"In the Year 252525..." Let's Read _Man After Man_!

Note: Many thanks to Sivatherium for his extensive archive of speculative biology books on his lovely Neocene website, because the book has been long out of print and asking prices on Amazon are outrageous.  His is the version of Man After Man I read for this review and do please read along, as I'm not going to post any illustrations.

Ah, Dougal Dixon.  We've already explored his two signature books on speculative animals, and we've touched on some of his more obscure and incredibly strange science fiction biology works as well.

And I swore up and down that I'd never do a post about his Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future.

This is all due to my first memory of sitting down and reading the book.  I was young, innocent.  I'd just devoured both After Man and The New Dinosaurs and I was ready for more.  I found a copy of Man After Man, bought it, brought it home, and sat down to read it.  And I was deeply, profoundly shaken to my core.  It had upset me that badly.  It upset me so badly, and remember this is preteen-logic at work here, I threw the accursed book into the recycling bin in the basement because I just could not stand having it in the house.  So there's my glowing review of Dougal Dixon's Man After Man from some time shortly after it was first published in 1990. 

Well, I am older now.  I've read quite a lot of pessimistic science fiction and it doesn't shock me the way it did back then, so I am breaking that promise today!  It's time!  Get a strong drink and a comfortable seat!  Do as I did and load up Sivatherium's archived edition of the book.  Tune your radio to the very easiest easy-listening station you can find.  (If the bioparanoia apocalypse has a soundtrack, it'd be even mellower versions of James Taylor and Amy Grant songs and the "St. Elmo's Fire" theme*.)  Notify your next of kin, because all your most horrifying bad dreams are about to be lovingly painted in vivid, fleshy, body horror-y,

-y detail by Philip Hood.  (Great day in the morning, this is a particularly epic Dixony Rolls Of Fat waking nightmare.  You know the kind of sick feeling you get when you stumble upon somebody's uncomfortably specific fetish art?  Yeah... 😨)

Humans are bastards!  Everything is horrifying!  God is dead and we genetically engineered Him away!  Transhumanist body modification is either going to kill us all or make us into hideous mutants living in our own special Hell!  Let's read Man After Man!

Bit of a side-note first.  Tetrapod Zoology has written about Dougal Dixon's works extensively and I'd be remiss if I didn't direct you to this wonderful interview with Dixon.  Man After Man has always had an uncomfortable place among Dixon's books, and this interview gives some hints as to why that might be: he really didn't want to make this book at all.  Add to that the controversy of whether the creatures in the book were... *inspired*, let's say... by these Wayne Barlowe sketches and you've got yourself a book that could scream "I am a thing that should not be" as loud as the grotesque people who inhabit it's pages.

The book begins with an introduction by Brian Aldiss.  It already sets a notably more dour tone than Desmond Morris' introductions to both After Man and New Dinosaurs.  He talks about previous science fiction books that explored the possible futures of humanity, most notably The Time Machine, in which H. G. Wells depicted two different future species descended from humans.  He supposes that Wells and his influences "would like this book, and be horrified by it: for we have, after all, traveled a long way since their day, and supped on horrors beyond their resources.  We have lived through an age... when we have almost daily expected the world to be terminated."

Surely, we are in for fun times for all with this here book.

Dixon gives us a very quick review of how the process of evolution works and then emphasizes that we humans, with our penchant for unnatural selection and for modifying the environment to suit us rather than vice-versa, have effectively "broken" it.  So then, how are humans going to change into the freakish mutants promised on the front cover?  Simple: Genetic Engineering!  This, indeed, may be one of the earliest instances of "genetic engineering is a new technology that is poorly understood and incredibly powerful and can probably do anything and is almost certainly going to end the world as we know it" in popular science fiction.  That's something at least.

Next up is probably my favorite part of the book: eight million years of human history given in a series of short stories.  This short-story format continues throughout the book, and that means where this book could have easily been a sort of freak show, instead it has an uncomfortable intimacy.  In Dixon's previous books, the text was more like a dry field guide, but here we are invited into the lives of individuals.  It's a subtle but particularly nasty way to remind us that no matter how strange the creatures in the book are, all of them, every single one, is a human.

The parade of body horror begins 200 years in the future and ends -quite abruptly- five million years later.  Modern humans as we know ourselves survive for about another thousand years on Earth until the shifting of the magnetic poles wipes us out for good; we're simply too reliant on technology to survive that.   Long before that, those who could afford to and who were deemed worthy went off to outer space to escape the ravaged Earth, in ships built, in part, by humans who'd undergone massive genetic engineering and body modification.  Of these, Cralym the Vacuumorph is the most extreme and perhaps the most upsetting.  She is a creature born to die, after serving her purpose of building the ships that will send her normal human parents to a new home. There is a question as to why people of the future would create such an extremely mutated human instead of, say, a machine, but this book has biotechnology as it's science fiction trope of choice and it's sticking with it.  Anyway, Cralym's story sets the tone for the wild ride we're about to head on.

And all told, this is some darn good "Far out, man"-style science fiction.  We meet the Mechanical Hiteks, cyborgs who are basically a brain in a box, and who are horribly vulnerable outside of their robotic vehicles.  The Earth is starting to recover by their time, and so the Hiteks create new species of humans to take the place of the large animals that roamed the wilderness.  The Hiteks themselves are succeeded by Tics, who live in what are essentially meat-mechsuits.  Yup, fleshy bio-engineered meat-mechsuits with those good old Dixonian rolls of fat as far as the eye can see.  They and the few remaining normal humans have the decency to die out, as previously mentioned, leaving the engineered new human species to their own agendas.

And oh we have such sights to show you.  The Memory People are blessed and cursed with a "racial memory" that allows them to find rich sources of food but also essentially leaves them with "Koyaanisqatsi" running through their minds at all times; they voluntarily let themselves go extinct, lest they be tempted to become industrial humans again.  Dixon's love of eusocial animals manifests in the Hivers, descended from humans modified to live on grasslands, they live in massive castles with a perpetually pregnant Queen (nope), and have a symbiotic relationship with a Seeker (nope), who starts off as a fairly normal humanoid with the psychic ability to find resources in harsh environments (what) and eventually evolves into a big-headed, limbless baby-thing the Hivers must carry around (nope).  And there are the Tundra-people and Forest-people made kind-of-famous by this:

The Forest people are the most similar to the ancestors of all humans, which means that they are both the most adaptable and the most prone to being right little bastards.  Once the technologically advanced humans are gone, leaving nature to take its course, they and the Tundra People diversify into the most bizarre mutants.  One group of the Tundra and Forest people eventually become telepathic symbionts, all because a Forest person, driven mad by cold, tried to hunt a Tundra person like this and ended up sat upon -but not crushed- by their would-be prey.  Sure.  Another group of Tundra and Forest people became host and parasite, the Tundra person becoming a walking mountain of flesh to carry and feed nasty little vampire guys.  At the four-million year mark things really get outright bonkers, with the Tundra people becoming "Sloth Men" who are preyed upon by Spiketooth descendants of the Forest people, who also give rise to specialized fish eaters (a dead ringer for the piscaverous ape in After Man) and, because this is a Dougal Dixon book, ant-eaters.  This is all after Forest people have been shown to make and use tools, so I don't even know.

It's in the Year 5,000,000 and a half where everything goes to hell.  This is probably the most infamous chapter of the book, where aliens invade Earth, enslave the mutants, mutate them even more horrifically into thoughtless biological weapons and living meat stores, and strip the land of all it's resources before blasting off again, leaving everything dead.

Did you guess who those aliens were?  They were the distant descendants of the humans who left Earth millions of years ago!  Woah!  It really makes you think, doesn't it?

Fortunately, all is not lost, as there are people who survive the Apocalypse.  Yes, the Aquatics!  For my money, these mans after mans are the most... haunting. It's the eyes.  And also the "mermaid tail" and the fact that we never really get an explanation of how it works, anatomically speaking.  And the most of them, really.  Anyway, these... merfolk... technically... they survive by camping out by the deep sea vents.  It's implied that once the world recovers enough, these people will repopulate the planet, and it will be full of life again.  So that's nice.  I guess.

Thank you all so much for joining me on this journey through the world of Man After Man.  I am going to have a lot of wine and a good long stare into space.

* - Sweet Christmas, somebody make a mostly straight remake of "St. Elmo's Fire" -- except all the characters are genetically modified affronts to nature.  Dammit, I want to watch this hypothetical movie right now!  I am so angry at myself for making myself want it so much!

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Art of the Day!


I am full of regrets...

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.


~*~*~*~

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:

I Hope the Titanosuchians Love Their Children Too... - Let's Read _The Synapsida_

I know next to nothing about early mammals. There, I was honest. I can lecture you into oblivion when it comes to the natural history of birds (thank you, Gregory S. Paul and your beautifully illustrated doorstopper), but when it comes to our furry little titty-sucking (record-scratch sound effect)

Concerned Parent: "OH MY GOD SHE DIDN'T JUST SAY THAT CHILDREN COVER YOUR EYES WAAAARRRGAAAARBLLLLZ!!!!!"

Yes I did just say that. Because we are going to be talking about mammals. And I know this is going to blow your mind if you are the kind of person who thinks the split-second sight of a breast is going to corrupt your children (even after they spent the better portion of their babyhood attached to one), but the one defining characteristic of mammals, the one thing that separates us from all other animals, it isn't the hair, it isn't the live-bearing of our young, it is the mammary glands. Deal with it.

Aaaaa-nyway, when it comes to our furry, titty-sucking forebears, I am totally clueless. This is not entirely for lack of trying: There are hardly any good books at all about "proto-mammals" (which I know is an old term, but a lot of people grew up with seeing it when this subject was ever brought up, so I'm only using it so more people will know WTF I'm talking about). Most people have only ever heard of Dimetrodon and the majority of them think that thing is a dinosaur anyway, because if your skeleton is on display at Harvard Museum of Natural History, you're a dinosaur, right? (No, really. I have overheard as much.)

Enter our old friend John C. McLoughlin, he of the unique and often very nice pen and ink illustrations and, err, equally unique ideas about the anatomy and behavior of prehistoric creatures. Published in 1980 by Viking, in the wake of the far, far better-known The Archosauria, The Synapsida is an attempt to tell the complete story of mammals. Turns out it's a very interesting story, though unfortunately I am unable to call B.S. or not on some of McLoughlin's claims (though it turns out that the "Walking With Whatever" writers weren't the first to come up with venomous synapsids).

But what we're really here for are the illustrations. And McLoughlin's draftsmanship is phenomenal, even when the animals he is drawing aren't the prettiest things:



Venyucovia here might give us a hint as to why you don't see scads of kid's books, stuffed animals, big Hollywood movies, and cartoons of questionable educational content about Synapsids. By now, we know how to make dinosaurs "cute", what the heck do you do with this thing?

Undaunted, McLoughlin introduces us to all the strange creatures at the base of our family tree. I mean it when I say ALL of them. His history of mammals starts with early Chordates and doesn't stop until we hit humans. And humans, by the way, are bastards.



Really, that's the strangest thing in the book. McLoughlin wears his politics right on his sleeve, and seems almost ashamed that the majestic beasts he chronicles in the book gave rise to us. Here's an example of how jarring this can get:



Subtlety is not one of McLoughlin's strong suites. There's another odd moment where he describes the fascinating story of the Pelycosaur, Cotylorhynchus, the world's first very large herbivorous four-legged animal. It was able to survive in a colder climate than any of the animals that could have preyed on it. The animal in question is a big, monstrously fat critter with a disproportionately tiny head and nothing at all to worry about. McLoughlin invites America to look at the horrors of our inevitably morbidly obese future when viewing his illustration of the unsuspecting beast.

Um... so, Dimetrodon!



Aww, look how ugly-cute he is! Here with Edaphosaurus who, it turns out, isn't a close relative at all (though they are both Pelycosaurs)! See, I never knew that because my childhood books couldn't be bothered to spend more than two pages on these guys.

Speaking of ugly-cute, here is a confusingly-named Dromosaur (not to be confused with those more famous guys with the fluffy feathers and the large talons). McLoughlin informs us that this little fellow has been discovered preserved in a sleeping position with his tail wrapped around his body. Given that McLoughlin was one of the first paleoartists to illustrate theropods with feathers, I'm honestly surprised he didn't give this guy a coat of fur.



Fact is, fur doesn't appear at all until late in the book. Even then, all we get are a few whiskers at first:



Again, I don't know very much about these animals. I have no idea if there have been any skin impressions found from them. I can't begin to guess where hair would have first appeared on mammal-like creatures in the fossil record. It seems this Thrinaxodon would be a good candidate for being furry, so it's very strange to see McLoughlin restore him naked.

Or... maybe that's just how McLoughlin renders fur; through stippling? Take a look at this... animal... we'll call him Generic Cenozoic Critter:



Yeah.

All in all, The Synapsida is not the strange ride that is The Archosauria, but it is definitely a worthwhile read. You will, at the very least, learn about some very fascinating animals you may have otherwise never heard of.

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Feederwatch Friday! I forgot to do this last week, but I've been sick:

Rock Pigeon 1
Black-capped Chickadee 3
Tufted Titmouse 2
Red-breasted Nuthatch 1
White-breasted Nuthatch 2
Northern Cardinal 2
House Sparrow 25

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Festive Thing of the Day!

I sat down at the computer after setting up the TREE, covered in sap and bruises and scratches, when what to my wandering eye should appear but a Bad Santa Gallery! Numbers 7, 24, and 25 are my favorites. (Some NSFW ads.)

30 Photos Of Children Terrified Of Santa

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Sketch of the Day!

Here are doodles I drew while watching the Quincy Christmas Parade. And being violently sick (my sinuses are still painfully dry, but I am otherwise feeling much better).

Back Injury Theater: Things to Notice in "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!"

First off, boo Target. Boo.

Second of all, when I recently reviewed John McLaughlin's Archosauria, which had some... unusual ideas about dinosaur anatomy, and Model a Monster, which had some... unusual ideas about dinosaur extinction, I had no idea there was a connection between the two. Well, according to the Jurassic Albatross blog, there is a connection. And, by the way, the crazy stuff in Model a Monster about how there were humanlike dinosaurs who killed everything with nuclear weapons at the end of the Cretaceous is an actual theory that has actually been proposed.

(I think the "mammals suddenly up and ate all the dinosaur eggs en mass" extinction theory is still more unreal.)

Speaking of unreal, you must read this recent "Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs" post. Because it contains an image that must go mimetic immediately. You will know it when you see it. (If not, my comment there will point it out.)

OK. On to the thing in the title.


Possibly the most beloved of all Halloween specials, "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" premiered in 1966. The second special based off the Peanuts comic strips, after "A Charlie Brown Christmas", this is the only older Halloween special that is still shown on television with any reliability (more on that Friday).

That means that you've probably seen it a few times already, and I don't have to tell you how awesome it still is after decades and decades. (If you are a younger viewer, and you've never seen it, hopefully you aren't too jaded to enjoy it.) Instead, this is a list of things you might not have noticed at first:

* - If the "Peanuts" holiday specials weren't so cute and funny, they'd be the most depressing pieces of animation ever shown on television in America. This is a Halloween special that ends with three kids who have no Halloween candy at all, which is tantamount to tragedy in a child's mind.

* - And on top of that, Charlie Brown has a bag of rocks. Now, I know there were real aluminum Christmas trees, so was there ever really a time when adults could punish children with lousy costumes by giving them rocks instead of candy?

* - And on top of that, Linus forgoes trick-or-treating and waits for the Great Pumpkin all night to no avail. Taken another way, the Great Pumpkin has one believer. And the Great Pumpkin is ignoring his one believer.
Essays have been written about this. Long ones.

* - It says a lot about the town in which "Peanuts" takes place that the adults agree to give Lucy extra candy for Linus, after she tells them he is sitting in a pumpkin patch waiting for a "Great Pumpkin".

* - Then again, this is a world where Linus is allowed to sleep outside in a pumpkin patch on a late-autumn night...

* - There is no way that wonderfully strange Red Baron scene would fly today. It's very long, it has nothing to do at all with the rest of the story (save for the payoff in the end), and is an exercise in color and mood.

* - I can't put this feeling into words, so I'll lift this quote from the great X-Entertainment: "Now, there's a big difference between watching the specials on officially released DVDs and videos as opposed to their annual taking over of an all-important prime time slot. There was something extra nice about watching the shows at the same time as millions of others; we all collectively felt the waves of spooky spirit both through Charlie Brown's poorly conceived sheet ghost costume and the many Halloween Happy Meal commercials dispersed between scenes. For those thirty minutes, everything bad in the world took a vacation."

* - And of course, there's Vince Guaraldi's instantly-iconic score running throughout the special. It's hard to imagine how Vince sold the producers on that jazz score for a kid's cartoon, but it's hard to imagine the Peanuts specials working so well with any other composer.

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Totally unrelated, but how's this for scary?



Discovered via SlashFilm. Highlights include Simba-Beast's stripey Tim Burton horns, teleporting Gaston, and their incredibly unsettling take on Lumiere.

I gotta tell you, as someone who lived through the heyday of Disney's Bronze Age, I find this trailer oddly comforting. In the early 90's, many many low-budget animation houses made (or more likely scrounged up) the most incredibly cheap knockoffs of every Disney film of the era and released them on video around the same time the Disney films had been in theaters for a while. And I'm not talking about just the Disney movies based upon public domain fairy tales either, they managed to do rips off "Pocahontas", "Hunchback" and so forth as well. Every company came up with a wildly different "Lion King" cash-in. They were taking advantage of the sad fact that some parents didn't realize the difference.

And it should be noted that the animation in these films is almost across-the-board terrible. What always puzzled me is the fact that these studios can get away with this at all. Shouldn't the Disney lawyers smite the pants off them? These are, after all, the same lawyers that started this little public relations nightmare...

Update: And, not surprisingly, GMToons has deleted all their trailers from YouTube. Too bad; I wanted to show you their equally unbelievable "Land Before Time" ripoff too.
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Sketch of the day!



I've got plans for this...

Let's play The Extinction Game! Wait, what?

As I mentioned before, Model a Monster, which is otherwise an innocuous and adorable book of arts and crafts projects centered mostly around dinosaurs, has an ending that is unexpectedly weird. Really weird. Like, "where did I read that creepy thing as a child that still haunts my mind well into adulthood?" weird. That kind of weird.
 
It starts around page 150, where we are told how to "Make a monster diary". We're going to take an ordinary diary and imagine that each "day" is about eleven million years in the history of planet Earth. By this reckoning, human history starts around 6:15 PM on December 31. World War Two ended a third of a second before New Year's Day. I always found activities like this to be like a real life Total Perspective Vortex.
 
And then, we get to play The Extinction Game. Yay...?

I know it probably would have been easier to retype the questions, but I'm going to be using scans instead (click for the larger images). Because otherwise, I don't think you'd believe me at all when I try to tell you that what you are about to read is the ending of a book for children about making hand-made dinosaur models and toys.
 
The instructions to The Extinction Game tell the little kids reading this to "find the answers to these questions". They can ask a teacher, librarian, or other adult for help in answering them.
 
This is going to be sad/hilarious later.
 
There are about two-dozen questions in The Extinction Game. Some of them have answers that are pretty easy to find:



Some of them... well, I don't know if there are straightforward answers for these, or if there ever will be:



So far so good. But the next batch of questions takes an unexpected turn, and the implications here are pretty weird:



This brings us to the next batch of questions, which... jeez, have fun fielding these ones teachers and librarians:



OK, this book was made in England during the Cold War (if you're under twenty, go download the "Songs from the Big Chair" album if you don't understand the mindset at work here; but download it anyway because it is awesome). Still, WTF?!
 
And then, it gets worse:



"No! I must model the monsters!" Trish shouted.
The book said, "No, Trish. YOU are the monsters."
And then Trish was a Bastard.

Lest you think this is as weird and dark as Model a Monster gets, it is time for a little story! This is what was chosen to be on the very last page of the book. Enjoy. I'm sure all the little kids who just wanted a book about making model dinosaurs did:



We need something to laugh at after all those vast, galloping herds of Nightmare Fuel. So next, I'll review a notoriously strange dinosaur book from way back in 1979 by a fellow New Englander. What could it be???

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Art of the day! Consider this a teaser for that upcoming book. It's actually pretty remarkable how spot-on my memories of it were:

Don Bluth Month: "Dog dies in the end." - Thoughts on "All Dogs Go To Heaven"

You know how I said, in the last post, that "I am looking at my Netflix queue, and things go straight downhill from here"? Yeah. Make that a 90 degree angle on a runaway train down a triple-black diamond.

Oh, "All Dogs Go To Heaven". The movie that assaulted my childhood. Most people my age have the "Star Wars" prequels or "Transformers 2" "Michael Bay Learns to Add and Subtract"*. I have "All Dogs Go To Heaven".

It is a hard thing for a kid to learn that their favorite director can do wrong, but something died inside me when I saw this movie. How in the world do you follow "The Land Before Time" with this? But before I go ahead and tear into how bad this movie is for all the conventional reasons (gaping plot holes, boring songs, ect.), let's talk about the psychology of a child at the time this movie was released.

There is something crucial missing from 80's nostalgia. You kids probably feel the same way about the 1980s as I did about the 1960s: a big, nonstop party to which I wasn't able to attend due to inconveniently not being born yet. Back then, 60's nostalgia meant tie-dye and the Beatles and hippies and Woodstock (possibly the ultimate retro "You shoulda been there" moment). There was, tellingly, no mention of racial tension, political unrest, or the Vietnam War and it's aftermath.

So with that in mind, here's my question about 80's nostalgia: Where's the death?

Listen, next time you're rocking out to "1999", pay attention to those lyrics. When Prince warns that "we could all die any day", he ain't kidding. That was the zeitgeist of the time. It was the peak of the Cold War and the bombs could drop at any minute. Just a few decades ago, there was a serious possibility that all life on Earth would be wiped out because two countries had different economic systems.

I was about six or seven when I realized all this was happening.

On top of this was an unspoken but collective agreement that something was going to happen in 1999, which wasn't too far away. Maybe this was a prediction from Nostradamus, maybe some other Middle Age prophet guy, but the world would be very different once the Millennium approached. Human nature being what it is, it was unanimously assumed that "different" meant "bad", and so the prediction was tangled up in nuclear paranoia. The point is, us 80's kids were thoroughly convinced that some way or other, we'd never live to see adulthood, an undercurrent of unshakable despair that still runs deep in our hearts today.**

Into this environment came a strange and seriously creepy trend in the motion picture world: Dramatic, non-horror (not intentionally anyways) movies where the action doesn't start until after the main character dies -almost always in a presumably horrible offscreen car accident- and returns as a supernatural something-or-other. "Ghost" is the best known of these and may have even started the trend. There are the utterly traumatic "Ghost Dad" and "Fluke" and "Jack Frost". There's "Casper", who, for his feature film debut, was given a sad backstory that explicitly reveals that he would more accurately and horrifyingly be called Caspar the Friendly Dead Child. Robin Williams has *TWO* such movies under his belt (and this is only if I am forgetting one): the thematically related and utterly mind-scarring "Jack" (Robin is a sweet child-man a la "Benjamin Button" who is doomed to die before he gets to college), and "What Dreams May Come" which may be the prettiest movie to ever have the potential to do you some serious psychological damage as a young person, ups the ante by killing off ALL of the major characters during the course of it's running time, and includes the classic line, "That's the last time I ever saw my family when we were all alive." Mind you, this big long list is off the top of my head, and ignores the wide world of End of the World/Rapture-themed entertainment(?) and direct-to-video/TV films.

And then, of course, there's "All Dogs Go To Heaven", which is a tender tale about a dog who dies twice and which operates in a universe where your afterlife options are a boring cotton candy cloud Heaven or an aggressively interesting Wayne D. Barlowe fever dream Hell.

"All Dogs Go To Heaven" was yet another symptom of the creepy death fixation running through Hollywood and the world at large at the time, and I hope you enjoyed those last few paragraphs because that is the only interesting commentary I can give this movie.  I might have mentioned earlier that "All Dogs Go To Heaven" is... not good. Let me make something clear before I rip into this movie: even though it is terrible, the character and effects animation is superb. Once again, you'll see Bluth and his team at the top of their game in this movie. That's what's going to help me survive some of the upcoming movies. As bad as they get, they'll still *look* good.

Man, if only that terrific animation was in the service of a better... well, I was going to say "story", but really, "everything else."

We'll start with something that always drove me up the wall as a kid. The plot centers around this little girl who can "talk to animals". Apparently, inter-species communication is impossible in the world of "All Dogs Go To Heaven". Except when it isn't. And among other things, this raging plot hole makes the infamous You Know What even more worthy of a "what the f*** just happened?" (Speaking of King Gator, there are some character designs in this movie that are just eye-searingly ugly.)

It's easy to sum up everything wrong with this movie by fast-forwarding to around the 45 minute mark. In quick succession, you get a God-awful song about sharing that has ruined stronger people than I (ye Gods, can you see why "The Little Mermaid" killed this at the box office?), a sad song that is essentially "Somewhere Out There" with the numbers filed off, and a truly horrifying nightmare sequence. This film doesn't know what the hell it wants to be and suffers dearly. But not as much as I did while watching it.

Next up, "Thumbelina". Yaaaayyy...

* - It will never stop being funny. NEVER. If you don't understand, and you're like me and you haven't seen "Revenge of the Fallen" because you've heard how bad it is and you don't want to give Michael Bay any of your money, read the second to last Q/A in this. Of course, maybe it's enough to say that this is the same Michael Bay who thinks sunset can happen all around the world at the *same time*, so...
** Only Mayans and archaeologists are sicker of hearing about 2012 than I am, but I have the deepest sympathy for little kids growing up and hearing about it. And of course I'll be the first to say that the Cold War was gorram cake and ice cream compared to today's kids' post-9/11 world.

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Sketch of the Day!

Still riding the sauropod...

Weird and/or Unsettling Christmas Cartoons!

This will be a "Public Domain Version of 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer' That Pops Up Everywhere"-Free list of old Christmas cartoons. :)

Hugh Harman's "Peace on Earth" - I'm going to start by posting the animated short first:

OK.
Now, this short is beautifully animated and notable (even admirable) for its pro-peace message delivered in the middle of wartime. But here's the thing: I first saw it as a little girl in the middle of a collection of more typical holiday cartoons. Let's just say I had a lot to think about while everyone else was eating cookies and singing "Jingle Bells."

Dave Fleischer's "Christmas Comes But Once a Year" - Everything is going to look like sunshine and lollipops after that last short, but this one's a little odd too. Mostly, it's because of Dave Fleischer's strange animation style. This is what Western Animation looked like before Disney came along and standardized everything. The special effects at the end are really cool:


The National Film Board of Canada's "Christmas Cracker" - I discovered this on NFBC's "Best of the Best" DVD collection, but the embed below comes straight from the Film Board's website. The animated segments range from the "aww how cute" to the "Augh I know I've seen this before!" The weirdness is provided by the jester MC and trippy version of "The Holly and the Ivy":


As a super-special-awesome bonus, here is the cheesiest/creepiest Christmas song and music video ever made: