electric relaxation

The skills go back to the days of wonderama

- “Day One”, D.I.T.C.

While others spit that wonderama s—,
Me and my conglomerate
shall remain anonymous

- “Dead Presidents”, Reasonable Doubt, Jay-Z

Got no time to be f—in with them Wonderama n—–

- “Make It Hurt”, Genesis, Busta Rhymes

So who or what was Wonderama? I couldn’t find anything relevant in Wikipedia or on Google, other than the song references (and there are more where those came from).

This past Saturday I attended Aunkur and Tina’s wedding at City Hall. The Bharat ceremony was held in the big Civic Center square out in front, complete with forty minutes of Bhangra, a white horse and a “band” consisting of two motivated Punjabi guys, one with a loud voice and the other with a big drum.

It was pretty spectacular, in that it was a pretty big spectacle. I don’t think the homeless guys napping on the lawn appreciated the disturbance, but we put on a good show for the tourbus that pulled up.

Pictures from my Alaska trip are up on Picasaweb.

Aside: I was entertaining the thought of switching to Picasaweb as a replacement for the gallery (especially since it’s broken right now), but instead I got off my ass and switched my website to Dreamhost. I’ve actually been paying for an account there for the past six months but I got lazy and frustrated before finishing my initial attempt at the conversion. So hopefully I can actually keep it up for more than two days at a time, the previous record I managed before my apartment got too hot and the media center machine overheated.

I started trying to write up a description of the trip but I’m lazy and it was too hard to fight the forces of hyperbole and lamenicity. So I refer you to Lisa for a better description. Anyway, the flight on the 1959 Beaver into Wrangell-St. Elias national park and the glacier hiking (with crampons) were my favorite parts. I wish they made crampons that worked on concrete.

Wow. Apparently a single animation studio in Japan was responsible for all of the “bad-ass” old school cartoons ever:

• Transformers series and Transformers: The Movie
• The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 5-episode pilot
• Dragon Ball Z
• Voltron

Here’s the complete list of Toei Animation productions.

I watched the new Transformers live-action film today. It was almost uniformly terrible, with precious few mitigating factors. One thing I did like were some of the foreshadowing, and references to the cartoon and the original 1986 feature film, including:

• The bumble bee “bee-otch” air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror of the Bumble Bee Camaro.
• Sprinkling out “more than meets the eye” and other catchphrases throughout the movie.
• The Volkswagen Beetle sitting next to the Camaro Bumble Bee in Bernie Mac’s car dealership.
• The voices of major characters, including Optimus and Megatron.
• Megatron’s head/helmet.
• Nearly all of the dialogue in the final battle between Optimus and Megatron.

The only truly worthwhile thing to come of it was the motivation to find and watch the original 1986 film again. I just did, and was struck by how truly awesome it really is - it’s even better with age.

I found this section of the Wikipedia article on the film particularly interesting. Fortunately, I don’t feel that the intrusion of real-life politics and business really dampens the value of the film itself.

An intention of the movie was to rid the Transformers cartoon universe of the majority of characters from seasons 1 and 2. Story consultant Flint Dille elaborated:
“ In the next season (3), we were going to have all these new characters, and people are going to be wondering what happened to the old characters that they liked so much. What we knew, in a business sense, is that they had been discontinued, because they were the 1984/1985 (toy)line – but, we needed to tie them off. So, we had this one scene where the Autobots basically had to run through a gauntlet of Decepticons. Which basically wiped out the entire ‘84 product line in one massive “charge of the light brigade”. So, whoever wasn’t discontinued, stumbled to the end. That scene didn’t make it into the finished movie. But if you think kids were locking themselves in the bedroom over Optimus Prime, basically in that scene they would’ve seen their entire toy collection wiped out.[1] ”

The movie was produced by Sunbow/Marvel simultaneous to G.I. Joe: The Movie. The writers of the G.I. Joe film asked for permission from Hasbro to kill a character, Duke. Hasbro not only approved the request but “insisted” that the writers of Transformers: The Movie adopt the same fate for Optimus Prime.[2] However, Optimus Prime’s death sparked some controversy which later caused the writers to make changes so that Duke simply ended up in a coma.[3]