Author silverstar

Beyond the Background: The Ghoul School

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Today’s installment of Beyond the Background spotlights that rare sub-species in pop culture: the all-female Monster Mash. Today we’ll be shining the spotlight on a gang of monster girls who all attend a special school together.

Ah, no, not them. Believe it or not, kiddies, there was another ghoul girl gang before Monster High. Today we’ll be looking at the girls from Miss Grimwood’s Finishing School for Ghouls, the finishing school for the daughters of monsters, as featured in the Hanna-Barbera Superstars 10 TV movie Scooby-Doo and the Ghoul School.
"Those Monster High bimbos think they're so hot. Let's see them rock these bitchin' tutus!"

“Those Monster High bimbos think they’re so hot. Let’s see them rock these bitchin’ tutus!”

Scoob, Shaggy and Scrappy were employed at Miss Grimwood’s boarding school for a single school year as gym teachers, though they spent most of that year being scared, running away from people and things and having to save their students from a swamp witch with a web fetish. Anyways….
The school’s headmistress was (no prizes for guessing) Miss Grimwood, who had an octopus butler and a floating hand in her service, as well as a pet dragon named Matches who acted as the school’s ‘guard dog’. Miss Grimwood definitely had a preference for the macabre, but what kind of monster was she? She didn’t seem to possess any kind of dark power nor did she seem to come from any kind of supernatural or paranormal lineage. Maybe she was just a Goth.
Miss_Grimwood
“I did assemble this outfit at Hot Topic, yeah.”
 
Now on to the students. First up, we have Sibella, the daughter of Count Dracula and one of his many, many, many wives, girlfriends, lovers and flings. (Vampires are the playas of the monster world, after all.) Sibella is very kind, polite and generous, though not above using vampire powers or her bat form to her advantage in sports such as volleyball and racing. She has a frequent habit of making puns on words to make them relate to vampires, such as “Fangtasic to meet you.”(Yay, puns.) She seems to be creative with clothing, making a bat robe for her father and a fire proof one for Matches, and she seems to be able to go out in the sunlight with no difficulty, though she doesn’t appear to sparkle in sunlight either.
“Darling, I sparkle everywhere I am! I just got it goin’ on like that!”
 
In addition to being the second tallest of the ghoul girls (tied with Phantasma and second only to Elsa) Sibella is, dare I say, the hottest among the girls. I’m starting to like the color purple more and more…
Sam-Kinison
“SHE’S AN UNDERAGE CARTOON VAMPIRE, YA FREAK! STOP THINKIN’ WITH YER PANTS AND GET ON WITH THE ARTICLE! OH-OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOH!!!!”
 
Next up, we have Winnie Werewolf, a brave, tough, sometimes over-confident 8-year-old lycanthrope, possessing superhuman strength, speed, and senses and perhaps as a result of her wolf-like nature, she is notably the most athletic of the girls, once challenging Sibella to a race.
Winnie Werewolf
“Yeah, I’m pretty awesome at sports. I basically rule all of ’em! Well, except maybe swimming. I don’t swim much; when I do the pool sometimes gets clogged with globs of hair. I have body hair issues.”
 
Next there’s Elsa Frankenteen, the teenage Frankenstein monster. She’s a tad slow and lumbering, with a facility for stating the obvious, but she’s got heart (or to be more accurate, 2 of them) and while lacking the speed and agility of the other girls, she compensates with great strength and extreme durability.
Elsa Frankenteen
“I guess I’m pretty strong. I did once lift the entire school to retrieve a soccer ball. But my real passion is Mad Science. I’m majoring in Dark Matter studies and minoring in Building an Army of Atomic Supermen.”
 
Next up is Phantasma the phantom. She’s loud, hyperactive, wacky and silly, with a high-picthed cackling laugh, but is actually smarter than she appears. She also loves to play, float, and run around. Being a ghost, she can float through many objects. She can also spin her head around like an owl. As a spectre, Phantasma can become intangible at will. This makes her able to phase through both inanimate objects and people alike. She’s also a talented organ player, having composed an original piece which she wrote and performed with with Miss Grimwood’s hand keyboard with her octopus butler on drums; it was called “Duet for Three Hands and Six Tentacles”.
“I’m totally gonna be a rock ‘n’ troll musician when I grow up! I’m gonna come on stage in a flashy cape and start my shows by saying, ‘It’s showtime, folks!'”
beetlejuice_by_invitroblossoms
 
“You’re adorable, kid, but that’s my line. The only things scarier than me are copyright lawyers!”
 
Finally we have Tanis the mummy, the youngest and shortest of all the girls, with an innocent demeanor. She’s a literal thumb-sucker. Cute, but not nearly as hot as Monster High’s Cleo DeNile.
“Who says I’m not hot? Underneath these wrappings, I look like Zoe Saldana!”
 
Lastly, it’s worth mentioning that Miss Grimwood’s Finishing School for Ghouls was adjacent to Calloway Military School, a military academy for boys. the Grimwood Ghouls had a long-running rivalry with Calloway due to the boys constantly beating them at volleyball (this is why Scooby and pals were brought on as gym teachers in the first place). I wonder if the girls like the boys now?
“Like them? Why, they were DELICIOUS!”
So no rematch, then.

Why Dipper and Mabel Pines are Awesome!

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  1. They’re twins. By now the awesomeness of twins should be self-explanatory.
  2. They get to spend the summer with supernatural oddities, mysteries waiting to be solved, and a known con-man.
  3. Dipper is an academic genius. We like geniuses here almost as much as we like twins.
  4. Dipper has a birthmark in the shape of the Big Dipper, proof that he’s a genuine mutant. The Xavier Academy should be calling any minute.
  5. Mabel rocks those stylin’ braces and a seemingly endless supply of colorful sweaters with cute decals.
  6. Mabel’s an avid collector of stuffed animals, though she only actually loves half of them.
  7. Mabel’s kind of crazy. We like crazy.
  8. Dipper’s done a brief stint in county jail for assisting his great uncle in a counterfeit money making scam. Dude’s got prison cred.
  9. Dipper once brought a fighting video game character to life. I’m waiting for someone to teach me that trick with Chun-Li.
  10. Mabel has a pet pig.
  11. They’ve played Laser Tag in the future!
  12. Mabel’s best pals with a deep voiced Amazon and a girl who wears cutlery on her hands.
  13. They’ve gone trick-or-treating as jars of peanut butter and jelly.
  14. Dipper’s been called cute by Wendy Corduroy in the past.
  15. Dipper’s a fan of girly bubblegum pop music. Way to tear down the walls of gender stereotyping, bro.
  16. They boast the title of “Mystery Twins”! That’s just cool to say.

Cartoon Country: Looking Back – Fox Family Channel

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The recent Titanic like sinking of The Hub called to my mind another kids’ network which like The Hub had potential but never quite lived up to it…Fox Family.

Fox Family logo
In 1997, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation entered into discussions to purchase a stake in the  Pat Robertson owned Family Channel with International Family Entertainment as a partner, in order to use the channel to carry the library of children’s programs that News Corporation had owned through television production company Saban Entertainment.
The Family Channel was sold to Fox Kids Worldwide Inc., a joint venture of News Corporation and Saban, in July 1997; that subsidiary was renamed Fox Family Worldwide Inc. as a result of the acquisition. The Family Channel was renamed as Fox Family Channel (though on-air promos typically referred to the channel as just “Fox Family”) on August 15, 1998 at 12 p.m. Eastern Time.
When Fox bought the channel, programmers sought to reposition it to target a dual audience – kids in daytime, families at night. Once the network became Fox Family, the new owners dropped nearly all of the Family Channel’s programming lineup – which at that point included reruns such as Bonanza, The Carol Burnett Show, Hawaii Five-O, Rescue 911, and Diagnosis: Murder – and replaced them with shows that appealed to a more younger demographic. “Our focus is on younger families, more suburban or urban, more plugged into pop culture,” said network president/CEO Rich Cronin. Fox Family was obligated to continue airing The 700 Club as part of the sale, but airings were scaled back to two times each day (though the sale agreement required the channel to air it three times daily, once each in the morning, late evening and overnight hours), with the evening broadcast being moved out of primetime, and pushed one hour later to 11 p.m. Eastern from 10 p.m. Weekly airings of Columbo were also moved from 9 p.m. Eastern to 10 p.m. on Sundays. More cartoons were added to the lineup, many of which were from the Fox Kids program library. The network was running about eight hours of cartoons a day.
Fox Family also became a cornerstone for syndicating foreign television series, such as the popular British S Club 7 television series, which became the flagship series for the channel until the new millennium. The channel also syndicated many Canadian television series (primarily those produced in English-speaking countries), both animated and live action, including Angela Anaconda, Big Wolf on Campus, I Was a Sixth Grade Alien, Edgemont, Mega Babies, and briefly, The Zack Files. The channel even showed cartoons and anime based on video games, such as Donkey Kong Country, Megaman and Monster Rancher. Most of these shows were a part of the channel’s morning lineup, which also included the original series Great Pretenders. Fox Family also aired reruns of some Fox Kids series such as Bobby’s World, Eek! The Cat, and Life with Louie. The channel added some recent family sitcoms as well, along with European shorts like Tom And Vicky, The Three Friends…and Jerry, Gogs, Lava-Lava!, Animal Shelf and 64 Zoo Lane. Fox Family was also the first channel to air reruns of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse since CBS canceled the series after Paul Ruebens was caught doing what you’d expect to see someone doing in an adult theater. (Really, what were they thinking he’d be doing in there? Playing Pictionary?)
Fox also created a film division for the channel, Fox Family Films, which produced films aimed towards different age groups, mainly children, including Addams Family Reunion, which was shown in its inauguration of the channel, and Digimon: The Movie, which was compiled from several Japanese Digimon short films. For a more teenage audience, Fox Family Films created Ice Angel, a made-for-cable movie about a hockey player reborn as a female synchronized skater, as well as the thriller Don’t Look Behind You. Fox Family also aired a wide array of Saban Entertainment-produced movies as well as airing many direct-to-video 20th Century Fox films, including Richie Rich’s Christmas Wish, Casper: A Spirited Beginning and Like Father, Like Santa.
With all that going for it, one would’ve expected this channel to sail to the heights, but unfortunately Fox Family wasn’t the shot in the arm to cable what Fox Kids was to weekday and SatAM programming back in the 90’s. I personally feel the reason for FF’s lackluster performance was simply due to a slew of mediocre programming. To be fair, aside from Mega Babies and I Was a Sixth Grade Alien! (the former was a gross-out cartoon guaranteed to make anyone and everyone watching it lose their collective lunch, while the latter was a cheaply made sci-fi comedy starring some poor kid in purple makeup and a garbage bag costume with a glow stick hot-glued to his head, piss-poor acting which made your local dinner theater troupe look like Shakespearean thespians and a season’s budget that was likely blown on a Happy Meal), none of Fox Family’s shows were horribly bad; the problem was that none of them were horribly good either.
  • I wanted to like Angela Anaconda, since it was co-created by Pepper Ann creator Sue Rose and I’m a big PA fan, but that ‘photographed heads on cartoon bodies’ filming technique was so creepy and off-putting that I couldn’t stand to look at it for more than a minute or so.
  • The Kids from Room 402 offered a few chuckles, but no belly laughs, plus I got the point of this show after a few episodes, by season 2 the story ideas and jokes really began to run dry and the characters just got more irritating and less amusing. Also, in season 2, the writers began portraying the students, who were supposed to be around 8-10 years of age, as teenagers when a hackneyed plot called for it, a writing practice I’ve never been a fan of.
  • The Donkey Kong Country series, which debuted in 2000, was also something I really wanted to like, but CGI was still in it’s early stages during this time, so the show suffered due to a severely limited budget (King K. Rool only had 2 minions since that was as many as the producers could afford to animate, for example). The show also may have fared better if it contained stuff that was, you know, actually in the games that inspired it. What was all that business about the Kongs working in a factory and a Crystal Coconut? The stories and cinemas of the games were far more entertaining. Maybe someday Nintendo will try to launch a DKC show again, with CGI and money being different beasts now, I think such a show would fare better the second time around.
  • Weird-Ohs, a Mainframe produced series based on a cultish line of toys, came and went so quickly that I can’t find anyone else who’s ever seen it, I remember it being one of those shows that I could sit through as an alternative to nothing, but immediately forgot about the second it was over.
  • I liked the idea behind FF’s weekday afternoon block The Basement, unfortunately none of the shows on it were that great or memorable: The best thing on The Basement was Eek! The Cat, and while I kind of dug it, even Eek!‘s staunchest fans would have to admit that the show is an acquired taste, Saban’s Monster Farm was another show which provided some light laughs here and there, but it was nothing worth rushing home to see, Walter Melon was the Sha Na Na of cartoons: a One-Trick Pony novelty act about a toon whose job is substituting for other famous fictional characters, since Walter had no setting or supporting cast of his own, he only appeared in spoofs of other shows, the novelty of Walter Melon wore off quickly. Bad Dog, another Canadian import, was basically one joke repeated over and over. If you’ve seen one episode of this show, you’ve seen them all; not only was it the same basic plot each time, but many of the exact same gags were re-used. The Three Friends…and Jerry was more or less a British Ed, Edd ‘n’ Eddy minus the bizarre quirks and endearing character traits and a slightly more perverse edge; once one got past the basic shtick that nothing ever worked out for the title characters and everyone else hated them, there really wasn’t much else to say about it. The added attractions imposed upon it by Fox were similarly hit or miss. The biggest misfire was the leftovers of Fox’s Stickin’ Around, co-created by Robin Steele and Brianne Leary, a show which was “meh” at best; it didn’t help matters that Fox chose to edit these shorts with a Cuisinart; the Stickin’ Around shorts were so mercilessly hacked to bits that following the plots was next to impossible.
  • I was exactly the wrong age demo for the likes of S Club 7, Edgemont and The Zack Files, so I never caught those. Similarly, I never saw a full episode of Big Wolf on Campus (it came on before some shows I watched, so I saw the ends of a lot of shows), but I understand it garnered a somewhat substantial cult following among certain fans.
  • I never saw an episode of The New Addams Family; my father watched a couple of episodes, and regarding his opinion on them, it was first time in my life I ever heard him use the word “suck”.
  • I have no memory of Outrageous!, ’cause I never saw it; come to think of it, I don’t think I ever watched Fox Family at night aside from some of the specials and movies which would air during The 13 Nights of Halloween and The 25 Days of Christmas, which are the only remnants of the channel to this day.
As Jason (Goldstar) mentioned, another thing which contributed to the demise of Fox Family was internal struggles between the companies which owned and ran it (still more shades of The Hub). There were frequent clashes between News Corporation and Haim Saban. On July 23, 2001, it was announced that Fox Family Worldwide Inc. would be sold to The Walt Disney Company for $2.9 billion. The sale to Disney included ownership of Saban Entertainment. Given that the Disney acquisition took the channel into a deeper decline in its early years and how ABC Family is now the home of trashy reality shows about gratuitous underage drinking and teenage pregnancy, this will go down in the books as EPIC FAIL.
So Hasbro can take some solace in the knowledge that they weren’t the first company to try and join the ranks of the Big 3 kid vid networks and miss the mark. However, even though The Hub failed spectacularly in its’ efforts, I still have to give it a slight nod over Fox Family since they put forth an effort to showcase girl centric cartoons not aimed at preschoolers. Well, actually, Fox Family did have one such show…

…but sadly there’s no longer a Fox Family or a Hub for this show to go to now. Hey, Netflix. As long as you’re reviving old properties, maybe you could give this one a shot. It couldn’t be worse than Angela Anaconda or SheZow!.

Peeks: Disney’s Big Hero 6: Factoids, Trivia and Assorted Stuff

silverstar 3 Comments

Big Hero 6, the latest animated feature from Disney Studios, is an action-packed comedy-adventure about robotics prodigy Hiro Hamada, who learns to harness his genius—thanks to his brilliant brother Tadashi and their like-minded friends: adrenaline junkie Go Go Tamago, neatnik Wasabi, chemistry whiz Honey Lemon and fanboy Fred. When a devastating turn of events catapults them into the midst of a dangerous plot unfolding in the streets of San Fransokyo, Hiro turns to his closest companion—a robot named Baymax—and transforms the group into a band of high-tech heroes determined to solve the mystery. 

If you’re a regular moviegoer, you probably already know all of this, as the films’ been teased and previewed quite frequently over the past several months in theaters and on the internet. What you may not know is that Big Hero 6 is a very, very, very, very loose adaptation of a Marvel Comics miniseries of the same name, ’cause you know, Disney now owns Marvel’s very soul. As is par for the course in movie adaptations of comic book stories, the Mouse House has taken their fair share of liberties with the story, making it a comics Big Hero 6 in name only. 

This is NOT a  review of the movie; I won’t be reviewing Big Hero 6 here because a) we don’t do movie reviews on Twinsanity and b) I haven’t seen the film yet. (Big Hero 6 won’t debut in theaters until Nov.7th.) This is just a brief list of some of the differences between the comic book miniseries and the movie; just some interesting factoids that I’ve compiled as a pop-culture trivia geek that you may find interesting coming into the movie:

  • The biggest difference between the film and the comic is that in the comic, all of the team members were Japanese. In the movie only Hiro and Go Go are Japanese. Also, in the comics, all of the team members except for Hiro were adults; in the film they’ve all been turned into teens. As ThatGuyWithTheGlasses reviewer The Blockbuster Buster put it, the movie seems to be a sort-of mash-up of The Iron Giant and Glen Murakami’s Teen Titans. Basically, Hiro=Robin, Honey Lemon=Starfire, Go Go=Raven, Wasabi=Cyborg, Fred=Beast Boy and Baymax is, well, I don’t think I have to say which one Baymax is.
 
  • In the comics version of the story, Hiro lived with his parents. In the film, he lives with his aunt and older brother (in the comics, Hiro was an only child). In the books, it is Hiro’s father who dies, not his older brother, and in the books it’s Hiro who builds Baymax; rather than being a hospital assistant robot built by Hiro’s bro, Baymax was built by Hiro to be his personal bodyguard, butler and chauffeur, using the brain engrams of his dead father, so for all intents and purposes, the comics’ version of Baymax was the reincarnation of Hiro’s dad, functioning as Hiro’s best friend and father figure, and staying by his side nearly every hour of every day. Baymax also felt a deep attachment to Hiro’s mother, which will obviously be omitted from the film.
  • The comics’ Big Hero 6 was home based in Japan. Here, most likely as a way to justify the multi-ethnic, multicultural cast, the movie is set in the fictional city of San Fransokyo, a meshing of Eastern and Western architecture, populace and cultures, which is admittedly a pretty cool concept.
  • In the comics, the team members aside from Hiro and of course Baymax each had actual super powers. In the films they are each given power-granting technosuits designed by Hiro.
  • In the comics, Honey Lemon was Aiko Miyazaki, a top special agent in possession of a Power Purse (also known as the “Nano-Purse”) which contained a series of miniature, artificial, inter-universe wormholes, granting her limited access to an indeterminate number of worlds and dimensions. It was basically like Felix the Cat’s magic bag of tricks: need something? Reach into Hammerspace and pull it out.
  • In the books, Hiro had a crush on Honey Lemon, but there doesn’t seem to be any signs of such feelings in the movie, despite them being closer in age here.
  • For a time it was rumored that Honey Lemon was the same girl playing the Fix-It-Felix, Jr. game in Wreck-It Ralph who first notices that Ralph is missing, but now that just seems to be a meaningless coincidence that the 2 characters share similarities in design.
  • The comics version of Go Go Tomago was a street urchin who possessed a voice-activated battle suit that absorbed and amplified kinetic energy, enabling her to temporarily transubstantiate her body mass into thermochemical energy simply by uttering the trigger words “Go-Go Tomago”. This transformation could be either partial or total. It remains to be seen whether or not she’ll possess similar abilities in the movie, but she does possess cool blue streaked hair.
  • The comics version of Wasabi-No-Ginger was a chef, hence the name. He was also a skilled swordsman who could give form to his Qi-Energy, usually materializing it as throwing knives that can paralyze opponents.
  • The comics version of Fred was nicknamed ‘Fredzilla’, due to his being Ainu in origin and his ability to manifest a huge ‘solid’ kaiju (monstrous creature) aura resembling Godzilla around his body. In the film, Fred merely wears a suit that resembles a kaiju.
  • The movie is very consciously pro-science.
  • Fred is voiced by comedian T.J. Miller, who’s been racking up his share of geek cred as of late; not only is he a regular on HBO’s Silicon Valley but he also appeared in Transformers: Age of Extinction. This will be Miller’s second time playing second banana to a robot.
  • Movie Baymax bears a notable resemblance to the title character in Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Tuturo.
  • In Japan, the movie will apparently be released under the title Baymax.

BIG HERO 6So there you have it; some little food for thought for when you go see Big Hero 6 (if you’re planning to see it, that is; I am). Will Big Hero 6 be Disney’s next big thing or just a homogenized sawed-off Avengers wannabe for kids? You decide.