I am soothed, finally: Daria finally out on DVD.

Here it is. The whole thing. From "Sealed With A Kick" to "Is It College Yet?"

It's a beautiful package, all things considered. Including the omitted songs and the fact that "Is It Fall Yet?" is still the shortened version and not the original version that aired. In the latter case, I wouldn't be surprised if the only version of the TV movie that MTV had still hung onto was the short version. In the case of the DVD of the original Spumco Ren & Stimpy episodes (Season 1 plus the first half of Season 2) Paramount Home Video actually had to use archival material kept by John Kricfalusi to get the best possible release. MTV Networks is notorious for these sort of things.

One other nit to pick: they didn't release all the goodies in the vault. There was a 30 minute "the making of" special, plus Garbage premiered a video during the initial "Is It College Yet?" airing, "Breaking Up The Girl." Later, Garbage released a "movie clips" version of the video...I've got it for you right here:



Thing was, there was a whole animated intro for the song that only aired once. I remember that they did an "anything can happen in a cartoon" gag where the band's animated counterparts took off into the air. Of course, that all could be buried in a filing cabinet in a locked room at 1515 Broadway, with a sign reading "Beware of the Leopard" on the door.

At least the "Freakin' Friends" Mystik Spiral video is included...plus a .PDF of a spec script for a Mystik Spiral spinoff series that never made it even to the animatic stage.

Again, all this is nits picked by an unashamed Daria fangirl. I'm delighted it's finally out, I'm doubly delighted it's out at a more-than-fair price: it's "streeting" for less than $50. Well done.

Notes from a "crank": on the demise of the moviegoing experience.

(By way of explanation: this was a post I made on Slashdot about why I have largely stopped going to movie theatres. It's not all about being broke and unemployed. It's about a very degraded experience. This is why whenever we have a podcast recording I hem and haw about not seeing the movie yet. It's just not WORTH IT in most cases to see the movie in theatres anymore for me. And here's why...)

OK, I'm one of those "cranks" who remembers how moviegoing USED to be, and considers the current "experience" extremely inferior.

It used to be, you'd go to a big, beautiful PALACE with thousands of seats and a gorgeous environment. Even if you lived in a small town, the local movie theatre was a glamorous, special place.

This was before mobile phones. And there would be a special room for mothers to take squalling babies or toddlers having a tantrum, called the "women's lounge."

In the 1960s, theatre owners, in an industry maybe didn't DIE because of TV but took a big, big hit, came up with the concept of the "cinemaplex." More choice! More people can go see movies suiting THEIR taste, not the programmer at the local movie palace. I live near where one of the first American multiplex theatres, The Americana 5 in Panorama City, CA, was built in 1964. It had one "big room" for what was then known as "road show" releases, the big movie expected to be the blockbuster of the moment. It also had four smaller rooms...and I really mean smaller. 200 seat shoeboxes as opposed to the 1,000 seat "big room." People went anyway, and the theatre chains realized they could make more money because they'd go to the movies regardless of the amenities or lack of them. They didn't really have a choice in the pre-home video and pre-HBO/Showtime days. You either saw the movie in the theatre or you waited for it to come on TV, and that wait would be literally years.

Eventually the "big room" was subdivided in two in the mid '70s, and the Americana 5 became, for a time, the Americana 6. It was only due to the decline of the neighborhood and the competition of cable and home video that the Pacific Theatres knocked down the thin subdivision barrier and turned the two theatres back into "the big room" again. Amazingly enough, the Pacific Americana underwent a bit of a renaissance for a while. They would have events, geared towards the local predominantly Latino populace, where Spanish-language movies, free concerts after the movie and appearances by local Spanish-language radio personalities would be part of the fun. Selena did one event and the immediate area surrounding the Americana was mobbed. The LAPD had to be called in to do crowd control.

Eventually the Mann Theatres chain put in the Mann's Plant 16 a couple of miles down the road at the big-box mall that replaced the long shuttered GM assembly plant. This was what killed the Americana. The Pacific Theatre Group unloaded it on a couple of locals who went indie. It got more and more run down, started playing second-run movies in both English and Spanish for bargain prices, and when things broke, they stayed broke. The last movie I saw in the "big room" there was Prince of Egypt. The movie theatre that every year around Easter would play "The Ten Commandments" had its swan-song with another retelling of the Moses myth. It was sad to see the place go. The area where the four small theatres stood is now a school of cosmetology. The old "big room" was once an indoor futbol arena where people would play pickup soccer games, and is now a banquet hall which, ironically, boasts a nice big movie screen. It is also more ornate than the "big room" at the Americana ever was.

Anyway, huge digression. The multiplex movie theatre encouraged a degradation of movie theatre etiquette. Going to a little shoebox theatre was less special than going to the community movie palace. People didn't have the same sense of "occasion" going to the movies. In a lot of respects, the experience of going to one of these theatres was like the drive-in experience. Often a theatre chain would knock down a drive-in and replace it with a mega multiplex. They could show more movies to more people and it was a more intelligent use of land. And with the competition of cable, home video, "sell-through" home video, and finally the DVD, there were now real choices about how to see a movie.

So yeah, theatres are not exactly rolling in the dough now. There has been a surge of moviegoing instead of other "family vacation" kinds of things to do, as people opt more for "staycations." But it will not and never will be the same.

Me? I just prefer to wait a little while, get the DVD, and enjoy it at my leisure. No assholes yakking on the mobile phone next to me, no crying babies or tantrumming toddlers whose moms haven't the decency to take outside to calm, no people doing their own, unfunny MST3K treatment of the movie. I don't have an awesome super-cool home theatre system here, but it's decent. Good size 4:3 CRT tube TV, 2.1 sound. And the popcorn is cheap and ungreasy. Go ahead and "enjoy" the current theatre-going experience. I'll just be an old crank and enjoy a more civilized experience right here at home. Oh yeah, get off my lawn, punk. ;-)

He yam what he yam and the DVD set drops 7/31

Yes!

POPEYE ON DVD!!!

And this time it's being done right!!!!

I know Jerry Beck said nice things about the Warner Bros. Golden Collections which have been DVNR-ed to death and are not necessarily so great, but his estimation of the Popeye set sounds like he's genuinely thrilled about it. I'm hoping that this is not anywhere near like the abortion that was the Betty Boop DVDs, which again were DVNR-ed into sub-Korean Traceover mishmash.

FINALLY, the Fleischers get their propers. Hopefully this marks a new beginning at Warner Home Video...perhaps another try at the Boops might be in the cards? There's already scuttlebutt that a "Forbidden WB Cartoons" Golden Collection might be coming down the pike as well. The cover art for the Popeye set has a very important disclaimer: "Warning: these cartoons are not for children, but for adult cartoon fans." Perhaps Warner Home Video is finally taking the treasures in the WB film archives seriously, and giving them the serious treatment? I hope so, dammit.

And I hope there's advance copies at Comic-Con. That would be something fun to have to watch on the train trip back home.

Cold Iron

(Obviously, images © Marvel Productions.)

Readers of our old blog (and yes, I will rebuild it...things are just bad right now) remember how unsatisfied I was with Ultimate Avengers 2. Which is why I didn't buyThe Invincible Iron Man on DVD, but rented it. (See, Blockbuster does have some uses. You can look at movies about which you have little interest, and that includes most of their stock.)

For those of you not into comics, or Marvel comics, understand that Iron Man is one of the most right-wing of Marvel's characters. The original origin story (that sounds redundant!) had millionaire weapons maker Tony Stark visiting Vietnam to see his weapons in use. He was kidnapped by a Communist general, after he had a near-fatal wound to his heart. Being a genius, Stark built a chest plate to keep his heart beating. Then he added stuff to make it a complete suit of armor, with jet boots and force-field repellers in the gauntlets.

Marvel's writers have done things throughout the years to try to make Iron Man interesting, and they were only partially successful. They fixed his heart so he could start dating women again, and not worry about taking off his shirt to reveal his Iron Man chestplate. They gave him numerous kinds of armor for special missions. Tony Stark became an alcoholic, and during rehab, had one of his assistants wear the armor. An enemy stole his armor's secrets, and Iron Man hunted down and destroyed the duplicates - even though some of them were bought by the military, making Iron Man a traitor to the USA.

None of this changed the idea that, if Dick Cheney read comic books, Iron Man would be his favorite hero. Wealthy, unrestrained in his use of force, protecting his wealth and power no matter what. And in Marvel's recent "Civil War" story line he promoted the registration of superheroes with the government, hunting down some of his old friends - including Captain America, who was American enough to see it as an exercise in facism.

Downplaying "Old Shell-Head's" comic book past in this animated film didn't make it any better. The story line takes place in China, where "rebels" are the bad guys who capture Stark, not Communist officials. And the main contention is the raising of a long-lost temple, which happens to be the center of a cult. The cult succeeds, and obtains the rings of an ancient figure called the Mandarin.

In the comics, the Mandarin was a cliched Yellow Peril villain. Here, he becomes a ghostly supernatural force (not the best foe for a technological hero) who takes over the hot Chinese chick, Li Mei (voice by Gwendoline Yeo, the Asian housekeeper from last year's Desperate Housewives).

The animation, mixing cel and CGI, works fairly well. But it's in service to a story where you can't gain any sympathy for any of the participants. Gee, I guess it's nice that Iron Man saved China from an ancient undead sorcerer, and that the hot Chinese chick got de-posessed, but I still kept the fast-forward button pressed through most of this movie.

The blandness of the plot, despite numerous off-screen deaths, made me focus on something peculiar to these Marvel productions, quasi-nudity. The show starts with Tony Stark (Marc Worden) in a hot tub with a well-built bit player. Their "naughty bits" were well hidden by mysterious clouds of steam. Later, when Li Mei is posessed by the spirit of the Mandarin, her nude form is carefully covered by mysterious streams of silk that hide her details but reveal her curves.

Y'know, guys, you're not selling that many of these things to kids; why not make it R-rated and show some nipples? At this point, it might be your only selling point. That way, perhaps you'd find some pressure to actually give the characters some depth to differentiate nude cartoon characters from pure porn. (I wouldn't call the character "the hot Chinese chick" if she didn't have less personality than Wendi Whoppers. And if you know who Wendi Whoppers is, shame on you.)

The only positive thing I can say about this DVD is that they avoided the terrible "blooper" section from the Ultimate Avengers DVD's, especially the "Tony Stark's House of Ribs" jokes that not even the most hardcore True Believer would laugh at.

Marvel was hoping to hitch their wagon to the rising star of Spider-Man's live-action movies. It hasn't worked. Come to think of it, if they had a working knowledge of what made a good cartoon, they could have made a good Spider-Man animated TV series - or kept alive the interesting CGI Spidey series they did with Sony a few years ago. Instead, they tried these lackluster DVD releases, failing to intrigue comic fans and non-comic fans alike.

There's still one more Marvel animated DVD in the pipeline, but if the trailer from Doctor Strange included in this disc's extras is an example of that movie, Marvel should cut its losses and end production. They couldn't pull off this militaristic, power-mongering military hero. What makes them think they can pull off the dimension-tripping, hippie-dippy, philosophically complex Master of the Mystic Arts in animated form?

A different kind of Otaku no Video

Perhaps the most interesting thing I saw at Anime Los Angeles wasn't Anime, nor was it officially on the program. I saw a fansub of the first episode of the Japanese TV series Densha Otoko on someone's laptop, and was blown away.

The weird tale of the guy who called himself the Train Man on a Japanese chat room was first compiled into a book, then was made into a Manga. Then came this TV series, a stage play, and finally a movie. The anime that was referenced in the TV series and the movie, Getsumen To Heike Mina, is now unspooling on Fuji TV, having its premiere on January 17th of this year.

I missed the screening of the movie iteration of this story at San Diego Comic-Con this year. However, it's going to be coming out from Viz Pictures on DVD on February 7th. Perfect timing for giving to the Otaku or Otome Valentine in your life. The Manga is already in the process of release, and the last of three volumes will also be out in time for Valentine's Day.

I would like to also see this TV series given a legitimate release on DVD because the guy who portrays the protagonist in the series, Ito Atsushi, is incredibly good as a comedic actor. He's a little bit Jerry Lewis at his spazzy best, a little bit Jim Carrey before he got all full of himself, and a whole lot of fun. I haven't seen the movie yet, so I can't really judge the cast. But the TV series is worth it for Ito alone. Fuji TV broke my heart by not putting out DVDs of Iron Chef. Don't do it again to me, guys!

UPDATE: the Densha Otoko movie is NOT as good as the TV series, unfortunately. However, the commentary, done by Japanese Pop Culture expert Patrick Macias and two of his closest Japanese friends, is hilarious, and the DVD is worth buying just for that. Also it looks pretty unlikely that a Densha Otoko TV series Region 1 DVD release won't happen because of music clearance issues. So between this and the translated mangas this is what we Amerika-jin get of Densha Otoko-mania. So enjoy it.