Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
I screwed up and didn’t prep for the Pretty Girls post I wanted to do today, and then went down my schedule and whoops the next three would’ve required reading, scanning, and digging books out of boxes. So a brief skip week.
In exchange, go read this exclusive 10-page preview for Adam Warren’s Empowered 6 I wrangled at Comics Alliance. It’s really very good.
Book drops next week. Look for a review, maybe on release date????
That’s one of the earlier episodes, admittedly before they really hit their stride and got good production values. Awesome Video Games is an internet series brainchild of Fraser Agar. There’s a good possibility that you’ve already heard of the series, but I only got into it recently, so to hell with it. Awesome Video Games is basically a parody of all the live action video game ads, promotional VHS tapes and TV shows from the late-80′s/early-90′s. Back when everyone who played video games was depicted as a totally radical dude with sunglasses. You know, like these guys from the Game Boy comic.
The show stars happy-go-lucky skater idiot Chet and his even stupider and more childish brother Ace. The two are a mix between Bill & Ted, the villain from The Wizard, the host of the Gamepro TV-show and basically every incompetent contestant on Nick Arcade. As they preview and review the newest titles for the Nintendo Entertainment System, they’re usually accosted and annoyed by their father Dad, who mixes aspects of everyone’s father merged with a vaudevillian charm. Often, he’ll scream at them to take out the trash, even — as shown in that above clip — if it’s in the middle of the night for some reason. A lot of the time, he’s there for Chet to point out that parents just don’t get it.
Although they have a zest for gaming, the duo are absolutely horrible at it and have no idea. It isn’t that they’re just bad gamers, it’s that they rarely understand how to even play the game in question. They think that Duck Hunt is about protecting ducks and performing cover fire to defend them from the sinister dog. They’re stoked when a fan letter tells them that there’s a secret SECOND level of Super Mario Bros. that you get to by not turning off the game when you get to the first castle (“No wonder it’s so hard to find. It’s underground!”). And man, I can’t even put their concept of Double Dragon’s gameplay into words.
Hours into discovering Awesome Video Games, I found that they’ve released a DVD of the show, featuring the first 43 episodes (excluding the Christmas specials) and with three additional episodes never released for one reason or another. Also, it has a ton of bloopers, some deleted scenes, commentary, some seriously high-quality animated menus by Retro Mike and a crapload of other extras. I found the whole concept of the show so fresh and entertaining that I felt the need to support them. See also: this post.
To further spread the love, here are some of the better episodes:
Gyromite: As Dad shows he’s a bigot when it comes to the game’s “greedy smicks”, the boys discover a newfound robot friend ROB to help them beat the game. ROB continues to screw up again and again, begging the question: is ROB more sinister than he appears? Short answer is yes. Meanwhile, a new dance craze sweeps the nation.
Game Genie: A very special episode. Ace and Chet’s shady cousin Lester visits and gets them hooked on codes. Sure, it may get their scores high and bring them to the next level, but it’s still an irresponsible gateway into a downward spiral.
Bad Dudes: To help rescue the NES game’s president, the boys dress in the coolest outfits they can find, thereby making Ace extra punchable (in the outtakes, the guy playing Chet is doing all he can to not tear his face off in a fit of rage). Their enthusiasm for badness starts to concern Dad, who wonders if they’ve been behaving wrongly behind his back. COMPLETELY UNRELATED, “the government himself” calls up the boys to see if they truly are bad enough to save the president.
Sonic the Hedgehog: In a remake of sorts of the first couple episodes, Ace and Chet are as excited and inept when it comes to Sonic the Hedgehog and the brand new Sega Genesis as they were with Super Mario Bros. and the NES. But man, the Green Hill Zone his HARD!
The Boondocks returns on Sunday :) I don’t have cable, so I can’t watch it live, but please believe I’m excited. On to the links!
-Paul DeBenedetto and Marc-Oliver Frisch take me to task for my Death to Canon post the other day. They raise some good points. I do want to say, as a meager defense, that I don’t hate the idea of the narrative, I just hate that perfectly good tales don’t get read because they aren’t important. That’s silly to me. I think we should treat all stories with the same level of importance. That was the point of the Spider-Man Noir vs Amazing Spider-Man comparison. I should have expressed that better. You should definitely read their posts, though. They say a lot of good things.
-Nina Stone serves up a good review of American Vampire, a series I have been enjoying much, much more than I expected to. I’m hoping Vertigo’s got another hit on its hands, because I want to see this one continue. That’s a good review there, you can see exactly what she likes about it.
-Kate Dacey’s Manga Critic turned one! Kate’s great.
So some of you might be wondering about the Wrestlemania Countdown and how I never got around to posting the top 3. I really wanted to get that done in time, but 11 straight days of writing plus coming down with a cold led to some nasty fatigue and I lost my writing momentum. I’ll get to it, but sometime in the next few days, albeit when nobody cares because Wrestlemania 26 already happened.
In other news, I stumbled across this the other day. It’s a well-known fact that the videogame Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time has one of the all-time greatest soundtracks. A guy by the name of MasDaMind decided to merge the tracks from that game with other pieces of music to create Teenage Mashup Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles In Time Tribute.
Some work better than others, but I personally dig “Got Yourself Sewer Surfin’”.
While “Deathlok” is currently being serialized, Huston doesn’t have any announced work coming out of Marvel’s stables. Until now, that is, as he spilled the beans on a few projects on his site on Thursday. Longtime readers will know that he’s written a year’s worth of stories on a major Marvel series which should debut this fall, but he also revealed that he’s doing a two issue story “about a guy who never misses [his] mark.”
How to Make It In America is, at least theoretically, about Ben Epstein and Cam Calderon getting off their butts and making something of themselves. Now that they’re pushing 30, they’re gonna strike it rich, or at least solvent, by creating a new line of jeans. Along the way, they’ll have to negotiate with Cam’s menacing cousin Rene, played by an aging but still talented Luis Guzman, coordinate with one of Ben’s rich friends, and fight against everyone who is telling them that they can’t do their thing. And then, in the end, they’ll win. They’ll stick to their guns, believe in each other, and their jeans will be the talk of New York City.
-Archer’s last episode for a while aired last Thursday, and whooo. It was something else. Vile, obscene, disturbing, hilarious.
One observation that really caught my ear was about Oda’s world building and his willingness to plant tiny, seemingly irrelevant narrative seeds that come to full flower later, sometimes much later. Natsuki Takaya did this all the time in Fruits Basket (Tokyopop), turning seemingly oblique observations and sideways glances from volume two into searing heartbreak in, say, volume nine. It’s quite a skill, that kind of callback work, and it displays a great deal of confidence on the part of the creator that they’ll be able to tell their story according to plan.
Because a vacuum does not carry sound very well, you would not be able to hear the many, many alveoli in your lungs pop like bubble wrap under a child’s fingers, but don’t tell me that you wouldn’t imagine it.
-Judd Winick and Sami Basri are taking over Power Girl as of issue 13. Coincidentally, I have three extra dollars to spend a month now.
-I haven’t talked about BPRD on here at all, I don’t think, but please believe that it has better than every single comic put out by mainline Marvel or DC for the past four or five years. Maybe All-Star Superman stacks up, maybe.
I’ve tripped and fallen across half a dozen links this morning about censorship and labeling and adult material and so on. I figure that’s a sign, so I’m throwing these out for you to check out. Keep in mind that various links may or may not be nsfw.
-Steve Bissette has been doing a great series of retrospectives on a comics controversy from 1986/1987. I came across it via a link to Colleen Doran’s blog, where she discusses her role in the controversy. Bissette has several (prologue, 1, 2, 3, 4) posts up currently, all of which are worth reading. Bissette’s got a really engaging style of writing and does a pretty good job of collating all this data. It’s a fun history lesson.
I usually hate empty linkblogging, but I’m still organizing my thoughts. I figure I’ll have something tomorrow or the day after. I will say that I am generally anti-labeling/ratings- I don’t think that you can apply a system with an objective scale to something as subjective as art, be it written, drawn, painted, scrawled, filmed, or programmed.
We at Marvel have always worked to support the trend towards ultraviolence–our readers like it, we like it, and you’d have to be fucking terrified of money to put a leash on Mark Millar. But we’ve always tried to remember that, at the end of the day, we’re making a product, a bit of fun, and that if we take it too seriously, if we try to make some kind of philosophical statement about justice or heroism, we’re going to end up with a dour, boring slice of poorly written shit.
How do you like your brutish and child-like extreme violence? Do you like it to look deeply into your eyes, desperately asking if you get it? Do you understand what has to happen to make a good man do wrong? Do you see how he can’t stop killing, as if he’s developed a taste for blood? Did you see those bloody socks? Do you get it? This is horrible, do you finally understand the stakes?
Or do you like it to be off the cuff violent, an act done simply because That’s What Bad Guys Do, something borrowed from Crank 2 or the best of crime cinema? No message, and no meaning beyond, “Yeah, this guy? He’s a douchebag.”
February 16th, 2010 Posted by Esther Inglis-Arkell
There was a huge upset, over at scans_daily, about a week ago. I know. How could that happen? But some of us like scans_daily, in part, because of the fights. This fight, however, frustrated me, because I’ve seen it too often.
I’ve seen a few too many arguments like this, lately, where someone does something dumb and offensive and then shouts at everyone who bothers to tell them that it’s offensive. Here are the arguments that they always, always, without fail, make.
1. But I didn’t know it was offensive.
2. But I didn’t mean it to be offensive.
3. But you should have been nicer to me when you explained what was wrong.
Number two has its variations (it was supposed to be funny, it was supposed to be satire, it’s not really important anyway), but number three? Number three is the catchall.
People who invoke number three will use any excuse in the book to make it work. They will use the excuse of politeness (there are certain ways we do things), and morality (don’t ever sink to their level!), and location (this isn’t the place for it), and loyalty (but I’m really on your side), and they love using practicality (You shouldn’t have to explain this but otherwise how will they learn? However will they learn?).
I hate all of those arguments, because all of them - every single thing I’ve listed above - boil down to this assumption:
You have consider my feelings, and I don’t have to consider yours.
That’s what every single person who ever makes those arguments is saying. That’s all they’re saying.
And when the original offender himself comes on in the second page to thank the people who ‘defended’ him, and not the people who acquiesced to the demands of all the idiots, waded thigh-deep into the bog, and educated him?
Man, I’m glad I can’t comment on that site since they moved to dreamwidth. Trying to get through to him would have been one hell of a waste of a few days.
