#become a reoccuring goof villain

[wwwwaaaaazzzzzaaaapppp]

Hopefully making this post will help me find more people in my situation, so here’s my TV adventure of me being forced to watch shows only with actors that I am familiar with. This all started about 2 years ago when I started watching the Afterparty a hilarious mystery show that I will forever love, this show introduced me to the actor Ben Schwartz I loved his character he was funny he was very interesting as *SPOILER* the villain and I wanted to watch more stuff with this actor.

This was when TikTok introduced me to Rise of The TMNT. I remembered seeing a comic of the show when I was younger so I was already intrigued during this time my parents had also decided to start watching Our Flag Means Death as a family during dinner and I was super thrown off when I found out that the lead actor in OFMD Rhys Darby played one of the main villains in ROTTMNT and it was really cool and I found it intriguing.

Just to quickly say this might become a little out of order because my brain struggles with keeping 3 years perfectly accurate in my brain.

Later on after finishing both of these shows I then watched the I think sitcom (if that is the accurate way to describe it) Fresh Off The Boat with my mom because I kept seeing clips of it on TikTok and it looked really good and I was completely shocked when Rhys Darby randomly ended up playing a character in an episode in the show the main focus is a family moving to Florida and if you watch the show you will know that there is a son in this family named Emry. Keep him in mind for later in this story he becomes important.

After a while of watching random shows that are not important to this story like Owl House I came across another show on TikTok that looked good and had just come out on Netflix due to it being said to have a movie on the way weirdly enough just like ROTTMNT This show is called Community, I started watching it and I became obsessed I loved the characters I was constantly making references to it and accidentally got my family hooked too. I think in season 5 there was an episode where it was entirely GIJoe themed and there were fake commercial breaks where there would be kids playing with the toys from the show including one very familiar boy by the name of Forrest Wheeler aka EMRY FROM FRESH OFF THE BOAT. I know it doesn’t sound that interesting but it felt very weird at the time. Community also has a reoccurring joke which is a parody show in the universe called Inspector Spacetime poking fun at the show Doctor Who somehow this was my first time getting an idea of what Doctor Who is and I just kind of laughed it off. Considering community has 6 seasons it lasted me along enough time without having to look for another show to watch.

I think a very long time after I finished Community I started getting clips from a show that I recognized. Good Omens was finally getting a new season after 5 years. I wasn’t very interested because when the first season came out I was young, apparently stupid, and had a short attention span I was also discovering the idea of having a phone for the first time if that’s an excuse. But I was spoiled on the fact that there was going to be a kiss seen and I was very excited because I desperately wanted find a show with LGBTQ+ representation and I was actually interested in so I convinced my family to watch. And the season was great and after finishing it I was constantly looking at good omens stuff online. During this I was slowly becoming more interested in the happenings of the actor David Tennant so I ended up stumbling upon a treasure trove of new shows to watch and I started it with watching staged which I was having a fun time with until I felt like I had experienced whiplash and saw Ben (mister blue man) Schwartz goofing around on my screen and I had no idea what was happening but it was fun and everyone was funny and entertaining.

If only I had know what was in store for me coming in the form of aquatic birds.

FREAKING DUCKTALES

ALMOST ALL OF THE ACTORS THAT I LOVED WERE THERE. Dani Pudi aka Abed from community was playing Huey Duck, Ben Schwartz was was Dewey Duck , Bobby Moynihan who I knew from SNL but didn’t really care about at the time was playing Louie Duck, and the crown jewel, the focus of it all ✨David Tennant✨ was playing the adventuring Scrooge Mcduck. I was driven mad this was getting too much I can’t just watch a show immediately because of these actors. This was very much a kids cartoon I can’t humiliate myself like this…

So I watched it anyway

and

I

LOVED IT

I thought it was funny weirdly angsty at points and it was perfect and even better there were so many more people from Community in it. But it was always supposed to come to an end so I finished it and continued my hunt for content.

That was months ago but David Tennant’s acting still has a chokehold on me so I am now a self proclaimed Whovian and watched of anything David Tennant related that my parents will let me watch and my Mom is along for the ride.

I have also found a deep love of Newsies because I am now playing Albert in my school production just to put it out there for people to know how far my love of random stuff goes.

Thank you for reading.

[protagonistheavy]

Finished Alien Force, yeah what a disappointing show. Especially through season two, there was a major lack of focus. Every episode felt like it was just going through the motions of your typical plots. No suspense, no ongoing mysteries, no development.

The big finale is the same stakes as usual, except the writing has gotten so lazy that they breeze right through all the issues and completely overlook the opportunities to do anything cool. Negative Ben 10 or whatever finally comes back, which is a sad way to kick off the finale of a series, and he has "the Ultimatrix," which lets him evolve the aliens to their best forms I guess. You'd think we'd get to then see these ultimate forms for like, at least a FEW aliens, but we just don't. We get to see Ultimate Humungosaur, and Ultimate Swampfire. The two aliens we see, all the goddamn time lol.

And the big "scheme" of this finale is that Vilgax and Negative Ben 10 work together to take out Ben's friends first, and then take out Ben himself, because they acknowledge that Ben always wins when he has his friends. Okay. So they get Kevin, they get Gwen, they fail to get Grandpa Max... and then they tell Ben exactly where they are, come meet them, they have those friends hostage, yadda yadda yadda. Ughhh. It's honestly soooo similar to other episodes that I dont even know why they act like its something special, to try and isolate Ben and draw him out with kidnapped friends. But then they don't even get all of his friends. Not like it matters, because the writers completely forgot about them too, but what about Julie and Ship? What about the apprentice Plumbers? What about all of the other aliens and worlds Ben specifically has received gratitude from? Was it really that unreasonable to include them in the plot somehow?

Speaking of forgotten things, you know just in general, the writers just never went back to Alien X, huh. Never. They were like "haha this is cute for one episode" and that was that, huh. What a huge disappointment. On that same level, I hate that Vilgax got this potential right at the end, when he enters the sea and warns Ben that he's "finally in his element" and goes into this ultimate squid form. That could have been so cool if it had then become, like, an actual fight! But nothing happens; we see ultimate Vilgax grab Ben and appear to swallow him... and then later Ben is escaping an explosion, says Vilgax probably is alive. Cool.

Vilgax, god, why even bring him back if this is what happens to him all season. I seriously thought he was going to be a literal joke villain, like a goof that sticks around and keeps falling flat on his face now that he's been provably beaten over and over. But nah, none of it was really a joke, he's just actually meant to be the reoccurring threat this season but he's portrayed so pathetically. He always sounds so desperate to get even a slight upperhand on Ben, on top of being just outright obsessed with him to a degree that goes beyond the omnitrix -- something he specifically mentions as the plot for the finale and why he and Negative Ben 10 team up... except, god this is stupid, instead of Vilgax giving NB10 the omnitrix as agreed upon... he just keeps it, as anyone would have suspected, even though it makes NO sense because NB10 has a BETTER OMNITRIX!!! So why not just give NB10 the old omnitrix so he can be a Galvin again, and Vilgax takes the ultimatrix??? Im sure they could have written some stupid reason why, but at this point it's just another mark in a long list of marks against the show's sense making. Man they ruined Vilgax hard in this one, never knowing what to do. One moment he's a lawful evil type, using the laws of the galaxy to force himself into positions of power, doing what he does because he genuinely loves his people and they respect him; the next moment, he's disregarding the law to do whatever he wants, happily betrays people while also getting outsmarted by them at every possible turn. Vilgax felt like a credible boss in the original Ben 10 series, but here, he's totally directionless and just a tool for making action pieces happen.

Huge let down. Such a shame that this is the product of trying to write the series in a serious manner, because after this, I doubt there's much confidence behind trying it again. It was just soooo boring, there was nothing to watch it for. An overpowered cast that never truly develops, a bunch of weak callouts to the previous series that was just better...... I mean by the finale, the writing is literally making fun of itself lol. The writers clearly did not have a lot of heart about the spinoff.

[radwolf76]

FLASHBack: Week 12 [First Class FLASHBack] - Trogdor

First Thursday of the month so it's time not just for FLASHBack, but for First Class FLASHBack, the week that I highlight the titans of the genre. Today's post is well overdue. I'm sure some of you have been wondering how I could go for almost a dozen posts talking about flash animation on the early web, and not once mention Homestar Runner?

There's a reason for that. I never really got into Homestar back in the day. Aside from a handful of standout animations from that website, most of my exposure to Homestar Runner was via pop culture osmosis at least one layer removed from the source material. So unlike most of my posts, where I augment personal memories with a touch of research, this one flips it the other way around.

  Homestar Runner was the brainchild of Mike and Matt Chapman, collectively known as The Brothers Chaps. The youngest of five brothers, the whole family of whom had a propensity for heavy snark and deep pop culture knowledge, the pair grew up riffing on not just popular media of the 80s, but also the earlier eras their older siblings came to age in. The name "Homestar Runner" comes from one of their friends, James Huggins, who for fun would impersonate an old-timey radio sportscaster, despite not knowing much actual sports terminology. (James would later become a musician in the band Of Montreal, working under the stage name James Husband.)

  While at college in 1996, Mike Chapman and his friend Craig Zobel (who would later go on to write and direct the true crime thriller film Compliance) were goofing around in a bookstore and made note of how low quality children's' books could be. They decided that they could try and make their own book, for fun. The result was The Homestar Runner Enters the Strongest Man in the World Contest. This book marked the first appearance of many of the characters who would later become the main cast of the cartoons on the Homestar Runner website, such as Homestar himself, Strong Bad, Pom Pom, and The Cheat.

  Later, in 1999, Mike and Matt were seeing how the internet was going to be the next big thing, and decided to get on board by teaching themselves flash animation. Their goal was to make a website that would recreate the feeling of sitting down in front of the TV in the 60s, 70s, or 80s to watch Saturday Morning Cartoons. Mike remembered the earlier children's' book and suggested that they could expand on that story. After all, shortly after they had made the original book, they had made a short Homestar Runner cartoon in Mario Paint on the Super Nintendo. In January of 2000, they had enough content to go live with their website, including the first full length flash animation to feature Homestar, Marshmallow's Last Stand.

  Ultimately though, it would not be the title character of the website that would become the most popular. Instead, it was the villain character, Strong Bad, a boxing-glove wearing luchador inspired by characters from the NES port of Tag Team Wrestling, who would become the franchise's breakout star. He was given a weekly series where he would respond to actual fan emails (while typing with his boxing gloves on). The SBemails were a hit with fans, and ultimately the Brothers Chaps would produce 207 of them. The SBemails would also often result in the introduction of concepts, characters, or songs that would become reoccurring elements of the site themselves, such as Teen Girl Squad, Homsar, Li'l Brudder, Cheat Commandos, 20X6, Everybody to the Limit, and The System Is Down.

  Probably the biggest thing to come out of Strong Bad's Emails, however, comes from #58 - Dragon, posted on 13 January 2003, sent in by Kaizer from California, which was a request for Strong Bad to show off his skills as an artist by drawing a dragon. Strong Bad took up a pencil in his boxing glove and drew a dragon he called Trogdor the Burnninator. He then proceeded to sing an epic song about how Trogdor was the bane of any peasant who lived in a thatched roof cottage.

  Words can not even begin to describe the sheer awesome that is Trogdor, so instead, I'll link to what that initial appearance inspired

On 17 Mar 2003, a flash game was released where you could play as Trogdor. It was later ported to HTML5.

The final episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, first aired on 20 May 2003, Trogdor shows up as the big bad of a session of Dungeons and Dragons. (Given the lead time in producing live action TV, this was most certainly a last minute addition.)

Another flash game, one that lets you play as one of the Peasants seeking revenge for his burnt thached roof, Peasant's Quest was released on 2 August 2004.

Three years after the original SBemail HomestarRunner.com begain celebrating Trogday as a holiday.

8 Bit is Enough, the fifth and final instalment of Telltale Games' multi-platform release, Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People, features Trogdor escaping from an arcade game cabinet to start burnninating the real world.

Trogdor's Theme is an unlockable bonus track on Guitar Hero 2. (It is impossible to hit every note on this song, as the notes per second in the strumming during the solo exceeds the game engine's strum limit.)

The song has been performed live in concert by the band Limozeen on 27 March 2008.

It was also performed by the University of Maryland Gamer Symphony Orchestra on 3 May 2014.

Mathew Beckham, a YouTuber who does metal covers of everything, absolutely shredded his rendition of the song (which was already pretty fuckin' metal to start with).

Previously on First Class FLASHBack, parody artist Weird Al was featured (Despite Al not making any Flashes himself). The video for Weird Al's song Word Crimes, Animated in Adobe AferEffects instead of Flash by Jarrett Heather, at one point features a cover of a school notebook that has been scribbled on with a doodle of Trogdor.

If jazz is more your thing, the soundtrack from the video game Poker Night at the Inventory features a Trogdor Jazz Cover.

In July of 2018, there was a Kickstarter for a Trogdor Board Game. It raised 1.42 million dollars against its original goal of $75,000. The Cheat would later put out a video "from the 70s" of a commercial for the board game. (There were a lot of inaccuracies present.)

While it has never been officially confirmed that the popular mobile game Merge Dragons is a shameless rip off of Trogdor, Strong Bad was merging together an "S" with a "more different S" to create Trogdor and other dragons almost a decade and a half before Merge Dragons was ever released.

  So, that's the Dragon-man (Or maybe he was just a Dragon). Next week, Kikkoman (or maybe he was just a Kikko.).