Tag Twinsanity

Exit Reviews on the Run, Now Entering Cartoon Country

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Just a quick heads-up regarding one of the recurring segments on this site. We won’t be making any more segments under the heading Reviews on the Run. The Pac is Back was the last one.

Country-Roads-US-FI-630x339

Haven’t we been down this road before?

Not exactly. Unlike last time, we’re not retiring the segment itself. I like the alterations that we made to the segment and those changes will remain intact. We’ve just decided to change the segment’s name. Preferably to a name that doesn’t contain the word “review”. The reason for this is because we never intended for this to be a review site; it was always meant to be a ‘discuss, celebrate, crack wise and spew out geek trivia about our favorite cartoons’ site. Initially, we felt like we had to have reviews of popular shows in order to stay relevant, but it was far too much work trying to force ourselves to write about things that we weren’t into, and whenever we would do so, our lack of enthusiasm would be all too noticeable in the blogs themselves. And even what we (laughably) referred to as reviews was just us spouting out random facts, making wise-cracks and jokes and nitpicking about cartoons instead of actually reviewing them. Basically, we’re only going to be discussing shows (or elements of said shows) that are of a particular interest to us. That will be the purpose of this segment, rather than doing full blown reviews of them. So while the segments will still be us looking at and offering our own unique opinions on cartoons, the cartoons that we’ll be covering here don’t have to be current or even running, nor does it even need to be an entire series. It can just be one episode or even one scene from an episode.

Generally speaking, the cartoons we talk about here (in the former RotR segments as well as others) span the range of the era that we grew up watching TV in: from the 70’s through the ’00’s, as well as some stuff from the 60’s and prior, which most folks in our particular age bracket encountered secondhand via syndicated reruns; largely Warner Brothers, Disney, Hanna-Barbera and MGM, but also more obscure stuff from other so-called ‘lesser’ studios as well, as such, some of these entries can, have and will get a tad esoteric at times. At times you may be thinking:

“WEIRDOS!”

On more than one occasion. However, don’t think that this is going to become one of those

“Cartoons were better in MY day! Flobbity-Flee!”

Retro-Snobbery sites. We try not to be time-warped; we like all kinds of things, regardless of the era in which they came from, so this is not to say that there won’t be any contemporary cartoons or shows which are currently in production at all; but they’ll only be shows that for one reason or another are interesting to us personally (it is our site, after all). For this reason, we’ll no longer be referring to them as reviews; in fact, expect the material here to get a lot less ‘review-y’ ’round these parts in the weeks and months to come. From now on, we’ll be calling this segment Cartoon Country, because it’s talk about cartoons, which is what this site is primarily about. So they’ll be the same segments that we’ve been doing as of late, just with a different name.

Walter Cronkite

“…And that’s the way it is.”

2015 Progress Report

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Hey, guys. I just thought I’d let you all know how things are coming along with those plans to revise the site that we mentioned at the tail end of 2014.

We’re about to blow up!

There will be videos. As of this writing, we’re still in the germinal stages of video making; they’re baby steps, but we’re making progress. Our brother Chaz (aka CJP of the Otaku Gamer Spot) has been giving us some pointers and we’re taking tutorials and watching instructional videos on how to do it and the right programs and software to choose, etc., so yes, original videos for this site will be happening. Our first attempts at video making will undoubtedly suck and suck hard, but you have to not be afraid to suck because that’s how you learn. If all goes well, expect the original videos to increase and the actual typed blogs here to decrease; in fact, I’ve been thinking of relegating the actual blogs to their own separate category, they’ll likely just cover site news and announcements and the few newsy type articles which don’t require a full video. Generally speaking, if it features visuals and jokey-jokes, it will done as a video rather than a blog article. We’re still mulling over choices for a video host; right now it looks like we’ll go with YouTube as our main host but also have a backup host in case YouTube decides to act funny regarding images and clips (we do plan to feature cutaways and such in the videos); right now we’re considering Dailymotion as a backup host, but if anybody has any suggestions or recommendations, please share your wisdom with us. We can use all the help we can get.

Now as for the content: in an earlier article when we revived and revised the Reviews on the Run segments, Jason (Goldstar) mentioned how the reviews need not be for a series as a whole: they could be about a specific character or a specific episode or even a specific scene from a particular episode. When we launch the videos, expect them to follow this standard. Additional inspiration comes from our friend Hobbyfan’s blog Saturday Morning Archives, in that we’re only going to cover the subjects that we choose to cover, regardless of whether they’re currently on the air or not. I try not to let myself become “time warped”, one of those people who allows themselves to get locked into one particular era, but at the same time, I admit that I have eclectic, almost esoteric tastes and simply lack the desire to try to follow everything that comes down the pike. As Goldstar noted, trying to please everyone by trying to cover everything was both time consuming and physically draining and we definitely won’t be going back to that.

The best way I can describe what I have in mind for the videos is something similar to the Nostalgia Critic (Doug Walker)’s commercial videos, only done as an on ongoing series so we can cover one thing at a time instead of several all at once and they can cover other topics such as cartoons, video games, sketches and products as well. Phelous, Calluna and Mike J’s videos are also indicative of what we hope to accomplish with the vids. I’d love to do the kind of stuff that Tony Goldmark (Some Jerk with a Camera) does but with varying topics. That’s the hope anyway.

Don’t worry, folks; the cartoon subjects won’t be going away. We’ll still be talking toons here, animation is and always has been a BIG part of our lives and that’ll likely never change, but we would like to branch out into other subjects as well (the 2 Funny and Nerdvana segments were born from this desire).

There will be riffs. As previously mentioned, I’d also like for us to do riffs on this site, kind of like Mystery Science Theater 3000’s Shorts videos, but as a series. We probably will do some 1950’s instructional type videos like Chicken of Tomorrow and Design for Dreaming type stuff sometimes, but I don’t want those to be our primary target because Rifftrax and The Isle of Rangoon pretty much have that domain covered, plus there are just other things I’d like to riff on. Ideally, I’d like for us to do riffs on cartoon shorts and episodes, TV shows and specials, commercials, movie trailers, etc., anything involving cartoons, costumed mascots, puppety oddballs or anything really campy and outlandish. Think Retsuprae tackling other things besides video games and you have the basic idea of what I’d like to accomplish with the riffs.

Hopefully, there will be cartoons. This idea is even more beta than the videos, but nonetheless it’s something I’d like for us to do in the future: original cartoons, either as web comics or possibly original animations. We have 1 idea that’s been in the planning stages for some time now; it’s sort of our take on the Johnny Test premise but with more Girl Power and very pro-STEM. Another idea we’re toying with is the Wild Cartoon Kingdom/Eat or Get Ate thing that we joked about previously but have since decided to actuallly pursue as a project, so we’ll see where things go from there. If all goes well with those, we may be giving the cartoons their own site, like what we planned to do with Twinsanity Toons: original cartoons.

So yeah, it may or may not look like it, but things are happening on that end. Expect Twinsanity to get more video-oriented and visual and less text-heavy in the coming months. We’ve been doing the site more or less the same way for 5 years now, and I just feel like it’s ready for a makeover. I’d like to see this site become bigger and better than it’s ever been. Our dream is for Twinsanity to become a fun site full of entertaining videos where we celebrate the stuff we like, cartoons and other things. Just good times and big laughs all around. We’ll keep you all posted as things progress, in the meantime…

Yearly Wrap-Up 2014: The Future, Plans and a Possible Rebuilding

silverstar 6 Comments

Well, this is it, Twinsanity’s final blog entry for 2014. We do have some new stuff in the works, but right now we’re swept up in the holiday season (i.e., getting fat, getting drunk, putting up with annoying relatives and cashing our Christmas money), so long story short, we won’t be blogging again until January.

First, the boring, gushy stuff: thanks large to everyone who’s been following this blog for these past 4 now going on 5 years. We hope that you’ve been enjoying reading the tomfoolery here as much as we’ve been enjoying making it. 2014 has been a good year for Twinsanity content-wise, and we hope to continue doing it for a good while.

Which brings us to where we go from here. Time to let our readers and followers know where things stand on the blog and our general web presence, and what changes may be coming your way.

We alluded to this last year, but as the months progress and our visions for content here continue to expand, it seems to be becoming clearer and clearer that a mere blog may not be conducive to the web presence we’re looking for. While a blog does serve a useful purpose as a “hub” for making all of one’s work link together (fun trivia fact: the segments Nerdvana and 2 Funny were originally going to be separate blogs, but we decided they worked fine as recurring segments on Twinsanity, as we’d rather keep all of our online content together as opposed to folks having to search for it across various places), there are things we’d like to do, vistas we’d like to explore that may be more than the blog format is able to contain (just like how we created this blog so we could do and say things which weren’t apropos or permeable to message boards; circle of life), and we’d like to expand Twinsanity into something profitable (perhaps via Patreon or something similar) and we will consequently be spending less time on message boards, as they’re getting a tad tedious for us and we enjoy the freedom and variety of expression we have here so much more, so we’re in the process of enacting a plan to take our general web presence to a whole new level. This plan is extremely beta right now, but nonetheless it’s something we’d really like to do.

Right now it looks like this: come 2015, if all goes well, we will begin producing online videos; we’re presently still learning the ropes of editing, acting, graphics and the like, baby steps and all. We will then purchase a domain name and extension (it’ll likely be a .co or a .xyz or something similar, since it always seems that the names we want to use have already been taken by someone else) and find a web host, preferably one who offers reasonable rates, and once all that is in place, this blog will go away and be replaced by a full-blown site (EDIT: It is possible to simply modify a blog to resemble a conventional website by purchasing a custom domain, redirecting it to a new homepage and banishing the Blogger look, so we’ll more likely be doing that as opposed to shutting this blog down; a blog IS a website, after all) featuring original videos by us, cartoons, riffs, clips, reviews (if such a term can even be applied to what we do; the closest things we have to reviews are the TV Special Showdowns and of course the Reviews on the Run, and even those are mostly just us riffing and making jokes, with only the occasional glimmer of bonafide analysis) and other assorted fun stuff, though there will still be a pronounced blog/news feed component (the stuff we’ve already done here–the stuff that’s worth holding on to, that is–will most likely be archived and will be able to be accessed via a hyperlink somewhere on the site). We were originally going to start a YouTube channel, but we recently felt launching our own site might be better since then we wouldn’t have to put up with their persnickety copyright issues; we don’t want our videos to just be 2 people talking to a camera, we plan to incorporate video footage, animation clips and cutaways into them, and we don’t want our channel getting suspended and/or shut down because of that. All of the current Twinsanity segments will still be around, but many of them will be in video form instead of blog form. While we did type a few diary style entries here at the beginning back in 2010, as soon as we switched to the current Twinsanity/Twin Factor format, we’ve always thought of Twinsanity as more of a show than a blog, and many of the segments and entries that we’ve created and done on here since then we typically envision being presented in a show-style format.

Our site may also serve as a home base for another project we’ve been dying to embark on: original webtoons and animation. Aside from comedy and writing, our chief goal has always been to one day make our own all-ages friendly cartoon show or write and illustrate a series of children’s books. We’d like to do toons a la Homstarr Runner, the Polly Pocket shorts or Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse. Again, this idea is also extremely early, but we’re ready,willing and able to learn the ropes. We have ideas for cartoons in our heads, we just need to learn the technological know-how to get them onto the screen.

But in the meantime, we will continue to bring you our unique and twisted take on animation and geek culture. Expect to see more Star Brothers’ madness come 2015.

We shall return…with gusto!

We Won’t Touch This

silverstar 3 Comments

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!