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It's a bit of a theme with Disney too, considering The Sorcerer's Apprentice is all about that. Heh, Kingdom Hearts has both Disney's Merlin and Yen Sid as similar in appearance yet complete opposites in personality classic wizard mentors. And it's a good way to depict magic as a useful plot device without raising questions why they don't use it to solve the plot, because magic is hard and barely controllable at the best of times. (Discworld does something similar, where magic is at best only good if you really need poo poo blown up desperately, or a very specific use case with preptime)Sourdough Sam posted:The movie also ends before it can get interesting plot-wise. This kid spent the whole movie turning into animals and now he's the king. They could have done something where none of Merlin's lessons taught him how to lead a state and he has to go it alone while Merlin hangs out in present day (60's) Bermuda. Well, it is loosely based on the first part of The One And Future King, which does end up playing with that. Merlin and his animal companions do end up concluding that Arthur's reign was at best a failed experiment... which they then realise was awful to say right in front of Arthur, especially considering he genuinely tried his best, and implicitly after he's taken to Avalon bring him in to join their next attempts to better humanity.
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May 9, 2024 10:07
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Sword in the Stone feels like it's supposed to be a pure comedy, but it's not nearly funny enough most of the time.
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May 9, 2024 10:33
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I just spent ten minutes digging through the previous iteration of this thread for my wallotext review when I was doing my own watchthrough of all the features, and apparently I just never did one because I found it so unremarkable or something  drat that squirrel episode though. I remember they snipped it into one of those Valentine's Day specials along with a bunch of other things in an anthology narrated by Ludwig von Drake, and as a ten year old I remember being hosed up by it for weeks.
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May 9, 2024 10:47
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There's something about that squirrel plotline that digs its roots deep into people's heads.
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May 9, 2024 13:30
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Sword in the Stone is a film where the sum of its parts is better than the whole. I definitely think if Disney wasn't run by utter idiots that swing between chasing the shiny or playing too safe, The Sword in the Stone is the disney film that REALLY needs a remake. not as a live-action movie, but a full on TV series - make it an entire adaptation of The Once and Future King, because it turns out? Despite being extremely influential on modern Arthuriana, there's been no real adaptation of the book beyond this film doing the early years.
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May 9, 2024 14:28
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paradoxGentleman posted:There's something about that squirrel plotline that digs its roots deep into people's heads. I'll the one to ask what the squirrel plot is? I remember characters being turned into animals but nothing specific.
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May 9, 2024 14:59
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BioEnchanted posted:Something I do like about Sword in the Stone (and this extends to Bedknobs and Broomsticks with Substitutiary Locomotion) is that it makes Merlin's magic seem powerful because of how difficult it is to control. Similarly, I feel like there might be something to gleam comparing Maleficent and Madam Mim's respective dragon transformations. They both perform the same magic, but while Maleficent purposeful and deliberate in her use of satanic powers, Madam Mim is more spontaneous. She's just playing around, and that seems to afford the latter more sympathy.
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May 9, 2024 15:16
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Kingtheninja posted:I'll the one to ask what the squirrel plot is? I remember characters being turned into animals but nothing specific. There's a very horny lady squirrel who wants to get it on with Arthur and Arthur is like 'um no' and she doesn't care and Merlin is like 'oh ho ho ho' and very much 'sorry kid no means yes!' Then they turn back into humans and she goes and cries to herself heartbroken. MikeJF fucked around with this message at 15:28 on May 9, 2024 |
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May 9, 2024 15:21
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Outside of Merlin, my favourite part of Sword is the wolf. The poor guy just wants food and he keeps getting thwarted every time. Of course, it peaks early with Merlin and Wart scaling a hill, then going back down and the reaction from the wolf for all his wasted effort is just 
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May 9, 2024 18:34
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MikeJF posted:There's a very horny lady squirrel who wants to get it on with Arthur and Arthur is like 'um no' and she doesn't care and Merlin is like 'oh ho ho ho' and very much 'sorry kid no means yes!' added with according to Merlin, Squirrels mate for life and implied the girl squirrel isn't going to find anyone else
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May 9, 2024 18:39
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I hope that girl squirrel got laid eventually
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May 9, 2024 18:40
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Das Boo posted:Also, WOW. Y'all should watch that Foodfight! documentary. Lots of production materials and crew interviews, plus a topless render of Lady X that the director apparently jerked it to. I'm torn between being interested by all the BTS and pre-viz stuff they dug up and being wildly distracted by the weird choices of music (with sound effects sometimes) and to spend 30% of the runtime watching a progress bar on Windows Media Player while people read reenactments of interviews But the tease of that really nice pencil test for the elephant, and then showing the 3d version later. Amazing stuff. And to do that with Kasanoff's voiceover talking about how much better the mocap is than hand-animated... Perfect
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May 9, 2024 19:01
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Lord Hydronium posted:
I also remember it as being very good and that's kind of why I've never revisited it, because I've heard multiple people (including yourself) express the same things about it being disappointing. I'm just gonna let the nostalgia cloud my memory on that one for good... ALFbrot posted:I'm torn between being interested by all the BTS and pre-viz stuff they dug up and being wildly distracted by the weird choices of music (with sound effects sometimes) and to spend 30% of the runtime watching a progress bar on Windows Media Player while people read reenactments of interviews Yeah, I watched it but that was kind of distracting. Like, I get that multiple people probably don't want to do video interviews, especially ones who want to remain anonymous, but there has to be a better way (in fact I know there's a better way from watching other documentaries in the past) than just showing a blank media player. I will say that it's definitely interesting hearing how they actually pioneered a lot of 3D technology but uh... they just did it really bad because of constant revision. TwoPair fucked around with this message at 19:13 on May 9, 2024 |
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May 9, 2024 19:07
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TwoPair posted:I also remember it as being very good and that's kind of why I've never revisited it, because I've heard multiple people (including yourself) express the same things about it being disappointing. I'm just gonna let the nostalgia cloud my memory on that one for good... As I said, sum of its parts is more than the whole - there's some REALLY good sequences, but they never really gel together, into a cohesive storyline (and the intended theme never really got across clearly) and you can see where the Disney team is starting to fracture - Walt was turning his eye towards live action, and his health was starting to falter.
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May 9, 2024 20:37
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MikeJF posted:There's a very horny lady squirrel who wants to get it on with Arthur and Arthur is like 'um no' and she doesn't care and Merlin is like 'oh ho ho ho' and very much 'sorry kid no means yes!' The bit at the end where he's a human and trying to explain the situation to her is the worst. Because you're this close to a human and an animal no-poo poo communicating, and they're clearly speaking the same "language", they just can't... quite... connect. It's maddening
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May 9, 2024 21:00
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Robindaybird posted:As I said, sum of its parts is more than the whole - there's some REALLY good sequences, but they never really gel together, into a cohesive storyline (and the intended theme never really got across clearly) and you can see where the Disney team is starting to fracture - Walt was turning his eye towards live action, and his health was starting to falter. Is that why Aristocats also isn't great? I watched it earlier today after Lady and the Tramp because all this Disney talk got me in the mood for some films and nothing about it feels quite complete. The story is pretty threadbare and there's no interesting character interactions, like there's absolutely no tension between the cast whatsoever. Also the sketchy look is genuinely hard to look at, in some shots all the extra sketch lines skitter across the characters like a swarm of flies.
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May 9, 2024 22:56
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I've worked on nightmare animated projects but the foodfight doc sounds so much worse than anything I've suffered through. So... feeling I dodged some bullets.
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May 10, 2024 03:41
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It does seem like a lot of Foodfight was the director being Dunning-Kruger as hell and having no one to talk back to him, and thus loving up basic poo poo in rear end-backwards ways every step of the way. Oddly enough the CATS movie comes to mind too, the director of a CG musical turning out to not know nor care to know anything about CG or musicals, how they're made or why people like them, and that's why the end result is so bizarre and focused on the wrong things even as the performers are trying their best, and it's the dancers who actually get to sing their songs well.
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May 10, 2024 05:51
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Ghost Leviathan posted:It does seem like a lot of Foodfight was the director being Dunning-Kruger as hell and having no one to talk back to him, and thus loving up basic poo poo in rear end-backwards ways every step of the way. That explains why Skimbleshanks (the railway cat (the cat of the railway train)) had the best song in the movie by far.
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May 10, 2024 06:36
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Pyrotoad posted:That explains why Skimbleshanks (the railway cat (the cat of the railway train)) had the best song in the movie by far. Musical YouTube person Sideways has a good video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3aK-EK5V2k Which forms a nice duology with a previous video on Tom Hooper's prior work on Les Mis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ikqU6G6Xgs
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May 10, 2024 08:01
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It reminded me of video game adaptations of all things, where a director who obviously has contempt for the source material is as a result incurious and begrudging about it and won't even try to understand how it works and why people like it, and ends up seemingly forgetting the basics of their job in the process because they're refusing to engage with what should be the main parts of their job.
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May 10, 2024 08:17
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We just got that with halo 
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May 10, 2024 08:56
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Why even sign up for a project like Halo if you don't even like the material. Is the paycheck really worth it if you hate the thing anyway?
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May 10, 2024 16:34
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Pixeltendo posted:Why even sign up for a project like Halo if you don't even like the material. I mean, I think it would depend on the project. Approaching something you dislike the source material of and using an adaptation to criticize the unironic ideas of the source material is an entirely valid path. (See something like Starship Troopers.) Halo's early lore (which, I admit, is the only stuff I know because I never got into the Halo plot) is unironic ra-ra fash bullshit and if you asked me to make a Halo movie I'd want to write about how hosed up and awful it is that the Spartan program is this glorified heroic necessary evil thing despite the fact it literally involved horrifyingly maiming children and was basically doing a "the Spartans were so COOL and AWESOME and MANLY" thing but sci-fi. If you don't want to deal with the actual Halo lore and just have a cool dude in armor fighting aliens, I'd rather make a Doom movie. Edit: If you asked me to do an adaptation of Harry Potter you best fuckin' believe I'd do it as accurate to the "lore" as possible which would mean there would 100% be good trans wizards and I'd replace all of Dolores Umbrige's dialogue with JK Rowling tweets. ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 16:45 on May 10, 2024 |
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May 10, 2024 16:40
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I mean, in the world of adaptation this is nothing new, and there's nothing inherently wrong with a writer or director wanting to transform the source material into something different and more befitting their style, vision, interests, and proclivities. Some of the best adaptations of all time have been massive departures from the source material. Hell, there are plenty of stories of creators having outright contempt for the source material and still making great adaptations. Being inspired by the original and using it to create a new and distinct work of art is perfectly valid. The problem isn't a lack of faithfulness to the source material, the problem is lack of compelling vision and/or poor execution. Since around the turn of the century (I'd place the demarcation point as the first Raimi Spider-Man), protective fandoms seem to act like as if they're entitled to a completely faithful adaptation of their beloved property no matter what. Even if there are multiple conflicting canons, or if much of the series' canon is based on a dozen creators, or some throwaway tie-in books, or contributors on fan wikis making extrapolations on series lore that becomes accepted. A lot of fans seem to take a creator going "What's MY take on this world?" as an affront to their own love of the original. Faithfulness isn't the issue, mediocrity is.
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May 10, 2024 17:13
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ImpAtom posted:Halo's early lore (which, I admit, is the only stuff I know because I never got into the Halo plot) is unironic ra-ra fash bullshit and if you asked me to make a Halo movie I'd want to write about how hosed up and awful it is that the Spartan program is this glorified heroic necessary evil thing despite the fact it literally involved horrifyingly maiming children and was basically doing a "the Spartans were so COOL and AWESOME and MANLY" thing but sci-fi.
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May 10, 2024 18:14
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Having not watched the Halo show, I just don't understand why they would take three seasons to get to the titular Halo when the setup of "spaceship comes across a mysterious artifact in the middle of a war against aliens that humanity is losing badly" is perfectly compelling and sets up an immediate and interesting mystery. e: like, everything I've heard is that the show isn't bad because it's not a perfect adaptation, it's just a bad show.
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May 10, 2024 18:53
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I just remember that one of the books set between 3 and 4 swung hard the other way by having literally everyone dogpile on Halsey, including: -The Spartan II’s drill instructor, arguably just as complicit as her -The head admiral of ONI, Halsey’s superior who gave the green light on it -A Spartan III who spontaneously got over her PTSD-induced loss of vocalization just to tell Halsey to shut the gently caress up (and decked her across the room for good measure)
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May 10, 2024 18:53
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Captain Invictus posted:admittedly it has been a long time(since the original release) since I read the first halo books, but I feel like it was very up front about how awful and inhumane the spartan program was and how terrible the human government was. I mean, it literally starts off with kidnapping children and replacing them with clones, and talks about how the Spartans were designed as supercops to crush dissent. At least until the covenant showed up and suddenly all of that interhuman conflict became irrelevant in a fight against eradication, and the Spartans purpose was rewritten on the fly as things got more and more dire. It was up front about it but it was painted in the "the orphan grinder was a necessary evil to make people as cool as Master Chief" stuff, which is something you saw from people who glorify the made-up 300-style Sparta too. It could very well have changed since then because lord knows I have no idea what is up with Evil Cortana or whatever.
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May 10, 2024 19:02
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CelticPredator posted:We just got that with halo Halo, The Witcher, Avatar the Last Airbender(both versions), Velma, and probably a lot more stuff I'm forgetting. Maybe Rings of Power too, but that might be a case of biting off more than they can chew.
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May 10, 2024 19:56
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wasn't it mentioned in one of these animation threads previously that corporations are basically allergic to "new" IPs, so the only way to get anything made is to take a preexisting property and hammer it into the show you actually wanted to make?
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May 10, 2024 20:02
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doomrider7 posted:Avatar the Last Airbender(both versions) wait, are you referring to the live-action versions (i.e. the Shyamalan movie) or do you mean that Mike and Bryan somehow grew disdain for their own creation as the years went on?
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May 10, 2024 20:29
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doomrider7 posted:Halo, The Witcher, Avatar the Last Airbender(both versions), Velma, and probably a lot more stuff I'm forgetting. Maybe Rings of Power too, but that might be a case of biting off more than they can chew. How about a lot of the bowdlerized-for-kids properties that got made into cartoons in the 80s, like TMNT, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, Real Ghostbusters, Police Academy...?
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May 10, 2024 21:11
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TrippDay posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgBO9c3WKII The big surprising thing I learned from this is that the story of the original workprint of Foodfight being stolen was just made up to give investors an explanation for why this whole project was so ridiculously behind schedule. None of the crew members who this guy talked to were willing to verify that and it sounds like a lot of them weren't even aware this was something anyone really believed. Perhaps not coincidentally, the same time this documentary came out someone went and leaked the original 2005 workprint which is apparently the source of a lot of the footage that was used in the earlier trailers- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sman2uX-I4
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May 10, 2024 21:40
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Oddly enough the CATS movie comes to mind too, the director of a CG musical turning out to not know nor care to know anything about CG or musicals, how they're made or why people like them, and that's why the end result is so bizarre and focused on the wrong things even as the performers are trying their best, and it's the dancers who actually get to sing their songs well. You didn't mention the reason why, which is the best part- Tom Hooper set up this elaborate seven stage system to do musicals correctly, and anyone who knew anything about music knew that it was terrible nonsense but also that there was no talking Hooper out of using it. Steven McRae successfully weaseled his way out of using it by claiming that everyone in his bit was just a dumb dancer who wouldn't be able to figure out how it worked anyway. This is better explained somewhere in the Cats YouTube documentary linked on this page, I just can't remember where exactly.
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May 10, 2024 21:49
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Acebuckeye13 posted:Having not watched the Halo show, I just don't understand why they would take three seasons to get to the titular Halo when the setup of "spaceship comes across a mysterious artifact in the middle of a war against aliens that humanity is losing badly" is perfectly compelling and sets up an immediate and interesting mystery. This is the biggest issue. Idgaf about halo lore. I love the games and I wanted to see a live action version of them more or less on screen. Doesn’t have to be 1:1 but it could’ve been done a lot better
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May 10, 2024 22:15
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Aces High posted:wait, are you referring to the live-action versions (i.e. the Shyamalan movie) or do you mean that Mike and Bryan somehow grew disdain for their own creation as the years went on? There’s two live action adaptations
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May 10, 2024 22:16
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CelticPredator posted:There’s two live action adaptations Yeah, but one of them is flawed but good and clearly had its heart in the right place so it's hardly an example of someone having disdain for a project.
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May 10, 2024 22:51
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Aces High posted:wait, are you referring to the live-action versions (i.e. the Shyamalan movie) or do you mean that Mike and Bryan somehow grew disdain for their own creation as the years went on? There was a Netflix version that has gotten some mixed receptions to my knowledge.
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May 11, 2024 00:19
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PriorMarcus posted:Yeah, but one of them is flawed but good and clearly had its heart in the right place so it's hardly an example of someone having disdain for a project. I don't know that you can really call Shyamalan's version as having disdain for the original. He clearly went to a fairly deliberate effort to adapt as much original material as he could within the constraints of a blockbuster film. Sure, he did so very incompetently and arbitrarily in a way that undermined most of what made the original work. But the Netflix version did the same thing really.
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May 11, 2024 00:41
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