#Spy Kids 3D Game Over

[movies-to-add-to-your-tbw]

Title: Spy Kids

Rating: PG

Director: Robert Rodriguez

Cast: Alexa Vega, Daryl Sabara, Antonio Banderas, Carla Gugino, Alan Cumming, Tony Shalhoub, Teri Hatcher, Robert Patrick, Dick Clark, George Clooney, Cheech Marin, Danny Trejo, Richard Linklater, Mike Judge, Guillermo Navarro, Johnny Reno, Shannon Shea

Release year: 2001

Genres: adventure, comedy, action

Blurb: Carmen and Juni think their parents are boring...little do they know that in their day, Gregorio and Ingrid Cortez were the top secret agents from their respective countries. They gave up that life to raise their children. Now, the disappearances of several of their old colleagues forces the Cortez's return from retirement...what they didn't count on was Carmen and Juni joining the family business.

[mattapparentlystumbltourneys]

Virtual Character Tourney - Bracket Delta - Round 15

Propaganda below (May contain spoilers!)

Sergey Ushanka propaganda:

(Unclear how much of the history I'm about to give here is true and how much is in-universe urban legend.) Sergey Ushanka was a Russian programmer in the 80s who fell ill with a deadly brain disease. In order to save himself from brain death, Sergey decided to digitize himself… and went about it in a much more violent way than you might think. Cue lines of code written in blood and fed into the machine and a brain violently shoved inside of a PC tower. Impossibly, due to the interference of an eldritch deity that preys on people's fear of technology and being replaced, his plan succeeded, and he did achieve a digital form… of pure unadulterated suffering. His human mind couldn't handle the rigidity of computer code, and now he spends his days stalking the internet, forcing those he encounters to bear witness to the indescribable torment he experiences.

Demetra propaganda:

Demetra is a program designed to deceive players of Game Over, a virtuality reality-based video game secretly created to mind control children. Interestingly, she's aware she isn't real ("I'm sorry, Juni, but it's in my programming"), is capable of expressing her own emotions (she sheds a tear while betraying the main protagonist), and can act against her directive (she helps him and his companions escape the trap she leads them into).

[my-gf-is-kazuichi-soda]

Hajime and Chiaki at the end of chapter 5

[high-quality-tiktoks]

I AM THE GUY

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

I was going through my DVDs earlier and I found an unopened boxset of the first three Spy Kids movies that I got from a Walmart bargin bin for $5. You would not believe how disappointed I was to learn that it did not come with a pair of 3D glasses. What the hell is the point of watching Spy Kids 3D in 2D?

[mrawkweird]

They were playing the movies back to back on TV and I couldn't help but check it out for old times' sake.

These are one of the few instances where you legitimately just had to be there. You would not get any of it now. They keep trying to do Spy Kids years later and like, it's over. The era is done and the people that would have been into it have already grown up and only needed the first 3 films (and the clips of Carmen and Juni in the 4th one from YouTube). You had to really experience it to still be able to find all the fondness in the cheese. The fondue if you will. Like the way the 3rd one just turns into Spy Kids: Endgame is insane. Shit, time frame wise you could say Endgame pulled a Game Over.

[spy-kids-database]

DVD ad for Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over.

[spy-flair-extraordinaire]

It's been 20 years since Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over released to theatres in the US on the 25th... 6 days ago. Yeah, this is fairly late. I wanted to take my time with this and not rush it. I think it turned out well.

I originally sketched Carmen and Juni fully, until I cut the sketches in half each once I finished the sketches. I simplified their game suits to fit the art style and so they're easier to draw. I also took some creative liberties with Carmen's game suit, including giving her a life counter on her chest that she lacked for whatever reason. Hers and Juni's life counters are also glowing, you'll notice. That idea is from the Game Boy Advance tie-in game, where one of the powerups is you shooting a laser out of your life counter.

The pixel effect was inspired by the main cover for Archie Sonic Universe #72, which used a similar pixel effect, as if they were going inside the virtual world.

The movie's logo is different too. I changed the glow effect on the logo from blue to green to match the rest of the poster.

The background of the poster is actually a screencap. Well, technically two screencaps fused together.

I must admit, as much as I love SK3, there's also plenty I would fix and retcon. Plenty. And honestly, the film and its premise feels more like an episode or special of a TV show (funnily enough, the plot point with Valentin going after the Toymaker for paralyzing him was originally an episode idea for the unproduced Spy Kids cartoon that Robert Rodriguez talked about in the SK3 commentary). Doesn't take away my love for the film though, as there's still a lot to like about it.

Game Over... for now..

[bee-in-a-box]

What exactly is it that you like about Spy Kids 3?

I was going to make a very long bulleted list, but I'll keep it brief instead lol

Everyone involved was so committed to the bit. The performances are so genuine, the art is so genuine, the costumes designs are genuine, the soundtrack/sound design is genuine. THE LOVE IS THERE.

The world building is really fucking cool. The game lore with The Guy and The Deceiver, the untold riches, and the game secrets. The game has societal rules and perhaps even a hierarchy based on life points.

And though the cgi is dated, the environments just look so appealing and explorable.

[the-witchs-cafe]

[cy-cyborg]

People on the internet: they can't hire actors who are actually in wheelchairs to play wheelchair users in movies! What if there's a scene where they need to stand up? A wheelchair user can't do that!

Robert Rodriguez: hold my beer

This is a scene from spy kids 3 - a movie in a series famous for its shoe-string budgets, where Ricardo Montalbán's character is in a wheelchair, but spends most of his screen time in a digital reality where he doesn't need it. Ricardo Montalbán was actually in a wheelchair though in real life, so they just used a combination of VFX and camera tricks (and a dolly for a few shots) to film those scenes. Also if I remember correctly the movie ends with him back in the real world, fighting a mech with his jet-pack wheelchair lmao.

The disability rep is dated (as is the VFX lol) and does fall into a lot of tropes I personally dont like, but it's so earnest in their attempts, and the visible effort behind the scenes to include a real, disabled actor outweighs it for me - even as a kid who wasnt fully aware of why.

Bigger studios have no excuse.

I've linked the video I got these screenshots from, they talk a lot about how they handled Ricardo Montalbán's character being out of his wheelchair there. If if you like behind the scenes stuff for campy old movies, I highly recommend it!

[ID 1: a screenshot of the movie Spy kids 3D, showing Juni, the main character in a suit of yellow power armour, talking to his grandfather, who towers over him in red power armour. his grandfather is kneeling so he can be at eye level with him.

the caption underneath reads "where he kneels down and talks to Juni" /end ID 1]

[ID 2: a photo of the same shot but without the effects. Grandpa is shown to be in a wheelchair, and is being held at the needed height by a moveable platform his wheelchair is sitting on. Juni is wearing the armour, grandpa is not, and there are green screens behind them.

the caption underneath reads "but we just had him lowered in a dolly" /end ID 2]

[sporesgalaxy]

i keep thinking about watching Spy Kids 3D: Game Over during the day when Im out doing stuff and then forgetting to watch it when I get home

[spy-flair-extraordinaire]

Yup, this shot right here is only present in the trailer, along with different CG. It never shows up at any point during the final cut.

There's also a cut line that's said by Arnold in the trailer as well: "I will crush you!"

murder

[sophie-frm-mars]

Into the projected corn field

I dunno I just feel like before I can even form an opinion on the Fallout TV series I have to do something to try and get through the haze of disgust, emptiness, anger, nausea and desperation that I feel sitting at home alone watching a TV show based on the insipid corporatised franchise that was based on the highly original and artful world in which one of the (and then two of the, and then New Vegas of the) best games ever made were set in. I'm not feeling any of those feelings at the show, I just have to feel all those feelings before I can feel any feelings about the show, because everything being made is Intellectual Property instead of art, and we've spent all this time discussing AI art when everything being made is already being made by the algorithmic logics of capital. All the same things we find troubling in the idea of inhuman heuristics deciding what art is produced and how and by who are already true - we aren't watching a show about the hubris of our society and nuclear annihilation because someone (anyone) thought there would be something poignant to say in it, something to explore in our moment, we're watching it because Amazon executives knew that if they made it we'd watch and go "look, ghouls! like in the thing! and mutants! like the thing from the thing!"

The original Fallout games were made in and around and after the neoliberal end of history, the ultimate period of peace and prosperity in western capitalist society and imagined an absurd world based on the penultimate period of american imperialist peace and prosperity playing out into an almost inevitable post-apocalyptic nightmare world where the same rubrick of control and domination that led to the destruction of society in the first place constantly tries to reassert itself over a hobbesian wasteland full of strange, silly, kind, funny, odd people whose human tendency towards care and altruism makes an endless mockery of the kill-or-be-killed nature of the wasteland that mocks it right back.

In the first episode the vault dwellers gather in a simulated corn field. It's an actual corn field, they're growing actual corn in it, but the horizon and sky are projected onto the vault walls to create the only wider world the subterranean human beings will ever see, and I just... hope that someone gets what I hope anyone ever gets out of art no matter how it's produced. I hope it makes you realise that love and the revolution are the only meanings in being alive, and I hope you get that from Rothko and I hope you get that from EpicLlama's Midjourney feature film sponsored by Dogecoin, and I hope you get that from Akira and I hope you get that from Spy Kids 3D. I just think about being in a moment right between the pandemic and the collapse of the conglomerate capitalist empire watching people on a screen seeing a better world projected on a screen and I feel gut wrenchingly alienated from other human beings, but I acknowledge that could just be me.

How am I supposed to feel about Walton Goggins' performance as a half rotted rubber cowboy man? I don't fucking know man. My opinion is this show is making me derealise.

[spy-kids-database]

Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over was released into theatres on this day in North America in 2003; 21 years ago!

[spy-flair-extraordinaire]

It did, actually! ^^

It was on a 3D Double Feature on Blu-ray alongside SharkBoy and LavaGirl in 2012.

How Spy Kids 3D didn’t get converted to a 3D Blu-Ray is beyond me.