Fun

Times are tough enough that Santa kicks the cinder blocks out from under the sleigh, throws some extra feed to the reindeer, and flies down to Cleveland to hock the old lady's jewelry and candlesticks. That's the premise of a spot my buddy Don and I put together for Coin & Jewelry Buyers of America on next to nothing, and it wound up getting more traction and notice than either of us expected.

The video is below, with Don Pavlish dishing on how it came together afterward.

The saga continues, and no, the naming conventions have not improved. GC-PU and VM-U2 slip past the henchmen of the Gamepire and end up stranded on the desert planet Nintendooine, secret plans still in hand. There they fall in with Lukeegi Pipewalker and go looking for Obi-Wan Shinobi, one of the legendary Mascot Knights, who kept the peace in the old Gaming Republic back when they weren't busy being ninjas.

Meanwhile Darth Mario returns to the Gamecube, determined to find the hidden easter egg and put an end to the Mascot Rebellion once and for all.

It is a period of console war. The rebel mascots, striking from an Easter egg, have won their first victory against the evil Gamepire, and the Gamepire has answered with a weapon of terrible power: an armored play station capable of rendering an entire planet in real time.

The stolen plans are aboard Princess Zeia's starship, pursued across the dark by sinister agents, and with them rides the fate of her console and the freedom of gamers everywhere. Part one of a saga nobody demanded, told in the only format the subject deserves.

One of the first cartoons I ever made in Flash, from back when I was learning the software mostly by clicking around until something moved. It is junk, honestly. The timing is loose, the drawings wobble, and it ends about where it started.

Still, there are a few parts that make me laugh, and I would rather keep the early stuff around than quietly delete it. Everything starts somewhere, and this is more or less where mine started. Worth a watch if you enjoy seeing someone figure things out in public.

There is a trailer now, which means Part 2 exists in some real form beyond a folder of clips and a vague plan. That is most of what this post is: the video, and a sentence pointing at it.

No plot summary, no behind the scenes notes, no release date. The trailer does the work a trailer is meant to do, which is to suggest what the finished thing will feel like without explaining how it gets there. If you missed the first part, that is the place to start, and this will make considerably more sense afterward.

Dug out of an old folder and posted exactly as it was made. It is old as dirt, and it looks it: the editing, the music, the pacing, all of it.

Nothing has been cleaned up or re-cut. It seemed better to leave the thing alone than to fix it into something it never was, and old work tends to be more interesting when you let it stay a little embarrassing. So here it is, parked where it can be found again, by anyone who goes looking and by me, the next time I forget it exists. Consider it an artifact more than a trailer.

A trailer, and not a great deal else. Some posts need a paragraph of setup explaining what the thing is and why it exists; this one does not. There is a video, it runs as long as it runs, and it does the explaining better than any amount of writing about it could. Part 1 itself comes later; this is the advance notice.

So press play. If it works on you, you will know soon enough, and if it does not, you have lost less time than you would have spent reading a description of it. Either way, that is the whole post.

Don Pavlish and I made this for our NYU Film and TV thesis in 1997. We were a little ahead of the curve, or at least ahead of the infrastructure: alongside the show itself there was a companion website, a set of chat bots, and blogs written in the voices of the characters. A decade later that sort of thing would get a name and a budget line. At the time it mostly just got puzzled looks.

The tape has not aged gracefully, and the whole thing arrives here in four parts. Apologies on both counts. The show holds up better than the encoding does.

Don Pavlish and I put this together for Sight and Sound in 1995, back in the NYU film days. It won a couple of awards at the time, and looking at it now I still think it is some of the better work I did in those years. The ideas were there, and so was the timing.

What has not held up is the video itself. Analog was analog, and every pass through a tape deck took its cut. Watching it today is a good reminder of how much we simply put up with before everything went digital, and how little any of it seemed to bother us at the time.