Isegoria

I was mildly disappointed by the Walking Dead compilation I read, but I’m still intrigued by this annotated Google map that shows the real-life locations of the fictional events that take place throughout the zombie apocalypse.

(Hat tip to Boing Boing.)

Terry Gross of NPR’s Fresh Air interviews Mike Judge on Extract, his new movie starring Arrested Development‘s Jason Bateman — who plays the head of a vanilla-extract company.

This inverts the point of view of Judge’s early cult-hit, Office Space, which is from the hapless employees’ point of view. Only after Office Space and after Beavis and Butthead had grown did Judge understand the plight of the hapless employer.

He also discusses Idiocracy. I was hoping he’d mention Cyril M. Kornbluth’s The Marching Morons, from 1951 — which I recently read, in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two — because it is clearly the basis for his movie.

Through the interview I found out that King of the Hill is only now coming to a close — and The Goode Family has already been cancelled. Sigh. At least I got to listen to an NPR host ask Judge about the show — delightfully awkward.

Steve Sailer suggests that Quentin Tarantino’s gifts may be better suited to a different career:

Surely, for example, Tarantino would have made an ideal Artistic Director of the Roman Colosseum during its heyday under the Emperor Commodus. “I’ve got it! We’ll start with a Mexican standoff among three gladiators, 27 Christians, two Nile crocodiles, and a giant squid. They eyeball each other tensely… suddenly, all hell breaks loose!”

He would also have served admirably as the Idea Man in the Ministry of Truth’s Fiction Department. Here’s an extract from Winston Smith’s diary that’s Tarantinoesque avant la lettre:

April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films. One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean. Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away with a helicopter after him. First you saw him wallowing along in the water like a porpoise, then he was full of holes and the sea round him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though the holes had let in the water. Audience shouting with laughter when he sank.

Granted, if Tarantino worked for Minitrue, this bit of action would have been preceded by 17 minutes of exhaustively clever dialogue riffing on sinking ship scenes from old movies, famous and obscure. The default trajectory of Tarantino’s screenwriting is to dissipate momentum until the story lies dead in the water, only to desperately jolt it back to life via carnage.

Robert Zemeckis is in negotiations to direct a remake of the 1968 animated Beatles feature “Yellow Submarine” for the Walt Disney Studios:

Like all Zemeckis’ animated productions — among them “The Polar Express” and “Beowulf” — “Submarine” would be done in performance capture and would be a digital 3D endeavor.

I don’t want to sound like a Blue Meanie, but seriously?

I can only imagine what the Venture Bros. Season 4 Trailer looks like to the uninitiated:

Izabella St James has written a book, Bunny Tales, about her time as one of Hugh Hefner’s girlfriends:

Being a Hefner Girlfriend was a specialised job, not to be confused with being a Playboy Playmate. In fact, Girlfriends were not allowed to become Playmates because Hef had found that they tended to flee the Mansion as soon as they collected their $25,000 Playmate cheque. Girlfriends were given their own bedroom, an allowance of $1,000 a week in cash, a new car, free dental and medical treatment, almost limitless clothes, hairdos, make-up and facials and all the cosmetic surgery they could wish for — Izabella reckons Hef shelled out $70,000 a year on breast implants.

It was a very generous deal in many ways, but it did have its drawbacks. First, there was a strict curfew, so unless you were out with Hef, you had to be back in the hutch by 9pm. Second, while you could order any food or drink you wanted, at any time, from one of the many Mansion “butlers”, you were not allowed into the kitchen, even for a glass of water. And third, of course, you had to live in the extraordinarily dingy Playboy mansion, where all the furniture was falling apart, the mattresses were stained and the carpets were covered in dog poo. I remember visiting it in the early Nineties and being struck by its shabbiness then, and evidently it was the same or worse when Izabella moved in. Part of the trouble might be that Hef does not actually own the mansion; he has to rent it, room by room, from Playboy Enterprises and, according to Izabella, pays $25,000 a month for his own bedroom.

But the real drawback was Hef. Stuck in his perpetual Groundhog Day, padding around in his pyjamas, eating all his meals in bed, watching the same classic films with the same old cronies night after night, going to the same bars — Las Palmas on Wednesdays, Barfly on Fridays — the only variation in the routine was restaurant night on Thursdays when the Girlfriends were allowed to choose where they went. But even so, Hef always took his own food, lamb chops. And even when they went out for parties or special occasions such as the Grammys, Hef would only stay long enough to have his photo taken before herding all the Girlfriends back into the car. Surrounded by phalanxes of security men, and roped off in VIP ghettos, they never had the chance to meet anyone.

The girlfriends weren’t all friends, and Izabella got kicked out of the house just before the enemy faction went on to star in The Girls Next Door.

If you grew up on too much Johnny Quest as a kid, might I suggest Toby Danger in “Doomsday Bet” — from the first season of Freakazoid:

I just learned that it wasn’t originally intended for Freakazoid though:

“Toby Danger” wasn’t actually created for “Freakazoid!,” though. Tom Minton, a writer for “Animaniacs” who specialized in parodies of other genres and styles of cartoon (he’d done a famous episode of “The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse” incorporating vicious send-ups of other cartoon series), came up with the idea to do an elaborate parody of “Jonny Quest.” The names would be changed, the character designs would be different, and even some of the characters would be entirely different (instead of Hadji, we got a teenage girl named Sandra Danger), but the inspiration would be obvious. The “Toby Danger” cartoon was written and storyboarded, but it wasn’t put into production because no one could figure out where to put it: the limited-animation, non-cartoony style it required wouldn’t have fit in with the very cartoony style of “Animaniacs.”

Then “Freakazoid!” was suddenly revamped from a straightforward adventure-comedy into an out-and-out comedy, and with very little time to produce the new series, the producers were putting in just about anything they could to get 13 episodes ready in time. So “Toby Danger,” with a script and storyboard ready to go, was put into production and aired as part of the second episode of “Freakazoid!” Some people liked it better than the rest of the show; me, I liked it all.

As storyboarded by Brian Chin and Butch Lukic (who are both caricatured in the cartoon, along with Minton), it’s a great-looking cartoon (though a lot of retakes apparently had to be done because the overseas studio initially didn’t make the animation limited enough), perfectly capturing the style and look of “Jonny Quest,” and all the infamous things like the casual racism (“Heads up, you heathen monkeys!”) and the scream everybody lets out when anything bad happens (“Aieee!”). But What makes “Toby Danger” a great parody is that it goes beyond just mimicking the style and look of the show and actually attacks the themes and messages of the original show.