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Flattened faces and extremely polite language (even while being insulting) seem to be Asian caricatures... and I personally thought the accents sounded Asian.
Not to rehash a years-old argument (how did you miss it?), but Jar-Jar reminded some viewers of how Jamaicans and African Americans have been caricatured in popular entertainment (e.g. loping, dim-witted, exaggerated mouths, speaking pidgin English). Some of the other aliens in SW:TPM were bore some resemblance to racial stereotypes as well (e.g. the trade federation reps =~ Chinese, Anakin's master Watto =~ Jewish), leading to some spirited debates about the subject.
The PC police believe that Jar Jar is an offensive caricature of black people (correction African-Americans). Similarly, the trade federation people were caricatures of Asians. And Watto was a Jewish stereotype.
Of course, all of this could be the result of George Lucas being a mere caricature of a good screenwriter.
Are you kidding me? The show today is a travesty of the comic genius it once was. Remember when Homer had a soul? When he was a man with emotions one could identify with, if only in caricature. Today he's as shallow as any contestant on reality tv. He exists only to engage in wacky antics and spout catch phrases.
I will be glad to see the simpsons off the air. Each new episode only serves to dilute the show's legacy as the finest work of comic art of the 20th century.
I remember the "good ol' days" of Ma Bell's monopoly, before the big breakup. I'd take exception to the use of the phrase "*real* quality of service".
The only good thing I recall about those days was that most Western Electric phones were virtually bulletproof, the telco equivalent of an IBM Type M keyboard. But that's about it.
For starters, since the telco owned everything on the network, adding an extension phone was a violation of their terms of service, and they'd come down hard on you if they found one in use (and don't think they didn't check up on people; they did). The sound quality was vastly inferior to what we now have: long distance sounded like long distance, but even local calls could sometimes be rendered unintelligible by the monopoly's antiquated switching system. Service in rural areas pretty much sucked hind tit; even in the late '70s it was party lines or nothing in certain towns in upstate New York.
Even worse, Ma Bell's responsiveness to consumer complaints was a national joke. Remember Lily Tomlin's character Ernestine? One ringy-dingy... That was a caricature, of course, but one grounded in truth.
After divestiture, things really changed for the better overall. The relaxation of restrictions on what could be placed on the network meant a boom in devices like answering machines, fax machines, and modems. Had the old pre-1984 restrictions been in place, what do you think the effect would have been on BBSs and dial-up access to the Internet? Imagine having to pay extra in order to have a modem connected to your phone line. Sound quality improved largely due to technological advances, but had the monopoly still been in place, would there have been any incentive to upgrade the telco network?
Yes, AT&T had been on the cutting edge of computer science and electronic engineering for decades. But had the break-up not taken place, we'd still be using a phone system worthy of the movie Brazil.
k.
Its Album of the Soundtrack, not Soundtrack of the Album you insensitive clod!
Sigh, alone again.
INTERVIEWER: We're all a bit stunned Mr. French about your claim that your latest film stars Marilyn Monroe.
FRENCH: Yes.
INTERVIEWER: Who died over 10 year ago.
FRENCH: That's correct.
INTERVIEWER: Are you lying?
FRENCH: No, no. Its just that she's very much in the public eye at the moment.
INTERVIEWER: What does Marilyn do in the film?
FRENCH: Oh, we have her lying on beds, lying on floors, falling out of cabinets, frightening the children...
INTERVIEWER: But surely Miss Monroe was cremated?
FRENCH: Uh. We had to use a stand-in for some of the more visible shots.
INTERVIEWER: Ah, another actress.
FRENCH: A dead actress. But Miss Monroe was in shot the whole time.
INTERVIEWER: How?
FRENCH: Oh, in an ashtray, in a vacuum cleaner, in a fire grate...
INTERVIEWER: So, Marilyn does not appear in the film?
FRENCH: N...Not as such.
INTERVIEWER: Mr. French, you're one of the film worlds most arrogant queens.
FRENCH: Well...yes.
INTERVIEWER: I mean not just gay or homosexual, a reall raving queen. A real 'whoops, get out, don't mind me' the limp wristed caricature.
FRENCH: Is that not in order?
INTERVIEWER: No, no, that's fine. And I also understand that you married the beautiful heiress Uwena Tannoy, partly for the publicity, but mostly to cover up the fact that you prefer going out with little boys.
FRENCH: What!?
INTERVIEWER: French you're an effeminate little pouf, a mincing gay-bar loiterer, a Winnet Common walking perfume shop, and an evil perverter of innocent little boys.
FRENCH: Really!? Is this part of the interview?
INTERVIEWER: No, I just wanted a few contacts. That's all.
FRENCH: What about the interview.
INTERVIEWER: Forget about the interview, we've been off the air for ages. Where'd you find them?
FRENCH: I think we really still are on the air.
INTERVIEWER: Oh, sod the fucking air! Please, just a few contacts.
FRENCH: We've got James Dean in it; in a box...
What replaced it?
The elistment of only volunteer soldiers rendered the shrieking jackass sergeant obsolete. Realizing that permitting jerks to abuse and lord it over new recruits would result in fewer volunteers, anyone identified as a jerk was generally awarded the Order of the Boot as soon as their current enlistment term ended. When I joined in '87 the army was very keen on emphasizing that we were all there voluntarilly and if one couldn't work well with others, one should just go home (you can quit for any reason in the first six months, no questions asked). Drill sergeants are very stern and loud, but they were nowhere near as bad as they were in the 60's (a la R Lee Ermey "Full Metal Jacket"). I remember only one incident in basic training, where a real jerk of a drill sergent in another platoon in my company punched a recruit in the stomach. He was gone from the training company the next day, and from what we heard, he was standing at a bus stop in civvies with his discharge papers five or six weeks later.
What are Hollywood screenwriters going to do now that they can't use the screaming parade sargeant prop?
Oh, they'll keep using that caricature for a long time. It's traditional. The difference between an abusive drill sergeant and a strict disciplinary one is obvious to someone under their command, but to a casual outside observer they both look the same. Besides, Hollywood writers don't care if they're accurate. Watch a couple episodes of The West Wing, for example, and puzzle over military absurdities like "the M-2 Bradley has a 120mm cannon", or plot devices like white house staff blackmailing a general who they discovered was wearing a medal on his uniform he was never awarded (someone would have noticed long before he became general and would've called bullshit on that; self-awarded medals are big no-no's; career-killing no-no's).
I was reading the paper this afternoon, there was a caricature of Usama Bin Laden with the caption, "I hablo espanol, too." I suppose that means that the FBI will need an interpreter for when Usama Bin Laden sends out his message,
Fu|X0r teh 3\/IL cru54d3rz. 0ea7h 2 4m3r1ka!!!
There are so few original games out there. The movie industry is going through the same problem. Think of the most successful movies made recently. Most of them are remakes of extremely successful comics/books/older movies/older tv shows. There's not a lot of innovation going on. You know why? Cost. How much does it cost to develop a really graphically satisfying game? Millions of dollars. I'm not even talking about a game that is fun to play. I'm just talking about satisfying the minimum graphical requirements that gamers today require. In the glory days of the Genesis/SNES, two geeks could mortgage their house, buy a development kit from Sega for 20K, spend 6 months developing an awesome title, and be succeessful. You're not going to see many small groups of developers attempting that on these new consoles. The other problem is consolidation. EA, Activision, and the like have sucked all the innovation out of the industry by buying up all of the competition. Basically the problem with videogames are that they've gone mainstream. Don't you remember when being into videogames had you pegged as a nerd? You never heard of games being mentioned on TV, in movies, or in commercials, unless the people playing them are caricatures of what we used to be as preteens/teenagers. Now that publishers have to play to the large audience of slackjawed morons, they have to dumb down game difficulty, turn up the eye-candy, and of course sprinkle in plenty of T&A. Videogames peaked with the SNES. I still own the newest consoles (GCN, GBA, etc), but I'll never have the same love for gaming that I did then. I realize that a good portion of this is nestalgia, but its also quality.
That's a funny caricature of right-wing, fundamentalist, homeschoolers. But your view of homeschooling is about twenty years out of date. Liberal-minded homeschooling parents have to deal enough with the stigma fundamentatists have given homeschool. Lets give that old stereotype a rest.
If you're so beholden to the school unions that you can't objectively consider the merits of homeschool, send your kid to a public school from which he'll emerge with an empty head. I'll homeschool my son, and we'll see which becomes the citizen best prepared to champion liberal causes.
People making TV shows et al. consider those factors only glancingly - after all the immediate concerns of the market and the interests of the producers and the most pressing aesthetic and technical concerns. And they make those considerations from a very interested, unobjective perspective: often seeping with defensiveness about the value of their work.
A good critical stance is informed by a lot of relevant historical, anthropological, sociological and other disciplines that even most producers don't have.
And if you think that game developers don't care about this, you're wrong. Oh, the rank and file graphics-and-behaviours grunt coders don't care, but Will Wright, Peter Molyneaux and others of their ilk certainly do: it's why they speak at universities themselves and invite people like Janet Murry to speak at Maxis.
(It is a quirk of the game industry that the trenches are often more defensive about their position than their counterparts in the film industry: someone doing character art feels more entitled to priviledged, sweeping claims about the industry than a gaffer or assistant cameraman does about film.)
And in film, film-makers like Godard and Truffaut credited Cahiers du Cinema and Andres Bazin with making their type of cinema possible.
It's not a matter of having them "think for you:" that's a very simplistic "thumbs up/thumbs down" approach to their object of study. Have you actually read papers or books by the people mentioned in the article above, or are you working from an internal caricature?
BTW, I just listened to the beginning of the McBride audio (I attended Moglen's talk but not McBride's), and the subtext is hilarious. Listen to the introducers carefully disclaim an endorsement of McBride and emphasize the planned rebuttal by Chris Stone. They say he's "learn-ed on the GPL" and compare him to Janet Jackson at the Super Bowl! (McBride even plays along with this jibe.)
The introducers reveal their real purpose: to "frame" the "hard questions" of software law, by offering an extreme viewpoint in caricature.
As for real security experts, they routinely find vulnerabilities in Windows beforesending a description to MS which would then, a few months later, issue a patch. Maybe.
There is a fine line between marketing and outrageous lying. I'm glad to see that MS gleefully steps over it every single time. Any other conduct would actually be unsettling. You see, we geeks revel in a binary vision of the world, and we cannot thank MS enough for consistently being a caricature of evil villain. It makes working against them so much more rewarding.
Otherwise known as the Bush presidency.
There are some things I like about Bush but overall, I hate what he's done to America. He's turned it into an ugly, uncaring caricature.
I wouldn't be too upset if Bush were killed.
The books I've read so far are all written like they were designed to be movie scripts, or they are bad adaptations of existing movies. Though some of the plot twists are interesting, the dialogue and character development are just clumsy. The guys deals in soap opera grade caricatures of personalities.
2001
To John Anderson, Jim Hourihan, Cary Phillips and Sebastian Marino for the development of the ILM Creature Dynamics System.
This system makes hair, clothing, skin, flesh and muscle simulation both directable and integrated within a character animation and rigging environment.
To Dr. Steve Sullivan and Eric Schafer for the development of the ILM Motion and Structure Recovery System (MARS.)
The MARS system provides analysis of camera motion and object motion, and their dimensions. It employs a rich set of user-interface tools and sophisticated algorithms.
1998
To Cary Phillips for the design and development of the "Caricature" Animation System at Industrial Light & Magic.
By integrating existing tools into a powerful interactive system, and adding an expressive multi-target shape interpolation-based freeform animation system, the "Caricature" system provided a degree of subtlety and refinement not possible with other systems.
1996
JOHN SCHLAG, BRIAN KNEP, ZORAN KACIC-ALESIC and THOMAS WILLIAMS for the development of the ViewPaint 3D Paint System for film production work
JEFFERY YOST, CHRISTIAN ROUET, DAVID BENSON and FLORIAN KAINZ for the development of a system to create and control computer generated fur and hair in motion pictures
1995
DOUGLAS SMYTHE, LINCOLN HU, DOUGLAS S. KAY and INDUSTRIAL LIGHT AND MAGIC for their pioneering efforts in the creation of the ILM Digital Film Compositing System
Pixar has a ton too.
A top UK university recently had to curtail its animal research due to the sheer cost of security that would be required to ensure the safety of its researchers.
Good. While I'm sure there are some less inhuman uses for animal testing than others, I can't see how anyone can think that the vast majority of it (e.g. sticking rabbits in restraints so that cosmetics and cleaning chemicals can be put into their eyes, sewing kittens' eyes shut to determine what the effect is on them if they never experience visual stimuli, repeatedly breaking dogs' bones in veterinary school so that students can practice setting them, then killing the dogs when the semester is over, vivisecting animals without anaesthetic because "it might skew the test results," etc.) does anything to elevate us as a species.
Anyhow, since most people seem not to have actually *played* this game (which is a shame, since it's great):
You play two animals who are escaping from a caricaturized corporation which tests on animals. Part of your objective is to free as many of the other animals as you can on your way out.
I fail to see what's so potentially horrible about that. If the British are so afraid of exposing children to what is effectively a cartoon's point of view, then their position must be pretty weak to begin with.
Secondly, the "stupid dinosaur splash screen" (which I loved) has been gone for about 4 release versions of Mozilla now, to be replaced with a hideously drab orange box with 'Mozilla' written in it. Now that we've compromised on an ugly splash screen, no one's happy. Hooray for attempting to pander to everyone!
I loved the dinosaur splash screen, too. But I couldn't show those releases of Mozilla to my boss (a government manager type - think of Lumbergh in Office Space) - because it made Mozilla look like it was designed and built by 16-year-old virgins with anime posters on their walls.
Now, with that dinosaur splash screen, can I honestly deploy Mozilla onto the desktops of dozens of judges, business CEOs, and lawyers who make >$5,000,000 a year? They won't take it seriously and will therefore resist it. At least the drab orange box looks like some sort of corporate logo that they'd see if they went for a drive around the suburbs of Palo Alto - it lends credibility.
Think of people like Frasier Crane - he's a caricature of the middle-aged successful man, the sort of person who makes big purchasing decisions based on tastefulness rather than functionality. "I don't care if you say that I'll get e-mail viruses! I'm *not* going to stare at KMail all day! They don't even have a real spellchecker!"
(NB. The lack of a real spellchecker was fixed in KDE 3.2.)
This is the same sort of problem we have *everywhere* with open source, shareware and free software from Linux to Mozilla, and including things like AVI Preview (comes with Kazaa Lite) - tacky and stupid user interfaces lacking the same features as the Microsoft equivalent we're trying to replace.
I've ranted about this a lot over the years.
I thought so as well.
The first series while reasonably original content for a TV series really was a bad show with caricatures instead of characters. I suspect our current apologists for the old show are viewing it through the rose colored glasses of their pre-adolescence.
Ian Maxtone-Graham was head writer. Mike Scully was producer. But those two events happened around the same time, and both people are widely percieved as "being the spawn of Satan," so your confusion is understandable. Some other problems associated with them include "stupidly wacky plots," and "characters becoming obnoxious caricatures of themselves."
Luckily, Ian and Mike have both left the show.
I don't really think the computer-aided drawing is a huge factor, although I admit it looked better before.