Wreck-It Ralph

Isn't there negotiation to feature Youtube in your movie instead of Bland-Name Product?

The frustrating thing about Ralph Breaks the Internet is that it has a half dozen really good premises to work with, but none of them really coalesce into a continual story. One great advantage the first film had was that it was able to properly develop the environment of both Ralph's game and Sugar Rush, making them feel like real locations where a problem needs to be resolved. The internet as a whole was too vast of a concept and so nothing really gets developed, it bounces from search engine jokes to commenting on trolling to exploring a pseudo "dark web." Which may be evocative of the internet as a whole, but doesn't really make for a good narrative.

We are also at the day and age that trying to respond to criticism will backfire tremendously. Disney and Google are both mega-corporations and Disney as a whole is too gutless for anything really biting, but even if they did any Google response would be met with mockery for having a thin skin.

Edited by KJMackley on Jan 13th 2019 at 10:45:48 AM

Cool, then Disney buys them out and they can do whatever they want with it in their movie.

Still perplexed that Disney was allowed to use Ebay in a scene and mention Youtube, but could NOT use Youtube as the place Ralph and Vanellope go to make videos.

FYI I go to that B. E. V. link and it takes me to nothing.

Edited by kyun on Jan 14th 2019 at 8:15:41 AM

free advertising for the Ebay brand,I'm sure mentioning their name alone generated money

Put an additional period at the end.

Or just click the first hyperlink on the page

Edited by PhysicalStamina on Jan 14th 2019 at 11:46:14 AM

Another thing. This is the movie where the main conflict, as in the reason they set out for adventure, is solved by a ludicrous get-rich-quick scheme that actually worked.

Edited by RAlexa21th on Jan 14th 2019 at 7:06:03 AM

Normally they got horribly wrong so the audience gets the lesson that shortcuts are not the answer,I wonder if lack of a real villain was them subverting expectations,they know people expect a villain like in the last one so why not surprise them this time

It was interesting seeing see the conflict come from within, rather than some big bad to defeat.

... isn't ..... reprogramming your code a shortcut?

Yes, so?

"The most notable iteration of B.E.V. was a manipulative villain that posed as a sweet, Midwestern lady. In another version, she was an antagonistic, yet well-meaning security official that sought to protect the Internet by any means necessary. In some versions even, B.E.V. was a militaristic male character with a cold and formal demeanor. Eventually, the filmmaking team opted to cut B.E.V. and the idea of a villain altogether in favor of a narrative in which Ralph's internal struggles served as the antagonist."

So we could've had yet another "surprise villain."

I prefer surprise villains to Obviously Evil.

Edited by RAlexa21th on Jan 14th 2019 at 8:19:16 AM

I lean more towards the Obviously Evil. I find that characters like Jafar, Facilier, Frollo, and Mother Gothel are far more compelling as villains than Hans, Bellweather, or any of the other Surprise Villains ever were.

I find Jafar to be really generic. The obvious villains really just go through the motion and rather interchangeable.

"Let me sing about how evil I am."

Except Frollo. Need more evil Christian priests.

Edited by RAlexa21th on Jan 14th 2019 at 10:18:51 AM

I personally don't like twist villains to much as they are either too obvious or they come out of nowhere and disappoint me.

Hans from Frozen was a perfect example of the latter. I think twist villains are pretty hard to pull off.

Edited by Wispy on Jan 14th 2019 at 11:26:27 AM

Surprise villains can work if they are firmly entrenched in the narrative, as such in their reveal you are forced to reassess everything they had been doing up to that point. The minor character surprise villain we only see in three or four scenes feels more interchangeable, as though the story isn't sure who is going to be the villain until the time comes. In turn, the obvious villain from the start can and often does carry the movie away from everyone else.

King Candy / Turbo worked pretty well as a surprise villain, because at the outset Candy appears to be a more benign antagonist before his true identity is uncovered. So you are watching the villain, know he is a villain but not HOW much they are the villain, simply because the stakes of the story really don't need an obvious villain. It's actually rather clever.

Agreed.

I'd also say Mother Gothel works as an interesting 'twist' villain as far as in-universe goes. We all know from the out-set that she is the bad guy and we see her doing bad guy things. But Rapunzel isn't in on that and reasonably so; Gothel's villainy stems from manipulation. We all know she's the villain. We just don't know when Rapunzel will stand up to her and when Gothel will show her true colors.

Candy's the better example and is probably what Bellweather should have been, maybe?

Hans and Te Ka are the only "twist" antagonists who outright didn't work, imo. Hans was cliche as hell, part of a plot that was pointless by the movie's end, and just kind of an excuse to have someone do something evil by the end. Te Ka (whose twist is that she's a good guy) only really fails due to having zero presence in the film (in either form) up until the very end.

As noted, Turbo is probably the best one of the lot because his role as twist villain compounds the role he already had in the story rather than dumping him into a new role halfway through.

I really liked Bellwether, too, and always give that one a pass because "red herring -> twist villain you would never expect" is obligatory for the genre of film that Zootopia was.

I had a conversation about this with a friend a little while ago, and they brought up Stinky Pete and Clayton as earlier examples of Disney doing twist villains, which does make sense - Pete working especially due to being one of Pixar's few sympathetic villains at that point in time. I definitely see him as more of a twist than Lotso (whose darker nature becomes evident very soon after his introductions, so it's more him misleading the characters at first than a twist in the plot). The twist with Clayton stuck with me even as a kid, as well.

Imo Jafar is actually up there with Gaston and Syndrome as one of Disney/Pixar's best villains, in terms of both character/plot writing and contrast with the heroes in driving the plot (though Gaston is champ when it comes to the former, and I could accept Syndrome as champ when it comes to the latter).

He's impressively opposed to Aladdin in terms of station and general philosophy - pretty much everything about him is a contrast - and his status akin to Aladdin as a schemer who often fails and gets back up to try again rather than a power for whom defeat is an uphill battle sets him apart from most of Disney's other antagonists.

Gothel isn't a twist villain. Rapunzel doesn't know things about her, but the audience knows all those things from the very beginning of the film.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Jan 15th 2019 at 2:49:14 AM

> isn't ..... reprogramming your code a shortcut?

No because reprogramming takes extra work,if you copied someone else's yeah it would be a shortcut

Gothel herself isn't a twist but she's a twist to the characters? I don't know how to explain it exactly.

Dramatic Irony.

THANK YOU! Ugh.

Wal-Mart seems to be selling mini Fix-It Felix Jr. arcade machines.

Unless I way late on the uptake.

But we know from that line that Shank knows how to recode a character, just like King Candy. Felix (or Ralph?, or someone else?) was able to recode the characters from Qbert into their game. There's no rhyme or reason for who knows how to do it and why, and the writers use that as a quick and easy way to resolve things. The only time it worked was with King Candy, because he's the bad guy. Recoding sounds like something only humans should be able to do, and a video game character finding out how to bend the rules of his own world would be treated as being horrendous.