Pride Cometh Before the Autumn

My latest favest TvTropes, fresh for [two]oh-ten, suckaz!

• Ever seen an invisible character beat the crap out of antagonists, even when they know s/he's coming? But, wait, how can you see someone that's invisible? The Badass Blink. (e.g. The only time you can see Batman is when he is kicking your ass.)
• When a supposedly awesome attack ends up effecting negligible damage, what you have isn't awesome: it's a Worf Barrage. The trope's named after Star Trek: TNG's resident Klingon warrior Worf, who can't win a fight for his life.
• Shows are often criticized for worsening over time, i.e. "jumping the shark." But some shows gets better over time. This is called "growing the beard." Again, this is named after Star Trek, but the most important example in my memory is the growth of the The Daily Show after Jon Stewart took over for Criag Kilborn.
• Deadpool. Just a hilarious read.[1]
• Villains like to brag and show-off, but sometimes they bite off more than they can chew — say, an evil frog who wants to be an ox — and end up paying the price. Derived from an Æsop fable, this gets my love for its real world example of Reggie Miller!

Miller is a guy who posted game winners over Michael Jordan, utterly annihilated the Knicks, and even taunted Spike Lee with a choking gesture... but the Pacers have never-ever-EVER won a championship.

PONÊD!

[1] Honorable mention to the Candlejack entr—...

What Measure is a Trope?

In the vein of the last post, here are 5 TvTropes entries I like:[1]

• You enter a dungeon, get past several devious puzzles, and avoid all sorts of nasty traps through your psychic powers and reflexes. As you you walk through the final door you find... your love interest lying on the ground and her kid brother on crutches mourning over her. How did they get there? They Took A Shortcut.
• You can shoot fast-moving vehicles with you missiles, but can't attack stationary buildings. Some building time and resources later, You Have Researched Breathing, and you can do that. Also prone to happen in any other type of game with character customization or unlockables (you can't wear boots until you play enough...).
• A seemingly trivial obstacle cannot be circumvented or removed with brute force. There are several variations of the Insurmountable Waist Height Fence, such as: The Adamantium Door,The Impassable Forest, The Gentle Slope of Unlclimability, and The Ledge of Instant Death.
• No matter how urgent your quest is, you can always take your time achieving unnecessary goals before finishing the main one. On a smaller scale, even the most pressing, immediate tasks, such as rescuing a fellow character who is dangling off a ledge at five hundred feet in the air, can be done at one's leisure.[2]
• Hot Skitty on Wailord Action (HSOWA). Any work of fiction in which two grossly dissimilar species are somehow capable of interbreeding. This pretty much misses the point of the term "species", which is supposed to indicate which animals can breed successfully.

My interest in the site actually derived from the HSOWA entry on Bulbapedia.

[1] In general I avoid TvTropes because it is the most sticky of wikis.

[2] But see: Timed Mission

Frederick Douglass Looks Kinda Like Karl Marx

When I Say "Sexy Robin" I Don't Mean Thicke

Hating on Halloween costumes is old hat. "Oh no, they made something not-sexy sexy. I can't believe how offensive that is." Still, I saw a few recently that really made me worry.*

1. Sexy Tin Woman

I'm as big a fan of slash as the next guy, but this just ruins Wicked for me. Also, everyone knows Tin Man didn't have a brain, so imagine how much of a bimbo this person has to be.

Plus the Tin Man was made_of_tin. Tin Woman shouldn't be showing flesh; this isn't "Sexy Cyborg." Which reminds me, is Lee Thompson Young ever coming back to 'Smallville'?

2. Sexy Ms Voorhees**

From Supergirl to The Next Karate Kid to Episode II: Attack of the Clones, female-version films fare pretty poorly. However, the Friday the 13th franchise STARTED with a female villain: Jason's mom. Why not make "Sexy Pamela Vorhees"??

And since when did slashers walk around with logos like NACAR drivers? You know your costume concept is weak when you have include more labels than an editorial cartoonist. This outfit is closer to "Sexy Anaheim Might Duck."

3. Judy Jetson Adult Costume

They don't even have the guts to come out and say, "Sexy Judy Jetson" with this one. No, she's "adult." Now, there are cartoon characters that are supposed to be sexy, like Josie & The Pussycats. Some are supposed to be sexy but we're not supposed to be okay with that, like Lola Bunny. A few accidentally end up sexy, like Velma Dinkley. Judy Jetson fits none of those categories. Even "Sexy Pebbles" would be better, because you have the "Maybe they mean Pebbles Flinstone-Rubble" excuse.

Does Judy Jetson ever grow up? For all we know about the Jetson's timeline, the earth explodes before then. Anyone wearing this is doing nothing but advocating ephebophilia, at which point they just dress up as Miley Cyrus and get some social commentary value out of the evening.

4. Sexy Spongebob Squarepants

...Never mind, this is legitimately hot. ::drools::

*I'm giving Sexy Wednesday Addams a pass because she has been depicted as a grown-up. Similarly, Sexy Robin isn't so shocking since the character has been a woman, but I can't help thinking about Seduction of the Innocent.

**Do you think Lark Voorhies had to endure ribbing when the Friday the 13th films got popular?

Famous Last Nerds = Rapping-Reduced Shakespeare Company?

Initially run on MTV's short-lived sketch comedy "Scratch & Burn," the throwaway setup to "One Minute Hamlet" involves MTV purchasing PBS and demanding a short - attention - span - safe performance of Hamlet. Don't expect much more societal commentary than that, though. For better or worse, "One Minute Hamlet" is all about acting a fool for the sake of a laugh.

Co-writer Jordan Allen-Dutton starts off as fake-English-accented Hamlet mixing up Acts I and III: "Seems? Nay it is; I know not seems / To wake or to sleep — perchance to dream?" He's followed by co-writer Erik Weiner as a fake-New York-accented Marcellus introducing Claudius (composer J.A.Q) and Gertrude (J.A.Q's brother GQ in drag) getting busy on the grave of King Hamlet (Weiner in a suspiciously quick change). This all takes 20 seconds. Between puppets of the “Mouse-trap” players, a Polonius dummy, and unnamed nuns, over the next 100 seconds — “One Minute Hamlet” actually runs 2 minutes — those 4 actors play 16 characters, most of whom end up dead.

For those of us more familiar with “The Lion King” than Hamlet, the story is ridiculous enough that we won’t notice the liberties Allen-Dutton and Weiner take with it. We won’t know who Fortinbras is, let alone appreciate that they replaced “rest” with “ditch” so “May flights of angels sing thee to thy ditch” rhymes with “I’m Fortinbras of Norway, taking over this b*tch.” At the same time, Shakespeare sticklers will be bothered that Hamlet is portrayed killing Rosencrantz & Guildenstern personally, or that Laertes leaps in to remove Hamlet from Opehlia’s grave rather than the other way around. Only the biggest Ophelia-philes will like the line “Hey nonny-nonny and a nonny-nonny-hey / Gather round everybody for a play within a play” as more than lyrical filler.

Still, these faults appear only upon inspection. Like Allen-Dutton and Weiner’s subsequent work on “Robot Chicken,” “One Minute Hamlet” is too short to grate, but does great things.[1]

[1] Look, I'll never said I was Zachary Pincus-Roth, okay? p_^;

SMH

Disaster Movie hits theaters on August 29. Sends chills up your spine, doesn’t it?

Written and directed by the guys who made Date Movie, Epic Movie, and Meet the Spartans, Disaster Movie is a spoof of big budget disaster films such as Juno and The Incredible Hulk. If you can spot the problem with the previous sentence, you’re not alone. Every one of their movies has been met with similar confusion, and we, the audience have finally had enough. Nacho Libre is not epic, and Transformers have nothing to do with sword-and-sandals adventure movies. Making references to other, better movies is not satire[...]

*Disaster Movie Contest*
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Co-sign

Deez Postmodernuts

I've recently encountered two fairly old memes:
1) Lolcode, a "love letter to very clever people who are slightly bored" which is dying as a meme even while I write this.
2) DeezNats apparel[1], in particular, the "Mets Suck Deez Nats" shirt, which is at least a year old in meatspace time.

Both are examples of what I call "the pomo rake bit." Kung Fu Monkey[2] defined the notion of "the rake bit as:

Something that's funny, goes on too long so it's not funny, then goes on so long that it becomes INCREDIBLY funny.

A "pomo rake bit" transcends time and/or space to reference a prior joke, especially a prior rake bit. I advance this neither as a new theory or new phenomenon, but as something I enjoy. Layers of indexicality often elude me in other genres/media, such as musical motifs, literary allusions, and cinematographic styles. Comedy, however, is often brash and immediate; consider that if you reach the proverbial parking lot before you get a joke[3], then it's relatively deep. You are not supposed to need to unpack a joke, and so to have referential rake bits — to have humor that on its face proclaims to always, already entertain — is both comforting and refreshing.

Some people might think that either rake bits are lazy and/or appropriating them under the aegis of postmodernity/irony/unabashed-hipsterdom just highlights the cultural bankruptcy of the contemporary era. We might be so far removed from originality that reiterating a phrase that was tired a decade ago, or making an ever-increasing-array of websites dedicated to games of write-your-own-caption is what passes for clever. I admit insecurity regarding where to demarcate the distinctions between smugness, salience, and stupidity when the object of contention is Star Trek-cum-kittens.

Then I think about would I would do if I saw a "d33z n4+5" shirt: sigh, chuckle, and write a contented blog entry about it. Maybe[4] it's just me.

[1]Why not "DC's Nats"? Too far from the urtext?
[2]I've actually been calling it "the rake joke" for at the past year or so, which is still better than what it's called on the TV Tropes Wiki.
[3]Ron G told a joke once and said, "That's some clever stuff; you gon' get that in the car." How did Ron G not win? Anyway...
[4]/Hopefully?