RE-IMAGINING DISNEY, BUNCHE-STYLE

Early on Thursday morning my friend and former-roommate Jessica sent me the following email:

Sent: Nov 5, 2009 11:26 AM
To: Bunche

Subject: Help with an assignment I just got?

Hey, you know how my new thing is complaining about the weird stuff I write for the blog internship? Well today I pitched a spin on how Disney is re-imagining Mickey Mouse. Now I have to come up with Melrose Place-style speculations about re-imagined stories and personalities for Minnie, Daisy, and Goofy. Any thoughts?

I responded moments later as follows:

Are you kidding? This one writes itself! Allow me to demonstrate:

MINNIE MOUSE

Bubbly and cute on the surface, Minnie is in actuality a roiling cauldron of resentment over having been assigned the role of personality-void love interest to her limelight-hogging boyfriend for just over eighty years. Smart, talented in a variety of fields that she never gets to showcase and fueled by deep-rooted anger, Minnie is ready to explode and has sought and found genuine emotional/sexual fulfillment in her secret trysts with the seemingly-retarded Goofy.

DAISY DUCK

Also trapped in her role as the distaff counterpart to her man, Daisy's position is more emotionally precarious than Minnie's because of Donald's un-medicated and out-of-control bipolar disorder. After decades of dealing with him, Daisy is skilled in weathering Donald's insensate rages but is weary of constantly trying to put a humorous spin on his tantrums by acting as his "straight man" for the sake of the studio's merchandising efforts and her and Donald's careers. Though never physically abused by Donald, psychologically Daisy is the classic battered wife who puts on a public face of the contented and devoted other half, a masquerade whose facade is beginning to reveal cracks...

GOOFY
Long perceived as little more than a functional retard with a masochistic interest in dangerous sports (see his short films to get what I'm referencing), Goofy is in actuality the Disney gang's secret stud, sort of a cartoon hot black engine of unbridled lust who's the forbidden sexual fruit of the studio.

While Mickey attends to more pressing matters, Goofy gives an apparently bawdy Minnie some Alabama blacksnake in this detail from Wally Wood's infamous and classic "The Disneyland Memorial Orgy" (1967).

Minnie secretly succumbed to his uber-masculine charms long ago but cannot publicly acknowledge their illicit affair for fear of harming her lucrative career and possibly jeopardizing the Disney gang's already dwindling marketability in an age that no longer finds their treacly-wholesome antics relevant to popular culture, but Goofy carries on regardless, rocking not only Minnie's world but also sampling the fleshly delights of farm girl Clarabelle Cow, bosomy operatic diva Clara Cluck, heiress house cat Duchess, and brazenly crossing the line separating anthropomorphized cartoon animals and the straight-up human 'toons such as Cinderella, Snow White, Princess Aurora (aka Sleeping Beauty) and the rest of the Disney princess stable, giving them inspiration for all those happy songs they sing about their dream-men (you didn't really think those songs were about that gaggle of fags we've seen those girls allegedly pining for, did you?). Comfortable and adventurous in his sexuality, Goofy even spreads the love among the "mature" Disney "bad girls," providing the real reason for the sly and knowing smiles seen on the faces of Ursula, Cruella DeVille, Maleficent, and even Cinderella's stepmother and wicked step-sisters. But sooner or later all good things must come to an end and it's only a matter of time before Goofy finds himself caught up in a maelstrom of jealousy, possible severe ass-kickings from his mistresses and their cuckolded spouses, and dozens of paternity suits over his growing brood of bizarre-looking bastard offspring.

See? It's easy!

Jessica's take on the re-imagining of Disney characters can be found here.

LAND OF THE LOST (2009)

I don't know what you think, but I say the vast majority of feature films culled from old TV shows majorly bite the big one, so with that fact in mind, coupled with a general apathy toward the overrated comedic talents of Will Farrell, I gave the bigscreen adaptation of LAND OF THE LOST a miss during its bid for summer blockbuster supremacy. Considering how the movie was obviously replete with dinosaurs, sci-fi elements and lowbrow humor, all things that I usually enjoy, me skipping it confused the hell out of several of my friends, but even with my love of stories in which dinosaurs eat each other's heads and also chomp on hapless humans, I was never a fan of the 1970's Sid & Marty Kroft kiddie show that served as the movie's source material. The previous works of the Krofts did little to draw me in — with the hippieish Brit charms of Joy from THE BUGALOOS being a rare exception to that rule — and the dime store dinosaurs found on LAND OF THE LOST looked rather wan to the eyes of a nine-year-old already indoctrinated to the films of Ray Harryhausen (although I did give them props for giving stop-motion a shot on Saturday morning). Come to think of it, one of my grade school contemporaries at the time described the show's baby Brontosaurus character, "Dopey," as looking like it had been cobbled together from freshly chewed bubble gum. I thought that assessment to be more than a little unkind, but the show did bear an undeniably cheesy look and feel that helped to nearly bulldoze over such fascinating elements as Enik (a super-genius lizard-man in a dress) and the mystery of the Pylons, a series of semi-organic formations that served as controllable gateways through time and space (controllable provided you had a clue as to how to operate the damned things). But whatever my own feelings on the series, LAND OF THE LOST lives on in the hearts and minds of those who were there to experience it as it happened, and even its budgetary constraints could not quash its considerable imagination (something that can also be said of DOCTOR WHO back in the days).

So then came the inevitable movie version of LAND OF THE LOST, a film that was met with indifference at best from many critics and outright panning from others, to say nothing of a largely apathetic response from the moviegoing public, thus leading the film's box office receipts to fall short of its production costs. In other words, it bombed. I was surprised by that, especially when taking into account how brain-dead audiences have turned pieces of shit like EPIC MOVIE and PAUL BLART: MALL COP into box office champs. Then AIN'T IT COOL NEWS — a journalistic organ whose critical opinions I give virtually no credence — intrigued me by postulating that the movie's failure lay in the fact that it was improperly marketed, with the studio pushing it on a kiddie audience when the film's content was clearly aimed at a fifteen-and-up audience. Now that I've seen the movie on DVD I have to agree with AIN'T IT COOL NEWS. The bigscreen LAND OF THE LOST was in no way what either the general audience or the original TV show's fans were expecting, taking the show's main concepts and jettisoning nearly everything else to come up with a parody of the concept, what I would consider something like a comedic DOCTOR WHO story as done by Americans, only minus the Doctor and packing a huge special effects budget.

The Land of the Lost: an extra-dimensional dumping ground for all of time and space.

Disgraced scientist Dr. Rick Marshall (Will Farrell), his cute British field assistant and science groupie Holly Cantrell (Anna Friel), and white trash roadside attraction owner Will Stanton (Danny McBride) find themselves hurled through a warp in time and space that traps them in a bizarre inter-dimensional nexus where they encounter hairy and horny proto-human Chaka (Jorma Taccone) and a number of threats in the hostile environment that make nearly every waking moment a fight for their lives. The exact whys and wherefores of how they got there and their motivations once stuck in the Land of the Lost are utterly beside the point and merely serve as a springboard for wall-to-wall live-action (and CGI) cartoon gags, so if you're expecting anything other than that you're shit outta luck. Many of the old school LAND OF THE LOST purists that I know wanted a big-budget rehash of their beloved kiddie show and as a result did not care for the feature film, but when I mentioned all of the stuff that I enjoyed in the movie as a non-fan and an appreciator of a fun parody, they agreed with each item cited. Go figure.

Holly and Dr. Marshall with the "tachyon amplifier," a device that opens a doorway to the Land of the Lost while blaring "I Hope I Get It" from A CHORUS LINE.

As stated, there really isn't much of a story but it's got it's moments, such as:

• Dr. Marshall arrogantly going on and on about a pursuing Tyrannosaurus Rex's allegedly walnut-sized brain when in actuality the T-Rex — a great parodic version of "Grumpy" from the TV series, and after whom this version is named — is not only smart but downright intelligent and it does not take kindly to Marshall talking that condescending shit, thus setting up the film's best running gag.

Grumpy, not at all amused by Dr. Marshall's ignorant trash talk.

• The film's version of Chaka is quite amusing, as is Dr. Marshall's first instinct upon meeting him being to attempt to "benevolently" enslave the ape-man and have himself accepted as his god. When Chaka completely ignores that crap, Marshall's frustrated reactions are priceless.

• There's a male bonding sequence involving Marshall, Will, Chaka and heavy-duty natural hallucinogens that joins the ranks of the classics of the genre.
• If you ever wondered what would happen if a Good Humor-style ice cream truck, complete with uniformed ice cream man, suddenly landed in one of the more hostile areas of Jurassic Park, wonder no more.
• The sequences featuring Marshall on the TODAY show tormenting interviewer Matt Lauer (playing himself) that serves as the movie's bookends are hilarious, especially the one at the end that proves the whole movie was merely one big setup for a punchline at Lauer's expense.

So the bottom line is that LAND OF THE LOST is a fun time-waster of a live-action cartoon that succeeds well enough for what it tries to be and it's definitely more entertaining than the majority of feature films with their roots in old television properties. It's a perfect mellow stoner film with a decent amount of genuine laughs (I laughed out loud several times and was not stoned, BTW), wall-to-wall visuals of interest, a shitload of Sleestak (including Enik) and a terrific take on Grumpy, so I say give it a look when it's on cable or snag it on Netflix.

Will encounters the "ugly" females of Chaka's tribe.

ROAST NUTS A LA DAIKAIJU

KING KONG VS. GODZILLA (1962) is one of those giant monster flicks that tends to polarize the faithful for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that the live-action Japanese Kong looks kinda like a burn victim duck in a tatty fur coat. Despite my down-to-the-DNA love of giant monster flicks, I have strongly disliked this movie since childhood (I won't go into it because that would mean wasting a post on a film beneath my vitriolic skills) and only bring it up to make mention of a question I've had about it since childhood.

Back in those pre-adolescent years during which I was first learning the lore of all things monster-related, the number one source for info on such matters was the legendary magazine FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND, a publication that gave us monster-kids tons and tons of text and photos to fill our heads with (when not bombarding us us with truly awful bad jokes) and the photos we first saw within FAMOUS MONSTERS' pages would soon be seen in other sources since many of them were obviously studio publicity stills, meaning they were probably pretty easy to obtain. For those of us interested in the Japanese monsters, one of the most ubiquitous stills was the image from KING KONG VS. GODZILLA seen below:

Um, is it just me, or does this look exactly like Kimono Kong's taking it square in the nuts from a blast of Godzilla's radioactive breath? I've seen a shitload of Godzilla movies and have consequently witnessed endless examples of Big G's irradiated halitosis blowing down buildings, setting cities ablaze and melting legions of government-deployed tanks like they were made of wax (truth be told, they probably were), so what chance did Kong's wedding tackle stand? And how did this publicity still get major press release without anyone making note of what is clearly a cheap shot to the nads? That question has haunted my mind at least since 1974, which may be one of the reasons why I have not yet bothered to get off my ass and solve the global warming crisis.

Special thanks to Glenn "The Jew" Greenberg for ferreting out a good-sized example of the still in question.

I GOT NUTHIN'

"Handsome pretty handsome Dr. Smith!"

I'm buried in work and dealing with a number of potentially ulcer-inducing things in the real world at the moment, so I got nuthin' today and might not for a day or two. Sorry about that but until I have something more substantial, please enjoy the lovely Athena (Vitina Marcus) from LOST IN SPACE. As far as I'm concerned, it's always a good day if there are green chicks involved.

HALLOWEEN RAMPAGE 2009, or THE GREAT HALLOWEEN WASHOUT

Continuing from Friday's pre-Halloween stuff, the actual main event turned out to be a major letdown for a number of reasons, chief among which was the on-again-off-again rain that varied from a dealable mist to torrential downpours, so this year's Halloween Rampage was in actual fact The Great Halloween Washout. Anyway, here's a much smaller than expected photo safari of the day's events.

The gray and overcast Halloween morning, a portent of things to come...

While doing my pre-parade errands, I ran into Popeye at Key Food.

Yer Bunche with a werewolf nose appliance, my first foray into self-applied Spirit Gum and latex.

With snout and fangs.

The finished product: Dashiki Bunchewolf 2009, with Henry Hull-meet-James Brown hairdo and serious glow-in-the-dark claws.

Awaiting the R train into Manhattan.

A ghost rides the R train.

Two literal wiener dogs in Madison Park.

Jared arrives at Madison Park, rockin' his stylish new hand-painted look.

Jared's new look as seen from the back.

The Devil as seen on 23rd Street and Broadway.

A STAR WARS family. Extra Points to mom for representing as Ahsoka Tano!

A Baseball Fury, the first of several seen both in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Two men of mystery take a cig brake.

About an hour in I began to sniffle and that's not fun at the best of times, but it's fucking disgusting when your nose is drooling into an over-the-nose appliance, so it had to go. Luckily I anticipated such a possibility and brought my trusty Duane Reed Bunchewolf mask and used that instead. I also removed the claws because they rendered virtually all use of my hands impossible, plus a few of the nails had already come off (one memorably fell into the medium root beer I'd ordered at Popeye's Chicken). And although I used acetone to take the nails off, the procedure proved quite painful thanks to the unusually strong bond provided by Crazy Glue between the claws and my fingernails. Getting them off took about fifteen minutes and a half-bottle of acetone, and it hurt like a bitch.

The evening's first Jesus. Totally in character, the guy was kind enough to bless me.

Add a caption

As seen on Thursday night in Grand Central Station, the first of 2009's costumed revelers.

The first of several Michael Jacksons (as predicted), and the only one not rocking the red "Thriller" outfit.

"Ave!" An excellent Roman centurion, a welcome change of pace from those damned now-ubiquitous Spartans from 300.

A pair I can't believe I'd never seen at a Village Halloween shindig: the Ambiguously Gay Duo.

A security guard gets into the spirit as Captain America.

An intriguing Lady Gaga.

A gathering of super-gals.

The massively crowded streets. Repeat after me: NO FUN.

Russell from UP, complete with balloon house and Dug.

Soaked and mostly miserable, costumed would-be revelers attempt to wait out the on-and-off pissing-down rain. At this point my friends and I gave up on the parade due to unmanageable crowds both on the sidewalks and off, the disgusting humidity, and the rain that drenched us. Jared left to return to his upstate home while Susan, Daniel and myself walked back up to 23rd Street, a journey that fortunately yielded some fun shots that the parade itself did not.

The always welcome Wayne and Garth. "Schwing!!!"

A terrific Serena Williams, who wished me a "Happy Hallo-Queen." And I apologize for the haze on this shot; it was taking in the rain and the lens had fogged up from the humidity.

A family of Supers. Note the baby in the sling, also rocking a cape.

Green Lantern club bouncer.

Go-Go Yubari from KILL BILL VOL.1.

A charming kitchen crew.

Hunter S. Thompson, who's becoming more and more frequently seen at Halloween and at comics conventions. Hey, I totally approve, but I'm holding out for Uncle Duke.

Dad's rocking the John Stewart looks while his daughter represents for the NYC superhero contingent. This kind of thing just warms my heart.

Most gloriously tasteless costume of the night and a strong candidate for "Best Couples Costume Ever": the Kennedy Assassination.

Wonder Woman and Aquaman.

Dr. Mrs. The Monarch and The Monarch.

Wrasslin' legend Rowdy Roddy Piper, encountered back in Brooklyn and right outside the bodega where I stopped to pick up some consolation beers before I spent the rest of the night watching cheesy gladiator movies.

Monday morning on the way to work: as Halloween 2009 fades, the first wave of the legion of bell-ringing Santas shows up outside of Grand Central Station. Pfooey.

THE BAND MAY SUCK, BUT OH THOSE SONG TITLES...

Anal Cunt's debut album, "Everyone Should Be Killed" (1994). Your grandma would love it!

Ever heard of the grindcore band Anal Cunt? Considering how how flat-out not airplay friendly the band's name is I would not be surprised if you hadn't, and perhaps that's for the best since they suck out loud. Rampant with often incomprehensible Cookie Monster vocals, cacophonous to an extremely irritating degree, and essentially unlistenable, Anal Cunt — or simply "A.C." for the squeamish — have somehow managed to put out eight albums that pretty much sound exactly the same and are even at work on an album tentatively entitled "Wearing Out Our Welcome," a title that, much like their previous "40 More Reasons to Hate Us" and "It Just Gets Worse," suggests that they know how simultaneously awful and offensive they are, but they refreshingly just don't give a fuck. But although they may be an aural endurance test of the most
grueling order, Anal Cunt will always have a place in my heart for their marvelously tasteless and ultra-offensive song titles. As I already stated, nearly all of their songs sound alike — with the notable exception of their hilarious cover of "Stayin' Alive" — so actually buying their albums is in no way recommended, but their song titles are definiteLY worth perusing for a cheap and immature laugh. Clearly designed to shock and promote outrage, here's a sampling, and bear in mind that most of these, when actually heard, sound not unlike someone having their larynx forcibly removed while trying to belt out the greatest hits of Louis Armstrong as accompanied by Cannibal Corpse:

• I Noticed That You're Gay
• Harvey Korman is Gay
• You're Gay
  
• Jack Kevorkian is Cool
• You Are an Interior Decorator
• You Look Adopted
• Your Kid is Deformed
• Ha Ha Your Wife Left You
• Breastfeeding Jim J. Bullock's Toenail Collection
• Foreplay With A Tree Shredder
• I Became A Counselor So I Could Tell Rape Victims They Deserved It
• I Like Drugs and Child Abuse
• I Sent Concentration Camp Footage To America's Funniest Home Videos
• You Rollerblading Faggot
• I Sent A Thank You Card to the Guy Who Raped You
• Body By Auschwitz
• Women: Nature's Punching bag
• I Snuck A Retard Into A Sperm Bank
• Your Kid Committed Suicide Because You Suck
• You Robbed A Sperm Bank Because You're A Cum Guzzling Fag
• I Made Your Kid Get AIDS So You Could Watch It Die
• Into the Oven
• I Gave NAMBLA Pictures of Your Kid
• I Made Fun of You Because Your Kid Just Died
• Domestic Violence Is Really Really Really Funny
• You're Pregnant So I Kicked You In the Stomach
• I Got An Office Job For the Sole Purpose of Sexually Harassing Women
• Having to Make Up Song Titles Sucks

Reads like stuff you would have thought up for your imaginary punk rock band when you were in junior high, right? Too bad it's only amusing for as long as you're initially eyeballing it...

WE'RE ROOTING FOR YOU, DENNIS

According to several news sources, actor Dennis Hopper has been diagnosed with prostate cancer and has checked in for a "special treatment progam" at the University of Southern California. I can't speak for you, but Dennis is one of my favorite actors and all-around wildmen, so I wish him a swift and thorough recovery.

SO MUCH FOR THE HALLOWEEN RAMPAGE...

It's the day after Halloween and I'm sad to report that this year's Halloween Rampage was more of a Great Halloween Washout thanks to the pissing rain and the unmanagable crowds and sidewalk traffic, elements that led to myself and my fellow would-be rampagers calling it quits by 9PM. I got some photos but overall the mood was quashed by the inclement weather, so that was that.

Pfooey...

Anyway, expect the meager results of the photo safari in a day or two.

WHAT'S HALLOWEEN WITHOUT ELVIRA?

I don't care what anybody says, I love me some Elvira and I always will. The only way this shot could possibly be any better is if the car she's reclining upon were either Christine or Dragula. Or if her ample bosom were "accidentally" spilling out.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!

Happy Halloween, oh Dear Vaulties! Today is that sacred day of the year when we set aside our boring everyday identities and bestride the night in a myriad of guises that unleash our hidden sides and flush our inhibitions down the toilet. Today is a day for well-intentioned scares, eerie revelry, imbibement of intoxicating elixirs, and fornication with plastic devil horns suction-cupped to our foreheads, so get out there and do your damnedest!

Hail Eallra Hālgena ǣfen!!!