Thousand Year Door has been tough for me to get through because it seems designed to avoid/prevent grinding, and I'm very big on over-preparation.[1] I want to ditch it altogether and go onto Super Paper Mario, but I need to follow protocol. However, leaving the ol' blogspot lying fallow all week has left me feeling like an absentee landlord, so I provide two fillers:
1) Nearly three weeks ago I promised to report on a Wii-pole and, per my prediction, Wii-voters prefer comedy movies (62%) to action (38%) ones. More to the point, I wondered what this would say about the gendering of the Wiilectorate, as men would obviously be more likely to prefer action.[2] Indeed 42.2% of Wii-men prefer action to comedy, while only 25.5% of Wiiwomen do. The most interesting thing out of all this is that only 58.4% correctly predicted the preference, which means some good chunk of people who prefer comedy thought they were weird outliers. Come on people: try some statistical analysis of box office receipts, why don'cha[3]
Another current question asks if Wiivoters wear perfume and/or cologne, which will test the metrosexuality of Wii-men. I'm torn between the stereotypical wussyness of Wii-owners and the stereotypical poor hygiene of gamers, but I'm going with the latter. For the record, I'm 21 for 26 with predictions.[4]
2) Even though Comcast claimed to have the final Spider-Man 3 trailer last month, on Thursday "Trailer 4" popped up on Apple's Trailer site. It's pretty much the same thing as what's on the Comcast site, but they use different clips of the villain Venom. At first I decided to write an entire post about this, but then I was reminded of this XKCD comic.
With Spider-Man 3, Transformers, and — to a lesser extent — The Simpsons Movie and The Order of the Phoenix — young professionals are seeing their fandoms realized on the screen in a big way this summer. Although fandom has been allowed to take over the official before,[5] the fandoms I was part of haven't. Venom is coeval with my interest in comics and Transformers: The Movie has been my favorite video to watch for the past two decades years; I am fairly certain I know more about these characters than any of the screenwriters, but do I know more about it than the reviewers? The depth of niche knowledge that some reviewers have never ceases to amaze me.
So, I wonder, is there a professional reviewer out there who will invoke Todd McFarlane and Erik Larsen when describing the CGI in Spider-Man 3, or will debate picking Peter Cullen over Gary Chalk to voice Optimus Prime in Transformers?
[1] It's what makes me a such a great PokeMaster, but that's a story for Tuesday.
[2] One could quibble about the masculinity of Men-who-use-Wiis — or Women-who-play-video games for that matter — but I will only do so through apophasis.
[3] Based on Box Office Guru and IMDb data from July 1997 through November 2003. I had yet to discover the beauty that is BoxOfficeMojo.
[4] Who knew so many people owned furry fish?
[5] FTR, I don't claim to add anything to what people already know about the interplay between fandom and "canon."
Wherein unreasonably free time is dedicated to proving Jonah Hill is funnier than you.
