Random 90's Animation: "Quest for Camelot" (1998)

Before delving into any of the projects I listed in the last post, let's cross another Random and/or Obscure Theatrical Animated Feature From the 1990's off the big old list.  Today's selection takes us into the late 1990's, and at this point animated features made in the very stereotypically Disney mold were coming in from even the most unexpected studios.

Arguably the strangest source for such a film was Warner Bros. animation. At the time, they were riding high on the success (commercially, certainly, goodness knows, not critically) of "Space Jam".  One of the people who worked on "Space Jam" -I forget who, unfortunately- described Warner Bros. feature animation as the antithesis of Walt Disney Feature Animation.  "They're the Merchant Ivory of animation," he said, "and we're more like 'Die Hard'!"  Which was a fine philosophy to have -- except then they went and made one of the most unabashed rip-offs of the Disney feature formula ever created.  Well then.

Watching "Quest for Camelot" with this in mind gives the movie an aura of strangeness that it certainly did not need, because the whole damn movie is just weird as hell.  It's weird in a really tedious and uninteresting way, though.  Rumor has it that the initial script for "Quest" was much more unique and interesting, but the poor thing got executive meddled to hell and back.  Additionally, nobody working on the film really enjoyed doing so.  I can believe both these rumors because you can really tell while watching "Quest" that the whole thing was a mess from the script level and nobody involved seemed to know what to do with it.

The basic story of the movie is staggeringly mediocre, to the point where it's even hard to discuss it.  I will address one of the big elephants in the room though: Not even a minute and a half into "Quest for Camelot" it occurred to me that this has to be what the people I know who still refuse to watch "Brave" must imagine "Brave" to be like.  It's as if "Quest" came first and took the bullet for "Brave", making all the boring and wimpy decisions so "Brave" didn't have to.

It is hopefully enough to say that "Quest for Camelot", having given us a plucky girl-hero who wishes to be a brave warrior instead of a pretty princess, decides about halfway through to give her a broody, angsty male sidekick/love interest.  *sigh...*

To the film's credit, they do at least attempt to do something interesting with AngstyWangsty McOurGirlHeroNeedsABoyfriend.  This is a major animated feature film with a blind protagonist.  That's actually really cool.  So it's too bad that (a) this movie sucks and (b) every song this character sings calls attention to his disability.  I couldn't make that up if I wanted to and it is just as horrible as it sounds.

So it's time to address the other elephant in the room: the songs.  Oh, boy, the songs.  I have a story to go along with one of the songs in this movie.  Did you know that the beloved and powerful Andrea Bocelli ballad "The Prayer" comes from this movie?  Most people don't know that.  I already knew this because (incoming sad personal story) I had the unfortunate job of picking the music that would play in the background during my Grandmother's wake.  Yeah.  My Grandmother was a huge fan of Andrea Bocelli, and this song was beautiful and moving and bittersweet, and everyone cried when they heard it.

So thankfully, it didn't seem like anyone there knew the original context for the song in "Quest for Camelot".  Most people would probably expect this song to play during a scene in the movie that would be, you know, appropriate.  At all.  Fortunately, I already knew that the scene where "The Prayer" appears is... not that.  Unfortunately, the scene in question is very like the "This is the skin of a KILLER!!!" scene in the first "Twilight" movie.  NOTHING can fully prepare you for it.


Man, I don't know where to take the review from here.  Would anyone mind if I just transcribe and elaborate on my notes?  Seems like the easier thing to do here cause I'm kind of sick of talking about "Quest for Camelot" and there's still a lot of ground to cover:

* - There's an awful lot of Irish iconography and Some-Kind-Of-Irishy-Or-Something music (actual genre; my iTunes library says so) in this movie supposedly set in Arthurian Merry Old England.  To be fair, this movie is already very lenient with the story of King Arthur (even though Arthur himself is barely in it and he, the Knights of the Round Table, and especially Merlin do an excellent job of being completely useless), but it gets weird.

* - I like how you can pick out who is going to betray the Knights of the Round Table only seven minutes in.

* - Funny, the animation here doesn't really look like "Batman: Mask of the Phantasm", "Space Jam", "Iron Giant", or "Osmosis Jones".  It actually reminds me more of "The Swan Princess," not least because of the male lead's distracting giant mouth.

* - In any case, whatever animation team they did put in charge was just not comfortable with it.  Ye gods, some of the designs on these minor characters...

* - There is a flashback to LITERALLY TEN MINUTES AGO!?!

* -  There is Conspicuous CGI and then there's this.  One of the special features on the disk goes on and on about this new computer-assisted animation technology called "Regging", and I wonder if that tech ever went anywhere or if it explains why the film looks so strange?

* - Sure glad that one character told us in the audience that the monster attacking King Arthur right now is a gryphon because this movie's take on the beast is... different.  This is the only instance where I didn't entirely hate that this is one of those movies where the characters provide a running commentary on everything we see happening onscreen.

* - This is... this sure is a Villain Song.

* - Say, why is ObviousBadGuy McCantEvenLookAtThoseFingernails even attacking Not-Merida's house?  It'd make sense if she made the potion he's using to make his monster army or something, but she didn't.  The stated reason is that her mom knows how to get to Camelot.  Except there's an obvious main road with obvious signs that lead you there?  It can't be because her presence would make them less conspicuous because they don't even bother to hide in the wagons along the way.  Basically, he's attacking Not-Merida's house because of Plot Reasons.

* - Speaking of ObviousBadGuy's monsters.  Holy mother of vocal dissonance, they come up with a kind of badass monster design and then they give it a shrill, whiny Bronson Pinchot voice, WHY?!?

* - You know, it'd be really cool if the Forbidden Forest was actually based on enchanted forest mythology from the British Islands, but that'd take actual imagination.  And not the "you can tell the animators dipped into the brown acid" kind of imagination.  Which is an easy dig, but really, look at this.

* - Let's not even talk about the deeply unpleasant dragon sidekick and it's (their? I don't even give a s**t) ghastly song.  It's like two insufferably obnoxious sidekicks for the price of one!

* - On the subject of small annoying creatures, was the falcon ever on-model to start with?  Cause for most of the movie it looks like a pile of fluff hovering around making dubbed-in Red-Tailed Hawk sounds.  Additionally, I'd call the chicken-thingy a JarJar-esque nuisance, except noted worst character ever JarJar Binks, like it or not, actually did contribute anything at all to the plot.

* - There's a scene late in the movie where it is heavily implied that Not-Merida would have succeeded in avoiding ObviousBadGuy and his minions on the road to Camelot and saved the day if she'd waited for her (all-male) sidekicks to join her.  Instead, she goes on without them, gets captured and dragged off to the castle, and ends up being rescued by the menfolks.  Seriously.  This happens.  Ugh...

* - The entire ending is just layer upon layer of "what just happened?"  A lot of plot points get resolved in a pretty cramped amount of running time, then the movie just stops.  But not before Not-Merida and AngstyWangsty get married, because of course that happens.  And then it just literally stops, as if even the movie is sick of itself.

For more in this series, click this link or the "Random 90's Animation Month" tag below.

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Sketch of the Day!  Have a random, half-Azhdarchid, half-"Dark Crystal" Landstrider creature designs.



I should probably mention that prior commitments are keeping me away from Boston Comicon this year, but I hope to enjoy the show vicariously through the internet!

Okay, let's talk about how freakin' adorable the new Mickey Mouse shorts are.

Because that doesn't really demand much elaboration.  All of the new Mickey Mouse shorts released so far are indeed freakin' adorable.  Here they are in a (hopefully region-free) official playlist.  Now this is how you effectively revive a classic character.  See how easy this is, Warner Bros.?



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By now it's Punch-a-Climate-Change-Denier-in-the-Face Hot, which means it's time to think of this year's summer series. I'm still debating what it's going to be, and rest assured I do eventually wish to do all of these ideas, the question is, which do I do first?

* - Jurassic Park Revisited: This would be me reading the original Jurassic Park novel from 1990 on my trusty little Kindle, and (hopefully) figuring out a way to share passages from said trusty little Kindle.  Passages that are now very strange after twenty-three years of paleontology marching on and that I will make (again, hopefully) hilarious comments about.  While, naturally, respecting the memory of author Michael Crichton.  Who, infamously, was a bit of a climate change denier.  Awkward...

* - Defending the Disney Princesses: In the (not exactly) immediate wake of Princess Merida getting her cheeks liposuctioned and having a vat of glitter dropped on her, I revisit the films in which the Disney Princesses debuted and voice my dissent about the way these characters are currently marketed.  See, one of the most frustrating fallouts from the Disney Princess thing is how utterly divorced these characters are from their original films and their original personalities.  To the point where otherwise reasonable adults -adults old enough to have loved many of these movies in childhood mind you- are remembering them wrong.  I want to try and set the record straight.

* - My Summer (or Autumn?) in "Fraggle Rock": It's remarkable that I haven't done this one yet!  This would be very like the DC Animated Universe retrospective from WAAAY back in the early days of this blog (anyone remember that?  Cause I didn't...)  Except this time I'd have the good sense to discuss significant episodes at length.

That right there doesn't look like a bad schedule.  Of course I'll also have the not-at-all-annual Animated Trailers post and Random 90's Animation reviews whenever any of the remaining films become available.  And I could probably stand to write something about the live-action Disney movies I've been watching, but this will be after I fill in all the gaps in my live-action Disney knowledge, because it turns out most of the classic live-action Disney films I've watched aren't as interesting to talk about as I thought they'd be.

Until then, here's this week's Sketch of the Day!  I don't think I've shared these magical peeps yet?

"I am at a moral crossroads, Mummy!" - Thoughts on "Rise of the Guardians"

Before this review gets rolling, I should make it clear that I am very glad that I revisited "Rise of the Guardians" before sitting down to write this review, because it would not have been fair to just go based off my foggy circa-Easter memories.  (Topical joke time: Look at me!  I am a more responsible film critic than Rex Reed!  [Note: very naughty language in that link.])  I did appreciate the movie a little more than I did the first go-round.  I must also give a shout-out to the Rotoscopers for their excellent episodes covering and supporting the film.

That said, I still don't like "Rise of the Guardians".  And you have to understand that I really, really wanted to love this movie to death.  Remember how excited I was when the first teaser trailer surfaced?  Man, I REALLY had sky-high hopes for the movie advertised in that teaser.  And it pains me so that I feel very strongly that the final version of "Rise of the Guardians" (henceforth "ROTG" because that title is just problems all the way down) is merely okay, with a lot of things that I found too problematic to ignore.

Above all else, the biggest problem I had with "ROTG" is how very weird the film is tonally.  It's downright melancholy for a movie where, as we were promised in that teaser, a badass dual-wielding Siberian Santa Claus teams up with the similarly badass Easter Bunny and very alien-looking Tooth Fairy to fight evil and save Christmas.  And it didn't hit me until the second viewing as to why this is:

"Rise of the Guardians" is that weird case where you do not learn until just a little bit over an hour into the movie that, all this time, you've actually been watching one of those movies for children where the main character dies in a horrible accident and then comes back as a supernatural something-or-other.

If you're a longtime reader, you might already know how much I love that particular genre.  And when they finally reveal that this is that kind of movie, they don't make it very ambiguous.  Our main character, Unimaginative RPG Protagonist Boy - err, I mean, Jack Frost, was a real live little boy who died in a skating accident.  Maybe it's just me, but that casts a considerable shroud over the entire movie.  The ENTIRE movie, back to front, because the very first thing we see in this film where a badass dual-wielding Siberian Santa Claus teams up with the similarly badass Easter Bunny and very alien-looking Tooth Fairy to fight evil and save Christmas is Jack Frost's Dive to the Heart.  Err, I mean, we see -and again, we don't find out that this is what we're seeing until much later- the drowned boy floating in the frozen pond while transforming into Jack Frost.  It's a little jarring, with troubling implications indeed because of course you start wondering if all the other Guardians were real people who died horribly, which is just the kind of thing you want to think about when what you came to see was a family holiday animated feature where a badass dual-wielding Siberian Santa Claus teams up with the similarly badass Easter Bunny and very alien-looking Tooth Fairy to fight evil and save Christmas.

If it isn't obvious by now, you would be totally forgiven if you assumed that "ROTG" is about (once more, with feeling) a badass dual-wielding Siberian Santa Claus teaming up with the similarly badass Easter Bunny and very alien-looking Tooth Fairy to fight evil and save Christmas.

I know I like to call out bad marketing of animated feature films but ye gods, they screwed the pooch big time on this one.  A lot of ink, blood, and spit has been spilled over why "ROTG" was such a spectacular box office disaster but the awful, misleading ad campaign cannot be discounted, and it goes a lot deeper than, "Oh, by the way, this is actually a movie where a badass dual-wielding Siberian Santa Claus teams up with the similarly badass Easter Bunny and very alien-looking Tooth Fairy to fight evil and save Easter.  In this movie released to theaters in America during Christmastime.  Oops."  They barely acknowledged that the film focuses on the blandest character of the lot and therefore is actually about the rise of just one Guardian.  And for God's sake, in the year of our lord 2012, why would you ever make that "Who let the elves out?!?" TV spot? 

So about that "saving Easter" aspect.  I know I went off on the part where Jack's been dead the whole time but really the scene that sums up everything I found wrong with "ROTG" is the scene where they try to save Easter. It's going to take some setup, so here's the larger plot, with brief tangents: A very unusual alternate interpretation of Santa Claus learns that this evil guy named Pitch is threatening the children of the world, so he enlists the help of other unusual versions of folklore characters to save them.

For some reason, this sounds familiar.

Unfortunately for us, "ROTG" is not going to be nearly as fascinatingly bizarre, and is going to be played painfully straight besides.  More importantly, the characterizations of the various Guardians never really go much deeper than "Santa's from Siberia and he's got tattoos and swords and an army of Sasquatches!  Isn't that COOL?!?  It's cool, right?  Please, please, kids, tell us you think that's cool..."  (I don't want to harp too hard on the celebrity voices but for reasons that are unclear, Santa Claus also has the voice of Alec Baldwin.  Because of course you'd cast Alec Baldwin as Santa Claus.  Why wouldn't you?  We all know how much Alec Baldwin likes children, right?)  The Guardians all look cool and interesting, but that's it.  I may still love the Tooth Fairy's design (Yo.  CGI animators.  I don't want to hear another word from any of you about how feathers are "too hard" or "look dumb".) but there's nothing about her character that's truly unique.

On the subject of the Tooth Fairy, there's also the little matter of the reason given why she collects teeth and why the villain wishes to steal them.  For some reason, that also sounds familiar, and in a way that is frankly a lot less easy to forgive.

Anyway, as unusual as they appear, the Guardians aren't very interesting characters.  So when I say that Jack is the least interesting out of all of them, it's pretty impressive.  I was not for a moment kidding when I called Jack Frost every unimaginative boy-protagonist of every forgettable role-playing game.  (It is also an observation I cannot in good conscious take full credit for.)  He's got the mysterious past that he's desperate to remember, incredible elemental powers that he does not fully understand, and an overwhelming obsession with finding a family to belong to.  All he's missing are the dozens of belts and zippers.  The film, incidentally, has not a moment to spare on how the other Guardians came to find their calling and their place in the larger group, which is a damn shame because not only does the film appear to be assuming "It's Santa, except now he's BFFs with Bigfoot for some reason" is enough setup for the audience to go on, but who wouldn't be interested in learning how Santa and Bigfoot became BFFs? Surely we can sacrifice one of the useless scenes with the real world children for that, right?

We will get to those real world children in a bit, but getting back to the plot.  The Guardians need Jack Frost to join their team to defeat Pitch for reasons that are, frankly, baffling.  Because design-wise and powers-wise, Pitch is clearly the evil counterpart to the Sandman.  They even acknowledge that in the script, which makes things even more awkward.  You'd be forgiven for almost forgetting that Sandman is even involved in this misadventure, by the way, because for huge swathes of the movie, he isn't.  Anyway, once Sandman's gone, they try their hardest to make Pitch and Hoodie McFrostedhair direct antagonists, going so far as to giving Pitch an honest-to-God "We're not so different, you and I" speech.  Yes, in this movie where (one more for the road) badass dual-wielding Siberian Santa Claus teams up with the similarly badass Easter Bunny and very alien-looking Tooth Fairy to fight evil and save Christmas Easter, the evil villain gives a "we're not so different, you and I" speech. This is a thing that happens in this movie.  That's how imaginative this movie is, once they're past the part where badass dual-wielding Siberian Santa Claus teams up with the similarly badass Easter Bunny and very alien-looking Tooth Fairy to fight evil and save Easter.  If you'll pardon me, I need to go get a beer.

So as far as the villain of this here picture, now that I've mentioned him.  The most you need to know about Pitch is (a) Jude Law is one of maybe two or three voice actors who had any fun with their role and I just wish they'd all been in a better-written movie, (b) concept artist Shane Prigmore desperately wanted the character to "not be just a guy in a suit" and created some awesomely creepy designs for the character, who finally arrived onscreen as... a guy in a suit, and (c) his motivation for ruining everything for both the Guardians and the children of the world.  Pitch, the embodiment of childhood fears and nightmares, is jealous of the Guardians because they are more popular than he is among the children of the world.  Yup.

But it really all comes down to the scene where they try to save Easter, doesn't it?  This particular sequence of events starts when an adorable little girl...

Actually, there are tons of adjectives I could use on the various real world children in this film but trust me, "adorable" isn't one of them.  You know what's a more appropriate one?  Horrifying.  Like, there's Uncanny Valley and then there's this.  All of their designs are deeply unpleasant, but the little girl in particular looks like she'd be happier haunting the sh*t out of people in a J-horror movie.  It's the hair.  It does not look like anything that has ever grown out of the skin of a healthy mammal.  It looks like spaghetti.  She has legit al dente spaghetti hair.  And it's so thick and lumpy and unnatural that it takes a while for it to be clear that, yes, they actually did bother to render her other eye.  In eleven years we've gone from Boo to... this.

Still, the Guardians act like this little girl is adorable when they see that she has wandered into Easter Bunny's lair (because convoluted plot reasons, that's why), and Bunny lets her help get all the eggs and treats ready for Easter morning.  And this scene is legitimately sweet, partially because Hugh Jackman is one of the other voice actors who's having any fun here and partially because, if it's not clear by now, this is one of the prettiest badly-written animated features of all time.  Anyway, Bunny sends all the little eggs off through the magical tunnels to hide themselves in the real world...

...and Pitch sends his minions down those same tunnels to smash each and every one of those eggs.  <:(

Thus, the whole sequence where a child character the same age of the children who'd most enjoy a movie where Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny hang out and do awesome stuff together actually gets to hang out and do awesome stuff with them herself turns out to be a shaggy dog story.  Ho ho ho, kids.  Easter is now ruined forever.  (For certainly, technicolor hard boiled eggs are the one most very important aspect of Easter, but ye guardians let us not even START on the fantastic religious weirdness in this movie.  Let us also not even discuss the fact that these Guardians who protect the children all over the world are the folklore characters beloved by American children -- yet there's one scene where they acknowledge one of the equivalent folklore characters from a different culture, which is actually more awkward than if they'd ignored the issue altogether.)  The Guardians are basically rendered powerless and put all the blame on Jack because... because there needs to be a scene where everybody yells at the new guy for f*cking everything up, I suppose.  Because, again, that's how imaginative this movie is.

I am willing to bet you can guess how everything goes from here on out.  Jack goes off to be Emo by himself, gets to listen to Pitch's "we're not so different..." spiel, and learns that he was once a little boy who died.  Blah blah blah, he goes back to rally the one child left in the world who believes in the Guardians.  And no, it is not the little girl who got to hang out and paint eggs with them literally just a couple of scenes ago.  It's her older brother, who had a much briefer encounter with the Guardians way earlier in the movie.  It'd be wonderful if a little girl got to lead the charge in the upcoming Kids Save The Day (all rights reserved to the 1990's) finale for a change of pace wouldn't it, but no dice.  Hope you little girls out in the audience understand, and that the end of this movie prepares you for a lifetime of similarly disappointing and subliminally sexist fiction.

So anyway, Jack rallies the children and in doing so levels up to evolve into a truly beloved folklore character believed in by all the children everywhere I guess?  Anyway, the kids help the other Guardians get their powers back through the power of childhood belief or whatever.  I have to say, I was deathly afraid that this would devolve into yet another damn "faith vs. skepticism" children's film and thank the gods it doesn't.  Heck, if anything it's pro-empirical evidence; you see, it's pretty hard not to believe in Santa Claus when he's right there kicking ass right in front of you.  They fight Pitch, Sandman comes back (because more convoluted plot reasons), Pitch is eaten by his minions(!?), Jack becomes a full Guardian, and the kids return to their homes in an admittedly hilarious mid-credit sequence.

In closing -and yeezus, this is a long review- "Rise of the Guardians", for all it's many many flaws, is still definitely worth a rental.  For many of the same reasons "Spirit", "Ferngully", and even Disney's "Dinosaur" are worth a rental: it's really pretty.  A lot of effort was put into the visuals here and it shows.  If only the screenplay had the imagination to back those awesome visuals up.

But the thing is, as much as I personally didn't like the movie, I can appreciate this aspect of it: They TRIED.

Look, we're in the middle of a summer where most of the big animation studios are playing it really safe.  (I know making fun of the next movie in Dreamworks' slate is just about the laziest thing you can do nowadays, bu have you seen the commercials for "Turbo"?  Particularly the ones where they assure us that the snail whose only dream is to go fast gets to go fast?)  The producers of "Rise of the Guardians" tried their damndest to do something very unusual, something not made for literally everybody.  I can appreciate that.

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Sketch of the Day! If we learn anything from this movie, it's that every girl loves unicorns.

In Which Trish Shares With You Her Crazy Theory About Was (Not Was)' "Walk the Dinosaur"

Hey, do you like dinosaurs?  Do you like music?  Do you like dinosaurs AND music?

Well, too damn bad.  Because according to anyone having to come up with a music cue for anything involving dinosaurs in the past, like, thirty-odd years, there has only ever in the history of the world been one appropriate piece of music: the chorus of Was (Not Was)' "Walk the Dinosaur".

Because it has the word "dinosaur" in the title, you see.  Which is very probably the reason why it is one of the most impressively lazy music cues of our time, popping up in almost anything involving a dinosaur, up to and including that crazy Electrical Water Pageant in Walt Disney World.  And if you're like me, and you like dinosaurs and music, this particular song has probably haunted you for most of your life, inspiring groans and silent wishes that someone -anyone- would write a new song with "dinosaur" in the title.

But I'll take it.  First off because there are indeed other pop songs that have the word "dinosaur" in the title that they could be using and that are far, far worse.  Here's an example.  Have a very strong drink handy.

But also and more importantly, if you listen to the lyrics beyond the chorus of "Walk the Dinosaur", it is some seriously trippy sh*t.  And my pet crazy theory that helps me survive every damn time I, as a paleo-nerd, get to hear this song, is this:

"Walk the Dinosaur" describes daily life long after the nuclear apocalypse.

Now, let me reassure you that this isn't just me being all, "LOL, this supposedly innocuous thing is really Dark and/or Edgy!"  It's really hard not to come to such a conclusion if you try to parse the lyrics.

I know hardly anyone plays the song past the chorus and the "Boom-Boom Acka-lacka-lacka-BOOM" part, so to refresh your memory:



Okay.  Let's review.

The opening lines claim that the song takes place "forty million years ago", which, as we all know, doesn't place us in the Mesozoic Era, (which, naturally, was the first thing that stood out to me as a child).  But the song obviously doesn't take place sometime in the middle of the Eocene, a time when there weren't any humans, either.  Therefore, we're going to assume that "forty million years ago" simply means, "a long-ass time ago", and is therefore akin to the "You've been jealous of me since fourth grade" line in "Monster's Inc."  It's just an expression, chill out and move on.

Because, you see, there are many more interesting anachronisms that force me to make some very odd assumptions.  In a world that initially feels "prehistoric," where humans live in caves, paint all over the cave walls, and live on whatever they can find that's remotely edible, we're told by the narrator that he "lit a cigarette" and watched both "Miami Vice" and "a passing car".  This is the first indication that something's up and I can't coherently explain what without skipping to the end of the song.

So let's skip right to the final verse because there's the kicker, the smoking gun of my crazy theory:

"A shadow from the sky, much too big to be a bird.
A screaming, crashing noise louder than I've EVER heard!"

"It looked like two big silver trees that somehow learned to soar.
Suddenly, a summer breeze and a mighty lion's roar!"

Okay, stay with me here.  Ever see "Mad Max" and/or any of the many and varied lowfat "Mad Max" substitutes?  Because if so, you may note that this sounds an awful lot like someone who cannot possibly comprehend what happened trying very hard to describe a nuclear war years and years after the fact.

The story has passed down through the generations since the war sent what was left of humanity back to stone-age level technology, and has therefore been adapted to the listeners' understanding.  Nobody knows what an "atom bomb" is, and rockets are only used by the gods (more on that in a bit).  But "two big silver trees" that fly and produce ominous shadows and frightening sounds is as decent an analogy as you're going to get in this kickin' it, wasteland style, post-technology world.

A few things survived the cataclysm.  People have been able to scrounge up recordings of old television programs and have figured out a means to view them.  In true wasteland style, their society is centered on the vehicles they've managed to get working again.  I'm guessing the cigarettes are either scavenged or they're smoking the same thing as whatever the pirates in "Waterworld" were smoking.

Unfortunately, the next few verses are not included in the music video embedded above.  As an aside and because I checked by listening to this damn song three times and you are all going to suffer with me, they are also not included in this cover version by George Clinton (you're going to crap yourself when you see what prompted it) or this OTHER cover version by Queen Latifa (who altered the lyrics a bit, probably due to Executive Meddling reasons even though they hadn't bothered anyone until then because, as is obvious by now, nobody pays attention to the parts of the song that don't involve a dinosaur).  Anyway, have more evidence of a post-apocalyptic setting:

"One night I dreamed of New York
You and I roasting blue pork in the Statue of Liberty's torch!"

It wouldn't be a post-apocalyptic story without an appearance from Lady Liberty now would it?  She managed to make it through the war in an intact-enough form that survivors and their descendants still recognized her.  Due to confusion, people living in the shadow of this green goddess from another civilization keep a fire burning in the remains of her torch.

Note also that people are scavenging whatever food they can: monkeys, rattlesnakes, and the surely only-appetizing-After-the-End "blue pork".  They're also cooking it wherever they can find reliable heat.

Brace yourselves, because here comes my favorite part:

"Elvis landed in a ra-ra-rocketship!
Healed a couple of Lepers! Ah, and disappeared!"
"But where was his beard?!?"

A few tales of the pre-apocalyptic world have survived.  However, over the generations, they have mutated and become conflated and merged with other tales.  One of the results: There is a new religion that confuses Elvis with Jesus.  Because of course there is!  If you think about it, when this song was written, that wouldn't be too far-fetched.  Elvis flies around in a rocket, which in this new religion is a conveyance reserved only for divine beings.  Nobody is really sure what a rocket is exactly, except that it can fly.

And that leaves us with what is, ultimately, the most confounding part of the song: the dinosaur.  The dinosaur that is the only thing people pay attention to in this song because surely, as we have seen, it is the most fascinating element of the song, right?

"I walk the dinosaur! I walk the DINOSAUR!!!"

I'm going to make the bold assertion that the dinosaur of the title that everyone is so hung up on does not actually have a hidden meaning at all.  Yes, even at the end where the narrator claims to "kill the dinosaur".  See, Walk The Dinosaur is just a dance people do in the far-flung crappy future.  It's their equivalent of the Chicken Dance, and the narrator was sick of it so he disrupted it one night.  (Well, there is another theory as to what the chorus is referring to, but, uh, let's ignore it.  I'm trying to run a family-friendly website here.)

So there you have it.  My crazy theory about "Walk the Dinosaur".  And either I'm right, or I'm close, or it's just the narrator describing what he sees during an acid trip as it plays out.


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Wikkid Important Addendums!:

I should note that I came to this conclusion independently, having no knowledge whatsoever that the band's guitarist has confirmed that, yes, that is in fact what the song is about.  I have to thank Albertonychus for sharing this article in the comments.  (Link is, sadly, broken.)  It's a little dated (gee willikers, a remix of one of their old songs is available as a ringtone!) but read it, because the fact that most of us (and this is a collective "us" as in, "most people, myself included") know very little of Was (Not Was) beyond this one stupid song used as a lazy music cue everywhere is a God-damn tragedy.  Turns out they've had one of the most fascinating careers imaginable. 

And much later on, I got this wonderful comment from Big Cheefski himself:

You still there, Trish!? Just came across this way too late! I enjoyed your meta-analysis of my certifiably daft lyric, and must say you found nooks and crannies I myself had well forgotten about.

But you are right about the central thesis: that the dinosaurs were fried up in a nuclear holocaust in the last verse, the first two verses setting the stage for the final solution with some surreal tableaus and wordplay, mostly just for fun, but mashing-up prehistory with modern times to set up the apocalyptic last act. In general, I suppose I was trying to suggest a parallel between natural cosmic extinction (big meteor strike) with our own man-made version of how-to-end-life-as-we-know-it.

P.S., the song was suggested to me by my then 4-year-old son, Nicholas, who asked me the following question: "Daddy, when the dinosaurs come back again, will we still be here on this Earth?" I comforted him with a provisional yes, then thought about the idea that we'd one day share cave-space with those terrible lizards.

Voila! Walk the Dinosaur came to life, for better or worse!

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Sketch of the Day! Have some dinosaurs, walking:

Let's Watch "Dinosaurs: Fun, Fact, and Fantasy"!

You know, I was all set to review "Dinotasia".  But right after I watched that, I watched an older dinosaur show that had been lying around on my YouTube "Watch Later" queue, and I found it much more interesting and worthy of discussion.

Tangent time for the curious: "Dinotasia" is a very strange edit of the animated sequences in "Dinosaur Revolution".  So if you've seen that already, it's not even worth your time.  Unless you love the melodious sound of Werner Herzog's voice, in which case you should watch "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" instead and become humbled as f*** as an artist.  The only thing different for me was I really noticed how frequently questionable the animation was this time.  Someday, dinosaur documentary animators will learn that CGI dinosaurs on a real live background for an entire film never look entirely right, and also that they are going about integument all wrong.  Until then... ouch.

Anyway, I called this show interesting, but really the more accurate descriptor is, freakin' fascinating.  It's from 1982, so it's from right at the last gasp of the pre-Dinosaur Renaissance way of thinking, so there are more than a few unintentional mind-screws seen thirty-one years after the fact ("Plodding Dinosaurs"?)  So here for your enjoyment is Picture Palace Productions made-for-video documentary for children entitled "Dinosaurs: Fun, Fact, and Fantasy".

Either that, or it is a collective fever dream we're all having involving singing crocodiles, a "Pokerap" but with dinosaurs (from before the "Pokerap" was even a thing, no less), magic dragons, and other, weirder things.  I don't even...?



(Note, I initially watched this because I had it confused with a Ray Harryhausen documentary with a similar title, but isn't that our old friend Dougal Dixon in the credits?)

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Sketch of the Day!  Inspired by an odd mechanic in a "Jurassic Park" game.