#(I know the actual clips aren't 2005 don't @ me)

[deancasforcutie]

Wake up bro it's 2005, conspiracy theories now hitting teh interwebz are so funny haha... Threatening US democracy with fascism? Misinformation crisis led by foreign agents and artificial intelligence and our own whose "memes" distract from it all by pretending their illiterate "discourse" on tv matters/gets to deprive us of escapism and catharsis we'd sorely need? Sounds like you've been reading too much Weekly World News roflmao come on let's go watch Supernatural XD

[boxturret]

The Adverse Affects of Pre-Release Materials

I usually post big rambling posts about bionicles, but today I'm going to do a big rambling post about one of my favourite movies, Steamboy.

And like...themes and stuff.

Have you heard of themes? Things can have them, they're pretty cool.

I know no one will read this but this is for me okay.

In 2005 I was watching the Space channel, now rebranded CTV Scifi, and they had an awards show called the Spaceys where they ranked and awarded media from that year. I recall when Stargate SG1 won one they had a clip of the Thor puppet being controlled by Richard Dean Anderson thanking everyone who supported the show, and that their voices sounded like "tiny farts". I wonder if that's available anywhere or if its lost media now lol.

In any case, they had an animation category and they mentioned several films that released that year, the winner was Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, but one of the nominees was a film called Steamboy, it was just named and they had a tiny clip from the trailer. It was literally just this part:

Really stuck in my mind and I went and looked it up and found the English website, which has been partially archived:

Unfortunately not documented is the previews and clips page, which had several short videos from the movie, notably, I recall, with incorrect character names. It called the main two characters Jay and Miss, instead of Ray and Scarlet lol.

One of the scenes on this page was from around half way through the movie, when the fighting breaks out in the Great Exhibition grounds, and Scarlet decided to stroll across the battle field to talk to the queen.

(I love all the shots where you can actually see the artillery shells flying through the air)

These men in armour come out and engage the British Tanks and one gets thrown by an explosion.

She goes to look at him and sees that he's dead, but she's surprised there was a man in there.

This being my first introduction to the "Steam Troopers" as the dub calls them, would prove a bit problematic for me and my understanding of the film for years to come.

This was 2005, it was harder to find things like this, by some luck after weeks of searching I did find the movie on DVD in a store and could finally watch it.

So now I could see the introduction of the Steam Trooper, which is quite ominous. The London Constabulary comes to break in to the O'Hara Manufacturing Company's pavilion in the exhibition grounds but the doors open and you see one standing there, menacingly.

And as a kid I thought "imagine being the guy told to just stand there all dramatic as the police storm in", thinking it was kinda funny really.

But something always bugged me about the Steam Troopers. They didn't really make sense, mechanically.

Steamboy is a steampunk movie, featuring all sorts of incredible machines with copious amounts of gears and belts and rivets and pistons and they all look very cool, but also there is a lot of thought put un to their designs.

In fact the British steam powered tank is actually based on a real world vehicle, the Hornsby Tractor.

Just stick a little gun turret on the front and you've got it lol.

You can see their power source, how they're propelled, their mechanisms make sense, they're crazy complicated and not really feasible or practical, but they're fun and make sense In the world established in the film.

But Steam Troopers don't!

Now from my point of view, from seeing the preview and seeing it was a guy in a suit, I just looked at it as a suit, so therefore, in my mind, the linkages and wheels and tiny boiler on the back must all be some sort of Victorian power armour, enhancing the wearer's strength in some way.

But it just doesn't make sense, nothing's connected to anything properly for that.

When you see the dead guy some of the wheels are still spinning and all they're doing is making some of the linkages, which aren't positioned to do anything, move around.

It really bothered me for years, everything else in the movie makes sense to me, but not them.

Then a year or two ago I did a little experiment. I watched this movie, which I've seen dozens of times at this point, but really tried to empty my mind of all my prior thoughts and knowledge. Just come at it fresh. And it was really fun! I highly recommend it. You'll never be able to really experience a movie for the first time again, but looking at it through this lens can make you notice things you may have missed.

Watching Steamboy in this way, when I got to the Steam Trooper scenes, it finally clicked. They don't make sense, because they're not supposed to make sense. They're fake. Its all fake.

They're supposed to be automatons.

The scene where Scarlet sees the dead man is supposed to be a big reveal that no, these are just men in suits.

This whole battle is a weapons demonstration orchestrated by Simon, the person in charge of this branch of the O'Hara Manufacturing Company. There are representatives from all over the world here and he spends the entire latter have of the movie trying to sell them stuff even when things start to go horribly wrong.

The whole ominous scene with the Steam Trooper standing there menacingly was for their benefit.

The O'Hara Manufacturing Company has so many amazing machines, they've got submersibles, blimps, actually functional airplanes, all in the 1860s, but its not enough.

They're so driven by greed they're not content to simply sell the amazing machines they have, they have to try and scam even more out of everyone.

It leads to them strapping some tiny engines that just wiggle around a bit and shoot out steam on the backs of some guys in full armour and have them march in to battle pretending to be clockwork soldiers.

This realisation also gave new context to this scene, which is one of the more humorous scenes in the film.

*bonk*

You can actually see these suits much earlier in the film, off in the background in a maintenance area. The Steam Castle, the true form of the O'Hara Pavilion, is massive and much of it was constructed in secret, under water, so they'd require many things like the submarine seen in the same scene and these diving suits with manipulator arms. But in their greed they're trying to sell these clumsy maintenance suits as amphibious battle suits, yet in reality they can't even climb stairs.

The O'Hara pavilion itself is a very clear example of this, its trying to look like a fancy stone building but really its all painted metal, and the shell breaks off to reveal the dark and dirty weapon of war it really is.

The Steam Castle started out as an idea of a mobile funfair and greed perverted it in to become this. This part was plainly laid out in the movie, but its fun to see how the theme was repeated in different ways throughout the movie.

So in conclusion, one of the major thematic elements of the movie was hidden to me for years because of the pre-release media that gave a away a twist before the set up, ruining the impact of it.

Its a tricky thing, seeing those preview materials were what made me excited to watch the movie, yet seeing them directly harmed my understanding of the movie for years to come. I've always loved the movie, its gorgeous, has an amazing sound track and sound design, it taps directly in to the gear obsessed part of my brain, and there's other themes and messages in the movie that even as a kid I noticed, but now I feel I have a much more clear understanding of the movie that I lacked before.

I've had my enjoyment of a few other things be tempered by overdoing it with pre-release materials, so in general once I've decided something is interesting to me I basically block out everything until I've finished it. I don't even read the blurb on the back of books anymore lol.

I highly recommend trying to go at something fresh, with an open mind, even if you can quote the movie from memory and every frame is etched in to your brain, you can learn something!

Some other quick notes:

Compressed gasses being released making things cold is an actual thing, if you've ever sprayed a can of compressed air for a bit too long and felt the can get colder, that's what's going on.

The two main henchmen in the movie are named Freddy and Jason, get it?

Canada is represented in the movie even though that flag didn't exist yet! :)

The PS2 game has an ending where you fight a pair of giant Punch and Judy robots.

The trailer and DVD menu for Steamboy is a song called Full Force, which is a cool song. The first half at least. I edited it a few years ago to remove the end bit which gets weird, and then found that several people also did that, independently. So that's neat.

I like my edit more, but its secret. Its mine.

I can't promise this won't happen again.

[tellthemeerkatsitsfine]

I have some previous posts that were about some other stuff that explain why I'm now going through my folder of Bugle clips I've saved for one reason or another, but these have nothing to do with those initial reasons, I've just found them and wanted to post them again.

First of all, am I the only person who finds myself frequently remembering the famous "confusing facts with emus" line, but forgetting its context? I feel like it's a famous line - is that wrong? I don't know why I think that, if I really have seen other Bugle fans reference it or if I just decided it was an iconic moment. But I remember the first time I heard that line, 81 episodes into the podcast, and thinking - this is the Zaltzman and Oliver sense of humour, distilled. It's also a joke that's equal parts Zaltzman-type humour as Oliver-type humour, even though it was just John who said it.

So now, when I'm going about my business in the real world, if the concept of "facts" comes up, I frequently find myself thinking - though not saying out loud - "You are once again confusing facts with emus." But when I remember that line, I don't usually think of the context that was around it:

And I also came across this post again, which I have definitely posted at least a couple of times before, but I'm sorry, I need to do it again. And I need to again tell my story, that I know something about this song!

Okay, okay, here's the thing about this song. And I've known this since long before I listened to The Bugle. I used to be really into following country music blogs - actual country music. Blogs by people who, like me, were fans of country music and significant anti-fans of pop music incorrectly marketing itself and country. The same way I feel about "professional wrestling". If you want to make entertainment that I don't enjoy for people who aren't me, then fine, whatever, go ahead and do that. But don't give it the same name as a thing I do like, especially if your thing is going to have far more broad mass appeal, to the point where it'll become the first thing most people think of when they hear that name. Leaving me saying "I like [thing] - no, no, not the commercialized manufactured bullshit that's also called [name of thing] and was was your first thought when I mentioned it, I mean the actual [thing]. Why the fuck do I have to clarify that? Why can't the people who make a completely different thing just give their thing a different name?"

Anyway. I hate "pop country" music quite a lot, far more than I hate other music that I'm just not into, but that doesn't call itself by the same name as music I am into. And I used to be really into blogs by other people who felt the same way.

I learned from those blogs about Jamey Johnson, the singer who put out a country album - an actual country album - that was very good, they thought. Or at least, it seemed good. It sounded good. It sounded like country music, and it sounded like good music. However, it was financed with the money that Jamey Johnson had made by co-writing a song called Honky Tonk Badonkadonk, and selling that song to Trace Adkins.

There was actually a huge debate in the country music blogs at the time, around 2006, and then again in 2008 when he released another album. Everyone asking - can we trust this guy? How could we trust this guy? He must be lying to us, claiming to be into country music. A spy, a traitor. I remember reading blog posts that would pick apart his lovely, quite traditional country songs, pointing out anything that could be read as secret signs of pop-country influence, to prove he was lying.

By the time he released his third album of lovely, proper country music, the controversy had mostly died down, and most people accepted him as a country singer. He did what he had to do. He wrote one shit song in 2005, and that gave him the freedom to make good stuff without worrying about money. Honestly, I'm surprised you don't see that sort of thing more often. I'm surprised I even associate this story in particular with Jamey Johnson, rather than it being so common that I don't even have any one name especially associated with the concept of people who write awful "pop country" songs so they can make good country albums. I'd probably do it, if I had that kind of talent.

Jamey Johnson is an absolutely beautiful singer and songwriter. The song Honky Tonk Badonkadonk was written by a guy who also wrote this:

He also wrote this, which have lyrics that go into the issues with commercialism and the tension between going along with it when he had to before ultimately rejecting it:

So that's the thing I know about Honky Tonk Badonkadonk. It actually caused a huge schism in country music blogs in 2006, with people disagreeing about whether they should accept Jamey Johnson as a legitimate country singer despite his previous resume. And I, as a teenager reading them all, was firmly on the side of "we can't hold a grudge against someone who did what he had to do to get this done, especially as that is far from the worst moral compromise I've ever seen someone make in purist of a greater goal." He made enough money to afford to make less commercially successful music. And then wrote several songs, including the two I posted above, explaining why he needed to do that.

Anyway, Honky Tonk Badonkadonk then became a running joke on The Bugle, starting in the audio clip I posted above from the last episode of 2009, but they continued to reference it for years. The frequently referred to it as being "by Trace Adkins", and never mentioned that Trace Adkins did not actually write the song. It's fairly silly that that annoys me, because I'm pretty sure Jamey Johnson doesn't want to be credited for that song. But still. The inaccuracy bugs me.

One reference I definitely did not get the first time I heard that Bugle clip is learning that that stupid song went around the Chocolate Milk Gang because Daniel Kitson and Gavin Osborn sent it to Andy Zaltzman, who sent it to John Oliver. All with insufficient information about who wrote it. Come on, guys? Do you really think Trace Adkins would be smart enough to write lyrics like "Lord have mercy, how'd she even get those britches on?/with that honky tonk badonkadonk/now honey you can't blame her for what her mama gave her"? Obviously it took a genius to write that.