Wolf Gnards

I was watching some Angry Video Game Nerd and stewing about how much more famous James Rolfe is than myself (as I am often wont to do), and I was really taken by this Turtle Tunes video. I had out grown Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles by the time they picked up musical instruments, so I’m not overly familiar with the whole singing turtle concept.

This is when a franchise truly goes bad, though. Kidz Bop type songs squeezed the last possible dollar out of the Ninja Turtles. It’s like a concept gets so watered down that its appeal goes from teens to kids to finally toddlers, and getting those final toddler dollars is about the last stop. But giving Ninja Turtles instruments isn’t that weird, at least, no weirder than giving a turtle nunchucks to begin with. The thing I thought was strange was would you really want actual Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to take care of your children? Would you entrust your child to four teenagers in masks singing about pizza? Scratch out the whole mutant turtle part, even scratch out the ninja part, just four regular teenage boys. There’s a reason why girls rule the babysitting biz, it’s because no one trusts teenage boys.

Take any children’s show though, take Barney for example. Would you feel safe leaving your kids in the care of a purple T-Rex? A T-Rex of any color? What if it said it loved you and demanded your love in return? Probably not. Or Oscar the Grouch? Would you leave children to learn life lessons from a hobo who lives in a garbage can? And not only that but a self professed “grouchy” hobo who lives in a garbage can? Why do we trust them?

Because there is a certain fakeness to them, a certain cartoon quality or plush animal appeal. There seems to be an unspoken trust connected to that which is of the Muppet.

It seems like a fair amount of the Internet has been waiting for me to dismantle the new Teen Wolf TV series. Even before it aired people wanted me to lambast it with biting retorts. I actually saw the first 15 minutes of Teen Wolf way back at Comic-Con last summer, and while I wasn’t particularly impressed then (or at all), I wasn’t ready to tear it a new teen hole either. Well, I’ve seen three episodes and I’m ready to speak.

The first thing you have to know about the new Teen Wolf show is that this is not Teen Wolf.

The second thing you have to know about the new Teen Wolf show is that this is Twilight.

No matter what the producers might say to the contrary, the new Teen Wolf show on MTV is more influenced by the Twilight books and movies than it is by the original Teen Wolf film. Now if you can get over this, which I know is asking a lot, but if you can then you might actually find you enjoy the show. Now if you can’t get over this then it’s definitely time to change the channel.

Part of the problem is us, the viewer. We no longer live in an age where Teen Wolf can be made the way we loved and remembered it. The original Teen Wolf movie was about a teenager, Scott (Michael J. Fox), who became a werewolf and used those powers to become good at basketball (and to a larger extent popular), and throughout the film nobody really cared that he was a werewolf. At no point in the film, did anyone question why Michael J. Fox was a werewolf. At no point, did they even question why being a werewolf made him good at basketball. I mean jumping is fine and all, but dribbling? Come on! Wolves aren’t known for their killer crossovers. These are small disbeliefs that we no longer suspend so easily.

Good or bad, we as an audience, can longer accept a werewolf going to high school and everyone not only being fine with it, but very encouraging of a werewolf being on school grounds. As well as buying werewolf t-shirts and changing the school mascot to a wolf. A feel good monster comedy then gets replaced with something that’s a little easier to wrap our heads around, namely Twilight. A little less of the funny, a little more darkness, and a lot more yearning, it’s pretty easy to see how they got there. Plus, being on MTV, it’s a little hard not to draw those comparisons. MTV has basically become one long commercial for Twilight.

Nothing marks summer like the running of the interns. I get to boss young kids around, watch my crusty old co-workers try to flirt with fresh-faced 20 somethings, and I get to see into the mind of the elusive college girl. Good times. But what I’ve found in those minds is mostly gibberish. Goo Goo Ga Gas and all that. Oh, they start out normal enough; they don’t suck their thumbs in the interview or anything. They seem like smart young women with their heads firmly on their shoulders, but then something changes. It starts with a harmless emoticon in an instant message or email, a frowny face when you tell them to do something over again. You let it slide because it’s just one frowny face, but it’s really just the beginning… the calm before the storm, before the onslaught of full on baby talk. This is Generation Wah!

Generation Wah! consists mostly of women from the ages of 20-25 (give or take a couple of years) who communicate mainly in infantile verbiage, or baby talk. Now there have been woman who have used baby doll voices on men since the dawn of existence, Jezebel is perhaps one of the earliest examples (And Jezebel saith, “I whaw makey-up juz wike, Mommy. Yay, Isweal!”). However, never before has baby talk been so prevalent and widely accepted. Examples can include upon finishing an assignment saying something like “I do good?” or “Me tiwerd. Me go home now?” I’ve come across one instance that is a particularly strange baby talk/Asian hybrid, instead of saying “more” she would say, “Mao” (which coincidentally is the same way I imitate my cat).

The Last Starfighter is best know for, besides dazzling special effects (they’re timeless, I tell ya! Timeless!), for giving gamers hope, for giving gamers a reason to keep on gaming. You weren’t wasting your time at an arcade, you were training for the greater good. You were defending the frontier from Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada. If The Last Starfighter is any sort of guide to living (and there’s no reason to believe it shouldn’t be), what videogame you’re good at can decide what you will do with the rest of your lives.

For instance, if a giant ape escaped from the zoo and terrorized a local construction site, who you gonna call? I think Billy Mitchell, Steve Wiebe, or Hank Chien would all do wonderful job Monkeybusting—all great men, all great champions. In fact, I’m fairly confident Billy Mitchell could handle most gorilla situations. Climbing the Empire State Building, in the mist, speaking sign language… Mitchell can help with your gorilla problem. But how often does a giant gorilla run amok? Once a year? Twice a year... tops. It’s like a Burger Time champion could probably make one hell of giant hamburger, but how often do you need a giant hamburger? Those Burger Time skills might be more useful in demolition, knocking down the top floor to the bottom floor. We all can’t be Starfighters; the secret is to find the best career suited for your videogame skill set.

Pac-Man

Best career option: Gardner at haunted mansion
You might think being a master of Pac-Man might put you line to be a professional eating champion, as Pac-Man is known mostly for his appetite and roundness, but what is he eating? Mainly ghosts. And where is he eating those ghosts? In a maze. And where do you find mazes filled with ghosts? Outside haunted mansions and/or hotels such as the Overlook. Duh. Which means gardener at a haunted mansion. Think of Pac-Man as your pruning sheers, pellets are weeds, and the ghosts are… well… ghosts.

Dig Dug

Best career option: Psychotic Hitman
At first I thought a top Dig Dugger would make a good member of a NASCAR pit crew, filling air in tires and whatnot. But that’s not quite right. The tires would always burst and that’s no good. A Dig Dug champ might also make a good miner or a half decent exterminator. Except what kind of exterminator uses an air pump to blow up pests? However, what if you used an air gun to exterminate man? Think the compressed air powered cattle gun used in No Country for Old Men. Don’t mess with a Dig Dug top score because those guys are loco. Old School videogames also make you good at flipping quarters.

Paperboy

Best Career Option: Drive By Shooter
You would think that the best job option that getting the hi-score at the videogame Paperboy could get you would be as paperboy, but you would be best served as a drive by shooter in a gang. A bike is just a slow two-wheeled car and a newspaper is just a rolled bullet. It couldn’t be simpler. Think about it, what are the objectives in Paperboy? Roll through a neighborhood, hit everything you can, followed by a daring escape.

Q*bert

Best Career Option: Bouncer at Gay Nightclub
With all the dancing on colored blocks I’m fairly certain the game of Q*bert actually took place at a disco, so this really isn’t that much of a stretch. He spent most of his time dodging balls and snakes, while looking for the safety of magical rainbow platforms. The only way to kill enemies is to get them to follow you off the platforms, and that’s how I imagine a bouncer at a gay club works. If there’s trouble you just sort of dance people out of the club. Of course, this is mostly drawn from The Blue Oyster Bar in the Police Academy movies.

This is why jobs now have standard interview questions like, what’s your hi-score at Double Dragon? Or can you drive Rad Racer with a Power Glove? Or how far can you make it through Ninja Gaiden? Employers aren’t looking for employees; they’re looking for Starfighters and Wizards. Go to your next job interview in full Starfighter regalia; I promise you won’t be disappointed.

I'm regrouping and getting some new Wolf Gnards together (I know everyone's on pins and needles), but until then here are some people who are better than me. I'm fully willing to admit when someone's better, most if not all people are unusually better than myself. Like if someone wrote a better Groundhog Day article than me, I would freely admit it. This hasn't happened yet (I'm aware of all the Groundhog Day bandwagons articles there are out there... and I still think I'm better). Or the second Futurama Wedding Cake (which is both bizarre that there's two and that so many people thought theirs was better).

They Did Better:

Frog Island Flicks released this little gem about Hawkman.

I've made fun of my share of B list superheroes before like Aquaman, but never in a way that people enjoyed. What pissed me off was that I was working on the same exact article, which can now officially be thrown in the trash. Mine would probably have been a list of superhero films that have yet to be made (not exactly clever). Plus I have no budget, nor a great number of friends willing to pitch in, how can I compete? I can probably raise about $1.50 and get two dudes willing to stand in the background and say nothing.

Awesomenator has put together a wonderful breakdown of Bill Cosby sweaters.

This detailed collection can certainly be called better than what I manged to cobble together as a Cosby sweater tribute. However, mine is still creepier so I got that going for me.

And if you see something out there floating around the interwebs that someone else has done better than me, feel free to drop Wolf Gnards a line (I know how much you enjoy pointing these things out to me).

Arnold Schwarzenegger has been in the news lately, what with his divorce and his illegitimate spawnenegger love child, but it all started with the hint of a possible Terminator 5. Maybe, Terminator 5 was all part of an elaborate smoke screen: Don’t look at my politics, don’t look at my marriage, don’t look at many children I may or may not be the father of, look at this totally awesome movie about robots from the future. And guess what… it worked because I’m sitting here thinking, “From the future, you say?”

Terminator 5 can go one of two ways: awful awful (which is the maximum awful allowed by law) or awful fun (which is still awful but in a way that makes one smile). I being a fan of bad puns and stupid catch phrases am hopeful for awful fun. However, as eager as I am for Arnold’s subtle acting touches, I do have one minor problem with Schwarzenegger returning to the Terminator role: Why are robots getting old?

That’s kind of a problem. Killing machines in walkers is kind of a design flaw that the filmmakers will need to sort out. And while Schwarzenegger certainly looks good for his age, he doesn’t look that good. There’s only so much that Vaseline lenses and digital face-lifts can do. At some point the storytellers will have to explain why this robot is so elderly. It’s sort of like in old school Schwarzenegger films themselves when the movie has to explain why this guy is just so god damn Austrian: he’s a barbarian, he was raised on an exotic private Island, he was frozen trying to save his wife, he’s Russian, he’s German, he’s an amnesiac spy on mars, he’s a robot. Now they have to find some plausible explanation for an aging machine. Solving this mystery is probably the thing that will set the tone for the whole movie.

Terminators Age

The T-800’s are made with an organic covering, which can sweat, smell, bleed, and presumably age. Aging robots are perfect for infiltration, you could put a Terminator in a sleeper cell for years without anyone noticing. And is Skynet really that concerned about the age of organic skin coverings when they’re sending these things out under heavy laser fire? How many robots are they really expecting to return with skin intact? So, Arnold would still play a T-800, just not a T-800 fresh off the assembly line. This is a Terminator who’s been around the block, seen the world, run with the bulls, backpacked through Europe. This is a Terminator that’s moved out his parents’ basement and works 9-to-5, but it’s just until his music career takes off.

Malfunction

Schwarzeneggerbot 800 has gotten older because of some sort of minor malfunction in his robotic skin graft. Any sort of malfunction will do. Maybe, it’s just bad skin; Abe Vigoda was all that was left in their Terminator skin vats. Maybe, whatever doodad that regulates skin is broken, or the slider that controls skin age in his CPU was set incorrectly. Just some simple, stupid reason that can be explained in some throw away piece of dialogue.

Both natural aging and skin malfunction are a little boring to me though. If you’re going to terminate a movie franchise, let’s just terminate the shit out of it.

Operation Shady Acres

Terminator 5, or Terminator: Operation Shady Acres, involves Arnold infiltrating an old age home. A terminator has to blend with his scenery, and what better way to sneak into a nursing home than with an old ass robot. You know something’s up if a young muscly guy in sunglasses is running around an old age home with a shotgun, but a robot with liver spots and a cane is just another patient. Picture this: Ed Asner is a cantankerous John Connor fed up with the hullabaloo of time travel and waiting for Judgment Day. Schwarzenegger plays his old T-800 friend who teaches him how to live again, while John teaches the Terminator what it truly means to be alive.