DJ and I were bullshitting about hidden meanings and how they were used in cartoons like Dexter's Lab and I wanted his opinion on a story dynamic i'm working on and he says Uncle Jesse wants me to post it and get everyone's opinions, so ta-da!
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Me: Do you like stories with hidden meanings? Like Kubrick or ... cellphone packages?
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DJ: Hidden meanings... like when they have "making of" documentaries? Or, like magic? :D
Anyway, I don't know much about the peoples like one of them Kubricks, but I do enjoy hidden meanings every now and then. I also enjoy stories that lack allegory completely. Sometimes I get the inspiration for this or that, and sometimes that monster or this thing might be inspired by something but I don't mind not really knowing it. Then there's stuff like Dexter's lab. That just gets funnier with time.
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Me: Dex was just awesome, I was so pissed when it got canceled. It was the first modern cartoon I saw where I thought "Wow this is good". The hidden stuff about family, upbringing even sexuality and incest was written so well that people fell in to it and, the older the viewer, the more they understood. Just plain genius. Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends is also good, you should give it a shot if you haven't already. There's alot of play around the separation of childhood and adulthood with the teenage girl being the link who suffers the slings and arrows of responsibility (teaching the younger characters who adapt and actively watch her struggles) while the main character (Max) teaches her how to still enjoy childhood. The whole spin on the series seems to be targeted at teens with a statement of 'dont try to grow up too fast'. It's pretty well done, almost every episode deals with a younger character in a delima with an older character offering guidance - the younger character then gets different opinions from other 'older' characters from a visceral old rabbit to manly-men and so on until the younger character who has the issue can gain the understanding to overcome it.
I have found two distinct levels of serious story telling of which all categories can be placed within. There are directors and writers who crutch on the ideal of retelling an event. Let's take the story of Moses from the old testament except Moses is an ant, Egypt is a backyard, God is the neighbors cat, etc. Now you can tell this engrossing multifaceted arc and it 'feels' new to the viewer but has the same morals as what the bible story teaches (but how many people besides me do you know that actually read bibles and not just for certain passages?) so the audience is none the wiser.
I call that method 'passive' subtextual story telling. The hidden meaning is just a backdrop to add a level of meat to the story. This is what most writers/directors use. It's most simple form is where the writer takes an event like a car crash or personal experience and retells it to convey the same emotion and learned lesson. A writer who faced depression, attempted suicide and all that fun stuff will find a way to share it in a easily grasped generality. Batman would fit here with the obvious overtones of depression, isolation, etc. If you ever saw (or read) Stuart Little you would find it's actually a complicated story about a child dealing with adoption - the writer (and later the director of the movie) were both adopted and wanted to share that emotional construct.
The flipside is 'active' subtextual story telling - both are passive in nature but while passive story telling just offers a substructure to build on the active story takes it a huge step in a different direction. This is where the writer is going to take an event in history (birth of America) or a thought process that's generally well known (religion) and study it to a degree that actually allows them to philosophize and educate others but in a hidden way so as to not come across as a soap box preacher and allow the viewer to gain their own insight and opinion from it. This Kubrickian process is the same as what was done with things such as the multiple versions of the bible and even the structures of governments within world powers (balancing the masses).
But it's most common form is ads and commercials where groups of designers come up with a campaign based off the wants and needs of basic human elements and covertly establish a level of social acceptance in order to sell a product (even lying to do so) - but they, like Kubrick, will first sell you its idea and concept - causing the viewer to gain his or her own opinion on whether they want it or not which isn't entirely your own since what you know about it was dictated by its source which raises our inability to trust our own judgment and rely on the social acceptance aspect and when its done really well you can have an entire nation or even the world buying a drink that actually tastes bad or a 600 dollar MP3 player.
The story teller doesn't want to lie to you so instead of trying to get you interested in some meaningless product there's a deep significance and morality such as human life, social climate and understanding, dynamics of faith Vs. reality and whats applied to life or gaining a fully encompassing understanding of the ideals of a historical event that would normally take volumes upon chapters and hours of education in a relatively short period of time and in a way that you weren't conscious to because just like the ad designers who used tried and true psychology with images and sound to attack your subconscious the master story teller applied the same rules - suddenly seeing a movie that has nothing to do with God or the ideal of God has actually given you a significant understanding of the ideal of God.
It's a clipart site but the way its navigated is genius. Its based on what colors you're looking for so just click an area of the picture with the colors you want to see.
This is just an idea, but imagine a program on the pooter where you feed it a 'main image' and it takes all the images stored on your pooter to make it a mosaic as a method to navigate them just like this site. It wouldn't be very practical for finding particular pictures but it would be an amazing way to display them where one picture hides thousands as you click deeper.
They've done a hundred times more illegal and immoral stuff than any "high crimes and misdemeanors" charge could ever account for, so why is it that almost all of the Democrats in Congress refuse to even consider it? Sure it wouldn't pass, but it doesn't need to PASS (though it would be amazingly great if it could, that'd never happen), it just needs to get out there and make a statement...
It just never stops. Every time you think you've heard the new most outrageous thing that the administration has done, they go and do another one... it gets pretty depressing if you think about it for long... and as someone highly interested in politics, I can't help but to do that. :(
Eegad, the original Producers is hilarious. I highly recommend renting it. Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel have great chemistry, and are both really funny in it.
For those who don't know, the Producers is a story about a Broadway producer and his accountant who figure out a loop-hole in which if they raise enough money and produce a show that they know will flop, they can keep the millions for themselves. So they choose a play called "Springtime for Hitler", written by a crazy nazi in Manhattan, and assign a transsexual hack for a director and a bum burned out on LSD for the starring role. Hilarity ensues.
This is even consistently funnier than History of the World (Part 1), although the latter still has the winning scene of the Spanish Inquisition musical number (don't you love Mel Brooks?).
I've also seen the remake, which was released a couple years ago. The original is better all around, but the remake has Will Ferrell in one of his few good roles as the crazy nazi author, and unexpectedly delivers better than Kenneth Mars of the original. Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick are also shoe-ins for the leading roles.
Anyway. Go rent "The Producers". In the mean time, I'm gonna be watching Blazing Saddles, another Brooks movie that's supposed to be great. Is it me, or is his old stuff much better? Spaceballs was good, but it was also a bit of a turning point, and while Robin Hood: Men In Tights was pretty funny, it was also a little too corny.
Alright, alright, that's the last tangent. Thread, off.
Ya know, Goldeen never really made sense in SSB. I mean, a fish on land doesn't make sense anyway but those things could attack just fine. They should replace it with magikarp, and it can use a splash attack! Goldeen can be changed up so that it can splash into water or something and then be all dangerous. A goldeen's power comes from WITHIN, where the water cannon is.
I mean I'd suggest this idea, but the so called SSBB web log doesn't really have any way of adding comments.
