Grab a bowl full of sugary cereal, and sit down to veg your brain out to heroic cartoons of the '60s to early '90s!
Category: fantasy
What I'm Watching: Rings of Power part 2
(I had this series of toots in my notes, apparently didn't publish. Whoops.)
SPOILERS
Galadriel continuing to be a badass, but shitty diplomat, is one of the best blundering D&D PC portrayals. Again has less than fuck-all to do with the book character, and I'm here for it.
Dwarf: "I am a Dwarf an I'm digging a hole." Mostly in his parental relations; I know the feeling. But it's not built up much before this, was much cut from this ep?
"Don't go to middle earth, it is a silly place." I am deeply bored by Numenor's politics, and whiny little Isildur. A swordfight breaks it up but then back to yakking. Elf-king's a bastard; where did I last see him? Oh, right, Abe Lincoln Vampire Hunter. Humans are 50% evil, 40% neutral, 10% good. Elf & Dwarf are pretty cute, tho. The one relationship in this given any love. New armor is all very shit except Galadriel's plate, which looks OK except dangling chain bits.
One thing is clear from this series: Elfs are assholes. Everything is their fault in the first place, and then you have to give them all your stuff and die for them because OH, wouldn't it be TERRIBLE if they went back to HEAVEN? And they ran that scam in the first age, they're running it again now, and they'll run it again in the third age. Isn't that great? Nobody ever learns to say "fuck off, Elfs". The one blacksmith who does is mocked by the evil vizier.
Arondir Elfpants' fighting withdrawal is a little goofy, very Army of Darkness. But then the peasants try a High Plains Drifter defense and it's obvious shit. Where did these incompetent peasants learn to shoot bows & stab with spears as well as trained Orcs (and untrained evil men)? Then deus ex machina, Numenor knows exactly which shitty peasant village to rescue. Yeah, map magic but it's still bullshit, the entire region must be at war.
Adar: "We have a heart. We deserve a home." Galadriel: "Genocide is good, because you are bad! Waah!" Yeah, that tracks. The thing the main LotR books & series couldn't quite articulate, because Tolkien believed in "lesser races". Queen is nice to peasant Bronwyn for all of 30 seconds until she can put a man of royal descent on the throne. Fuck royalty, kill all kings.
Fun fact: The initial survivors of Pompeii who didn't get off the island all died from pyroclastic heat in the next day. There's no Humans or Orcs surviving Mt Doom. DOOOOOooooom! Also I survived Mt St Helens (hundreds of miles away), and I can guarantee you it just shat grey ash on the ground, it didn't apply an orange filter to everything. Fuck Hollywood cyan/orange. I haven't mentioned the fucking 'obbits, because they do nothing, the wizard did nothing.
Elrond lurking around the Dwarfs, "Man king" lurking around the Elf court, 'obbits and wraiths lurking around the wizard, Queen lurking around the sea captain. None of these are good ideas. Clearly everyone would be better with their own, and the Elfs would all sail West, and there'd be no wars without them picking fights. So many preachy "nobody seen the trouble I seen" speeches.
The Three Rings of Power scene should've played the Airwolf theme, in honor of the greatest "engineers worship their creations" scene of all time.
Endless flute playin' music as 'obbit can't go off the track. I 'ate 'obbits. Uh, and showing NZ square pastures delimited by trees, which seems unlikely for empty woods.
Pacing really sucks, there's as usual 4 eps of content in 8 eps of streaming, would get ★★★★½ if it was edited down, barely ★★★★☆ as is.
Compare it to The Witcher. S1 was excellent, Cavill likes being Geralt, the plots were largely from the books, bit disorganized, should've just followed the Surprise. S2 was meh, went off-books, Cavill sorta saved it. S3 was off-books shit by the incompetent producer, and S4 won't have Cavill. It's down >50% from S1, instead of building audience.
Rings of Power succeeds where it goes off-book. Except the 'obbits. Murderhobo Galadriel was fun.
What I'm Watching: Rings of Power
So… I've been reading a lot of RoleMaster Unified and Shadow World books, which is of course very Tolkieny, "Iron Crown", after all. I finished a Good Omens ep (will review when I'm done, I'm taking my time), and Rings of Power is suggested to me. Well, why not, just one Tolkien fanfic show. As I've previously noted, I dislike the man, and his more overtly racist parts, but I liked The Hobbit book and I'm still up for some Human-Dwarf-Elf cliché fantasy, esp if they go off-book, non-canon, which they've had to.
Spoiler spoiler spoilers, as if it matters. On fediverse I didn't even bother to CW my thoughts.
First ep, 2 minutes in, whiny Elf claims a wood (really paper in this case) boat floats because it has secrets. No, unscientific, pointy-eared moron!, it floats by water displacement. It's this shit that loses you your immortal magic home.
Sauron and the Orcs look much cooler, I like their style. Unfortunately they only show up momentarily until late 3rd ep.
Elfs are too dumb to understand a fork symbol, and the eventual revelation of what it means doesn't make a lot of sense for non-literate savages the Orcs are portrayed as. "Nobody's seen an Orc in years", what? That's ridiculous, they rule half the planet. "Land", I guess since it's flat Earth.
The Elfs carrying 2-handed swords on their backs can't possibly unsheathe for battle. Body armor is preposterously bad. Elf armor is overly carved & decorative. Human armor is leather fake-scale, terminates above the belly button, doesn't cover the arms either. All but useless. Generally the fight choreography is very dance troupe, not much in the way of practical fighting.
Cliché cave troll attack. Galadriel for some reason is a super high level fighter, does no magic. Repeatedly we see the Elfs flying into the air on jump boards or wire fu.
Elfs congratulating themselves on delusional political bullshit. Elrond's a boring, pretentious twat for 2000+ years. Superhero Galadriel is kinda cool, just totally implausible and non-canon (not that I care). Arondir's OK, overarmed knife-ear bastard Human-fucker cop. There's an RPG Elf! There's a lot of racism against the Humans, all Morgoth-worshippers, but that seems typical for Elfs.
Too much time spent with the fucking goddamned 'obbits, or "Harfoots" as they call themselves in this. Filthy barefoot little cannibal shits running around (OK, that's a Dark Sun ref, but I don't doubt that book full of people they consult is a cookbook). They have a stultifying, dead-end culture of nomads who every year mark the 10%+ of their population who died, in some hilarious ways. "Stay on the trails, never walk alone!" That actually kinda works for pre-civilization 'obbits, like in 2000 years they could have settled down but still be cowards.
2nd ep has the 'obbits find a flaming man from the sky: Gandalf‽ I love that guy, even if he's a shitty angel/4th-Level Magic-User. He's just a hairy slob right now tho.
So Galadriel's shipped off West for being inconvenient. Boat to the Undying Lands (North America is heaven) has a real Logan's Run Carousel tone. Stupid Elfs going into the light are just gonna get zapped by lasers. Then Galadriel just swims back across the Atlantic? Sure, why not.
Dwarf kingdom looks really good. Super cool. But the Dwarf costume/appearance are kinda sus, bad stereotypes. Tolkien was racist as fuck, maybe don't perpetuate it in the show? The casting is semi-random racially, which is a nice change, but it's only 50% less. There's been a lot of whining from Internet racist trolls like the owner of "x dot com", and fuck all those people. I must say, I'm disappointed Durin's wife shaves her beard off to conform to Human beauty standards; she should embrace Dwarf hairy-faced tradition.
The naming of things is still kinda shitty, "The Southlands", etc. At least put it in an old language, Torpenow Hill style. If you say it's Mordor or Gondor, that kind of gives things away, but it is those.
First peasant vs Orc fight is fun, mostly. 0th-Level character funnel. The Healer delivering evidence to the town headman is funny, very much what D&D characters do to motivate the militia. Stupid peasants, who we are AGAIN told sided with Morgoth and therefore their line is tainted with evil forever after, really deserve a good hard kicking while they're down. Just coat them with mud, maybe a corpse cart-man singing "bring out your dead!" I do keep seeing Monty Python and the Holy Grail in this.
Galadriel keeps failing upwards, floating in the sea to a raft of hostiles, raft of a friendly dude with suspiciously Viggo Mortensen-looking face and pendant, to ship of Numenor. It's amazing how after days of falling in and out of sea water, starvation & dehydration, she has perfect makeup, slightly mussed & dark roots in her bleach blonde hair. Elfs really are magic.
The Numenoreans say several times, "The sea is always right", I correct STARBOARD! every time. Galadriel, having again failed upwards from prisoner to fairy queen, gets to ride a horse along the beach in romantic slo-mo! And it's clearly the most ecstatic thing she's ever had between her thighs. This scene goes on way too long, it's clearly the director's dirty fetish, someone should've had veto in the editing suite.
I don't understand how the Orcs ever captured all the Elf soldiers off-camera. Arondir fucked up, but most of the centuries-old soldiers must be at their 4th-Level Fighter cap by OD&D rules, so how can a bunch of juvenile 1-1 HD lesser Orcs who literally burn in sunlight fight and shoot on par with them? They do have a Warhammer-spiky-punk-rock hyena/worg special figure, with sub-Roger Rabbit-quality CGI.
1st ep was boring as hell after the cave troll, all premise and exposition. Then it got kind of good, I'm 3 eps in and despite a LOT of problems, it has some good fantasyland style, tone, & fight material worth stealing for your FRPG of choice. It mostly looks magnificent, they really did the "drone flying thru New Zealand and some CGI shots" well, the extras are usually well costumed, armor aside. The scenes in Numenor especially remind me a lot of HBO's Rome. CGI sets are a little iffy, but they don't linger too much on fake buildings.
I'll be finishing this up tomorrow, and then supposedly 'zon has paid for 5 seasons already!
★★★½☆ Definition of mediocre but fun enough to watch.
Mornin'. Nice day for fishin', ain't it? Hu ha!
- Epic NPC Man: Playlist of 182 (and more all the time) little skits from "The World of Sky-craft" aka "Aze-Rim". Some nail exactly what the MMO experience is like, frustrating and amusing at once, some are less so. But I watched most of these in the last 2 days, totally worth it. My brain has melted.
- Baelin's Route: Movie of the silly fisherman with one line of dialogue, dragged off to adventure. The actor does a LOT with that one line and a fishing rod (that turns into a staff with a knob on the end during fights). If he earns a tiny bit of XP every time he fishes, and he's been fishing nonstop for 20 years since launch, he's probably the most powerful being in Azerim. I don't like the inevitable plot twist 2/3 thru, but fucking Witcher did it, why wouldn't these guys?
- NPC Dungeons & Dragons: Playlist of the nerds playing D&D (5E, not at all my favorite edition and I dislike the kind of story-driven modules they're been funneled thru, but the play's the thing)
Makes heavy use of New Zealand's fantasy aesthetic and loudly plays celtic music like a certain set of movies set there. Their costumes, props, and film editing "magic" are simpler, but better than those movies. They do OK at getting diverse casting, it's not all honkies.
What I'm Watching: Adventure Time: Distant Lands: Together Again
Third, following Obsidian, for Finn & Jake.
Well, Finn. Who's old, nearly dead in some dungeon, and goes through to Hell looking for his long-dead brother. Instead he finds a bunch of returning characters who are all dead, including Tiffany (sigh) as the main rival/annoyance.
The designs of the Hells, "Dead Worlds", are fantastic, except the crappy 1st one, but you don't get to spend long in each, there's no exploration or sense of wonder, just fancy backdrops for a few death angels & New Death chasing Finn who's chasing Jake. The cosmology is sort of Buddhist by way of Dante's Inferno; but it's never explained enough for that to be a major element, either. In the silly 12-minute episodes, they could do a long dreamlike song or mystical exploration, and then next ep be back to kicking butt. In these 46-minute movies, they don't really seem to do that.
It is nice having the brothers back together, having adventures.
But, BMO had a great setting, kind of a good story, but terrible characters other than BMO and the bugs. Obsidian had a boring setting, boring characters except P.B. and Marceline, no plot. This one has the best characters, a plot… but an unexamined setting. Are they doomed to just make sequels with different failures?
★★★½☆
What I'm Watching: Adventure Time: Distant Lands: Obsidian
The next one after BMO, this time about a glass kingdom, a lava dragon, and P.B. and Marceline.
Apparently P.B. and Marceline have been living for… decades? in Marceline's old house. I guess most of the Candy Kingdom is extinct and doesn't need P.B., but she spends zero time worrying about that, just being a domesticated lesbian wife.
This time the new generation sidekick is not terrible, Glassboy's just a weak kid literally made of cracked glass, but he's brave and not too stupid. See-Through Princess is just vapid, waffling between "hey now don't be mean" and doing meaningless ritual.
Most of the episode is P.B. staring at a force field console, while Marceline goes off on a vision quest to get her angry punk rockness back. And occasionally the flashbacks to Marceline's youth in the mutant wastelands have some pathos, drag this up from dull to "oh that hurts". Marcy's first song is excellent, she doesn't quite rock out—the Pixies she's not—but she's trying. The second one is Lisa Loeb-like.
There's a couple cameos of old characters, which mostly just reminds me of how terrible the last few seasons of AT were, but this was much better than those.
★★★½☆ — Watch this one.
Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine on Archive
I was looking specifically for Philip K. Dick's "Cantata 140", also found Roger Zelazny's "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" and look at that great wraparound cover! But also all of F&SF is in there, and it's pretty much all good, the best of the more literary end of SF, fantasy, weird tales. Unfortunately it hasn't all been neatly organized in a category on archive.org, but you can just page down in the pulp magazine rack.
Anyway, there's your reading stack for the next year sorted.
Portal Bandits RPG
I saw there was a one-page RPG jam, but hadn't thought of any theme or tricks to do with it. Then in the shower, I realized I could adapt the source of my PortalWorlds 7DRL videogame to one page really easily. I went with more of a Norse mythology theme, rather than the inspiration movie's "God" and "Satan" (whatever those are supposed to be, some crank carpenter cult thing).
In one page there isn't much room to expand on setting and discuss design, but two main principles: You are small and weak, and not even very clever; a Human adult is a scary monster. Magic items are the great leveller, in fact there's no advancement except getting Loot. Gold is really only a score, and it can bribe Humans and other monsters.
For a sample Realm, I just rolled Ancient Egypt, Zombies, Evil King. So now you might have to fight a bunch of undead, but more likely you'd sneak around vast temples and pyramids, let the zombies in, rob the Pharaoh without getting mummified, and run for the portal out. Next Realm is Modern America, with Assassins, and a Good King. So here you find a sympathetic President (mid-'90s?), being hunted by assassins. You still need to loot the White House for Kennedy's Gold Dildo or whatever, but you can't do that unless you stop the killers. Nobody thinks a bunch of little Dwarfs are any good at anything or a threat.
Written & layout in Pages, which works great for little things like this.
Only solo-tested a quick combat, but it works. Let me know if you get a chance to play, I will when I can.
What I'm Watching: Barbarian Queen
From the SHOUTFactory Sword and Sorcery Collection. Remember DVDs? You stick it in a slot and your movie just starts playing!
First, trailers!
- Streets (1990): "The most brutal, sadistic killer on the streets… is a cop!" Yeah, no shit! That was true even in the '80s. Christina Applegate (age 19) is cute as a teenage hooker (age 16). Eb Lottimer made a half-assed career of dirty cops and evil soldiers. This looks better than average for exploitation flicks by Roger Corman.
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Angel in Red aka Uncaged (1991): Whores and a psycho pimp and brother. Looks dire. Apparently a remake of Streetwalkin' (1984) by the same writers, and the director Lisa Hunt took her name off it. Nope.
Huh. I guess they know their audience. And now our feature presentation. Note: R-rated and then some.
- Barbarian Queen (1985): Instantly starts with a blonde girl (Dawn Dunlap) gathering flowers captured, tits exposed, and raped by two heavy metal dudes (long hair, black clothes, medieval, work with me here). Sets the tone for the film; if you can't handle this, don't go on.
Wedding day for the girl's sister, Amathea (Lana Clarkson)—previously seen in Deathstalker—is rudely interrupted by a whole bunch of these heavy metal dudes who didn't RSVP. Mass fight choreography is… not an exact science. Mostly you see dudes taking turns holding up a sword or staff, enemy attacks, then they switch roles, very D&D initiative sequence, not much like real swordsmanship.
All the village men are defeated, but the women can bare-handed (sometimes bare-breasted) kick the ass of any man. Mostly because the heavy metal dudes stop mid-fight to try to rape, which turns out to be a tactical mistake.
The barbarians have fabulous '80s hair & makeup, and wear preposterous linen bikinis and reed bundle pushup bras/legwarmers, uh, and unlabelled Keds tennis shoes. The people live in reed & grass huts, but then bundle up in furs. This was filmed in Argentina, like so many of Roger Corman's wilderness flicks. The wilderness cinematography is quite good; they try to avoid showing skylines and obvious clues as to the location.
The "city" (barely a village) isn't bad but anachronistic; low stone/adobe walls, topped by wood pallisades. The "arena" is a solid wood pen, because of course they have a gladiator arena. A few hundred extras, wearing a weird mish-mash of clothing, muu-muus, hoodie robes, tunics & pants, half middle-eastern. It's like any bad D&D campaign, the Referee just threw random stuff together until it was full. The rebels of course hide in the dungeon tunnels under the city. There's always a dungeon.
The props deserve a call-out, and not in a good way. Weapons range from clubs, sharp sticks, and stone axes, to a few pole-axes, to many crappy mass-produced shiny swords with bad brass/gold pommels, and stage swords made of pig iron. Shields are a layer of hammered tin(?) over wood, very awkward. Armor is mostly black linen with big chunky chains sewn on top, it looks ridiculous and offers no protection. One or two people have brigandine which doesn't look awful. None of this fits any consistent period.
Katt Shea, Susana Traverso, and a little tomboy girl soon join Lana as an adventuring party, hunting heavy metal dudes. They never lose HP to these dudes. Dawn goes looney tunes, because that's what happens when you're tied to a tree. Middle girl is constantly eating, thru the entire film, it's kind of remarkable, giant lump of bread, unidentified "meat", craft table in the harem, she's horny for food.
"I'll be no man's slave and no man's whore, and if I can't kill them all, by the gods they'll know I've tried." —Amathea will kick your ass.
Armando Capo as Lord Arrakur is very businesslike. I can't tell if he's supposed to be stoic, doesn't know his lines all that well, or thinks he's doing taxes instead of torturing, raping, and killing. He's much too fat, useless, and square to lead the heavy metal dudes, I don't know how he got cast here. When I think of all the roles Jack Palance chewed scenery in, and compare him to this dork, ugh.
"20 years that THIS KINGDOM has ruled THE LAND. And we gather for your entertainment, the greatest warriors of ALL TIME, willing to sacrifice their lives for the glory of THIS KINGDOM." —Arrakur has no idea when or where he is, either.
The torture room, and glasses-wearing Jewish nerd torturer are amazing. Hanging metal claw hands, swinging stabby gadgets, acid bath, and an automated rack. Lana's tits spend a lot of time exposed and upthrust. Her '80s-style G-string bikini bottom is a little out of time. Her way of getting off the rack is amazing, only ever matched by Kathleen Turner in The War of the Roses.
The gladiators don't get much better at fighting, and they end every fight in a KO or kill, which is not how you keep a gladiator population; they were highly-valued entertainers, like pro wrestlers. Here, apparently the reward for the surviving gladiators is the harem, which rather misses the point of harems; but there is a fat eunuch harem guard in pseudo-Turkish outfit completely out of place with everyone else.
Maybe this whole thing's post-apocalypse. No artifacts or mention of the olden days, but there's also no churches, the entire operation's such a mess of periods it's just nonsense as history, but perfectly reasonable as post-apocalypse Argentina. I've had the same hypothesis about Deathstalker, but it has Orcs and magic, more likely a secondary world.
Some great shots. Guards go running past, Lana slips out sword ready and runs like a panther. She looks great and kills like an experience-crazed D&D murderhobo PC. The final fight is still badly fight choreographed, but well-paced.
Title is a lie, she's not the queen of her barbarian tribe, nor of the city (I presume the rebels take over, but the ending just freeze-frames).
The deleted scenes on this DVD are a mix of longer kills, even more T&A, and some backstory for the traitor and rebels.
A classic of swords-and-no-sorcery, heavy on the exploitation, half-assed (if that) at production as usual for Corman, but mostly saved by the story, and focus on Lana Clarkson and the girls.
★★½☆☆
(A reminder about my star ratings. Full ★ is for quality filmmaking. The extra ½ is earned by being fun, regardless of quality. I'd rather watch a ★★½☆☆ than a ★★★★☆!)
What I'm Watching: Adventure Time: Distant Lands: BMO
Available on the HoboMax.
BMO, especially delusional BMO being a hero, is generally my favorite character of AT, even tho I skip all those awful Grables eps. So I was looking forward to this. Not happy about the result.
No way to talk about this without spoilers:
BMO and their potatoes are going to Mars. But then they're redirected to an ancient space station made of little environment pods, like blown-up Xandar (in the comics, not the boring planet in the Guardians movies), or Robert Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky, and BMO sets off to save everyone!
Unfortunately everyone in the station sucks. The bunny kid sidekick is useless, spineless, and nigh-treacherous (but too spineless to be an effective traitor), the repair drone is just a follower, the adults are all villains or parasites who should be broken down for scrap. The character designs, other than a few sight gag characters in street scenes, are very plain, either blobs, the laziest-drawn humanoid bunnies ever, or a few alien/elf hybrids. Literally the only sympathetic characters in the entire show, besides BMO, are two thieving bugs, and a scrap robot (voiced by Simone Giertz! So there's like one good thing about this!)
There's an amazing environment, a setup perfect for a long series, which is wasted on a very stupid plot and a trite non-Adventure Time ending. Brute force or reason shouldn't get you out of trouble in AT, only insanity, lateral thinking, or coincidence should. Pen Ward hasn't written or directed since S8, everyone still involved is like 3rd-hand hires from when it was good, so tone drifting towards Hollywood garbage writing is inevitable, but tragic.
Well. That was, I guess not surprising after S10, but disappointing. Will any further eps be better?
★★☆☆☆