Setsuled's Journal

Watched the other half of the Sherlock Holmes DVD with Ha last night and was happy to find that she liked Jeremy Brett a lot, too.

Bought the new Cruxshadows album, Ethernaut, yesterday and it's pretty good.

Can you tell I'm spending Christmas money here?

At 2am, I found myself watching Darkwing Duck on Toon Disney. I like Darkwing Dark. I like the character. The writing in the episode I saw was . . . palatable. I like how characters in that show used guns. Hard to imagine, but just seven or eight years ago, that was okay in a kids cartoon.

At 4am, I watched DuckTales, which was an even greater stride down memory lane. Those were the days when the people making kids shows didn't usually figure the kids wanted some annoying, super-zany character. Well, there are a few shows not like that nowadays--Pokemon's fine, for example. I think the problem is that adults are annoyed by these shows, so they assume that kids like annoying things, and write for them accordingly. That's why Freakazoid didn't work and it's why everyone hates Jar-Jar Binks. It's not that I think the creators are conscious themselves of the annoying quotient of their creations, merely that they have gorged themselves on annoyance-vaccines.

This morning--or, really, this afternoon, for people who keep sane sleeping schedules--I found that the television was still on Toon Disney, and so I watched some of the brand new Mickey, Donald, and Goofy cartoons. These aren't very good cartoons. They're quite bad, in fact. They have much the same problem as the new Looney Tunes cartoons; the writers don't understand the sensibility with which the old cartoons were written.

And it's a shame. These new cartoons have good animation, although not the lush, more unpredictable animation of the old cartoons. It's mainly the writing--old gags and fall sound effects are used Because They Must Be and not because they come from real comedy-logic. Donald's been made impotent, prevented from using some of his old violent tricks when dealing with his foes. Yes, true, he always was impotent. But his impotence had a kind of meaning back then. You could look at what he was doing and say, "Jeez, this guys pullin' out all the stops and still nothing." Now his actions are sanitised and empty.

This unconscious campaign for the destruction of all things biological is kind of doomed, I think.