. Only the idea of an angry cloud of insects that otherwise possesses the standard characteristics of a kids' movie villain is something that is completely unique. It will likely remain that way until Michael Crichton's "Prey" is adapted for film.

Review: "It! The Terror from Beyond Space"

noreply@blogger.com (Captain Video) — Mon, 12 Jan 2015 03:08:00 +0000

Back at the end of 2012, I wrote a pair of movie reviews as part of an application to become a website's movie critic. It didn't happen, and since then I've been sitting on the reviews, so I decided I'd post them here. Anyone looking for a person to critique bad or strange movies for modest sums of money is advised that I'm still available. Here's the first one:

It! The Terror from Beyond Space

A crew of black-and-white sci-fi's finest is deployed to Mars to retrieve the lone survivor of a crew he's accused of killing, only to find that the true killer has come aboard with them.

Directed by Edward L. Cahn, 1958.

Smokeless rockets wouldn't be invented until 1981.

The benchmark for the mano y mano alien attack film is, of course, "Alien," but it was neither the first nor the last to use the scenario. The basic formula is as simple and timeless as a group of teenagers setting out to spend a weekend at a cabin they're sure isn't as haunted as the locals claim. When a movie formula goes unchanged for as long as this has, it gives us a chance to examine and appreciate the things that do: the characters and the setting. In this case, the future is 1973 and humanity has unwittingly unearthed the slumbering, rubber-clad terror of Mars.

We're introduced to the situation through a brief introductory voiceover by Col. Edward Carruthers, played with deft detachment by Marshall Thompson. He's going to be brought back to Earth to be court-martialed for the deaths of his crewmates.

"If you'll direct your attention to the back wall, I'd like to talk about my latest purchase from the Bradford Exchange."

Immediately after this introduction, we're taken to the only room in the movie not on the returning spaceship: a press room (the "Science Advisory Committee Division of Interplanetary Exploration") on Earth where reporters are told that the rescue team has just arrived on Mars to get Carruthers. This is where the movie really shows its chops: A middle-aged man, who is acting in the sense that he's reading from a script in front of a camera, informs a roomful of journalists on recent developments received through a "teleradio" broadcast. The conference finished, the journalists then all run out the door like lead paint just went on sale.

Nobody comments on how this reference schematic for a spaceship appears to be a hand-drawn one-off in outlined pencil.

The rescue ship is comprised of a series of stacked rooms that have the proportions of cans of tuna fish. Each level has a staircase running up from below and down from above, and when we're shown the ship's blueprints at one point we see that the whole ship is indeed laid out pretty much like a tenement building. The set design team - which otherwise saw fit to take standard 1950s appliances and mount them flush into walls - gets credit for going the extra mile here. If you went inside any of the rockets on the covers of pulp mags from the '50s and '60s they would probably be laid out just like this, and it takes a certain amount of bravado to go through with stacking the floors instead of laying the thing out like an airliner sans wings.

"Yeah, all we need now are a few gray bean-bag chairs and some beer that comes in those cans you have to punch holes in."

We see the rocket standing upright on Mars at the beginning of the movie and so the whole inside of it is oriented accordingly. Bravo. That this choice reduces the shooting space on any given floor to one medium-size room (or a bunch of smaller rooms each the size of elevator cars) is something that the people who made "It!" simply chose to live with. It certainly allows them to shoot a lot of the movie with a stationary camera, sitcom-style, and everybody knows that stationary camerawork is what you look for in futuristic thrillers.

The women are smiling, so clearly everything is fine here.

The rescue crew actually includes two women, which seems highly progressive right up until you see that they're just there to cook dinner and provide school nurse-level medical care when the men get injured. That's all the future you're getting, 1958.

Carruthers is innocent, however; the real culprit is, in the best 1950s tradition, a lizard man. Carruthers desperately pleads with his captors to believe his innocence, but they don't listen to him until they, too are overtaken by a monster as tenacious as it is ponderous.

According to the Internet Movie Database, the lizard mask didn't fit right and what appears to be the monster's tongue is actually Ray Corrigan's chin. I dare you to find anything more 1950s than that.

"It" is played by Ray Corrigan. I didn't know a whole lot about Mr. Corrigan, so I took a quick trip to the Internet Movie Database, which told me that this was the last of 98 productions he was in. There was a biography I could have read, but I feel like I learned enough just going over the credits and finding that he's credited as playing a gorilla 13 times, an ape five times, and "Gorilla Man" in a 1943 musical comedy called "She's for Me."

I like to imagine that when they found out Corrigan was auditioning for the part, the producers looked up from a pile of heavily smudged mimeographs and said, "THE Ray Corrigan?" I don't know what your options were as a casting director who needed a large hominoid in 1958, but it seems like Corrigan was certainly a bankable choice.

There's a lot of this.

"It" is introduced a bit at a time, in glimpses seen in the darkness. In a better movie this would have built suspense, but here we're simply allowed to ponder the individual shortcomings in the costume, starting with the Barney-esque feet shown wending their way uncertainly through the storage area at the beginning. Soon enough, however, It moves in for blood, and Carruthers renews his cries of warning after a couple of the crew are picked off. Something has to be done.

It's then that we really get into the heart of the action. The human vs. lizard fight standards of the era aren't really that high, as anyone who saw Captain Kirk lugubriously fight the Gorn a decade later can attest, so it's a sort of delightful surprise when the movie steps it up. After It has retreated to the depths of the ship's ventilation system, the humans regroup and... break out the box of grenades.

Yep. In the ship's storage area, sitting right on top of everything, is a medium-sized crate with GRENADES stenciled on it. Somebody packing a spaceship for the express purpose of a round trip to Mars to look into a mysterious disappearance decided the recovery crew needed grenades. I mean, heaven forbid anybody on this inane mission should needlessly endanger themselves, take everything you need to do the job right, but when you're coming down out of space to apprehend your quarry you really don't need the sort of weapon that's typically lobbed two dozen feet by hand. And, of course, the idea of using grenades inside a spaceship has a very limited appeal to anybody who's ever seen Jiffy-Pop in action.

So of course they hang some grenades on one of the vents on a trip wire and wait. Presumably Ray Corrigan went out and auditioned for a few gorilla parts while they shot the scenes he wasn't in.

Then we enter the film's magical second half, in which it becomes clear that It cannot be killed. It never injects its eggs into anybody; it doesn't shapeshift into cunning facsimiles of those whose lives it's taken.... it's just really, really hard to kill this thing. Really hard.

After gas, bullets and grenades fail, the crew uses an inter-floor hatch to seal It into the lower levels of the least interesting spaceship ever while they ponder their options. Eventually, Carruthers and a shipmate take an extremely slow spacewalk down the outside of the ship from one airlock to another so they can sneak up on the creature. They then use a torch to weld some electrical lines to the metal staircase with the intent of shocking It to death.

This doesn't work, and only annoys It. Carruthers makes it back to the airlock, but the other - Lt. Calder - breaks his leg trying to escape his hidey-hole and is forced to hold It at bay with the blowtorch. Rewatching this scene with the Netflix subtitles on, I was heartbroken when it turns out that Calder doesn't actually say "Sure, whatevs" into his radio when they tell him to just hang on. It turns out he's just saying "Sure, what else?" which took a lot of his grizzled teenibopper mystique away, in my opinion.

Also, It is saying "[-roaring]."

This came so close to happening. So close.

Back up in the nurse's office - "[machines beeping]" - Ann Anderson tells Carruthers how "I decided after one bad marriage to bury myself in science." This miniscule fragment of character development comes as she rubs a swab of something on his forehead with one hand and wraps the other one almost all the way around his head. "Van changed your mind?" Carruthers asks, indicating a limp shipmate on an IV drip.

The other nurse, Mary, says that Van needs blood. The ship conveniently has some on board, but all the on-hand blood has been used up and somebody has to go downstairs and get more from the compartment where they apparently store overflow blood.

Rather than make another trip outside, the men plan to simply take off their boots and sneak down the ladder while Calder, still pinned in with his blowtorch, makes noise to distract It. Conveniently, the creature wanders into the reactor room, housed on that level, and they just lock it inside by remotely lowering the door.

"Oh man, I LOVE 'Karma Chameleon'!"

Meanwhile, Van staggers out of bed with a sort-of-good idea: unshield the reactor while the creature is trapped next to it and irradiate it to death. He staggers over to the control panel and raises the shield, once again slightly annoying It. "It's enough to kill a hundred men!" says Van with unnervingly genuine enthusiasm.

Unfortunately, It rips through the extremely thin reactor room door and proceeds to flail one of the guys to death with a frenzied series of waving motions.

The other survivors then flee to the ship's control deck and pile random stuff on top of the last hatch in the hope of making the movie feel even longer. Van woozily accuses Anne - or "Chicken," as he lovingly calls her - of falling for Carruthers. Then the survivors break out the bazooka and wait.

I like to think that when the movie was done, somebody pulled all these switches and dials out of that board and reused them in a boiler room.

Finally, with time running out, Carruthers looks at a huge bank of dials and realizes something: The monster is drawing heavily on the ship's oxygen. So they open the doors and let all the air out. The creature dies.

Back on Earth, the world's least compelling press secretary actually stands there and reads a "teleradio" message sent from the ship, warning that "another name for Mars is 'death.'"

Oh yeah!

In a closing note, the movie poster for "It!" contains the following text: "$50,000 guaranteed! By a world-renowned insurance company to the first person who can prove 'IT!' is not on Mars right now!"

Now, I haven't been able to find an online copy of the poster high-res enough to read the fine print, but it's possible that offer is still standing. If anybody feels like trying to cash in on the saddest promotional stunt ever conducted, now is certainly as good a time as any.

The Death of Robin Williams

noreply@blogger.com (Captain Video) — Tue, 12 Aug 2014 05:44:00 +0000

The following was originally posted on ourworld.katbox.net.

As I am uploading this, it is still less than six hours since I learned of the death of Robin Williams, who died earlier today of what the news is saying is an apparent suicide. It's very hard for me to accept that someone who's life's work was making other people laugh was so eaten inside that he felt he had to do this. He leaves behind friends and family and a magnificent body of work and a shaken world that never thought it would end this way.

I know many people who suffer from depression, and I suffer from it myself. I also know that many people who do not suffer from depression conflate it with ungratefulness - they perceive an inability to be happy as a person's refusal to be happy. Without knowing the details of his life, I wonder if this made it harder for Robin - to be so successful in so many ways and still hurt inside.

If you or someone you care for has depression, please be kind - to them and to yourself. Depression is an illness, and people are not made lesser for having illnesses. I believe that this will be a hard night for many of us, but if there is a message to be taken from this event, let it be that we must always let those around us know that they are loved.

The Gradual Joke

noreply@blogger.com (Captain Video) — Sat, 05 Apr 2014 03:58:00 +0000

I get my weather news from a site called the Weather Underground which, yes, is named after the revolutionary group from the 1960s. On April 1, I noticed that their logo - a cloud floating over a rainbow - was falling down. Back again today, I noticed that stick men had come to clean it up. At this point I took notice of the fact that the logo files are numbered. With that knowledge, I was able to see the entire procession of events. I'm sharing it with you because I think it's clever that this tiny little drama is unfolding at the top of the page each day.

Here's the original logo (well, an archive copy from Wikipedia with the old font):

And here's the unfolding saga, which officially hasn't completed as of this writing:

The logo updates stop there; there is no 16th panel to the story. I assume that by the middle of the month, the logo will be unveiled in its full glory, something I suspect will closely resemble the old Macromedia Shockwave Flash logo that disappeared around 2005 or so. Still, since the logo they're retiring literally goes back to 1997, that's a definite improvement all the same. Good on you, guys.

Get Better

noreply@blogger.com (Captain Video) — Thu, 03 Apr 2014 23:58:00 +0000

I don't always have to explain something when I present it. Here's a song worth listening to, if you've got a moment:

Luigi's Ballad and the Changing, Rubber Face of Pop Culture

noreply@blogger.com (Captain Video) — Thu, 13 Mar 2014 00:39:00 +0000

First off, have this video, which I highly recommend (if you're not at work). Then, if you want, you can read my thoughts about it.

) Still here? It's been long since forgotten how weird Super Mario Bros. really is, even by the video game standards of the 1980s. While the pellet-chomping maze prisoner tale of Pac-Man and the ladder-climbing, barrel-jumping experience ofDonkey Kong are both classic and surreal, they (and all other games of the period) share a forced minimalism that mutes the weirdness somewhat. By the middle of the decade, however, processing power had improved enough to allow worlds that could allow for some realism in scenery and character interaction. Nobly, the creators Super Mario Bros. did nothing of the kind. I'd say that they threw everything at the wall and kept what stuck, except that by all appearances everything stuck. How else to explain a game where a plumber and his brother battle turtles and walking fungi to rescue a princess from a an evil turtle lord holding her in an unspecified castle?
The 1980s might also be the decade that pop culture became self-aware for the first time. The watershed example is The Simpsons, of course, but even some earlier works that don't lean on pop culture for satirical purposes were beginning to get in on the act. Back to the Future has a rich undercurrent of cultural references that define both the home world at the start of the movie (California in 1985, home to '80s-tastic protagonist Marty McFly) and the world he travels to (the same town in 1955, home to his teenage parents). A judicious use of pop culture makes the movie more real.
By the time I was watching TV and movies in the 1990s, the ability to reference pop culture had turned into something of an obsession, culminating with the debut of Family Guy in 1999. This was a show that eschewed the integrated pop culture references of The Simpsons in exchange for sight gags and cutaways that allowed the writers to do virtually anything they wanted at virtually any time, a sensibility that has carried that show through good years and bad. When Family Guy was renewed from cancellation, it was a victory for the show's random style, which has since become a definitive characteristic of Internet humor. And that might be why, for all its flashing colors and hectic pacing, the video at the top of this page strikes me as refined.
Arin "Egoraptor" Hansen - lead animator on the video and part of Starbomb, the group that performs the song - is Internet royalty. I first encountered his works in the middle of the last decade at Flash repository Newgrounds, where he had already garnered an impressive reputation for the "Awesome" series. These were videos in which he would deconstruct a video game at a rapid-fire pace. Here's Metal Gear Awesome, which was the first video he published on Newgrounds. This one is also not recommended for work:

) Let us all pause to remember that 2006 was eight years ago, and that it was a simpler time. All of the Awesome videos are like that, each one a hot mess by design. It's never really clear how much the low art quality in them reflects a style that hasn't yet matured, and how much the rushed look is deliberate.
Egoraptor later became the cohost of a web series called Game Grumps that I quite frankly can't get into. Listening to two guys crack random jokes over video game footage lacked the visceral punch of rewriting and reanimated the games themselves and using that as a springboard into comedy. (Full disclosure: I'm focusing on Egoraptor because I'm familiar with him. He's joined here by Leigh Daniel Avidan and Brian Wecht, the former of whom is also on Game Grumps, and I know virtually nothing about them, or Rachel Bloom, who sings the part of Peach. There's only so much one man can know about the Internet.)
The Super Mario universe has been broadened considerably since Super Mario Bros. came out, but Luigi's Ballad would still mostly make sense to somebody from 1985 who had played the game. Some visual elements - such as enemies from later games and the references to Mario Kart, which first appeared in 1992 - would get lost, but stylistically the games have remained remarkably similar over nearly thirty years. Perhaps the biggest jump for time-traveling viewers would be the characters' personalities.
Mario and Peach have the sort of weird quasi-relationship shared by Barbie and Ken, or Micky and Minnie Mouse: They're always together, and yet their couple status never seems fully confirmed. We don't get a very good look at their personalities until Super Mario 64, the N64's inaugural game and the first one in which either character speaks. They each get only a few lines (Peach's at the beginning, Mario's looped throughout the game whenever he does anything), but they're enough to give us reinforcements on what we already knew: Peach is a nice person with terrible luck and Mario is a go-getter who is unfazed by absolutely anything. Both of these traits are ramped all the way up in Luigi's Ballad: Mario is unable to stay out of anyone's face about his wants and Peach, while untroubled by his incredibly blunt advances, is too polite to actually choose between the brothers.
Luigi, whose appearance in Super Mario Bros. was as a palette-swapped Mario, has similar in-game characteristics that are ramped down in the song for humor value. He's a nice guy who just wants to do stuff with the girl his brother is also hitting on. The exchange between him and Peach at the song's height is actually kind of beautiful, the idea that these are two people who want to try something, even if they don't know what it is. Mario, of course, ruins all this, but you don't save the same girl from the same bad guy for thirty years without getting a little frustrated.
The immaturity of the subject matter in Luigi's Ballad is a clever rouse: The creators had a fantastic sense of understanding and scope on the source material, as well as how to best bend it to suit the Internet's current sense of humor. That the whole thing manifests itself as a barrage of dick jokes is simply par for the course in this day and age.

The moment of truth

noreply@blogger.com (Captain Video) — Tue, 18 Feb 2014 05:00:00 +0000

We've moved! ourworld.katbox.net

Originally, this news was going to go up on the Our World website, but that went down. Kuurion was subletting space from friends and for some semi-complex reasons, their site is down too. But that's the past, and I'm finally, after so much time, ready to present you with the future.

If you're familiar with furry webcomics, you've probably been to the Katbox at some point. Home to such genre guiding lights as Las Lindas, DMFA, Caribbean Blue and many more, it's also home to Our World as of today. I approached site owner and founder SoulKat back in August of last year and, to my great excitement, he said yes. Everything since then has been work and planning, both on his side and mine, and today the dream became reality.

I am sorry I didn't get a chance to tell everyone this on the old site, so if you're friends with any of our fans and they're still wondering what's up, please tell them. I still don't know if the blog will continue to be a thing or not, either, but I just wanted to leave this message here. We've got a new home now, and we hope you'll join us there.

Unto 2014

noreply@blogger.com (Captain Video) — Mon, 30 Dec 2013 00:06:00 +0000

The more you want to be able to do something, the harder it is not to be able to do it. Just now, what I'd like to be able to do more than anything is summarize. I want to be able to understand all the things that have happened to me over the past 12 months. It's hard because I don't want to analyze so many things that went so badly. There's a price to be paid when what you are and what you think you can be are greatly out of alignment. For some people this constitutes ambition, and for some it's delusion, and the only way to know is to try.

I tried giving up my old life to go traveling, and it was a disaster. It was actually even worse when I got back, for reasons I'd still rather not share. But the life I'm living now makes me happier than the one I left behind to get here. It is for that reason that, for the first time since 2010, I really believe next year will be better than this.

I'm so sorry Our World has gone a year without an update, and it's more or less entirely my fault. The good news is that last night Kuurion sent me the finished versions of the first 12 pages of the prologue chapter. They're as good as anything he's ever drawn, and I can't wait until we can show them to you.

To recap, the rewrite covers the parts of the comic that are currently done as color pages. We're redoing that part of the comic, both in story and art, because neither of us were happy with it. The completed rewrite will segue directly into the existing black and white pages.

I don't know if I'll keep up the blog or not. Kuurion hasn't written a post in literally years, so it's just me now, and my enthusiasm for it has waned. I suppose we'll see. As it stands, I have reasons to believe 2014 will be a good year, and there, too, I suppose we'll see. Thanks for reading.

Webcomic Review #10: Homestuck, revisited

noreply@blogger.com (Captain Video) — Wed, 21 Aug 2013 02:44:00 +0000

Have you ever gotten to the end of a really good book or movie and wished there was more to tell? You will never have that feeling with Homestuck.

Kuurion introduced me to Homestuck about the same time he wrote our original review for it. That was in June of 2012, and at the time I believed that I would have caught up with the story in about a month. At this point, having read literally thousands of pages and seen dozens of animations, I don't think I'll ever finish it. The story creator Andrew Hussie is telling moves too fast and has too many intricate parts for me to follow anymore. Half the purpose of this review is to apologize to Kuurion and let him know his favorite webcomic has bested me in fair combat.

Homestuck starts with a premise that is deceptively simple. Structured like a text-driven video game, Homestuck introduces you on its first page to an unnamed boy who has just had his thirteenth birthday, and suggests you name him. The reader doesn't actually have any control here, though; when the comic prompts you for something, it's almost like it's talking over your shoulder to someone you can't see. This gets the reader into the habit of ignoring the omnipresent second person structure - though, in appropriately surrealist fashion, it becomes important later. Or at least that's what I think happened.

The comic grows complex quickly, something that caught me off guard because the dialogue is so disarmingly simple. Our protagonist, now named John Egbert, lives a strangely insular life that seems to consist exclusively of talking with his friends Rose, Dave and Jade through an IM client. The story, while nominally a comic pretending to be a video game, is actually conducted largely through huge blocks of IM chat that appear as text beneath the picture part of the comic on most pages. Overshadowing this already complex set of proceedings is the fact that the apocalypse is about to start, and also John has just become the client player in a real-world video game called Sburb.

In fact, each of the four kids is either the server or client to another, allowing them to daisy-chain the control structure. The server player is actually more in control than the client, who appears on their screen - like a video game. What does the client player do? He or she fights imps, which have suddenly appeared and produce useful materials like "build grist" when defeated. The player can use grist and other materials to make things using a trio of confusing machines: the cruxtruder, the totem lathe, and the alchemiter. As the game's second person narration cheekily points out, you'll never have quite enough material to make the thing you want.

If you're not excited by this premise yet, then truthfully I've done something wrong. Homestuck is a masterpiece that will rope you in and hold you for a very, very long time. But it lost me and, try as I might, I can't get the magic back. Hussie shares Stephen King's gift for making the improbable a little too acceptable. The comic starts so far outside the realm of plausibility that it's actually managed to lap the readers by the time they've adjusted their expectations. In addition to the stories of the children, we're introduced to a number of side characters - starting with the Wayward Vagabond, an imp living in a desert in an unspecified time and place.

Once we've wrapped our heads around him, we're introduced to the trolls who are heckling the kids through IM. Except that they are literally trolls, who live on a planet in another universe and created our universe through a game of their own called Sgrub. Then we're introduced to a set of characters called the Midnight Crew in an "Intermission" segment that actually loops around the have direct bearing on the plot. Or maybe those two segments happen the other way around; for the purpose of this review, it doesn't really matter.

There's a pattern that repeats here: the stage keeps getting larger. We get to know the ground rules of the universe through John, and then we meet his three friends. Then we zoom out and meet the Wayward Vagabond, who becomes the first of several "wanderer" characters. Then we zoom out and meet the trolls who made John's universe. Then we go to a second universe, at which point the story breaks into two parallel lines and I gave up. Again, this is literally thousands of pages in, and still with no end in sight.

There are a lot of kind things that can be said about Homestuck, but since they've all already been said, I'd rather give voice to my own, slightly less kind thoughts. While I will openly and honestly say that Homestuck is a rare and significant cultural work, it's also susceptible to diminishing returns. I had loads more fun reading the story at the beginning before it become bogged down under accumulated internal mythology and story lines. There's just too much going on here, and I stopped reading because it stopped being fun to read.

Webcomic Review #9: Manly Guys Doing Manly Things

noreply@blogger.com (Captain Video) — Thu, 01 Aug 2013 02:07:00 +0000

As I continue to stagger forward under a strange load of accumulated promises, I'm trying to keep work in rotation. That way, nothing stays undone for too long, even as I work towards getting everything operational again. To that end, here's a new Webcomic Wednesday. These things were supposed to be every Wednesday when they were new, I think, but I can't believe we were ever that ambitious. But hell, here's at least one for this month. Take it one piece at a time.

Fan fiction has always had a bad rap. I don't know why; I just know it has. However, the metric starts to change when there's a visual component. That's not to say DeviantArt gets an automatic "awesome" sticker from the Internet (even if it totally deserves it), but there's less of a bias. If I had to guess, I'd say it's because it's easier to digest something visually than through prose, but sometimes you meet somebody who takes the added bonus fan comics have over fan fiction and uses it as a step stool to greatness. And that brings us to to "Manly Guys Doing Manly Things."

MGDMT - conventiently located at thepunchlineismachismo.com for your browsing pleasure - is proof that a strange idea can unfold like a beautiful, weird flower as it matures. Those are the main characters in that comic above. Our protagonist is Commander Badass, a supersoldier for the future who has returned to modern day to run a temp agency for ultramanly men (usually from works of fiction). The woman next to him is Jones, romantic interest to him and exposition springboard for us. Since Manly Guys has its manly fingers in as many pies as writer Kelly Turnbull feels like, it wisely avoids examining what such an interconnected fanfic world would look like, and wisely sticks to a ground-level view. (One exception that still played to the rule showed the Commander eating breakfast cereal and watching members of the Lantern Corps rag on each other in the universe's version of C-SPAN.) In case you're wondering, this means Kelly actually saw "Green Lantern."

Helping the story bridge the gap between fan fiction and original work is Jared, the kid holding Fattest Pigeon. Jared is a Pokemon trainer whose favorite Pokemon is an extremely laconic Gyrados named Mr. Fish, who swallows Fattest Pigeon whole in the follow-up comic, prompting Jared to walk into its mouth for retrieval.

According to the site's 'About" section, "Jared is the end result of a complicated mathematical equation designed to compute the most completely average teenage boy ever," something I very much subscribe to. I had a friend who looked like this when I was in college, and you probably did to. Jared is a sort of intern for the commander, who never really knows what to make of him. Jared is similarly oblivious, and the two get on in good-natured confusion at all times.

Comics - which are usually stand-alone entries, but sometimes become arcs - showcase life at the apex of manliness. True to its offbeat form, this often leads to unexpected situations. In the very first comic, Kratos, from the God of War series, is shown trying to sell electronics through violence. In another, the commander makes Jared put money in a jar for using the word "epic." Sometimes wires get crossed and we see what it's like when a bunch of different fictional characters are played by one real-world actor:

From its springboard as a situational comedy into the most esoteric depths of fandom, "Manly Guys Doing Manly Things" is a rich tapestry of "What is this, I don't even." And if the Internet has yet to produce a higher form of art, I haven't seen it.

The End of MythBusters

noreply@blogger.com (Captain Video) — Mon, 24 Jun 2013 05:04:00 +0000

My wife has spent the last week out of town, staying with her mother, who had surgery on Monday. With so much time to myself, I've ended up watching a fair bit of "MythBusters," because we don't have real TV reception here and I tend to default to what I know on Netflix.

Netflix is a few years behind, so I've only actually seen one new episode, and that was only because it was one I'd somehow missed on my previous passes through. Of the episodes available, I've probably seen most of them half a dozen times. I've been watching "MythBusters" for years. But, as it enters its tenth year on the air, I find myself increasingly nervous about how, sooner or later, it will be cancelled, and take another of my lines to the past with it.

The show follows a fairly simple premise, but it's undergone a number of revisions as it's evolved. The first season introduced the setup: Two men, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, "with over 30 years of special effects experience between them," tackle myths to see if they're possible or not. The net for "myths" has widened over the years: Originally the mix was mostly urban legends and historical tales, but as time went by an increasingly large number of things seen in movies came up.

Those earliest episodes seem downright primordial to someone who's kept up with the show. Adam and Jamie, somewhat uncertain before the camera, would introduce a myth and then test it. And then another. Then, usually, a third. Quick segments by Heather Joseph-Witham, credited as a "folklorist" on IMDb, would give context to the myths. She only did 18 episodes and, without being mean, I don't think anybody missed her. Interview segments seemed out of place as the series found its footing and became all about the explosions.

The very first episode I ever saw was "Explosive Decompression," the first episode of 2004 that was in reruns by the time I saw it in 2006 or so. This was classic "MythBusters": five episodes before the show's build team made its first proper on-camera appearance, and eight before Heather left. I don't remember her being in this episode, though; it was just Adam and Jamie.

By now the show had a good rhythm down. The very earliest episodes seem ponderous in retrospect: The guys would test one myth, then another, and yes, if there was time, a third. The introduction of the build team as a separate, autonomous group allowed the show to stagger the myths. Adam and Jamie would start a myth, then the build team would start a separate myth, then we'd go back to Adam and Jamie while they finished up, then the build team again, then Adam and Jamie would start something else, then the build team would finish, then Adam and Jame would finish their second myth as the credits rolled.

And, with a little more ironing to be done, that was the gist of it. The build team originally consisted of Tory Belleci, Scottie Chapman and Kari Byron. Scottie left the show in 2005 and was replaced with Grant Imahara. Like Scottie, he had a specialty - she did welding, he was into robotics. The others were more general-purpose, although Tory gradually built a well-earned reputation for hurting himself.

And that's how it is today, minus a period in 2009-2010 when Kari was off on maternity leave and was replaced with Jessi Combs. But a decade is a long time, and the popular consensus is that the show is beginning to flag. I remember having a discussion with a friend of mine, Eric, in 2010. He'd been my boss in college, and after I'd graduated I'd left the area to live out of state for six months. Coming back, he and I caught up on all sorts of things, including the show. We'd both been fans when I was in college, but he'd become disenchanted of late, calling them the "Fun Busters." He disliked how they took movie myths apart, feeling it ruined the fun of the movies.

When I got back was also when I lost track of the show. My mother - yes, I moved back in with my mother - didn't have full cable, and when my girlfriend and I moved in together, we didn't get it either. We didn't have the money. From the time I first saw the show before I left for college until the time I got back from Florida (where my rented room had cable), I kept up with the show. These were its best years, too - I'm currently rewatching the episode where they build and burn model Hindenburgs, but I remember when this episode was new in 2007. I also remember seeing a clip of it on the air years later, when narrator Robert Lee introduced it as a "classic episode." And that might have been the first time I felt a twinge of sadness, because I hadn't been aware of the passage of time before.

I'd comment now on how the hosts have aged, but the funny thing is that only Adam really has. Tory, Grant and Kari all look like they're in their late 20s to early 30s, but Kari is 39 and both the guys are 42. Jamie, born in 1956, looked 55 when the show started, and he looks 55 now. Adam, born in 1967, is the only one who seems to be aging normally. Over the show's run, his beard has grayed as his hairline has (unevenly) receded. It's possible they could push this another decade, but it seems incredibly unlikely. As the cast ages and the myth well depletes faster than it can be replenished, I see "MythBusters" hanging on for at least two more years but not more than five.

And it's going to break my heart when this happens, because "MythBusters" has always been there for me. I watched that very first episode in 2006 with the whole family gathered around the TV. Nobody does that anymore, not without also checking their phones and laptops while they watch. And there we were, and my brother looked at the hosts' vast shelving units full of improbably labeled bins and said to my father, who was to die 18 months later from a cancer we had yet to discover, "they have more crap than you do." My God, how we all laughed.

It was there for me in college, and I watched who knows how many episodes in my dorm room on a black-and-white TV I'd originally picked up as a gift for my then-girlfriend but grew too to love too much to give away. If I wanted to see an episode in color, I would go out to the dorms' common rooms and watch it there. I'd stay on campus during the summer to work at the print shop (with Eric, the friend I mentioned earlier), and I'd sit in the common rooms and watch "MythBusters" there while summer thunderstorms rolled in across the mountains. It was there when I joined DeviantArt in 2008, and has been the source for what is frankly the best body of fan art ever (sample above by Arashicat).

And it was there for me in Florida, a travel experiment that sucked. It's there for me now, even though I can't see the new episodes. Actually seeing the show is of secondary importance, believe it or not. It's enough for me to know that there are yet people in this world busting myths. I can catch up with the actual episodes later.

EDIT: Today, Adam Savage tweeted this:

I hope they live forever.

Let's start again

noreply@blogger.com (Captain Video) — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 04:38:00 +0000

Hello. I'm Captain Video. I like stories about zombies, explosions, hijinks, confusion, long odds, bad ideas, secrecy, honesty, deception, revenge, aliens, suburbia, explorers, sunken ruins, broken things, obsolete technology and doomed romance. And forgiveness. And redemption.

Travel

noreply@blogger.com (Captain Video) — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 03:01:00 +0000

Didn't work out. We're turning back.

Webcomic Wednesday #8: Dear Toadington

noreply@blogger.com (Captain Video) — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 00:12:00 +0000

The original intent behind Webcomic Wednesday was, quite frankly, that we'd do them more often than we have. We haven't had one of these since the Homestuck review last June. The thing was, Kuurion got me into reading Homestuck at about that time, and I thought I'd be able to do my own review of it by July. It hasn't worked out that way because I still haven't finished Homestuck; it's incredibly complex and staggeringly long. So I just ended up not writing any more of these. Until now! Today is a Wednesday, and I'm making myself do this.

But I'm going to ease myself back into doing these with a softball review of a comic I love without reservation: Dear Toadington. It's made by two brothers, James and Jefferson Miller. The closest thing it has to a plot is shown in the first strip:

After that, each of the comics is titled "Stories About...", where each comic is a separate story being shared with Toadington. The whole setup is sort of like "Robot Chicken," except that I actually like Dear Toadington. I was made aware of it the one and only time they advertised with Our World as (and I'm paraphrasing from memory) "the webcomic for the discerning gentleman amphibian." At the time, this was the current comic. It's still one of my favorites:

It's smart and it's sick. I haven't liked, or even understood, every single Dear Toadington comic, but when I do, they're usually defined by those two characteristics.

It's rare for the people who pass through the warped lens of a DT strip to show up more than once, but there are exceptions. The Millers themselves appear in a number of comics (especially the early ones) and Daedalus, of mythological fame, appears in "Stories About History's Greatest Inventor," "More Stories About History's Greatest Inventor," and, as of this week, "Even More Stories About History's Greatest Inventor." His inaugural comic is a perfect demonstration of the Millers' sense of humor. Daedalus is tasked with building a labyrinth to contain the minotaur. The word "labyrinth" is normally used as a synonym for "maze," but in truth it isn't. A maze has dead ends in it; a true labyrinth is just a very long path. King Minos has his doubts when shown the blueprints, but Daedalus is sure that nothing could ever walk the whole two miles of the labyrinth and escape. Naturally, he is wrong.

The world of Dear Toadington is invariably childish but often hostile. In one comic, for instance, a man is shown walking down the sidewalk and is then randomly set upon by crows, with "CROWPOCALYPSE" written across the bottom of the page. In another, a different man walking down a different sidewalk arrives at a "sidewalk closed" sign, pops a Mentos in his mouth, and is shown in the last panel wearing a bomb vest in a standoff with police. In the series' most random cartoon to date, "Stories About Awkward Conversations," we see the Millers eating in a diner and discussing a Choose Your Own Adventure book when a sad looking clown comes up and puts a bloody handprint on the outside of the window. They both look at it, and then James asks Jeff again which adventure he chose.

Kuurion doesn't get Dear Toadington, something I have never faulted him for. Dear Toadington is not something that can be gotten 100% of the time. But, fortunately, they have a Twitter feed, which you might find useful for narrowing down why you aren't getting something in particular.

Don't Ask Me About the Plane

noreply@blogger.com (Captain Video) — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 03:15:00 +0000

Salem, Massachusetts, is known for one thing, and one thing only: witch trials that were held there in 1692. Witch trials that, according to at least one TV documentary I saw, may have been fomented somewhat by the lack of any sort of entertainment in Salem. The natural irony is that all Salem entertainment today is based on witch trial history. Somebody needed to break this cycle. That somebody was the guy who runs this place:

This is a car repair place, although you'd be forgiven for thinking it was a mini golf. The guy who runs it also works at an animal reserve and rescue place in Cost Rica. Or something very close to that; he had a sign up inside that explained it properly, but I didn't have my camera with me then. This is his way of sharing with the world.

"Robin Hood" and the Advent of Furry Fandom

noreply@blogger.com (Captain Video) — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 05:02:00 +0000

Stuck without Internet for two and a half days, my wife and I ended up rooting through our movie collection for entertainment. We watched three movies from our childhoods - Anastasia, Robin Hood and Mulan. Mixed in with my realizations that Eddie Murphy used to be really funny and Christopher Lloyd makes an awesome Rasputin was the thought that Robin Hood might have consolidated most, if not all, aspects of furriness.

This carries significance to me as the writing half of an anthro webcomic. Neither Kuurion nor I are entirely on board with the idea that what we're doing is "furry," exactly - the term carries connotations that we don't completely associate with - but it's something we resort to as shorthand. Both "anthro comic" and "furry" are in Our World's HTML fields, and I don't think any search engine has used those things since AltaVista.

Robin Hood predates all but the most primordial aspects of furry fandom, and as such I think it had an unrecognized yet simultaneously outsized influence on the shape of things to come. First, though, some context.

PRODUCTION BACKGROUND

After Walt Disney died in 1966, the movies bearing his name went into a qualitative slump that lasted for more than two decades. The Onion's A.V. Club has an excellent review of the first movie made without him, "The Aristocats," which it describes as the beginning of the company's dark age. "Robin Hood" is the movie they made after that, allowing them to reuse footage. Here, watch:

My thanks to whomever made that video, which is honestly still best viewed on a screen not larger than a stamp. Still, the quality is good enough to tell the tale: That dance sequence was cobbled together from three different movies (the other two being Walt's last and first films, "The Jungle Book" and "Snow White.") The knowledgeable among you may have also remembered that Phil Harris, the voice of Little John (who sings "The Phony King of England") is also the voice of Baloo the bear from "The Jungle Book."

"If ever an entertainer was born to be a Disney character, it's Phil Harris," writes Noel Murray in that "Aristocats" review you still haven't read, and he makes a fair point. Harris just sounds so much like a Disney character. So much, in fact, that they reused him in all three of those films. In the "Aristocats" his made-for-AM radio voice works because he plays an alley cat (the refined female lead was Zha Zha Gabor), and it's pretty much the same case with "The Jungle Book."

Here, however, he plays the unwitting lead of an entire faction of people who, in 14th century England, have country accents.

Click on that to see the full-size version. If you haven't seen the movie: Yes, they actually have cards at the beginning explaining who the people are and what they're supposed to be. We're almost to the furry bit, but it's worth going through this because it's just so weird. Clockwise, from top left: Robin Hood (Brian Bedford, British); Maid Marian (Monica Evans, British); Sir Hiss (Terry Thomas, hissy); Lady Kluck (Carole Shelley, Scottish); Alan-a-Dale (Roger Miller, country); The Sheriff of Nottingham (Pat Buttram, country); Friar Tuck (Andy Devine, country); and Prince John, (Peter Ustinov, British). So, of the nine main characters in that picture (which I got from Fanpop; thanks, Fanpop, for compiling all those pictures into a grid) we have four who actually sound like they're from the United Kingdom, three who sound like they're from the Deep South, and one guy who talks like a snake because he's a snake.

Setting Sir Hiss aside, that's still half the major cast being from a wildly different time and place. Pat Buttram is Mr. Haney from "Green Acres," for God's sake, and Roger Miller is the guy who sings "King of the Road." None of this was ever given any contextualization, either. It's just a thing that Disney did, in addition to plundering their other films for footage. So how did this slap-dash collage become the place where the basic tropes of furriness first unified? Truthfully, from what I can tell, this was largely an accident, as the Wikipedia page can explain:

"Initially, the studio considered a movie about Reynard the Fox. However, due to Walt Disney's concern that Reynard was an unsuitable choice for a hero, Ken Anderson used many elements from it in Robin Hood.

"Robin Allan writes in his book Walt Disney and Europe that 'Ken Anderson wept when he saw how his character concepts had been processed into stereotypes for the animation on Robin Hood.'"
So that's where it started. Walt decided that Reynard the Fox wasn't Disney material and the concept art was reprocessed into something else.

CONTEXT

Disney is a cultural-economic monolith. Each of their animated features is conspicuously numbered, indicating the importance that each commands. Even if "Robin Hood" isn't the first Disney animated feature most people would name if pressed for a list, it would probably come up once they're past "The Lion King" and all the princess movies. Probably after "101 Dalmations" but before "Oliver and Company," but I'm only speculating.

As a Disney movie, "Robin Hood" will never go away. It's something each generation of American youth is routinely exposed to, like Playmobil people and chicken pox. People grow up, have kids, and reach for all the same things that they had when they were children. And some of those kids grow up to be furries. But why?

WikiFur (the furry wiki encyclopedia, as you probably guessed) says that furry fandom was born when the old "funny animal" genre expanded out of comedy and into drama. (Taking an additional step back, the original funny animal cartoons probably owe something in their popularity to the fact that furries are easier to draw than humans.)

"Robin Hood" is, in my mind, the first time anthropomorphic animals had been used visually in a dramatic situation, and every one of those points is necessary to the genesis of the fandom. The WikiFur "History" page linked above (and here) lists a number of works considered groundbreaking on the road to furdom, and "Robin Hood" is the first to meet all of them. While many other works contain multiple dimensions of furriness ("Kimba the White Lion" actually made it stateside several years earlier, and I only discount it because the characters aren't truly anthropomorphic), "Robin Hood" was the first to put them all together. The closest thing previous is this:

It's almost drama ("Well, what did you expect in an opera? A happy ending?"), it's visual, and it's anthro. But it's not really furry. Not even with the it's-awkward-but-we're-laughing sexuality that evokes virtually everything non-furries seem to think of furries. It also isn't actually a story, it's a parody of a story, existing exclusively as a mocking shadow of its subject. "Robin Hood" was more ambitious than that, although truth be told, "What's Opera, Doc?" might well be the better cartoon. After seven decades of sight gags, the funny animals finally got a chance to be something other than funny in "Robin Hood." The spectre of death is very real here, going against the keystone tenet that cartoons can't die, and the characters are shown with (generally) realistic emotions.

King John, the "Phony King of England" from the song, is, for instance, shown as a thumbsucking mama's boy trying desperately to overcome his own inadequacies through wanton brutality. That's not a three-dimensional character, but it's at least two-dimensional - earlier cartoon characters, like Daffy Duck, could only show frustration and fear. To move from frustration to overcompensation, and fear to self-conscious inadequacy, is akin (to switch analogies) to the step up from the three primary colors to the whole spectrum of secondary colors.

IMPACT

Ultimately my argument of significance is built entirely on circumstantial evidence, but I feel like it's pretty good circumstantial evidence. And the significance also extends to the way furries look. I'm too tired to upload any more pictures, but actually click on any of the ones I have. Compare Robin against Bugs Bunny up there. Bugs is lanky, with smooth fur. Robin looks more like an actual anthropomorphized version of the animal he is - his fur fluffs out in places, something that has gone on to be virtually universal in furry art.

But he looks more human than Bugs, too, and that's the last and biggest part of what it means to be furry. Furry fandom - and its detractors - are so distracted by the animal half of things that both sides forget that it's the humanity that people need to be able to relate to. The exception to this rule being the assignment of breasts. That's another, probably somehow longer, essay. For now, it's enough to say that the human element, while less visible, is not diminished.

The last visual component is also the first thing you see, even if you don't notice it anymore: Anthro characters wear clothes. Donald Duck, a true funny animal, doesn't wear pants. And while this has been a font of cultural ridicule for Donald, we also know he doesn't have anything to hide. He's just feathers down there, which is a great source of relief for me and God knows how many other people. But Maid Marian has slight secondary sexual characteristics, and her lady-in-waiting, Lady Kluck, has cleavage. These aren't animals anymore; they're naked under their clothes.

"Robin Hood" was the place where funny animals stopped having to be funny, but it's also the place where they stopped having to be all animal, too. TV Tropes, which has covered all this ground before, calls this evolution "Anthropomorphic Shift" but in this case the shift all took place prior to the start of the movie. "Robin Hood" made a story about humans and told it with animals - but, crucially, the animals are still largely human. And that, simply, is where everything finally came together.

Libraries I Have Blogged From

noreply@blogger.com (Captain Video) — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 20:00:00 +0000

Here in Lebanon, New Hampshire, you get two basic choices for "library," and they are both ridiculous. The first is the Lebanon Public Library, which is built primarily out of marble and, even with a new wing, is so tiny that the books have to really be packed in there. This is the children's room:

See, that's what I imagine a children's room in a library looking like - a congenial mess. My wife and I spent a fair amount of time there because 1) usually there aren't actually that many children, and 2) the adult section had the one obligatory creepy guy who never left. Later on we found out that there was some extra space on the second floor, which you can get to with this elevator:

Which contains this phone:

The piece of paper taped to the handset says "Call 911."

and then be left alone to browse the Internet in peace.

Your second choice is the Kilton Public Library, which was finished in 2011 and feels remarkably like an airport concourse. This is what the inside of Kilton looks like:

That's... not actually that many books. "Spacious" isn't a word you normally associate with libraries, either. How many people did it take to bankroll such a majestic public structure?

This many:

Holy living fuck. That board is four feet wide and contains 526 plaques. BUT - does Kilton have this poster?

My wife says this is the "2000s-est thing ever." She's not wrong.

Nope, that's the proud property of Lebanon Public. This is too close to call. Let's go to the grid.

Criterion	Kilton PL	Lebanon PL
Books?	Some	Lots
Wi-Fi?	Y	Y
Sells coffee?	Y	N
Bathrooms?	M + F	Unisex (2)
Bathroom smelled like weed smoke at least once?	N	Y
Will sell you photocopy of NYT crossword?	Y	Y
Spells "public" as "pvblic"?	N	Y
My Little Pony-themed Obama-style poster?	N	Y
Donations board the size of a flatscreen TV?	Y	N
Confernce room with moving walls?	Y	N
Microfilm machine?	?	Y
Share a website?	Oh	yeah.

Clearly, this is still too close to call. Such are the bountiful options if you are in Lebanon, N.H., and need a place to read/blog/get high.

Water Is the Enemy

noreply@blogger.com (Captain Video) — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 00:21:00 +0000

Water is the enemy.

Water permeates. Water corrodes. Water consumes.

To be fair, the fine folks at Isuzu and Concord, makers of my car and camper, respectively, did their best. Nineteen is old for a car. Forty-three is really old for a camper. And where things are starting to give out, water is starting to get in.

I don't know the full providence of Milo, the Isuzu, but I bought it in Vermont and it looks like it were used there its whole life. Vermonters use road salt, and it's hard to explain the ramifications of that to people who've never woken up to a thermometer reading -10 and whined "Not again!" to themselves. By lowering the freezing point of water, the ultimate need and ultimate enemy, road salt makes roads passable under circumstances they wouldn't otherwise be. But it comes at a terrible price.

Milo is rust-eaten to a degree that astounded the man who sold it to be and then ended up doing frame repair work. I backed into some steps with the trailer hitch and about ten pounds of rust fell off. Just handfuls of gravel-sized pieces of iron oxide.

Water is the enemy

The camper, a 1969 Woodsman Traveler, leaks. I'm not entirely sure from where - a path of delaminating wood indicates the back window - and it's making the board the mattress sits on wet. Laying down a tarp seems to help some, but only to a point.

Yesterday, I spent an hour and a half - I checked the clock - trying to get a taillight to come on because water had seeped into the casing. This was on the truck, and the taillight, after being cracked by a previous owner, was patched with some sort of rubbery epoxy. But water got in anyway and the taillight stopped working. After pulling out some (naturally) rust-eaten screws, I managed to liberate the old bulb and then had a certified hell of a time trying to get the new one to come on because one of the contact points in the socket was rusted over and in a hard-to-get place.

As this latitude, at this time of year, an hour and a half is most of your afternoon, and I spent mine trying to make a bulb come on so the cops wouldn't pull me over again. Because water is the enemy.

Draw, Draw, Stop

noreply@blogger.com (Captain Video) — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 03:36:00 +0000

My wife's grandmother invented a game called Draw, Draw, Stop. It involves two people and drawing materials. One person starts a drawing, and the other person tells them to "stop," then finish it themselves. Yesterday, while we carpooled with my mother to a family get-together, my wife and I played Draw, Draw, Stop in MS Paint. The results are as follows.

This one was going to be a truck. It became a classy whale with a tophat:

In this one, the fuzzy edge that was going to be the fur on a Santa hat became a cloud, which led to this:

The mouth of this eel was going to be the back of a guitar. Remember that all of these were drawn by two cramped people using a touchpad to draw in a moving vehicle:

This one was actually going to be a ballerina, so the dashboard hula girl it came out as is actually pretty close to the mark.

This one was going to be just a pair of giant eyes. Now it is, according to my wife, two jolly fruits singing to baby banana Jesus. I agree with her assessment that this is better than the pair of eyes.

And, finally: This sea turtle was going to be a helicopter, and the Mad Hatter was going to be a blender. See if you can guess how

Unto Madness, 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Captain Video) — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 15:21:00 +0000

I don't even want to talk about all the stuff in the news lately. Just... take this. You'll need it where you're going.