Television Zombies
Long-time WADPAW reader the most pressing issues of our day TV shows. Chris has been following my Venture Bros analysis and asked me to contribute a little something to his show, and I was happy to oblige. The podcast can be heard here or through your nearest iTunes thingy. My contribution, where I gas on about how I go about my VB analysis, is toward the end, but the whole show is certainly entertaining enough to listen through, and features a guest-opening from Rusty Venture himself.
Some more happy faces
As one of my readers pointed out the other day, Up is not the first Pixar movie to receive the happy-face treatment. Here we see the original Toy Story poster on the left, and the DVD cover on the right. In the first, Woody looks frightened and mistrustful of the cocky, headstrong Buzz — rightfully so, as their relationship is the central drama of the narrative. But in the second image, Woody looks like the secrets of the universe are being revealed to him. He’s not just happy to be carried off by Buzz, he’s positively ecstatic. Woody apparently has no problems at all in the DVD version of this movie. (The army men have also been included in the fun.)
Put on a happy face
Old-timers like me can remember back to the dark ages of 1990, when Ivan Reitman’s Kindergarten Cop came out. The posters for Kindergarten Cop featured star Arnold Schwarzenegger enduring the enthusiastic attention of a bunch of five-year-olds. The joke was clear: the Terminator can travel through time and walk through explosions, but a bunch of five-year-olds is a little too much for him.
Then something strange happened: a few weeks into the run of Kindergarten Cop, the posters suddenly changed — the "overwhelmed" Arnold became the "beaming" Arnold. I remember clearly, I was living in New York, and all through the subways the Kindergarten Cop posters suddenly went from funny to not-funny. Arnold overwhelmed by children is funny, Arnold proudly hoisting kids is not.
