Weekend Reads (Sep 17): “Turbo Teen,” Disney, D&D Racism, Jean-Luc Godard (RIP), Amish Romance
Recommended weekend reading for September 17, 2022.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
Last week, I wrote about a long-lost “gem” from my childhood titled Small Wonder. I’m continuing that theme this week, with an article about one of the strangest Saturday morning cartoons of all time.
I’ve had Turbo Teen on my list of shows to give the “Worst Episode Ever” treatment for years, assuming, like most of my other entries, I could research which episode was the worst without watching multiple episodes. However, as I said, Turbo Teen has been almost entirely forgotten. So I subjected myself to hours of this horrible, horrible cartoon for this article, and I can say with some authority that all 13 episodes of Turbo Teen are tied for Worst. They suck. They’re all dumb as rocks, insultingly written, lazily animated, and made by people who didn’t even pretend to care. All that said, “Video Venger” was the episode that made me the angriest, so here we are.
I loved Turbo Teen when I was eight years old, but mainly because I loved sports cars. I have no doubt that Turbo Teen is objectively terrible — the premise sounds like a bad acid trip, for starters — but I do enjoy remembering it alongside other Saturday morning cartoons of that era, like Kidd Video, Lazer Tag Academy, and Mister T.
Related: The above screencap comes from this epic Twitter thread that contains screencaps of every single transformation in Turbo Teen.
Also related: Revisiting “classic” cartoons like Silverhawks, Mighty Orbots, and The Real Ghostbusters.
In recent years, Dungeons & Dragons has undergone significant changes to remove racial stereotypes and other offensive material, but some believe that still more needs to be done.
On August 18th, Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast released Unearthed Arcana: Character Origins, a free document that provided fans of the tabletop roleplaying game with their first look at a new, updated ruleset currently called “One D&D.” It is game design in flux: 21 pages of preview material highlighting changes to the way characters are made and the game is played.
It is, essentially and effectively, a first draft, one the publisher released early in order to request feedback from fans, particularly in regards to changes in the way the game handles the thorny topic of race. It is also, unfortunately, not nearly enough to divest the game from the racial bioessentialism that has dogged D&D game design since its inception.
I’m running a campaign for my son and his friends, and am currently guiding them through character creation. A character’s race and their abilities, stats, etc., do go hand-in-hand quite a bit, which can reinforce stereotypes and lead to uncomfortable descriptions. Thus, decoupling those things as much as possible makes sense.
I’d wager that the controversy stems, in part, from our traditional fantasy notions of what elves, dwarves, orcs, trolls, etc., look like and how they live and behave (much of which comes to us via Tolkien, for better or worse). For example, trolls are often portrayed as big and brutish, so from a gameplay perspective, it makes sense to give them certain physical bonuses compared to elves and other, smaller species.
Moving away from such depictions is certainly possible, and may even be the right thing to do — and could open up some really cool character ideas. But to the extent that you do that, what then — from a gaming perspective, at least — makes a troll a troll, an elf an elf, and so on? Are any such distinctions between different species still important? What sort of impact, if any, should they have on gameplay? Is it possible to keep such distinctions in place, but strip them of any connected racial coding or stereotypes?
I don’t want to harp on this too much, because the fact is that there are some really terrible stereotypes in D&D that should be removed — and if opening up the game and making it more accessible pisses off the old guard, then so be it. But, as is the case with The Rings of Power and the controversy surrounding its racial diversity, doing so definitely raises some thorny (albeit super-nerdy) questions.
Disney revealed a slew of upcoming titles and announcements at their recent D23 fan event, including new Marvel titles, lots of Star Wars (including The Mandalorian’s highly anticipated third season), and a sequel to one of Pixar’s most beloved and original films.
Jean-Luc Godard, who helped establish cinema’s French New Wave with 1960’s Breathless, died earlier this week via assisted suicide. He was 91 years old.
Godard started as a film critic before stepping behind the camera with the stylish and edgy Breathless. Its stars Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo were glamorous in a new, casual way, while the camera was constantly moving, the editing was swift and bold, and the script semi-improvised.
The director once said: “It was a film that took everything that cinema had done — girls, gangsters, cars — exploded all this and put an end, once and for all, to the old style.”
Some of Godard’s other acclaimed films include Contempt (1963), Band of Outsiders (1964), and Alphaville (1965). Godard was deeply influential on numerous filmmakers, including Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino. (Tarantino’s film production company, A Band Apart, was named after the original French title of Band of Outsiders.)
20 years ago, Roberto Benigni — perhaps hoping to capitalize on the success of the award-winning Life Is Beautiful — released Pinocchio, largely considered one of the worst movies of all time.
To be fair to Benigni, just about no one in this country has seen the original version of his Pinocchio. Dumped into U.S. theaters by Miramax without advance screenings or much promotion, Pinocchio was hastily dubbed into English and recut after opening in Italy a few months earlier. If you try to rent Benigni’s Pinocchio now through any of the major digital services, it appears you’re stuck with the bastardized U.S. cut. But although some American critics have a few mildly kind things to say about the Italian version, this doesn’t sound like a case of a masterpiece being hacked to pieces by a thoughtless U.S. distributor. More likely, Benigni’s English-dubbed Pinocchio is a bad movie made unimaginably worse by some disastrous alterations. Not “So bad you have to see it” bad. Not “This is a fascinating train wreck” bad. We’re talking the kind of listlessly bad that makes you want to swear off movies for a while. Maybe going outside and getting some exercise really is a better way to spend your free time.
The confusion and frustration surrounding HBO Max’s recent merger and cost-cutting efforts continues unabated, especially for animators.
“Looking at the wide breadth of all the shows that were taken off of the service, it’s hard to even see a throughline between them,” Jones-Quartey says. “We’re still just not sure why some things were taken off and other things weren’t. The whole thing is just very confusing, and there hasn’t been much outreach to anybody.”
Inverse spoke to three animators who had their shows pulled. None of them were contacted by Warner Bros. Discovery representatives before or after their show's removal, and all remained “confused” about why it even happened. WBD did not respond to our request for comment.
By revealing the “behind the scenes” aspects of various influencers’ posts on social media, Belgian artist Dries Depoorter highlights the extent to which our lives are under constant surveillance.
Using EarthCam, a website that provides live streaming feeds from cities around the world, Depoorter recorded weeks of footage from cameras in Dublin and two U.S. cities. He then scraped Instagram photos that had been taken nearby, targeting posts by users with more than 100,000 followers. The software he created uses artificial intelligence and facial recognition technology to scan the videos and find influencers in the act of taking the photographs that end up online.
The resulting split frame shows a polished post next to the real-time surveillance footage, an awkward dance of false starts, costume adjustments, doting accomplices and faux-spontaneous laughs. For many viewers, the video — which comes from just 10 days of footage — says something more about the decay of online privacy than it does about social media superficiality.
To celebrate their 15th anniversary, Consequence has compiled their own list of the 100 greatest albums of all time.
This is a list compiled through hours of debate, frustration, laughter, acquiescence, and epiphany. It’s one that assessed the mercurial value attached to art, from perceptions at the moment of creation, to retrospective consideration, to the impact on ever-evolving fashions. It’s also one that allowed joy to be a factor of greatness.
So, go ahead, lob your criticisms. Voice your feelings about how your favorite artists were left off, or how we skipped over that iconic LP. We welcome it! And when the dust settles, the staff of Consequence will stand proud behind our list of the 100 greatest albums of all time. Until the next time.
For years, the Montana-based pastor J.D. Hall made it his mission to go after anyone he deemed insufficiently Christian or conservative, all while building up his own status as a conservative media mogul and political operative. But in recent months, Hall has become embroiled in arrests, lawsuits, and allegations of abuse and embezzlement.
So in the middle of a criminal case, ongoing police investigations and the cumulative scrutiny of numerous public controversies, the pastor who built a persona on never fearing to speak out, who for years pursued a position as a kingmaker within the religious right, a holy warrior who took it upon himself to discern true conservatives from fakes and genuine Christians from heretics, fell silent.
Arren Kimbel-Sannit’s thoroughly research and reported article is as sad as it is fascinating. I’ve followed Hall’s exploits off and on over the years, such as when he began criticizing the 15-year-old son of one of his “opponents” on Twitter back in 2014; the boy later committed suicide. Any decent human being would have seen that as a sign to repent, self-reflect, and change their public witness and rhetoric — but not Hall.
As with any and all such abusers and hypocrites, I hope Hall repents and make amends for what he’s done — including going to prison if necessary — and then just stays away from the public sphere lest he cause any more damage.
Finally, an interesting and confusing experience with his church’s library led Sam George to explore the world of Amish romance novels and their popularity in evangelical Christian circles.
Amish romance provides an alternative world to our hypermodern one. The genre’s pastoral settings and earnest yearnings for family and fulfillment provide a slower and more grounded view of the world than that which confronts its readers in their real lives. The view of the Amish as rejectors of modern technology and dynamism — however accurate or not — provides the impetus for an Amish setting specifically rather than a less precise pastoral environment. The books are also products of hypermodernity in that they are written and marketed with set structures at scale to sustain businesses.
Despite perceptions to the contrary, the genre does not use hypersexuality — the elevated commodification of hypermodernity as applied to sex. Romance is chaste throughout, with nary an explicit scene. The bar for chastity is defined by late 20th century purity backlash against sexual revolution norms. Amish romance sees little need for touch, much less something more.
From the Blog
Although it was released back in 2018, I finally got around to watching Parallel Love: The Story of a Band Called Luxury — and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It works wonderfully as a nostalgic account of a bygone era in Christian music, a celebration of a great band, and a thought-provoking rumination on faith, art, and vocation.
Even if you don’t know Cornerstone from Purple Door from Ichthus, have never heard of record labels like Bulletproof, or have no attachment to “Chrindie” music from the ’90s and early ’00s, Parallel Love is a fascinating story with all of the requisite rock n’ roll twists (e.g., young talented band, music industry woes, controversy, struggles and trials to overcome). But if you’re a Christian who’s at all interested in the relationship between faith and art, or understanding how your faith works itself out in your vocation, then Parallel Love will give you plenty to think about. That, and some awesome songs from a band that deserves any and all acclaim that comes their way — even if it takes a decade or two.
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