Archive for July, 2007

I Already Know How the Imaginext Dinosaur War Will Turn Out

by Glenn Vance on July 27, 2007 in Toys with 3 Comments
Tyranosaurus!

My son loves Imag­inext Dinosaurs, I mean, really loves them, loves them so much that he wants not just one red Tyran­nosaurus Rex but also its part­ner, the looks-just-the-same-except-for-the-color green Tyran­nosaurus Rex. Both are named Razor, by the way, but my son never calls them that. It’s always just “T-rex”. And those T-rexs live, of course, at T-rex Moun­tain. He loves these dinosaurs, which I sup­pose are prob­a­bly the heirs to my old Adven­ture Peo­ple from years ago in the 1970’s. And man, I loved those Adven­ture People.

And the dinosaurs are pretty cool. They move and make noises and stuff like that, but rather than just make them dinosaurs who coex­ist with each other, Fisher Price has turned it into a bat­tle. From the Fisher Price site -

Imagine…a prim­i­tive civ­i­liza­tion of humans and dinosaurs, liv­ing in a lush, green land. One side—the predators—are using up its nat­ural resources, wip­ing out every­thing and every­one that gets in their way. The other side—the ecovores—want to pre­serve their land. And they’re will­ing to fight to make that happen.Will the preda­tors suc­ceed in destroy­ing the land, caus­ing their own extinc­tion? Or will the ecov­ores stop the destruc­tion and make the land a place where dinosaurs and humans can live together peace­fully? In the world of Imag­inext®, any­thing is possible!

Is it pos­si­ble? Really? “If I had a hammer.…”

Let me ask you this — did the preda­tors win? Or the ecovores?

I don’t want to give this away, gen­tle reader, espe­cially if you don’t know how this whole thing ends, but I really, really can’t help myself. I’m sorry. It’s just too dif­fi­cult to keep such spoi­lerific infor­ma­tion all to myself.

Okay, I’ll say it — they both lost!

Here’s how it happened.

The place is Pangea, and our ene­mies, the Preda­tors and the Ecov­ores, are meet­ing up and about to have one of those mother-of-all bat­tles, you see, and there they were, Razor and Rip­per and Slasher and all of their allies, and they were mov­ing in for the kill on Whip, Thun­der, Tank and Ham­mer, when out of the blue, they heard some­thing in the sky. They stopped their run­ning and slash­ing and bit­ing and looked up, quizzi­cally, to the sky.

“ROWR?“
“ROWRROWR!“
“RUHROWR?“
“RUH…ROWR!”

BANG.

And thus died the Imag­inext Dinosaurs as that big comet hit the Earth and destroyed them all. Sadly, they, and their polit­i­cal agen­das, were lost in the com­ing ice age.

Can’t we just let them be toys?

Brush With Local Greatness, Vol. 6 : Charo

by Glenn Vance on July 23, 2007 in Brush With Local Greatness with No comments
Charo

Kim and I met Charo at the Dal­las Museum of Art sev­eral years ago when she came there to hock some new salsa or some­thing for Pace. They had a car out­side dec­o­rated up by some artist or some­thing and she spoke and played her gui­tar for a few min­utes before a crowd of about one hun­dred peo­ple. After­wards she took ques­tions, of all things, doing that “Cuchi-cuchi” thing she says every once in awhile. It was goofy and sur­real at the same time, know­ing that this was that strange unin­tel­li­gi­ble Span­ish woman I’d seen on The Love Boat when I was a kid.

Kim, never one to shirk from mak­ing a com­ment, had the guts to pipe up when she said that she lived on the Hawai­ian island of Kauai.

“We had our hon­ey­moon there!”

It kind of threw Charo1 off, but hen became excited. She was bond­ing with the audi­ence, you know. “Oh, did you love it? Where did you stay?”

“South side of the island at a B&B.”

“The B&B’s on Kauai are won­der­ful, aren’t they?”

“Yes!!!” Kim was so excited.

What was even cooler was she even took a pic­ture with us. She was wear­ing a red sequined minidress and was com­pletely falling out the thing. We were going to use the pic­ture for our Christ­mas card (“Merry Christ­mas from Kim, Glenn and Charo”) but Kim was laugh­ing when the pic­ture was taken and her smile was Joker-esque, so we didn’t use it, but, you know, it’s still a great story.

  1. Yes, I know Charo does not live in Dal­las, but she was there, and we talked to her. So there. [↩]

What I’m Not Looking Forward to With The Bourne Ultimatum

by Glenn Vance on July 20, 2007 in Movies with No comments
Bourne

I like the Jason Bourne movies because they’re gritty and real­is­tic (kinda)1 and Matt Damon is much bet­ter as a CIA assas­sin than I thought he would be. When I first saw the pre­view for The Bourne Iden­tity I was so-so with it, but in the years fol­low­ing that first knock-out punch I’ve been hooked like a zom­bie on fresh, deli­cious human brains. The two films so far have been great, but there are a few things I’m not excited about with this third one.

1) Damon has said no more Bourne films after this one.

I under­stand what he’s doing here. He wants to be iden­ti­fied with some­thing else besides Jason Bourne2, but that doesn’t make it any easier.

2) The amaz­ingly cool Brian Cox is gone.

I love Brian Cox. He’s one of the great char­ac­ter actors of his gen­er­a­tion and see­ing his char­ac­ter Abbott kill him­self in The Bourne Supremacy was heart­break­ing for me. I was very dis­ap­pointed when he turned out to be a bad guy because up until that moment that he stabbed his lackey he was just a great amoral character.

3) More shaky cam­era fight scenes.

One of my big crit­i­cisms between the first and sec­ond films was the way hand-to-hand com­bat scenes were filmed. Doug Liman filmed the scene in Bourne’s Paris apart­ment from about 10 feet back, allow­ing you to see what was going on with the knife/pen fight­ing. Paul Green­grass shot the fight scene inside of the house in Ger­many way too close to the action and with far too many edits for my taste. French direc­tor Jean-Luc Godard3 said “Every edit is a lie,” and it’s true. I would have pre­ferred a more con­tin­u­ous feel to the com­bat than a shaky pile up of visuals.

4) No more Franka Potente.

Unless some mir­a­cle hap­pened in that Indian river, Marie’s not com­ing back. That’s too bad.

And unless there’s a huge plot change, this is how it will all go down — the CIA will find Bourne some­where and try to dis­pose of him. Bourne will rely on his train­ing and smarts and will out­wit all of them and over­come his adver­saries. In the end he will be more para­noid than ever.

I’m sure it will be good, though. We’ll see.

  1. If you can say any­thing about these movies it’s that they reignited the James Bond fran­chise. Daniel Craig is no Pierce Bros­nan in Casino Royale. He’s one mean SOB. [↩]
  2. Maybe he shouldn’t do any more of the Ocean’s movies then, either. [↩]
  3. If you don’t know him, Godard was one of the most influ­en­tial mem­bers of the French New Wave move­ment in film. The New Wavers exper­i­mented rad­i­cally with edit­ing, visual style, and nar­ra­tive, and the move­ment has been claimed to influ­ence many movies, from Arthur Penn’s Bon­nie and Clyde all the way to Quentin Tarantino’s Reser­voir Dogs and Wes Andersen’s The Royal Tenen­baums. [↩]

Brush With Local Greatness, Vol. 5 : Troy Dungan

by Glenn Vance on July 17, 2007 in Brush With Local Greatness with No comments
Troy-Dungan

It was Parent’s Week­end at Bay­lor, prob­a­bly around 1993. The big hul­la­baloo was going on over at Founders Mall — par­ents meet­ing teach­ers, kids intro­duc­ing their moms and dads to Pro­fes­sor So-And-So, and there I was just ambling through with­out my par­ents, who hadn’t come this time around. If you’d seen me then on that warm early Octo­ber day, you’d prob­a­bly have said, “Why is that dirty hip­pie walk­ing through here?” I was not the clean cut per­son I became later. That’s the trou­ble with peo­ple; they change.

And so that dirty hip­pie was lop­ing through the hordes, prob­a­bly going some­where in a slow and “keep on truckin’” kinda way, when I saw him. He was the weath­er­man that I’d grown up with, and I knew his daugh­ter was attend­ing his alma mater at the same time that I was. His trade­mark bow ties were leg­endary around Dal­las from the first time I remem­ber him and he wore them every news­cast, no mat­ter what. He’d always been short, you could tell that by com­par­ing him to the other news anchors on the chan­nel 8 sound stage, but I didn’t know he’d be that short. I’m talk­ing like Danny Devito height, no kid­ding, the man was SHORT. Like 5′ 2″ or something.

As I brushed by him (lit­er­ally) he seemed star­tled. I mum­bled, “Hi there.” He didn’t say any­thing, just sorta glared.

I thought, “Man, what a jerk.”

And that was my close encounter of the weather kind with Troy Dun­gan. He’d started work­ing for WFAA on July 19, 1976, and he’s retir­ing tomor­row, July 18, 2007. From what his col­legues say he’s a swell guy. I’m sure he is and was just prob­a­bly scared of that dirty hip­pie kid way back when. So long, Troy. Happy trails.

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