It was only a matter of time before Seth MacFarlane realized that it would be far easier to just go ahead and use other people's material directly, rather than continue to insist that scratching out the name "Han Solo" in a script*
and writing in "Peter Griffin" constitutes parody.
And that matter of time has now passed, as Seth MacFarlane has been hired to remake The Flintstones:
...in what we can only hope is a "gritty reboot," because as grimly overused as the gritty reboot is these days (even Charlie's Angels is getting a gritty reboot, albeit one which features fancy purple tops alongside what the producer promises will be people actually dying), a gritty reboot of "The Flintstones" would be far preferable to what I'm sure we're going to see, which is simply The Flintstones recycling Family Guy episodes, which themselves have simply been recycled Flintstones plots.
Not that I'm criticizing; if I could get paid $100,000,000 to just keep writing the same damn script over and over, but spice it up with poop jokes, I'd do it.
As a famous philosopher once said, "Never start out with a quote from someone. It's lazy writing."
That's why I'm going to jump right into this post without the usual foofooraw, a word, which, if you Google it to try to find out whether it's a real word, Google will ask you "Did you mean 'foofaraw,'? as though that is a real word.
Of course, if you click that link and tell Google Yeah, I mean foofaraw, even though you didn't really -- lying to Google is not (yet) a federal offense, you know -- you'll find out that foofaraw is a real word, meaning "a fuss over a trifling matter."
So, in the end, I really did mean foofaraw, even though I first said foofooraw. Thanks, Google!
I have, over the past four years, watched many a Disney cartoon, because the Babies!, who are getting close to five years' old, have watched many a Disney cartoon, too, although my watching Disney cartoons predates Mr F and Mr Bunches' existences; I watched The Little Mermaid when it first came out on video back in the 1990s (and bought the soundtrack, too) and watched The Lion King, too, when that came out because by then I had nephews who watched Disney cartoons, and then I watched Hercules when the older kids watched that (and used Hercules to help get over my irrational fears of the Jeeper Creeper, so I'm kind of an expert when it comes to Disney cartoons, which makes me the perfect person to ask The Four Best Stupid Questions About Disney Cartoons, the third entry in my series of posts about stupid questions, and we'll begin today's (stupid) introspection with:
1. Why were the Wall-E's needed?
If you've watched Wall*E, then you know that the lovable little robot who [SPOILER ALERT!] saved humanity because he was in love with another lovable little robot had a job to do: he, along with apparently many other Wall*Es, were created to gather up trash and compact it into little squares, which they then used to build monumental trash towers.
Leave aside, for the moment, the question of how that was supposed to help clean up the over-polluted world we humans had created: the Wall*Es were, after all, simply stacking the trash neatly in and around the cities we humans abandoned, not moving it to someplace else. Let's assume that they were doing that in order to, say, launch all the trash into space and lob it into the sun, as a noted genius once said humans should be doing.
If you assume that the Wall*Es were actually doing something useful, the question still remains Why were there Wall*Es at all.
Or EVEs, for that matter.
In the movie, after all, once Eve finds the plant and returns to the spaceship, it turns out that Otto the Autopilot is under orders never to let humans return to Earth.
[OH, UM... SPOILER ALERT? Sorry, I was a little behind on that one. Blame it on my deregulated FAA Air Traffic Controller Training.]
That plan is revealed when the captain of what apparently is the only spaceship full of the only surviving humans tries to get the ship to go back to Earth because plant (and therefore other kinds of life) is now sustainable; but upon trying to execute that order, the captain finds a secret video that tells him that it's all been a ruse, and that there was never any plan to go back to Earth in the first place, because the Buy'N'Large people who set this whole thing up figured that the Earth was beyond redemption and would never be cleaned.
Which, if that was true, doesn't explain why a massive corporation created all the Wall*Es to clean up the place: they were never going to come back, so why bother pretending they're going to clean it up?
Also unexplained: what happened to all the animals on Earth? Not a single animal was seen on the spaceship holding all of humanity, which means either there's another spaceship out there, full of animals (or full of people who learned to love Zebra McNuggets, which is far more likely) or humans returned to Earth to live life as vegetarians.
"So I've just been part of this massive government make-work project... but I'm only doing that until I finish my screenplay. What say we go back to my place?"
2. Whatever happened to the OTHER Lost Boys in Pinocchio?
Just how many chances do you think Pinocchio should have had to prove he can be a good boy? After failing the first time -- going to join a theater company instead of going to school, a choice that paid off handsomely for the Olsen Twins, who are now almost billionaires and are getting richer selling ridiculously overpriced clothing to Mrs. Obama, but for which Pinocchio was punished -- Pinocchio is given a second chance, which he blows even more spectacularly, going to drink and smoke cigars on Pleasure Island.
Which could have made the stupid question "How does a puppet drink or smoke, since he has neither lungs nor a belly?" but I went more profound and philosophical with this one.
Pinocchio narrowly avoids becoming a full-on donkey, you'll recall...
... by coming to his senses just in time and getting off the island, after which [SPOILER ALERT ABOUT A STORY THAT MANY PEOPLE WILL CONFUSE WITH THAT ONE ABOUT JONAH AND THE WHALE, WHICH WILL THEN CAUSE THEM TO THINK OF FOLK-POPSTERS 'NOAH AND THE WHALE', A GROUP THEY REALLY LIKE BUT WHICH HAS BEEN KIND OF REPLACED, ON THEIR PLAYLISTS, BY SLOW CLUB... OR IS THAT JUST ME]
Pinocchio and Jiminy run into Geppetto, who has been swallowed by a whale, and they save him, after which Glinda The Good Witch (I'm pretty sure that was her) makes Pinocchio a real boy... because why? What did he do that was so good? Run away to stop becoming a donkey? Wasn't that why he left the island?
(I've just looked it up and realized that he set off to save Geppetto and sacrificed his life to do so, which means that Pinocchio effectively co-opted pretty much all of the Biblical heroes into his story, a fact I'm only pointing out to get you to overlook that I was wrong about whether he was a good boy or not.)
So Pinocchio is a real boy and dances to celebrate with Geppetto and everyone's happy, except that Pinocchio never seems to tell Geppetto about the magical slave ring that's going on.
Sure, maybe that took place offscreen - -maybe, after the movie ended and Pinnochio settled into life as a real boy, he said over dinner one day "Hey, Father, by the way, did you know that men are kidnapping bad little boys, turning them into donkeys and selling them into slavery?"
But I don't think so -- because wouldn't that be pretty much the first thing you said when you woke up as a real boy?
Assuming you're a good real boy, that is: wouldn't you say "Hey, great, I'm a real boy, and now I can help do something to help all those other kids."
But, no, Pinocchio just seems to go on about his life, never bothering to wonder what happened to Lampwick and the rest.
"Oh, yeah. Those guys. Well, maybe they like being donkeys, right?"
3. Where were the super-villains in "The Incredibles?"
The whole plot of The Incredibles revolves around the idea that Americans -- I'm assuming it's America, because the insurance industry makes its money screwing people over and the government claims to be out of money -- would reject superheroes who want to help them and engage in a variety of frivolous lawsuits making outrageous claims about people whose only purpose in life was to protect them.
That would never happen, right?
Right...
Anyway, after the trial lawyers got hold of super hero claims -- and somehow forced the government to pay for damages caused by the heroes, who must have had some government affiliation to cause that, right? -- the super heroes went into hiding and the government passed a law mandating that no superhero lawsuits could be filed anymore.
Which is great... except that it left a bunch of supervillains running around, in a world where the police needed help to catch a bank robber.
Now, granted, the movie was pretty short on naming the villains-- there was Bomb Voyage, and that Mole Guy at the end, The Underminer, and other than them, and Syndrome, who wouldn't have been a villain if Mr. Incredible hadn't been such an incredible jerk (see what I did there?) But there were other problems -- including the guy with the missile in this clip:
So if there were other supervillains, what happened to them? Did the police suddenly become much more effective? Did Syndrome kill them off? Did they go into hiding, too?
It's easy to be a superhero when the only people you fight are skinny muggers.
4. Why did Buzz Lightyear stop talking when Andy came into the room?
The original Toy Story movie is generally lauded as the single greatest human achievement ever, judging by the hyperbolic way people rhapsodize about it.
Don't get me wrong: I loved it as much as the next guy, and, like the next guy, I tried to blame my tears, at the part of Toy Story 3 where the toys are going to be incinerated, on dust in the theater.
But Toy Story had a major gaping plot hole: If Buzz Lightyear didn't know he was a toy, why did he stop moving when Andy was around?
As I gathered, the rules of being a toy are that you're not supposed to move around people. Woody says as much, at the end, when they're all going to rescue Buzz from Sid: "We'll have to break some rules," Woody tells them.
(That, by the way, is supposed to be kind of a dramatic moment: Woody is advising toys to break the rules. But that's about the least disturbing thing Woody -- who I've pointed out previously wasn't the nice guy everyone thinks -- does. Woody, remember, knocked Buzz out a window and then lied about it.)
Woody's plan then goes on to break those rules, proving that toys, when they want to, can move around in the presence of people. They just choose not to.
Which means that Buzz, at the beginning of the movie, can move around even when Andy's around. So why doesn't he? Buzz, after all, doesn't think he's a toy -- most of the plot of the first movie revolves around Woody's efforts to get Buzz to realize his place in the world (and, not incidentally, to realize Woody's place in that world.)
If Buzz doesn't think he's a toy, why does he act like a toy?
Toy Story 2 explained part of this by pointing out that all Space Rangers are to be in "hypersleep" until they're purchased -- which is why America wasn't terrorized by legions of tiny men struggling against their plastic bonds at Toys'R'Us stores -- but nobody ever explained why Buzz, once freed from "hypersleep" at Andy's birthday party didn't immediately start moving around, and enlist Andy and his other giant friends in an effort to help him take on Zurg.
"I'm telling you, Sheriff, these people are HUGE, and I'm going to enlist them to help me fight. Heck, with just a few of them, I can quit being a low-paid Space Ranger and set myself up as Emperor. If you thought a clone army was tough to beat..."*
I'm still celebrating the Month of New, and what could be newer than... The Future?
Unless, of course, the future that is being set up is "the future" in Star Trek: Over And Over Again, that new movie that's coming out that promises to tell, or re-tell, or something, the origins of the Enterprise crew.
Did anyone actually wonder about that? Is there anyone that watched all those Star Trek episodes and movies and thought "I wonder how Kirk and Spock ever met up?" Because I've never wondered that. I just assumed they happened to be assigned to the same military unit, as happens over and over and over again in the military. It happens nowadays, it probably happened in Spartan times, and I'm sure, in the future, guys will enlist in Starfleet and will be assigned to a unit and will then be partnered up with the guys in that unit and... that's it. That's their "origin" story.
So Star Trek: Redux Reduxed is exactly the opposite of what I'm trying to do here in the Month of New. It's a remake that tells the most boring part of the story imaginable, the "origin" of the story, and somehow, even the commercials reduce the fantastic, wondrous world of the future to a great, gaping Space Yawn.
To combat that, and continue presenting the New, I've searched my memory for other, better, more original, more creative looks at the future, as expressed in humanity's highest art form, the cartoon. And that's today's nominations:
The Three Best Cartoons To Forecast The Future (And How They Did.)
1. The Jetsons.
Any look at future-forecasting cartoons has to start with the Jetsons, because they were the first cartoon to take a peek at the future and tell us how we'd be living. Or they may not have been the first, but they are at least the first cartoon I can remember, which, to existentialists, is the same thing. The Jetsons took a freewheeling look at family life, business, and entertainment in the far-flung future of humanity. How'd they do? Let's see:
Year It Forecast: There's a bit of an argument about that, and 50% of that argument takes place on Wikidiotpedia, which in one entry on the less-than-reliable site says 2962 and 2162. (Wikipedia is a sterling example of how democracy does not work for everything, like facts.) The upcoming movie version of the cartoon (you knew there had to be one, right?) is going to be set in 2307. The ultra-reliable website "Chacha.com" says, with no references or source material whatsoever, that the show is set in 2262. Apparently, in the future calendars will not work so well.
Vision of the Future: Upbeat, but a lot like life is today: People still work, the family unit has remained essentially unchanged, and we're all still driving cars -- we're just driving them through the air, but somehow still staying in traffic lanes. The Jetsons forecast a time of people living in ultra-high-rise apartment complexes, flying to work at their jobs, which for some reason were still mostly drudgery. There was interplanetary travel, but we still had rock stars on TV. We will have videophones and personal little bubbles that drop down from cars-- but people still used cash, as the opening credits showed over and over. We would, in the Jetsons' future, walk our dogs on treadmills hovering precariously miles off the ground, and we get our food from the Food-A-Rac-A-Cycle by the push of a button.
How Right Did They Get It? On a scale of Scotty-to-Spock (Spock being most correct), let's give the Jetsons a Uhura -- not very. We do get our food quickly, but we do it from a drive-through window in a car that remains frustratingly glued to the ground, and we pay for it with a credit card that costs us 17% annual interest on that double whopper. People are leaving the high rises and buying up prime farmland to build 4300-square-foot houses with four-car garages. And while we've got videophones, they're used almost exclusively for "tweeting."
2. Futurama:
How about a cartoon show that doesn't simpy send the Flintstones into the future, instead? Futurama took the bizarre social commentary spawned by The Simpsons and sent it a thousand years into the future -- as you'd know if anyone had ever been able to watch it. Fox, for some reason, thought Futurama would be better appreciated by people if it was continuously pre-empted by football. Then again, who can blame them? They were busy getting ready to pour money down the rathole that Family Critic and its related shows have become.
Year It Forecast: Futurama is set in the year 3000, or, as it will come to be known, "The Reign of Bristol Palin XIV, Queen of All Western Lands."
Vision of the Future: The year 3000 is a mind-bogglingly complex to former Delivery Boy Philip Fry, who accidentally cryogenically freezes himself and then wakes up in that year to gaze in wonder at a world where he can ride a Tyrannosaurus Rex at the children's zoo, where he can visit an amusement park on the moon in an afternoon, where Blernsball is a major sport and Hypnotoad threatens to rule the world... and where his job chip says he's going to be a delivery boy. We will travel by spaceship and by personal transporter tube. We will... drink cola advertised by a slug. We will constantly re-elect the head of Richard Nixon as president of Earth, and the Harlem Globetrotters will help us save the planet a few times. Also, there are Robot Devils co-existing with space paperboys.
How Right Did They Get It? McCoy (Fair-to-middlin'). To begin with, we don't have paperboys at all anymore -- we barely have papers, and those that still exist are delivered by surly old men and recently-laid-off banking executives. Nobody's going to the moon, and the only thing we send to other planets are radio-controlled cars. But package delivery is, as accurately forecast by Futurama, one of the primary industries of planet Earth now -- by my estimate, 98% of all commercials are for a package delivery service already, and that's not counting the by-now-tired "Whiteboard" UPS commercials that have blown through their original premise (clever drawings that morph into something else) and are just dumb. We're still more than 900 years away from the world of Futurama, but it's not hard to envision our entire economy being based on package delivery by then.
As for electing the head of Richard Nixon, is that so far-fetched? We've turned Bill Clinton into an "elder statesman" in just 8 years, we gave a Nobel Prize to Former Worst President Ever Jimmy Carter, we named an airport after Ronald Reagan. With our culture repackaging old disgraces as new triumphs faster than ever, if we could elect Nixon's head, I'm sure we would. And you say you wouldn't, but you haven't yet seen the People magazine special issue with the headline "Nixon's Head: Shame Over Childhood Made Me Do It." That, plus a special interview with Dr. Phil's head, would be all it took to vault him into the presidency.
And the commercial success of Slurms Mackenzie, the spokes-slug for "Slurm," the drink of the future? Have you seen those little boogers that advertise "Mucinex?" We're already using slugs as spokespeople.
3. G-Force:
How much more popular would "G-Force" have been if it ran with its original Japanese title, "Science Ninja Team Gatchaman?" About a billion times more popular, I bet. As it was, G-Force was, I think, pretty unknown to everyone but me. Strange. You'd think a show about a bunch of teenagers who protect the Earth from an alien planet by donning bird-suits and fighting in space would have broad appeal. G-Force was actually the second of two shows featuring those teens; the first was called "Battle of the Planets," and had the same general theme, with the added allure of "Keyops," a childlike artificial life form that stutters, chirps, beeps and talks.
Vision of the Future: In "G-Force/Battle of the Planets" future, the Earth is threatened by Spectra, and the sole guardians who can help us are Mark, Jason, Princess, Keyop, and Tiny -- teenagers (who look 35 or so) who can fly a spaceship, don flight suits, perform acrobatic, vaguely-karate-ish stunts, and otherwise wreak mayhem. Their adventures are, in the American version, guided by a humorous robot, 7-Zark-7, that has a robotic dog named 1-Rover-1, and also has a robotic crush on the sexy early warning computer... Susan. When not fighting, the teens eat "Space Burgers," work as test pilots, attend "Space Academy," drive in inteplanetary car races, mess around with space yo-yos, and drive Galacticycles.
The spaceship they fly can transform itself entirely into fire. They fight against aliens led by a hermaphroditic leader who goes by both male and female names, the latter being an anagram of the former. There is a galactic federation of some sort, and planets can "hide behind" other planets.
How right did they get it? Spock -- dead solid perfect. I wish. What's life without a Space Burger? If we need to be constantly at war with alien hermaphrodites hiding behind other planets to get that kind of cushy futuristic lifestyle, then so be it. And what could possibly be wrong with trusting the fate of the human race, not to mention weapons of interstellar mass destruction, to teenagers?
Take A Book For Charity? I recently published my first novella, Eclipse. To celebrate, I'm sponsoring Take A Book For Charity: I'm offering my book to various public and private people and asking that they do something neat with it -- like take it into space. The book will then be auctioned with the proceeds going to benefit Mateo and McHale Shaw.
If you've got a charity, or an idea, email me at "thetroublewithroy[at]yahoo.com." If I like your idea, I'll send you the book to carry it out and then will auction your book off.
If you're a library, public school, or other group that makes books available to people for free and want a free copy of my book, email me, too, and I'll send you one. Make sure the subject line includes the phrase "Take A Book For Charity."
