Disney, Star Wars, and so on…

I’m just over the line of too old to have ever had any kind of serious affection for Elmo, as he wasn’t the “big thing” on Sesame Street until years after I was too old to be watching. Never the less, my heart is breaking for the GenY folks who now have to go through this: Kevin Clash, the performer who has puppeteered and voiced the character since 1984 (recently the subject of the well-recieved documentary “Being Elmo”), has taken voluntary leave from the series in order to defend himself from allegations of an innapropriate relationship with an underaged accuser.

This sucks.

  The whole thing raises a massive amount of red flags, most egregiously the fact that the accuser and his attorneys took their issue to Sesame Workshop first rather than the police (officially, there have been no criminal charges) automatically looks like straight-up “settlement-extortion” stuff… but in terms of “guilty or innocent, this guy’s career is probably screwed” that’s somewhat beside the point.

Thus far, Clash has admitted to having been in a relationship with the accuser, but when he (yeah, I know, I’ll come back to that) was of legal age. Sesame Workshop, however, notes that he (Clash) had been disciplined for “poor judgement” regarding company email – plausible translation of that? He was corresponding with the accuser in some way when he was underage (the now 23 year-old man claims the relationship took place when he was 16) but they didn’t “get together” until he was a legal adult.

To my understanding, that chain of events may or may not be technically illegal… but it doesn’t look “good” at all for Clash (who’s in his 40s) to be skating that close to over-the-line when he’s a public figure in an industry involving children. Sesame Worskshop is merciless when it comes to ditching characters, storylines and segments at even the hint that their presence might in some way negatively effect their intended audience (the entire Snuffalupagus “everyone thinks he’s Big Bird’s imaginary friend” characterization was famously junked and retooled when it was pointed out that kids might be taking it as confirmation that adults wouldn’t believe them about… well, use your imagination) so if this thing snowballs I can easily imagine them either pushing Elmo (the nominal “star” of the series for over a decade now) to the rear or dropping him completely.

The fact is, even if Clash didn’t break any laws… it sounds like he’s made at best some questionable decisions. And given the way the media works now, just the known facts of the case right now are enough to fuel a year’s worth of outrage (are the wretched dwellers of right-wing forums already celebrating the scandal because it reflects badly on PBS? Of course they are…) and bad jokes, which will almost certainly taint the character – a beloved icon of (at least) two generations. A whole lot of kids grow up with an Elmo toy (and plenty of adults still have theirs) and it’ll likely be impossible for them to avoid hearing about this and thus impossible for this not to become one of the main things they think about when they look at them now. Something that was “pure” for a lot of people is now tainted.

And that sucks.

Now, just for the record: I would be saying that it sounds like Clash exercised questionable judgement (re: getting involved with a teenager, legal aged or not) regardless of whether or not it was a younger man or a younger woman – and Sesame Workshop would almost certainly be reading him the riot act wither way… but let’s be real: The only reason this is a scandal in the media is that the accuser is male. If Clash was being accused of being “involved” with a 16 year-old girl, well… there’d still be “jokes” but they’d be of the “Duuuuuude! Elmo’s a PIMP!!!!” variety, the story would be over in a week or two and the guy’s career would not be in the jeopardy it is right now. You know it, I know it, it’s a lousy double-standard but it’s how things are.

Either way… not enough is known yet for me to say I feel “bad” for the guy, since even the best case scenario boils down to him behaving pretty irresponsibly IMO. The people I feel bad for are the Sesame Street-aged (and maybe a little older) kids who’re having to hear “Elmo did something bad” on TV, radio, web or general conversation today; and for their parents who’ll now be forced to have very difficult discussions about what’s “going on.” That breaks my heart.

As you may have heard, “The Game OverThinker” is undergoing a bit of a shakeup. The original series has made the leap to Blip as “The Adventures of The Game OverThinker” – a trailer for which is now available at THIS link:

Meanwhile, we also recently debuted the ALL-NEW spinoff series filling TGO’s previous spot at ScrewAttack, OVERBYTES!

http://blip.tv/play/AYOI3BsC.html?p=1http://a.blip.tv/api.swf#AYOI3BsC

James Rolfe, aka “The Angry Video Game Nerd,” is more or less the godfather of my entire ridiculous profession; and like a lot of us, he also started out as an aspiring filmmaker. Now, he’s finally gone and parlayed his online persona into a feature film of his own making… and I think it looks pretty damn good:

Yes, fine – the “Gen-X geeks on a reference-ladden road trip” premise is by now a whole genre unto itself, but considering this is “The Movie” of the webseries that helped create a lot of the memetic in-jokes that seem to populate this I’m willing to let it “slide” if the movie itself is fun, which looks to be the case. Good on you, Nerd – can’t wait to see it.

Alright, people. This has to stop. Now. It’s not fun or funny anymore.

It has always been my policy on this blog that anyone can post anything they want, but I will not tolerate thread-jacking or harrassment of other commenters – any other commenters.

I understand that, like any open forum, this site has it’s trolls. I accept that as a reality and delete them where I find them. I understand that there are some regulars who see themselves as “helping” me by harrassing and picking on certain trolls, and while I appreciate the spirit the fact is it does much more harm than good.

Also, while I’m annoyed by (and won’t tolerate) trolls… the fact is that a lot of people who engage in this kind of behavior do so at least in part because they are suffering from serious personal and/or psychological issues of their own and I’m not interested in making their lives any worse than they already are by trying to “bully” them into going away – nor will I allow any posts by others trying to do so stand without prompt deletion.

All regular commenters can consider this your final warning: If this bullshit continues (on ALL sides) I am banning anonymous comments again and this time it won’t be temporary. I don’t want to do this, as it innevitably lowers traffic and cuts into my income, but I Will. Not. Tolerate. Bullying. Of ANY kind. On this blog.

Do we have an understanding?

As good as you’ve heard.

Know what else is good? “Lincoln.”

Rachel Maddow is my favorite TV News personality. Not necessarily because of her politics, but because I like the way she puts on a show: Funny without being unserious, serious without being maudlin, obsessed with the history/politics geek minutiae of the news business but without the unctuous, obnoxious macho swagger that you got from Keith Olbermann or Bill O’Reilly.

I’ll happily admit that she’s as “biased” in favor of her own opinions (it’s an editorial/opinion show, after all) as the likes of O’Reilly and Hannity are, but I’ll offer sincerely that it’s not really at the same level because a lot of her biases are not so much in favor of leftist political THEORY as they are biases in favor of apolitical fact. That’s really the difference between the “Left” and “Right” in America now: Conservatives aren’t just asked to defend the theoretical philosophies of Ayn Rand, Ronald Reagan etc but also a set of provably false lies about evolution, climate-change, life-science, birthplaces of certain persons, etc. Liberals, for all their faults, don’t have that problem… they ONLY have to defend their philosophy; all the other things American Liberals are expected to “believe” (evolution is real, climate change is real, etc) aren’t beliefs at all – they’re proven, settled, demonstrable FACTS.

Which is why this clip of Rachel Maddow “gloating” over the results of the 11/06/2012 election is quite possibly the least biased 3 minutes of cable news you’ll watch for a long time:

Here’s the new trailer for Tom Hooper’s “Les Miserables” movie, the big hook of which (apart from “OMFGTHEYFINALLYDIDLESMISSQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!”) is supposed to be that the singing was all done live on set for the cameras and mics, as opposed to ADR’d in later like usual. So… yeah. Lots of well-liked actors performing a visibly-taxing physical feat onscreen, adaptation of legendarily beloved novel/broadway mainstay, cue torrent of Oscars.

The hook of Max Brooks’ “World War Z” was that it told a mostly conventional zombie movie story (zombies happen, things go bad) in the style of a historical narrative. Judging by it’s trailer, “World War Z: The Movie” – which is already almost-garaunteed to be a huge pile of shit, BTW (seriously, your movie is so bad that a Damon Lindelof ending is going to HELP!? – has opted to just be a mostly conventional zombie movie. Brad Pitt stars, because other actors were starting to get jealous of him having been in nothing but really good movies for the last half-decade or so and Brad Pitt is humble like that:

So… doesn’t look TOO bad, but also doesn’t look deserving of Brooks’ awesomely exploitationish title. If you’re not going to film the book, then a title like “World War Z” where the Z is for Zombies should be selling something that looks like “Starship Troopers” crossed with “Planet Terror;” whereas this just looks like the flashback parts of “I Am Legend” with less interesting cinematography.

BUT, I’ll give it this: Zombies are reliable enough that if you can’t think of anything new to do with them narratively something new visually can still be “good enough;” and in this case swapping their default behavior patterns from “feral humans” to “fire ants” looks like it could maybe do the trick – the “zombie wave” is a money shot if I ever saw one, regardless of how the rest of the thing is.

I don’t think I’ll ever be “okay” with fast zombies, if only because it just doesn’t “work” with that whole “walking dead-person” thing that’s supposed to be the whole point of this particular monster. When “28 Days Later” invented this schtick, part of the new angle it took was that it was “zombie horror” but with creatures that weren’t zombies – they (“The Infected”) were something else. I feel like we should’ve stuck with that, instead of conflating the new “Infected” monster with the then-resurgent zombie meme.

Maybe that’s still the best move: Someone should come up with an entirely new classification for “Fast Zombies.” It would actually make more sense, since the whole point of Zombies as monsters was to play on fear of death and the fast ones aren’t really doing that – especially not in THIS. I like the wave/ants motif partly because it’s the next logical extension of what Fast Zombies represent – no fear of death, but fear (and, let’s get real, hatred) of other humans. A big, writhing, mindless, vicious horde of humanity (but “de-humanized” so it’s okay to enjoy mowing them down, importantly) bulldozing over and through everything in it’s path? That’s not about death anxiety, that’s about… well, take your pick: Overpopulation? Urban sprawl? Crowd panic? General disconnect from “everyone else” in our increasingly self-centric modern lives?

The Future, as it must, has defeated The Past.

Obama winning is important. His presidency being both historic AND successful is important to the narrative of history. But, more immediately, American voters have – whether by intent or incident – protected the Supreme Court from anti-choice, anti-science nominees for another four years and maybe longer… NOTHING was more important than that.

However, other things of profound importance were either decided or are in the process of being decided tonight. Among them:

Puerto Rico has voted, for the first time, “YES” on a non-binding referendum stating that they wish to become the 51st full member-state of The United States of America. Both Obama and Romney were on record as saying that they support and would sign off on the change, but if this really does get to the U.S. Congress expect a massive fight from Republicans – the zealously anti-Hispanic Tea Party wing of the GOP will not support a predominantly-Latino Spanish-speaking territory becoming an American State. In a very real way, this could be the biggest thing that happened tonight.

Marijuana has been legalized or semi-legalized in at least three more states than before by solid margins. This is the beginning of the end for Marijuana prohibition.

When the next session begins, more Women will sit in the U.S. Senate than ever before.

One of those aforementioned women, Tammy Baldwin (Democrat, Wisconsin) is also the first openly-gay woman to be elected in U.S. Senate history.

Four states had gay marriage legalization ballot initiatives on their ballots. Previously, such initiatives have either lost or won AGAINST marriage-equality 30 times with no victories. Tonight, all four were affirmed. The tide is changing.

Here in Massachusetts, archetypal preening alpha-male bully Scott Brown was trounced by Progressive firebrand Elizabeth Warren – kiss my actual working-class Boston guy ASS, Scotty.

The down side to all of this is that there will be no “wakeup call” to the Republican Party. The spin tomorrow morning will be that Romney lost because he was too moderate, not a “real” Christian and not a “real” conservative; and the push will be on to run a true believer next time. They will only become more intractable, more fundamentalist and more committed.

But, still, little by little we are improving. With each battle won over the forces of “tradition,” anachronism and superstition; persons of open-mind get one step closer to building the Superior America that we both need and – to be frank – deserve for the 21st Century.