don’t fuck with the mouse
happy holidays! if that phrase insults you, pretend i said ‘i don’t care how you spend the next week, eat a pine cone!’ i swear, if i see one more reaction video, to someone freaking out over starbucks cups, or someone else’s reaction video reacting to someone reacting to starbucks cups, i’m going to throw a cup of hot coffee at a nun. people can be so shitty this time of year. and the rest of the year. and all times in between.
except my company, who took us all to see the last jedi, which was a very nice thing to do, and all anyone is talking about it right now. i thought about it quite a bit, and decided there’s nothing really to say about the movie. if you like it, you like it. it had issues, but it was fun overall. but that’s my personal opinion. i could dissect it for you, like so many have, and will have done soon. but what’s the point? as a movie, it’s fine. it’s never going to be what a new hope was to me, cause i was a child then. so to go on about that is pointless. i will say, that i think the nonsense surrounding the movie is a bit much, and i don’t mean all the opinions, i mean the marketing, the controversy. the endless whining. few thoughts…..
currently it sits at 93% on rotten tomatoes. some people care about that, some don’t. and then, some care so much, that they are working as hard as they can to cheat the audience rating down. which, at this moment, is 53%. and why? the studio doesn’t care. it’s about money for them, and the audience score isn’t scaring people away much. i read an article where the ‘alt right’ was taking credit for it, because they think liberal hollywood is ruining star wars for them by including minorities as cast members. i don’t know what to say about that. i always assume someone forward thinking enough to believe in sentient AI and light sabers wouldn’t really have petty prejudices, but there it is. so, in an effort to be noticed, the squeaky wheels are raging at rotten tomatoes. time well spent.
the other thing i noticed alot of, was focus on marketing points over substance. articles about the aforementioned racial issue some people were freaking out over, why the little penguin things (porgs) were designed, all the ENDLESS cameos of famous actors in storm trooper suits (which you’ll have to take their word for), and even ‘why kylo ren was shirtless for that one scene’. all this stuff seems like distraction. i mean, eventually, people might want to know that stuff, but it’s not part of the substance of the story. having it dominate the news, feels like being force fed commercials disguised as articles.
i hope that’s over soon, but probably just in time to talk about the infinity cash grab marvel is putting out. of course, both those things are disney now……
and i get it, disney didn’t pay billions of dollars for these companies for bragging rights. we knew we’d be seeing reboots of spiderman well into our old age, but there’s something sinister and souless about the way it’s taking place. i’ve never been a big fan of disney, or ‘the mouse’ as people in the business refer to it. i’m an animator, we tend to have strong feelings about things like that that no one else really considers. i think it’s cause anyone who thinks as much about marketing and story and film as much as i do, might see disney as more of a machine working on the perfect bit of code that accesses your emotion. installing themselves into your hearts as children, a plugin that allows you to be happy, and updating the software every few years, well into adulthood. there’s no firewall for it. children are notoriously susceptible to malware.
maybe i’m just a cynical asshole. ok, i KNOW i am, but it comes from experience.
final thought, i have a friend who was running a booth at a tech convention many years ago. a guy at a booth next to him was showing off fancy new media technology, and using a laserdisc of cinderella to do so. a disney rep or lawyer appeared, and asked if he had permission to use a disney product in this fashion. he said no, and the man was forcibly ejected from the convention, and whatever he intended to do that day didn’t happen. the disney rep turned to my friend, and in a way that was supposed to sound tough or intimidating, and said ‘don’t fuck with the mouse’. i imagine where ever that guy goes, he hears the Who playing in the background, and he constantly takes off his sunglasses to show his steely cold gaze to all the ladies.
art!
Well, Disney capitalized on popular public domain stories, along with lots of cute & fluffy stuff. So of course they worm their way into the heart of everybody who watches.
I had to take my cat (2000-2017) to the vet one last time on Friday, and for Friday and Saturday I was a wreck. So yeah, little fluffy things get ahold of your heart.
The thing that Disney does is that it tries to program everybody that they invented public domain characters like Snow White and Beauty and the Beast, and you can only access them through Disney. Eh, wrong.
As I was coming home on the bus yesterday, the parents of a little girl gave her a phone to watch videos on it. Reading to her? Coloring books? Nothing interactive, just watch the videos, kid, shovel in the garbage.
My view on Star Wars, The Last Jedi? Yoda did the right thing. (It’s just that he didn’t do enough of it.)
i belive that they don’t own the properties outright, if it did come from public domain, which might be why as soon the knock off studios find out what they are working on, they rush to put out their own movies, at a poorer quality, but sooner. they used to be direct to dvd movies, but i don’t know if they’re still doing that.
i find it sad that even video games, these days, are not interactive. kids would rather watch pewdiepie and the like play a game, than do it themselves. which is pretty lazy.
sorry to hear about your cat. that’s a bummer. we have cats too, and a few close calls. but it’s never fun to have to make that call. still, they go out happy, and cared for. people don’t always get that.
Interactive games are one of the things that I think should take off, but none of the game studios seem to have put any effort into it. The Eliza program is, what, 51 years old or so, and we don’t even have that level of interaction in games. The Gatebox “virtual robot” is a step in that direction, but I’m not sure that product is a good direction. It kind of reminds me of Little Computer People. I tried to get that thing to die by neglect, but it just wouldn’t do it!
i remember little computer people! i don’t think he was programed deeply enough to die. but damn did he love that dog. i think it died though….
but yeah, games aren’t where they could be. the telltale games are a step in the right direction, but even those are more like stories with an interactive feel than open worlds. and the open world games are more like waling simulators in a world that waiting for you to go to the right place before more story can take place.
Happy holidays to you as well! Love the new art! Also, you said “force fed” in a rant about Star Wars and someone had to point that out and I was here first dammit! I agree with what you say about programming of the children by Disney (and adore you for the bit about malware). I’d love to think it is all for some benevolent, world-unifying purpose, but that’s probably just the mouse making me feel that way XD
the force fed thing i noticed, but left it in as a pun.
i think that they are just making sure that they associate themselves with warm feelings or ‘feels’ (ugh), and not to question the motivations of a company who defined love for you as a child. i’m not saying they are actually bad, but the ground work is being laid for something big. acquiring the other main pieces of my childhood (marvel and starwars) doesn’t make me feel any less ill at ease.