Castle Magus

It has been over two years, but I finally got around to (re)watching the rest of Captain N: The Game Master.

( Blah blah blah )

Just watched both of those films for the first time, both based on books by Richard Adams (which I have not read, yet) and both made by the same animation company, even sharing some actors (e.g. John Hurt voiced one of the main characters in each). Not going to say much about either of them, except this: I'd always heard about Watership Down and how traumatizing it supposedly is, and yeah, it gets pretty visceral at times. (Though I came out of it with a feeling of "Was that it? Was that all there was to it? That wasn't so bad.") But... well... Watership Down might as well be Winnie the Pooh or something compared to The Plague Dogs. Holy shit. o_O

Granted, this is me as a 46 year old saying that. If I'd seen these movies when I was a kid, they probably would've messed me up something fierce. (And I'm still saying The Plague Dogs kind of did mess me up a little bit, even now.)

How can I forget something I never knew existed in the first place?

Out of all of those, the only one that I have even vaguely, remotely heard of before is Captain Caveman, but definitely not "and the Teen Angels."

(Post writing started at 8:15pm. 8:15pm of July 26, that is.)

Over the course of the past couple of months or so, I've finally gone through all of The Real Ghostbusters (including the Slimer! stuff) and Extreme Ghostbusters, all of which is something I've been talking about doing for at least a decade now. So, I'm about to dump another big wall o' text here, like I did for the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon a few years ago.

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( "The Real Ghostbusters," behind-the-scenes/casting stuff )

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( "The Real Ghostbusters," talking about the actual show now )

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( "Slimer!" stuff now )

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( And, finally, "Extreme Ghostbusters" )

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So, in conclusion, for the most part, I would say that The Real Ghostbusters, Extreme Ghostbusters, and maybe even the Slimer! stuff (if you like Tom and Jerry/Itchy and Scratchy-style slapstick) is worth watching today. Just know what you're getting into if you decide to watch the Slimer stuff, is all.

Maybe now I'll go through all of The Ghost Busters and Ghostbusters at some point, too. Just... don't hold your breath on me writing a gargantuan post about those like I did here, though. ¬_¬

(Post actually finished and postedmade public at... 3:20am the next fucking day, July 27. God damn it. -_-)

My initial reaction to this video was to question if whoever wrote the title for it may have had a stroke while doing so.

Anyway, I'm with Woolie in that "hearing the music from outside the room" set for things like Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss. I only learned the existence of The Amazing Digital Circus (which, apparently, has nothing to do with the former two, outside of presumably having the same sort of "vibes" to it) via watching the above video, though.

"If Newgrounds was a movie studio" seems like a pretty fitting description of this kind of stuff, yeah.

For reference: the Super Best Friends Play LP of I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream. I vaguely remember watching all of that back when it was first released, 10 years ago, after having played the game myself, via GOG (currently on sale there for $1.49 USD, coincidentally), which in turn came after having read the original short story by Harlan Ellison. If this The Amazing Digital Circus cartoon is actually inspired by that, then I might have to check it out.

So... I finally watched it. Despite my hesitation going in, I have to say... it's way better than it has any right to be. I mean, I'm not saying it's great or anything, but it's pretty good. More than just "okay," anyway. Much better than the utter dogshit that I dreaded it would be going in, at the very least.

Here's the thing, they knew this movie was going to be really dumb when they made it. And it is. It's really dumb. They knew it was something that they couldn't take seriously, and for the most part, they didn't. And yet, they took it juuuuuuust seriously enough to make it still be interesting to watch.

But if you're going to watch this movie, you're probably in it for the references. It's like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? on steroids. (I mean, Roger Rabbit himself is in the movie, for example.) Even though this was a Disney movie, there were characters from way more than just Disney here. Basically, if it was animated at some point in the past century or so and was more than just some niche Internet thing[1], then it was probably referenced or at least mentioned at some point in this movie. Rather than even begin to try to name any of it from memory, I'm just going to link to this.

And yeah, Ugly Sonic was in the movie, but I'm a bit surprised that he had as big of a role in the movie as he did...

...and that brings me to what is probably my main complaint about the movie. Ugly Sonic, oddly enough, had kind of a bigger role in the movie than any of the actual Rescue Rangers did (aside from Chip and Dale themselves, of course).

Monterey Jack was the guy who essentially kicked off the main "plot" of the movie (what there was of it), and that was the driving force behind why Chip and Dale were even doing anything together in the first place, but then Monterey Jack himself essentially disappeared entirely, until the end. Other than the opening flashback stuff and the reunion stuff at the very end, he was barely in the movie aside from his one scene. But, at least, his presence was still sort of felt, given that, again, what happened to him was why the events of the movie were happening at all.

However, Gadget (my favorite from the original show) and Zipper probably had even less presence. Again, aside from the flashback stuff at the start, the little bit of reunion stuff at the end, and whatever passing references were made to them off and on, they had their one "big" scene together with Dale (which wasn't very big at all, and Chip wasn't even there), and... that was it. (For what it's worth, I had no problem at all with Gadget and Zipper having hooked up in "real life" the way a lot of people seemed to, though. It was funny. That was the point. I just wish they'd been in the movie more, that's all. Weird little mousefly children and all.)

One other thing that bothered me was that the movie as a whole tried way too hard to be "meta." The vast majority of the references were there just for the sake of the reference and nothing more, and some of them were distracting, but I'm talking about more than just that. I'm talking about shit like Chip's whole "it's so dumb when they make cartoon animals rap to try to stay relevant" joke, and then, who would have guessed it, Chip and Dale later have to rap, because the plot contrived a reason for them to need to rap, all while they were complaining about how lame and stupid it was that they had to rap. Another such "joke" was at the end, with the very last lines in the movie, which I will directly quote here: Dale: "Hey, do you think we can get, like, a pop star to do the theme song?" Chip: "Yeah, right. Like a super serious version, even though everyone just wants to hear the original?" Dale: "Yes! That exactly." Which then immediately transitioned into some random ass-pop remix of the Rescue Rangers theme playing over the credits. *Yawn* I didn't mind the references for references sake, but that sort of meta "humor" is the kind of dumbshit that made me roll my eyes and sigh a bit.

And... the fact that Chip and Dale don't do the chipmunk voices... it did bother me at first, but after a while I got used to it. (Actually, they did do the chipmunk voices, at least a time or two, here and there, but all that did was just draw attention to the fact that they weren't doing them the rest of the time.)

Honestly, though, I'd have probably rather just had an actual, feature-length Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers movie, rather than the whole meta "Chip and Dale (and Monterey Jack and Gadget and Zipper) were just 'actors'" thing with the cartoon being "just a show" within the movie itself. The characters you saw in this movie weren't the characters from the show, they were the "actors" who "played" those characters in the show. (But then, they make another "meta" "joke" about how Gadget's "real life" character, what very, very little we see of it, was basically exactly the same as the "character" she "played" in the "show." Again, direct quote from the movie: Dale: "I'm amazed this thing actually flies. And you know how to fly it." Gadget: "Yeah, I guess my character from the old show and my character in real life are basically exactly the same." Dale: "Yeah, I guess so." *Snore*)

Watching this movie is kind of like what it would be like if you watched a movie starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, David Boreanaz, Alyson Hannigan, Nicholas Brendan, Charisma Carpenter, Anthony Stewart Head, etc. all playing themselves, openly talking about how they were the actors on the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer almost 30 years ago, and then they all went on a vaguely Buffy the Vampire Slayer-ish adventure together in the "real life" world of the movie. (And... now that I've written that out, I'd probably actually watch something like that, too.)

Still, despite the gripes, I'd recommend it, on the whole. Just don't go into it expecting high art or anything.

[1] - I mean, you're not going to see references to something like Homestar Runner (as rad as that would've been) or anything in this movie, for example.

Not too sure about the main premise of this article, but I will say this much: if Disney ever made a movie/show/game/whatever in which all the Disney Princesses™ (and throw in Elsa and Anna and all the others who aren't officially Disney Princesses™ as well, just for good measure) were to team up to, say, fight all of their respective villains who had also teamed up... or even just teamed up to, like, do mundane slice-of-life stuff, that's something that I, a 40-something dude with no kids, would be willing to watch, let alone the little girls who are their primary target audience. It could potentially be the next MLP:FiM, at least if Disney treated such a thing with the respect it deserved. It could be like Kingdom Hearts, only without all the Squeenix baggage and convoluted plotlines and time-travel antics and such.

(And all the "anti-woke" broseph asshole types who'd just trash such a thing as "pandering" or "virtue signalling" or whatever can go sit firmly on a saguaro.)

Remember that "Star Trek: The Next Generation, but in the style of Star Trek: The Animated Series" thing I posted about last year? Well, the same people who made that also did a bit from Star Trek: Voyager.


The episode they chose to animate is one of the most reviled episodes out of all of Voyager.

"April O'Neil from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles can be any race. It doesn't matter. Let's not do a culture war over this."