phamos

There's a new box set of Gumby shorts coming out in September. Given that lyrics from the original theme song are on the cover, one would hope that means the original theme song will be restored to the cartoons. All of the other (really crap) Gumby DVD releases had the shitty 80s version. IMHO, if the words "He was once a little green slab of clay" or "pony pal Pokey" are not included in the theme song, it's not a real Gumby cartoon. Hell, the theme song is often the only good thing about some of those shorts. Well, and Goo, and the Blockheads. They make everything better.

I'm very excited that any time this song comes up on my video ipod, this picture will accompany it on the screen. There are some perks to actually legally paying for bad music -- the corresponding visuals.

Last time I saw him, Oates had shaved his mustache. I was very sad. I am very morally opposed to the shaving of iconic 80s mustaches. Like when Tom Selleck was lip-bald on Friends.

I will always associate Hall and Oates with their appearance on DTV, the Disney Channel's music video show. There was a great bit with Chip and Dale fighting over a girl chipmunk nightclub singer to the strains of "Kiss on Your List", as well as Goofy and Donald as "Private Eyes". There are not NEARLY enough DTV clips on YouTube. I'm waiting patiently for the clip of "Belly of a Whale" by Burning Sensations with visuals from "The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met".

I've recently become interested in the history of American animation, so I've been downloading clips off of YouTube of some of the more famously racist or otherwise inflammatory cartoons made by Disney, Warners, and MGM. I've only just started watching the Tex Avery shorts from MGM, and the first one I pulled up was called "Half-Pint Pygmy". Not only does the pygmy speak with a caricatured voice and have that lovely blackface visage so common to all these cartoons, it has a nice bit where the protagonists try to lure the pygmy out of a hole by dangling a WATERMELON in front of him. Jesus. I feel a little dirtier for having watched that.

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A lot of the earlier Warner Brothers cartoons, and some of the Walter Lantz ones (he did Woody Woodpecker -- as well as a lovely short called, I shit you not, "Little Black Sambo"), are in the public domain now, so they can be released on DVD or distributed in general by pretty much anyone who feels like it. John Kricfalusi, the animator of Ren and Stimpy, was posting YouTube clips of Tex Avery and Bob Clampett cartoons, some of which were in the public domain, on his blog as an ongoing educational feature for his readers. Then, Warners put the smack down on YouTube, and YouTube went through and pulled all the WB clips it could find -- even ones in the public domain. So Kricfalusi raised a stink about fair use and copyright protections, all of which is pretty interesting. Then he went back to posting stupid promotional material for his new Ren and Stimpy DVDs, featuring the hypersexualized shorts he made for SpikeTV. So, not as interesting. Kricfalusi was infamously tossed off of Ren and Stimpy while it was still on Nickelodeon for basically wanting to push the envelope too far in terms of sex and general grossness. But he's made a comeback as an animation commentator, even doing commentary for the Warner Brothers Golden Collection DVDs that he's so critical of for their general whitewashing of the studio's history.

I always watched a lot more Disney than Warner Brothers, and my exposure to MGM and Lantz cartoons were limited to a couple of videos we rented when I was a kid and then copied onto Beta cassettes (talk about copyright infringement -- ah, Betamax). The extent of Disney's controversial content includes the WWII propaganda films that included some lovely Japanese stereotypes and a number of racist undertones in characters like the crows in Dumbo (I just watched that the other day, and it was the reason I went looking for the Tex Avery cartoons in the first place), the edited-out-of-future-relases black servant centaur in Fantasia, a bunch of nasty Native American stereotypes in some of the shorts and Peter Pan (though I love the song "What Makes the Red Man Red" in spite of myself), and, of course, the never-released-to-video Song of the South. Kim's had a bootleg videocassette of Song of the South, so I rented it. I think I had a record with Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah and a couple of the Brer Rabbit/Fox/Bear sections on it as a kid, and I definitely remember them showing a clip from the movie at the Disney Store when I was in there once in the early '90s, so I didn't have any recollection of the more-offensive frame story. The complaint is less that the movie is full of stereotypes, which is true (although not as ridiculously hit-you-over-the-head offensive as in these other shorts that I've been watching) than that the movie portrays this antibellum plantation as this totally happy place where the slaves have all stayed on because they love the family so much and they sit around and sing happy songs all night long and everything is just WONDERFUL. My complaint, on the other hand, is that the live-action parts of the story, apart from the historical whitewashing and the racial stereotyping, are just plain boring. Of course, I don't know if it picks up towards the end, because the Kim's videotape was a piece of crap and the picture totally cuts out about halfway through, right after the little rich white boy and his little black not-a-slave-anymore-my-life-is-so-much-fun-YAY friend meet up with a little poor white girl whose brothers want to kill her dog. It's a downer in so many ways. But see the races and classes all coming together in youthful innocence! Sure. I won't really get into the racism or non-racism of Walt Disney himself, because, well, the man was probably an anti-semite, which was also tied up in him being strongly anti-labor, and it's all been pretty well hashed-out, and that's all I have to say about that.

I'm rambling. This post has no real point. Suffice it to say, I find the history of all these animation studios to be really interesting from the point of view of someone who's obsessed with DVD releases. The amount of stuff that's being covered up is pretty crazy, and it ties in to my interest in copyright protections, given that Disney's the impetus for all the changes in the law, anyway.

yay! an imdb page full of aqua teens quotes!

So there me was beating boulder into powder because me couldn't eat it, and magic ball land in lap. Naturally me think, "All right, free egg." because... me stupid and me caveman. So me spent about three days humping and bust open with thigh bone so me could eat it good. Then magic ball shoot Oog with beam, and next thing me know me go out and invent wheel out of dinosaur brain. Magic dino wheel rolls for three short distance until me eat it. The point is, me get smarter. Soon me walk upright, me feather back dirty matted hair into wings for style, and me stop to use bathroom as opposed to me just doing it as me walk.

flight of dragons is a wonderful animated movie from the '80s, loosely based on a book that tries to explain the science of dragon flight. the movie revolves around 4 wizard brothers in a magical realm, where magic is dying out because of the development of science. they bring a modern-day man back in time to help defeat the one evil brother, but some magic goes wrong and the modern-day man (peter) ends up in the body of a dragon (gorbash). and then, the quest begins! it's really quite good. it's one of a trilogy of fantasy movies that meant a lot to me as a child. the other two movies were the dark crystal and the last unicorn. all three of them still make me cry.

oh! apparently it's also loosely based on this book.

tsarin asks about ignignot. ignignot is a mooninite. the mooninites are characters on aqua teen hunger force. the other mooninite's name is ur. ignignot is more fun to say.

bugboy3001 wants to know about beef on weck, and i am reminded that i have two roast beef-related interests, which may seem kind of weird. beef on weck is a western new york specialty. it's roast beef on kimmelweck roll. kimmelweck is a kind of german bread with salt all over it. the roll is dipped in gravy, so the meat and the bread sorta smoosh together. apparently, you have to be raised eating it to really dig it. segev doesn't like it. then again, he never had it at schwabel's, which is to beef on weck what the anchor bar is to buffalo wings. that sentence made no sense to people not from buffalo, i think. the anchor bar is the bar where buffalo wings were invented. so i guess the comparison isn't so apt, given that beef on weck wasn't invented at schwabel's. that's just sorta the infamous place to get yourself some genuine beef on weck. the door to the kitchen is open, so you see roast after steaming roast being cooked. yeah, i guess this is all really weird if you're not from buffalo.

anyone who owns a convertible in new york city is a nimrod. i hope that asshole in his beemer speeding down amsterdam gets his roof slashed.

whew! why am i so hostile tonight?

also, the extras on the alice in wonderland dvd are interesting, but mostly crap. although i did enjoy listening to the deleted songs. there was good reason for them to be deleted. pee yew.

it is a good world when, if you just wait long enough, you get to see homestar runner sing the neverending soda song.

ah ah aaaah, ah ah aaaah, ah ah aaaaah, never ending soooodaaaaaa!

a song from winnie the pooh is eminating, muffled, from somewhere nearby. it's not me, and it's not jessie. the logical culprit would be fred, who always plays loud music. but usually loud RAP music, not disney music. i don't think fred's daughter is here or anything.

it's very difficult to do work with pooh-music playing, because it keeps cracking me up. and making me want to leave work and go buy disney dvds.