I just finished Portal

[frostedelves]

WAH!

Anybody who says there's no emotional depth in games has to sit down and play this first before they talk again. Oh, my aching heart. Oh, the peppy music. Just... oh. And &hearts

In other news, I graduated this past Saturday. Done. I have an MA now. Um.

It's slowly becoming real.

Time for bed. My real self needs some real sleep again.

Comments

[dreamsbay]

At the risk of opening myself up to even MORE geekery than I usually admit to in public...

One of my secret pleasures in recent years has been the 2002 reinvention of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. When the toys were relaunched in 2001 or 2002 they were all meticulously redesigned and resculpted by a group called The Four Horsemen, who are all about our age and who grew up with the property. The result was a series of mini-statues that were intensely detailed and way better-looking, which struck me as work being done by people who really cared about these things as characters and as art, as opposed to way to make a quick buck off cheap plastic molds.

This theory was driven home by the 2002 Mike Young animated series. Want to have a good, geeky time some night? Go to Blockbuster and rent a disc of the original 1980's He-Man show and a disc of the 2002 Mike Young show and then compare and contrast. The 1980s show is AWFUL, one of those things (not unlike Twinkies) that you have to experience again as an adult to really understand how abysmal it was even when you were a kid. The 2002 version, like the toys, is a reimagining done by adults who grew up with the show and are now able to share their own intepretations of it. That's where I think all the power of serial narratives and expansive universes (like transmedia franchises) is to be found -- in all the empty spaces that our brains fill in ourselves. The stories we tell ourselves are usually way better than the ones that others tell us, which is why the origin of Boba Fett that Lucas gave us in the prequels was doomed to suck compared to whatever secret origin we dreamed up ourselves as kids watching the movies. The 2002 Mike Young He-Man cartoon is a wonderful mishmash of mythology, worldbuilding, and even kung-fu fighting. The battles are choreographed like a Quentin Tarantino movie or an anime series, the cinematography is often staged like something out of a classic genre film (like noir or Western) and the dialogue, 3 times out of 5, isn't half-bad. It's fun to watch the animators try and explain away the awful names of the original figures -- in one episode, the two-headed villain Two Bad is given a new origin story as two mercenaries named Tuvak and Badra that are fused together by Skeletor. There's a ton of stuff like this, including origin stories for most of the characters. It's really astonishingly well done, especially for a kids' show.

Of course, this totally rose up to bite it in the ass, since the balancing act between fan service and selling lumps of repainted plastic to kids is crazy difficult to pull off. The show and the toyline were both canceled, but now the show is experiencing a comeback on DVD and the toyline is being relaunched by Mattel as a series of adult-centric, fans-only, high-priced statuettes. In a way, despite all the cheesiness inherent to it that makes it so difficult to be taken seriously, He-Man is sort of the Conan the Barbarian of our generation. There's even been discussion of a new film by John Woo being kicked around Hollywood, although I think that project has been dead and resuscitated more times than one of John Carpenter's zombies, especially given the recent blockbuster success of Michael Bay's Transformers. Next out of the gate will be G.I. Joe next summer -- and I live in fear of what will come next after that. Personally I'm secretly hoping for a Kevin Smith interpretation of Care Bears or Rainbow Brite. :)