(from 9 November 2004)
Voiceover man: In a world
(Santacorp high-rise on the Arctic wastes)
Voiceover man: where Christmas means business
(interior Santacorp CEO office. CEO reading a child’s letter)
CEO: “Dear Santa, blah blah, I’ve been very good all year, brownnose brownnose brownnose… ah, here we go: what I want for Christmas is…(he flips the page) my little brother to get better?” (stops reading) Who let this get through?
(shot of nervous, cowering elves with pointy green hats in their hands)
Voiceover man: Now
(shot of the elves running from the room, chased by the raging CEO who is throwing their hats after them)
Voiceover man: the most unlikely heroes
(shot of the elves fighting amongst themselves Three Stooges style)
Voiceover man: must find the one man
(shot of elves marching out through the reception area of the Santacorp high-rise)
Voiceover man: who can put things right
(closeup of one elf who seems to be in charge)
Elf: We gotta find Nick.
(a boardroom meeting at Santacorp.)
CEO: Saint Nick, Santa Claus, Father Christmas – he’s old news. History. We need something fresh.
(CEO standing in front of a small audience, giving a big speech)
CEO: Allow me to introduce the new face of Christmas: Santa Rhymez
(zoom in on a black dude wearing a red gangbanger vest and shades, with swimsuit ladies hanging off him and lots and lots of jewellery.)
Santa Rhymez: Yo. What’s digging y’all?
(Elf talking to a policeman on the streets of New York)
Elf: Excuse me, sir? I was wondering if you could help me?
(The policeman is kneeling down, eager to help.)
Elf: We’re looking for a magical fat man in a red coat.
(Cell door closing on the elf, who is kicking and shouting)
(Santa Rhymez addressing a group of teenagers)
Santa Rhymez: “Remember, there’s a reason for the season: tha ka-CHING-CHING-CHING!”
(Shot of the elves beating the crap out of a guy in a Santa suit)
Voiceover man: This Christmas
(Elves gathering around a table, lit by the torches in their high-tech goggles. They unroll a blueprint of Santacorp’s high-rise.)
Voiceover man: Get ready
(Shot of the elves abseiling down the outside of the building in a blizzard. Something SWOOPS past the camera.)
Elf: I don’t think we’re alone out here.
(SUDDENLY a RAGING REINDEER SPRINGS INTO VIEW behind the elf)
(Shot of elves breakdancing in a nightclub)
Voiceover man: To get merry
(A flame-filled cave. Standing in the centre is the Devil.)
The Devil: I’m Old Nick.
Elf: Ah. Well, we’re looking for Saint Nick.
The Devil: Sure, sure. It’s a common mistake.
(cut to TITLE)
Voiceover man: Desperately Seeking Santa
(Santa Rhymez with a gorgeous young woman on his arm.)
Santa Rhymez: Ho ho ho!
(the woman slaps him)
Woman: Watch your mouth!
—————-
It’s a game idea that took on a life of its own. As with so many things, blame ubiquitous_cat…
Month: December 2009
A Christmas Message
Hey everyone! This is David Hasselhoff, multimedia star of the new generation! My fans call me The Hoff and you can too (I like that name – snap!). And don’t forget that I was the first and best Nick Fury! (Take that, Samuel Jackson!)
Anyway, just stopping by to wish a very Merry Christmas to all of you readers of From the Morgue! You guys are the reason America’s so great! So keep on rocking in the FREE WORLD! (You know what I mean!)
And maybe you should give yourself the greatest gift of all this Christmas, and sign up to HoffSpace, my own personal social networking system! It’s great! “Morgue” (known in HoffSpace as “Morgan12”!) already has a profile, you should sign on up and be his friend! You can win great Hoff merchandise and help make the world a more amazing place! That’s truly brutal – or should I say TRUTAL!
As a talking car I know used to say: Oh Yeah! See you on Hoffspace!
Dan O’Bannon (1946-2009)
Stan Winston (born the same year) passed away in 2008, and in 2009 it’s Dan O’Bannon‘s turn.
Dude was one of those do-it-all guys from 70s cinema, a special-effects geek, screenwriter, actor and director. He’s in my pantheon for being one of the creative powerhouses behind 1979’s Alien. He co-wrote the original script that kicked the whole project into gear, and was the guy who pushed Giger at Scott as a creature designer. Others involved have not been entirely generous about O’Bannon’s contributions (Giler and Hill called it “a terrible script with one amazing scene”), and O’Bannon certainly saw himself as frozen out of the core creative process once the movie started rolling, but he stayed involved as an effects guy as the movie came into being.
Over at Coilhouse, Mer points out that “O’Bannon and Ron Shusett initially sketched all of the roles for Alien as generic males. However, they handed over their script with a note that explicitly stated: “The crew is unisex and all parts are interchangeable for men or women.” They were the first to suggest that traditional gender roles could be reversed, leaving the door wide open for Brandywine’s rewrite/production team, Ridley Scott, and casting.” I’m not sure quite how much of Ellen Ripley I’d lay at his door, but he does deserve some credit for sure.
O’Bannon’s chestburster idea (that one amazing scene) is one of the most iconic moments in all of cinema, and – I’m being serious here – is up there among the greatest artistic achievements of commercial American film. A deeply Freudian nightmare that reconfigures the relationship between human and non-human life, it had an indelible effect on those who saw it, and has only lost its power thanks to being endlessly copied and parodied since.
After Alien, O’Bannon had driving-seat roles in films like Heavy Metal, Lifeforce, and cult favourite Return of the Living Dead. He can be seen on the documentaries on my Alien DVDs. He was an interesting guy who did good work. Respect, Dan O’Bannon, respect.
—
By the way, yesterday’s Avatar review has attracted some hefty disagreement in comments from my friends Conan and Jarratt. Spoiler-heavy, but worth a look if you care about that film, especially if you thought I was off-beam…
Avatar (USA, 2009)
I will remember the opening moments of Avatar as one of the greatest cinema experiences of my life. Seeing Jake Sully emerge from cryo-sleep and move in a zero-gravity space, with a deep well disappearing far beneath him, astonished and delighted me. It was my first experience of the new 3D tech (if you don’t count the Alice in Wonderland trailer that immediately preceded it) and the visual shock lived up to the billing. That and Cameron’s customarily polished production design, and some very efficient early storytelling, started the film on a tremendous high.
The rest of the film was a steady roll downhill. By the end I was completely disengaged from everything that was happening in front of me, and occasionally resenting it. Even the lush natural world, surely an incredible accomplishment, wore out its welcome – too many spectacular lava lamp plants, not enough moments of genuine wonder.
It’s a film with its heart in the right place, but all the subtlety of a Captain Planet episode. The storytelling was perfunctory at best, often laughably so – Our Hero meets the natives, and they establish in two lines that the hot girl he met is the chief’s daughter, and the tough warrior is betrothed to the hot girl. The chief tells the hot girl to train Our Hero in the native ways, but she better not fall in love with him! We’ve all seen this movie before, right? We all knew that was going to be the case, why waste any extra words on it?
And it had all the clumsy you would expect from a tech-fetishist’s attempt to depict a holistic/shamanic worldview – they can measure the web of consciousness with their scanners because it’s made of electricity!
But mostly, the film annoyed me for buying in so thoroughly to the White Man Saves The Natives fantasy. I knew it was coming, but I didn’t expect just how egregious it was going to be.
It isn’t just a white man learning to become a high-functioning highly-respected member of the tribe in a spectacularly short time – no, Our Hero actually proves to be the awesomest native in history, not only becoming one of the few people ever to do the most difficult thing (apparently because of a tactical insight any ten-year-old could replicate), but also being the only one ever to do this other amazing thing that, um, why does it work for him again? No justification is presented. He’s just awesome is why.
And he’s a tool. Seriously, the hero of this movie is not a nice or charming guy, and Sam Worthington is not the actor to convince you otherwise.
Lets not get into the roles of the non-blue people of colour in this film.
Jim Cameron, this is the one that tips you over. I was with you through Titanic, which I really enjoyed and (though I haven’t seen it for a decade) am confident I’d still like. I stand up for you when people point at that and laugh at its cartoonish storytelling and grand excess. But Avatar, I cannot defend. (Still, it keeps getting four-star and five-star reviews. So what the hell do I know?)
Good points: the opening sequence, everything with Sigourney Weaver, all those Maori men and women in space.
I genuinely recommend watching this in a foreign language, untranslated. That isn’t sarcasm, I think it’d improve the experience tenfold.
Santa Linky
First: sign the Avaaz petition for a deal in Copenhagen. Several world leaders asked Avaaz to do this to lend weight to the negotiations; so far over 13 million people have signed. That’s a lot of people. They’re aiming for 15 million. Sign here.
Best photoblog of the year? Sketchy Santas:
Amazon’s gigantic warehouse. It’s big. No elves though.
The amazing Kate Beaton does some Xmas-themed comics
Santa Baby (Eartha Kitt)
World’s smallest snowman!
Still looking for gifts? How about Gnome Chomsky? Or a heartfelt album by Ken? Or how about you make a replica of a famous science-fiction vehicle like these superfans did?
And finally, readers, I have two gifts for you:
Chris Walken reads the lyrics to Lady Gaga’s ‘Poker Face’
Carrie Fisher and her stunt double catch some rays on the Jabba’s barge set. And you know what that means.
Madagascar Kartz
Another game I worked on for NZ’s finest game company Sidhe Interactive has been released, so I can talk about it: Madagascar Kartz I worked on this one in parallel with the Hot Wheels game, and it’s good to see it out in the world. Sidhe recently tweeted a link to this 4.5/5 review of the game, which sums up the whole thing pretty well.
My primary role on MK was to write the incidental comments that the characters say during the races. Working on well-established characters was quite fun, as they all had a very distinctive voice, particularly King Julien whose dialogue in the films was largely improvised by Sacha Baron Cohen. I really pushed myself hard to try and embed appropriate gags in short stand-alone sentences, and I was pleased with the results. The tiny snatches of dialogue in the trailer don’t sound like mine, which emphasizes another point – I’m just working on one step in a long process that is itself just one strand of a much larger project. Things get changed a lot as they go, particularly for licensed games, and it’s entirely possible that none of the work I do survives to the released game.
Here’s another example, a game I worked on a couple years back, Speed Racer. Another licensed game, based on the cult money-loser by the Wachowski Bros. The game was extremely well-received, so it’s a shame it didn’t get much benefit from the movie which mostly left audiences baffled and overstimulated. Anyway, here’s some gameplay that I nabbed off YouTube. See how, through the whole clip, characters make comments which appear at the top of the screen? A lot of those are mine. I was particularly stoked to see that “Ha ha ha ha ha!” got in with the correct amount of “ha”s…
There’s a bit less talking in this Battle Force 5 gameplay, and it’s hard to hear, but again a bunch of it is mine:
So, yeah. The glamorous world of the computer game industry! These were all fun projects, and it’s a good challenge to the writing craft to try and devise five hundred variants on “I’m going to win and you’re not”. Good times! I’ve just picked up another gig with Sidhe so looking forward to getting stuck into that one too!
Grad
Thank you parents!
Graduation last night. I can now put MSc after my name. Nice.
Way back when I last graduated, I had no interest in going to the ceremony – the pomp struck me as, well, pompous, even grotesque, and at a considerable remove from my values at the time. It didn’t strike me so much as a celebration of achievement, but rather an encoding of social difference, and one beholden to a foreign social system at that.
The big ol’ ceremony is still there with its crazy robes and hats and formalised interactions, and it doesn’t bother me so much these days. However, I was pleased by the beautiful waiata and resounding haka performed by family and friends in the audience when many of the Maori students took to the stage. They brought the whole ceremony to a standstill, disrupting the smooth process and the expected role of the audience. I liked that these mighty and heartfelt performances did not fit with the old-Europe ceremonial structure, and in fact seemed almost to be a response to it, an assertion that academic achievements do not belong to the old culture of Europe but to all peoples on their own terms. It was an uneasy fit, and that’s exactly as it should be at this stage of New Zealand’s bicultural development – an uneasy equilibrium, two parts pushing against each other, still working to find a sustainable balance.
Anyway, it was a nice event for me, I got to wear my kilt and remember the madness almost a year ago as I was racing to hand in. Here’s hoping for a relatively quiet summer for a change – been a long time since I’ve had one of those!
Sending Malc Home
Speaking of going home again… in a few hours, Oor Scottish Friend Malcolm hops on a wee plane and flies back to Scotland. It seems like only yesterday that we ordered him off of Amazon.co.uk: Scotsman (Falkirk), housetrained, scribbles words. We had him delivered, and we read the instructions carefully, about how we weren’t supposed to feed him after midnight, and god forbid anyone should call him English…
…and then it was time to open the box and meet our new Malc for the first time.
Safe home, Malc ol’ buddy, safe home. See you in May!
Coming Home Again
I never expected Shihad’s anthem to be “Home Again”. NZ’s mightiest live act released their third album in ’96 and it was a departure from the heavy intensity of their first two releases, defiantly poppy and restless. (It’s a great album to sing along to.) “Home Again” is a touring musician’s thin promise/apology to his partner, a charming upbeat track with no small undercurrent of melancholy. It has become the song with which Shihad are most identified, their ultimate crowd-pleaser.
Kiwis like songs about going away and coming home again. This shared affection comes from a number of different strands in our national identity. It’s most obvious in how our middle-class youth (which is a lot of us) habitually embark on the Big OE, the overseas experience, and take off to Europe (sometimes other destinations) for a couple of years. It’s also visible in the large number of New Zealanders living overseas (the global Kiwi “diaspora“), or the relationship many Maori have with a home marae. The bare facts of geography are also influential – when you’re a big island a long way from anywhere, leaving the island and coming back to it become important concerns.
Which brings me to the Returning to New Zealand pages on the Careers NZ website. This set of information was the pet project of a friend of mine, and I’m pleased to send some eyeballs in its direction.
It’s really just three pages, with supporting docs and links. The first is about preparing to return home, with advice and ideas for people who are ready to come back. Then, unsurprisingly given it’s a Careers NZ site, there’s a page about seeking employment back in NZ – definitely worth consideration, as the job market in NZ is its own beastie, quite unlike those in other countries. Finally, there’s a page on settling back in, the cultural and mental adjustments you need to dig back into the local scene (including “reverse culture shock“).
It’s a good wee resource, and I hope it gets found by people who are about to make the jump back – it will surely be of help. There’s also a short survey for recent returners – you might want to click through if that’s you.
You know, I remember vividly getting off the plane, back in Wellington for the first time in years, and the way the sky looked, and the sharp colours of the trees, and most of all the crazy colourful wooden houses clinging to the hillsides. It was very strange and very familiar all at once, and it was a great feeling. I loved coming home.
Too Many Linky Not Enuf Mics
Exit your show like I exit the turnpike
Google Street View now extends into the ruins of Pompeii
Web Site Story – some of this is so perfect it hurts.
This is getting much buzz right now, a promo for a potential show named Slingers, to try and garner enough support to actually make the show. It’s got a groovy, effortless charm to it. I guess you’d call it Ocean’s 11 Go To Space Casino:
SLINGERS from Mike Sizemore on Vimeo.
Xmas present option: art book by Paul Bourne, who renders amazing CGI environments and characters.
Tor.com hosts a Lovecraft art-a-thon. Neat stuff here.
Oh, I do love this rather a lot. Old net-heads who, like me, are Aliens geeks might recall the mid-90s site Wierzbowski Hunters (lovingly maintained in its original vintage) dedicated to celebrating the most unknown of the Colonial Marines in Jim Cameron’s film: Pt Wierzbowski, played by stuntman Trevor Steedman. Wierz went down somewhere in the confusing action of the film, and was presumed dead – but these fans have decided to create a different future for the character. Aliens Epilogue is a fan film now in production in which Trevor Steedman reprises his role as Wierzbowski, and it may well be the entire reason the internets were invented. Here’s the trailer:
The NY Tribune in 1910 imagines burglary in the future, Popular Mechanics in the 50s just doesn’t give a damn about anything, and Modern Mechanix in 1929 features a women’s beauty treatment that seems to involve putting your face in a giant radioactive ribcage.
How the sun moves in the sky
David Bowie writes back to his first American fan. He seems very excited!
And finally… new Barbie has pooper scooper and dog that poos everywhere.