This week on Badger Pod Nerd Cast:
Over the Garden Wall, a tale of two brothers and their strange adventures in an even stranger forest. Will they ever get back home before the Beast finds them?
Black Dynamite! Let me tell you a stor-aay! He’s a mean muthaf*cka and he’s super-bad! Hold on tight, it’s time for Black Dynamite!
Time traveler, crazy kid, or something more insidious? Let’s take a good look at Donnie Darko. Then maybe have some hasenpfeffer.
Join the Honey Badgers this week as we discuss fun, nerdy, and awesome things such as Patrick McHale’s animated miniseries Over the Garden Wall, the hilarious film to animated series Black Dynamite, and the cult cinema hit Donnie Darko! All from a red pill perspective!
SHOW NOTES
Donnie Darko
By Mike
He was killed by a falling jet engine.
The good thing about Donnie Darko is the spoilers don’t spoil anything. It’s a guy in a Halloween costume. See? Doesn’t even explain a damn thing. You need to watch Donnie Darko at least twice to even have a hope of understanding what’s going on. Much like Fight Club and Memento and Pulp Fiction, it has a very unusual plot structure. Taking the Foster-Harris model of there being three fundamental possible plots to a story arc: the happy ending, in which a sacrifice pays off; the unhappy ending, in which that sacrifice fails; and thirdly, the mysterious “Literary Plot” in which crucial events unfold to the audience in the wrong order. Sometimes chronologically, sometimes through story gaps and revelatory twists. The appeal of the literary plot is not to make the audience wonder what will happen next, but what *just* happened. Not “What are they going to do?” but “What did I just watch?”
And don’t we all love that feeling.
Until you untangle it, Donnie Darko is about a precocious, brooding teenager who has a series of metaphysical arguments with people as he tries to come to grips with high school life in the 1980s and various other hallucinatory experiences. Hallucinatory experiences mostly involving a night-crawling zombie man-rabbit called Frank, who appears in ghostly apparitions telling Donnie the world will end in 28 days. Donnie talks to his therapist at length about Frank. And about the strange time-travel phenomena he has been experiencing and reading up on. So the first time you watch the film, you spend most of it trying to figure out if this is just a story about a paranoid schizophrenic.
But once you’ve seen it and you’ve untangled it some, you see that it might be a film about what happens to people when they die—they live out an alternate universe, then they use time travel to exact their own death. It’s a vision of purgatory in which no one ever dies but by their own choice. Perhaps.
By the third or fourth time you’ve watched the ending, you’ve become open to the possibility that the entire story is inspired by what happens when two strangers look at each other and both feel weirdly, as though they’ve met before. Maybe they really were brought together in an alternate universe by the perambulating machinations of the manipulated dead.
If you like the feeling of forever wondering if you’re dead and none of this is real, Donnie Darko is the film for you. And even if you’re not a fan of that particular feeling, don’t worry. You won’t understand this movie.
Over the Garden Wall
By Rachel
Over the Garden Wall is either the epitome of this new age of cartoons or merely the beginning of the greatest series, surpassing anything that I’ve seen from the Cartoon Network in a very long time. Much of the notable works coming out of this new age rely directly on crowd funding and online audiences. Investors are much more careful than they once were, and many networks are hesitant to take risks.
If anything, Over the Garden Wall is a well-calculated risk. It’s a multilayered complex story about two brothers lost in an alternate plane of existence called the unknown. It’s unclear as to how they could be transported there or even what the unknown is. The only thing that is clear from the beginning is their desire to return home.
Wirt, the older brother, is serious and prone to worry. His brother, Gregory, is a stark contrast, being silly and often thoughtlessly entering dangerous situations. The two journey through the unknown in search of a way to return to their normal lives. On the surface, it seems cute and even safe in design, but beneath the surface are references to everything from Betty Boop to Dante’s inferno.
The place where this series really shines is in its storytelling and its ability to be both dark and wonderfully absurd. It’s well-planned, well-executed, and probably has one of the best uses of an animation budget that I have ever seen.
With Cartoon Network holding the purse strings, it seems likely that the budget was incredibly tight. Instead of blowing it on anything frivolous, they chose to spend their money on an amazing soundtrack and excellent voice talents.
There are beautiful details here and there, but much of the key animation is simplistic. What it lacks in appearance, it makes up for in storytelling and memorable characters. It is a wonderfully spooky world that challenges the norm and fuels our imaginations.
Most notable is the overall message of the 10-part drama. A message that isn’t one of love conquers all, or that happily ever after is within your grasp. Instead the message is one of personal responsibility and owning one’s mistakes. That only through acknowledging the truth can we ever get beyond our mistakes to be better people.
If this is the future of Western animation, then I welcome it with open arms. This generation needs stories like Over the Garden Wall, which aren’t afraid to be dark, intelligent, and honest while managing to be charming and entertaining. Over the Garden Wall is an immediate classic, and I sit in wait, hoping that its creators will continue to create work of this caliber.
Black Dynamite
By Brian
When The Man kills his brother, and puts the dope on the streets, he made one big mistake; he killed the brother and put the dope on the streets of the baddest and smoothest cat on those streets, Black Dynamite!
Black Dynamite is an outrageous action comedy-spoof following the exploits of an ex-CIA agent, Vietnam vet, full-time ladies man, and maybe pimp (it’s intentionally unclear how Black Dynamite makes an income) out to avenge the death of his brother against treacherous kung-fu masters, drug-dealing pimps, and The Man.
Black Dynamite is a kung-fu-fighting, pimp-slapping, gun-blasting, outrageously over-the-top parody of ’70s-era blaxploitation films that delivers big action, absurd laughs, and a groovy soundtrack, can you dig it?
Even though the film had a limited release in 2009, it had such a cult following that a spinoff animated series was made, bringing with it satirical humor while maintaining the hilarious absurdity of the film. In the series, Black Dynamite meets many black celebrities from the 1970s, from a coked-out Richard Pryor, to an evil Michael Jackson, to a lovable but unstable OJ Simpson. There’s even a gang war between American Bandstand and Soul Train. Black Dynamite brings big ass, black ass laughs so hard, they dipped they ankles in it!
TUNE IN THIS TUESDAY @ 7PM Eastern!
Art by Brian Martinez: brianmartinezillustrations.com
and
kukuruyo: http://kukuruyoart.deviantart.com/
Animation by Dr. Randomercam, see more of his work at https://www.youtube.com/user/DoctorRandomercam
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