Matthew Belinkie, Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, Josh McNeil, John Perich and Matthew Wrather gather in person mere minutes before the Overthinking It 5th Birthday Party to overthink their favorite pop culture from their fifth birthdays. Eventually, they fall into what they do whenever they get together: pitch one another ridiculous movie ideas.
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5-year-old Cat was obsessed with the Disney version of Snow White. At the time I guess there weren’t a lot of examples of Asian characters in childhood media for my age group. Because I saw black hair and ran with it. It also explains my continued interest in fairytales, singing, animation, and representations of women in fiction.
Happy anniversary again, guys. Sad I couldn’t make the meet-up. Maybe next time :)
We’ve got another one on the books for January, 2018.
I will start preparing for The Little Mermaid discussion now.
Five more years! Five more years! And ONLY five more years. After that, I’m cutting all ties.
This may have been the big mass media break for Deadspin, but they have been the foremost purveyors of pictures of athletes accidentally exposing themselves for years. Also, to the extent it is relevant, it’s pronounced Man-TIE Teo.
Your ideas are in a similar vein to an actual idea for a pilot I may get to writing eventually. It’s in the style of the Adam West version of Batman, but the crime fighting hero is Richard Nixon.
Not really bothered by the Jonathan Coulton thing as that song was the weakest part of the episode anyway. It was probably supposed to show how fun and quirky the Adam’s Apples were with their sassy hats and diversity but while Coulton’s low-key vocals work for solo covers as a group number, it just made their voices seem really weak. It just gave me the impression that yet another character (Kurt) was making a decision based on a crush on another character (leader of the Adam’s Apples…not going to bother looking up his name).
By the way, for anyone still watching Glee, doesn’t the Adam’s Apples sound like it should be an all male show choir? Can someone explain why it isn’t?
The bad guy in Top Gun is actually………no one. At no point in the movie do they specify who they are fighting – it’s just a generic country with black helmets and a Red Star. So it’s obvious in the Communist bloc, but at no point do they specify what the stakes actually are.
OH MAN, Wee Sing in Sillyville. That was a big part of my childhood as well. The Sillyville video was not only a nursery rhyme jukebox musical, but the “plot” such as it was was a really shallow and hamhanded racism allegory. Each group of nursery-rhyme-singers wears a different color, and they won’t talk to each other anymore! The Generic Kid Protagonists must help Silly Whim (Wim? That name never made sense to me.) to reunite them and restore the rainbow of colors to her outfit. Of course, since this all takes place inside a magic coloring book, I assume these are just some not-not-very imaginative kids thoughts as they color.
Also, The Little Mermaid came out exactly three weeks after MY fifth birthday.
And MY random anime that I watched as a small child was something called Serendipity the Pink Dragon, which we found at the video rental area in the local Phar-Mor and watched over and over (on which note, do any of you remember Phar-Mor?).
I turned 5 in 1991, and I really don’t remember a lot from that time period. When I got a little older, I watched a lot of Chinese-dubbed Dragonball (I actually didn’t realize it was originally from Japan until later) and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
-ko is a fairly popular ending for girls’ names and pet names in Japan. It’s somewhat diminutive, since the kanji used for it is usually the word for child.
Huh, I learned something. I was going to slag off Matt Belinkie for describing the crow from Dangermouse’s accent as “a lot of cockney slang”, but then I discovered they changed it to that for US distribution. I guess that a character called “Stiletto Mafiosa”, with an overblown Italian accent that veers close to racism, doesn’t play well with the Italian-American market. Who knew?
That’s hilarious they redubbed it from something nobody would like to something nobody would understand.
There was a block of TV early in the mornings I’d watch as soon as my mom dropped me and my older sis off at my babysitter’s house, both when I was too young for school, and then for an hour or so before she’d drop me off for kindergarten and first grade, that captivated me for a few years. I don’t think they were all on the same channel, but it consisted of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Thundercats, the Mario Brothers and Zelda series, and the Ghostbusters cartoon. I’d combine the worlds when I was playing with my toys later in the day, sometimes mashing up all of the episodes I had seen that morning. If I didn’t have the right toys by actual brand, I’d just pretend something I had was something I was lacking. So I had MLP, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Barbies (and Disney versions of them), Power Rangers figures (the ones where you push their belt and their head flips from being mundane to in the helmet, while the rest of their body was in uniform- and those were a little later, like second grade), and Transformers all playing together.
Also, I used to act out Disney movies in kindergarten and first grade. Once a little older, I’d play Power Rangers with other kids during recess. Interesting thing about that, though, is I’d actually do this with the some of the same kids that made fun of me- as if play-acting was of the same symbolic and cultural import for us as the Olympics is to modern states. We’d put aside our differences for the sake of playing these self-constructed RPG/theater games. And even though I went to like four or five schools for my K and 1 years, and moved from Bellflower to Las Vegas between 1 and 2, it was always a thing at each location.