Imagine, if you will, an authentic Viking longboat of the historic period with members of its crew weary of their steady diet of gruel. Offered the usual slop, one crew member dares to ask one in charge if they have any ribeye. They even presume to ask for how they would like their steak prepared, as does their mate, who wishes theirs well done. “Why would you do that to a piece of meat?,” questions the first of the second’s preparation choice…
But as you might imagine, a Viking longboat is not a restaurant, and the picky Vikings are issued a ladle full of gruel, which looks about as unappetizing as you’d think. “Thank you for the gruel,” meekly says the first Viking, probably lucky not to be thrown overboard…
Despite the monotonous diet, Vikings like pirates remain popular fantasy figures, despite sea raids never yielding pizza or fast food…
(- -Ahh, to be a Sea Fox with a hardy crew back in the day! )
We haven’t seen the Woodland Critters on South Park in 21 years, and although many thought that we’d never see them again, they make a roaring return to the finale of South Park’s Season 28!
Now the Critters were originally created as part of a Xmas story dreamed up by 4th grader Eric Cartman for a twisted Xmas story that he wrote, and while they appear cute, lovable, and child-like are really satanic creatures with dark powers including the ability to summon demons and hellfire. They engage in murderous and sadistic acts, including the torture and murder of Strawberry Shortcake.
There are a dozen Woodland Critters that include a bear, deer, rabbit, squirrel, and a fox. All are named simply by adding a “y” to their species name, so here we have Foxy the fox. (We foxes do struggle to control our dark side, you know.) Despite their apparent innocence, the Critters are quite sadistic, and use their dark powers to engage in violent and despicable acts that I don’t wish to even describe in a blog that tries hard not to venture beyond PG-13 territory.This time, the Critters are all excited because Donald Trump has impregnated Satan, who is going to give birth to the Anti-Christ. Things get very strange in a show that includes a talking towel prone to getting high, Towelie…
I know of no other show that has an anthropomorphic, marijuana-addicted talking towel as a recurring character. In Towelie’s defense, however, the government created him, and he’ll do the right thing when he knows what’s going on. He’s actually saved the boys from an evil towel on one occasion…
South Park at its best reverses and confounds our expectations, and the re-appearance of the Woodland Critters after a long absence from the series is an example of that, mixed in with the saga of satirizing the Trump administration and its key players for several seasons.- – Y’all have a Merry Xmas now, ‘ya hear?
Lady Gaga has given us all of us Halloween heads a great early gift for spooky season in The Dead Dance, a masterpiece of song and dance. It ranks up there with Michael Jackson’s Thriller and Wednesday’s dance from the Netflix series Wednesday. There are some Jacksonian moves to it, yet the production, directed by Tim Burton, is unique and distinctly Lady Gaga’s.
For one thing, the video incorporates the feeling of Mexico City’s Island of the Dolls, a place where aging, discolored, rotting, and dismembered dolls are strung up in trees and around the landscape. Such dolls are rather creepy, and appear right from the beginning of Lady Gaga’s video wheas such does not appear in Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Lady Gaga’s zombified dead also seem to do a lot more twitching as they hover in that nether world between death and a recall to life…
Is there anything that Lady Gaga cannot do? She sings, dances, and writes songs, and The Dead Dance can easily be interpreted to represent recovery from romantic break-ups, depression, and other forms of mental illness and personal setbacks in life. Although its topic is dark and presented in terms of the paranormal, the video is both dazzling and yet uplifting…what a triumph! Enjoy, if this is your first viewing of the video…
Flow is a 2024 animated movie that features a young black cat with large, expressive eyes who is trying with other diverse creatures to survive a flood of almost Biblical proportions. His companions include a lemur, a secretary bird, several dogs, and surprisingly, a capybara…
Victims of circumstance, the unlikely menagerie are swept up in extensive flooding of their homelands, places that are never precisely specified or illustrated, and wind up clambering onto a small, well-worn sailboat that serves as their life raft and conveyance through a watery wasteland. This is a “journey”type of movie…
These animals are not anthropomorphic, and do not speak but make animal sounds appropriate for their species. For the most part, their movements are completely believable for the animals depicted. While essentially realistic, the animal companions are not finely detailed or photorealistic, nor are the habitats that they pass throughon their survival journey. At one point, a fantastic whale-type creature unlike anything I’m familiar with vaults over the small craft. There’s nary a human in sight, although we are shown abandoned if nondescript settlements. While there is no dialogue, there’s a soothing musical background soundtrack, and the combined effect is somewhat magical or mystical. This is neither Disney nor Wild Kingdom…
The nameless black cat is kind of the cast protagonist, plucky and adaptable, rolling with the punches and reversals of their journey while retaining feline curiosity and wonder. He is endearing, resourceful, resilient, and at times comical, and you want to root for him and his survival. This cat grows on you, and he’ll endure…
There’s no violence or death in Flow, unless you count the fish that the cat catches and shares with his fellow travelers. Flow would likely be captivating viewing for any child, and can be a hypnotic, rather zen-like experience for adults as well. There’s no profound or transformative lesson conveyed here, although the values of co-existence, toleration, and cooperation emerge. We could all benefit from more of that in 2025. Recommended for all fans of animation, Flow was formerly shown in theaters,may now be seen on HBO, and it’s good stuff…
“Whatcha doin’,” inquires hubby of his wife in this recent NJM Insurance commercial. “Just shopping for new car insurance,” she chirps while on the internet. That’s all it takes, apparently, because then the Mascots come!
A bear is repeatedly ringing the doorbell…a rabbit is knocking on the window…the phone is ringing insistently…windows are popping up on the computer…and a pair of bird legs is struggling to emerge from the fireplace!
“We should have known!,” despairs hubby as he grabs an umbrella to jab at the bird legs, and repel the invader!
Now I, for one, have always wanted to seek out the furry mascot army, and join their hellish crusade, so I would embrace the invaders, and go off with them! Just let me grab my fox fursuit. – -My time would have finally arrived, Ahahahaha! 🦊
(What?! – –You think I’d rather watch the Trump coronation?! Not in this life! 😼 )
In a government public service promo, we are taken to a taxidermy shop where I suspect that the proprietor has not quite mastered his art, because the taxidermied animals there look creepy, more like road kill than a recreation of life…
These poor specimens present that vape smoke can contain formaldehyde, the same chemical used to preserve dead animals like themselves…badly! The talking animals banter among themselves, struggling to pronounce the word formaldehyde…
The promo is darkly comic and even disturbing, but conveys a serious message that vaping fumes are not simply harmless water vapor, but can contain toxic and damaging chemicals that will be conveyed to the lungs…and that’s a thought even more unnatural than these badly-preserved animals!
Now this is toxic taxidermy, and I feel sorry for my poor cousins for whom death was not the final insult!
It’s important to realize that many cartoon characters, like ourselves, have backstories. In the 1951 cartoon Let’s Stalk Spinach, we are shown that Popeye came from an impoverishedfamily background (above). We are shown Popeye’s mother, who looked like Popeye himself, complete with a squinty eye, sporting a pipe, and sadly, suffering from the same enlargement of lower arms that was passed on to her son. From seeing the young Popeye in this cartoon wearing shorts (or knickers?), we also learn that Popeye suffered from similar enlargement of his lower legs! Clearly, medical research needs to be done on these conditions…
(Popeye and his mother…Observe the hideous bodily limb deformations!)
Well, we also are shown Popeye’s four nephews, who not only look like miniature versions of himself, but also suffer the apparent genetic abnormalities. Their names are Pip-eye, Pup-eye, Poop-eye, and Peep-eye. Such names seem to me to be uncommonly cruel, as if the physical stigmata weren’t enough…
Well, the sailor-man had prepared lunch for his nephews which consisted of spinach sandwiches. I’m not surprised by this, nor was I surprised that the nephews upon taking a bite of the sandwiches spit them out. One can hardly blame them for this! Popeye then tells the nephews the story of how he discovered the virtues of spinach, which involved confrontation with a giant who easily thrashed Popeye until he was thrown into a giant-sized can of spinach, acquiring super-strength from ingesting it . The tide of battle then predictably turned, and Popeye bested the giant!
So Popeye’s nephews upon hearing the tale then eagerly consumed their sandwiches, and the battered giant makes an appearance at the end to testify to the veracity of Popeye’s story. Giants usually do not come out on top despite their clear advantages of size and strength, and are often depicted as dim-witted. They really deserve better…
A similar revelation I experienced recently is that Yosemite Sam, who might be considered the poster-boy of the gun lobby, had a brother! This brother looks identical to Yosemite Sam, other than the fact that his bushy eyebrows and prodigious mustache are black in color rather than reddish-orange. In the cartoon Along Came Daffy (1947), Yosemite Sam and his brother are bested by Daffy Duck rather than Bugs Bunny, the usual match-up. In his role as a cookbook salesman, however, Daffy proves himself easily up to the job… and speaking of abnormalities, check out Yosemite’s four-fingered hand… 🙀
In the aftermath of the election, we may at least be glad that our parents didn’t name us, Poop-eye… 😸
Somewhere between theMayhem guy’s minimalist animal impersonations and a full-fledged, identity-concealing fursuit is Earl the Cat, doing commercial duties for Smalls Cat food. Earl is anthropomorphic, sleeping in a bed, going into the bathroom and brushing his tongue, and yes…we briefly glimpse a litter box in that bathroom, but thankfully do not see Earl using it!
We see Earl engaging in cat-behaviors such as doing a variety of full-body stretches to limber up the old back…but Earl also does humanoid activities such as going on his computer and getting into social networking sites. He becomes visibly excited when viewing web images of chickens…
Yes,Earl has the best of both worlds! Half-man and half-cat, Earl’s thoughts eventually turn as do all of ours to food. Earl is one of the sophisticats, too…no alley cat he! Picking out a container of food from a pantry-full, he carries it to a nice table, where there is candle-lighting, and perhaps a bottle of vino.- –How refined! – -How sweet it is! But in the manner of domestic animals everywhere, Earl puts his face down to eat directly from his plate.- – No utensils necessary!
Wouldn’t you love to have a human-sized anthropomorphic cat to lounge around your place? Sign me up!- – Cuddles and snuggles, anyone?- –Meow!
I find the “Feed The Pig” PSA commercial creepy, surreal, and oddly disquieting in that it features a human-sized pig, the walking and riding embodiment of a piggy bank, going about with a gaping slot in his head! The pig’s eyes are disturbingly human, while his face is frozen, and plastic-looking.
There is something terribly wrong here! With the gash in his head,the commercial makes me wonder who did this to the pig?! Is there some kind of Dr. Mengele or Dr. Moreau who goes about performing brain surgery on porcine members of the furry fandom, or what? What is the purpose of this mutilation? This pig walks, but is he brain-damaged? For some insane reason, this pig appears happy, and is just going about his business…does the pig even know what’s been done to him, or is he too neurologically-damaged?!
In the commercial, a young man shopping receives a text message that his bank balance is low, spots the pig walking along, and then hastily pursues him through a variety of scenes, the pig at one point riding a motor scooter, riding on an escalator, and in another appearing on a subway. The chase continues through the food prep area of a fine dining facility, and through the restaurant itself. The young man is in hot and frantic pursuit, dodging traffic, and even vaulting over a yoga class in a park to the sound effect of the Bionic Man, Steve Austin, jumping…
Eventually, the guy catches up with the pig outside a residence, tackles him, and stuffs a currency bill into the slot on his head! They are surprisingly polite to one another. “Same time next week?,” asks the dude of the the pig. “Well of course!,” the pig obligingly replies…
Created by the American Institute of CPAs and the Advertising Council in in the U.S., the Feed The Pig series of commercials is designed to get young people saving. I get it…but it’s also nightmare fuel! (*shudders*)
Yes, there’s something in the barn, and it’s not a moo-cow but rather a Norwegian barn elf in this black horror comedy that plays like the movie Gremlins run through National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation…
It seems that a rather annoying American millennial-type family has inherited a Norwegian farm estate where their distant relative died trying to expel or exterminate the barn elf, succeeding only in dying a fiery death. Oblivious to Norwegian traditions and mythology, the Griswold-type family tries to impose gaudy American holiday traditions on the estate in the process of converting it to a bed-and-breakfast type inn…
This serves to make the barn elf angry, as they are creatures that despise change, bright lights, noise, and modernism in general. Only the family’s pre-teen son Lucas understands this, solely believing in the entity, and forging an alliance with the being by giving it cookies. If you are nice to such an elf, they will do service to you such as remove snow and split and stack firewood. Offend an elf, however, and open warfare results, with the mythical beings being able to call in reinforcements of their fellows…
You wouldn’t like such elves when they are truly angry. They are tribal, not adverse to killing, and will use primitive and environmental weaponry. When they stumble into your liquor cabinet, they’ll indulge themselves, and throw raucous parties…
The Americans are guided in their struggles by an expert in Norwegian folklore, who chides them with such admonitions as “This isn’t America. We don’t go about shooting each other in the faces!” A sensible people, Norwegians prefer negotiation.
Cookies are also powerful negotiation chips, if used in a timely fashion. Proper respect for folkloric beings is always in order, too. So be nice to your barn elf, should you have one… 🦊
FOXSYLVANIA 
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