Sad resolution to childhood mystery...

For years I had nightmares about certain scenes in this show, without remembering it was a cartoon I actually saw. It's crap and not scary at all of course, but pretty gruesome for something ostensibly for children. what's annoying me is that it could have been a great mystery, one of those weird memories that you're never really sure about. the last time I flicked through as many 80's cartoon intros as I could find I was looking for this, almost frantically. When I didn't find it, there was a sense of genuine spookiness. It felt a bit like having seen something unique, unrecoverable, something from somewhere else. I knew it had to be a real cartoon, my own memories are never traditionally cell-animated, but maybe, just maybe it wouldn't be what I thought it was. But of course it wasn't. I came across it and there it is, just an 80's cartoon with a bit more gore than average.

The future of fashion is the past.

This is way less ridiculous than you might think. Just look at the guy's outfit at the end and realise that every webmaster you know looks like this, except all the gadgets are smaller. That's how the thirties envisioned the neckbeard they knew was coming, instinctively. Women in shiny, metalic dresses? The same outfit throughout the day? These guys knew exactly what was up. There's way to much pointing out of the obvious failures. We forget that the reason we don't have rocket cars isn't because we don't want them, it's because they're too expensive, ridiculous and unsafe. So many of these things are more cyclical than we'd like to admit. Imagine sitting in the sixties movie version of H.G. Wells' time machine and looking only at beard fashions from circa 1880-2010: Seeing unkempt muttonchops degrade to pencil thin mustaches, to clean shaven, to hippie hair, degrading into sideburns, back to mullets and 'taches, on to gelled tops and goatees, to resurgent neckbeards and permastubble.

Mid week video round up

Iyaz, the frontman for my proposed racially diverse boyband, the sugar thugs, gets in to the summer vibe with his new cool island video for a groan worthy pun song. It's got all the hallmarks, except for the 'tropical' lyrics. He might well be from the dominican republic or something like that (no, not going to the wikipedia page.), but some astute record executive should have realised that the video made this a coll island song to warm our hearts, and should have (1) pina colada or fruit reference...



The youtube comments for this are grumpy about this song sounding somewhat like Ace of Base's 'Don't Turn Around' as if Ace of Base is a paragon of originality, no one's commented on ABBA's Fernando, which is name checked. But what I really want to know, what's the video going to be like? Subject matter, etc. seems to point to a bolero jacket made from garbage bags and Gaga in a bloddy bullfighting match. Can't wait!

The second golden age...

Further rustling through my comics collection turned up the gems I became more interested in in the home stretch towards college, when beer money eclipsed comics for a few years. Vertigo was a weird mix of more adult-oriented material. When Alan Moore and Frank Miller revolutionised comics in 1986, Marvel did nothing, but DC decided to recruit some more Brits from 2000AD and it's competitors. The British comics scene took much more advantage of the total lack of interest from serious critics to move towards more underground and weirder stuff. Not being taken seriously meant doing whatever you felt like. Consequently the comics were tackling big issues, lacked meaningful censorship and attracted better writers. Vertigo imported these guys wholesale and set up the comics version of HBO, a well-funded mainstream home for non-mainstream material with a high emphasis on quality over quantity. Around '97 or '98 I was bored with the x-men and decided on a whim to subscribe to the four hottest vertigo/dc titles of the moment. I followed Hellblazer, Preacher, Hitman and The Invisibles. Consequently I got sucked into a mind-expanding world of shocking violence and evil occult shit. I specifically picked up the Invisibles because of a wizard magazine list of the weirdest things in the comic. If I hadn't done that I never would have gotten out of the x-ghetto, and would probably have lost all interest in comics forever.

No man is an Island

UGH. This one is somehow much worse than the first one. The digitally inserted Micheal, the truly terrifying vocodering, the completely nonsensical rap bridge. I hate pretty much everyone in the video. You sort of begin to wonder if these kinds of projects exist to save lives or to further inflate popstar egos. What's really going to happen to all that money? Most likely buy a solid gold plane for the Haitian president, or whichever warlord is in power when the cash gets there. Administrative costs and the salaries of all those highly necessary aid workers will take another big chunk. The rest of the cash? Miscellaneous(theft). If only the American Army wasn't so busy they could restore law and order.

Jihadists were cool once

I remembered this video vividly, like a lot of 80's videos (they were on after the cartoons), but never in a million years would I have connected it to a classic goth band like sisters of mercy. Their early stuff is exactly the kind of thing you'd toss into the faces of progrock enthusiasts who hate everything made after 1978. But apparently they later succumbed to the cheese and did a bowie. Not that I have anything against that, but this might be a bit too on the nose. White suits, reflecting shades, Afghan freedom fighters? They were the coolest oppressed minority there was for a while. The classic desert palace set really takes the cake, though. It really makes me wonder what other fond memories I can disinter for the lulz.