Apart from Star Wars, attempts to introduce the nibblings to classic TV shows and movies has not met with a great deal of success. Who would have guessed that kids these days would have their own ideas about culture, taste, and entertainment, and that stuff made for kids forty years ago wouldn't have instant, cross-generational appeal. Shocking, I tell you. Anyway, there have been a few things here and there, that some of them have glommed onto, and one of the things that the Terra has gravitated towards is the old She-Ra cartoon. If you aren't familiar with it, this video pretty much covers it:
She Ra and the Best of Science Fantasy
I think that's reasonably accurate, except for the bit about the show being a completely cynical vehicle to advertise toys. I think that part gets overstated quite a bit. While it's true, that the show was commissioned by a toy company, it was actually produced by Filmation, America's last family-owned animation studio; who did everything from writing the scripts, to drawing the animation frames, to recording the voices. And when you listen to interviews with the show's creators (included with the DVD box-sets), you get the impression that there really was quite a bit of love and care put into it.
Anyway, the main takeaway is that it's science-fantasy aimed at six-to-ten-year-olds, and despite a lot of the ideas being incredibly silly, they're presented with a surprising amount of sincerity. There's no irony or sarcasm, the main characters are all grown-ups, and you're never going to hear fart jokes, stoner humour, or the retarded skater-punk slang that you get with crap like the Ninja Turtles. And since I quite enjoy sitting down and watching the show with Terra, it's kind of become one of "our things".
Therefore, it was only natural that we would want to check out the Netflix original reboot of the show. Despite the fact that it's turned out to be an entirely different type of show from the original, we have both gotten rather into it as well; and catching up on the latest batch of episodes was something Terra and I did as soon as I got back from my trip away.
In case you're wondering what the show is about, here's a quick rundown. This info is dribbled out over the course of many episodes, so skip over this bit if you want to avoid spoilers:
Etheria is a planet that used to be home to a highly advanced civilisation, referred to in legends as "The First Ones". Their technology appears to permeate everything, and it's possible that the planet itself might be an artificially created Death-Star type super-weapon. Anyway, The First Ones society was destroyed by some unknown catastrophe, and the more primitive and barbaric society which has grown out of the ashes has created a system of "magic" based on the surviving technology.
Certain women are born with the innate ability to tap into the planet's "magic", effectively giving them comic-book-super-hero type powers. Rather than being labelled "witches" or "sorcerers", these women are referred to as "princesses"; so yes, this show literally revolves around super-powered princesses. The most powerful type of princess is "The She-Ra", but there hasn't been one of those in over a thousand years.
Decades ago, an alien named Hordak, a disgraced general from an intergalactic military empire, crashed his ship through a dimensional portal, and became stranded on Etheria. Hoping to win back favour with his superiors, he has been building an army with which to conquer the planet, and a machine with which to contact the rest of the empire. Working against him are a loose affiliation of princesses and their followers. Time is also not on Hordak's side, as he is slowly dying from some sort of degenerative illness.
Our story begins when a teenage girl in Hordak's army (Adora) discovers that she can tap into the power of She-Ra. She defects, and joins the other princesses, but her best friend and fellow soldier (Catra) refuses to follow her—thus setting up a bitter rivalry and the basis for much angsty drama.
The first thing you notice about the new version is that it's aimed at an older crowd than the original—I'm guessing around the 10-14 age range. Which is okay, I suppose, given how old Terra is now. On the other hand, she's not particularly mature for her age. I dunno. At any rate, she doesn't seem to be having any trouble handling the subject matter, so it's fine, I guess.
The second thing you notice is that the writing is very heavily influenced by Buffy The Vampire Slayer. The protagonist is a teenage girl, who was chosen by fate to have powers and responsibilities that alienate her from everyone else; she's super strong; she has her own version of the scooby gang, central to which are her two best friends (one male and one female); she has her own version of a watcher, who is tasked with training her; there's a reasonable amount of action, but the driving force of the show is emotional drama, inter-personal conflict, and internal struggle; and most of the dialogue can really only be described as "Whedon-esque" in nature.
Fortunately, most of that stuff is handled pretty well. While this could be said about most of the characters, Adora and Catra in particular, are wonderfully constructed, and the development of their complicated love/hate relationship is beautifully played out. And even though there are more than a few sarcastic teenagers in the show, most of the characters aren't annoying and completely unlikable arseholes … most of them … Adora's talking horse is kind of an unbearable cunt.
Unfortunately, the show also has its weak points. For starters, Adora's talking horse is kind of an unbearable cunt. Some of the fight scenes are crappy and anti-climactic; the rich and complex character development is occasionally undermined, when someone does something really childish, like describing themselves as being on either the side of good or evil; and sometimes the world they're in feels empty and kind of fake. For example, both Hordak's forces and the princess alliance are supposed to be these huge armies, but a lot of the time it feels like each side might have—like—maybe 150 members, tops. In one episode, Adora and her friends journey to a "kingdom" ruled by a princess with plant-related powers, and from what we see, it appears her entire realm is just a commune of about 30 hippies living in a clearing in the woods. Kind of a shame, considering how fun and interesting the characters are … most of the time.
On the other hand, I'm not sure how much of a fault any of this actually is. Even though I find these things disappointing and distracting, the show's target audience (Terra), either hasn't noticed or isn't bothered by them. There is one thing that she thought was beyond the pail though. There's one character who has a dozen brothers and two gay dads, and Terra was adamant that she wanted to know where all of those babies came from if there was no mum involved. At this point, I don't know if the show ever intends to answer that question. Probably not.
Interestingly, I think both of us are more invested in the villains than we are in the heroes. I suspect there's a few reasons for this. First of all, the world of the villains feels more dangerous and exciting. Being a military outfit, Hordak's forces are pretty tough when it comes to disobeying orders, and there's been times in the show when main characters have literally been locked up, awaiting execution (though never actually executed), or sent on suicide missions as a form of punishment (but didn't actually die). On top of that, our main villain (Catra) has a much more dramatic—and I would posit, sympathetic—character arc than our protagonist (Adora). She's been abused and betrayed by her adopted mother, abandoned by her best friend, and the only thing that's ever got her anywhere in life is being dishonest, taking massive risks, and looking out for number one. At this point in the show, she's an emotionally wrecked nihilist, and unfortunately for me, her behaviour sometimes seems a little bit too familiar to be comfortable.
Lastly, the villains are the only group on the show who have a romantic sub-plot … and I'm totally into it. I never would have suspected that at my age, I'd be this invested in watching a relationship blossom between a crippled and dying alien warlord and his chief technologist—an autistic genius (yes, the writers have confirmed that she is intentionally written as autistic)—who also happens to be a princess who defected to the dark side "because they have better tech" … Oh, and she also has magical hair powers … because y'know … she's a princess. Actually, I can't even remember the last time I saw a show which had a romantic sub-plot I was really into. Was there one in Game Of Thrones?
To end this post, I'd like to take a little bit of time to talk about the She-Ra fandom. Since my favourite niece is into it, I thought I might have a poke around the internet and check out the sorts of things she's likely to find online. For the most part, it all seemed pretty normal. There's a wiki that explains every aspect of the show in minute detail. There's YouTube videos reviewing the show and making predictions about what might happen in future episodes. There's chat forums where people post memes and fan-art, talk about shipping, discuss the romance angle, and hotly debate which of the villains should get reformed, and which ones should stay villains to the end. Mostly harmless, mostly kid-friendly fluff.
Having said that, there was apparently some controversy when the show was first announced (of course there was) because fans of the old show felt like She-Ra's character design made her look too masculine. Here's a video from the same woman as before, talking about it:
SheRa - Femininity and the Power of Hair
Finally, I went and looked at some of the fan-made She-Ra music videos on YouTube. I think I've mentioned before that I used to work as a video editor way back in the day, and one of the first communities I got involved with when I first got the internet was the fan-made music video mob. While I still have a soft spot for it, it's been a long while since I've actively gone looking for material. A couple of things that I found interesting:
1) The use of special effects is a lot more common and a lot more sophisticated than it used to be. I'm guessing this is due to consumer video editing software coming with more and better "one click" presets. In the old days, if you wanted a complicated effect, you usually had to build it out of more basic effects, and then hope it didn't crash the application during the rendering stage.
2) Apparently people no longer feel like they have to make a video that last for the entire duration of a song. A lot of the videos I saw were less than 2 minutes long. What I found even more bizarre is that people generally don't even feel the need to fade them out or do anything else at the end of them. Most of them just stop … really fuckin' abruptly.
3) It's still the case that most people don't seem to get the concept of syncing the "flow" of the video to the "flow" of the music, and that both of them are going to have "beats" that need to be matched up if you want the final product to really grab people.
4) YouTube isn't a very productive place to make music videos, since 99.9% of the feedback you're going to get will be about the show you pulled the clips from, rather than constructive criticism regarding your editing.
In any case, here are the two videos I found which I liked the best. Of course, they both concern the romantic sub-plot I fawned over earlier. One is from the perspective of our dark alien overlord, and the other from our adorably unfiltered inventer, so they work well as a complimentary pair.
I find this second one especially interesting, because of the amount of work that's gone into the audio. Somebody—probably not the person who made the video—but somebody has taken a shitty pop song, stripped out the music and half of the vocals, then they've completely stripped out the vocals from a second shitty pop song (leaving only the music), and then they've remixed those two bits together to make something far superior to the source material. Consider my hat is tipped.
So anyway, in closing, if you're looking for something to watch with a nine-year-old girl, you could probably do a lot worse than the new She-Ra cartoon. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.
No comments :
Post a Comment