Random Thoughts about Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs

Just a couple of things that have been floating around my head about Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. There are spoilers here, but as it's been out in theaters for over a month and will be on DVD in just about two months (January 5th! Yes!), I feel that it's safe enough to post. If you don't want to be spoiled, feel free to skip this.

Toward the end of the movie, as Flint heads off to stop the FLDSMDFR, he ends up putting together a Five Man Band of himself, Sam, Manny, Steve, and Brent, and this is how I see it breaking down:

Flint is The Hero, obviously.

Manny is The Lancer, with his cool and collected manner acting in contrast to, well, everyone else, really.

Sam is both The Smart Guy (she's the one with the Doppler Weather Radar 2000 Turbo, after all) and The Chick.

Steve is the Team Pet, also obviously.

Brent starts off as the Tagalong Kid, seeing as he basically invites himself along (and this is made especially clear when, after asking about his part in the plan, Flint tells him he can be "President of the Back Seat"), but he becomes The Big Guy with his rebirth as Chicken Brent.

Kind of makes me want to see a TV series of them going around, solving weird problems. In that case, Flint and Sam would share Smart Guy responsibilities.

I remember reading somewhere that in Disney's Beauty and the Beast, the character of Gaston was made to specifically be the Beast's opposite, not just physically but also in the sense that Gaston at first seems charming but has a hidden dark side while the Beast seems frightening at first but has a hidden softer side. I mention this because I think that this same sort of thing holds true for Flint and Brent.

First off, there's their roles in the town. At the start of the movie, Brent is effortlessly adored by the whole town, and has been since infanthood, while Flint, despite his best efforts, is not very well-liked by anyone. With the success of the FLDSMDFR, their roles begin to reverse, until the world is cheering Flint's name and the same people who once delighted in Brent now have no respect for him.

Secondly, there's the matter of their appearances. The most obvious is that Flint is a basically stick thin while Brent is...not. At all. The next obvious contrast is their hair colors, brown for Flint and blonde for Brent. Not to mention Flint has these huge hands, whereas Brent's hands are much smaller, especially in comparison to the rest of him. However, there are also a number of things that they have in common lookswise. According to The Art and Making of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, Brent and Flint are the only characters built all the way down to their toes (as Flint's spray-on shoes are slightly translucent and Brent always wears sandals). They both have that crazy hair thing going on, and they both have blue eyes (granted, so do most of the characters).

I find it kind of interesting that in the first scenes of the movie, where we see both Flint and Brent as children (I'm guessing seven or so), Flint looks basically the same as he will as an adult, head-shape and hair-wise, but Brent has neater hair and a rounder head as a child. Yet, they both already have the outfits they will wear throughout their lives: Brent is wearing a monogrammed blue tracksuit, and Flint is given a professional grade labcoat, although he still has to grow into it.

Elefun and Friends?

Well, my Blockbuster blues are slightly cured, as one of my discs finally came today, the official debut of the new MLP style in animation, Twinkle Wish Adventure. I'll be blogging that one soon, but before I get to it, I'm taking a quick look at a bonus short that was included on the DVD. Titled "Elefun and Friends," it is apparently a tie-in to games like (natch) Elefun, Gator Golf, and Hungry, Hungry Hippos. At first I thought it would be your typical, run-of-the-mill, children's show, and while it does generally follow that format, it put in some scenes that surprised me.

I mean, to start off with, the short begins with Elefun and his roommate Froggio getting some breakfast, while a lighthearted tune plays in the background. Froggio gets the spoons and starts drumming along to the tune on a piece of furniture, then jumps onto Elefun's head and starts drumming on him. Elefun doesn't seem to mind, but then he suddenly trumpets, blowing the frog off his head and into a coconut bowl. While Elefun just watches, their butterfly friends pour first cereal and then milk in both bowls, right on top of Froggio. Guess Elefun wasn't so keen on being a drum after all. Shortly thereafter, Elefun goes out for a morning swim, and upon seeing the empty pond suddenly fill up with all manner of animals, he cannonballs into the pond, splashing everyone else out quite intentionally. Sheesh.

The main plot kicks off when Elefun finds a kite shaped like a dragon stuck in a tree. Rather than send Froggio or the butterflies up to get it out, he decides that following the string to its origin will help him to get it unstuck. If you say so, Elefun. As Elefun states his dedication to following the string, even through jungles and deserts, Froggio begs out, only for Elefun to fix him with a withering glare until he agrees to come along. After that, things are pretty run-of-the-mill, with Elefun following the string through different countries, picking up the occasional companion, and learning the word "friend" in different languages. It isn't until they reach the actual end of the string in China that things pick up again. That's where they encounter a purple panda trying to treebuchet using bamboo over a river to the end of the string. She only gets halfway, leading this this exchange:

Elefun: Wha'cha doing?

Pandarama: Sipping tea. What does it look like I'm doing?

Spin: Sinking.

Pandarama: Who asked you?

Elefun then goes on to introduce himself and his hangers-on to her, and when he asks if she wants to be friends, she instantly replies, "No!" although she does backtrack, as she slips toward the water, "So, let's just say I want to be friends, not saying for sure, but pretend I do. What does that get me?" That's good enough for Elefun, and he devices a plan to help her across: she can slide down Giraffalaff's neck. Giraffalaff objects to this, though not because Elefun's being awfully presumptuous here, but because he has an embarrassing secret (and amusingly, when he asks Elefun if he can keep a secret, Froggio pops up to say, "Well, no," and Giraffalaff rebukes him, "I wasn't whispering to you!"), which everyone finds out anyway: he's afraid of heights (and sure enough, he's kept his head low the entire time). He even goes off on a soliloquy about how he hates eating the brown leaves on the ground, but the green leaves are too high for him, prompting the panda, still hanging from her bamboo, to ask him to solve his lunch woes later. Eventually he sticks his neck out and rescues Pandarama. With their friendship cemented, Elefun calls her a friend, and Pandarama corrects him with "朋友", pronounced "peng you," as Froggio explains to the audience, although not to Elefun, leading to this:

Elefun: Peng You is a pretty name.

Pandarama: My name is Pandarama.

Elefun: Then who's Peng You?

Pandarama: You!

Elefun: No, I'm Elefun.

Pandarama: Of course you are.

There are a few more hijinks that ensue to finish up the episode, but that's basically the end of the good stuff. Pandarama was seriously the best part of the short, and voiced by Katie Leigh, although I really wouldn't have placed her without looking. The animation is done by Renegade Studios, who also did The Mr. Men Show, which I mention because a few of the voices also come from that show (Phil Lollar, Danny Katiana, and the previously mentioned Katie Leigh). While the animation itself is fluid, the edges on the characters are occasionally choppy, most noticably on Elefun. I don't know if I would check out a whole series of this, but I would definitely make a point to watch a few Pandarama-centric episodes, especially if the writing perks up a bit.

It Just Bugs Me: The Busy World of Richard Scarry

I'm getting right down to business this time around. When I was younger, my sister and I watched a fair amount of Nick Jr., and almost always watched The Busy World of Richard Scarry. Which is why, to this day, I still burn with rage when I remember the terrible inaccuracies about different cultures and world history they fed to unsuspecting children. The show was in a "three shorts" format, and while most featured the gang from the Busytown books going about their Busytown lives, there would be the occasionally story about recurring detective characters (there were at least two different ones, if I recall correctly) or historical events. Only, as I said before, they were not anything close to the truth.

I don't remember the detective stories well enough to have that much rage against them, except for one, where the female detective went to China and had to solve the case of the kidnapped noodle chef. Only, it turned out that the guy who kidnapped the chef only did it because he always slurped his noodles and got banned from the restaurant for doing that (I think). Only, and even as a kid I knew this piece of information, in China and Japan you're supposed to slurp your noodles. It's a sign that you're enjoying your food. *headdesk*

But it's the show's attempts to tell a historical story that really brings up the ire in me. I mean, according to The Busy World of Richard Scarry, sandwiches were invented because the Earl of Sandwich's servant got distracted and forgot to wash the gloves aristocrats wore to eat food (what?), Amerigo Vespucci was a stowaway on Christopher Columbus' ship, and Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel's ceiling because he couldn't get the Pope (or maybe just a Father) to stop messing with the mural he was doing on the walls. There are more, but those are the ones I remember best.

I guess what really bothers me about these gross inaccuracies is simply that I don't understand why the show's producers thought it was necessary to completely change the story of history, or why they wanted to include historical segments anyway. It just makes no sense.

Cloudy With a Chance of Whistles?

I saw Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs a couple of weeks ago, and I enjoyed it, even if the whole fathers and sons thing was too heavyhanded IMO. And I've recently been relistening to the OCR of Anyone Can Whistle, which made me realize that there's a bit of similarity between the two. Not a lot, mind you, but some. For instance, both take place in a town that's fallen on hard times due to their main industry falling flat for a rather silly reason. In ACW, the town made a product that never wore out, thus, no one needs to buy anymore, and in CWaCoM, the town's sardine industry goes down the tubes when the world realizes that sardines are "super gross." And in both, the towns are revitalized by a "miracle" (water spurting from a rock and raining food, respectively) that is taken advantage of by the mayor. Of course, in CWaCoM, the food rain is actually created by a machine, but so is the water from a rock in ACW, although the mayoress and her cronies try to pass it off as a genuine miracle. And frankly, the mayor from CWaCoM could very easily sing the mayoress' opening song, "Me and My Town," with lyrics like:

Come on the train, come on the bus,
Somebody please buy a ticket to us.
Hurry on down-
We need a little renown.

Fitting, as the mayor's first scene is him announcing his intention to unveil something to put the town on the map. Over the course of the movie, the mayor's motivation is to build himself up using the town's fame, which is what ultimately leads to the third act, and meshes nicely with the mayoress' main motivation, which is, as her song states, "Me and my town, we just wanna be loved."

The second similarity is slightly spoilery, so if you're planning on seeing the movie, feel free to skip the rest of this post (although really, it's not a spoiler that will ruin your enjoyment of the movie).

Anyway, in both Anyone Can Whistle and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, the female leads (Fay Apple and Sam Sparks) have a persona they put on to hide their true selves, which they only reveal (at first) to their respective male leads (J. Bowden Hapgood and Flint Lockwood). Sam hides her geeky self behind a perky, "dumb blonde" TV personality, while Fay uses a Wig Dress Accent to get around her rigid, by-the-book self. However, the male leads react differently to their ladies' secret identities. Flint encourages Sam to embrace her inner geek, including inverting the usual "Glasses Gotta Go" scene, but Hapgood encourages Fay to relax and be free on her own, basically to be who she is with the wig, but without it.

Other than that, though, the two stories have little to do with each other, which is to be expected, considering ACW is forty years older than CWaCoM.

Sushi Pack Coloring Books

I finally got around to picking up the Sushi Pack coloring books last month, although I've put off blogging them, since there isn't too much to say about them. The second is mostly images from the first, but with different captions. Really, the only thing of note concerns Oleander. The coloring books posit that Oleander is her last name, and her first name is actually Fatima *dry laugh.* I'm not sure if this is canon or not, though, since it never came up in the show. I always assumed that she was simply going by her first name, and in my own personal fanon, her last name is White (mostly because I kept mistakenly referring to her as White Oleander in the early days). Apparently there is also a sticker book now, I'll have to try and track that down soon.

In a related note, a reader sent me a link to this doll that looks rather Kani-esque:

Blockbuster Blues

Unlike those folks who use Netflix, I get my movies-in-the-mail from Blockbuster, which goes back to when I was in college and had at least five Blockbuster stores I passed regularly when traveling by bus, and I used to get two free in-store rentals per month as part of my subscription. Now, there are only two or three stores nearby (and none of them any closer than fifteen minutes drive), so I've dropped that part of my subscription. But I still get the movies by mail, and for the most part I enjoy what I see, except for the odd occasion where I completely forget why I put a movie in my queue by the time I actually receive it (not that I don't enjoy it, but I do wonder about myself sometimes).

Lately, though, I've been faced with a slightly frustrating situation. You see, over this week, I've received three DVDs, but none of them are the ones I put at the top of my queue. What bothers me about this is simply that I put two movies at the very top, so as to get them next. Both are listed as Available, so availability shouldn't be a problem. And yet, as each DVD was returned and new ones sent out, those two were skipped. I understand that there's more to the DVDs being sent than just running down a list, but still, it's very vexing. One, I could understand, but both of them being skipped three times?

Now, my subscription is the three-at-a-time variety, and yet, I was surprised to get two discs in the mail today, since I already had one and had just put one in the mail to go back. Well, earlier this week, I reported that a DVD I had returned hadn't shown up on my profile page yet, and I'd sent it in two weeks before (and another DVD I'd returned since then had already shown up). So they sent the next DVD (but not, you know, the next DVD. Or, come to think of it, the DVD of Next, although they did send that to me once by accident) that day. So now I'm guessing that the DVD I returned finally made it back there, and so they sent another DVD anyway. Except, they sent a DVD that they already sent (the same one, I think, that they sent when I reported that DVD missing in the first place). This could be an indication that the computer system over there has gotten slightly messed up, which could very well be why the two DVDs I want keep being skipped over. But really, I'd better get those movies soon.

Fun With the IMDB Again

Once again, the IMDB has broken my brain. I was looking at the things Richard Horvitz (Daggett from Angry Beavers, Zim from Invader Zim) has done, and while I knew most of them (aside from a few "additional voices" credits), when I got to toward the end of the list, I just stopped cold. Why, you ask? Because he was Alpha 5 from the original Power Rangers series. And I honestly have no idea how to feel about that. At the moment it's ranging from "I can't believe it!" to "That makes so much sense now!" to "Is this really true?"

(Not relevant, but I would like to point out that it was my younger sister who was into Power Rangers, thus I saw a lot of it due to her.)