Rebel Taxi

Wakey-wakey, everyone, because pan released Volume 2 of his Every Nickelodeon Movie Reviewed series! In this installment, we have Rugrats in Paris, Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, Clockstoppers, Hey Arnold! The Movie, and The Wild Thornberrys Movie.

Never underestimate the importance of an open mind and compassionate heart.

So how many more films do we have to go through?

I still think his argument that the Rugrats movie is responsible for the downfall of theatrical 2D animation is kind of weak.

The direct cause? Probably not. A contributing factor? Probably. It was a great number of factors that led to the fall of traditional animation.

What caused the decline of traditional animation was the workload involved and the cost,and more often as not the films didn't make their money back at the box office

New theme music also a box

Pan kicks off the Halloween season with a mediocre The Simpsons Game Boy game.

Never underestimate the importance of an open mind and compassionate heart.

I had that game. Not my worst GameBoy game, but far from the best.

Sound the sirens and get to the shelters, because Pan's dropping the Top 10 Box Office Bombs in animation (Numbers adjusted for inflation):

Honorable mentions:

• #11: The Black Cauldron
• Fantasia (missing original theatrical gross)
• Cool World
• The Pebble and the Penguin
• Treasure Planet
• Home On The Range
• Atlantis The Lost Empire
• The Road to El Dorado
• The Good Dinosaur (managed to recoup its budget)
• The King and I
• Thumbelina
• Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil
• James and the Giant Peach
• Astro Boy
• The Powerpuff Girls Movie

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• #10: Cats Don't Dance: Completed by Ted Turner's animation studio just before its merger with Warner Bros., allowing Warner to release it with Invisible Advertising (so as not to compete with whatever in-house movie it was releasing at the time) and still turn a small profit. Loss: $44,447,513
• #9: Delgo: Spent a decade in Development Hell (necessitating several re-casts) due to the inexperience of its fledgling studio, and only ran in theaters for one week. Loss: $45,981,350.13
• #8: Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return: Produced by a small studio with funding from several investors hoping to start a Cash-Cow Franchise. An investor blames the film's failure on the Hollywood Propaganda Machine. Loss: $54,779,279.30
• #7: Titan A.E.: Languished in Development Hell and ultimately failed to stand out despite having the talents of Joss Whedon and Don Bluth. 20th Century Fox closed down its animation department a mere 10 days later. Loss: #55,413,218.33
• #6: The Iron Giant: Warner Bros. lacked faith in the movie after the failure of its previous animated film, Quest for Camelot, and gave it Invisible Advertising before shuttng down its animated film division. Thankfully, the Iron Giant has become one of the most remarkable examples of being Vindicated by Cable. Loss: $70,174,353.76
• #5: Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within: A simple Audience-Alienating Premise; casual fans felt the photorealistic CGI swam to close to the Uncanny Valley (not helped by the characters being advertised as "virtual stars"), while fans of the box office-bombingly popular Final Fantasy games saw it as In Name Only. Loss: $73,967,641.37
• #4: Osmosis Jones: "Like many animated flops at the time, executives blamed 2D animation for the reason no-one wanted to see Bill Murray vomit all over a teacher." Loss: $79,822,246.28
• #3: Strange Magic: Completed by Lucasfilm prior to its buyout by Disney and released on January so as not to compete against The Force Awakens. Loss: $89,913,111.09
• #2: Monkeybone: Was an ambitious art-house film with its Medium Blending Roger Rabbit Effect, but its over-the-top raunchiness led to poor test screenings, resulting in several re-cuts and only two weeks worth of marketing. Loss: $96,085,224.18
• #1: Mars Needs Moms: Alienated audiences with its infamously unappealing Motion Capture and the questionable casting of Seth Green as the lead character. Green was recast with a younger VA really late into development despite having already marketed the film with Green's performance. Loss: $124,713,768

Edited by Noah1 on Oct 24th 2018 at 8:18:13 AM

Never underestimate the importance of an open mind and compassionate heart.

Despite what its place in the Animation Age Ghetto will tell you, The Flintstones was not originally meant for kids. Pan Pizza shows us four attempts at reintroducing a more adult edge to the show's name:

• #4: The Flintstones On The Rocks, a 2001 Made-for-TV Movie about Fred and Wilma vacationing to Rockapulco, Roxico to patch up their rocky marriage. Despite its slower pace and heavier tone and themes, the movie was never meant to air on [adult swim], airing only once on Cartoon Network and failing get audiences interested.
• #3: The Rubbles, a series of bumpers spoofing The Osbournes starring Barney and his family. The bumpers aired only in CN Latin America despite using US Voice Actors.
• #2: A teaser trailer for a potential reboot of The Flintstones by Seth MacFarlane. Despite Seth's promise to be faithful to the original and not as raunchy as Family Guy, response was negative enough to earn a Take That! from the Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode "Granite Family". A few episodes worth of storyboards and 10 minutes of test footage were made, but the project was canned due to FOX having enough animated shows, Seth having enough projects, and Seth not knowing how to write Fred distinctly from Peter Griffin. ^note Pan finds that, despite the characters sharing a similar archetype, Fred is more of a grumpy Straight Man than the brash, wacky Peter, with the humor coming from his reaction to the situation around him.
• #1: The Flintstones from the Darker and Edgier Hanna-Barbera Beyond label. Written by Mark Russell (who hated The Flintstones and took the job partially to sneak in a Take That! towards their line of gummy vitamins), the comic deconstructs the concept of "Modern Stone Age" for in-depth Worldbuilding and social commentary.

Edited by Noah1 on Nov 11th 2018 at 9:20:38 AM

Never underestimate the importance of an open mind and compassionate heart.

Pan's back with a brand new video: "Top 5 BEST/WORST Modern Cartoons Vol 9"

• 1. Summer Camp Island: Pan thought the pilot was utter hipster/millennial baloney. Someone actually threatened him for it on tumblr. As for the actual show, he feels a sense of sinisterness and ambiguous sense of weirdness (like is it supposed to be weird?) Regardless, he recommends it as an acid trip to have, more because it's too overwhelming for him.
• 2. Big Hero 6: The Series: After thinking the movie was okay, he loves the show for its character dynamics, fun bad guys, and balance between levity and drama. Only downside is the animation tends to be inconsistent. All in all, it's cozy.
• 3. Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: As someone who's seen pretty much all previous TMNT shows, Pan is in absolute love with it, calling it "TMNT meets Motorcity + Kill La Kill". Enjoys the Monster of the Week thing it's got going. Drawbacks are the intro's a little too fast and Splinter is kind of not what he used to be.
• 4. She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: After briefly commenting how people whining about reboots on 80's shows are dumb because those shows were explicitly meant for the sole purpose of selling toys and vowing to review the new She-Ra on its own merits, Pan declares it to be pretty good if suffering a stiffness and weird pacing that go away after the first half of the season. What grabs him are the character designs and drama between said characters, especially between Adora and Catra. He ends it saying while it's fine preferring the retro style, it isn't fine for folks getting whiny about the different body types, saying how while it is weird seeing pudgy people being heroes, he asks that you consider how the original show used the same body type to appease the same toy molds (remember, most 80's toons were glorified toy commercials), which put a strain on unique character designs. Here, body-types reflect fighting styles with melee users being buff or trim while magic users are chubby. The idea is that being a hero is about more than just physical strength. Long story short: now anyone can be the hero, body types be damned.
• 5. Big City Greens: Another simple cozy show, Pan loves how it has the main family be absolute fishes out of water and its Gravity Falls style of humor.

(Still waiting to see Pan talk about Hilda...)

Edited by TargetmasterJoe on Nov 23rd 2018 at 3:48:26 PM

On She-Ra and He Man the same body types wasn't just to appease toymakers, it was also so that Filmation could reuse line-art. There are in fact some case were Filmation would reuse the same body type even if it would make it not accurate to the toy, such as Beast Man having boots instead of clawed feet like the toy.

Oh yeah, that was a thing too. The 80's was really bad for cartoons...

EDIT:

Oh. Well, I feel pretty embarrassed...

Edited by TargetmasterJoe on Nov 20th 2018 at 5:36:20 AM

Not to defend online trolls or anything, but dismissing something outright because you think it's too "hipster" or "millennial" is a really weak stance to take, especially when at least part of your persona is based around giving oft-dismmised cartoons a fair shake. Glad to hear he at least gave it another go, though.

Still, that long description he gave at the beginning was pretty funny.

Really a lot of the best looking cartoons from the eighties are Japanese co-productions or US production outsourced to Japan as they wound up with studios already trained to do more with less having higher budgets than they would normally have. Like while there are certainly many animation errors, overall Transformers looks really good.

Dont know about that. While I enjoy G1, season 3 (outside of Call of the Primitives) has a weird "blocky" look to it, even in the good episodes like Webworld or Dark Awakening. It's kind of distracting IMO.

RE: Box Office Bombs

I'm looking at the reactions in the comments to some of their favorite movies being box office bombs, which is a sad truth. Sometimes good movies don't get as much attention as we wanted it to. That being said, Warner Bros was pretty careless about their animated films in the 90's and early 2000s. I hope that Warner Animation Group is working on something great that isn't another Lego movie.

Also, every time I hear the argument against Mo-cap films that realistic animated movies are pointless and just go back to using real people, I want to bring up this counter-argument. What's the point of hiring that one live action actor when 99% of the movie is animated, and you can just make the whole movie animated? I'm sure some good videos explain this answer so please show me.

New podcast!

Pan takes a look at Wakfu, the cult classic French animated show.

I absolutely lost it at the comparison of Nox's life to Plinkett's Kodak Printer challenge.

A corpse should be left well enough alone...

Get ready for Anarchy Reigns!

Never underestimate the importance of an open mind and compassionate heart.

So, is it common knowledge that Pan writes for Playboy, or is this a recent development?

He's brought it up before.

YO. Rules of the Internet 45. Rule 45 is a lie.

Pan Pizza delivers Something Completely Different: a tale about a Frivolous Lawsuit over Decision Darts:

Never underestimate the importance of an open mind and compassionate heart.

On the bright side, this story has a happy-ish ending.

tl;dr: Waffsicle apologizes to everyone in Twitlonger, tags Craig and Rebel Taxi, then posts an image of their Writer's Guild registration torn to shreds.

🏳️‍⚧️she/her | Vio Rhyse Alberia

Just imagine if a big corporation did this. That would be even more sticky.