Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, Shana Mlawski, and Matthew Wrather overthink New York Comic Con 2014.
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Your Panel
- Peter Fenzel: @fenzelian
- Mark Lee: @goestotwelve
- Shana Mlawski: @shanamlawski
- Matthew Wrather: @mwrather
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Further Reading
- Alliteration on Wikipedia
- Alliterative Titles: Darkman III: Die Darkman Die, Finding Forrester, Dirty Dancing, Krazy Kat, Gossip Girl
- The Americans Season 1
and The Americans Season 2
on Amazon (affiliate links)
- Cedar Rapids
Fenzel’s first, Wrather does an accent, Lee sings, and there’s a girl on the podcast? Anyone playing the OTI drinking game was wasted by the eleven minute mark!
By a striking coincidence, I just happened to be looking at the following tumblr post when the discussion of Hulk/Banner’s eating habits came up, and I thought it might be relevant.
http://theshriekmaster.tumblr.com/post/99939202163/devildoll-this-city-is-a-symphony
My Hulk dietary datum is this:
In _Marvel Zombies_, the eponymous infection gives its victims an insatiable appetite for human (or meta-human) flesh. The infected hulk eats a whole bunch of folks, including biting the head off the Silver Surfer. If I remember correctly, once zombie Hulk’s hunger is sated, he becomes zombie Bruce Banner again, and the enormous mass of flesh in his stomach bursts out of his now normal sized form. While this is probably a stylistic choice in the body horror rich _Marvel Zombies_ books, it seems like these problems of scale and digestion may be reason enough for The Hulk to not eat very often.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_versions_of_the_Hulk#Marvel_Zombies:_Dead_Days
Hulk really likes Beans:
http://westfieldcomics.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/HulkBeans3.jpg
Though only briefly mentioned, I would like to add the 1993/1994 Three Musketeers film is fantastic.
Oh, man. I have so much I wanna say about conventions and comic cons. Good episode, and I hope I can get back to it soon.
Justin
It just gets a brief namecheck but I actually think there’s a lot to unpack about the title of the show Gilmore Girls and the intrinsic Gilmoreness of the Girls.
For those who haven’t watched it (and you should, BTW, especially now it is on Netflix instant), the show centers on Lorelei, a 32-year old single mother and her 16-year-old daughter Lorelei “Rory” Gilmore. Applying some basic math, that means Rory is the age Lorelei was when she got pregnant and ran away from her parents. Her parents, the Gilmores, are a very aristocratic and proper New England monied family. At the time the show begins, Lorelei makes a deal with her estranged mother, Emily Gilmore, that Emily gets to be involved with the lives of Lorelei and Rory in exchange for helping to fund Rory’s fancy private school education (Uh I probably just spoiled the first two episodes or so. But it’s the premise of the first few seasons of the show, so whatever).
What’s this have to do with the title? Well, first off “Girls” here is meaningful. We’re used to people casually applying the diminutive “girl” to adult women but here I think it is more calculated. Rory is pretty plainly a girl, albiet one who presents as mature for her age. Lorelei’s girlness in this context reflects both her relative youth as a parent and her unusually close relationship with her daughter–she’s “one of the girls.” Ok, what about Emily Gilmore? She is not chronologically a “girl”, but the degree to which she is “one of the girls” waxes and wanes over the course of the show. It isn’t self-evident whether or not she is included in the title, which I think is a deliberate tension.
Ok, what about Gilmore? On the surface level it’s simply the last name of the characters. But in context it’s very fraught. Gilmore is the family dynasty Lorelei rejected, and represents the whole monied New England establishment. Rory’s
Gilmoreness is reasonably strong given her close relationship with her grandparents and Ivy League ambitions. But she wasn’t truly raised A Gilmore. Lorelei was, but rejected everything about that part of herself. Superficially Emily is the most Gilmore–the living embodiment of the name. But, of course, unlike the other “girls”, Emily wasn’t born a Gilmore. When we later meet her mother in law–yet another Lorelei–this tension becomes plain.
The degree to which the Girls are intrinsically Gilmore–and even who is included in the scope of the title–represents a substantial tension in the show, and the title’s alliteration plays that off excellently.
Okay, so first of all, OBVIOUSLY, it’s “Dirty Dancing 2: Electric Dirty Boogaloo.”
Second, my favorite alliterative title is Martha Marcy-May Marlene. To get the effect of the alliteration, compare it to, say, Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Isn’t it obvious that the latter is about three things, and the former is about three aspects of one thing?
Fun with punctuation: Because “may” is a verb, you could hear it as: “Martha, Marcy. May Marlene?”, with the implication that though Martha and Marcy may, Marlene may or may not.