My oh my, it’s been a while.  But here I am with another installment, which will be spread across two days, because I couldn’t get the whole thing polished in time and these posts tend to be way too long anyway.  For the record, if you’ve been following this series of posts from the beginning, you’ve read just over sixteen thousand words of my natterings about a decade-old TV series, which works out to well over fifty typewritten pages.  Almost a hundred pages, if you use Courier New with wide margins and jigger the kerning.

Before getting to the episodes on Disc 4, let’s take a quick look back over the series so far, which is just, just over halfway done.  (I’m cutting this off after Jupiter Jazz, the literal halfway point.)

Note that when I say focus character, I mean more than just who gets the most screen time.  I say that the episode is focused on a character if we derive significant insights into their motivations or backstory, or if it plays an important part in their character arc.  So while Spike doesn’t do a whole lot more in Waltz for Venus than he does in Gateway Shuffle, his stepping in as a mentor for the hapless Rocco is a really important moment for his character development.

The balance of “light” and “dark” episodes is pretty interesting.  But more significant I think is the way that we get exactly one episode dedicated to each of the main characters other than Spike.  The series thus far is tidy.  It’s not mechanistic or anything, but you could definitely imagine the writing team sitting down to work out this general structure ahead of time (even if, as some of our more anime-savvy commenters have pointed out, that almost certainly didn’t happen).  You could also make a much, much more complicated version of this chart that also includes thematic links between the episodes, like the music boxes that show up in 1, 5, 8, and 12/13, or the big food sequences in 1, 4, and 11, and so on.  But I’m not totally sure that there would be anything to gain from this other than the “Okay, it’s all a dense tapestry” factor.

Anyway, the second half of the series is, for want of a better word, a lot sloppier.  I’m still not quite sure what to make of that.  The individual episodes are still fun, but the stakes just aren’t as high, and the connections between them are a little harder to figure out.  If one were feeling uncharitable, one could suggest that the show had jumped the shark. That the writers had run out of good ideas, and were simply spinning their wheels.  One could also blame pressure from the network censors:  Cowboy Bebop was very nearly cancelled after thirteen episodes because of concerns over adult themes and situations.  And The second half of the series is a lot more, uh, laid back.  Most of the time.  But plausible as they seem, I think that both of these explanations are mistaken — that there’s more to these later episodes than meets the eye.

One thing to note:  in the first half of the series, Jet, Faye, and Ed each got exactly one episode dedicated to their antics.  In the second half – well, I haven’t actually finished it yet.  But on this disc alone, Jet and Ed get an episode each, and Faye gets two.  And I guess Spike just takes a cigarette break, or practices Jeet Kune Do, or something.

Today on Cowboy Bebop: Spike Takes a Dump

Welcome back!  I hope you’re in the mood for Bebop.  Take a gander at the introduction or Sessions 1-5 if you need a refresher, and then settle in for some episode recaps.

These cows almost killed Disney.

It was only five years ago that Disney ran up the white flag and did the unthinkable: it shuttered its 2D animation facilities. This is the Walt Freaking Disney Company: they invented animated movies as we know them. But a series of flops (Treasure Planet, Brother Bear, Home on the Range) at the same time as Pixar churned out a string of instant classics was too much for the Mouse House. They decided that the public clearly wanted computer animation, and that’s what Disney was going to give them.

Except that didn’t work either. 2005’s Chicken Little didn’t even make back its budget domestically. So in 2006, Disney took the if-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em route, purchasing Pixar for $7.4 billion (which actually seems like a steal to me). The Pixar people were suddenly in charge of Walt Disney Animation… and the first thing they did was get the 2D animation department back up and running.

John Lasseter and Co. were betting that audiences hadn’t stayed away from Home on the Range because it was 2D. They had stayed away because:

a) It was lame, but more importantly…

b) a trio of sassy cows wasn’t what audiences wanted to see from Disney.

Anyone who’s been around a little girl in the last twenty years knows that the old Disney films still resonate, maybe even more than the new Pixar stuff. In 2009, the Disney Princess line of merchandise netted over $4 billion for the company. In a way, the continuing popularity of those 2D films is what enabled Disney to buy Pixar.

So when they set out to make The Princess and the Frog, they had a tricky task: produce something that recreated what people loved about the old Disney movies (especially the early-90s triumvirate of Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin), but also something creative enough to get consumers back into the habit of reflexively going to Disney movies. It’s sort of like making a Bond movie–you need to stick to the formula, but also keep it fresh.

So how did they do it? Well, let’s go to the chart. (And by the way, bigtime Princess and the Frog spoilers begin now.)

Howdy, y’all!  It’s good to be back, it really is.  Hope you missed me.  Since it’s been almost a month since the introductory installment, you might want to give it a quick once over, especially if you don’t really know the show. And a quick reminder:  while you can say anything you want about episodes 1-5 in the comments now, don’t go spoiling the later ones.  At least not much.  Like I said last time, I’m not totally sure that Cowboy Bebop is a show that the concept of “spoilers” really applies to.

In typical “Overthinking X” fashion, I’m going to begin with a quick plot summary a long plot summary of the particular episodes in question.  And actually, for the first one, I’m going to go into some pretty extensive detail.  A problem that I can see myself having to deal with a lot, writing about this show, is that a lot of the important stuff is in the details, and it’s hard to talk about the details in isolation.  We could be looking at some mammoth posts here, people.  I’ll try to keep a lid on it in the future.  For today, just settle in.  You might want to get a snack.

[While Mlawski's analysis of Battlestar Galactica is on indefinite hiatus, another Overthinker is surging into the gap, with another series of posts on a geek-friendly science fiction franchise.]

Cowboy Bebop and I have something of a troubled past.  I had been hearing great things about the show pretty much since it came out (and I mean, like, freaking rapturous things), but I somehow managed to avoid watching it until the summer of 2008.  Even then, all that I saw was the credits sequence.  But what a credits sequence it is:

Judging from that credits sequence, Coyboy Bebop was some kind of hundred-year-storm combination of things I think are awesome.  Jazz!  Kung Fu! Animation! Spaceships! Pop Art! -- and while I prefer an interesting female character to a pin-up any day of the week, I am not immune to the attractions of -- Cheesecake! My appetite was whetted.  Scratch that:  my appetite was honed down to razor sharp keenness in one of those Williams-Sonoma electric home knife sharpener dealies, to the point where I could use it to do all the fancy tricks like chopping a can of tomatoes in half or slicing really thin and perfect slices of bread.  Based on the strength of the credits alone, I was damn near ready to buy the DVD box set one day when I came across it on sale.  But since I don’t have a lot of disposable income (buy a shirt, dammit!), I just decided to Netflix it, one DVD at a time.  And at first, I was glad I did, because when I started watching the series, I was distinctly underwhelmed.

What is keeping Ariel upright?

Unless you have hung out with a little girl during the past ten years, you may not be aware of the Disney Princess phenomenon. Sure, Disney’s had princesses for years, and generations of girls have wanted to be them. But it wasn’t until 2001 that the company got around to creating an official Disney Princess brand, selling apparel, toys, videos and pretty much everything else that they could slap a picture of a princess onto. The New York Times reported that there are 25,000 products in all, and the franchise grosses over $3 billion a year. And that article is three years old.

There’s a lot of be disturbed about here. Some of the older Disney films are pretty retrograde to begin with—Sleeping Beauty meets the prince on her 16th birthday, and marries him pretty much the next day. The newer heroines are better role models, but in the context of the Disney Princess brand, they’re presented as pretty little flowers, not women of action.  And I don’t need to point out that all of them make Nicole Richie look fat.

But I’m not going to discuss the feminist implications of this marketing juggernaut. (If that’s what you want, the Times article above does a good job.) Instead, look at this photo of the Princess lineup. Four of the girls are princesses by birth (Sleeping Beauty, Jasmine, Snow White, and Ariel). One of them marries a prince to become a princess (Cinderella).

That leaves Belle, who I’m not sure really qualifies.

The 1980’s may have been morning in America, but children’s animation was full of nightmares. There was The Secret of NIMH (1982), in which a mother mouse struggles desperately to save her babies from drowning in the mud as they cry out in terror. There was The Black Cauldron (1985), which was so dark that Jeffery Katzenberg was afraid it would get a PG-13 rating, and made animators remove scenes like this. There was The Land Before Time (1988), which begins with the main character’s mother getting killed by a T-Rex.

But there’s dark, and there’s The Brave Little Toaster (1987). This movie is twisted.

A John Lasseter sketch, from back when he wanted to make a computer-animated Brave Little Toaster.

In some ways, Toaster was a dry run for Toy Story. It’s about inanimate objects that talk and move when people aren’t around, and their fierce love for a little boy. Both movies center on the objects’ struggle to be reunited with their owners. In both movies, the objects obsess over becoming lost, broken, or unwanted.

These similarities may be more than a coincidence. In the early 80’s a Disney junior animator named John Lasseter had the crazy idea of making a computer-generated feature. Years later, he recalled:

A friend of mine had told me about a 40-page novella called “The Brave Little Toaster,” by Thomas Disch. I’ve always loved animating inanimate objects, and this story had a lot of that. Tom Willhite liked the idea, too, and got us the rights to the story so we could pitch it to the animation studio along with our test clip.

That pitch went so poorly that Lasseter was fired ten minutes later. (But don’t feel too bad for John–he runs Walt Disney Animation now.)

The Brave Little Toaster became a traditional 2-D feature in 1987. The story is about a vacuum cleaner, a radio, a lamp,  an electric blanket, and of course, a toaster. They live in a cabin in the woods, which hasn’t been visited in years. Everyday the appliances wait, broken-hearted, for their beloved “master” to return for them. It is pretty much the saddest thing ever.

Video after the jump.

So I was watching MTV, and I saw this ad:

Okay, first of all, do the kids still watch Looney Tunes? I’m serious. Back in my day, they had a half hour block on Nickelodeon. That’s where I memorized all the classics (including the Speedy Gonzales ones, which I imagine no network would ever show nowadays (which I guess I agree with)). But according to Wikipedia, Looney Tunes is (are?) currently not regularly aired on any U.S. station. I’m not necessarily saying that kids don’t know who Pepe Le Pew is. I’m just saying that having him selling cells, 47 years after his final cartoon, seems a little odd.

On the other hand, using Pepe is a brilliant masterstroke. In the cartoons, you’ll recall, the cat was always accidentally painted like a skunk, and completely horrified at Pepe’s amorous advances. When you think about it, Pepe may be our culture’s strongest symbol of the Luckless Suitor (well, they could have gone with Jon Arbuckle, but that would have been weird(er)). But in this commercial, the cat’s head over heels for the skunk. In fact, she’s painting herself (lest he find out the truth and shun her). The point seems to be that the AT&T phone gives you such an advantage in the mating game, it can make even a skunk into Robert Pattinson.

So I give it points for cleverness, and I give it points for nostalgia. It’s a little creepy imagining explicit text messages with a horrible French accent, but still, Vive L’amour.

Overthinkers who live in and around New York City should make a point of riding the Q train from Brooklyn into Manhattan the next time they want to see something amazingly cool.  (No, I’m not talking about the waterfalls.  Those were lame, and are gone now anyway as far as I know.  This is way better.)

If you look to the right as the train sails through the abandoned Myrtle Avenue subway station, you will see a Yakov Smirnoff joke about Cinema:

It’s brief abstract film animated by the motion of the train itself.  It works on the same principle as the 19th century zoetrope, except instead of spinning a drum you just sit back and let the train do the work.  (Don’t feel bad if you don’t know what a zoetrope is — if google hadn’t come through for me, I had planned to write “one of those old timey spin-the-wheel-and-look-through-the-slot dealies.”)

What I like about the Masstransiscope is that you’re suddenly confronted with a piece of art while you’re inhabiting the least artistic space imaginable.  It also helps that it’s a film.  Usually when we see public art, it’s a statue.  A statue isn’t something that commands urgent attention.  You look at it for a while, you get bored, you stop looking, you wonder what you’ll have for lunch, you look again… as a result, there’s nothing particularly odd about ignoring the statues and murals that decorate so many of our public spaces.  Even if you went to a museum for the specific purpose of seeing statues, you’re going to spend a more time ignoring any given individual piece of art than you will spend paying attention to it.  But we are NOT used to ignoring moving pictures.  (At least not yet, although in the post-Tivo era that may be changing.)  When we go to a movie, we keep our eyes glued to the screen for the whole duration. If we look down even for a second, that second of film will be gone, and we won’t get it back.

Add to this the fact that we spend most of our time on the subway zoning out and not paying attention to anything.  So when you pass the Masstransiscope, you’re suddenly shocked out of this listless commuter-state into an incredibly active perception of this miniscule blip of beauty… and then it’s gone.  Like Keyser Soze.  Or, you know, a psychadelic jellyfish.

Anyway, it’s really worth seeing it for yourself if you can.  You might want to do this sooner rather than later.  There’s no plan to take it down, but it spent most of the last 20 years under an impenetrable coat of graffiti, and it probably won’t be long before it gets tagged back out of existence.

More on the project and it’s creator, Bill Brand, can be found here.

Or: Holy plaisire du texte, Barthes-Man!

The plot of The Dark Knight, like that of Batman Begins, is honestly kind of shapeless and waffle-y. And yet, as Memento proves, Nolan is capable of writing narratives that are drum-taught and mongoose-agile. Why is he churning out these behemoths? Why, despite the wafflage, are they so dang good?

To answer this, I’d like to take a minute to consider Batman as a piece of storytelling, to consider the properties of the tale as it’s told. You’re probably taking it as given that there are spoilers for The Dark Knight ahead. But I should warn you that there are also spoilers for Batman Begins, Citizen Kane, The Godfather, Forrest Gump, the Superman comic books, and The Hunt For Red October. Be warned.

In his famous – for a certain value of “fame” – book S/Z, Roland Barthes strip-mines Balzac’s Sarrasine, wringing every scrap of meaning out of the text and classifying his findings into five narrative codes: Hermeneutic, Semic, Proairetic, Symbolic, and Cultural. The wikipedia definitions of these codes are pretty solid as of this writing (I mean, they could be “Taco! Taco! Taco!” by tomorrow), but they’re easier to understand when you see them in action. Like after the jump! Convenience!