Tag: comparisons

Netflix’s Wednesday: kind of like Harry Potter without the stink of Rowling’s bigotry

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When the stills came out for Netflix’s Wednesday, I didn’t realize that it was a show primarily about Wednesday.  I couldn’t get over Luis Guzman as Gomez Addams, and I figured this was just a reboot reimagining of The Addams Family.  Regardless, the premise seemed intriguing and I had made a note to catch Wednesday when it dropped.

Having finished the show, I can say that it was overall a fun season of television, that blended nostalgia, a clever plot and pace that gave just enough hints to make you think you know what’s going on, but also so many hints that it makes it difficult to narrow the who done it of the story.

It was also interesting that the show basically takes a property of most of its target audience’s childhoods, which was always campy, but giving it a much more of a push into an adult territory.  As much as the old Addams Family show and movies talked about blood and violence, it was rare that any was actually seen, but that’s hardly the case with Wednesday, which isn’t shy at all about showing both.  In a way, it’s kind of like Riverdale, re-telling Archie comics, but way darker and more grown-up storyline.

The casting of the show was fantastic, and aside from my fascination with Luis Guzman being Gomez, I think the cast was done well, from all of the Addams to all of the core students that we’re supposed to become invested in.  Naturally, the show is centralized around Wednesday, and I had no idea who Jenna Ortega was before this, but I’m sure she’s become quite the household name after this show.  I think she did an incredible job of portraying and evolving Wednesday’s character light years beyond the most popular rendition of Wednesday most people remember from Addams Family Values.

And of course it was fun to try and count how many times she actually blinks in the show.  I’ve heard no number higher than seven.

Atmospherically, the show feels like Harry Potter in setting, but like the title of the post goes, it’s better that it’s not, because JK Rowling is kind of cancelled and it’s nice to have something that feels like Harry Potter without having to be it.  All the way down to the borrowed plot device that was originally lifted from Castlevania II.

The funny thing about the show to me is the fact that the general plot and story of it didn’t actually have to be skinned with the Addams Family franchise at all.  Change all the names of the characters and remove all Addams IP, and it would stand alone.  Obviously it’s done to give it immediate credibility and ease the need for buzz, but I’m just saying I feel that a show called Friday and featuring equivalent characters with different names would probably be just as enjoyable.

Overall, it’s a fun and enjoyable show that has a lot of variety of appeal.  It’s nostalgia, it’s clever, well acted, and has a pace that doesn’t drag and has an easy to follow linear plot that it’s funny to play guess who as the episodes progress.

I’m sure future seasons will be in the works if they’re not already renewed at this point, and I think it has the makings of one of Netflix’s more substantial wins over the last few years.

Imagine if your existence was to one day become a chip?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I saw this bag of effectively, chicken chips at Sprouts, and I had to stop and examine the bag.  10 grams of protein from chips?  Servings per bag, two?  So I could effectively get 20g’s of protein by crushing this bag of chips made from chickens? 

But then I was like mehhhhhhh because I had no idea what to expect from a taste and consistency standpoint of chips made out of chickens.

But then I had to pass by the display again on the way to the register and they were 2/$7 and next thing I knew, I had bought two bags.  The other one is chili lime.

Honestly, they’re not that bad.  Crunchy like a potato chip, and frankly they taste kind of like Pringles.  And I get 20g’s of protein, which is always important to people who exercise and lift weights.

Really though, what I really thought about, and what served as the impetus for this post, was the sheer thought that a chicken, a living, bleeding bird, was somehow reduced to becoming, a chip.  Not a potato, not corn, not some other vegetable.  A chicken.

And then I got to thinking about what humans would feel like if we were ever overtaken by a more intelligent species that also was higher on the food chain than we were, and decided to one day reduce humans as a food source to not just any food, but chips.  Like I imagine a person getting one of those cheese slicers taken to them to carve out thin, malleable slices of their flesh, and they’re deep fried to become chips for creatures who eat people want to eat.

Fucked up to think about sure, but this is what my mind wandered off to while I was indulging in chips made out of chicken.  Better them than us, I suppose.

Ken Masters, Street Fighter canon and divorce in fiction

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A while back, I remember making a post about how Ken Masters in Street Fighter V was clearly on the back half of his prime, and was at the stage in his life where he was wearing compression shirts to help hide his deteriorating physique, a natural occurrence with the passage of time.  And as much of a Ken main that I’ve been in my own experience playing Street Fighter games throughout my life, it was an awkward but still mostly a yeah ok whatever thing, because it was still a fictional character in a video game.  But it didn’t change the perception for me that Ken was being slightly disrespected in the grand spectrum of the franchise’s history.

Many years later, no real thought given, but with the impending release of Street Fighter 6 (and it’s shitty logo), some gameplay footage has apparently been leaked, and among it, some visuals of what Ken Masters is up to in SF6.  Long story short, the once famous and handsome and suave and cool US champion of some title of fighting, in SF6, has become a shell of his former self.  His wife has left him and taken their child, and supposedly the story of Ken is that he’s on the pursuit of trying to be just like Ryu, which is the best fighter on the planet.

But apparently he also has decided to be a homeless man just like Ryu, and has apparently hit bottom in terms of appearance and attire, which is kind of hilarious because now he’s basically turned into the Mark of the Garou rendition of Terry Bogard, which may or may not be a deliberate dig at SNK, that hobo Ken Masters is basically the greatest SNK fighting game protagonist of the 90’s.

And that’s about as far as we’re going to go with analyzing the storyline because when the day is over I really don’t give two more shits as much as this is just something that piqued my interest and inspired some words to manifest onto a post.  But my reactions to this character development are:

  • Ken Masters has decided to become a homeless bum just like Ryu; in the name of trying to be the best fighter in the world, but still homeless all the same.
  • Eliza, his ex-wife, is apparently the sister to Guile which is completely new information to me, and makes me wonder just when the hell this was written into the series canon, because the two characters have had basically no unique interaction throughout the first ten years of the series since Guile debuted in SF2.
  • Street Fighter canon writing has apparently gotten really dark, and not in the sense that people are dying and bad guys are succeeding at taking over the world, but its characters are being dealt some too real and life-fucking circumstances like divorce and separation from children

Obviously, I’ve been living in a bubble under a rock over the last few years, so series canon has passed me like a bullet train, but I get the impression that SF lore is kind of starting to get as wild and written on the fly as Mortal Kombat lore is.  Maybe not so outlandish to where they’re retconning all sorts of joke characters as core characters or merging franchises in order to boost their character counts, but when you’re going as far as to deliberately deconstruct characters like having Ken go through a divorce and becoming a hobo, that’s some pretty wild development.

Then my train of thought departed from solely Street Fighter, but just on the thought of why it seems like divorces and other breakups seem to keep happening to fictional properties.  I chatted it out with a group chat of confidants and realized that I was answering my own question, but it doesn’t make it any less sad to those of us in a generation or minded like one as mine is, to see these fictional breakups.

Peter Parker and Mary Jane.  Homer and Marge Simpson.  Kermit and Miss Piggy.  Ken and Eliza Masters.  All these fictional couples had loving, lasting, strong relationships, but as time has progressed, the world becoming more cynical, people needing reassurance that they can be related to and aren’t alone, even these are not safe from being dismantled in order to, try and be an ally.

Because that’s really what it seems to be all about, showing the watching world, that anyone and everyone is capable of break-ups and divorces, and for those children of parents who go through it, that they are not alone.

I understand that it is important to be allies, but damn it, I’m seeing iconic relationships of my childhood being systematically dismantled in order to hitch their carts to helping, and it’s no less sad, even if there are important lessons to be taught and imparted by doing such.  It’s exasperating and depressing all the same.

Fiction is where people come to escape how shitty the real world actually is, but apparently even fiction is not safe from the heavy hands of reality, to where it has to be altered and mutated into content that can help people who just wanted to get away from it in the first place.

One year later (the not-so good one)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It was just days after my child was born.  As she was premature, she was immediately admitted to the NICU, and it was heartbreaking to leave the hospital without our daughter coming home with us, but we tried to take comfort in the fact that she was exactly where she needed to be in order to play some physical catchup to where she would be allowed to come home.

Every single day afterward, mythical wife and I would go to the hospital twice a day to spend some time with our child.  Except for those first few days, I didn’t go, because I had come down with a pretty nasty cough, and given the situation that was rapidly spreading across the globe, understandably, there were some major red flags about an Asian guy having a cough, especially not just at a hospital, but at a NICU.

Fortunately, it was most likely just allergy-related, as like a true genius, I had participated in a double 5K event that involved running two 5Ks in an eight hour span; one at 1 am, and then one at 7 am the following (same) morning; it was daylight-savings themed, and the novelty of it alone made me want to try it.  But in doing so, I had inhaled a metric fuckton of early Georgia spring pollen, and my body was revolting as a result.  However, it cleared up fairly quickly, as the pollen coursed through my system, and I would get to go into the NICU later on.

However, it was on one of those days in which I dropped mythical wife off at the NICU, and came back home to log into work, I have a memory of swinging by the nearby Publix on the way home, and knowing we were low on bottled water, I made a point to pick up some more.  There was a display upon entering for a buy 2, get 1 free, so I figured, why not just get three cases?  With this whole pandemic thing starting to gain momentum, I figured three cases of water between two adults should be sufficient for all this shit to blow over, right?

Funny how perceptions are when you’ve never really lived through a global pandemic in your life.

So here we are, one year later; people with brains larger than a pea, are still wearing masks out in public, if they’re even leaving home in the first place, and coronavirus has officially killed over half a million Americans, and countless many more over the rest of the globe, but pretty much nowhere worse than it was in America.  Several vaccines have finally come to light, but the distribution of them leaves a lot to be desired, considering an entire planet’s population all need it in order to hopefully return to some semblance of normalcy, so in spite of the supposed cure existing, it’s still a slow and still dangerous path to the finish line.

Continue reading “One year later (the not-so good one)” →

Probably how Screech would have wanted to go out

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Not necessarily the dying at age 44 part, but most definitely the part where everyone* on the old Saved by the Bell cast is probably left feeling like a bunch of assholes.  Regardless, it was unfortunate, and sad to hear that Dustin Diamond AKA Screech from Saved by the Bell, passes away from lung cancer, despite the fact that he alleged to never have been a smoker at all.

*except Mario Lopez, who seems to have been the only member of the old cast to ever have reached out to Diamond to make amends prior to his passing

I’ve made no secret that I loved Saved by the Bell.  It was definitely one of the shows of my childhood, and I can to this day, with great clarity, make SbtB references and analogies to even the most obscure episodes.  There’s nary a week where I don’t make at least one Jessie Spano on caffeine pills SO EXCITED reference, and the general cast are almost biblical characters in how often they can be compared to, when describing other human beings.

That being said, it’s also been no secret that since the heydays of Bayside’s finest, the alumni of the show have not been particularly nice to Screech since everyone went their separate ways.  The popular narrative, as told mostly by Screech himself, is that among the cast and the crew, he was the youngest of them all, and was therefore systematically alienated and left out of the cool kids’ club throughout their time on the show as well as all traces afterward.

Dustin Diamond clearly held sour grapes to his Bayside brethren throughout the years, and unfortunately that kind of vitriol seemed to poison everything about his post SbtB career; whereas Zack maintained an acting career even to this day, Kelly went onto 90210, Slater went onto be the male morning talk personality, Jessie did Showgirls and even Mr. Belding parlayed his career into all sort of personal appearances and cameos, it’s hard to really say what Screech did afterward.

He certainly spent a lot of time trying to tear down the posse that shunned him, with projects like the tell-all Beyond the Bell, and the Lifetime-released Unauthorized Saved by the Bell Story, and when all else seemed to fail, he resorted to celebrity boxing and even released a porno, thus feeding the age-old narrative that people really will, pay to see just about anyone, fucking on tape.

For the most part, the rest of the SbtB crew no-sold the shit out of Screech’s attempts to deride them, which in itself is sad on all parts; it was clear that Screech just wanted to be a part of the gang, a lifelong member of Zack Attack, but was going about it in the worst possible manner; and as a result of the antagonization, the rest of the crew gleefully went about their lives, continuing to shun and deny Screech from anything and everything potentially related to any sort of SbtB reunions.

With the coup de grace being a legendary skit on Jimmy Fallon, where pretty much the entire crew, minus Screech (and Lisa, who more or less got into drugs and religion at different points and mostly dropped off the face of the planet, but didn’t seem to hold ill will or have any real desire to stay in Zack Attack), where everyone reprised their old roles and acted out a skit with Jimmy Fallon basically being the nerdy dork who needed Zack and Co to help a brother out.

Continue reading “Probably how Screech would have wanted to go out” →