Thursday, June 12, 2008
Monday, May 5, 2008
Lessons For Life From The Joes
Their wisdom. Their courage. Their outfits that even flamming homosexual beefcakes would find distasteful. This was the age of cartoon multi-ethnic American commandos, bestowing their wisdom upon children in every locale feasible in full Joe regalia.
The 80's was the decade of the Joes and their patent slogan "And knowing is half the battle!" Now let us delve into the archive of PSAs that taught you and I everything we know today:
We learned to be chicken shits
We learned to steal bikes (I didn’t see him return it…)
We learned how to legally cop a feel our friends while they’re unconcious
We learned what not to do if somebody we hate catches fire
We learned that pink hats are not cool on anybody ever and that naval officers hang out in the woods in the afternoon for things better left unknown…
Spread the knowledge and make America proud.
~CMK
Saturday, April 26, 2008
All Horatios Go to Heaven
No, I don't really believe that David Caruso's ham acting will earn him a supervisor position in Heaven's crime lab... But aren't paint programs fun?!
Why, yes they are!
~CMK
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Now Give That Chick Some Clothes
If you’ve frequented anime, you know her look: A tiger stripe bikini with matching knee-high boots, long pine green hair, itty-bitty horns and a way with others that is electric in the literal sense because she uses her alien powers to fry people. Don’t worry, she’s not homicidal; she’s just trying to make the earthling idiot Ataru own up to his accidental marriage proposal to her.
Lum, the Invader Girl of Urusei Yatsura is the predecessor of Ranma ½ and Inu Yasha. Isn’t it nutty when a manga artist can’t escape their style even decades later and end up drawing cartoon individuals that look like slightly varied clone version of earlier creations? Kagome is Lum minus sex appeal and green hair. Shampoo is Lum with blue hair. Inu Yasha is Lum minus breasts and green hair. In short, Lum is standing in the three degrees of physical separation or less line with all of Takahashi’s subsequent works.
Rumiko Takahashi is a thriving manga artist in spite of his stock character designs. Three of his series have gone on to spawn hideous merchandise, multiple OVAs and movies that have absolutely nothing to do with the original manga concepts (I’m looking at you Ranma ½ The Movie 2: Nihao my Concubine. Think soft-core porn without sex.) Who could ask for anything more— multiple successes and the ability cash in on them with ease? It’s like being a sexy polygamist married to a batch of rich elderly people who are all near death.
Victory, like a donut, takes many forms. For social reject Jim Davis, that opportunity was a sub-par comic strip followed by a gruesome merchandising orgy.
Allow me to tell you a little story about the man named Jim. Jim began a comic strip called Gnorm Gnat, inspired by his work on Tom K. Ryan’s Tumbleweeds. It sucked and was eventually cancelled. He then created Garfield. It also sucked but due to declining literacy rates in the day, it became successful because as we all know Garfield is a cat of few words. Generations thereafter would be stunned to learn he shared a namesake with the assasinated 20th President of the U.S., spawning the anachronistic out-loud thought: "I didn't know we had a President named after a cat."
Jim then tried his luck again and created U.S. Acres, aka. Orson’s Farm. Bill Watterson of Calvin & Hobbes fame declared it an insult to the intelligence (and that’s a total burn because only desperately foolish people like me read the paper’s comics. No sarcasm intended. Newspaper comic strips were meant to work in sync with various other government schemes as a means of obliterating the middle-class’ ability to ponder anything in depth beyond four panels.) In short, not even stupid people possessed the non-capacity to tolerate the placid stupidity of Orson’s Farm. I hated that egg with legs. Was it supposed to be a euphemism for partially aborted children who survived the procedure and went on to exist as hideously deformed people? (No, that's a little too insightful for ol' Jim.) It was cancelled as a comic strip too. Double burn.
As previously noted, however, he made a killing off of the Garfield frenzy of the 80's and 90's. So not even the great Berkeley Breathed (aka. My God of the funnies) or any other Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist can burry the monolith of idiocracy that is an orange tabby with a severe eating disorder.
In conclusion to all my this and that: Garfield is Lum. He has boobs, occasionally his stripes are tinted green and to somebody out there somewhere (heaven forbid I ever date them), he’s sexy.
There. This entry has no continuity beyond that small 180 I just made in order to square the original threads of my article with my random swerve into a hateful rant towards Jim Davis' creations. I can’t be expected to control my constant digression in the albescence of Ritalin!
Thank you for reading, oh merciful readers.
For your patience, I will leave you with Matthew Sweet’s "I've Been Waiting."
P.S. This is not an AMV. It's an actual music video.
~CMK
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Resident Evil: Voice Acting 101
This requires absolutely no explanation on my part.
Favorite quotes are:
Wesker: "Stop it! Don’t open THAT DOOR!"
(It might be a way out to safety...)
Barry: "I’m going with you. Chris is our old partner, y’know."
(Do you have any documentation that will defend your claim? Because your timbre makes me wary, Barry...)
Barry: "A dinning room!"
(For a member of S.T.A.R.S. he sure is unfamiliar with household anatomy. "A dinning room! I've only ever heard about these in books!")
Barry: "And—Jill, here’s a lock pick. It might be handy if, you, the master of unlocking take it with you."
(Master of unlocking sounds like a D&D rank. I am a Dwarven Brawler/Master of Unlocking/Paradox Mage. And my magic missile attacks the darkness)
Barry: "It’s a weapon! It’s really powerful, especially against living things. Better take it with you."
(As opposed to the other weapon he was planning on giving her which was only powerful against canvas portraits, ceramic tiles and the cast of H.R. Pufnstuf)
M'kay, I had my fun.
~CMK
Monday, January 28, 2008
And Now for a Moment of Childhood Messedupness
Do you recall when computer animation was in its exploratory phase? And have you ever repressed memories of being **assaulted by really trippy experimental 3D animation sequences? (For Canadians, that would have most likely occurred on YTV during the weekends sometime in the 90's.) Are you now getting painful shivers at the base of your spine? Perhaps a twinge in you sinuses like I've just opened up a jar of cayenne pickled asparagus?
If you aren't feeling it, not to worry— you either have no clue what I'm talking about or you just aren't like me. That's not necessarily a bad thing because God knows I needed therapy after viewing segments from the grossly underrated and elusive Gate to the Mind's Eye series of 3D animated shorts, among other things. Again, back in YTV's hay-day, filling those 2-10 minute gaps between weekend programming, especially in the afternoons became a grounds for exposing youths to bright, emblematic and always creepy animated segments which more or less involved stories about evolution, peace to mankind, or a little dog named "Styro". You may remember these shorts simply titled "Short Circutz."
As for me being disturbed for years after their initial run, well, that just reflects the brittleness of my psyche and my caveman dislike for all things ultra-colorful, symbolic and cathartic (No really— the "Pyramid" segment used to make me weep and gag simultaneously. Don't ask how I could 'relate' to butterfly people, I just could!) And while I can't exactly explain why those shorts impacted me the way they did, if you’re in the neighborhood of making me feel like less of a screwball, share your childhood experiences viewing Mind's Eye shorts, etc..., or just tell me how they make you feel right now.
I'll now leave you with a few of my favorites (I have since gotten over my fear of 3D animation):
Enjoy!
~CMK
**The phrase "sporadically bombarded" sounds like something a monkey would type up after ingesting a bottle Listerine and a handful of ritalin. It kills me how bad my writing is at times...
Friday, January 25, 2008
Science v. Religion (Or Eve Rides a Theropod)
I guarantee you won’t find another girl in the Northern hemisphere whose bathroom reading section includes the novelization of the Star Wars trilogy, a March 1993 Playboy containing the notable interview with Anne Rice amid the dirty, dirty pornography (which I also look at), and Billy Corgan’s Blinking With Fists (albeit with personal revisions). A new addition to my heap in recent months has been a subscription to New Scientist magazine, the Christmas edition sidestepping Science v. Religion somewhat by including only a small section on what stem cell research means for the future of humanity and why Christian activist have their feet in their mouths or other places.
Pop Quiz Hot Shot: many of the Christian activists (and I won’t get into numbers because God knows I’ve failed mathematics too many times to be credible with numbers) holding up those sad little protest signs, you know the ones: “My baby is not an organ donor” or “Only God may give and take life” still don't have a Blue’s Clue what stem cell research involves beyond the literary propaganda handed to them by their church heads, i.e. They are aborting life and we don’t stand for that one bit. And maybe that's over-dramatic, but Heck, if I cared about life that much, I’d probably have their back. Scientists and the likeminded, however, don’t need that kind of mental roadblock because what they produce is high art, higher than God. Think: beyond Dan Brown’s character Leonardo Vetra in the novel Angels & Demons, there hasn’t exactly been a whole swack of holy scientists real or fictional bent on reconciling faith and science (I read moderately, so if there is another example dangling in front of my face, do inform me. I like to be clued-in on life.) Scientific fact and the Christian Holy Book don’t exactly melt together; but heck neither do dinosaurs and the story of Genesis (and I promise an amusing picture depicting exactly that by the end of this entry.) Wait, what happened to the pop quiz?...
Alas, one great 2 am, soaking my popsicle toes in the sink basin (low blood pressure = cold feet), I flipped through the NS Christmas edition to find a lengthy article on Mary Stopes that I had previously overlooked. That brought back half a week of University where I actually learned something useful: years before dear Alfred Wegener argued his Pangaea/continental drift theory, Mary Stopes was already collecting samples and trying to lobby for a place on Robert Scott’s ship bound for Antarctica, one that would prove fatal for him and his crew, but one that would also produce plant fossils proving that all Southern continents had been joined in the past, aka. Gondwanaland.
Mary Stopes was a keen specimen herself: the article mentioned candid details about her love life and her obsession with a Japanese man twice her age who eventually faked leprosy just to get her off his back. Good riddance, because while NS chose to omit a fair chunk about the woman fossil crusader's later life, I didn't require a pick-axe to uncover what my professor had mentioned only in passing a year ago: that Mary Stopes was a dirty little eugenic campaigner. High and mighty was the woman who disowned her son for marrying a woman who wore glasses (that was a disease her son was apparently spreading to humanity through his children.) By golly! How long before they applied that theory to race? Not very: Germany held The World Population Conference in 1935 under Nazi rule— and Stopes attended it! *Sigh,* one person’s theory of eugenics is another person’s pretext for racial and ethnic cleansing.
All that hate aside, it’s nice to assume that we all came from the same place. I mean, I’m Catholic, so in theory I would believe that we are the progeny of the outcasts of Eden, right...? Ok, I’m not that naive because I also believe in scientific facts: scientists have determined that dinosaurs existed and that—no way José—were there ever humans and dinosaurs sharing dirt and air in the land before time.
Here is now my squaring off of those facts, a kind of happy medium that marries the Bible and the bones into what I hope will be many more fun drawings courtesy of my paint program. Enjoy!
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
I ♥ed the 80's (even though I couldn't remember being there)
You know you have diverse tastes when the bulk majority of your iTunes playlist contains either music from Gilbert and Sullivan comedic operas or else late breaking Kanye West, the end result being "We sail the ocean blue, / And our saucy ship's a beauty;" / "So how the hell could you front on me / There's a thousand yous, there's only one of me." A true masterpiece! Until next time, stay alive, starry eyed and nostalgic. Always. ~CMK
But enough about the K W.E.S.T Pinafore (not yet realized, though there is an H.M.S. Dumbledore...)
No, for the sake of consistency, I will now proceed to discuss the original title of this blog post which is a hazy retrospective on the decade that saw both the Pope and President survive gunshot wounds from assassination attempts, the last days of the Soviet Union, and the birth of a magical place called Care-a-Lot. On second thought, let's just chuck everything and make a CB list, shall we?
Things I Learned from the Care Bears