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So, you may or may not have heard of Mudlarking, the Victorian pursuit of poking about riverbanks looking for interesting old trash. I'm open to suggestions, but it's what I'd call something I'd been doing a fair bit lately: picking through the wads of tv people upload to youtube looking for interesting stuff. Anyway, in this thread that's what we post about, hopefully make amusing gifs, and watch things so other people don't have to. For that last bit, I hope we can bring back the noble art of the effortpost; because frankly reading an effortpost on Ultraforce is way more concise and entertaining than actually watching Ultraforce. I've discovered some weird stuff; but let me start with the weirdest. 1. Filmation  Thanks to recent advances in AI, a certain percentage of you will hear this GIF If you are 30 or under you likely never heard of Filmation, but they were a notable animation studio until the end of the 1980s. Their most famous shows (in my opinion) were He-Man, She-Ra, and the animated Star Trek. I remember the first two from childhood, along with Ghostbusters (not the real Ghostbusters, the other ones.) Filmation productions were recognizable by its house style. To conserve money, they used and reused very generic setups could be used intersticially with the larger action, which gave proceedings a recognizable, if stilted, visual style. Having seen a few episodes of the original TMNT as an adult (and it being a total perspective mess) maybe some of it was also avoiding visual mistakes? Filmation shows are now popular for block uploading, most of them being the TV equivalent of abandonware. If you've never seen a Filmation production, it's definitely a trip back to when animation was for kids alone. A friend recently talked up the Buck Rogers show they made, and I want to find more of that as it is brilliant for GIFs: https://i.imgur.com/m213ZDa.gifv  Yes, ladies, GIFs! But aside from that, Filmation is definitely of its time. If you've seen either He-Man or She-Ra, you have the lay of the land for Filmation: Heroes who are so flawless and powerful they are almost Jesus analogs, villains who are, well, Skeletor-like if not actually Skeletor. All bad guys get defeated like a Soviet defense lawyer in a USSR show trial, these villains have a squad of not-terribly bright goons to yell at regardless of how well or poorly things are going. They often use as models other kids stories, sometimes slavishly so - a good example here is He-Man having a secret identity, not for any story or character reason, but because that's what Superman did. There will be a female character on the good side and on the bad side who will have eyebrows like a late 60s stripper. Nothing ever changes past the episode end. I remember thinking He-Man (a couple years ago) was a pretty good for a show aimed at young Children, and that's about as far as you can praise them: doing well for what it is. So thanks to Mudlarking I've seen some of the shows they were making post He-man, and I think the good people they had working for them got recruited away, and even highly problematic spaceship-totem poles crossing the stars, and the evil ghosts of behemoth alien cows can't save them. I am speaking of Bravestarr, which was the late 80s He-Man replacement. My friend tells me the entire series was inspired by the villain, Tex Hex. Tex Hex is a black-hatted skeleton-y wizard, who works for the aforementioned demonic cow-ghost, Stampede. He's also, I think, a skeleton wizard take on Bad Bob. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zPo253ePXM So despite what you might think looking at the director, screenwriter, and the cast, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972) is a bad movie, not worth your time. The Bad Bob scene, though, is WELL worth your time. My friend also tells me that there is a two-parter where Bravestarr travels through time to the future where he meets Sherlock Holmes and Holmes can shoot lightning and they fight crime. Sorry, one sec, I feel dizzy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hO-6NfhutQU Actually, let me just quote my friend: quote:i spent some time watching bravestarr, its not a good show but it is very entertaining I can't stomach it. I find the extra-heavy handed moralism obnoxious, and having never seen it since the 1980s, I suddenly remembered I loving HATE Deputy Fuzz.  Or to use his proper name, DWEPUITY FUUUUUUUUUUUZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ This weirdness I think is shot through the late Filmation work. There's an episode of She-Ra they introduce this character, named Huntara. Now clearly somebody had been looking at, I dunno, Grace Jones in Conan/Brigitte Nielsen in Red Sonya, and thought "I could get a Heavy Metal submission out of this." Huntara turns out to be good (though with liberal views on slavery[!]), but that's not the truly bizarre part. It's the voice. For some reason she talks like Tom Waits making a prank phone call? I think somebody did a temp track for the VA, but they figured 'meh, let's just use that."  Huntara. I'd show you some suggestive Gifs but truth be told she's only well animated a few times that episode. Ghostbusters can't pull off that weirdness, because it is too much of a mess. In case you've ever wondered who owned the name Ghostbusters before Ghostbusters, it was Filmation, who in the 1970s made a live-action TV show about two dudes and a gorilla catching ghosts, apparently inspired by an even older Mickey Mouse cartoon. With Ghostbusters such a hit, Filmation naturally made a new series. I'm thinking it was aimed at younger kids? That's the only reason I can think of for why it sucks so much. Pretty much regardless of who you are aiming at, your show has to believe its own premise, or have rules, and as far as I've seen Ghostbusters (not the real one, the other one) just doesn't. Like I saw one episode that was in outer space, with the Ghost Jalopy flying around with no problems, as the three Ghostbusters (straight-man, intelligent ape, comic sidekick) are accompanied by a blue space (?) woman on a flying pulpit or lectern like Serpentor used to rock. The ghosts in question are Moby Dick and Ahab, who in the afterlife became BFFs, and are on a ocean-prison planet for no reason, and there is ghost/space/pirate ship which has nefarious plans to weaponize ghost Moby Dick, who as a ghost can naturally go into space and attack space ocean liners and plunder them for their gold booty. Now consider all that, and know the episode is painfully boring, and if you watched past the first commercial break you are either beyond help or perfect for this thread. But this brings us to:  This gif works as an example of Scheimer's signature and as CNN's logo for the Israel-Palestine conflict 2. Lou Scheimer Lou Scheimer is someone who's name I've seen but haven't thought much about until I saw the thing I'm very slowly getting around to telling you about. While I'm going to be mocking stuff that he did, I think it's worthwhile to say that the guy seems to have lived a good life, and was a kind of Roger Corman of North American animation: a guy who gave a lot of later notable people in the industry their start. (Also note I'm getting all this from a book Scheimer wrote, so if this all turns out to be entertaining lies, I owe you a "believe it or not!" card.) The son of German-Jewish immigrants, the Scheimer family came to America in 1923. Lou's dad, Sam, a decorated veteran of World War One, found trouble early [1922] with the Nazis, on account of the time he disrupted a meeting with some old friends, and knocked out Adolf Hitler. The Nazi party might of been one of many new political parties with a street gang side gig at the time, but they still bore a grudge, so the Scheimer family immigrated. Lou was old enough to be drafted but not old enough to be in World War Two, instead being stationed in occupied Japan in the late 1940s. He had an interest in art, and that eventually translated to animation and then founding Filmation with two other guys, which from ~1970 to 1989 was a big mover in kids animation. The death of Filmation was pretty simple, as animation followed a long-standing trend in American industry. So places like Sunbow and Filmation were animation studios that were subcontractors to places like Marvel and Hasbro: you hired them to produce animation, and they produced everything in house. By the end of the 1980s, though, two things had changed: the in-between animation, if not the entire animation process, was being outsourced offshore to first Japanese and later Korean animation companies. Meanwhile, the other part of the production, the VA work, the design, the direction was moving in house to these very large companies, as they began to value animation more. (You can see that in Batman: the Animated Series, where the show was done by a team in house to Warner Brothers, and the animation was done by, say, SUNRISE, a Japanese animation house.) This left the previous studios out in the cold with little to do. quote:In 1989, Westinghouse sold Filmation to Paravision International, an investment consortium led by the French cosmetics company L'Oréal. Before that sale was complete, Westinghouse shuttered the film studio on February 3, 1989, which left L'Oréal with only the Filmation library.[8] This happened a day before the WARN Act went into effect requiring companies to give employees 60 days' notice before a mass layoff. [...] quote:So, with only about three days before a sale was about to go through, I decided to make a last-ditch effort to buy the company back to salvage it. I called up Dino de Laurentiis because I knew that he had been interested in buying the company years prior to that, and he could raise the money. I said what I’d reallv like him to do, if he was still interested in buying the company is to get him on the phone with Westinghouse, and he could tell them he was interested and he'd like to take the place of the French guys who wanted to close us down. A bird in hand, etc. It wasn't professionally easy for Lou after that. He was fifty, and suddenly found himself an outsider. He could put stuff together to pitch on, but unless somebody thought it a brilliant idea, the people who used to back Filmation projects had their own people working on their own projects. So he pitched on a lot of stuff, most of which never went anywhere. In the late 1990s he had a serious heart attack, and went into semi-retirement. There's a happy coda to all this, though: he stayed alive long enough for some of Filmation's classic shows to be republished on DVD, connecting him back to now adult fans. He died in 2013. 3. Bete Noir So to rewind back to the late 1980s/early 1990s, Scheimer was thinking about something that a lot of people were considering: animation aimed at adults. Clearly Lou was onto something, even if he couldn't know an animated sitcom on the new Fox network was about to change the world and prove him right. Of course, if you remember "adult" animation from the 1990s, you know there was a learning curve to that. There's a lot of shows that tried, like Fish Police, or Tripping the Rift, and there was a lot more to it than tits and jokes about same. [Fish Police sandbar: of course Fish police is now definitely drifting ashore your local youtube riverbank. I've seen a few and am genuinely astonished to report it is not awful. Some episodes are lame as hell, some of them are alright. I bring this up only so I can show you this: so I was unaware that Ed Asner was in Fish Police, and I don't claim to be any kind of voice acting expert, but I believe in his character intro he is killing it:] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3UXzvflHEI&t=540s Anyway, Lou Scheimer dreamed up a few of these. I share one of these pitches now, entirely because it contains an amazing name that you will have great difficulty searching for: quote:During February and March, Filmation produced artwork and a video presentation for a new series we wanted to do called Hardchrome, The Last P.I. It had originally come out of an idea called Hard Core, about the first private investigator in ancient Rome, and then the last one in the future. It was going to be an animated series for adults, with crime, violence, and sex. It was very pulp hardboiled detective, but with a science-fiction twist. Anyway, and here we get to me watching things so you don't have to, Scheimer produced something that was animated and adult. In his book, he described it as the weirdest thing he made in his entire career, and I believe him. 4. Robin and the Dreamweavers [note: video is not work-safe] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJRQykEuThw So this is what we've been building to. I found it thanks to this dude's youtube channel, you can watch it yourself. There's a tonal clash going on in this that has to be seen to believed. The writing and form are of a Filmation show from the 1970s, but it is slathered in as much mid-90s cyberpunk and VR as could be contrived. This is already loving strange. Add ontop of that a relentless horniness. Add ontop of that the same sort of mawkish morality that animated [if you pardon the pun] '80s Filmation shows. Oh, and then do some scenes and characters who appear to be orphans from a 1980s cartoon. It wants to be an adult swim show as funded by Lighthouse comics. Welp, let's get into it So do you remember the Matrix? Because we're opening with EDM and green data moving on a black background. Pretty sure I saw an Omega symbol Some excited mysterious voices say "it's coming online!" Then we cut to a scientist man We learn that Dr. David Rittenhower has been trying to cross the bridge between mass and energy, which he's been working on 13.6 years. He converts a half eaten pear "from matter to digital energy."  His story checks out. He tries the reverse process, and for some reason fails. Then these mysterious viewers hack into his computer and create a viable human----embryo? The mysterious hackers say "her name is Robin." We get an opening then, CGI, EDM, CGI tunnels etc. Our scientist is down for growing this embryo in his life-sustaining appliance, and everything is fine until two cyberpunk mooks explode through his wall  It's like they are invading from the Venture Brothers These two goons try and fail to kill the doctor, and that one goon's arm gun shatters the life-sustaining appliance, and the doctor grabs the now to term baby unharmed, then flees in some kinda flying car. I mean, it's a fast birth scene, I'll give it that---- There is a chase, the babe is left in a basket of reeds, a goon sighs as he draws his katana, the doctor gets shot down, he blows up his lab and himself with it. CUT TO  A building that says "Biochip" on it The two goons do some 1990s cyberpunk procedure and jack in to Decadence Decadence is a system of caves  The two goons meet one of our main characters. She goes by the impossibly 1990s name Triple X, but let me speed things up a bit by saying Decadence is the VR pornhub, except, you know, system of caves, and xXx is in fact Lady Satan, and Lady Satan is powered by internet porn. She kills the two goons for not succeeding hard enough, as they killed the doctor but lost the baby. MEANWHILE We see the same shot we just saw of the "Biochip" building, and it fades to the same interior shot A very small cyber-man learns the two goons we saw are dead, dying in VR kills you for realsies, etc Although this is apparently completely new knowledge to the small cyberman And I don't know why it had to be established here, but new VR helmets that jack into your brain directly have been invented, even though we just saw the old technology literally kill people Since we're hitting every branch in the 90s cyberpunk cliche tree, cyberman orders the bodies disposed of quietly, as I guess biochip is rolling out the new VR helmet hotness. His goon makes a note of it, and Nelson is annoyed at notes for a criminal conspiracy. Truly, this show walked so The Wire could fly  Nelson Oiler (the small cyberman's name) is then invited to go exactly where his now dead goons were when he was killed, and Oiler jacks in without hesitation, despite the whole actual 'VR death' thing being new Lady Satan motorboats Mr. Oiler, who has a virtual orgasm as Lady Satan speaks to his greedy dreamy dreams. Satan wants to escape from Cyberspace and wants a machine like Dr.Rittenhower had so she can do it. We then cut to - a town, a cartoon town, with music that makes it sound like we've switched channels into a young kid's TV show. A clique of cartoon animals on the level of the care bears don't want to tell a cartoon bunny something. The cartoon bunny shows up in a CGI car, and using a lot of references to GUIs, we learn, no, this is connected since they tell the rabbit Robin is missing and Dr. Rittenhower is dead. This is apparently bad news, as Robin was the only hope of stopping Lady Satan.  As you'd expect these things can create life ex nihilo in a gritty cyberpunk near future Also, and I admit the first time I watched this, I didn't put together the critters here were the ones watching the scientist. CUT to: a hospital We see a creepy maternity robot care for the newborns, including Robin  SMASH CUT TO Robin at 21 dancing. Time jump! (Or else the rest of this is one weird baby dream.)   Robin is hot and very '90s. She has jeans, a bare midriff, great hair, and a rack so hot she could concuss a small child with her boobs, if the child was standing at boob height, and Robin spun around really quickly. She has that particular heart tattoo she was born with, and she's dancin'. Coming off the dance floor she gets hit on by a drunk guy who's dressed in a purple suit coat, red shirt, gold epaulets, and a fremen style gold nose-chain. When he gets grabby, Robin reflexively pushes him back, and then vanishes his clothes. Everybody laughs! A tuba plays notes of failure.  You know, like in the Matrix? While everybody else was chill with the superpower demonstration, Robin herself apparently doesn't know how she does such things. She's off to an arcade to play "Dark Catacomb". (Audio FX: an arcade from the early 80s.)  A guy has followed the hot girl with the sex biotic powers and says not to worry when she gets a game over, that one is pretty tough. Robin gets pissy about this, and some 1970s gender politics is exchanged. A horn of failure plays! It's a little weird, but as we know literally nothing about what Robin's life has been like, I'm gonna say she's under-socialized but getting by due to extreme hotness.  Next, Robin encounters Brenda Plump. I thought she said Plum, what with that hair color, but this character as a personality trait talks about how fat they are.  Aside from her Eye Makeup like a John Waters protagonist, she's not bad. She offers Robin a job as a DJ in her virtual dance club, but that's cutting to the chase since she also explains that being a virtual DJ is literally new, and THIS IS VIRTUAL, etc. The club is going to be called NETRAVE. There's a throwaway line here about how this is a new thing because the new VR got "the government stamp", but wasn't the old VR nearly as good? I mean those goons were killed by it? Congrats, we've just thought about this more than Robin and the Dreamweavers does. It's weird in other ways, like Brenda is explicit she's recruiting Robin because she's hot as gently caress, not "I think you can be a DJ."  Also look at this waitress outfit, did it get cribbed from The Fifth Element? MEANWHILE AT THE BIOCHIP FACTORY We see Nelson Oiler, exactly the ----- wait, my mistake, his sideburns are grey ----- attempting and failing to make virtual objects into real ones. This is a real problem for the company that has supplied the world with VR technology for the past 20 years; they have to get "this piggy to market fast, or we're all finished!" Nelson checks in with Lady Satan who is pissed but is restrained from killing Nelson when Nelson tells her his death will kill the Cyber to reality pipeline. I mean, that is how the Zuck remained in charge of Facebook with the VR grift collapsed in on itself  Robin's apartment is gigantic, and a mess. For somebody who's past we'll never reference, Robin sure does have a lot of crap We then cut to Robin, singing in her apartment, and it goes all music video-y for 30 seconds or so. The music is naturally - an 80s style soft ballad about some ideal place Robin wants to get to. Interlude over, it's the next night and NETRAVE is go. Brenda has "spread banner ads all over the net". Then the horns of failure play for Robin! Because her new co-worker, Reed Stokes, is that dude she blew off last night when he made a completely harmless remark. {Reed Stokes? Seriously? At this point I was expecting "Deckard", or "Decker".} Reed is ripped like a pro wresler, bares his midriff, and wears Laser PPE or similar. Brenda is focused on getting Robin changed for her VR experience. That's pretty stupid, but recruiting somebody super hot for a VR position is dumber, and complaining about how you look exactly the same in virtual reality, as Brenda does, is possibly dumbest of all.  Brenda shows off Netrave, saying "on-liners from around the world" will be in a few minutes logging in to the virtual club! Brenda also explains that because the Vcap directly massages the actual brain, you can experience getting drunk, food, loving [etc] virtually! Brenda calls this "the perfect addiction" since getting drunk [etc] only lasts as long as you are actually logged in, disappearing once you log off. So despite being almost literally identical to reality, there's "no chance of addiction." Believe it or not, this comes up again, and I can't tell if Brenda is engaged in lovely foreshadowing or the writers literally forgot they slipped that in there. Brenda grabs her rack and jiggles quite a bit whenever she is on camera So the party starts as Robin floats around on her virtual VR deck. Then some spammers arrive! By that, I mean two people show up and start shouting "Hey! Go to Decadence!" This causes chaos and was completely unanticipated - not only because they didn't anticipate spam, they also didn't anticipate people acting aggressively or inappropriately online. Just when things are getting rape-y one of the goons sees Robin's heart tatoo and screams "ITS THE BITCH" - and then is physically (virtually) flung aside by Reed, which is how the bum gets banned. Robin uses her heart power to ban the other one. Robin tells Brenda this, but she doesn't believe Robin? [Trigger warning: epilepsy]  "Alright, little blame arrows going pu-pu-pu into my heart..." Robin looks out the windows of the club and says she thinks something is out there; Brenda also dismisses this, saying there is nothing but empty cyberspace beyond those windows. We cut back to Decadence, the sex dungeon {sound fx: fleshy moans and stock screams I heard in build engine games}. Triple X is pleased when one of her minions reports the bitch sighting. Lady Satan dispatches the goon to find out where Robin lives, and then steal something she cares about. VR? Meatspace? Lady Satan doesn't specify. Oh, I was being dumb. This goon find and breaks into Robin's real apartment in about 30 seconds and scans a picture Robin has drawn, which I guess is a *kind* of taking. Thirty seconds after that, Robin opens a door, literally into cyberspace, and sees her dream house. We've seen it a few times by this point; it looks like something Teddy Ruxspin would live in. Naturally, Robin ascends the steps and opens the door, to find--------- ---Triple X inside. Triple X is standing in a surreal interior of root vegetables, spiders, and human orifices. She tries to get Robin to step inside, and when that fails, she shouts at Robin to get in here. It's pathetic enough that I think Triple X thought she could do some voice commands Dune style, but was mistaken? Robin just keeps saying no until Triple X turns into a tornado. Things get so frightening that the real world Robin, VR helmet on, is not only screaming but fading in and out of reality, which Brenda takes as the sign to haul the ol' VR helmet off. The thing Reed is freaking out about is that Robin walked out into cyberspace, not "it seemed like you were fading from reality.' Robin reveals that Triple X [who Reed knows, "she's from Decadence.zone"] wants her for mysterious reasons. A part of me would like Triple X to be known to Reed because she's to Decadence what that blonde elf woman was to Everquest, but I think we know that is out. CUT TO: BIOCHIP And for the third goddamn time we're treated to the same two images The boys are doing science and have summoned a dead rat from cyberspace  If only those creatures from the other TV show could be subcontracted MEANWHILE Reed appears in a cave Naturally Reed is going to Decadence to find Triple X.   You can see why this place is so popular  Triple X coughs some dope smoke at him and the two have a conversation. Lady Satan does a exposition dump on Reed, on how she is literally the embodiment of sex addiction and she corrupts everything she touches. Meanwhile, Reed is talking at her like she's the site admin, saying to keep the spam out of Netrave, "It's a clean place and I intend to keep it that way" and "how come I can't locate a URL for your site? Where's your source?"  Triple X does a little grinding against Reed, and Reed threatens to destroy Decadence with viruses. Triple X says to tell Robin she's waiting, and then tosses Reed from the "zone", or whatev  The next night, Robin is VRDJ-ing it up, and asks where the spooky door went. Brenda and Reed say naturally they got rid of it. Robin then leans against the wall and falls out of the level geometry  That's not all; Robin vanishes from reality. Brenda and Reed are alarmed, but not alarmed enough. Robin falls until she is saved by a bunny rabbit in a flying retro car rendered in not terrible for the time CGI. The bunny immediately starts hitting on her, and Robin faints. A bad move, but fortunately for her, if Robin is our stacked, miniskirted Neo, then the bunny rabbit is our Morpheus, and is named Randy I'm not joking   Note to self: the audio tech screws up here, Randy talking sounds like your boss talking in Cruelty Squad Meanwhile, Reed in the real world does the logical thing and immediately logs back on again and goes to the extremely dangerous place where Internet horniness has total power. He immediately find Robin tied up in a non sexual way, but Robin also starts getting flirty. "I don't get it. How did you physically cross over into cyberspace?" Reed says, but all Robin wants to do is make out! GIRLS, amirite? Finally Reed tweaks that this isn't Robin. Triple X (for it is none other) explains that Robin has been taken by those drat Dreamweavers, who are most certainly evil, and I, Triple X, will help you. Triple X seals this new understand with Reed by allowing him to gently caress Robin by proxy. This would be weirder if Robin was less hot.  MEANWHILE We go from loving to this:   Robin wakes up in Randy's bed, and talks to another Dreamweaver, Sass and Frass, a two headed thing that talks like if scrappy doo had a mirror image of himself growing out of his head. You know, like the Matrix?  We then go for a walk in off-brand toontown, and we get a further exposition dump. Triple X is a demon powered by internet lust. She wants to escaple to the real world, and that would be bad, because she'd have magic powers to get people fuckin', and thus, become more powerful. [Ed note: Only as I'm editing this do I see this is a repeat of exposition from not long ago. Sloppy writing or a break dictated by imaginary episode sectioning? You be the judge!] The Dreamweavers created Robin as somebody who could exist in cyberspace and the real world to fight this demon. Never mind - you know, sometimes a gif really is best. Imagine this thing explaining you were engineered by him and his friends, and boy did you grow up right, hubba hubba!  Robin is saddened. Not for any of the obvious reasons, because she doesn't have the magical super powers this rambling tale sorta implies she should have. Randy promises she's legit, and only needs training from the other dream weavers. Randy also educates Robin in that she had a father, and he died So sticking to the Matrix, we...don't really get a training montage as such, what we get is Robin meeting the rest of the Dreamweavers: Creep, teaches...invisibility? Stealth? Moving by monster jump-cut? I'm not sure;  Sass and Frass, teaches fighting; [editing it now hits me they fight like an old married couple, with is some real...1960s rear end character design]  Flit, teaches flying;  Notion, teaches...creating objects with your mind? This, then, is the team that's going to help Robin take out Lady Satan:  MEANWHILE Reed can't concentrate as he imagines Triple X being bootylichious:  Also at this moment you can hear the "sexytime" music sting, notify all applicable hip hop artists Reed and Brenda have restored the door in Netrave and hope to go through it to find Robin, who, gotta remind everyone again, physically vanished in addition to virtually vanishing. Nelson Oiler appears and says their plans are stupid and dumb. Brenda knows Oiler and gay innuendo happens when Nelson says he wants biff slabcake over there instead of Brenda. Of course then things get silly: Nelson says the only way to physically enter cyberspace is via his chamber. Reed leaves with Nelson and nobody reflects even for a second how stupid this all is, let alone Nelson, who've neither character have ever seen before, being totally caught up on the plot Meanwhile Robin gets a training montage of mostly ineffectual training. In the Gif below  things go downhill after Robin gets about 30 ft off the ground, and Flit says "no flapping! You're not ready for flapping!" For the fourth loving time we see the same two shots of Biochip Reed is happily climbing into the giant chemical tank while Brenda (how did she even get in here?!) protests, saying Triple X is leading him around by his dick. Whatever Reed's motive (loving Robin by proxy or ambitions to gently caress the real deal) he enunciates very well, even when submerged Reed vanishes and appears in cyberspace, exactly like HE DOES WHEN HE PUTS ON A VCAP--------[audio FX: furniture being kicked] and he is back in da club and goes through that door. Instantly the Triple-X Ghost form rolls through and begins spewing drugs. The now unmodded dance party (Like seriously Brenda, this is your business here) becomes an orgy as the VR sex drugs make people want gently caress. Lady Satan then strings Reed along on this "Dreamweavers are totes bad" plan with about as much skill as Skeletor would have, but squat hardthrust is down. MEANWHILE Oiler perfects creating living matter from energy. MEANWHILE Meanwhile, training continues, and the floating baby with a lightbulb coming out of its skull actually teaches Robin something minorly useful regarding her Heart abilities. It ends with the baby taking a snowcone to the mush, but anyway----Randy is confidant even if Robin isn't, and they get into the retro fly car to stop Lady Satan. On the way, Reed picks up Robin literally and tosses her into HIS 1950s retro convertible skycar. Robin is...kinda angry, but Reed ignores her brainwashed jabber. [Realtalk, somebody watch this and tell me if anybody in this thing actually listens to somebody else when they talk. I'm pretty sure no conversation has had, or will have, any influence on what happens.] Reed takes her back to the Teddy Ruxspin house, saying she doesn't need to worry about anything anymore. Reed describes this place as almost literally heaven, which doesn't flash any alarm bells. This is a trick and both wake up in Dark Catacomb, the game from the start. After Robin runs and make DC look like Pitfall, Triple X corners Robin, and says "Enjoy oblivion!" It's after THIS that Reed realizes Lady Satan is in fact bad. Triple X zaps Robin into unconsciousness and imprisons Reed as a boytoy. She also takes him along as she opens a portal. Robin's tattoo vanishes. We cut back to the BIOCHIP factory (same two shots etc) as Reed and Triple X come out of the science tank. Oiler wants to talk turkey immediately with triple X, because Nelson has big plans for the make-things-from-cyberspace-real chamber. Triple X says 'naw' to all that - she sees the chamber as the one thing that could put her back into cyberspace. So she blasts a few laser bolts, wrecking the lab, and then dragging on a defeated fuckboi Reed, departs to paint the real world red.  Reed is bent to her will OK, so I have to point out something: the construction of that chamber and Robin being neutralized are separate events that don't have anything to do with each other: they are just two things Triple X accomplished at almost the same time. For that matter, Oiler making Cyber-teleportation working was entirely his effort; he just had some vague, frankly silly, promises he was gonna profit from that. Also, Triple X having infinite magic powers sorta made sense in the context of cyberspace, but it absolutely does not in the real world. While "knocking Triple X back into Cyberspace" is going to be the goal from this point, Nelson (or any other character) could have taken out a gun and shot Triple X in her stupid unseen head, following the rough logic that got us here. For that matter, when I first watched this, I assumed that the Teddy Ruxspin cabin was some kinda message from the Dreamweavers to help Robin find them. Nope! Her idealization of such a place was just her missing her father's love. The fact that the Dreamweavers live in off-brand toontown and Robin's Pavel's dream house is a coincidence. This obviously doesn't matter, if you read this far you know how much crazy we're just rolling with. I mention all this as now is the best time to bring it up, because from here, things get truly wild.  James Dean achievement unlocked. Robin is still in the sex caves, sexy, disheveled, and dead. The Ghost of Dr. Rittenhower then appears, and restores Robin to life. [Because Triple X kills in such a generic (by cartoon standards) way, and nobody makes any comment on Robin's state after, when I first watched this I assumed Robin was merely knocked out until she's resurrected.]   OK, now picture this. You're falling out of your dress. You've just been restored to life and have just met the ghost of your dead father. You then turn your head, these assholes walk in, and they know your father's ghost.  Then, you fall out of your dress. The ghost of Dr. Rittenhower explains Triple X imprisoned him in the sex caves of the VR porno web site decadence when she found his soul wandering cyberspace. Then spooky black warp effects start filling up the passages! The Dreamweavers announce that if they get caught in the 'purge', they will be deleted for sure!  Dreamweavers at bay Randy contemplates his and his friends annihilation at the hands of evil, which has triumphed.  At least a hot rack is framed in the background So this part is what I remember with crystal clarity. We transition from the image above to an orgy. Warning that from this point forward, images may not be work safe, I'll link those. Topless women run by; titties be out and people are loving in this scene. One couple came with such force it collapsed the building around them.  Cumshambles Reed is chained to a giant erect dick statue. Lady Satan stands atop the dick statue and wiggles her rear end at the crowd, who she’s taken control of through the power of horniness. She declares this the city of X-treme.  wiggle she bum MEANWHILE In the Sex Caves, the Dreamweavers encourage Robin to project herself into reality, which is a thing she does. Now, totally screwed, the Dreamweavers are saved by Brenda, who's broken out of the room the Biochip people threw her in, and logged on. Very similar to the end of the Matrix, minus the robot squid. MEANWHILE Robin touches grass  THIS ORGY IS OVER MEANWHILE Brenda, back in reality, is assisted by the Ghost of Dr. Rittenhower via zoom call into rebuilding Oiler's VR teleporter. After metaphorically wanging the particle accelerator with a frying pan, the machine works, and the Dreamweavers are summoned into reality.  Creep is holding out that locket throughout this, I'm guessing this was some unexplained power - zoom call from anywhere or similar MEANWHILE We return to Tribble-X and Robin in medias res. The "and then the doom music kicks in" of the start of this fight is pretty kickass, and I'd post it if I wasn't lying about the existence of the start of this fight. xXx catches Robin on fire, which she puts out via mentally created giant snowcone. Triple X says "BORED NOW" and invites the crowd to gang-rape Robin. This Reed prevents, by finally getting angry enough to break his chains, and then punching, like, two people. Oh, wait, the Dreamweavers also show up, so naturally the crowd backs the gently caress off.  I mean look at Creep, he's clearly in high cover, and in overwatch Robin uses the break to shame the sweaty, jizz stained crowd, which seems to sort of work. It's the embodiment of internet porn vs. I don't know. Some self restraint? Getting addicted to anything is bad? Well, Internet porn's arguments conta these points are interrupted when Reed hauls down Triple X's hood, to the disgust of the crowd, which also works to kill horniness. Whatever this moment is worth is then ruined because one of the Dreamweavers jokes "baw gawd, she's uglier than Randy’s shaved behind”. This happens 30 seconds after the attempted gang rape. Then the fight re-erupts, Tripple-X gets a costume change, and some Dr. Octopus like robot tentacles. Robin leads Lady Satan final form back to Biochip, where she announces 'the uncrossing of Triple-X!" where, long story short, the Dreamweavers dogpile the succubus and smash her with their hovercar back into the science tank.  Crab-bucketin' the avatar of internet porn Holding Xsy in place, Reed flicks the switch, so the Dreamweavers, car, and Lady Satan are put back into cyberspace. Xsy says she’ll be back, and Robin says the Dreamweavers will be waiting, like it was the first clash between She-Ra and Hordak or something. So, the end, and this might blow your mind, there's a sorta-funny joke!  I mean, sure, get rid of the dick statue; but I feel like also the dick statue would be less puzzling Read apologizes for being mind controlled by a demon of internet porn.  He overcame his crippling porn addiction via the love of a smoking hot girl. Wisdom for us all Brenda is here for some reason, and she gets Robin to vow to help her "rebuild" Netrave, even though it wasn't really damaged in any way. Robin says no for now, as she is needed in Cyberspace for a bit. We cut to cyberspace, where Randy blitzes across the HTML superhighway. Naturally Xsy is vanished, but not dead, and she will be back, and she will hold a grudge which will make literally satan somehow worse. Randy is taking us to our coda before the end. Which is that Teddy Ruxpin house again. In it is the Ghost of Dr. David Rittenhower! Well, upgraded: he now has a physical form in cyberspace, a gift from the dreamweavers. He's still literally a ghost in the machine, but meh. Robin gets a parent, and when she leaves the house to cruise the streets of Toontown with Randy, Dr. Rittenhower says to Randy that Robin should be home before curfew. That's pretty much it; we see Randy and Robin on a toot through cyberspace. Oh and Nelson Oiler addresses the camera, saying that the master of the cyberverse [himself] is alive and ready to be a villain in the continuing adventures, which were not made.  Just like the end of the Matrix, we end on a mid-90s style soft ballad. This has been Robin and the Dreamweavers Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 19:57 on Mar 13, 2024 |
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Mar 13, 2024 02:17
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mllaneza posted:Ima just leave this right here, So first five minutes of this are a enviro-cyberpunk fugue state. Were people from Aeon Flux involved in this? The character design has that weird, extra shanky vibe to it. Also, somebody eats something weird and it in no way looks natural PS: Mid 1990s CGI
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Mar 13, 2024 17:28
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Open Source Idiom posted:This is my thread. This was made for meeeee. Welcome! Before I forget, if you don't have some gif maker/image capture software, I really like this one: https://www.screentogif.com/ Use for the following things: News graphics!  Western animation!  Eastern Animation!  Telling a story via mixed media!     Tragic still images!  and so forth! 
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Mar 13, 2024 20:43
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Explosionface posted:Inject all of this straight into my veins. I live for it. The og run of He-man and She-Ra are officially online: https://www.youtube.com/@MastersOfTheUniverse I got into this basically because Hasbro posted the many different GI Joe series, and watching the original one it was not only hilarious, but I think unironically quite good. I mean, batshit insane, but quite good for all that.
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Mar 13, 2024 23:39
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:Mr.Bumpy... AAAHHHH! Real Claymation! Mr. Bumpy was after my time. I don't think I watched a single episode, but watched the opening many times. So there was a mid-1990s cartoon called Sky Surfer Strike Force. I'd never seen it until now.  In our search for the maximally 90s TV show, it's certainly a contender, as it involves sky surfing vigilantes who are into extreme sports and hacking. Point Break would tell them to chill. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87sG3bTn1H4 https://i.imgur.com/mUlueip.gifv So when we see the rogue's gallery, the dude on the upper right is called Five Eyes, which is a weird thing to reference in a kid's cartoon. Just for the curious, it was made well into the "anatomically wrong era" of big strong men. Like they don't have abs, they have chitinous plating on top of where their abs should be. I also have to list the good character names: Skysurfer One [Leader, flowing mane of blonde hair] Crazy Stuntz [ponytail down to his knee, dresses like a futuristic minuteman] Sliced Ice [Japanese woman, hot, in superhero mode is clearly a Major Kusinagi knockoff, in normal mode wears jeans, bares midriff, jean vest.] Air Enforcer [black, large, 1920s flying helmet with goggles, wears actual blocks of missiles on both shoulders] Sore Loser [Boomerangs] Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 18:51 on Apr 23, 2024 |
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Mar 15, 2024 03:48
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Explosionface posted:Skysurfer Strike Force: tell me you sourced your animation from Japan without telling me you sourced your animation from Japan. Man I would've eaten that show up if I ever knew it existed. This is gonna sound a bit dumb, but I don't think I realized how far back and to what extent "Non-Japanese anime" was a thing. I know some of it was subcontracting to Japan, but this was driven home by the dualing "Sabre Rider and the Star Sheriffs" and the Galaxy Rangers, which was very very North American. It was produced by Gaylords  I couldn't make this up, Gaylord got into real estate after this and some annual GOP conference is hosted by the Gaylord conference center Also Explosionface, please tell us about about an ep of Skysurfer Strike Force. I think I've seen one, where the villain turns Sliced Ice into a 800 ft tall version of herself so she can kidnap a president for him
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Mar 16, 2024 01:41
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So there's a French dude named Jean Chalopin He founded DIC, children's animation producer and the company behind that godawful 2nd GI Joe series, where the Baroness looked like a young Peggy Hill, but also other shows. He was a producer on a long list of animated tv shows, starting with Ulyssess 31 in the early 1980s and was working constantly for about 15 years after that. A frequent collaborator with Avi Arad, he was the producer for The Mysterious Cities of Gold, Inspector Gadget, Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, Teddy Ruxspin, and Conan the adventurer, among many others. In the mid 90s he and Arad were executive producers on the show we're gonna talk about, called The Botsmaster. It's a show that is even more abandonware than usual, simply because it only ever was released on VHS and then vanished. I've no idea who owns the rights to it, and it is news to me if it ever made it onto a streaming service somewhere. But, thanks to the intensity of certain internet nerds, people have pieced together the entire series on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UWCOho7Alk The premise: the protagonist, Ziv "ZZ" Zulander is a very young super genius who with the backing of the Robot Megafact [RM] corporation changed the world with a revolutionary new type of robot AI: the evocatively titled 3A. 3A robots are used so much around the world that the show only has six regular human characters in the sprawling metropolis of [city name.] Too late, our hero realizes that this giant corporation who stands astride the world’s economy is planning on formalizing that arrangement by, well, taking over the world via hardware upgrades, in the form of the Krang chip. So ZZ becomes a (somewhat inept) freedom fighter, trying to stop the evil corporation. He has help in this in the form of the Boyz (if you despise using z's like that, for God’s sake, flee), sentient next generation robots ZZ made basically for a laugh, but now repurposed to fighting robots. He also has help from his 10 year old little sister, who’s frankly a lot better at this war business than he is. RM corp, meanwhile, brands him a terrorist criminal, something that is frankly very easy to do as they control the media, even aside from the protagonist running plucky SAS-style raids to blow RM poo poo up. The RM corporation is ran by Sir Louis Leon Paradigm, who could be Jeff Bezos, if Bezos had a French sense of drama and style [which is to say he dresses like a satanic priest]. The usual antagonists are his two VPs, Lady Frenzy, and Dr. Hiss, a cyborg scientist who was horribly maimed at some point. The show apparently had toy tie-ins, and a gimmick where action sequences were in 3d. That's so much history, because the other thing you will notice about the show is that the characters are hard to understand. And I mean that literally, in that their voices can be difficult to make out. The ‘3A’ bots all talk like their voice is being generated by early 1980s “dragon speaks” software, except slower and more halting, with the tone and emphasis happening at random. The Boyz speak mostly like humans, but first have a “robot” filter over top their voices, and often have squeaky, high pitched voices on top of that. The soundtrack is sometimes loud, and for some goddamn reason (maybe it is a French thing) nearly all the characters refer to other characters by their initials. This is deepened further by, and I couldn't make this up, the Boyz take all c's and k's [edit: and sometimes s's?!] and pronounce them as z's. What I’m saying is that the dialog can be genuinely hard to follow at times. Oh, and Dr. Hiss has a severe lisp. The other thing is if you try and work out why ZZ built a particular robot a certian way, you can only conclude he was crazy, or amazingly cruel to AI that are always presented as sentient, or both. Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Apr 23, 2024 |
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Mar 16, 2024 18:26
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The Botsmaster 1: Adios ZZ Hot pink, black, and aqua...boob valance? Really restrained for this tv show. The first episode opens with a surprise! Reporters still exist! Loni Chang is doing a newscast, and tells us <city name> is a vibrant metropolis, and home to the RM Corp, the giant corporation that makes most of the world’s robots. With the development of the 3A, now robots are “drive our buses, do our laundry, build our houses, teach our children, and police our streets.” What a marvelous world the 3As have made for us! The Newscast is being watched by our titular botsmaster, Ziv “ZZ” Zulander. We cut between the news report and ZZ, who is dictating a message "in case a new dark age happens." The short of it is that the Robot Megafact [RM] corperation runs a good part of the world economy, and are going to take over the rest of it by installing new Krang chips in all its robots, a robot rootkit that will make all 3As obey their soon to be tyrannical commands. The RM corp can do this because boy genius Ziv Zulander designed the 3As for them. Zulander somehow found out about this plan, and has decided the thing to do is armed resistance against RM. A good notion, but ZZ is doing this narration high up in the Quad towers of the RM building. This is our the first sign that ZZ may not be the brightest revolutionary. ZZ says he intends to fight back, using his “Brain Operated Young Zigiotropic Zoids”, or Boyzz bots, a revolutionary type of bot that he made in his spare time so he could have some friends, but now intends to weaponize into the (ugh) ‘Boyzz Brigade’.  Steve Jobs is a bitch We switch back to the newscast, where we meet the big bad in charge of RM: Sir Louis Leon Paradigm, (LLP to his friends, and I'm not sure if that's a coincidence or a subtle joke). His intro is impressive, as he deploys himself on a mobile throne behind three blast doors, while dressed as a satanic catholic priest. He’s has a brief chat with Chang about maybe running for “World President”, as apparently he’d win that office “by a comfortable majority.” This broadcast is being watched intently by our two other villains, Lady Frenzy (VP, villainy) and Dr. Hiss (mad science division head.)  Paradigm likes contrast in his VPs. Their gloating over LLP being a genius is interrupted by a phone call which enrages Hiss. He shouts at Frenzy “Ziv Zulander found out everything - that twit in a lab coat could ruin us!”  Dr. Hiss's cyborg attachments in his chest sorta look like he's wearing a weird T-shirt with cyborg attachments printed on it. We switch back to ZZ and he’s just finished saying he hopes to blow up the krang chip factories before RM is onto his plan and sics a bunch of security bots on him. A robot cockroach, the first Boyzz (again, ugh) we see, melts his way through ZZ’s metal door and surprises ZZ. Swang, the robot cockroach, warns ZZ that RM knows Zulander is onto his plan and is sic’ing bunch of security bots on him. ZZ legs it. (Swang must have been an early boyzz expernment - it speaks in R2-D2-like gibberish that ZZ none the less understands. Functionally, it serves as a scout and a useful distraction.)  In its own way, this .gif is a condemnation of the future by itself. Note that Ziv wears his own initials. Dr. Hiss and Lady Frenzy have relocated to the security center (which is super-luxurious in that there are actual humans manning the consoles there.) Hiss just wants Zulander neutralized; Frenzy wants him captured alive as she believes she can convince him to rejoin the choir. Once the security sweep starts, both go to report to Sir Paradigm. Meanwhile, our heroic revolutionary is making his way out of the labrintine RM building (which looks like the World Trade Center squared; four towers instead of two, with the spaces in between glassed in with crisscrossing ped walkways) and while on one of those pedestrian bridges is surrounded on both ends by security bots. ZZ is saved by his cockroach, which imitates his “biosignature” and hops into the mob of security, which causes the security bots to open fire on themselves. Using no obvious skill, somehow ZZ manages to get out of the holocaust of exploding robots and laser blasts unscathed. Taking the elevator to the ground floor, ZZ uses his watch/cellphone to contract Jammerzz and Toolzz, who report that they’ve planted the explosives at the first Krang chip factory. ZZ then steps out of the elevator and faces at least 50 security bots who were waiting for him. The standard security bot looks like a decontented Geth trooper, with a video camera for a head. ZZ calls for backup, and his car, Twig, answers. As backup, he’s pretty good. He is a car, he can fly, and is equipped with military-grade laser cannons. After he breaks through a checkpoint, Twig drives through a 20 m tall, 50 m wide plate glass window, (no doubt killing at least a few innocent bystanders in the process) and then, 1) transforms into a robot, 2) picks up a giant globe that happens to be nearby, and 3) uses the globe to bowl over the mob of security bots (and nearly hitting ZZ in the process.) He then hoses any survivors with laser cannon fire. Twig has no fucks to give, but is, at least, effective.  I think the low tier security bot might be the Zune of robotic security. In what I choose to see as satire, robots exploding, the evisceration of dozens by plate glass, and more robots exploding was entirely missed by Chang, who was too busy fawning over her boss, one of the world's richest people. Meanwhile Sir Louis’s interview is wrapping up, and Lady Frenzy and Dr. Hiss sprint and hobble respectively up the massive flight of stairs to Sir Louis’s desk, letting him know something is up. In Lady Frenzy’s office, our villains discuss what is to be done with the young Zulander. Dr. Hiss guesses correctly that the Krang chip factory is a likely target, while Frenzy reiterates that Zulander should be captured, not killed, as he invented the robots that got them this far. Sir Louis agrees with Hiss, saying only to use a light touch - RM doesn’t need any negative publicity. We catch up with ZZ and Swang as they meet up with the Street Boyzz, Jammerzz and Toolzz. Toolzz and Jammerzz are construction bots, but ones with power roller-blades and laser blasters. Jammerzz has a big shoulder-cannon which is also a big hydraulic hammer; Toolzz has many arms and can actually disassemble enemy bots in combat. Anyway, this conversation happens: quote:
ZZ sends Swang in to the factory to confirm nobody’s in there - only to confront a mob of security bots. That’s not that alarming - then ZZ turns around and sees Dr. Hiss closing in a tank/truckasarus type giant assault bot. So, ZZ sets off the explosives, over Dr. Hiss’s objections of “Fool! You’ll kill us all!” The explosion is huge, destroying the factory and whatever people were inside, knocking over Hiss’s battlebot and sending ZZ, Jammerzz and Toolzz, flying - up into the sky. There, Twig in his flying car form intercepts them, and they grab on and fly to safety, leaving an understandably baffled Dr. Hiss to spit and curse. The boyzz and ZZ are completely uninjured. It makes zero sense, and to double down on the stupidity, this was a concious plan on ZZ’s part, as he knew he would be 1) blown skyward, and 2) Twig’s timing would be perfect to rescue them before falling.  Talk about failing upward! The boys arrive at ZZ’s mansion outside the city. We then descend into the wreck rec room of the house, where - basically all the robots from the credits are. We’ll introduce all these fucks when it matters; suffice it to say you’ve already met the bots capable of fighting in a resistance movement. The most memorable ancillary bots are T1 thru 4. They are four robot heads that sit on the rec room shelf, mostly just watching TV. The most annoying one is the pink one, who’s only reaction to literally anything (including his own vivisection in a later episode) is laughter. Flawed AI experiments are only sane explanation - who the hell would make the disembodied heads of Eric Trump, Sinbad, Eeyore, and Jeb Bush to watch TV with? We also meet the RnD team of the Botsmaster, Genisix and D’Nerd. D’nerd looks and acts like a bot specifically created to help with ZZ’s homework, and for comedy reasons (I use the term loosely) likes to define words. Genisix is a science/engineering bot advanced enough to make other Boyzz - here we learned he created a bot called Birden, which mimics a bird’s behavior perfectly, by squawking loudly and flying into poo poo randomly. Which he demonstrates to ZZ by flying into him and knocking him over. This lesson on the unintentional consequences of making AI that can replicate itself is totally lost on ZZ. Cutting through the low-grade bedlam, ZZ manages to lower the house, literally. The house is like an iceberg in that the part above the surface is only about 10% of it - and it is constructed like a gigantic screw, which on ZZ’s command twists itself into the ground, “into an old bomb shelter ZZ’s grandfather built.” With that, the mansion becomes a secret hideout. Once ZZ’s gotten these muppets to calm the gently caress down, they have a meeting, where D’Nerd points out the Corp’s next logical course of action is to, ahem, kidnap ZZ’s younger sister now living at the Corp’s elite boarding school. Zulander completely forgot about her, which he tries to disguise by saying “I almost forgot about her!”. The villains also remember ZZ’s sister exist, and plan to ambush ZZ when he shows up to collect her. Lady Frenzy says “Perfect - knowing him, making sure his little sister is same will be the first thing on his mind.” Cut to - night, outside this boarding school, which has automated security somewhere between a federal prison and the Baghdad green zone. Despite this, ZZ, Jammerzz, and Toolzz, have no problems sneaking into position and then open fire with the cry of “Laser time!” (The 3D action section of the show happens.) The boys encounter three security bots and dispatch them easily, and then somebody grabs ZZ by the belt and throws him against a wall.  This is Blitzy Zulander, the character with no nickname, and my favorite. She’s ten, but she nearly cold clocks her older brother like she was Adam Jensen. Blitzy then she informs ZZ she ordered the rest of the girls to hide in the basement “as there was going to be trouble.” Clearly the elite boarding school girls don’t gently caress wit th’ Blitz. Also like all the other human characters, Blitzy's sartorial game is tight...  Red hair, bandanna, hot pink jacket, aqua shirt with yellow/black caution print, yellow pants and legwarmers. The police have now arrived in enormous force. We get a small demonstration of the Krang chip in action: The police, safe in their command van, order the police bots to capture Zulander; Dr. Hiss, lurking in some bushes in his 20 ft tall warbot (?) mutters about what an excellent field test this is, and orders the police bots to kill. Another fight happens - and some cheating of the police bot crowd allows a formerly massive force to be crushed by a falling wall pushed by the street boyz. Then, bot choppers attack, firing comically ineffective missiles.  Unless it is a smoke missile, it is a lovely missile. In an even more goofball maneuver, ZZ takes off his boots, bitches that they are his favorite boots to Blitzy for some goddamn reason, and the lightly throws them hundreds of feet into the air. There, the “bio-signature” the boots causes the bot-copters hovering overhead to target the boots instead of the bots, who use this distraction to naturally shoot down all the heli-bots.  Blitzy's responce to ZZ's sadness over his boots is to stare at him and say nothing, which is the correct response. (The fuckups in this scene make me think these were supposed to be tiny helicopter drones - I mean that missile explodes with less force than an M-80, but this was lost due to laser time?) Anyway, Twig extracts them. Dr. Hiss tries to engage in his oppression mech, but ZZ just blows dust into Dr Hiss’s face with Twig’s engines. Game over! (IE the 3d section is over) So back at the ranch, ZZ fills Blitzy in on what’s going on. “I’ll fight, even if I only have a chance in a million!” ZZ tells her. She responds like General Patton: “I’m with ya, ZZ! We can beat Paradigm and his geeks. We just gotta be smarter than them! We’ll hit ‘em fast and hard, sabotage ‘em, strike fear in their hearts!” Genesix agrees, saying that the vast resources in the hideout will allow them to construct whatever kind of war machine they want. Blitzy drags Genesix off saying it’s the start of a beautiful friendship. The End Casualties: The Boyzz definitely blow up a factory without any idea who's in there, and I imagine would have killed more people from the blast and shrapnel. Speaking of, the giant plate glass front of the RM corp building shattering in real life would have been a blood tornado. Winner: Dr. Hiss. His anticipation of the attack on the Krang chip plant allowed him to surprise ZZ to the point he basically killed himself, only living through the factory explosion thanks to plot armor and some physics that isn’t so much cartoon as just wrong. I’m not sure if Dr. Hiss is going to be declared the winner often, but he beats the hell out of Ziv “walked into four ambushes on a single day” Zulander
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Mar 17, 2024 02:25
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reU_IfkN9_A So, some of you may know when broadcast TV peaked as far as cultural dominance goes: the late 1970s and the early 1980s. Cable hadn't made enough inroads to seriously nibble away at market share, and video tape was similarly not big enough. One year, the networks across the board raised ad rates 50%. The paradox about this era is that nearly all the TV it produced was really lovely. Maybe this was a product of having a captive audience, or maybe this was a product of trends in programming? Or drugs. Could be drugs. Whatever the cause, the whole era is notable for strange TV shows that were at the same time painfully generic. Above is an example: Laverne & Shirley, popular comedy spinoff from Happy Days (itself inspired by American Graffiti [1973]) got an animated spin off where Laverne & Shirley join the Army? And are bossed around by a tiny pig Sergent? The shame here is not that it happened, but that the results are so anodyne and dull. Similarly: the cocaine era could do baffling things when it came to mid season replacements. This youtube channel is a guy cutting together trailers of new TV shows from earlier periods. Mid-season 1979 is for some reason especially cursed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfGZOmcR-nU The Ropers is in there [you may not believe the show's logo, I certainly don't] A friend called this out as the worst, IE most uninteresting, promo - apparently one of the girls is a famous housewife?Also McLean Stephenson definitely sounds like a fake Canadian Prime Minister This is such a lovely premise I'd almost call it intriguing, and I think the narrator is the VA who was Winnie the Pooh? Mrs. Windslow and son: this is a sitcom about a single mom. Considering Dan Quayle was bitching about Murphy Brown being a single mom a decade later, it says something that being a single mom was, by itself, seen as enough of a premise PRESENTING: Susan Anton - It's a talk show with a radiant blonde; opening is pictures of radiant blonde throughout her life. A show that could have been a big hit with the true crime crowd: A show called Whonunnit?, hosted by three newspaper columnists, where every week they watch a play IN FRONT OF A LIVE STUDIO AUDIANCE and decide who the murderer is. This is pretty weird by modern standards, but the first production we see, called "A High Price for Oil" appears to be 1930s racist. It's followed up by a show called "Real People", which is all about real people. Despite being parody levels boring it was one of three shows here to get renewed. Oh and it's hosted by the real people people The Dukes of Hazzard and BJ and the Bear [what, Any Which Way But Loose (1978) was pretty good against all odds, you kids] Mrs. Columbo Andy Griffith stars as a genius scrap dealer who in the first episode builds a moon rocket, flies to the moon, collects the "scrap" of the Apollo program and returns to earth with it. Names I recognize: Jeffery Tambor, Ernie Hudson, Saul Turtletaub, Norman Fell, Ivan Reitman, Corey Feldman, Mary Tyler Moore, Michael Keaton (as Kenny, Mary Tyler Moore hour) Diana Mulduar, Kate Mulgrew, Vincent Price, Amazing names: Stockard Channing [f], Randy Stumpf, Nick Abdo, James Widdoes, "and Peter Fox as Otter", Clu Gulager, Roscoe Lee Browne, John Dennis Johnston, Jack Ging as detective Chuck Morris, Jet Yardum [f], Linda Scruggs Bogart, Aarika Wells, William Nuckols Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 23:40 on Mar 19, 2024 |
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Mar 19, 2024 23:28
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Watching GI Joe: Sink the Montana! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiQYSjN-3b8 GI Joe was a unique TV show in several ways: one of the most unique things about it is riffing on Defense related current events, which is not something you usually see in a kid's show. In this one, they are riffing on the 1980s reactivation of the Iowa class battleships, with a misguided admiral who can't let go of his beloved ship. OPEN: In the GI Joe Universe the Montana class got built. [For those that don't know, the 1930s in America saw a major naval recapitalization effort, as part of the New Deal, and as part of rearmerment as a major war seemed more likely. The Iowa class was the last class of battleship completed. The next class that would have been constructed would have been the Montana class, but the USN decided post-Midway to prioritize Essex class carrier construction instead. The Montanas would have been as big as the IJN's Yamato class, superficially looking like a 12 gun (as opposed to 9 gun) Iowa class, so making the ship the Montana is a bote nerd deep cut.] Anyway, the Montana is being retired, and the old admiral doesn't have an ex-SEAL Cook on board. But there's a nice ceremony, the Montana is sailing into the Philadelphia Naval Yard [or is that the Camden, NJ naval yard?] There's a hovercraft filled with the USN Joes, naturally we get comment from Shipwreck:  Shipwreck: "They're nuts to scrap her. She's got the lines of a lady, and the punch of a dockfighter...." Polly: [SQUAK] "but can she cook?" Shipwreck: "Cook?! HOW ABOUT STUFFED PARROT YOU---" (falls into the sea) Narration describes the Montana as "a heroic ship" and "the greatest fighting ship to ever sail the high seas!" Which is devious writing, for soon to be obvious reasons--- Here is Admiral Latimer, after the rest of the crew has deboated  General Hawk is there to greet him along with a jerk admiral, Admiral Overton, and right now he's pushing the window as to what constitutes a useful capital ship. Admiral Latimer is in a mood: "Have the harpies of the shore come to pluck the eagle of the sea?"  Overton forbids poetry  General Hawk tries to cheer Latimer with the honoring of Latimar and his giant kickass ship. But Latimer, as stated, is in a mood: "If you think that circus out there is some kind of honor, you're no friend of mine and never have been." Get this man some coffee and a grill cheese, stat This is when Cobra attacks. They drive the crowd back from the ship, and move in with hundreds of BAT troopers, who toss Overton overboard. Hawk discovers that this is more than an attack when he finds Destro just chillin' on the bridge with Latimar. Latimar says "anything is better than retirement, even if I serve Cobra." While hawk is saying "how can you betray America and your friends, Latimer is thinking of how the Montana saved his life in a murky past war [Second Korean War] and then says "Hawk! I've only got one friend, the Montana! And I'm not letting 'em cut her up!" Man, imagine if Adm. Kinkaid did this with the CV-6 Enterprise? Hawk escapes out a window, falling, I dunno, 100 feet to the deck? Soon the BAT troopers overwhelm him and toss him another 100 ft into the drink. Despite taking a face full of rudder, Hawk is fine. The BATs know how to run a Montana class battleship, which if you've seen the montage near the end of Battleship is actually kind of impressive.   Latimar and Destro then turn the main guns of the Montana on the mothball fleet in the harbor. A bunch of ships eat 16" shells.  This drawing is the closest that they get to a real USN ship, sorta looks like a Long Beach nuclear cruiser It's here we get Cobra's Plan: 1. Get control of the Montana (and her captain I guess) [x] 2. Destroy the USN 7th Fleet based out of Norfolk 3. North Atlantic ruled by one giant battleship With Philadelphia's harbor in flames, Montana departs. After pleading a final time with Admiral Latimer, Hawk reluctantly orders GI Joe to sink the Montana. This fails, with Joe torpedoes falling inert and Joe Crusaders falling out of the sky. Cobra in a previous scene equips a device on the Montana that negates all hostile electricity in a radius around their new Battleship. No electricity, no weapons. Meanwhile, Admiral Overton is sortieing the 7th fleet out of Norfolk. The Montana might be forty years old, but in a gunnery dual it can squash a lot of post-war ships before it goes down. The Joes in desperation ask themselves "what USN ship doesn't use electricity?" That's right CUT TO: Boston harbor, where the Joes airlift the USS Constitution to some place between Philadelphia and Norfolk   So they can sneak aboard the Montana before Adm Overton can defensirate the entire USN Atlantic fleet at it Also shipwreck (and polly?!) get a pirate costume  And go mega-nautical on the joes until they threaten him with a beating with a rope-end  The Montana gets closer to Norfolk, they load armor-piercing shells  The Joes stage a cutting out expedition:   Shipwreck is first on the Montana's deck. Good thing you can just gun down BATs! The Joes get aboard and start fiting the BATs, they win, though they loose the line on the Constitution, apparently having ALL gone onboard the Montana. Hawk turns a turret on the EMP device, it goes boom Destro sees it's half past running away time, and programs the Montana to engage the USN fleet via its computer, them escapes via trouble bubble. Still, the Montana continues to engage the 7th fleet. So Cobra has somehow contrived the mother of all battleship engagements OFF VIRGINIA  The Joes and Adm. Latimer run to the engine room to try and take over fire control so the Montana will stop squishing Knox class frigates, All the while Adm. Latimer is all "oh god! My ship is getting blown apart! save her Hawk!"  A familiar sight for those that know USN ships The Joes manage to blow up the targeting computer, and the Montana stops firing. Admiral Overton is all "sink her!" so things are going in a Bismark vs. the Royal Navy direction. The Joes abandon ship for the Constitution  Latimer tries to go down with the ship. Hawk clocks him one, then jumps in the water with him, Latimar says "It would have been kinder to let me drown!" poo poo's getting dark. Everybody is safe on the Constitution, let's imagine the Montana sank like a third of the USN Atlantic fleet Shipwreck asks what will happen to Latimer, Hawk replies "I don't know. But he's already received the worst punishment imaginable..." [Battleship sinks, explodes]  FIN Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 15:41 on Apr 25, 2024 |
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Mar 25, 2024 04:28
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Owl at Home posted:Love the concept for this thread, I have so many things that fit into this category that I don't even know where to start. One question - do movies fit in this thread, or are we just doing TV shows? I think movies fit if they fit the aesthetic (note: this is in a lot of ways an astonishingly garbage answer.) Put it this way: I'm a big fan of old educational films, and while most of those I'd say wouldn't fit, I'd say this one would. Especially as it got turned into a Boards of Canada video. Here's a movie I think fits right in: Radioactive Dreams (1985), panned and scanned from a Japanese laserdisc
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Apr 10, 2024 18:49
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feedmyleg posted:Same. Media archeology is so fun for me, just going back and finding weird hidden gems and bizarre oddities. I simply haven't had time to keep up with it, but this is one of my favorite recent threads. Definitely whatever you are into! 
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Apr 10, 2024 19:27
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Madurai posted:The show ran for one half an interrupted season, a total of 13 episodes. Because I hate you, here's one: The name "Biff Warren" made me laugh I'm watching this as my internet is kinda messed up right now and my gifs are not uploading. I like that the rip doesn't so much look like an old VHS as an old filmstrip 
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Apr 11, 2024 20:25
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I'm not even through the first segment yet, and 1) I've seen the puppet shark, and 2) they are at the same goddamn drive in that they use in Heat(1995) for a shootout?
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Apr 11, 2024 20:38
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Big Bad Voodoo Lou posted:Oh holy crap, God bless you. I don't remember when I first heard about Radioactive Dreams, but I have wanted to watch it for years, and of course it is out of print on physical media and not streaming anywhere. Thank you sooooo much! :fist bump: Also in 2019 some film society had a 35mm print - so keep searching those skies https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFl-TC2aTLE
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Apr 12, 2024 01:13
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I'm watching another one of these collections of opeings for new shows, fall '93 edition and am feeling like I fell out of a tree https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNUxJtpckPE First show - some female crime drama, starring a very pretty face who's name rang a bell - Robin Givens. You can search the name; suffice it to say she went from being a protegee of Bill Cosby to married to Mike Tyson The second show is called "The Hat Squad" The third show is...just stop me when you think I'm bullshitting you. quote:The series centered around the six survivors of a world nuclear holocaust. They live together in an abandoned farm house while trying to survive and re-establish civilization. In July 2002, TV Guide named [REDACTED] the 42nd-worst TV show of all time, and referred to as a "post-apocalyptic Gilligan's Island". quote:Frederick Ross (Cleavant Derricks) was formerly a research biologist. His excellent knowledge of science is vital to the survival of the community. Although he considered it ironic that he was possibly the only Black man to have survived the nuclear war, and occasionally mused over the possible loss of a Black female companion, he genuinely enjoyed his White friends and living on the farm. quote:some kids were fooling around with their remote-control toy car, which caused a nuclear warhead to launch and all the world's powers to open fire. At that time, Mark had just gotten off work and was making a deposit at the bank when, in a flash of light, the nuclear holocaust happened. Now driving through a barren wasteland, Mark stumbles upon a fertile valley containing a farm that houses five other survivors. However, the six constantly bicker and do not get along as a community, until a gigantic, mutated spider threatens the farm. The survivors have to work as a team to be able to fend off the spider. quote:A crystal causes Alice's bustline to grow much larger. She seems to be enjoying her new status as the object of men's attention, as opposed to Suzanne, but Mark reminds her that by giving in to being considered a sex object, she may be ruining what she has worked for her whole life – for women to gain respect. quote:Curtis becomes devastated after the loss of his necktie. When it is found again and he puts it on, he somehow believes he is in the year 1986, before the nuclear holocaust happened. Mark and Alice have to somehow restore Curtis' memory. quote:The group finds out Suzanne is in love, and the men clamor amongst themselves to see who is the one for whom she has fallen. When they find out she is in love with Jack, he is glad, but she cannot stand the fact he loves to go exploring and push his shopping cart around to collect things he finds on his expeditions, when he ought to be paying attention to his girlfriend. The song "My Guy" is the theme played all throughout this episode. Meanwhile, mutated squash has grown, which comes in all colors and makes a sound akin to "mach" when squeezed. quote:Christmas is approaching, but it is not the same, as the nuclear holocaust has ruined much of the world's evergreen tree population. While cleaning out the chimney, the group finds Santa Claus (Stuart Pankin) has visited the group, but appears depressed. Santa later reveals to the group that he is suffering survivor's guilt, as his workshop at the North Pole had a fallout shelter, but the door slammed shut and Mrs. Claus and all the elves were unable to get inside. quote:When Alice makes the group hold a party to celebrate their first six months together, they all spend it daydreaming about ways to kill her.
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Apr 14, 2024 03:44
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Random Stranger posted:Same. Though I think I only watched one episode that I caughr before the excellent and canceled too soon Get a Life was on. Speaking of Get a Life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCJkxwKV4CM e: The Ben Stiller show had a cast of legends plus:  Also look at this grunge rear end 16mm opening riffing on Kids in the Hall Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 04:39 on Apr 15, 2024 |
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Apr 15, 2024 03:59
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So of the several things I've encountered recently, this is one: The Mighty Orbots was a brief series, only 14 episodes. It was an attempt by some western people to get in on the giant-fighting-robot Gestalt trend, with a Japanese company, TMS, doing the animation and music, while the character design was done in the west, as was the concept and writing. The show only lasted 14 episodes for a fairly absurd reason: Tonka was about to bring out its transforming robot toyline, and felt the title was too close to 'Gobots.' I'm going to tell you the series on a writing/character level is quite bland - for the most part. But here's the interesting bit: TMS is a storied animation studio, having worked on an amazing list of Japanese and Western TV shows, and a few features: quote:Hayao Miyazaki was associated with Tokyo Movie before founding Studio Ghibli.[5] His most notable work at TMS was his role as the director of The Castle of Cagliostro, which is notable for being his first feature-length debut.[6]    Clearly TMS had lots of money for this, and the animation is frequently as vibrant and spectacular as the plot is dull. Well, I say dull: the first episode has evil rockers strumming a psychedelic kaiju into existence for the Orbots to unite and kick the rear end of. The villain is an evil sentient supercomputer in a space fortress inside a dyson sphere named Umbra, and once again, kinda the norm, but his visual design makes him look like Giygas from Earthbound:   The other thing I can't get enough of (and consider this in its context to tell you what a standout it is) is the music. It's done by Yuji Ohno, the musician who did the soundtrack to Lupin the Third, and is filled with 70s funk and jazz flutes. Here's a sample I should also say the narrator is Gary Owens, who's spent a L - ong career often being a narrator. Our cast is basically one human, Matt, constructor of the Orbots, and two space elves: Rondu, Matt's boss in charge of the galactic patrol, and Dia, his agent daughter. Matt and Dia have, for no reason, a clark kent/superman thing going on, where Dia is down for Matt's alternative form but not him. Western cartoons were into the secret identity even if it didn't make sense, and this is a time nerd could at any point scream "HE IS ME" and change into the other one and just, like, blow her mind. Our orbots are:  Somebody tweet this at Jordon Petersen, he'll have a nervous breakdown Ono - a bossy childlike bot who is needed to form the big boy for few discernible reasons. She's absolutely necessary to the team, though, as only when being lead by either her or Matt are the Orbots effective. Any other time, getting the bots to split up and attempt to do something is like dispatching your pets to pick up your dry cleaning. Torr - the big strong bot, he keeps the pressure on Bort - Bort [not joking] is a robot who can transform himself into anything. Often starts and ends episodes as a couch for the femmbots [also not joking]. Crunch - a fatbot who eats metal all the time. Crunch is pretty simple, but at least his eating has purpose: he uses that to stuff to generate energy, eh, somehow. Boo and Bow - the Femmbots I have difficulty telling apart, mainly because while the dudebots have well defined powers, the femmbots have basically ALL THE POWERS. One can manipulate and control all energy, while the other can control energy in specific ways, IE magic. The first time we see the gestalt teleport, it's three seconds after Matt says to Boo "can you teleport us?"  The gals, who dream of meeting rock star robots and maybe loving them - which is implied of course, but also a little more blunt than you might expect  The title cards are also a joy Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 21:53 on Apr 23, 2024 |
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Apr 23, 2024 21:27
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Gaz-L posted:Speaking of the Clark Kent thing, Jem & The Holograms was bad for that too, where I don't think the cartoon ever had a reason why she couldn't just be open about Jem being a stage persona. (The 2010s comic book version at least explained her having massive stage fright, and hiding behind the persona helped her cope with it) Speaking of, I'm watching the first episode and not only does Matt have a secret identity, so do the robots. The Orbots (who when they transform gain, I dunno, 100 times the size and mass of their human forms) are marked as working with the Galactic Peacekeepers or whoever, but are not recognized by Dia as "those robots that make up Mighty Orbots" [The mighty orbot?]
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Apr 25, 2024 00:37
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More selections from Mighty Orbots: The most 80s device  Space Potato  Ono works abstract art buttons  Zardoz  One episode opens with the good and bad guys watching tv about Mighty Orbots. Umbra does that with his lacky, Mentallas.  Part Gigyas, part lava lamp  Pink Sauron  In this episode the Mighty Orbots are framed (possibly for the death of thousands / crimes committed against a race of evil ewoks.) In a secret trial that their boss is the judge of, the Human Friend straight up betrays Mighty Orbots for plot reasons and they are condemned to Robot prison for a thousand years, except it is much closer to robot hell. It all starts with smiles and sunshine  But mighty Orbots did nothing wrong  Bort the transformer is forced to be a piston:  Crunch is force fed gravel to generate electrical power  One of the femmbots is forced to do an reef of dirty dishes, and her reward is an island of dirty dishes The Orbots have to kill their replacement, it's hosed up  Power of T-POOOOSSSSEEEEE  Ono is still the boss: 
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Apr 27, 2024 02:07
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Boring TV titles:   Truly ready to go up against the So I think this show was a competitor for SNL? I'm guessing that because the cast is comedy and there's a musical guest. Also I didn't know that SNL in its first, forgotten season was hosted by Howard Cosell.      
Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 15:03 on Apr 27, 2024 |
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Apr 27, 2024 02:24
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Madurai posted:Ah, the Blue Thunder TV series, how I haven't missed you. Posted this in the cold war thread, I don't think people will mind if I repost it here: quote:So if I can talk Cold War Dadfiction, the early 80s movie/tv show, I watched Blue Thunder (1983) PS> 
Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 22:47 on Apr 27, 2024 |
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Apr 27, 2024 22:41
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Madurai posted:I tried to describe The Highwayman to a young person, who probably still thinks I'm lying and/or crazy. I was with you until I got to Tim Russ as "D.C. Montana" Now I think you are crazy OK I'm reading the wiki article and I'd like to upgrade that to WHAT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Highwayman_(TV_series) I could block quote the whole thing, but it sounds like the movie pilot was a cross between Stephen King's Gunslinger series and Knight Rider, so naturally the Roland Character has a futuristic transport truck e2: Madurai the more I read about this thing the more I think this is some sort of elaborate prank on your part: Here are some of the cast members in the pilot: Jimmy Smits (Bo Ziker) Wings Hauser (Sheriff Wyatt) Roddy Piper (Preacher) G. Gordon Liddy (Ed Merrick) Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 20:47 on Apr 28, 2024 |
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Apr 28, 2024 20:07
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Like clearly this never existed, look at this:quote:"Send in the Clones" quote:The series is at first vague on the exact year that it takes place. Other than Highway and Jetto's trucks, Highway's occasionally seen sports car (a silver Lotus Esprit) and Ms. Badler's car (a red Mark II Toyota MR2), the other vehicles are generally that of the era in which the series was filmed. Many of these vehicles, such as the Ford Motor Co.'s Aerostar minivan, were marketed at the time as having sleek, futuristic designs. Seriously though, that early 1980s series about the American family, the pyramids, alternate dimensional dystopias (etc) used 80s Toyota Vans for the same reason, which I find amusing.
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Apr 28, 2024 21:06
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bobthenameless posted:came courtesy of the big red link, and skimmed through it with intentions to keep up with it as this is a thing I also enjoy, sometimes for nostalgia but also its wild to look back at what used to be possible to throw against the TV wall. Just watching that supercut Darkstalkers seems like they pulled off a few jokes, at least. "She's a succubus" "I'll say she does"
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Apr 30, 2024 00:18
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Smik posted:Man, I loved the animation for the show but I have next to no recollection of the episodes. That does not surprise me. As I said, the writing isn't in the same post code. Actually, here's one of the few times the script gave me a good laugh: The might Orbots have found a mysterious crystal egg on a far off planet, and they take it back to earth. We learn immediately that this was planted by this lizard-y shadow agent:  Who calls Umbra from his spaceship to confirm the Orbots took the bait. Umbra is all "and the earth will be destroyed etc etc". (The egg hatches a kaiju who after it munches on the dilithium stores on Mars becomes a giant three headed dragon kinda like Timat.)  The lizard agent rings off, then attempts to start his ship, only to find he's broken down.  So he calls Umbra back, and asks for a ride.  Umbra says the Lizard Agent's reward will be to spend the rest of his life on that planet, and let me quote him here, "hahahaha, loser!"  this is the happiest Umbra is in the entire series run  Assorted Orbots GIFs:   As a joke Matt builds Ono a early 1980s style robot: 
Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 04:25 on Apr 30, 2024 |
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Apr 30, 2024 04:20
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alf_pogs posted:this thread ROCKS. gonna make an effortpost tomorrow with some old horrifying children's telly from DOWN UNDA :fist bump: It seems like the best copy of the Botsmaster out there was recorded off of Australian TV, it frequently has a time and weather infographic in the corner Small Strange Bird posted:Some ITV shows from the same era like Armchair Thriller and Tales of the Unexpected are still up, though, and worth a watch. I've heard of tales of the unexpected thanks to the old ricky gervais podcast; I feel like the title is promising more than it can deliver Speaking of "low-budget horror/suspense anthologies", looking at another old tv promo reel, got some random notes here: quote:There's also a cowboy thing called Wildstyle Which lead me to this: Scene of the Crime, hosted by Orsen Welles?!? The link has one of the horror stories. It's not badly done, but the thing that stuck out to me was that it reuses the same house as two different locations. The Orsen Welles intro, though, is positively amazing Also: Return to the Dark Tower with Orsen Welles Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 21:03 on Apr 30, 2024 |
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Apr 30, 2024 17:42
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I've been a bit distracted lately by real life and Flash Gordon, the filmation cartoon. Flash Gordon as a pop culture reference is strange in that it was clearly an influence on a vast swath of later things, from Star Wars to Star Trek, early DND, and Christ knows what else. It is a tv show, however, that a friend described as having "mormon animation".  Our Hero at his most charismatic  Knowing this show's love of animation re-use, I'd bet you five bux we see the scene where these two kiss later.  This is the way people laugh in Filmation, it's consistent across time  I swear I didn't remove any frames here; this is how they animated Space Princess Aura throwing a spear. The dude in green is "Prince Barron" who does the tricky thing of possessing a French accent without having one.  "Come." "hup----!" It's a show that brings out the purile gif maker in me, simply because mocking what goes on feels like a waste of time.  Example: this is how well designed Ming's robots are. A few episodes later, we see these tin honkeys immersed in water and functioning. Flash [OOOOOHHHHHHH!] is uniting the many factions of the planet Mongo to bring down Space Emperor Ming the Merciless Blizzard style (IE uniting a bunch of factions who hate each other to take down a bigger existential threat) and every new place they go to, there's a space princess who wants to gently caress Flash as soon as she lays eyes on him, or Flash and his band are enslaved. Sometimes both. Also the amount of times Dale (Dale Arden being Gordon's Earth girl) is forcibly married off is-------well, I guess it played differently in its day, now it is a bit weird. Aside from that Dale's main job is to fume as the latest space hottie attempts to bang the Earthman  It's not that she lacks moxie, it's just it rarely gets animated  Also Flash is always dragging her when they run  Here Princess Aura attempts to seduce Flash on her peltbed, ignoring that Flash's GF and this sulking Lion Man are literally right there  Ming is clearly a freak himself, as I see lioness-women, hawk-men-women, and a green skinned gal who might be a mermaid  Of course these human dancers are in the Hawkmen city...  The astral projector. Get it?!  She was killed, Flash was fine Ming the Merciless is his own trope - one that has taken a lot of different forms over the years. Europeans and North Americans created this trope of the fiendishly smart and totally ruthless Asian dude - I guess the idea being that somebody who adapted to western technology, science, commerce etc without all those deeply enshrined cultural values would be amoral and terrifying - true, as far as it goes. Ming is immortal and is described by one person as the best scientist in the universe which is quite a claim, but here, voiced by the VA who did the voice of Skeletor (?) he comes off as endlessly pissy and insecure. In fact, the only time there's good dialog thus far is in episode five, where Space princess Aura and a officer of Ming's fail to capture Flash Gordon. They report back to Ming, and Ming throws the officer into the slave mines as punishment, when suddenly Aura speaks up and calls Ming out on how petty this is, especially as Ming was abjectly defeated by Gordon in the previous episode.    Ming also as his zoom background has a Mosaic of himself  More clever money saving by skipping the bits that would let the action make sense  We need to economize animation frames so we can do the 'giant king chases Dale around the table' scene  "You know those green skinned girls you see? That's because Ming tapped that, or similar."  I like this Lizard-Woman who is sus of the slave. For some reason Ming's slave drivers are all identical lizard women, which could mean, well, something aside from economy in a better written series  Aura deploys the woke ray  In one of those weird moments of recognition, these green tentacle things are blind, and find their prey by sound. Very much like some Half-Life monsters, although those guys didn't look like sock puppets   This is how you steal a fishman's boat-sub-thing.  The first climactic battle with Ming happens in a control room that looks like an abandoned theater or casino  I don't know if they are Balinese dancers  The Bali wedding episode is wild all around. Here, Dale foils Ming by smashing something that isn't explained and we never see get smashed.  This is about 30 seconds before they are flash frozen in the pool, with the entire top sealed with ice. Flash's expression does not change.  Also the Bali wedding episode. Turns out if you keep a firm grip, you can just marry them!  The one thing I can give Filmation is that with its constant re-use of animation and generally crazy composition, there are rarely animation errors. Here is one, and I was saddened to discover Rasputin-smurf didn't in fact have a tiny, cloaked, hovering assistant  Dr. Zarkov is also from Earth, and announces his plan to follow Flash Gordon down the elevator shaft by diving in headfirst, then screaming "help me I'm falling! Save me Flash!"  Ten seconds later, he's bitten by a poisonous bat despite Flash causing a forest fire to drive the bats away  The last episode I saw had some echoes of DnD. Namely they encounter a Witch queen, who possesses such mind control powers she's basically a Mind Flayer. She kidnaps flash, then ERASES HIS PERSONALITY as he's identical to her lost King in appearance, Ming's old Master, King [ugh] Gor-Dan.    This is what mind control looks like, BTW.  They have, 10 episodes in, finally started doing multipart episodes, so we will see if things improve. Right now the Witch Queen is getting mind erased Flash Gordon to murder his friends. I'll keep you updated 
Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 19:46 on May 8, 2024 |
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May 8, 2024 05:25
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Madurai posted:And yet, it remains Filmation's peak achievement. Despite all my mockery, I do sort of get that. It's a continuing story, and there are flashes (if you pardon the pun) of interesting visuals. People die, if not characters. I have zero familiarity with anything previous of Flash Gordon, but I can only assume it is faithful to the earlier material.
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May 8, 2024 19:07
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LashLightning posted:One can't help but respect the power plays for their audacity alone. Meh; I've told Elon Musk/Jeff Bezos many times that if they want my respect, they better start dressing like Serpentor
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May 10, 2024 19:02
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The Botsmaster 2: Enter the Ninjzz It's night, and Blitzy, Doc Wattson, Cook, and this muppet-like hand helicopter thing are in a closed grocery store, swiping food. The security can't be that bad, as Cook is actually being quite choosy about things like the cheese they are stealing. Well, I say stealing: once they have a full cart, Blitzy takes out some ZZ monogrammed stationary, writes a note to explain the theft, then pays in cash what they owe. It's only when Blitzy opens the cash register that she sets off the alarm. Blitzy runs for the door with the shopping cart, but like this was a GTA style sandbox game, approximately 12 police cars have spawned 144 police bots. When they run back inside, all the police bots open fire. Blitzy is unphased, as she called for an air evacuation, gets the domesto-bots to take the groceries to the roof, and then uses the muppet bot [called Freehand] to distract the police. The police bots meanwhile were just issued special instructions, that because "the subject is wanted by RM corp, the subject should be captured alive". Which, considering the subject is ten, you'd think would have been a flag already set? Anyway, Freehand first blinds the police bot optics with black spraypaint, then to defeat the backup radar, takes a roll of aluminum foil, and feeds it into its own rotor. Which isn't quite real radar chaff, but is close enough.  The party escape via one of the big fighting gestalt bots Blitzy and Genisix whipped up between episode one and two. Back at the ranch, ZZ accuses Blitzy of being cavalier with this whole one man revolution thing. Kiddy, a bot permanently stuck at the age of five who I guess ZZ made for Blitzy when she was small, steals Blitzy's sandwich. Zib takes both of them to the robot foundry they apparently have at the house, and shows off two Gundam sized war machines already constructed by it. ZZ then shows responsibility by letting Kiddy and Blitzy play rock'em sock'em robots with them. (Blitzy's sandwitch is returned, but once again, Kiddie being stuck as a child is a strange choice ZZ evidently forgot about.) MEANWHILE At the top of the RM Corp towers, where LLP apparent has an executive office hanging with the required transparent floor, which is honestly pretty cool------  Dr Hiss shows of HIS new toy, a lion-like bot that can hunt ZZ by smell. Oh, and RM's total control of the media is busy painting Zib Zoolander as a monster (They control the TV, the news, newspapers AND magazines!) Ironically the one thing missing in this show is the internet.  Audio: Left, the dulcet tones of Lady Frenzy, right, unpleasant dentist suction sound Meanwhile, we get to see Ninjzz, A new BOYZZ built for combat. Only problem is (apparently) programming its fighting skills. ZZ gets Da'nerd (basically a living Clippy hooked into Wikipedia) to find the identity of “the greatest Ninja warrior who ever lived.” At this point I'd really like for ZZ to discover Ninjas didn't exist, but of course they do, and the greatest warrior of them all died in 2017. [Oh, this show is set in the grim darkness of the far future 2025.]  OK, this is a good gag, when De'nerd gets scared his tv face just locks into a still of him screaming The next day, in Dr. Hiss's stainless steel office, he joyfully informs VP Frenzy that ZZ has been detected by the lion bot, who's detection abilities are evidently much more long range than you'd think. Hiss says “It will be a lovely day!” now that ZZ can be captured or killed. We cut to the library, where ZZ, disguised as Albert Einstein, and Da'nerd scan a hologram for DNA. {Long story short, Ninjzz is getting programmed via “holographic DNA” from the ninja warrior, who will then have that warrior's fighting ability, and possibly that warrior's tragic allergy to cold medicine, as well.} Then, Dr. Hiss and his enormous robot dog enter the library. Our heroes run for the back door, and call Trip for a pickup. Unfortunately, Trip doesn't know where ZZ is. After running into traffic to flee the Robot lion, ZZ makes the unusually smart command decision to tell De'nerd to deliver the scan back to the hideout, and to tell Blitzy what happened. ZZ is captured soon after when the robot lion explodes through a wooden fence, allowing the RM's cyberpunk goons to get ZZ into the van. Back at the ranch, the news of ZZ's capture causes really, really shrill bot hysteria. Blitzy manages to bring the rec room to order, and loads the “DNA” into the Ninjabot. Ninjzz comes to life. Two blessed things, is that first Ninjzz has a fairly normal voice, and second, despite having been brought to life seconds ago, he takes command of the rescue, pointing to the competent Boyzz (Jammerzz and Tools, plus Trip) and two of the sports boyz. (ZZ at some point built sports playing robots. They play baseball, football, golf (!) and volleyball. They can lay their balls with ballistic force, or maybe they just get explosive balls, we'll see.) Oh, did I mention most of the boyzz have built-in rollerblades? They have built in rollerblades. The posse of bots break into the RM factory. The vollyball boyz distracts the gate guard 3Ms with a vollyball, and in a motion almost too fast to be animated, Ninjzz slits them up a treat with his energy katana. Meanwhile Dr. Hiss has ZZ in the palm of his hand, IE the hand of a very large bot. Lady Frenzy is trying the carrot approach: “rejoin RM and all is forgiven, plus maybe sexytime with me?” Dr. Hiss is impatient to murder ZZ. The good guys burst in, and the golf bot fires a golf ball right into the very large warbot remote Hiss is holding.  A 3d action sequence follows, where the RM 3As are knocked ten for six by the boyzz. I'd say more but the 3d scenes are basically a license to cheat action. All I can say is that Ninjzz slices the robot fist off with his light-ish sabre and the 50 ft fall to the floor doesn't injure ZZ.    Oh, and Dr. Hiss and Frenzy should be killed, but are not. The good guys escape (why'd you smash through the roof when the hanger door was wide open, anyway?!) and Frenzy tells Hiss and his lionbot to shut up. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Winner: Ninjzz. There's being precocious, and then there's organizing a successful rescue operation when you are ten minutes old. Casualties: Zero Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 00:37 on May 12, 2024 |
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May 12, 2024 00:02
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 12:55 |
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PS> I don't know what the Karate Kid series was about, but if it were this, we'd ALL know what the series was about.
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May 12, 2024 00:40
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