<3 it! Harryhausen was a master of claymation. His filmography includes the absolute best of the 60s high adventure fantasy films, and Clash of the Titans in 81 was his final opus.
It wasn't until rewatch that I realized the weirdness of that show reflects a specific contemporary cultural milieu where everyone was constantly bombarded with non-truths and those who rejected any part of the collective adopted reality were marked as "other".
Saddam did 9/11
Iraq has WMDs
'Murrca is a force for good
They hate us for our freedoms
It continued
Conservatives can be compassionate
People's marriage are a point for debate
France is awful for telling America to "chill" (and not for Haiti)
We hadn't yet found the means of communication we now posses.
We'd no way to pass notes conveying our thoughts on The Emperor's new threads.
You spoke up, you were slapped down.
Laying text to vexation meant excommunication.
The Dixie Chix were nixed from airwaves for airing their contrarian variants.
Chicks with dicks weren't even on the radar.
Collectively we knew shit was fucked up, and individually we experienced malaise at our collective silence alongside guilt at our personal inaction. We were confused, and disconnected from what it seemed now was reality.
Every day, every person who'd not yet bowed down to the frothing raging god of Hate felt like they were tripping.
There are only two ways out of a trip that goes on too long.
A person can jump out the window, or a person can ride the trip.
Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law and show like it—that post–9-11 post-Dadaist, neo-Neo-Surealist fare—came out of that environment, and from (and for) the people who had decided to trip.
They metaphorically "drank cough medicine". They literally drank cough medicine. They let the unreality wash over them and even if they never fought the falsehoods face-to-face, neither nor they acquiesced.
I imagine similar fare came out of LSD-laced responses to invading Vietnam.
The protagonists dealt with unreasonable authority figures, unfair hierarchies, unspoken expectations, and no permanent accepted basis for reality. Truth changed daily, acknowledging the ability of the truth to do so was something done by terrorist sympathizers. You had learned not to even think otherwise lest Mentok NSA the Mindtaker Phone Tapper pay you a visit.
You escaped this dissonance by dissociating.
Harvey Birdman was watched by an audience who'd come to just sort of roll with being asked if they'd got that thing they'd ostensibly been sent. Ones who'd seen the cultural markers they'd been raised on twisted into farce.
An excellent analysis - I remember those times well. I think that it was the twisting of those cultural markers into postmodern farce that allowed the viewers to escape the hypocritical morality portrayed by those old cartoon heroes and villains.
After all, if you can laugh at something, it has no power over you.
What was unique about Harvey to me was that where other Gen X media was attacking the context of the centralized paradigm as written, Birdman attacked the subcontext behind our heroes and villains, exposing the unwritten rules that form the framework of our ideas of morality. It wasn't pure Dada, like Space Ghost, and it wasn't a deconstruction of a 50s sitcom, like the Brak Show (great show, but limited in scope) - it was a full surrealist postmodern narrative, that pointed a shrink ray at everything under the sun and made it give opening statements in a squeaky voice to a jury full of cartoon characters.
You can see the influence of Birdman in almost all of the later superhero movies, especially Marvel, where the humanization of the characters' personal quirks and absurdities often eclipses their role as a hero. Many of Joss Whedon's scripts sound like he's trying to shove a slow-motion Phil Ken Sebben into latex tights, and you can tell RDJ studied Colbert's dialogue in Birdman for his role as Iron Man.
Now, as corporate media attempts to re-establish the dominant paradigm by centralizing social media, and seeing my children's classmates suffering a wave of stifling corporatism and despair that drives freedom and imagination from their lives, I keep getting drawn back to classics like these that break open the mind to play with possibility... maybe it's not to save the world, but it might be enough to win them a case or two in this absurd farce of a civilized society.
Totally agreed - This one has some of Banderas' best acting (in an English speaking film), and the cinematography is extremely good (still get chills from the firewyrm scene). The supporting cast is also exceptionally strong, and extremely dynamic - one of the best renditions of Vikings in cinema when it came out.
You know, I realized when I read your comment that I had never read the novel, and decided to go track down a copy. It's reminding me a lot of Nabokov's Pale Fire in how it approaches the narrative through the lens of academic analysis - very cool read thus far - thanks!
No worries. Didn't think it would be a threat as it's just an aggregator that links to 3rd party servers, but I get it. Love the instance - great job here.
@Arotrios@Hotrod_Jesus Goddammit. There's little on this earth that can make me cry these days, but re-watching this for the first time since I was a little kid got my face all wet. Fuck y'all. I'm not crying, you're crying.
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