Saturday, March 25, 2017

Now That Was One Geeky Conversation

My son and I were out doing some Pokemon hunting today.  We got talking about how the Remoraid (A sardine like fish style Pokemon) makes no sense at all to evolve into a Octillery (Basically an octopus like Pokemon). It is the kind of thing that makes it very clear the creators of Pokemon were on drugs while watching Animal Planet when they came up with most of these creatures and their evolutions.

We went through most of the Pokemon and made judgement calls as to how much sense the evolutions made. I think less than half of them really looked right. The creators clearly didn't care at all about logic or study nature when they came up with most of them. They have a basic teddy bear somehow turning into a monster grizzly bear with nothing more than them being bears connecting them, as they physically are clearly not the same species. There is a fat flying rabbit/squirrel then somehow becomes a ferret. Seriously, WTF were they on?

And of course if you get enough gold fish (Known as magikarp in the game) you can turn one into a giant sea serpent...

Then beyond the clear we don't give a damn about rational biology that s obvious, some of the Pokemon are a little disturbing and not necessarily well thought out with their storyline.

Cubones are little rodents who wear their mother's skulls on their heads, as they deal with the death of their mothers.... So I guess all females cubones die when they give birth for the first time to just one offspring. Not a good trait for survival there.

Then we have the truly creepy Drowzee, a creature who sneaks into people's bedrooms and steal their dreams through their nostrils while they sleep... Yeah, no drugs involved in the creation of that one.

I am enjoying Pokemon Go well enough, but it is really hard to take the franchise seriously when so much of it seems to have just been thrown together without any thought put in. Of course we are dealing with a 'cutified' concept of cock fighting where it is considered sad if the creature you are having fight using deadly powers, gets hurt.

Sunday, March 12, 2017

Taking on The Round Robin Challenge

Good friend of mine and fellow Blogger, Mr. Smith, has drawn my attention to a Round Robin Blog Challenge that he has participated in.

 
 
This week's challenge is called Two Great Tastes That Are Great Together.

This challenge is actually an easy one for me, as the topic I am going to talk about is one I was planning on doing. DC Comic has been doing a He-Man and Thundercats limited series crossover event. I was going to wait until the series finished up to write about it, but it fits this challenge too well.

The series starts off with Mumm-ra and the Spirits of Evil working on a plan to find a way defeat the Thundercats by acquiring a weapon more powerful than the Sword of Omens. They are able to move Third Earth to the orbit of Eternia during a coming of age ceremony for Prince Adam. Of course all chaos break loose.

I'm not going to go much into the details of the storyline, as right away things get interesting and I don't want to spoil it for anyone. Just trust me that it does not take long before you ask 'did that really just happen?'. Of course Skeletor and Mumm-ra do team up, but it is not as simple as you might think.

Right away we are given a good connection between the two worlds that made sense. As these two franchises have a lot in common with their mixture of magic and technology, so connecting them was not an issue as they fit together just fine. In fact I have always felt it was fairly obvious that Thundercats was trying to get in on the popularity of Masters of the Universe.

What I found most interesting was what canon was used from both.

They both came out it the 80s with their basic storylines, although Masters of the Universe did take a years or so to stabilize its best known storyline. While thanks to what MotU started, Thundercats was able to come in strong with their storyline from the get go. Both of the franchises faded away and had recent reboots that were actually much better than the original, but regretfully neither took off even though both were worth watching.

So in He-Man and Thundercats, the writers went with the most basic Thundercats canon, staying with the original characters unaltered from what we had been given in the 80s cartoon, not even making use of any of the characters introduced later in the series.

For MotU however, they used the hybrid storyline that Mattel has been using for their on-line collector's club figures. This storyline is a mixture from just about all things MotU starting with ideas from the early pack in mini comics all the way through the last cartoon reboot. The official canon is about as complex as it gets with all these elements mixed in there, even though He-Man and the Thundercats does not do much in exploring this new hybrid canon.

So we have one issue of this crossover event that was a long time in coming remaining. While I do expect somewhat a cliche end to the story, since they have done an impressive job with surprising us so far, I am looking forwards to seeing how they wrap it all up and what final surprises they have waiting for us.