L.I. Underhill is a media critic and historian specializing in pop culture, with a focus on science fiction (especially Star Trek) and video games. Their projects include a critical history of Star Trek told through the narrative of a war in time, a “heretical” history of The Legend of Zelda series and a literary postmodern reading of Jim Davis' Garfield.
Over the summer, I posted a rough draft of what I called a “Reading Guide” for Tom and Jerry. You know. The cat and mouse cartoon. I’ve since rewatched the series and revised my picks and criteria, so here’s “Version 2”.
(Also, apparently something happened with the latest DTV Tom and Jerry movie? Apparently it went mememtic this summer without me noticing?)
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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the history of animation, particularly during the Golden Age, these past few months for a variety of reasons. I used to watch theatrical shorts all the time on Cartoon Network and I have a real affinity for that genre, but I think I’ve come to the conclusion now that Tom and Jerry is probably my favourite out of all the Golden Age series. Naturally, it’s the most controversial one.
Some of the criticism I find perfectly understandable. Some of it I find utterly preposterous and born from media illiteracy. But to take the more valid complaints, while there are certainly some pretty appallingly racist shorts in the Tom and Jerry catalog I tend to find this disproportionately overemphasized in modern criticism, making it seem like racist jokes and stereotypes made up far more of a percentage of Tom and Jerry’s humour than they actually did. I don’t actually find Tom and Jerry to be on average worse on stuff like this than Disney or Warner Brothers’ output, it just looks worse for Tom and Jerry because MGM never outright banned any of their most egregious outings like the competition did (I would count WB’s “Censored 11” as far and away worse for the time than just about anything Tom and Jerry ever did, and that Disney’s Peter Pan was allowed to skirt by unchallenged is a resounding source of ire for me).
On the whole, Tom and Jerry comes across to me as the most consistently creative, inventive and reliably excellent series in the entire Golden Age. I don’t think Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera always get quite the credit they deserve for sticking around the industry as long as they did (especially when their rivals were starting to visibly flounder), or for being the gifted comedic talents this series demonstrably shows them to have been. Other studios had a much harder time grasping the cartoon morality (let alone comic timing) Tom and Jerry perfected. And I was very surprised to see that Chuck Jones’ run on Tom and Jerry seems to be held in such low esteem by both Chuck Jones fans *and* Tom and Jerry fans: For someone who claimed to not understand the characters, I always thought he sure handled them well.
But more than that, Tom and Jerry is workmanlike, and I mean that in the best possible way. It constantly tries to adapt to a changing environment, and its humour is truly universal: Somewhat famously (and tellingly), Japan considers Tom and Jerry one of the greatest “anime” of all time, and it’s the only Western series to consistently make people’s Best Of lists.
This is the first year I’ve paid serious attention to Gamescom, which basically amounts to Europe’s E3. Perhaps it’s because I’ve even less chance of getting to go it than I do to E3, but it’s kind of a blank spot in my games journalism career, if you want to call it that. But with a suite of teases at this year’s E3, not a lot of solid details and a whole slew of games all coming out in the next 2-4 months I’m actually interested in, I figured it was time to give the big game show on the other side of the Atlantic a try. With Bethesda saving most of its content for QuakeCon, which ran at the same time last week (which I’ll get to later on), and me not being terribly happy with Sony and Microsoft it was naturally only Nintendo I cared about, so here’s a rundown of what they did at Gamescom this year.
I’m not sure if companies do the big press conferences at Gamescom like they do at E3-If they did I didn’t see anywhere to stream them, and either way Nintendo seemed to once again go the route of releasing information directly to its fans through its own social media profiles. So strap in, it’s time once again to overanalyse some trailers.
Fire Emblem Warriors is a game that I’ve gotten progressively more interested in as the months have gone by. I don’t know much at all about Fire Emblem as a franchise: The earlier games’ permadeath turned me away from what basically amounts to Medieval Fantasy Advance Wars, but the corner it seems to have turned as of Fire Emblem Awakening on the 3DS, making the permadeath optional and adding in a visual novel/dating sim style relationship mechanic (clunkily implemented as it is) seems to have made it into something that seems marginally more up my alley. I was all ready to put down cash for Tokyo Mirage Sessions ♯FE on the WiiU in spite of my total disinterest in Persona, Shin Megami Tensei, Fire Emblem and JRPGs in general simply because that game looked and sounded freaking awesome, but the collector’s edition turned out to be *way* more money than I wanted to spend at that time, especially with the WiiU at death’s door in 2016 and other releases causing me to have an existential crisis about the video game medium. I do still kind of want to at least add that to my collection given its critical acclaim, possibly if I can get it at a budget price, but it’s definitely not a priority anymore.
In the end, it took Omega Force releasing a musō game based on the franchise to get me to really pay attention to Fire Emblem for the first time. My hunger for any and all things musō cannot be satiated, and I’ve been desperate for another game like this I can take on the go with me and play without an Internet connection since grinding Hyrule Warriors Legends into dust last year, and in lieu of a proper Dynasty Warriors Empires or Samurai Warriors Empires release on the Switch I initially thought I’d have to settle for this.
Sonic Mania released this past week on consoles, with the PC version delayed a few weeks for additional tweaks and optimization. This is one half of SEGA’s 25th Anniversary celebration for Sonic the Hedgehog (the actual anniversary was last year, but that’s just how SEGA rolls), a game made by a team of former Sonic fangame developers led by Christian Whitehead, famous for his HD remake of Sonic CD and his extremely high-quality conversions of Sonic the Hedgehog and Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Sonic Mania, as you might expect, is thus a game self-consciously indebted to the style of the earliest Sonic game releases and plays out as a kind of fan’s version of Sonic Generations: A bunch of “reimagined” classic stages with the occasional crop of new material, but this time done in a manner that slavishly attempts to recreate the style of the original games on a new platform.
This is not a review of Sonic Mania. I don’t even have the game as of the time of this writing, though I do have the Nintendo Switch version of the special collector’s edition on preorder, primarily because I thought the display statue and faux-SEGA Genesis stand would look nice in my room stood next to my library. It is a game I’m looking forward to, as you can probably tell, and I do have something special planned for it later in the year. I am not, however, looking forward to it as much as I am some other releases coming out in the next few weeks and months (the fact I not only do not have the game, but I don’t even have the console to play it on should probably speak to that), and it would seem I’m not looking forward to it anywhere near as much as certain other individuals, if the press’ crop of reviews is anything to go by.
The enthusiasm for Sonic Mania has been nothing short of rabid, and the professional reviews for it have been glowing in a way typically reserved for things like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (particularly perceptive longtime fans of mine will know where this is going). Amongst the expected slew of reviews declaring Mania “a return to form”, there’s been many a re-evaluation of the Blue Blur’s history to date, and one author even made the analogy that Sonic is the Bugs Bunny to Mario’s Mickey Mouse, with their sympathies clearly lying firmly with the wabbit (Given the fact that, when faced with the age-old binary of “Disney or Warner Brothers”, I’m the asshole who picks “Tom and Jerry”, my thoughts on liberal Nerd Culture’s veneration of Looney Tunes are many and varied, but would require an essay of their own). But the reviews have been something else too: Nasty. Not towards Sonic Mania, of course, but towards basically every other Sonic game ever made that isn’t Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Sonic CD and Sonic 3 & Knuckles.
Update 8/29/2017: And now the original XBOX One has been discontinued to make room for the XBOX One S (which is *different* from the XBOX One X). Only two years and nine months after it was released. Think about that, and remember how the SEGA Dreamcast was considered a colossal failure.
Can I make an appeal to the video game industry? Can we cool it with the technological determinism shit already, please?
Just…stop it.
I want to apologise in advance if this turns into more of an angry, ranty polemic than what I’m comfortable presenting these days, but I’m deeply upset this week. I’ve always been exasperated and annoyed with the line of thinking in games criticism that graphics tech is the most important thing in the industry and needs to be privileged above all else, but at this point I’ve officially had it. The state of the current industry is so out of control I don’t really even have words to express how stunned and aghast I am by the aggressive, mindless technofetishistic lust that seems to be driving almost everyone on both sides of the Pacific right now. The most blatantly obvious example is the grotesque display that is the current console market: We’re supposed to have hardware cycles of 5 years or so between revisions and new machines, but then somebody told Microsoft and Sony about Apple’s business model with smartphones and suddenly we’re in an era of “mid-generation hardware revisions” for $500 computers. We didn’t even get 3 years between the PlayStation 4, touted in 2013 as the most powerful thing to ever anything, and the PlayStation 4 “Pro” that supports 4K resolutions, which Sony seemed so embarrassed about they didn’t even announce it until it came out. Meanwhile, Microsoft is about to unleash the XBOX One X, a machine that is so obscenely overpowered I’m convinced it comes from some outer space futurescape and that mere mortal humans aren’t worthy to wield it. Certainly nobody I know is rich or crazy enough to be able to get it to do what it’s supposed to do.
(Meanwhile, Nintendo came out with the Switch after just managing to squeak five years out of the WiiU, but that’s primarily because with the WiiU and 3DS Nintendo momentarily forgot absolutely everything they learned about branding and marketing in over a century of trading. I’ll come back to them a little later.)
None of this is of course new. Microsoft’s strategy with the XBOX One X to push 4K reminds me of what they they tried to pull with the XBOX 360 in 2005 to push 1080p (the one that forced them to rebrand and slash prices a couple years later). And there is, of course, a precedent for this going back decades. I like to pick on Sony here for how they set the discourse for the fifth generation with the original PlayStation, but I probably also have to blame SEGA of America for how they marketed the Genesis in the United States, openly bullying Nintendo and Nintendo’s fans by saying that faster processors and better graphics chips were blatantly, objectively better in every instance and anyone who thought otherwise was a dumb crybaby.
This past week I treated myself to two recent Blu-ray releases that oddly seem to compliment one another: The brand new Collector’s Edition release of Species from Scream Factory (which gives the film a proper HD transfer for the first time and features a whole slew of interviews, making-of featurettes and commentary tracks), and Funimation’s Blu-ray/DVD Combo Pack release of their localization of Shin Gojira, known as Shin Godzilla in the US.
I currently don’t have access to an HD TV so I can’t actually watch most of the material here yet…I haven’t even touched Species, which is killing me because this set looks really interesting: Just the prospect of getting people like Natasha Henstridge and Michael Madsen to talk candidly about their experiences with that curio is tempting enough, but add to that the fact there’s an alternate ending included and I truly cannot wait to be able to put this set through its paces. Whenever I get the chance I’ll be sure to give this release a proper analysis and any re-evaluations I come to will definitely influence the revised version of the Species essay that will go in what will hopefully be next year’s book release.
I also can’t watch the main disc of Shin Gojira yet, but since a print of the film is included on DVD in this set I am able to watch that on my laptop. So the other night I sat down to watch the first new true Godzilla movie in twelve years for only my second time to see how it holds up a year later, and to see if I could hopefully make better sense of it this time around.
I’ve loved the Godzilla series forever. Godzilla 1984 is a movie whose imagery is burned into my psyche, and was probably one of the first pieces of genre fiction to really have a big impact on me. I always remember being mesmerized by the movie poster and the haunting, out-of-context movie stills of Godzilla prowling around the disquietingly empty neon canyons of Shinjuku, still lit up as if the night shift salarymen were still making their rounds. In fact, it’s probably directly responsible for a not-insignificant portion of my aesthetic preferences. In the 90s I remember being exposed to both the Hanna-Barbera Godzilla cartoon show and the Trendmasters Godzilla action figure line (which was my big clue the film series was still going) at about the same time, and I always made an attempt to watch the older movies whenever they would show up in horror movie marathons or if I found a copy at the local video store. When I first saw the original Gojira I was blown away by its maturity and tone, and it’s a film that’s only grown with me and I understand better the more I learn about Japan and East Asian history and culture. Then came 1998 and the TriStar reimagining and Godzilla was big in the West in a way I’d never seen before, and getting to see Godzilla 2000 in theatres two years later was a thrilling experience even if I was one of only four people there.
Today’s video over at my channel is the first in a new series featuring full playthroughs of a number of different video games, all centred around the same set of themes and motifs. These will probably be split up into 15-30 minute episodes of pure gameplay footage. First up, the original BloodRayne from 2002, which was available on the Nintendo GameCube, PlayStation 2, XBOX and PC. I’m playing the PC version, modded for controller support and widescreen HD resolutions. Now I know this perhaps doesn’t seem like the kind of game I typically like to talk about and some of you might have questions about that, but all I can say right now is to please trust me-I’m going somewhere with this 🙂
Edited text from the video description:
Bloodmoon is a series that looks at the evolution and apotheosis of specific themes and archetypes throughout various video games via the medium of full playthroughs with open discussion prompts.
Questions and observations:
Why does the intro cinematic seem to be, at first, trying to mislead us into thinking Rayne is a villainous monster when it would have been immediately obvious to anyone buying this game that she was the protagonist?
Rayne’s look and general persona are derived from that of a classical dominatrix. What BDSM themes, if any, can you find in the game going forward and what ramifications does this have for how we should read it?
According to the game’s official backstory, during this opening tutorial sequence Rayne is technically only still a teenager. Do you think this influences how Laura Bailey chooses to play her?
In Romanian folklore, where such legends are almost exclusively derived, the traditional name for creatures like Rayne is not “vampire”, but “strigoi” (thought to be derived from the Greek “strix”, which referred to a nocturnal bird of ill omen). Only male strigoi would have been comparable to what we think of as vampires: Rayne, being female, would specifically be a “strigoaică”, which simply connotes a witch or sorceress. Of course, an important part of the game’s story is that Rayne is only *half* vampire, or “dhampir”, a reference to Balkan folklore which emphasized male vampires’ patriarchal lust to dominate women.
Much modern American art and folklore is inspired by places such as the Louisiana Bayou and Mississippi Delta region and is about coming to terms with its place in the nation’s collective consciousness. The birthplace of the blues, the only true musical style invented by the United States and home to the deepest of the deep South, and all that goes along with that, many would argue this region is the “real” heartland of the United States.
In Neopaganism and Wicca, the Moon, especially when full, is associated with the power of the Sacred Feminine. However, myopic and appropriative beliefs stemming from the ubiquity of these schools have misled people into thinking the Sun is “always” masculine and the Moon is *always* feminine, even though Solar Goddesses have been prominent in many cultures throughout history.
At long last, after two weeks, the accompanying commentary for my Sonic Generations Aquarium Park superplay is finally up on my YouTube channel thanks to me spending the weekend in a place with a dramatically better Internet connection than where I live.
I talk about it in the video, but this was originally meant to be cut from outtakes of the recording session for the original superplay video, but in the end I recorded a whole new session just for this commentary. That wound up being good though, as I learned a few more tricks and techniques between the recording of that video and this one that I think makes the run I close out with here better than the one I uploaded before! Other topics of conversation include parkour, the discipline of training, movement and Japanese spiritual philosophy.
The video itself is kind of a hybrid experiment for me. I’ve been told working from more of a defined a script would do me well, so I wrote one this time. I vastly underestimated how far 3000 words would get me though, so the back 2/3 is completely off-the-cuff and extemporaneous, which should provide a nice contrast! I actually think I work better unscripted, but you can decide for yourself which style you like better!
Video clocks in at just under 1 hour, 12 minutes. I like these longer videos for commentaries and discussions, but I think I’m going to try and limit them to livestreams from now on because this was a *nightmare* to upload and my hard drive space is dwindling at an alarming rate. When next we meet on YouTube I may start work on what I hope to be the channel’s first marquee series: A game showcase featuring a full playthrough split up into different episodes. Stay tuned, I suppose.
Don’t forget to subscribe if you want to see these as soon as they come out and, not to press the issue too much, but I do have a Patreon to hep support this and other endeavours. Thanks as always for watching and supporting any way you can, and I’ll see you next time.
“There are many paths leading to the top of Mount Fuji, but there is only one summit-love.”
-Morihei Ueshiba
Simple pleasures for simple minds, so the saying goes. Many a joke over the years has been made at the expense of Odie’s celebrated idiocy, surely to the delight of Garfield‘s Cat Person target demographic everywhere. And truth be known Odie is not a particularly complex being: Not so much irrational or prerational as nonrational, Odie is guided by mere existence. He doesn’t stop to let his superego overanlyse his actions largely because it’s not entirely clear he has a superego. Certainly Odie will never be in any danger of being paralyzed by an overactive mind. Within Garfield‘s Funny Animal satire of modernity, Odie offers the biggest challenge by being the biggest diegetic commentary on the strip’s fundamental artifice: Odie is the one animal character who acts in accordance with stereotypical Western ideas about animal minds-Pure, unthinking, instinctual being.
Certain schools of Taoism and Advaita Vedanta Hinduism would probably find a lot of commonality with Odie. As the embodiment of pure “I Exist”, his character lends itself well to being read as a metaphor for the simple bliss of calm, unexamined presentness. We are all seeking happiness and peace and, such sages would tell us, we deprive ourselves of them both when we focus too much on our thoughts and our conscious mind. True enlightenment, they would argue, exists simply within the concept of existing itself: Being aware of consciousness and being at peace with that. Other disciplines encourage the pursuit of enlightenment through trance and meditative states of keeping one’s mind similarly clear and empty. It is tempting then to leave the analysis here-After all, what’s the point of clouding our being with thoughts when true bliss and enlightenment can only be found within the absence of such things?
Garfield, however, has always been about presentness, so the argument that Odie and Odie alone is the gatekeeper to that knowledge does not hold. This is the setup to today’s joke, in which Garfield exclaims that “Odie has discovered the secret to happiness!”. The great tragedy of modernity is perhaps not a lack of presentness, but a lack of respect for presentness and its virtues, and this is what the constantly thinking cat satirizes. Happiness is something we all claim to be searching for (the United States even cites “the pursuit of happiness” as a central ideal upon which its nation was founded), yet so few of us are engaged in practice that actually allows us to manifest within a state of genuine bliss. And if anyone has found such a secret in the world of Garfield, it would certainly appear to be the dog: Odie is very rarely depressed or upset-His grin, while vacant, is indeed one of happiness. For a strip depicting a universe of unceasing boredom and banality, Odie’s unwavering contentment with himself and his lot in life provides a tempting role model many may wish to emulate.
I spent all weekend writing, recording and editing the video I wanted to share this week, but seeing as how I left my laptop on for 12 hours straight to upload it to YouTube and it only ever got 29% of the way there (and then I lost the Internet, deleting all of my progress), I’m not especially in the best of moods right now.
In the meantime, here’s a rough draft of something I’ve been playing around with lately.
My sister and I have been rewatching a lot of older cartoons recently and I’ve been thinking a lot about the history of animation. I used to watch theatrical shorts all the time on Cartoon Network and I have a real affinity for that genre, but I think I’ve come to the conclusion now that Tom & Jerry is probably my favourite out of all the Golden Age series. Naturally, it’s the most controversial one.
Some of the criticism I find perfectly understandable. Some of it I find utterly preposterous and born from media illiteracy. But to take the more valid complaints, while there are certainly some pretty appallingly racist shorts in the Tom & Jerry catalog I tend to find this disproportionately overemphasized in modern criticism, making it seem like racist jokes and stereotypes made up far more of a percentage of Tom & Jerry’s humour than they actually did. I don’t actually find Tom & Jerry to be on average worse on stuff like this than Disney or Warner Brothers’ output, it just looks worse for Tom & Jerry because MGM never outright banned any of their most egregious outings like the competition did (I would count WB’s “Censored 11” as far and away worse for the time than just about anything Tom & Jerry ever did, and that Disney’s Peter Pan was allowed to skirt by unchallenged is a resounding source of ire for me).
On the whole, Tom & Jerry comes across to me as the most consistently creative, inventive and reliably excellent series in the entire Golden Age. I don’t think Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera always get quite the credit they deserve for sticking around the industry as long as they did (especially when their rivals were starting to visibly flounder), or for being the gifted comedic talents this series demonstrably shows them to have been. Other studios had a much harder time grasping the cartoon morality (let alone comic timing) Tom & Jerry perfected. And I was very surprised to see that Chuck Jones’ run on Tom & Jerry seems to be held in such low esteem by both Chuck Jones *and* Tom & Jerry fans: For someone who claimed to not understand the characters, I always thought he sure handled them well.
Of all of the Golden Age output, Tom & Jerry seems to always deliver the shorts I would never think twice about putting on as straightforward entertainment. So I’ve been working on a list that I hope puts Tom & Jerry back in a slightly better light among progressive litcrit-types.
Cheating a little bit this week as I teased and released this video two weeks back, but because of E3, the Elder Kings livestream and Zelda (not to mention the effort it took to record this video), plus some personal stuff, I couldn’t get a second video out in time for today. I wanted to do a video on Titanic: Honor and Glory’s new demo, which just came out, but given that thing is 6 gigabytes and I have joke Internet, downloading, installing and learning it in time to record, edit and upload a video on it wasn’t going to happen in a week. Did get some stuff on the Steam Summer Sale, and hopefully some of that will show up on the channel someday soon.
But hey, this should still be new to many of you.
A “superplay” is what we used to call a tool-assisted speedrun without the tool assits. It’s what we did to hone our focus back before people could add hacking tools to video games. It is a finely tuned runthrough of a video game level based on personal familiarity with and mastery of a game’s mechanics and layout. I take it to mean a run with no mistakes, taking no damage and moving in a stream of unbroken movements and actions.
This is a video of what I’m calling a “superplay” of Aquarium Park, a mod stage for Sonic Generations based on a level from the 2010 Wii game Sonic Colors. I’m going to talk more about this in a future video, but to me this level perfectly encapsulates everything I love about Sonic the Hedgehog games, so I thought making a video about it would be the perfect way to celebrate Sonic’s anniversary. It’s in many ways the definitive example of everything I want from one type of video game, and it’s the kind of game SEGA does better than anyone else.
Blaze the Cat, for those understandably unaware of the Sonic series’ Byzantine lore, is basically the female version of Sonic from an alternate universe. She has all his powers and abilities, just in slightly different forms. I really wanted to play as her for this for a lot of different reasons, so thankfully there’s a mod that lets me do that!