Commercial Roundup

Mazda – 10 Car Dash

I admit I’m a little curious about the modifications the disclaimer proclaims (disclaims?) have been made for the stunts. I’d like to get some mods like that for my car, in the event that I’m assaulted by Parkour people.

Comcast – Big Old Expensive Phone Company

Comcast, this is just embarassing. Sure, I used to make strawman arguments this insipid, ham-handed and generally Buckley-grade–when I was 12. What’s your excuse?

T. Boone Pickens – Pickens Plan

A problem we can’t drill our way out of? Tell that to Simon.

The future of political cartoons (God forbid)

Sean Tevis is running a new kind of campaign.

If this were a blog of smart people, I might draw parallels to Senator Barack Obama’s small-contribution fundraising and speculate about a new paradigm for campaign funding. I might discuss the potential implications of such a paradigm for the face of American politics (presumably, more glasses, acne and Darth Vader helmets.)

But this isn’t a blog of smart people, so all I’m going to say is that to be a true XKCD homage, the comic would have to have alt text. Well, that and emo pining for an unspecified, yet rather frequently recurring, woman.

Least I Could Write

Last time, I talked about puerile, embarassing pandering. How appropriate, then, that today I talk about the popular webcomic Least I Could Do.

LICD, penned by Ryan Sohmer and drawn by Lar Desouza, is a Joe Shuster Award-winning comic that is being adapted for television. Not bad for a comic all about the most transparent self-insert ever and his adventures falling ass-backward into sex, power and success.

How transparent are we talking here? If you are a LICD reader, you know everything I’m about to say and should skip the remainder of this paragraph. For the rest of you, protagonist Rayne Summers (seriously) looks exactly like how Ryan draws himself has Lar draw him, except with hair. He is borderline obsessed with Red Bull, as is Ryan. Both have a cat named Baby who, tragically, passed away on November 12. Rayne enacts Ryan’s nerd-fantasies. And of course no Mary Sue would be complete without an obnoxious know-it-all complex.

Given that Ryan himself has lampshaded it, I think the self-serving nature of Least I Could Do is beyond dispute

And that’s what’s really infuriating about LICD. Lar’s art is good, the update schedule is brisk and adhered to with professional zeal, the jokes… well, they’re tepid sitcom fare once you get beyond the risque subject matter. But the essential flaw of the comic is that Ryan Rayne is a smug prick whom the universe inexplicably bends over backwards to accommodate. He can be a total pig and no women ever seem to think less of him for it. He has propositioned a female CEO under the pretense of applying for a job under her, and gotten a cushy executive position out of it. He has gone on a date dressed like a Nazi and had it go perfectly. Even on the rare occasion that Rayne gets knocked on his ass, he never suffers any lasting consequences. He’s Garfield with sex instead of food, which is a valid comparison not only because he gets everything he wants, but because every single strip is about him being an asshole.

Rayne is a bad side character who has somehow fallen into the role of protagonist. He’s not like Achewood’s Ray Smuckles, a womanizing and perpetually fortunate playboy who is nevertheless relateable and likeable. Where Ray has his vulnerable side, where Ray gets into a variety of situations that speak to the breadth of his character, Rayne has no flaws (at least no consequential ones,) and all he ever seems to do is follow his dick into more and more ludicrous farces. Rayne is not a character to be sympathized with so much as he is an egotistical fantasy to be projected upon.

This character is infinitely more human than Rayne.

This wouldn’t even be so bad, though, if not for the comic’s unwavering focus on Rayne. Take a look at the cast page. Rayne is depicted as the largest, and not just because of his ego. No one else in that picture has ever mattered, or ever will, outside of his or her relationship to Rayne. There’s the teacher friend, the fat friend, the female friend, the possibly gay friend. Don’t bother learning their names, because they are all the same character, existing only to react to Rayne’s zany antics. (Don’t believe me? Try reading a transcription of a LICD strip and seeing if you can distinguish anyone besides Rayne by the text alone.) They are there to fill in the space at the end of a speech bubble’s tail, and nothing more.

Now, credit where credit’s due. Ryan has recently been attempting to lend Rayne some depth. However, like his last attempt to do so, it is bound to fail. I can say so with such confidence because Tim Buckley of Ctrl+Alt+Del tried the same thing. Buckley seems to be unaware that taking a pathological cretin and turning him overnight into Mr. Responsible is not growth; it is retardedly inconsistent behavior. Ryan, you ought to know better. Not even CAD fans would believe that the kind of guy who welds himself into an Iron Man suit is qualified to tell anyone how to raise a child.

At this point, you may be thinking, “Well, maybe I can still enjoy this comic in spite of its overgrown-teen author’s obnoxious e-wanking.” You would be wrong. I reiterate for emphasis, the jokes are nothing special.  At best, LICD’s humor is that kinda-funny thing your idiot stoner buddy totally said last Friday night (you had to be there.)  Direly lacking in subtlety and creativity, LICD has neither the depth for a character-driven strip nor the wit for a gag-driven strip. Unless you really like jokes deemed too lame for Fox primetime, there is no reason to like LICD except the desire to, like Ryan, bask vicariously in a cartoon manchild’s success.

In conclusion, Ryan, you’ve grown since you started Least I Could Do (EDIT: Oh wait, no you haven’t.) Rayne, however, hasn’t, and he never will; any attempt to make him more than the masturbatory wish-fulfillment fantasy he started as can only turn out cheap and disingenuous. I advise you to take what you’ve learned, toss Rayne back into the semen-crusted seventh-grade notebook from whence he came, and start from scratch. Good luck.

Bedtime for GONZO

Last time, I mentioned airfare to Japan. What an appropriate segue.

Yep

This promotional spread is almost a review of Strike Witches in itself. And yet it can never quite encapsulate the shallowness, shamelessness and downright idiocy of GONZO’s new direct-to-YouTube (fine, it’s on TV too) anime. Perhaps no picture can.

The picture does a fine job of conveying that Strike Witches is about pantsless girls, in varying degrees of pubescence, who moonlight as catgirls. (Specifically, it’s about their crotches.) What the picture will not tell you is that said girls are as two-dimensional as the simile of your choice. How can I attack their characterization before I see the series past episode one, you ask? Simple. When your character is a flying, half-naked teenage girl with cat ears and a pants allergy, not even Hemingway could make anything meaningful out of her.

For the record, aversion to pants does not seem to be limited to the main characters

But I’ll not belabor the obvious. Now I’d like to move on to addressing potential reasons (both those previously articulated by other reviewers and those I’ve anticipated) to defend this show.

You’re taking it too seriously!
Strike Witches has neither the camp nor the self-awareness to call itself a fun B-movie romp. It is not, like Adam West’s Batman, a terrible show that invites you to sit back, turn your brain off and enjoy the ride. It is a terrible show that prostrates itself before your feet and begs you to buy an episode for three dollars, and while you’re at it, can it interest you in some merchandise. You will not laugh with it, but you will not laugh at it either. You will be too busy staring slack-jawed in disbelief or, alternatively, sobbing quietly.

It’s not as bad as anime X!
That doesn’t excuse Strike Witches any more than the existence of DeviantART excuses Rob Liefeld.

You just hate this kind of thing!
I liked Es and Trigger Heart Exelica, damn you.

At least the action scenes were good!

Open up a picture of some panties in a new browser window, switch rapidly between the two and congratulations! You now know what Strike Witches combat is like

I’ve heard this a number of times from people who really should know better, and it bewilders me every time. Sure, the flyby sequences could be mistaken for something from a decent action anime. You would, however, have to ignore the forced crotch/ass close-ups and stock firing animations that comprise the remaining 70 percent of the battles. The whole mess is hacked together with no regard for flow or even coherence. The camera whips around like an excited puppy that has been set on fire.

Strike Witches is no Macross in terms of fight choreography, to be sure. But should we expect it to be? Given the show’s supposed focus on dashing aerial combat, I have no problem with doing so.

Strike Witches is no Macross in enemy design, either. The enemies are three-polygon, one-texture blobs the likes of which you would expect to encounter in an early-’90s FPS. They wouldn’t even be particularly strong enemies.

This is intimidating.

In sum, you shouldn’t watch Strike Witches with your friends. But nor should you watch it alone. You should not watch it in a box; you should not watch it with a fox. Strike Witches is the anime equivalent of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation – an expression of the shame of a culture. GONZO, please make like Griffith and die of cerebral hemorrhage. Griffith, I’m sorry I compared you to GONZO; please don’t come after me as a zombie.

Commercials: Subway and ANA

I’ve recently been seeing a new commercial promoting Subway’s five-dollar footlong deal, presumably for the benefit of alien body snatchers who have never encountered a Subway or a television before.  The commercial seems to be unknown to my friends outside California, nor is it posted on YouTube (otherwise I’d link it here,) suggesting that the ad is restricted to my locality.

I am thus forced to contemplate what about my area suggested to Subway marketing executives that we would like to buy a product referred to as a “Yum Rocket.”  The only product to which reasonable minds could ascribe a name like that would be a dildo–and not even a good one, but a bubblegum pink lump of smelly Thai resin, jagged with flash.  This is not something I would particularly like to put in my mouth, not even in the process of perpetrating “Grand Theft Sandwich.”

The other commercial I’d like to highlight is not exactly new, but at least it’s online for me to show you.  As embedding is disabled, please refer to this link.

A bold effort, All Nippon Airlines, but I’m fairly certain weeaboos comprise less than 10 percent of the global market for airfare to Japan.  Also, your animation smacks of Amerimanga.