Jesse's Summer of Improvised Vegetable Shakes: Sweet Potato!

So, um, yeah. Sometimes I agree to weird stuff, and then make it even weirder by deciding to make it an official thing! Vegetable shakes? Sure, why not, let me arbitrarily make this a thing.

I'd originally intended to start off with a carrot milkshake - that's the idea from which my summer experiment emerged - but it seems like SOMEONE in this house is dead set on stealing my carrots, every single time I buy them, as soon as possible. So let's settle for something that probably makes more sense as a milkshake in the first place. Something SWEET. Sweet potatoes!

D52 Week 29: The Rescuers Down Under!

It's easy for someone in this day and age to look back and say, "Why, golly gee willikers, everybody! Disney was on such a hot streak by this point, why would they even bother making a sequel to such a minor film as The Rescuers?" As though The Little Mermaid instantaneously gave the company the right to immediately return to full-blown arrogant cockiness. But, how was Disney supposed to know, really? Proportionately, Mermaid wasn't a much larger box-office smash than The Fox and the Hound, which also had a relatively big budget. And what happened when Disney took THAT film's success to mean they could have some degree of confidence in themselves? The Black Cauldron happened, that's what! By this point, Disney had been financially bipolar for SO LONG.....how was Jeffrey Katzenberg supposed to NOT grow more paranoid with each and every box office success? Minor though it may be, The Rescuers WAS a success, and through Katzie's haze of paranoia, a safe sequel to a relatively recent success probably seemed like, well....the safest possible way they could proceed. Of course, NOW we know that it..............wasn't. Insert your favourite cliché pertaining to hindsight here!

D52 Week 28: The Little Mermaid!

Here's something I was discussing with my tasty li'l cupcake, Taylor, while we were watching this, that I feel would be worth recycling here, for her to re-read, and also, the one or two other people who might pay attention to this blog. (And the poor souls who stumble upon my blog while hoping to find actual, substantive information on "Bongo", which nobody remembers, at all.) Romance, as a "genre", seems to be subjected to even more scrutiny than just about anything else, and that's because, well....it's one of the most subjective things in fiction, isn't it? You can judge a mystery by how well the logic ties together, for instance, and even something as objectively subjective as comedy CAN kind of be measured. (PROTIP: Chickens are always amusing.) But romance....EVERYBODY has a different view of what romance is, and so, in my mind, setting out to write a romance is a really risky thing!

For instance, some people see a sense of noble sadness in unrequited love, whereas others think it's just creepy. (When it happens in real life, who feels what way about it tends to depend very much on who's, um, giving, and who's receiving.) And some people feel brightness and happiness and general optimism when they hear tales of "love at first sight", whereas others will say, hey, c'mon, dudes, that's just silly and impractical. And then there are the idiots who think falling in love with one person means abandoning everyone else of importance in one's life, which is...well, I'd like to think that's more objectively stupid, but maybe it's not? Actually, for proof of how much people's taste in romance differs in weird ways, look no further than Twilight. THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO FIND THAT ROMANTIC. And there are apparently weirdos out there who find The Little Mermaid romantic, too, though I am, shall we say............not one of them.

D52 Week 27: Oliver & Company!

Did you know? The Disney Renaissance is just around the corner! Next week, it officially kicks off with The Little Mermaid, and....well, okay, I have a confession to make, I've never actually seen it in its entirety, I don't think. I've heard the songs, and I remember the silly male anatomy-related controversies, but for one reason or another, I've never actually watched the movie itself. So, for now, I'll unquestioningly agree with what the animation scholars tell me. It must be good, right? I mean, the main character is a redhead, and they're some of my favourite people, sexually.

But first, Disney needed a kick in their pants to recommit to the movie musical format. And so, here, we have a smaller-scale effort in the musical department. Oliver & Company deserves credit for being, in a way, what ultimately served to point Disney towards one of their longest winning streaks in years. What else does it deserve credit for? Ummmmm......well, Young Joey Lawrence probably appreciated the work to bridge the gap between Gimme a Break and Blossom, maybe?

D52: The Halfway Point Roundup Thingamajig!

Oh, hey, look at the time. Apparently we're already halfway through this silly little project! Twenty-six down, twenty-six to go. (Weird to think that nearly half of Disney's films were released just in the last two decades, isn't it?) What have I taken away from this so far? Well, um......pioneering as they might've been, there's no denying that Disney's early stuff is HIGHLY uneven. I can't think of a single film so far that I liked 100%, with no major caveats. When Disney himself was in charge, a recurring hang-up I had was the general lack of emotion characters tended to display, especially females in abusive situations. And then Wolfgang Reitherman came along, and gave everything visual character, but also made for stories that were, undeniably, pretty shallow. And then.....well, let's just say that it's clear that they didn't know where to go from there.

But now the Disney Renaissance is around the corner, and that'll be an entirely different story! And hopefully a better one. But, before we march forward into a fairly thick gauntlet of princesses, allow me to take a look back and share a few things I liked, and a few others I didn't, in the best format of all: ARBITRARY LISTIES.

D52 Week 26: The Great Mouse Detective!

It's a bit strange, when you think about it, that Sherlock Holmes first popped up one-and-a-quarter centuries ago, and is being borrowed so heavily from even to this day. Earlier this millennium, the formerly number one rated drama on television, House, was a fairly blatant ripoff homage to Holmes, at least conceptually, and actually was pretty much only amusing when Hugh Laurie got to pull the old Holmesian deduction routine. Even more recently, Hollywood-type people have decided to stop beating around the bush and just revive Holmes wholesale, with those insane big-budget films directed by Guy Ritchie, and the supposedly quite good (and presumably less insane) BBC series, and the upcoming CBS series which sounds like basically the same thing as the BBC series, but boring, and with an audience in their eighties, because it's CBS. So, yeah. The Sherlock Holmes stories still have legs.

That still doesn't mean it's not a strange concept to adapt the Holmes universe with mice that aren't Holmes and Watson, but happen to live in the same flat as they do, and have many of the same character quirks, so they might as well be. I can get behind the idea that Basil thinks Sherlock is totally rad and wants to emulate him, even though the movie downplays this to a confusing degree. But, really, what are the odds that this Holmes-adulating mouse would just happen, conveniently, to meet another mouse, that is exactly like Watson in every way, even down to his participation in the Second Anglo-Afghan War? For that matter, why were mice participating in that war at all? It's a really bizarre concept for one book, let alone several as well as a major motion picture. It's nuts! But let's not hold that against it, okay?

Squaring the Cylinder, or All's Wellbutrin That Ends Wellbutrin!

Hi. Sometimes I still have weird thoughts that aren't related to Disney films! Tonight's one of those nights where I'm having trouble sleeping, because anti-depressants have a way of simultaneously making me drowsy and giving me insomnia. (They also have a way of making me more depressed, always, no matter what it is. Truly, anti-depressants are the masters of confusing contradictions!) I'm hoping that having to endure my own ramblings on will finally be the thing that renders me unconscious for the night.

So, let's say that, hypothetically, you were an employee of some sort of government agency, of the sort that has to drug test a bunch of people. Let's look past the idea that you've somehow stumbled into a job where you have the misfortune of having to process copious amounts of urine, which sounds like a pretty horrific nightmare to me, as it would be to anyone, really, who isn't gross and icky and awful. (Hello, unspecified former roomie!)

Your hypothetical job is a very delicate one, of course. There's so many ways that things could go horribly awry. We've all heard about that silly myth about how indulging in a tasty poppy seed muffin can mark you as a reprehensible heroin addict and, oh wait, it's totally not a myth at all! And then, of course, there's the issue of pills.

D52 Week 25: The Black Cauldron!

In 1959, Disney released their noble experiment, Sleeping Beauty, their first film produced using the Technirama process, allowing for a wider picture and more detailed art, especially the backgrounds, which artist Eyvind Earle poured a theretofore unprecedented amount of time into, to get them juuuuuust right. The film was also an exercise in crafting a darker, more realistic narrative than was standard for the studio at the time. (It immediately followed a particularly fluffy movie about doggies in lurve, after all.) And Sleeping Beauty was such a smashing critical and commercial success that, twenty-six years later, they decided to recreate that magic with The Black Cauldron, another unusually dark Disney fantasy filmed in glorious Technirama!

By which I mean, nobody really liked Sleeping Beauty, and it lost Disney a lot of money, so I don't know why the fuck they thought it would go any better this time. Actually, it managed to go even worse. Idiots.

D52 Week 24: The Fox and the Hound!

I know, I know. I'm running really far behind on these. I have my excuses, of course - the people who matter know, and the people who don't matter don't know. But, for now, I'm gonna pretend that my slowness in getting this up is just my homage to the laid back country bumpkin ways of the characters in The Fox and the Hound. Yeah, that's the ticket. And, I suppose I have to make a confession right out of the gate. As someone who lives in rural America, I kind of hate rural America. (There's a LOT of Amos Slades living 'round these parts.) I'm probably predisposed to dislike this, in the same way that I was predisposed to dislike Pixar's Cars. But, y'know, we'll see. It's interesting to note that Walt Disney really didn't set many of his features in rural settings, though. Even the ones that DID feature, like, barns and shit only included them as an obstacle for characters based in more urban settings, e.g. 101 Dalmatians. So, for as traditional and old-fashioned and horribly dated as it might seem, this really IS still a studio with an identity crisis trying new stuff and seeing what sticks.

D52 Week 23: The Rescuers!

Wow. It's already the last week of this project that I can whine about Wolfgang Reitherman? Though I've enjoyed the "sketchy" animation over the last decade and a half, it's been obvious that I've been increasingly unimpressed with his habit of recycling, over and over and over again. (Perhaps calling it "recycling" is, itself, giving this practice too much credit. I love recycling! But this....this is just lazy.) But, then I realise that I can't really whine about him all that much this week either! With a couple other directors also, um, directing, and a bunch of new animators stepping up, there's a distinctly different feel from any other Disney film, not only during Wolfgang's wolfreign, but up to this point in general. You'd think that change would be a good thing by this point, but The Rescuers would be their last reasonably successful film for, like, twelve years. I guess they could only keep cannibalizing their past efforts to maintain the post-Waltie goodwill for so long. Now, the studio has to try, and fail, on their own merits, which is probably not the best thing in the world for them. Why, it would take some sort of miraculous renaissance, of some sort, to save them from themselves!