So my blog has been getting a lot of blog-spam lately. At first I tried to delete all of the fake comments, but it's been getting really out of hand lately. Ryan said he'd try to install his spam-blocking thingy on my blog. It makes users type in a number to prover they're no "one of our robot overlords," as Ryan put it. I thought that was pretty great... spam really is the product of our robot overlords.
Meanwhile, I've been mirroring this blog on livejournal.
Also meanwhile, Maggie finished Jerksquad version 2.0 over the weekend! Hooray! The two year wait is over, and the site is very nifty and color-coordinated, with new features and only a few small bugs. Surely I'll use Jerksquad more now!
Meanwhile^3, Alison and I finished the comic on Friday night, for the RSOM 4 contest. We totally look forward to losing again. In the end, we kept Hal's title "Chronin", which is a truncated "Chrono + Ronin". By far, the following are my favorite three panels, because the characters could be saying anything:
I encourage you, the reader, to fill in the blanks 1-5.
Also on Sunday I saw the Yu-Gi-Oh movie!!! Yesssss!!! It's been getting rotten reviews everywhere, including at Rotten Tomatoes. Here are some choice quotes:
"Adults: If your child forces you to go to Yu-Gi-Oh! , remember that there's no law against iPods in movie theaters."
-- Lily Burk ,L.A. WEEKLY
"I took one for the team this week ... If your kid is a Yu-Gi-Oh fan, then God help you."
-- Willie Waffle ,WAFFLEMOVIES.COM
I sacrificed 90 minutes of my life points to sit through this and nothing I can summon is going to make up for that."
-- Cherryl Dawson and Leigh Ann Palone ,THEMOVIECHICKS.COM
These reviews were clearly written by parents and reviewers who had never bothered to watch the TV show - not even for five minutes. It's kind of like if you saw the Care Bears movie and never bothered finding out what Care Bears were. "I was totally unprepared for the upbeat and annoyingly sweet message the Care Bears film had to offer," one might say, "Like I never thought they'd be saccharin bears that actually 'care' and are clearly just a marketing ploy to sell stuffed animals."
The Yu-Gi-Oh TV series, is, by all means, one of the worst shows ever made. If it weren't animated it might be lower than Power Rangers. Every episode is marketing shill meant to sell more collectable Yu-Gi-Oh cards. The show is just 22 minutes of characters playing "Duel Monsters" which is a thin veil for the Yu-Gi-Oh card game itself. Every episode is, essentially, the "How to Buy Action Figure Man" episode. I pity the fool that walked into the movie theater thinking the Yu-Gi-Oh movie might somehow be different.
Now, I don't play collectable card games, let alone Yu-Gi-Oh, so its somewhat difficult for me to explain the appeal this show has for me. Once you get past the initial shock of watching such a ridiculous show (kind of like coming to terms with watch Sifl and Ollie - you have to get past the fact that they're sock puppets. Yes, sock puppets!), it turns out the Yu-Gi-Oh is mostly about nerds, arguing over the rules of a game. The rules are really complex, and I don't know them.
It's kind of like me playing D&D. After two years, I still haven't read the Player's Handbook. However, 90% of playing D&D is arguing about the rules, looking things up, knowing the exceptions to the rules and the exact statistics, and proving other players (or the DM) wrong. That's also 90% of Yu-Gi-Oh: "With this trap card in effect my monster has 350,000 attack points." "No! With my spell card, your monster only has 120,000 attack points, and if I sacrifice my dark magician, I can resurrect my Blue Eyes White Dragon Card from the graveyard, raising my attack points to 400,000 and my life points to..."
...you get the idea. Apparently in the Japanese version of the show there's also some homosexuality going on, but the TV series was sanitized for American television, leaving out the one thing of any interest in the show (this according to expert anime geezers at Otakon). Some of the sanitized-out elements are in tact in the movie. Pegasus (the man, no the horse) hits on Kaiba, for example. And Yugi totally gets stabbed in the back in a pretty violent scene. The dagger comes out of the front of his chest! This earns the movie a PG rating.
Pegasus is always drinking wine in the TV show (although the English script is careful not to call it that) but in the movie, he is drinking "white wine spritzers" or in another scene "red wine spritzer." That's something the voice actor who plays Joey kept making fun of when I was at that TMNT record - the specific line, "No more white wine spritzers before bed for me!"
So for me, as an armchair fan of the Yu-Gi-Oh TV series (in that same way my mom enjoys Power Rangers) I think the movie was alright. I expected to see some God Cards in play, and they were there. I expected some arguing about rules and super-rare ridiculous cards and even more ridiculous Egyptology, and the movie delivered. Some of the close-ups had this weird line-weight style, and some of the monster cards had weird or poor animation during their screen-time, but that was on par with the TV show.
A lot of the reviews complained about the scene where the characters harp on "the power of friendship", but that scene wasn't bad at all compared to a lot of children's programming. And it was, again, on par with the TV show, where in nearly every episode the characters keep saying that Yugi can win because his friends are cheering him on from the sideline (and to a lesser extent, he "believes in the heart of the cards") - we the viewers know that's obviously bullshit. Yugi can win because he's a skilled Duel Monsters player with the best deck (who's possessed by a Pharaoh's spirit), and not because his fairly wussy friends are cheering him on. The movie seems to try to drive home the point that Kaiba, even though he's the richest kid in the world, and even though he has three super-rare Blue Eyes White Dragon Cards (which I like to think of as the Frank Sinatra card) can't win because he's a jerk with no friends (and, to a lesser extent, doesn't believe in "the heart of the cards" enough). Kaiba even has a jet plane shaped like the Blue Eyes White Dragon. That's right - Kaiba has a robot dragon. But can he beat Yugi at cards? No.
The best part of this movie (and by best I mean, perhaps, funniest) is how they "raised the stakes" in the climactic scene. As is often the case in the series, all of Yugi's friends' souls are trapped in another dimension, leaving their bodies life-less and their eyes without pupils. Every time Yugi's monsters lost life points, Yugi's real body takes physical damage. Meanwhile the bad guy has a virus card that steals 10 cards from Yugi's hand in every turn. Yugi is down to two cards and only 150 life points (when he started with 4000). His last two cards are a spell card and a trap card - he doesn't even have any monsters left! Also the the fate of the world hangs in the balance - but who cares about that?! YUGI IS DOWN TO TWO CARDS! OH MY FREAKING GOD! That's a desperate situation if you're familiar with the TV show.
So that's my take on it. I wouldn't recommend this movie to anyone who doesn't enjoy Yu-Gi-Oh the TV series on some level, whether that enjoyment is ironic or not, it doesn't really matter. If you don't like this movie, that's because it's not for you.