Worthless

Yeah, those kids weren’t the brightest. They deserved to be eaten by a wolf, really. One would have thought they’d at least recognise it wasn’t their mothers voice, even if his wasn’t hoarse any more. In any case, having done pigs, wolves, goats, and more wolves, I think the next natural step would be talking household appliances.

So, lets go with the Brave Little Toaster, an old[1] childrens film. No, not Talky Toaster, even if they are getting the Red Dwarf crew back together to finish off the series. This is an entirely different toaster. Not that you’ll see much of him, as this song, Worthless, is entirely sung by talking cars:

Worthless – Brave Little Toaster

This was by Hyperion Pictures, and it’s worth noting that some of the animators later ended up at a little animation company called Pixar. And, damn, they don’t make kids movies like this any more. Dark, deep, and with lessons about mortality.

The limo for the wedding and the hearse going at the same time has to make you think a bit. And I’ll admit to liking Crazy Eddie. Possibly because he’s crazy in ways I can sympathize with.

There’s some shear artistry going on here. The sparseness and sentence fragments in the lyrics do a lot to enhance the effect they were after. And they did such a good job of adding character to all the doomed cars.

And in case you’re curious, one of the big things that convinces me to post a youtube clip is if I find myself playing it multiple times, or get it stuck in my head. Both are true of this clip.

[1] Well, 1987, anyways.

1-30-09 Super Happy Fun Time Sailor Mama Goat using her Kitchen Shears Chakra on Doomsday Omega Wolf Android No. 17

I wonder how the Japanese would handle European fairy tales? Probably the same way Euros would handle Japanese fairy tales: they’d murder them. Some things just don’t translate well between cultures.

Anyway, we’ve done pigs, so I guess it’s time we did goats. Here’s some early anime of The Wolf and the Seven Goats (no, I’ve never heard of it before, either), possibly from Toei.

Courtesy of summerbrezz74.

The animation is cute, but it’s really notable for the jaw-dropping “Huh?” moments that fairy tales are rife with.

First of all, goats are cloven-hooved, but the wolf fools the baby goats into thinking he’s Mama Goat because he has white paws. Mama Goat raised some dumb kids.

Mama Goat, on the other hand, is a scary lady. Not only does she know how to do field gastrointestinal surgery, she can do it with just a pair of kitchen shears and some catgut. (Wonder if she can field strip a rifle blindfolded, too) She doesn’t even need anasthesia. She just waits until you’re asleep and whack whack! The Ninja Goat Surgeon strikes again!

And what she did with putting the rocks in the wolf’s stomach so that he’d drown was cold, man, like ice. It makes you wonder what happened to  Papa Goat…

Pigs Is Pigs

Well, to continue the themes of both Pigs and Disney, I thought I’d share this amusing Disney short:

Pigs Is Pigs

The wonders of bureaucracy. The irish tune he plays, incidentally, is “The Irish Washerwoman”. I recognised it pretty quickly, but mainly because I was familiar with this song:

Do Virgins Taste Better (then those who are not)? – Brobdingnagian Bards

I’ll admit I enjoy this song a lot. And yes, it’s fairly traditional to set lyrics to a traditional melody with this genre of music.

1-29-09 Archie Campbell turders the mairy fale Pee Little Thrigs

Ah yes, Fractured Fairy Tales. They were one of the best parts of Rocky and Bullwinkle. (I hate to say it, but they were often the best parts of Rocky and Bullwinkle)

Since it looks like we’re going to be on our own fractured fairy tale kick for a while, I’d like to shift gears to the fable of the Three Little Pigs. Or, as a certain Rev. Spooner, or Arthur Campbell, might put it, Pee Little Thrigs.

This is Pee Little Thrigs as recited by Rick Connolly. (No, I don’t know him, and you probably don’t, either) What’s remarkable is that Connolly does it pretty much from memory – either that, or the home video camera that he’s talking into has a teleprompter.

Courtesy of jlharvey1.

A slightly more depressing version, where that weisenheimer pig gets his comeuppance, can be found at Goonerisms Spalore, which probably has one of the best slogans I’ve ever heard, “Meduating the Asses since 1997″. (Goonerisms are of course completely different from Gunnerisms, so-called because the man who came up with them wasn’t named Gunner)

Thanks to Joe McGasko’s Surface Noise show on WFMU for Al “Jazzbo” Collins’ version of Pee Little Thrigs.

Snow White & Rapunzel

Well, I wanted to follow up the last post with a modern variation on a fairy tale. After much debate, I decided not to post Snow White stripping to “Fever”,  though, even though I was very tempted. Instead, does anyone recall the “Fractured Fairy Tales” segment Rocky & Bullwinkle used to have? I used to love it, and decided to post one of them:

Snow White Meets Rapunzel

All right, it’s a bad pun, but did you expect anything else? Or perhaps we should stick with Red Riding Hood…

Red’s Riding Hoods

1-28-09 Chaperon Rouge

Well, while we’re on the subject of Little Red Riding Hood… here’s a CGI short that I stumbled across today. It’s a fairly intense retelling of Little Red Riding Hood by four French students – Emeline Bafoin, Eric Le Dieu de Ville, Tristan Michel and Vincent Techer, with music by Eric Orbaf – as their final school project at Supinfocom Arles (movie site and free download here). The scenery and CGI work are imaginative and amazingly well done, especially the wolf… or wolves.

Courtesy of gemtracker.

Blue Riding Hood

Are you sure he was off meth at the time he animated that, Sean? The wolf singing “Mac the Knife” in Russian? Strange.

All this talk of Little Red Riding Hood reminds me of an old Stan Freburg number, though:

Little Blue Riding Hood – Stan Freburg

Yes, it’s Little Red Riding Hood meets Dragnet. “I made a note to book her on a 614 and turn her over to the psychiatrist. I tied her up, put her in the closet, put on the Grandma suit, and got into bed…” Great Stuff.

1-27-08 In Russian, “Seryi Volk and Krasnaya Shapochka” apparently means “schizophrenic breakdown”

Can you blame Disney for using fairy tales, though? They’re incredibly popular. I mean, who wouldn’t like watching a little girl in a red riding hood getting eaten out by a wolf?

And perhaps I shouldn’t have shared that with you.

Russian animators are a whole ‘nother thing, of course. For instance, animator Garri Bardin got his hands on the story of Little Red Riding Hood, called it Seryi Volk and Krasnaya Shapochka, and, as Russian animators tend to do, turned it into something special (“special”, of course, being Russian for “straight out of a three-day meth-and-psilocybin binge”).

Seryi Volk and Krasnaya Shapochka was made by Bardin in 1990, near the end of Soviet rule in Russia and, according to SapphireAMoerleva, it “serves as a metaphor for Communist takeover in Russia, as well as revolt (so I am told)”. To which I respond: Sure, dude. Whatever floats your boat.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

The Skeleton Dance

Sure Disney movies feature Murder, Betrayal, Wrath, and Vengance. For the most part, they are based on traditional fairy tales, and are basically watered down versions of thr ones you know, which in turn are watered down versions of the originals.

Take Little Red Riding Hood. In early versions of that story, she eats dinner with the wolf, and the dinner is actually her dead grandmother. The wolf has her throw all her clothes on the fire, crawl into bed, and then he eats her. No woodchopper; the story ends right there.

And realize that most fairytales involving evil step-parents originally just featured evil parents, no “step” about it. At that, there have been some good modern-day creepy versions of these tales, like Neil Gaimans take on Snow White (Snow, Glass, Apples). Oh, and you forgot to mention the whole “cutting out her heart” bit in that film. The original versions of Snow White were pretty bad, too.

And Disney steals most of it’s ideas these days, so the themes will seep in. Disney used to be more original, though. Here’s an older Disney clip:

The Skeleton Dance – Silly Symphony

This was released in 1929. No real explanation for the events that happen, just skeletons, and a dance. And skeleton pogo sticks.

1-26-09 “Murder. Betrayal. Wrath. Vengeance.” “What are four words you usually don’t associate with Disney, Alex?”

Ugh. Wicked. I could only get a quarter of the way through that. Way too depressing. It’s kind of like watching Revenge of the Sith. You know things are going to go to shit at the end, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

But while we’re on the subject of putting adult twists on beloved children’s classics, let’s consider the ouef (literally, the three-cheese omelet) of Walt Disney. Disney cartoons are wholesome family fun, right? Well, they are, until you start breaking down the themes in several feature-length Disney cartoons:

• Sleeping Beauty: Betrayal, poisoning, a fairly intense fight with a demonic-looking dragon
• Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: Betrayal, poisoning
• The Lion King: Betrayal, fratricide, attempted infanticide, vengeance
• Hercules: A fairly creepy interpretation of Hades and the Greek afterlife
• Bambi: A child all but sees his mother get shot
• Hunchback of Notre Dame: Betrayal, prejudice, romantic rivalry
• Beauty and the Beast: Prejudice, curses, romantic rivalry

I’m not saying Disney is Edgar Allen Poe or even bush-league Stephen King (read, most of Stephen King’s work lately). And Lady knows Disney movies have more than enough treacle and glurge diluting the good stuff. All I’m saying is that when Calledkidblast strings them together and sets them to P. Diddy’s Come With Me (with melody from Led Zep’s When the Levee Breaks), they suddenly look… kind of cool.

Not Work Safe for a few F-bombs and such.