Happily Ever After (1993 film) - Part 4 (Final Part)

Part 1.
Part 2.
Part 3.

I was really slacking off on writing this, but in my defense, I thought I'd be really clever in finishing up this movie this month since February was the month of love and all that.

Now, normally, I reserve this space for one again mentioning that this movie is weird (as if you really need me telling you that), this movie is still a guilty pleasure of mine, it was a big favorite of me growing up, various excuses to make myself feel better for liking this stupid movie, yadda yadda yadda, but I have a very special treat in store for my readers for this final part of Happily Ever After.

While I was writing the post up for Part 3, I learned that there is an honest to god Happily Ever After videogame.

This might be the greatest thing I've ever seen.

From what I've seen from the gameplay videos, it's your typical mediocre sidescroller platformer game that was extremely popular during the 16-bit era that gives you the option to play as either Snow White or Shadow Man, and for some reason the first level of the game involves throwing apples at oversized caterpillars when I'm positive that wasn't in the movie, but you know what? I want this game. Not just want, but need. Crave. Thirst. I don't even own a working Super Nintendo right now (at least until I run into one at a swap meet or something) and I desire to own this magnificent cartridge so that I can go up to random strangers and tell them that I, this humble writer of this humble cartoon blog, own Happily Ever After: THE VIDEOGAME.

Yeah, remember the part of the movie where Snow White climbed on a giant beanstalk
and watched Scowl drop bunches of grapes on her?

But you're not here to hear me talk about videogames. You're here to hear me talk about cartoons. Okay, fine. Have it your way, expecting me to talk about nothing but cartoons on a blog titled "Nothing But Cartoons". I might as well conclude the daring chapter that is me nitpicking every last minute of this film once I get into...

Happily Ever After Part 4

Happily Ever After (1993 film) - Part 3

You know, let's just pretend that December never happened. I'm going back to the regular schedule for this month. And boy, do I have a treat for you.

Part 1.
Part 2.

So the best way to wash away the stench of failure that was last month, I'm doing Happily Ever After once again. Because after getting sick, missing deadlines, being surrounded by relatives that I don't really even like all that much, and just plain hating everything for about two months, it's nice to get back to something nice and fluffy again.

Even if my definition of nice and fluffy involves fairytale creatures narrowly avoiding death multiple times while being aided by a reject from He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. I've already said this about a thousand other times when talking about the movie, but here is where it gets weird. The movie, as if ashamed by how cutesy and flowery the first two parts were (and that's saying something, considering both parts contained some pretty messed up stuff like the dragon and the trolltastic mirror that gives children heart attacks by showing them the queen's death mask), decides to cloak the entire movie in darkness and make the children watching this cry as they watch Snow White try to outrun a pack of wolves.

And yet I love every twisted, dark, gruesome minute of this film. But then again, this is coming from someone who wrote four whole blog posts about how much Felix the Cat: The Movie sucks, only to turn around at the final minute and admit I watch that crap every year. By now, you're probably just ignoring my opinions and only come here for the screenshots.

I will warn you though; this is technically the weakest part of the movie (although to be fair, Part 3 of Felix the Cat: The Movie was the same way), so don't complain as I unearth repressed childhood nightmares and recycled animation as I disinter the craziness that is...

Happily Ever After Part 3

Happily Ever After (1993 film) - Part 2

Part 1.

I will conclude the month of November with yet another trip into Happily Ever After, a staple of my video library.

Box office failure or not, this movie will still remain a childhood favorite (and like Felix the Cat: the Movie, I can't bring myself to ever hate this movie), which is basically me saying that this film is a really big guilty pleasure for me. Oh sure, it's bad. I'm not going to deny it. Plot points are unnecessary, and we're about to see stuff that makes the man who can turn into a dragon look sensible, but I still watch this multiple times for enjoyment. It probably doesn't say much about my taste in cartoons, but I get a kick out of movies this cheesy.

And we're journeying into the actual meat of the movie. Compared to the crazy depravity that's going to explode from my disc like an Ecto-Containment Unit in New York City, the intro with the dragon, the He-Man prince, and the rapping owl with a cigar is going to look subdued and downright sane and intelligent. Just warning you ahead of time. We're dealing with Felix the Cat: The Movie levels of crazy here.

Since I can't give too much away, I might as well mention the DVD now that I actually have the DVD of this movie with me. Unless if you really, really, really love this movie, don't buy this thing. The DVD is crap. Oh sure, it's more convenient than the VHS, and I have yet to find a computer that can play VHSes, but this DVD is one of the worst examples I have ever seen of archival quality. There's little things like parts of the screen being out of focus for some scenes, or rings of black surrounding the edges, but it's those little things that just piss me off. From the looks of it, either the movie just hasn't survived that well over the years (and it really wouldn't surprise me, considering Filmation is a defunct company, this movie bombed horribly at the box office, and was critically panned by everybody) and they can't digitally restore the movie, or someone got lazy rushing this thing to DVD.

In short, they did a really poor job and the picture is nowhere near as good as it should be.

Why am I choosing to mention the DVD? Because of the scene selection menu of course.

...yeeeah, what am I supposed to be looking at here? Out of all of the possible stills they could choose for Lord Maliss, they had to go for one where he's trying to be all sensual. The pink curtains in the background certainly don't help.

That being said, don't try to fight it, because you're going to see dragons and feminism aplenty in...

Happily Ever After Part 2

Happily Ever After (1993 film) - Part 1

Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy, I'm so glad that I can share this movie with you. I can't really express this in words, but I'm practically hopping up and down in my seat like a giddy schoolgirl because I get to talk about THIS.

Aw yeah, Happily Ever After.

This movie has had a very unlucky past. Originally called "Snow White and The Realm of Doom", it's pretty infamous for being the movie that sent a pretty famous cartoon company, Filmation, into bankruptcy, and for being the subject of a minor legal dispute with Disney on account it's pegged as an unofficial sequel to that particular movie. Finished in 1988 but finally released in theaters in 1993 (a good five years after its completion), it's also known for being a box office bomb (here's how bad it did; it opened on the same weekend as Super Mario Bros. and that movie made eight times more money than this movie), a regular appearance in store bargain bins, and just all-around derivative of one of Disney's first animated classics. It's not as derivative as Happily N'Ever After, that terrible CGI film, but it's pretty up there.

But when I was a kid, I didn't know of any of these things and watched the everliving crap out of this thing. Yes, it's sad that I'm admitting this, but I liked it. Ah, the days when you could just enjoy something without knowing about other people's opinions of it and getting into large flame wars about it. Instead we were free to make our own decisions.

Disney scholars are going to scoff at me and mock me for my lack of bad taste, but when I was a kid, I loved this movie a lot better than Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. To me, there was no contest. While Disney's Snow White merely had some weird looking evil queen who has to brew a transformation potion in order to turn her into something that could've just used simple costume props, Happily Ever After had dragons, evil sorcerers that shot lasers out of his eyes, a talking bat, a smoking owl, and freaking packs of evil wolves with rhino horns. And while Disney's Snow White just had dwarfs, Happily Ever After had female dwarfs with freaking magic powers that could summon like thunderstorms and crap.

Yes, my friends. This is basically the tale of Snow White on steroids. And man did I cherish this film for it as a little girl.

It was only until later that I found out that people are actually supposed to hate this movie, which kind of bummed me out, but maybe the rosy glasses of nostalgia are blinding me and this truly is a turd wrapped in a pretty princess gown. Either way, I'm going to be looking at the strange, messed up world that is...

Happily Ever After

The Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald: Scared Silly - Part 2 (Final Part)

Part 1

Time to talk about The Joker's wealthy businessman brother again. I hate leaving fast food meals unfinished, because I know that if I don't polish it off now, this movie will end up getting shoved in the back of my refrigerator where it will stay until I pull it out five months later and find that literally nothing in the meal has rotted and, if left untouched, a McDonalds Big Mac could probably outlive me if it wanted to.

For those of you who read the first part and wondering just what was so scary about just camping in the woods, hold on tight. Because you haven't seen nothing yet. The worst has yet to come, and readers beware, because you're in for a scare.

The Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald: Scared Silly - Part 2

The Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald: Scared Silly - Part 1

Okay, chances are if you're aware of the concept of "fast food" (and if you're not aware, congratulations for crawling out from your rock long enough to read my blog!), then you know about McDonald's. McDonald's is like the undisputed Lord and Master above all other forms of fast food, the crowning father of fatty hamburgers and cheap plastic toys shoved into mini meals to coerce children to start clogging their arteries early. Whether you love them, hate them, find them a world-destroying scourge or a delight that you visit every other week, you are aware of their existence and their ability to be absolutely anywhere. Starbucks wishes they were like McDonald's multibillion empire. Sadly, in this universe, scary clowns will always beat sirens in hand-to-hand combat.

But I'm not here to talk about cheeseburgers. I'm here to talk about cartoons. And one day in the 90's, McDonald's came up with this great idea. Oh sure, their mascots are portrayed well enough in the commercials, but what if they were in a cartoon? Kids love cartoons, and if Ronald was a cartoon star, that meant even more Happy Meals will be devoured on a daily basis! It's a win-win situation. Unfortunately, McDonald's didn't go the whole gambit and greenlight a 13 episode TV series; instead they chose to make a series of short films.

So they teamed up with Klasky-Csupo (aka the people behind Rugrats) and made a direct-to-video movie about Ronald McDonald and his hideously deformed food friends frolicking through the strange, cholesterol-filled lands of McDonaldland.

And it was a hit.

Man, remember when you actually had to rewind your movies?

It's hard to say just how popular these things were if you didn't live through it first-hand, but I remember when these VHSes first came out in McDonald's. For just a couple bucks more on your combo meal, you could get an exclusive Ronald McDonald cartoon where he pals around with his equally soulless partners designed purely to hypnotize the young'uns into buying more McDonald's food. This sounds stupid, the thought of bringing a cartoon clown and his giant rotten chicken nugget pal (what the hell is Grimace anyways?) into your home, but I remember McDonald's places all over the tri-county area selling out of these things. And, when they sold out, people would hop in their minivans and drive 45 minutes into another city in hopes that maybe one of their McDonald's has one.

What's really sad is that I'm not surprised people would sink this low. After all, I lived through the Beanie Baby craze and remembered when McDonald's places would have these huge lines of people getting their hands on shapeless cows or shapeless inch worms stuffed with beans.

Now, my family actually owned a copy of one of these things. My mom was lucky enough to buy the film before the popularity rush snatched them all up, and my family and I would actually sit down and watch this thing more than once, and mostly when it was October and getting close to Halloween. Because this movie was one of our "Halloween movies". Like Buttons and Rusty in Which Witch was Which, it was one of those odd VHSes that we didn't really acknowledge its existence until the right holiday came up. We'd watch it, not because we were compelled to, but because it was in season.

That being said, does this still hold up? Is there something to be redeemed in this fantasy world where a man can dress up his dog in clown makeup and get away with it, or is this movie as bad as a movie about freaking' McDonaldland characters could possibly be? Grab some McNuggets, mourn the loss of the triple cheeseburger and the Supersize combo option, take some anti-heart attack pills, and inhale this delicious portion of...

The Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald: Scared Silly - Part 1

Felix the Cat: The Movie - Part 4 (Final Part)

Part 1.
Part 2.
Part 3.

What a better way to issue in a brand new month than by closing up on this strange, delightful acid trip to my eyes that is this movie?

...I can probably think of a million better ways to celebrate the month of September than by sitting all by my lonesome in a quiet room and watching the hopes and dreams of Hungarian animators get silently crushed by horrible time schedules and weak budgets, but since I went for a specific theme for my blog, this is what I'll write about. Otherwise I'd be boring you all about anecdotes involving the colorful people that inhabit my dorms.

Anyways, Felix the Cat! I just recently learned this, but there are a couple Felix the Cat black and white shorts involving circuses. There aren't any women dancing in bubbles or overweight alligators with throat scars in them, but this proves that I was wrong about the filmmakers. They were making a really clever allusion to "Felix Wins Out" and "The Circus", very classic silent 1920's shorts.

...either that, or they were making this crap up as the film was being produced. It's hard to tell.  

NO IT ISN'T, FELIX.

Also, you know how I said that the animation is only going to get even worse as time goes on? Well, yeah, that was mainly to warn you ahead of time about the last portion of the film. Even fans of this movie can't excuse the last fifteen minutes of this film, it's that bad. Characters start to melt, eyeballs start to slide off faces, animation clips starts to be reused, and it's just a horrible thing to watch because you know they could do better because anyone could do better than this. It's a sliding scale of badness with this film, unfortunately, and it's really sad when the high point of any animated film is when the main character is being held captive by an overweight lizard mutant.

So be prepared for the final reckoning as we see this movie finally get out of the circus and reach its conclusion. And trust me, you will be disappointed once you see how this movie ends in...

Felix the Cat: The Movie Part 4!

Felix the Cat: The Movie - Part 3

Part 1.
Part 2.

Time to revisit this movie again. I don't like leaving things unfinished, especially if they're nonsensical blog posts where I, someone who's over 20, decide to watch a film about talking cats and try to invoke some form of deep commentary on it.

That, and it's just too easy to point and laugh at the fact that the movie makers thought that any of these plot developments were a good idea. I mean, sure, I guess you can give them points for creativity by having the princess rescue plot take place in a circus filled with tap-dancing mice hybrids, a giant spacelizard who honestly outstages the actual villain, and radioactive interdimensional mud mutants, but yeah, so far my opinion on this movie is that it's crazy but poorly animated movie that would have some great ideas if it wasn't attached to a brand name that it's not doing any justice to.

And it's only going to get crazier and even more badly animated from here on out. The good news is that I have only one or two more parts to do of this movie, but the bad news is that I'm getting to the parts where the movie starts to lose momentum and, if possible, get even worse. I have to wonder if this movie was on a tight "don't spend ANY money at all!" budget once we leave the circus portion because it really shows. The animation starts to drop in quality (even more than before), the plot starts to fall apart onscreen, characters stop being characters and just meander on the screen just to exist, and well...okay, perhaps I'm giving too much away.

This part of the movie, unlike the previous part I just did, actually has the princess and the Duke of Zill. And you'll see why this is a bad thing once we dive into the glittery, badly-animated mushiness that is...

Felix the Cat: The Movie Part 3!

Felix the Cat: The Movie - Part 2

Part 1 of Felix the Cat: The Movie.

I covered Part 1, so here's Part 2 of this wonderfully insane film known as Felix the Cat: the Movie. So far we've run into magic talking bodily secretions squirted out princessy tear ducts, fish with boobs, friendly swamp-traveling miners that like to talk about intelligent bubbles, and a kingdom that is just totally okay with their ruler disbanding the entire army. Will Part 2 be just as acid-tripping crazy as the first part?

The answer to that question is "Definitely yes", because we're heading into my favorite part. This part has a little bit of everything and is arguably the one part where the script writers temporarily got out of their drunken stupors and wrote something that makes some lick of sense.

Unfortunately, in Felix the Cat: The Movie's universe, the part where the movie starts to make sense is when Felix the Cat has to entertain a giant space lizard's circus while he shares a dorm room with some mice/lizard hybrids and gives stand-up comedy to aliens. This bears repeating. The part where the movie makes sense is at a giant space lizard's circus. It's not too late to bail.

But if you choose to stick around, it's time for...

Felix the Cat: The Movie Part 2!

Felix the Cat: The Movie - Part 1

Animated films; the form of entertainment that people use when they objectively look at animation.

To the populace, an animated film with a giant budget and a contained story that has to be told in a given amount of time is the best way to present the craft of animation. Animated TV shows could get away with being cheap because they're the soulless byproduct of an industry, but not films. No, no, no. Not with Pixar around who always thinks about the art and never about the money! (although this state of mind is slowly dying out with the advent of Cars 2) And with animation studios constantly competing with each other in order to make the next film that will be as great as Disney or Pixar, animated films have become a profitable business.

At least most of the time, because for every well-made cartoon with a budget over several million dollars, there are probably like five cheaply made movies that were made with a budget that couldn't get you a Happy Meal from McDonalds. These are the movies that are usually forgotten by the wayside. This movie was one of those movies.

Felix the Cat: The Movie was an attempt to revive an aging cartoon icon after years of being nothing more than a seller of merchandise. Their heart was in the right place (unlike Heathcliff who just repackaged episodes from the TV show and shilled it off for a quick buck)...at least until they decided that the best way to revive one of the oldest cartoon characters still in existence today was to ship off the cartoon product to Hungary and then put the movie in theaters to compete with Disney's Beauty and the Beast. Yeah, that was smart.

Needless to say, Felix the Cat: The Movie bombed at the box office and wasn't the Felix revival the creators had hoped for. Ironically, Disney, possibly still laughing their asses off at the fact that this movie had the same opening day as the Disney movie that almost won Best Picture in the Oscars, would run this movie a lot on the Disney Channel and that's how most people know of its existence.

That being said, I have a sad confession to make. The reason this is going to be my first animated movie blog post is because this was one of my favorite movies from my childhood and still remains a personal favorite for me. I'm currently going to school for an Animation BFA so I know bad animation when I see it, and unfortunately, even though this animation is from an outsourced Hungarian studio, there's admittingly a bizarre charm to it that I can still deprive some entertainment from.

That doesn't change the fact it's a strange as hell movie, though, so into the grinder it goes.

Since I blab so much about only 22 minute episodes, I'm splitting this analysis into multiple parts. So sit back and gaze into the strangely animated abyss that is...

Felix the Cat: The Movie