Let's Watch "The Dinosaurs: Flesh on the Bone"!

I know I've said this before but YouTube is here to make us happy. Except for the comments, but never mind them now. Here is one episode of what is, all things considered, my all-time favorite dinosaur documentary:



You'll have to trust my foggy memory because there is almost no information about this documentary online, to the point where neither Wikipedia nor IMDB appear to have heard of it (to be fair, the title makes the series hard to search for). There were four episodes of the PBS documentary mini-series "The Dinosaurs" and this is the only one intact on YouTube. By a happy coincidence, it's the one I remember most fondly.

Let us first of all talk about the animation in this show. It's unfortunate that one could make a very valid argument that animation ate dinosaur documentaries. They tend to focus on CGI dinosaurs of wildly varying quality mostly doing the same damn things we've been seeing CGI dinosaurs do since about 1993. But here, everything is hand-drawn, which makes a big difference. HUGE, really. I don't just mean aesthetically either (and, reminder, I do not hate CGI). You see, we meet the animators at one point in the show, and now that we know everything was drawn by hand by what appears to be only two guys makes you appreciate it more. Hell, I have a hard time drawing a stegosaurus with accurate... thingies... even once. I can't imagine doing twelve drawings per second's worth!

Better yet, the animated dinosaur action is supervised by none other than Dr. Robert T. Bakker.  And so in the early 90's, when this documentary premiered, we got to see animated dinosaurs doing things we *really* usually didn't get to see them do.  That migration sequence blew my mind as a teen and I still love the sequence with the mother tyrannosaurus. Many of the animated sequences appear to be directly inspired by the drawings in The Dinosaur Heresies.

Aside from the beautiful animation, here's another thing that's really worth pointing out: this is a documentary about dinosaurs and the focus is on the actual science of paleontology.  They manage to make it look fascinating without resorting to cheap sensationalistic tricks.  On top of that, they're focused on paleontologists who were studying the incredibly exciting and sexy subject of... dinosaur metabolism.  Woo.  Party.  (And it is very amusing to watch it twenty years after the fact.  LOL, "Gigantothermy".  Is that even still a thing?) On top of THAT, they follow a group of scientists as they perform an experiment to test a theory and the results they get are basically the exact opposite of what they were hoping for. Yet they aren't upset, because at least they still learned something. It's all incredible, and I cannot imagine a modern-day dinosaur documentary giving over so much time to actual science like this one does.

There are a lot of terrific things to see in "The Dinosaurs" that I haven't mentioned and wouldn't dare give away.  I hope the other three episodes eventually pop up on YouTube but I'm honestly just happy to have this one.

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Sketch of the Day! Drew these while watching "Nature: Cracking the Koala Code", speaking of documentaries that actually show scientists doing science.

In Which we Wintess the Slow Extinction of Saturday Morning Cartoons

The exact reason for the gradual phasing-out in the late 1990's of animated programs for children airing on the big three networks on Saturday mornings is highly disputed.  Many argue that the readily available children's programming on Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network rendered Saturday morning cartoon blocks irrelevant.  Others note that networks probably found the 1996 FCC mandate that required at least three hours of educational content for children too restrictive.  And still others will point out the most cynical reason: airing blocks of mostly infomercials instead of a block of cartoons on the weekend was the cheaper, more profitable option.

But whoever you argue this subject with, almost everyone will agree that the beginning of the end, the Chicxulub meteor of Saturday morning cartoons if you will, was the premier of "Saved by the Bell". And that brings us to this remarkable video lurking quietly in my YouTube queue.  It's the first-ever appearance of the "Saved by the Bell" characters on NBC, on a weird special promoting (ironically enough) Saturday morning cartoons.



Now as I said before,"Saved by the Bell" has shouldered a lot of the blame for killing the Saturday morning cartoon tradition... but let's take a look at NBC's lineup here, because the animated alternatives to "Bell" suggest that the death of Saturday morning cartoons was a more excruciatingly slow process.  We've got the very bizarre final season of "The Smurfs", the second-to-last season of "Alvin and the Chipmunks", and two animated "Alf" series, one of which is completely given over to parodies of other things.  New series included the improbable "Camp Candy" and "Captain N: the Half-Hour Nintendo Game Commercial".  A look at other networks' schedules from the same year reveals several long-incumbent series broken up by head-scratching new series.

So with this in mind, I am willing to say definitively that the reasons for the big three networks essentially giving up on Saturday morning cartoons are complicated.

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Art of the Day!

The_Disney_Channel_in_the_1990s.mpeg

I'm going to just post this thing that was lurking in my YouTube Queue without further comment.

Actually, I will give you fair warning that the sound quality is blargh.  I will also warn you that, no matter what your age, your brain is not prepared for this.  It can't be.  There's no way it could be.  Your brain might actually just sh*t itself at some point during this movie; like, your spinal column will be full of brain-poop by the end of this movie.

Okay, without further ado: The Disney Channel Circa 1990 Presents Shelly Duvall Presents the Most Random Collection of Celebrities Ever Assembled Starring in, "Mother Goose Rock-N-Rhyme"...



Yeah... this probably could have stayed in the nostalgia box...

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Sketch of the Day! Have a unicorn.

"Smash your TV and have ADVENTURES!!!" - Disney's "Fluppy Dogs"

I'm still plowing through my YouTube queue, and callooh calleigh! I've hit our first Weird Disney Thing!

Now, if you remember this 1986 episode of the Disney Sunday Movie, and you try to tell me that you expected exactly this from a title like "Fluppy Dogs", you are a damn liar:



If you aren't a liar, then you are psychic.  If you aren't psychic, then you are halfway between insane and awesome.  Because literally the only other option here is that you are Michael Eisner, because when you see a strange Disney thing from a time period roughly stretching from the mid-80's to the late-90's, your explanation will almost certainly involve Michael Eisner somehow.

Now I'm being a little unfair here because there's no hard evidence that this is the case with "Fluppy Dogs".  There is basically no information at all about this franchise to be found online (aside from good old Ghost of the Doll and even their section is scant on information).  Based off what I remember, this hour-long animated special was based off a very generic stuffed dog toy put out by Disney through Kenner around the same time as the Wuzzles, and they followed the formula of far better-loved 80's toys: they were colorful, cute, and collectable.

So, naturally, their nominal movie had to involve dimension-hopping.  Really, the only nostalgia at all appears not to be for the toys but for this special itself, which was itself a pilot for a series that never got off the ground.  I'll be honest that if they hadn't gone for the crazy fantasy route here, I'd have zero nostalgia for the Fluppies myself, since I remember exactly nothing about the toys.

So about the special.  The animation is very iffy for a Disney production.  In particular, it seems the studio was used to more stylized cartoon animals and humans gave them problems.  The Fluppies themselves look fine, but the human characters often just look... well, there's off-model and then there's this, which is like never-even-ON-model-to-start-with.  Aside from that, here are the things that hit me after having not seen it in many years:

* - Mr. Wagstaff is such a "Captain Planet" villain.  Hell, he goes to depths I don't think even Captain Planet villains would sink to, keeping demonstrably sapient cryptid animals in a tiny cage in his library.

* - Speaking of, endangered animals kept in tiny cages in a library.  That's... that's new.  I wonder if Wagstaff's home was initially supposed to resemble the Colby Trophy Room, but they were afraid that would be too traumatic for the children, so they made sure all of Wagstaff's rare animals were still alive.  And in tiny cages.  In a library.  Yup, totally less horrible.

* - One aspect of this special I really like is that they address something that always kind of bothered me about fantasy stories where an ordinary kid goes off on crazy adventures with magical creatures.  The writers of such stories seem to be wholly unaware that kids aren't fully independent.  Don't the kids in these stories go to school?  Wouldn't adults wonder what they've been up to?  Wouldn't their parents ever confront them about all the strange things happening around the house?

* - On that note, man these Fluppies are like the worst peer pressurers:
"You gotta help us, Jamie!"
"But I can't skip school!?!" 
"~*~ADVENTURE!!!~*~" 
"Uuuuugh, fine!  This better not end with Main Street getting flooded!"

* - I'd like to think the first episode of the series that never happened would have been just short scenes of Cryptozoologists, Xenobiologists, and everyone at SETI watching footage of the Fluppy invasion and either fainting, crapping themselves, or breaking out the champagne.

More Disney Television from the 80's: "The Wuzzles" and "The Adventures of the Gummi Bears".

And do read the review of "Fluppy Dogs" on Total Media Bridge as well for a different take on the movie.

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Sketch of the Day!  Decided to color the Fantasyland Dragon making friends with Duffy just for the heck of it. 

In Which Trish -once again- Wonders if she Even WANTS a Fourth "Jurassic Park"

Quick, impulsive post based off recent news that's lighting up the Twitterverse and that my opinion about will not fit into 140 characters.

You gotta give mad props to "Jurassic Park 4", because this thing just flat out refuses to die.  I wrote a post about my thoughts regarding a fourth "Jurassic Park" way back in 2011, and I'm not even going to bother linking back to that post because they're pretty much the same for this latest announcement.  I apologize, but I'm going to be That Person on the Internet and repost some of my thoughts about the possibility of a fourth "Jurassic Park" movie.

The big question is, "Why?"

Ignoring for the moment that this is a sequel to a long-dormant franchise, the last movie was objectively terrible, and it has a release date but no director.  Sounds like a winner already but could you even make a halfway-decent "Jurassic Park" movie in the 2010s?  We've learned (and here I am going to use a very scientific term) a metric sh*t-ton more about the signature dinosaurs in "JP" since even the third movie, and at this point things like naked coelurosaurs would look stupid.  Not only that, if they decide like, "Okay, fine, we'll have the velociraptors actually look like velociraptors," how are you going to do that without a massive retcon?  Furthermore, you can't really do anything with the reoccurring human characters, nor can you really introduce new ones, without it feeling really forced.  (Then again, who cares about the humans in a "Jurassic Park" movie? :)

So you would either have to do a massive retcon.  Or come up with an excuse as to why the velociraptors don't look like velociraptors, or indeed like any healthy animal that has ever existed in this reality.  Or go for broke and do something totally, stupidly insane like the anthropomorphic dinosaur soldier hero squad idea that was floating around a while back.

Or -and call me crazy- maybe come up with a totally new and different prehistoric animal franchise?

About the only thing that might make sense at this point would be a prequel.  Consider that the current writers gave us one of the few recent prequels to a long-running franchise that was actually worth a damn, "Rise of the Planet of the Apes".  And in the novels, there's a lot of implied (and not) backstory which could fuel a good "JP" prequel.   All from memory, since it's been a while: A better explanation of the lysine contingency.  The genetic engineers being asked to make the real live goddamn non-avian dinosaurs look and act more like what people "expect" (in the late 80's remember).  Alan Grant being called in the middle of the night with the question "seriously, what would a baby Miasaura eat?" since the Park scientists have no zookeepers among them and have *no* experience with animals.  Struggles with adapting the animals to modern diseases and parasites.  And of course they could show exactly how the Park scientists learned how unruly the pterosaurs and maniraptors are...

Whatever happens, remember this'd be the first "Jurassic Park" movie released in the wake of this wonderful thing:



Important Addendum: Nope. Nope, I do not even want a fourth "Jurassic Park".  Here's the reason, via Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs.  (Dammit, it's not even the "no feathers" announcement [I wasn't really expecting a different outcome anyway].  It's the smug, "Suck it, nerds" attitude of the announcement.)

Dog Dies in the Beginning - Thoughts on "Frankenweenie" (2012)

Movie # 65: "Frankenweenie" (2012)

So here's the good news about "Tim Burton Presents Tim Burton's 'Frankenweenie': a Tim Burton Joint".  If you miss the earlier, weirder Tim Burton, he is... actually, no, he's not back in this movie.  Indeed, the included trailer for "OZ: the Great and Powerful" shows that he's still--

What?

Sam Raimi?!

No kidding?

Well, hell, knock me over with a feather!  Oh, wait, Burton's listed as producer, so there's that.

Anyway, the Tim Burton we miss isn't exactly back in "Frankenweenie".  But "Frankenweenie" is by far the most Tim Burtony of the recent Tim Burton movies.  It's not the most inventive thing he's ever done (it's an extended dance remix of one of Burton's own short films after all), but it's the first film in a while where it feels he actually put some heart into it.  Heck, there's even a nice little exchange in "Frankenweenie" about that very idea.

So everything about "Frankenweenie" is perfectly fine.  The animation is very good, the voices are nice, all the references to classic monster movies are clever, and the characters are delightfully weird.

Really, the only thing "Frankenweenie" did wrong -and this isn't even the fault of the movie itself- is that it arrived in theaters only about a month and a half after "Paranorman".

It's downright unfair to compare the two, isn't it?  Netflix sent me both movies within a week of each-other, so I was watching "Frankenweenie" with "Paranorman" very fresh in my mind.  And, man, that's really unfair, because I loved "Paranorman" so much, it left "Frankenweenie in the dust.  It had a far better and more profound story, much better characters, and far, far better animation and effects (those Tulle clouds!  Norman's translucent ears!  Ye gods, that final showdown!)  It's face-meltingly beautiful and it p*ssed the "Wah, think of the CHILDREN!!!" crowd right off (to which one can only say, great job completely missing the point of the movie).  Come to mention that, "Paranorman" really has more in common with "Rango", not least because it's very probable that it will be my favorite animated feature of the past year.  Stay awesome, Laika.

So, there's my review of "Frankenweenie": it's perfectly okay, but it's just okay.

For more posts in this ongoing series, go here, or click the Chronological Disney Animated Canon tag below.

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Art of the Day! Trophius is a weird Pokemon; part giant tortoise, part dragon, part... tree...  Here he is holding the Sharp Beak item, and looking weirder than usual.

"Faeries" - The Animated Television Special

One of my New Year's Resolutions is to work through everything in my YouTube "Watch Later" queue, IE the aforementioned "Dinosaur Revolution".  If I find anything especially unusual or noteworthy, I'll share it here.  For example, here's a particularly weird artifact dug up by the kindly YouTube elves. 



"Faeries" (not to be confused with a far less interesting 1999 film), was inspired by the artwork in the famous and gorgeous illustrated book of the same title by Brian Froud and Alan Lee.  It dates back to 1981, and this would have been around the same time as the (relatively) better known "Flight of Dragons" and "Gnomes", though somehow I managed to miss it until now.

Now, you'll immediately notice that "The Dark Crystal" or "Labyrinth", this isn't.  The animation is very wonky.  Froud's elaborate creature designs suffer badly under the limitations of the television budget. But the short is weird enough to be worth a look, and the story is pretty cool as far as 80's fantasy goes.  You need something a little weird to ring in the new year.

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Sketch of the Day!

Yeah, it isn't Christmas anymore, but while we're on the subject of strange book-based fantasy-themed made-for-television animation from the early 80's...

All Yesterdays Contest!

Irregular Books has announced a contest inspired by Shut Up and Take Tricia's Money: The Book All Yesterdays.  Art Evolved has the details, and here's the official announcement, via Nemo Ramjet's DeviantArt:

All Yesterdays Contest - Apply Today!!! by ~nemo-ramjet on deviantART

Seeing as a few artists have already come up with some gorgeous speculative dinosaur art in the wake of All Yesterdays, this could get very awesome, very quickly.

In Which Trish *Finally* Gets a Look at 3/4ths of "Dinosaur Revolution"!

Yes, I finally saw it.  Out of the kindness of the YouTube elves, since there is not one scrap of evidence that this miniseries will be available in it's original televised form on DVD in America anytime soon.  And with the second episode completely missing, that single episode having been deleted by Discovery Networks (because content providers cracking down on the internet know no logic).  So here are my thoughts, well over a year after anyone could possibly care!  Huzzah and Happy New Year!

Bit of background, first.  The story of "Dinosaur Revolution" (also known by the less-confounding title, "Reign of the Dinosaurs") begins several years ago when a teaser image of concept art appeared on the Internet.  (This was occasionally credited to Pixar, possibly having been conflated with contemporary teaser art from "The Good Dinosaur".)  At the time, we were given sky-high promises about the upcoming miniseries.  Most exciting among these were the promise that this would be a narrative dinosaur film with no dialogue or vocal narration at all, that the dinosaurs would be the most scientifically accurate animals to date, and that noted paleoartists and animators would be contributing to the project.  It was not referred to as a serious documentary, but would instead be a series of short animated vignettes of life in the Mesozoic.  One of the earliest previews shows what they initially intended for the series.

In short, this sounded like the dinosaur animation that I'd been longing for since, like, forever.  And that I'm still longing for because "Dinosaur Revolution" isn't it.

But it comes really damn close to it.  A lot of what's bad about the miniseries has been blamed on executive meddling, so let's tackle the not-so-good parts of "Dinosaur Revolution" first.

There are, to be sure, segments with excellent animation.  There are also segments with very sloppy animation, with "floaty" physics and wonky walk-cycles, and the inconsistency can get jarring.  I didn't have as much of a problem with the more stylized aspects of the series that most people did, looking back at reviews of the series from the time.  That said, there were a couple of scenes that had me thinking, "really?"  Most of them have to do with the non-dinosaur characters, like the weirdly dolphin-like Mosasaur and the pterosaur mother with her babies...  Hey, you know that scene in "The Land Before Time" with the cute baby pterosaurs going after the one berry?  There's a scene in "Dinosaur Revolution" that is the exact diametric opposite of it. <8(

The narration is oftentimes just awful, sounding exactly like what you'd imagine the end-result of a long string of bad decisions from wimpy execs would.  It just keeps showing up again and again, stating the stunningly obvious, and getting in the way right when I was most enthralled with the visuals.

Then you have the segments where Coachella Tupac hologram scientists talk about *sort-of* sciencey-stuff in a very fake looking science lab set.  Oh dear, these were indeed very silly.  Now, it's always fun to have Scott Sampson talk about dinosaurs in a television show, and I like how they interviewed Scott Hartman.  It would have been very nice to have the show's contributors talk about their reasoning behind the animated sequences after each episode.  Apparently, this was the original plan, but the network caved and decided to throw the interviews randomly in during the show itself.  Like the narration, these segments just interrupt the dinosaurs we're here to see.

There's also that damned strange ending.  Spoilertext: You cry for the mother Troodon desperately trying to save her last egg. But then, there is flash-forward to modern times with some incredibly sh*ttily animated birds to show that all is well and some Maniraptors made it! Man, if they had just stopped there it'd be fine. But they end on a very, very different note - and you cry again.

The other big point of contention people had with "Dinosaur Revolution" has to do with the tone.  Discovery shot itself in the foot advertising this as a straight, serious documentary.  Indeed, it feels as though they took the animated segments, which are as a whole essentially like a more rigorously accurate original "The Land Before Time", and tried to force them into a dead-serious science documentary by adding the narration and interview segments.  The end result is jarring, to say the least.

So, basically, the main criticisms I have with "Dinosaur Revolution" have to do with what it isn't, and what the networks tried to force it to be.  Ignoring all that, there is a lot to love in the miniseries.

First off, these animated dinosaurs look absolutely fantastic.  I dare say they may be the most believable CGI creatures this side of "District 9" - when the animation is at it's best, at least.  I love how they're allowed to look and behave much stranger then we're used to seeing in this kind of CGI dinosaur series.  It's not always realistic but it's believable, and that's what counts.

Most significantly, in many ways, "Dinosaur Revolution" reminded me of the "a paleoartist is going to inevitably be wrong about what dinosaurs really looked like anyway, so why be wrong and boring?" philosophy of Brian Engh's astonishing Sauroposeidon illustration.  Or the illustrations in All Yesterdays, come to think of it.  It's mind-blowing at times, and I hope the re-edit of the miniseries (with the facepalm-worthy title, "Dinotasia") is closer to the original vision for the series.

Overall, what I liked in "Dinosaur Revolution", I liked a lot.  I'll try to ignore the rest. 

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Sketch of the Day!  The very first entry in Sketch of the Day 2013!  A pretty Troll bride-to-be and the difference between the "Jurassic Park" and "Dinosaur Revolution" T. rexes.