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avortac4's Replies
It's quite phenomenal, how they just keep vomiting more episodes into existence.
It wouldn't be even remarkable, if the show had started this way and kept the quality (such as it is) consistent. However, starting as an almost anarchistic, controversial, downright iconoclastic slap in the face of the hypocrite, soulless, stale and 'safe' TV culture of the time, as well as the corporations and 'powers-that-be', and THEN ending up as the 'establishment' is quite astonishing.
At this point, it's like a quadraplegic coma patient on life support. There's nothing there, but somehow the 'show must still go on'.
Where's the rebelliousnes against the comfortable, safe and clean boredom that TV used to be? The Simpsons is SO bland these days, it would've made the late 1980s and early 1990s TV look shockingly daring.
With this being the case, I would recommend to ONLY consider the first maybe eight seasons and a few random 'quality episodes' after that as 'The Simpsons', and the rest just some kind of weird 'zombie show' that has nothing to dow ith 'The Simpsons' regardless of the similar name.
There are some videos somewhere that analyze the whole thing and explain the difference between writing in the golden days and writing later on. Something like 'The Fall of the Simpsons' - I can't remember the title, but I am sure anyone can easily find it.
No point in waiting, just watch the good episodes, disregard the rest, and enjoy a good show.
I think this is a way to just 'give the audiences what they whined for' just so they can see how stupid and boring it is. It should not have been Snoopy or any 'beagle', it should've been some kind of easter BUNNY maybe, but even that's a bit stupid considering Linus ALREADY has the perfect 'The Great Pumpkin' myth self-created. That's all we need.
This shows how flat everything becomes when Linus blindly believes something that then actually happens. It's like .. "OK, it happened. Now what?"
It doesn't lead anywhere, the whole thing just ENDS abruptly right there. No lesson learned, no humor, no funny mix-up, no 'woman scorned' scene, just the stupid dog prancing around like an idiot and Charlie not getting an egg (who could've seen THAT coming..)
Then it just .. ends.
Conflict and mystery create excitement. Marcie failing those egg preparations every time is funny. Linus succeeding in keeping Sally on his good side is not funny. It's just boring.
The whole thing is so pedestrian, it's almost not worth watching. The eggs are just the ones Lucy painted, this is not interesting. Snoopy being the Great Pumpkin would be the last nail in the coffin.
I can't believe you people are this short-sighted.. you are like a kid that wants to eat candy instead of vegetables. There's a REASON why we shouldn't always get our instant gratification - all we really get from that is pain in the stomach and a sick feeling in the end, and we can't go back to eating the vegetables, it's too late. We would lose one of the greatest running gags in human history, and we could never get it back.
Maris should NEVER be shown. The little red-haired girl should NEVER have been shown - she looks very pedestrian, very ordinary, the mystery is destroyed, and we can't put the genie back in the bottle. Now we know what she looks like, and IT IS BORING!
Don't you see? When things are kept a mystery, when your lust for gratification is not fulfilled, but instead, kept alive, it keeps things more exciting and interesting, and this means - MORE ALIVE.
Once you solve every mystery, wrap everything in a neat bow, and make everything as pedestrian and boring as possible, you have nothing valuable left, all you have is MEH.
Do you really want the Great Pumpkin to be just ANOTHER costume for the most annoying swamp monster ever wrongly machined into existence? REALLY?
It not existing is the WHOLE POINT. It being Snoopy, EVERYTHING would soon be Snoopy, and then nothing would have ANY value or mystery about it. Is that what you REALLY want?!
I disagree strongly.
Snoopy is the most annoying Deus Ex Machina ever made, and should've died on the table, OR at least remained a 'normal dog'. What he became was the ruin of the strip (and the cartoons to an extent). Way too much time is spent on him, when we COULD be exploring Pig-Pen's life or the dynamic between Lucy and.. I don't remember the name of the other girl, but whatever.
Oddly, 'Snoopy, Come Home' has a really good and poignant Charlie Brown-scene, but my point is, there could be SO much more of that.
In any case, I think it's always the right choice to stay true to the character and his confusion that creates shame, embarrasment and annoyance around him. Someone even said that the feminist's misandry against Linus was the funniest part of the 'It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown'. I don't necessarily agree, but I kinda see the point from some point of view.
This cartoon shows us what it's like, when Linus' irrational beliefs and passion are rewarded.
It's.. boring.
I mean, this whole thing feels like: "Ok, here you are, you got what you wanted, see what it's like? Are you happy now that you ruined Linus and all his comedy potential? Are you happy now that you got your boredom?"
It's REALLY, really boring and not funny at all. Instead of getting a funny conflice of a 'woman scorned', we get a 'meh' of epic proportions. I know, oxymoron, but all we get is "oh, so you were right". I can almost hear the next thought, "So... what's on TV tonight?"
It becomes completely meaningless when it's so easily 'resolved'. It should eternally remain a 'conflice' between Linus' super deep conviction that's based on a misunderstanding, and all the strain, frustration, drama, confusion and pain that comes from that. But no, we get what the audiences wanted on a silver platter, and the result couldn't be "meh"er.
Snoopy should have been destroyed decades ago. I am GLAD no one is 'The Great Pumpkin', him being THAT would OBLITERATE all that's good!
There's 'book smart' and there's 'street smart'. Patty is the latter, so she knows how to 'function in the world', she knows the 'rules of the street', if you will (though in a bit watered-down way, because this is a cartoon).
Marcie knows only what books tell her, and she's awkward in the real world. She knows about sociel sciences, but she has no PRACTICAL EXPERIENCE of the world, so she stumbles and fumbles and doesn't know how to function in the world.
You could say Marcie has THEORETICAL knowledge and Patty's EXPERIENCE-based knowledge wins in real-life situations, regardless of how super smart Marcie may be.
Also, just because someone wears glasses, doesn't mean they are actually smart. I have never seen Marcie do or say anything all that smart in the strip or the cartoons, so even this claim is questionable. She may be good with the social stuff, or maybe she just has a small crush on Charlie Brown, so she feels compassion and empathy for him.
In any case, as Calvin's mother asks, 'How can a kid know so much and yet be so dumb?', while cleaning something Calvin accidentally broke on the floor because he was clumsy.
For those that don't know, 'dumb' referes to 'lack of wisdom', which could include 'street smarts', whereas 'stupid' refers to 'lack of intelligence', which could mean 'book smarts' in this case.
So, Marcie is intelligent, but dumb. Patty is stupid, but smart (opposite of dumb).
So you write your post twice, except you make a typo in Schultz's name this time. I am not talking about the 'T', either.
Couldn't you at least VARY your extremely short post when you bombard the discussion boards with it multiple times? Also, can't you make up your mind - which is it, TOTALLY relevant or REALLY relevant?
I can only conclude that you are on drugs or something.
So, 'we', the people of the Universe, HAVE figured it all out. Duh.
'We', -some- people that may or may not still exist on this wretched ball of mud, HAVE indeed figured it out (if you count yourself to belong to the same group for one reason or another).
'We', the people in the public realm haven't (seemingly) figured it out.
So yes and no, we have, and we haven't.
The flying motorbike thing would be easier - all you need is to control gravitational forces or even just remove the 'mass quality' to be able to move fast as well. It would be pretty dangerous, though, and I would say impractical.
It'd be more practical to just use a proper beamship to move about (and you could then even go to space easily), or just fly around in your spacesuit normally. Involving a bike would just be cumbersome and unnecessary.
The invisibility is relatively easy, but it requires a certain type of craft. You can't have protruding objects or a boxy shape like the Vipers have for that to work, unless you want to encase the whole craft in a different, metallic 'bubble' of sorts.
It would be more practical to, again, use a normal beamship so you can just elevate or lower (what's the opposite of 'elevate' anyway?) the surface or the energy field frequency so the craft will for all intents and purposes exist closer to the etheric plane than the physical one, and thus it would be invisible to the human eyes (unless third eye chakra is used, so you could still see it with some effort).
If you make the frequency elevation subtle enough, you can probably still use heat sensitive (infrared cameras, for example) equipment to detect at least something.
'We', as people of Terra (not that I am included), have not in the public realm made this kind of technological breakthrough, but the shadowy shadow government(s) that -really- control things, did reverse engineer all kinds of craft ever since Roswell, and full well know how to do this kind of frequency manipulations and build craft and beamships like that.
There's the 'public realm of technology' that masses know about, then there's the 'hidden realm of technology', that only a select few know about - military secrets, black ops, and so on and so forth. 'Security' is a great excuse to keep secrets from people. Even the F-19 was eventually 'forgotten', because of the sleight of hand; F-117A.
Yeh, those stories were always SO cool right up to when Starbuck lands on some planet. Then it's suddenly some 'boring, old, over-used trope' instead of 'an exciting, interesting space story'.
As a kid, I guess the only thing you really see in a show like this is 'lasers, explosions, robots, spaceships, the launch sequence, the great musics and light effects, robots, vocoder sounds, space battles' and in the other series 'Extra-Terrestrial tech vs. primitive Earth tech-conflicts that create funny situations'.
Honestly, the only moment I really remembered in detail, besides the flying motorbikes, was the kid exclaiming how the pizza tastes exactly like Galactica's floor. I didn't know eating spaceship's floors is going to be a future pastime, but it seemed funny to me at the time.
It's funny, how these 'aimed at kids' shows went from 'grand epic spacemagic' to 'more mundane talking car, but still some cool tech' to 'a guy knows how to apply chemistry lessons from school'.
The 'magical' feel shrunk every time until there was nothing left.
This show still feels a bit magical and exciting, atmospherically and conceptually speaking. The concept is epic, the scale is massive, and it feels like anything can happen in such an interesting setting. A car that's grounded on one planet is such a smaller scale, it's almost disappointing (but who didn't love K.I.T.T. as a kid..?), it's more personal but the 'epicness' was gone.
Then we get just some guy that knows how to create chemical reactions for diversion so they can escape some desert prison. Then... nothing.
"..why are all of the male characters"
Are you a sexist?
Are we all equal? Why can one gender do things the other can't, in your view?
Why shouldn't men be able to wear dresses and capes, if women can wear pants and suits?
Something is very wrong in this world, equality isn't respected at all, women are liberated but men are still kept imprisoned .. in SO many ways. I recommend everyone that lives in a male body get a cape, preferably brightly colored, and pink pants or a dress. It would look weird at first, but so did the first women who wore pants. Now it's so normal, no one bats an eye if a woman wears pink or black or yellow pants and walks all over the city.
It's VERY telling that even in a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT WORLD that has a completely different culture (despite everyone speaking and understanding english and having the same intonation patterns as The U.S. of Americans), you wouldn't allow someone to drape their physical body in a certain garment of certain shape, texture, color, style, form or functionality, ONLY because of what is inbetween their legs!
I think this is the very DEFINITION of sexism. Could you please retract your female-chauvinistic misandry-type sexism? Thanks.
"I wish they hadn't of had "
You asked for thoughts.. well, my thoughts are: you should learn english.
There's no such thing as 'hadn't of'. Don't you see anything wrong with using a word like 'hadn't', but then suddenly using 'of'?
"I wish they didn't need to", "I wish they weren't forced to", "I wish they hadn't have to"...
What kind of sense in your mind does 'hadn't of had' make?
OF and HAVE are not synonyms, they're completely different things.
Please learn at least this fact before thinking your writing skills are up to par so you can write a review of something. Maybe next time you can write something coherent.. I'm rootin' for ya!
Why would he need any humans or women to talk to?
He's clearly asexual and has found a way to nourish his body with pure energy he can get from the machines, so he has no 'bodily needs' per se, not even need to sleep.
He basically sits on his throne and looks evil with lighting that comes from below, and laughs a lot while conducting a neverending Turing's test, while planning the destruction of all life in the Universe. What more could he want?
"Being surrounded by Cylons would drive him insane- no non verbal signals of any kind. No real interaction. He's going to be a loon in weeks"
Sounds exactly like this forum and its posters..
That's not how anything happened, though.
Lucas came to the other people with some kind of massive 'treatment', and they realized it's too big to be made into a movie, so they decided that the MIDDLE part of it could work as three movies.
In this way, it was "originally meant as a trilogy", but only very loosely. They just wanted to make a 'space serial-like movie', just like Spielberg did later with Raiders of the Lost Ark, that copied the old 'adventure serials'.
Heck, even the famous Star Wars text-scroll is 'borrowed' from those serials.
However, Lucas worked and edited the script a lot, constantly reworking and 'improving it'. Darth Vader wasn't originally Luke's father, and even the other characters had extreme changeovers. It was a very complicated process, he didn't just sit down one evening and write the thing.
It's questionable where he even got the 'treatment' in the first place, knowing his 'expertise', my guess is that he bought it from someone.
So, based on all this, after the success of the movies, Lucas probably planned to try to make the whole treatment into more movies, which is why he named the movies so weirdly as IV, V and VI instead of I, II and III (though originally the subtitle 'A New Hope' and 'Episode IV' weren't even part of the name, it was just 'Star Wars')
I remember reading about a nine-part movie series - the next movies were going to be 'Clone Wars', which would mean episodes VII, VIII and IX, and then we would get I, II and III. Everyone expected them to be as good as the already existing movies.
However, later the episodes VII, VIII and IX were scrapped, and now it was only going to be a six-parter.
MUCH, much later, they started making the episodes I-III that are weirdly called 'prequels' (still not sure if this term is correct or not, as they're supposedly legitimate episode numbers, not an afterthought), and people were excited - to say the least.
So your story doesn't come from reality.
"BSG was somewhat entertaining, but was aimed at a younger audience, which is why the stories are a little simpler, and also seemed to borrow somewhat from Judeo-Christian mythology."
Yeah, because 'younger audience' always instantly spells 'Judeo-Christian mythology'.
WHAT?
Am I in some kind of parallel universe, where no one is allowed ot make any sense?
What the F are you talking about? Kids don't care about 'Judeo-Christian mythology', they just want lasers and robots and PEW PEW BANG BANG SWOOSH spaceships and more robots! What the heck are you smoking?
"They were made as robots because the costumes were more cost efficient than making costumes making them look like living beings."
Uh, what?
The actors are ALREADY living beings, they don't need costumes to make them LOOK like living beings. How can it be more cost-effective to create those always-polished robotic costumes together with functional, moving red light and vocoder sound effects compared to just slapping some outfit on some actors?
None of this makes any sense.
Not having seen the episode (at least recently enough to remember), but having read about Earth history a bit, there was an incident with primitive canoes and a 'modern ship' (well, contemporarily thinking).
The 'modern ship' had cannons, it was a massive gunship, and the european men had guns, while the primitive canoe-paddling people had stones and slingshots.
Now, hands up, whoever thinks the hundreds of canoes won that battle? Anyone? Fry?
Yeeaah. That didn't go so well for the canoe-people - you don't bring a slingshot to a cannon fight or stones to a gunfight. The more advanced technology OBLITERATED the hundreds of canoes, lots of the primitive-tech people died and got injured, and they fled the scary sound of cannons anyway at one point.
This is basically TNG Enterprise vs. 'laser-equipped cargo vessel from hundreds of years ago'. TNG would eat 1000 ships alive before they could say 'no fair'.
The same would be true here - NUMBERS are not so important when you have SUPERIOR technology vs. INFERIOR technology. The superior tech wins.
Think about 100 people throwing rocks at a battleship. There's only ONE battleship, but it's not gonna care about 10 000 rocks thrown at it, there's not gonna be even a dent. A scratch, maybe.
Spears vs. tanks, same thing. No matter if you have 80 000 warriors furiously throwing their best spears at a tank, it's not gonna matter, they will lose. The tank will shoot a few times with its various weapons (remember that tank is not JUST a cannon), those people will go down very quickly and the conflict will end there, tank will be unharmed.
So unless the tech level is _VERY_ nearly the same (as in WW2 machine guns vs. modern machine guns instead of spears vs. machine guns), numbers aren't going to cut it, you need to level up your tech.
Amidst your many errors, there's also your wrongful opinion, as it proves you are wrong in about as many ways as possible.
This happens to be an excellent episode - one of the few that ISN'T boring.
This episode is NOT about 'seeing' anyway - it's about FEELING. If you are a sociopath or psychopath (judging from your extremely short post that you STILL managed to cram full of grammatical, logical, structural and other errors coupled with extreme stupidity, I'd say the probability for that ranks higher than the likelihood you will misunderstand what I am saying), naturally you can't understand what others 'see' in it.
If something requires feeling, and people feel and thus understand, but you only look and still don't even see, it doesn't mean the episode is bad - it just means you experienced a WOOSH, and then embarrass yourself by publicly showing your ignorance and lack of understanding to the world. Congratulations, that's quite an achievement only made possible by a complete lack of self-awareness!
Is your name Karen by any chance?
In any case, I was surprised to actually have started to cry at the end of this episode, when I 'semi-casually' watched it today. I remember a family member I showed this to years ago praised this to be better than Star Trek episodes we had enjoyed earlier (that family member is a big fan of Star Trek).
If everyone else can experience something to be good, but you, that can't even stich the simplest english sentence together correctly, do not 'know what others see in it'... are you SURE the problem is in the episode, and not ... somewhere else?
I don't cry easily - usually I don't cry at all - so something has to be PRETTY gosh darn powerful and special to make me cry without me being even able to anticipate it. I know this is supposed to be a 'touching' episode, but I would never have thought I would start sobbing almost uncontrollably because of watching it almost in the background.
TL;DR? You are wrong.
Glad you prove by your comment the exact level of intelligence and deep understanding of exploring forbidden concepts like 'friendship between a human and a Cylon' you are able to muster.
You don't know how to write a complete sentence, your punctuation and grammar are wrong, you lack capitalization and can't even use the word 'I' when it's needed.
You don't say 'most overrated something', you say "This is the most overrated.."
On the same token, you can't just say 'also boring' - you need ty say 'It is also boring'. However, for better cohesiveness and coherence, you could've joined these irrational opinions, as in "This episode is both overrated and boring.'
No need to use hyperbole anyway, as 'Battlestar Galactica' isn't known for having many 'overrated' anything - if anything, people have insulted and put down this show quite a lot. Factually speaking, there are way more overrated episodes in other shows.
Is there a reason why you are unable to use some kind of definitive words in your half-baked almost-sentences? Instead of "don't know" (weirdly, you got the apostrophe right - must be auto-correction or something..), you should've said something like "I don't know".
Now, expressing your OWN ignorance as some kind of proof about something being bad is neither wise nor intelligent.
You could've also mentioned that you simply don't see what others see in it, instead of saying you don't KNOW what others see in it. Maybe if you had said you don't UNDERSTAND what others are seeing in it, it would've made more sense, but 'you don't KNOW' .. ah, sorry, "[some unspecified group OR you] don't KNOW' what others SEE ... it's just so incongruent and you could also so easily remedy lack of knowledge by GAINING knowledge - for example, by ASKING people.
Then you'd know. You would still not understand, but at least you'd know.
"And that's saying a lot."
No, it isn't. Peanuts specials are always somber and depressing, they're not supposed to be trivial, mindless, superficial childrens' entertainment, they are meant for adults who understand things like cultural subtext and metaphors.
Also, who cares about cancer, there are worse problems in the world. I'd rather have cancer than depression any day.