#When The Music Mattered

[thislovintime]

At the premiere of Head, November 1968.

“The first time I met Peter was at the Troubadour where he performed, long before the auditions. I’ve always liked his warmth and honesty. And he’s always been very kind to me. Both Davy and Peter have lived with us and Peter was always very considerate, helping with the dishes and all. One night Mike just brought Davy home to dinner and that was how I met him. It was at a very early period, right after the guys had been chosen. Davy was so charming and nice. He would walk the dog, play with Christian and compliment my cooking — really nice to have around. Christian liked all of them right from the first. He’s always so happy when any of the Monkees drop over. When Davy and Peter lived with us it was kind of a family atmosphere. They just all kind of pitched in — and even babysat for us!” - Phyllis Nesmith, Fave, January 1968

“I remember staying at Mike’s house in Hollywood when we first started filming the series. It was the upper story of a two-story building on a little hillside. Mike’s wife, Phyllis, was wonderful. Mike and I laughed a lot and played music together. I remember that time very fondly.” - Peter Tork, When The Music Mattered (1984)

“Michael was very kind to me at the outset. He put me up through the entire shooting of the pilot process. He and his wife had a wonderful little apartment just big enough for a guest on the day bed, which overlooked Hollywood. I remember a Thanksgiving Day when the air was crystal clear in a way that I’ve never seen it before or since in L.A., and you could see all the way out to Catalina. It was wonderful. That crystal clarity symbolizes the whole era for me. Mike and I wrote a few things together. We were very comradely and very buddy buddy, and it was a wonderful time, with Mike’s then wife, Phyllis, and Christian, their little infant baby. The early days of the pilot shooting were just great by my lights and I had a wonderful time.” - Peter Tork, quoted in Hey, Hey, We’re The Monkees (1996) (x)

Q: “Being that your tastes were similar, and you both were the first to leave the group, why didn’t you form a group with Peter Tork?” Michael Nesmith: “I don’t like Peter Tork — never have liked him, I don’t like him as a man. I have to qualify that now: Me not liking somebody doesn’t mean that they’re bad people — he could do a lot of wonderful things for and to me. Not liking someone to me is a very gut reaction — a very visceral attitude. The first reaction to Peter was one of dislike. I don’t like him, I have never liked him, and I probably will never like him. I didn’t enjoy playing in a band with Peter, and I still don’t. Our tastes were much the same, our political beliefs were similar, our ideas of fun, pleasure, our intellectual capacity, our ability to talk to each other — we were very much alike. I have a great respect for Peter — his technical abilities on an instrument and the positions he took were well conceived ideas, always a posture with a motive, never emotional. I don’t like my mother. She happens to be a very nice lady — never done anything that would make me not like her — but I don’t. I like my wife.” - Hit Parader, February 1972 (x)

“[We were] partners in silence.” - Michael Nesmith, Rolling Stone, December 3, 2019

“I have a great deal of respect for Mike as a musician and a songwriter. He’s very good. He could make it on his own easily. Also he’s one of the funniest people I’ve ever met.” - Peter Tork, Flip, August 1967

"I have a lot of respect for Michael.” - Peter Tork, The Sacramento Bee, April 20, 1997

“I still have a lot of respect for Michael.” - Peter Tork, WDBB, February 2006

[transannabeth]

btw if you borrow dvds or cds from library you can rip them onto your own blanks or onto your hard drive or whatever. librarians don’t care and they won’t know if you do it or not

[night-orchids]

There's just something about Rook and Lucanis reaffirming their support and love for each other throughout the game that makes me so emotional.

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[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Look what we've become.

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[captaincrowe]

Anyway, after watching the Wicked movie again, I think my ideal outcome of the love triangle in a canon divergence scenario is "Gelphie and their free-range boytoy Fiyero who comes and goes as he pleases."

[kwillow]

As an eligible young noble of no small fame, Ambroys had a number of arranged courtships and suitresses in his youth, but any nascent marriages always fell through.

It's not that he didn't try; he certainly knew how to court a lady (perhaps too well, according to many fathers and husbands), and when he lacked knowledge on the affairs of womens' hearts, he sought counsel from a young woman who was a dear friend of his (perhaps too much counsel, according to his own father). Nonetheless, all he garnered for his efforts was separation after separation.

Ah, well. Maybe it was for the best.

[the-fandom-crossroads]

Alright I caved and I'm actually going to talk about the live action HTTYD trailer.

I'm annoyed at all the things others have already mentioned but there is one thing that makes me angry while also making me laugh at the same time. In a "how is this a struggle they are still dealing with 15 years later" sort of way.

This attempt to get Toothless to "sit".

I know most of you didn't grow up a httyd nerd watching the director commentaries of the original movie. But I did and I can tell you they called this one of the hardest bits of animation they pulled off with the models in this film.

Rigging models in animation are intentionally well rigid. Animators intentionally code in limits so limbs aren't doing unnatural movements everytime something glitches out. Watch the Shrek bloopers for nightmare fuel examples of why animators started rigging in limits to limbs and even face muscles.

So these limits exist and in httyd's time you couldn't just turn off those rules for the model when ever you wanted. So they had to fight the limits they put in place while trying to keep the movement looking natural.

You obviously can't see it from this angle. But they removed his right wing from the model. Once it drops behind his head it is gone. Because it was just another thing to keep track of that wasn't needed in the shot.

I laugh at the live action because they are clearly running into the same Rigging limitations that come with using a CGI model. But unlike the animated movie they aren't pushing the limits of the rigging to have Toothless sit upright.

No to keep it more "natural" they have it be an awkward shuffle back. They decided not letting his tail bend like that was more important than the whole point of the scene. Which is that he is mimicking Hiccup's body language.

This and the Eye pupil shot tell me all I need to know about this remake.

That they are willing to get rid of key details that helped us feel the connection between Toothless and Hiccup if it means a more "realistic" feel for the movie. Which is going to lead to us feeling more distant from these characters compared to their animated counter parts.

So yeah that "cold soulless" feeling isn't just nostalgia. It's an intentional part of their attempt to make a httyd "in the real world". And tells me I'm just going to be disappointed by this remake. So join me June 2025 as I pop in my 15 year old httyd dvd for a rewatch.

Because no matter what this remake does the original will always bring me joy.

[lyculuscaelus]

So lately I’ve been seeing a lot of posts asking people to stop trying to make Odysseus look nice in their works cuz he’s a “messed-up person in the mythology”. Your opinion is valid however I have but one thing to point out:

You want to know who started all this? Who started to “make Odysseus look nice” in the first place?

It’s Homer. It’s nobody else but Homer himself.

A non-Homeric Odysseus would try to murder people out of his own interests. He’d murder Palamedes without remorse (and we’d be cheering over this but it’s a murder after all), he’d attempt to murder Diomedes just to get the Palladium himself, he’d volunteer to kill Astyanax…meanwhile you wouldn’t find any mention of either Palamedes or Nauplius in Homer’s poems, neither did he mention anything abt the Palladium heist (and Diomedes necessity did not happen until Conon’s version), the death of Astyanax, the distribution of war prizes, etc. And all the details in the Odyssey seemed to deny the existence of Nauplius’s vengeance at all, so Odysseus would not take any of the blame.

A non-Homeric Odysseus would be depicted as “cruel, treacherous”, meanwhile in book 10 of the Iliad Odysseus was not mentioned to have killed anyone during the marauding, neither did he promise Dolan anything at all. The negative interpretations are denied by these details subtly put by Homer.

A non-Homeric Odysseus would be widely known as a “coward” for only shooting arrows from afar. But Homer gave him a spear and had him absolutely slaying in both the Iliad and the Odyssey. That part of Ajax’s speech was invalid already.

Most importantly—a non-Homeric Odysseus would be having kids everywhere else, and the loyalty to his own wife as seen in the Odyssey is no where to be found. Meanwhile his lineage was a single-son line made by Zeus in the Odyssey, and his love for Penelope was one of his main drives, especially seen in book 5 of the Odyssey. He loved his family as a loving parent—something you don’t get to see in most of the non-Homeric writings—for most of the time they followed a different tradition indeed, in which Odysseus wasn’t half as nice as in the Odyssey.

TL;DR: in case you haven’t noticed, the characterization of the Homeric Odysseus was quite different from a non-Homeric version of Odysseus. It’s not that Homer didn’t know of the existence of other versions—he knew them too well, which is why in his version of the story, you don’t get to see any mention of them.

[lookninjas]

Pick a song from a bad description! You do not have to recognize any of the songs to vote (although tbh I feel like this is one of my most obvious ones -- there is an actual song title in one of the choices). Just go from the vibes. Pick whichever is funniest to you, or matches your current situation, or whatever makes a random bad song description appeal to you.

At the end of the week, I will take the poll results and use them to arrange the songs in a playlist, from the song with the lowest amount of votes to the song with the highest amount of votes. If you would like to hear the playlist, leave a comment or put it in the tags of your reblog, and I will tag you when the playlist goes up. And if you really can't wait to know what a song is, send me an ask and I will answer it.

And please reblog the poll! 'Cause this is as close as I can come to sending you guys a mixtape, so if you share it with your followers and they share it with their followers it's like we're all getting a mixtape, and that's fun. So let's keep the mixtapes moving.

[productofaritual]

Odysseus' level of simping is so fucking high that when he's half drowned, unconscious and sleep talking, he's STILL going on about his wife

[prince-of-ithaca]

Me when I found out the “friend” Athena had was my father

YOU AINT GETTING HER BACK SHES MY FRIEND AND REPLACEMENT PARENTAL FIGURE NOW BITCHHHH

(More of an explanation in the long af tags)

[thislovintime]

Backstage and onstage in Salt Lake City on May 17, 1968; photos by Henry Diltz.

“[In Head, there’s a scene, following the war sequence, where] we all dive into a tunnel, blow things up, come out of the tunnel, and we're all dressed up in white and it's a concert. We do a tune, and at the end of the song we put down our instruments and run. The kids come screaming onto the stage and start ripping the clothes off what turns out to be dummies. The overall view of the movie is Bob Rafelson's vision of the whole scene. He saw rock concerts as war sequences.” - Peter Tork, When The Music Mattered (1984)

[muckyschmuck]

you better not be species swapping eli into a jackalope and calling her ‘jelly’ when i get back-

[uniiiquehecrt]

Voice actors are NOT the same as actors.

It takes a specific kind of skill-set and training to be able to warp and meld the voice. It takes a certain kind of talent and dedication to hone that talent into the ability to meld the voice and invoke emotion with one's voice alone. Actors are used to using their voice secondarily to their body language and their facial expressions. It's all mirrored back on camera. They do have nuance. But it's a different kind of nuance and a different kind of training to produce that nuance.

Voice actors might get their likeness transposed on their character's design, and maybe their mannerisms might seep into the character's animation. But when it's all said and done: their presence is in their voice. They are bringing a character to life, showing that emotion in their voice, trying to keep a specific accent, drawl, pitch, tone in that voice and keep it consistent for their recording sessions.

The voice actor is like a classically trained musician who can play first chair in a competitive, world-renown orchestra. The actor (who fills the voice actor's role) is like a moot who played violin in beginner and intermediate high school orchestra and thinks they can get into Juilliard with that 2-4 years of experience.

This doesn't mean that the HS orchestra moot can't play. They can even be really good at it. Maybe they won competitions and sat first chair. But they are not in the same league as the person who's been training their whole lives and lives and breathes to hone their craft using the instrument and all of the training they've ever acquired to perfect it. They are not meant for the same roles. They are not in the same caliber. You do not hire the HS equivalent when you want to play complex music in a competitive orchestra.

Actors are not the same as voice actors.

And furthermore, actors - especially big name actors - taking the roles of animated characters for big budget films or TV pilots makes no sense anyways when - at least in the case of TV pilots - there's not a point to hiring a big budget actors anyways. That money could be used elsewhere (like paying your animators), and the talent that is brought onto the screen for X character could then be hired on to voice said character no recasting required.

I wouldn't say voice acting as a profession is in danger exactly, but it's certainly being disrespected and overlooked for celebrity clout, and this has ALWAYS been an issue. Shoot, even Robin Williams knew that much - which is why he tried so hard not to be used as a marketing chess piece for Aladdin and got royally pissed off when it happened anyways. People shouldn't go to any movie (but especially not animated films) because "oh famous actor is in it". People should go because it's a good movie and the voice acting is good.

People who honest to god think that voice actors are replaceable because "oh well anyone can voice act" or "I like xyz celebrity so naturally it'll be good" ... Honestly I just wish you'd reassess your priorities because you're missing the point and are part of the problem.

Voice Actors ≠ Actors.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

The musical episode.

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[cillyscribbles]

obsessed with ideas of what a fight between those two would look like...