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DC Apparently Stands for "Don’t Chuckle"

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Ever wondered why Man of Steel and the Dark Knight trilogy were so grim and joyless? Well, it would seem that, according to Drew McWeeny of Hit Fix, that that Warner Bros. has applied an interesting policy when it comes to their upcoming slate of DC comic book movies. This policy can be summed up in just 2 words:

NO JOKES!
 
If this is to believed, then it would seem that the culprit to this current mode of thinking lies with the cinematic bomb that was the Green Lantern movie starring Ryan Reynolds, which was filled with cheesy one-liners and Reynolds’ non-stop quips, and this is also a way for DC to distinguish its’ movie franchise from arch-rival Marvel, who has made it a point to stuff as many jokes as they can in their films. However, as Drew points out, humor can be a great way to alleviate the tension of a scene as well as allowing for the suspension of disbelief, which is usually required to some degree in a comic book movie.
How do we feel about this alleged “No Jokes” policy, if true? Glad we pretended that you asked.
Damon (Silverstar):

If this is true, then it in a nutshell explains why I’m generally not that into a lot of action properties: so many of them just take themselves way too seriously. I guess DC is really trying to distinguish themselves from Marvel’s movies, but going all grim and serious really isn’t the way to go. They’ve forgotten a very basic premise: that when people go to the movies, particularly action movies, they want to go out together with their friends and family and have FUN. Just pure, escapist fun. Yeah, it’s great when the characters are badass and the story is deep and compelling and all that good stuff, but all that means nothing if the films are boring or a bummer to watch. That has little to no replay value. People are more apt to come back to a movie they had fun watching. People like to laugh, what’s wrong with laughing occasionally between explosions?

The idea that superhero stories have to be all grim and grown-up, I just can’t take that pretentious crap seriously. When your stories involve crazy do-good freaks in funky tights beating up bad guys armed with a Weather Dominator, how dark and serious is it supposed to be? The genre is already kind of silly to start with, so I don’t see the harm in having a little levity thrown in. I actually think Squirrel Girl said it best: “Things were better when the comic book world was a place you wanted to escape to, not from.”

Jason (Goldstar):

Everybody likes to laugh. What’s wrong with laughter? Man of Steel was desperately lacking in fun.

Seriously, though. I wouldn’t take a statement like that too seriously. It’s most likely just DC trying to differentiate their movie universe from Marvel’s. I mean, how can you make a movie about SHAZAM!, a story about a 12-year-old boy who is turned into a muscle bound Adonis by a wizard and who’s rogues’ gallery includes an intelligent ape and not have any jokes in it? I think that a dark, serious take on SHAZAM! would end up being more hilarious than it ever would be as a light hearted comedy.

This mentality has seemed to have seeped its’ way into the comics continuity as well;check out the murky and generally joyless New 52 titles, which are chock full of this “Look at how dark and grim and graphic and not funny and totally not for kids we are!!” attitude. It would seem that the DCAU/Brave and the Bold way of thinking is, for now, a thing of the past. The current mode of thinking at DC seems to be, “Can’t make these movies fun, lest we end up like Marvel”. And we think………

blue-beetle-and-booster-gold-100437

….That’s a laugh.

2 Funny: "Tongue Tied" from Red Dwarf

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Here’s a musical number that was played during the opening scene of an episode of the popular British sci-fi comedy series Red Dwarf. If you haven’t seen this series, you should check it out. The last couple of seasons weren’t very good, but the rest of the series was great! Here’s “Tongue Tied“:

Wow! The Cat (Danny Jon Jules) can really belt out a tune!

We Won’t Touch This

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The Twin Factor’s been blowing up lately. We’ve recently launched a new segment (Nerdvana) and several of our other segments have been going well; I’m sure the folks who follow this blog (we know you’re out there, we can hear you checking your email) are curious as to what we’ll tackle next, but there are some things which we definitely won’t be tackling. Just to set the record straight, the following items listed below are subjects which will not ever be reviewed or analyzed by Twinsanity:

  1. MOVIES. Do you know how many movie reviewers there are on the internet? The line starts with the Nostalgia Critic and circles the block 5 times over. The web is littered with dozens of movie reviewers and critics, and most of them do it 30 times better than we ever would; our collective attention spans are only about 20 to 30 minutes max anyway, and movies require longer and more involved reviews, and we know from experience that blow-by-blow reviews are time consuming and exhausting to write, especially for lazy people like us. So we won’t be reviewing any movies here. It’s just our Aquarian natures; since a bunch of other people review movies, then we won’t. We’re just rebels, and we’ll never ever be any good.
  2. ANIME. We here at The Twin Factor are about the ugliest of Ugly Americans; we’re about as Japanese and otaku as a Burger King Whopper. We’re only extremely casual viewers of anime, so we’d look like giant clueless hypocrites trying to review an anime and we’d have an easier time finding Waldo than we ever would trying to unlock the subtle nuances of the average anime. Keep in mind that the fancy label ‘anime’ didn’t exist in the US when we were kids in the ancient 1970’s; back then, everything animated was simply labeled ‘cartoons’, so that’s how we tend to view things. For anyone wishing to see an anime get proper analysis, we refer you to the Otaku Gamer Spot. Those guys have more anime knowledge in their eyelashes than we have in our entire bodies.
  3. VIDEO GAMES. Again, we’re just very, very, very casual gamers, and even then it’s mostly retro games, or at least they’re retro now; generally speaking, most people who are old enough to remember a time before there were video games tend not to be hardcore gamers. So we won’t be doing any game reviews here either. Yes, we do have a segment devoted to video games (Videots), but those are just pointless ramblings about games we’ve played or geek talk about specific characters, tropes and idioms in video games, and the Videots are rarely if ever informative. Again, the guys at the Otaku Gamer Spot do a much better job at tackling video games than we ever could.
  4. SILVER AGE WARNER BROTHERS CARTOONS (Tiny Toon Adventures, Animaniacs, Freakazoid!, et al). As those who follow this blog know, we’re both huge Warner Bros. fans, and we enjoyed the so-called Silver Age WB cartoons like Animaniacs, Freakazoid! and Tiny Toons a lot (Pinky & the Brain, not so much; we feel they were best taken in small doses, and we’re still a little miffed that Slappy Squirrel didn’t get a spinoff), but are we ever going to do full-on reviews of any of these shows? No. Why? For one thing, many other internet personalities have already reviewed these shows in great length, so anything we could say about them would be redundant. For another, it’s common knowledge that we like the majority of those shows, what else could we say about them other than “they were great”? It’s like with Barbie: Life in the Dream House; I like the show, and I watch it when it’s an episode that interests me (the ones focusing on Barbie’s Fab Sistsers are my favorite ones) but I’m not going to do a review on it, as I wouldn’t be saying much other than “I like it”. We can (and have) given some characters and such from these shows some shouty-shouts and mentions in other segments, and will continue to do so as desired, but we won’t be doing full reviews or analyses on any of them.
  5. LOONATICS UNLEASHED. I’m sure some folks would like to see us tear this show a new one, but sorry, we won’t be doing that. What could we possibly say about this show that hasn’t been already been said by dozens of angry fanboys and fangirls? It’d be like taking shots at Barney and Friends or any of the Family Circus TV specials: they’re not interesting enough to be a viable target and snarking on them would be FAR too easy. Another reason why we’re not going to review Loonatics Unleashed is because that would mean having to re-watch some of the episodes and that’s not going to happen.
  6. MY LITTLE PONY: FRIENDSHIP IS MAGIC. No. Nope. No. Not going to do it. Sorry. This show has gotten so much commentary and analysis over the past 4 years that there’s no way that we would even attempt to do anything along those lines. We’ve seen the show, it’s OK, but we’re not “Bronies”. We spotlighted 3 of our favorite MLP:FiM characters on our Why (blank) is Awesome! segment, that’s as deep as our fandom for MLP is going to get.
  7. ACTION CARTOONS. As the blog’s title states, this is where cartoons and COMEDY collide. While we do watch some action cartoons, we’re first and foremost comedy cartoon guys, as such any action cartoon we’d spotlight would be automatically be viewed from a comedian/weirdo/wise guy perspective. We’re just not that interested in most action cartoons to give them that kind of attention. If a certain character or trope from an action show catches our attention, we’ll give it a mention somewhere, like I could see myself mentioning Miko from Transformers Prime in an upcoming Why (blank) is Awesome! or a Nerdvana since I’ve always liked her character and find her to be a tasty little cookie, but I’m not the guy to come to for an essay on sentient robot soldiers from Cyberton. Again, anyone expecting a rich, full and detailed review or analysis of an action cartoon should look elsewhere.
  8. EACH AND EVERY NEW CARTOON THAT PREMIERES. When we started this blog back in 2010, we felt like we had to cover everything animated in order to appear knowledgeable and attract as many followers as possible. As a result, we ended up typing a lot of drawn-out, boring and uninspired articles about shows that we knew or cared little about. After 4 years, we’ve learned that it’s best that we stick to what we know and what interests us specifically; we don’t have to review every cartoon that comes down the pike, especially since blow-by-blow reviews are a pain to write, which is why we don’t do them that much anymore. The reviews we do nowadays are abridged for the most part (hence the name Reviews on the Run) and we have a strict policy that they have to be shows that we actually watch and are legitimately interested in. Something that our interest in fades after a few episodes or we were never interested in to start with doesn’t get an article. It’s way too much work pouring time and energy into something that we’re not even into.
So the next time someone ponder whether Twinsanity will ever spotlight any of the above, just remember….
WE WON’T TOUCH DIS!

Nerdvana: Song of the Songs

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Hello and welcome to another installment of our newest segment on Twinsanity: Nerdvana. For those who don’t know, Nerdvana is the segment where we celebrate the geeky stuff we like. There’s so much ranting and snarking on the internet, we figured we should occasionally break out of cynic mode and say nice things about the things in media that we enjoy. Nerdvana is all inclusive, and can be about anything: a show, a character, an episode, a trope, a song, a skit, anything, as long as it’s something we like and we have something entertaining (or at least interesting) to write about it. Be warned: some of these Nerdvana entries are going to be very free-form and non-linear, and these entries aren’t informative in any way; think of Nerdvana as nerdy ramblings from someone who’s buzzed on Happy Juice and celebratory geekings out from the right side of the brain. That said, buckle up, and let’s begin.

Today I’ll be praising all things, concepts and characters connected to one of the characters on The Hub’s Littlest Pet Shop, Blythe Baxter’s BFF, Youngmee Song.

She’s cute, she’s got purple eyes, she’s a mathlete, she possesses encylopedic knowledge which Blythe sometimes finds creepy, she squees at boy bands and even wrote a song for one, she and Blythe have watched scary movies and tried on identical outfits together, she refuses to call adults (such as Blythe’s dad Roger) by their first names and can’t be made to do so via reverse psychology because she’s “different”. Awww.

Another reason I like Youngmee is because she’s related to this lady, her Aunt Christie.

She’s one of my toon crushes right now. I consider Christie to be a BILF: a Businesswoman I’d Like to…uh, Fool around with. Yeah, let’s go with that.
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Christie owns and operates this place, a sweet shop called Sweet Delights, where Youngmee works in her spare time.
Conveniently located right next to Littlest Pet Shop and right in front of a pile of tires.
 
Come on. The lady owns and runs a flippin’ SWEET SHOP. For some reason I really like this idea. How awesome a fictional job is that?? Surrounded by cupcakes, eclairs, ice cream sodas, doughnuts, jellybeans, malted milk balls, licorice, lollipops, parfaits, jaw breakers, peppermints, caramels, gumdrops and other assorted fattening tooth-rotting indulgences.
Jared Fogle
“OK, screw the diet! The only word I wanna hear after ‘healthy’, is APPETITE!”
 
Aww, look at Youngmee’s little hat!
 
Christie’s personality is largely that of a business woman. She is often seen talking on the cellphone and is usually working. Aunt Christie is often seen doing a combination of cooking, talking on the phone, emailing and interacting with others, showing an extremely good ability to multitask (even going to the degree of performing certain tasks with her feet to save time, such as opening oven doors and catching things she dropped).
“Feet. Yeah….heh…heh…heh…heh….”
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Enough heavy breathing, please. You’re steaming up my monitor.
Anyway, Christie is Youngmee’s aunt, though in the theater of my mind she’s her mom. In a recent episode of the show, “Feud for Thought”, which suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucked in my humble opinion, we learn that Youngmee isn’t an orphan, she has parents who have yet to appear on screen, but I still like to think of Christie as Youngmee’s mom. It makes her that much more MILF-ish. Plus for me that makes things like this that much more fun:


Gee, I wonder if they like that box. I don’t know about you, but I could watch these two sing about their box for hours. What?

They’re also the owners of Buttercream Sundae, a adorable pet rabbit who’s clearly been eating too much of the unsold candies.

“Living in a sweet shop is great! I don’t know why you humans are always saying that too much candy is bad for you. Aside from the frequent trips to the dentist, the foaming at the mouth, the periodic blackouts and the odd night sweats, I’m as right as rain!”

yuck-mouth1

“Yeah! I’ve been surviving on nothing but junk food and no brushing for 45 years, and look how I turned out!”

So there you have it, my celebration of all things Youngmee Song.

yuck-mouth1
“Say, I’m a little peckish. Can I eat that rabbit? I likes ’em raw! I want my baby back baby back  baby back…”
 
 
“Just so ya know, I’ve got a taser!”