Ah, Sevenya

So The Lion King was top of the box office this past weekend, beating out other movies that probably had actual budgets they had to earn back (ie. movies that had to be created and did not already exist).

Apparently it’s 3D now. I don’t know how you turn a 1994 hand drawn cartoon into a 3D movie and not have it look like a wacky cut-out/pop-out book, but that is why they are making like $30 million in pure profit and I am slumming it up here in the gutter. DVDs weren’t even invented when The Lion King came out, but I think 1994 would have gladly taken to widespread 3D movies a lot easier than the spoiled masses of 2011. You know how wacky the vision of technology was in 1994? People from 1994 thought that time travel would be available in 2004 and be done via bobsleds with Lambo doors, and that male pregnancy would be hilarious and upbeat. That is an (overly) optimistic take on technology that I kind of miss having.

There was also a weird trend of skydiving action movies in 1994. Drop Zone with Wesley Snipes, Terminal Velocity with Charlie Sheen, and Freefall with the bad guy from The Expendables – all came out that year. I have no explanation for this.

Oh and Forrest Gump, Pulp Fiction, The Shawshank Redemption, and Street Fighter were all from 1994 too. Not a bad year for film. Was the 1994 Oscar season like the 1996 NBA draft? I want to answer this question, but I don’t think I have enough trivial knowledge about either film nor basketball to do it. Sounds like something Grantland should do.

(Quick and dirty attempt…Shawshank is Steve Nash due to late critical recognition versus the lack of initial box office success…Iverson’s Rookie of the Year award and early success seemingly put him as a lock to be the best player from that class, but his relatively sudden drop-off and dismissal as such easily compares to Forrest Gump‘s ambivalent Oscar win…Street Fighter is obviously the greatest basketball player of all time in Starbury…Ray Allen is as timeless as both the lead and the tale of the Keanu-helmed Speed…Jermaine is Pulp Fiction because even though he died midway through the picture he still makes it to the end…Kobe is The Lion King as the top grossing performer…Derek Fisher is City Slickers 2 because even though it’s kind of a shitty movie, I still see it playing on national television all the time despite all logic…Antoine Walker is Hoop Dreams because he was born in Chicago and because there are no notable Bulls from this draft?…Shareef is a combination of all of the aforementioned skydiving movies plus Double Dragon.

…yeah, this analogy completely fell apart.)

Let’s move onto the links and put this all behind us.

– This is a Tumblr featuring a series of pictures illustrating how Things Could Be Worse. …can I just call this a webcomic?

– Check out this leaked footage of a now cancelled Avengers video game that was presumably going to tie into the movie. Generally speaking, there hasn’t been a glorious history of first person melee mechanics in video games, but it looked pretty sweet here. And I am further impressed when you consider how great it looks for an early alpha build of a game. And further still because it’s a movie game…and the good ones are few and far between. Considering the steaming piles of garbage that video game publishers have rushed out to ride in the wakes of blockbuster movies, I’m surprised that they’ve cancelled something that looks so apparently polished. The standard for these games are so low that I bet they could have just released whatever they had and complaints be damned – all they need is for you to go buy the game once. I guess it goes to show just how crazy the process is to actually get a game out there – all the work and all the hours that went into this was ultimately wasted.

It’s a shame, it looks pretty neat. I like how Iron Man can do all these crazy things…like FLIGHT! HOVER! REPULSOR BLASTS! MINES! ROCKETS! SHIELDS! EXPLOSIONS! He’s flying around, blowing shit up, it looks pretty awesome playing as Iron Man. And the Hulk is badass too, he’s got like ENHANCED MELEE COMBOS! SUPER JUMPS! AERIAL FINISHERS! PICKING GUYS UP AND SMASHING THEM INTO EXPLODING BAGS OF JUICE!

And then it cuts to Captain America and it’s like…ledge grabs. Whoo.

– On the other hand, seems like DC Universe Online will be free to play, so that at least makes the worst video game purchase I ever made slightly easier to swallow. Time to dust off Lady Cervix and get back to cleaning up the mean streets of Gotham City. That bitch can grab ledges like a mofo. If I make it to level 30 with her, I get two gold PS3 trophies. That seriously might be the only reason I may continue to play it.

“You want some of this insulin?”
“No, I just want crack.”