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#it's so dumb they do a bunch of ted lasso stuff at work
wilder-fangirl · 1 year
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THEY WORK IN THE DARK QUIET DEATH PLACE????!!?!?!?!? 😭😭😭
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popculturebuffet · 4 years
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Toons for Our Times: Star Vs: Demoncism
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Halloween Havoc BEGINS! And with Tomtober this same month, i’m taking another of my on and off looks at Tom! Tom tries to tackle his literla nd figurative  personal demons the natural way: by having a creepy anti-demon cult that’s never explained suck them out of his body. For some reason Star has a problem with this. We also get Ponyhead in a robe, the wonders of reflectcor and free toys from the toychest for being such a good boy. Face your demons under the cut. 
Welcome boys, ghouls and that bootiful technicolor rainbow inbetween, to halloween havoc! MUAHAHHAHA.  You might be wondering a few things. What the hell that is, isn’t that also the title of a bunch of old wcw pay per views, and have I gone insane. In order it’s usually my catchy term the past two years and this current one for my binging of halloween films and logging and reviewing them on my leterboxd account, but I decided to expand it to here since while it’s not my first halloween on here it’s the first both reviewing animation and planning ahead, I decided why not reuse a good title here.  As for the wcw thing.. well yeah. It’s a great title, neither WWE, who I think still owns the copyright, nor WCW”s Heir Apparent AEW are using it right now despite being one of the best recurring Pay-Per-View titles either promotions had. Maybe not in actualy MATCH QUALITy but that name.. it just sings to me so i’m using it for my weird blog. I’m not making any money of this so why not. And as for my sanity that left a long time ago. So prepare for a month of ghouls, ghosts, goblins, lichs, scooby doo parodies, long forgotten characters, and some suprises and pies of all sizes. THIS... IS....
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So to start us off, every year my pal @jess-the-vampire​ does a monthly event known as tomtober, a celebration of all things tom lucitor. And since I started hte tomtropsective for that and still am behind, I figured why not celebrate that, and the fact I can’t draw so I can’t do day 1 as a chat or anything, by continuing the tale of everyone’s faviorite teen demon.  Thankfully unlike last time, or next time wink wonk, there’s not a TON of other plot stuff to fill in. There is one important bit not to this episode but to the series as a whole: Eclipsa is here, since Moon trying to screw her out of the deal she made backried once toffee actually died... as did you know keepiung him alive instead of dealing with eclipsa being free and having the comissoin to back her on it. Nice job moon. Real nice. So yeah Eclipsa’s around.. dosen’t effect this episode but given tom’s involved in two of the biggest plot important episodes in the show, AND one deals with the direct fallout of one of those episodes i’m probably going to have to cover her soon to get to more tom anyway so might as well prepare for that now. 
So yeah this episode’s entreily a straight line from last time and opens picking up on the end of that episode: Star is calling tom wondering when their gonna get that Cornshake. Thankfully she gets an answer. Unthankfully.. it’s from a VERY sweaty ponyhead. 
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So that was my own personal hell. Anyways she’s so.. sweaty.. GAHHHHHHH, because she’s keeping a secret and much like me she can’t keep her mouth shut about something she wants to talk about for very long, so we find out what she knows: SHe ran into tom who swore her not to tell Star he was getting a Demoncisim. Which suprises me.. not the demoncism thing the fact Pony would actually listen to anyone else.. Star included. LIke it’s the one thing about this episode that dosen’t quite fit: She’s such a selfish, toxic asshole, though Jenny Slate bless her makes her at least entertaining at times but even she has limits, it just dosen’t track she’d care what Tom thought unless we saw it for ourselves. Pony is ONLY capable of carring about star so while I could see tom framing it as for her own good, it’d be nice if the episode just came out and said that. It’d also be nice if we didn’t get sweaty ponyhead because that’s probably someone’s fetish and I.. OH GOD. 
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Okay now i’ve mentally snapped from that revelation, Star lasso’s pony when she tries to escape, and we find out the demoncism is pretty self explanatory: A cermony that removes demons from one’s body.. and given tom is you know, a demon, this could end bad. So with no idea where it’s being held and it going on now, giving them little if any time to figure it out, Star suggests going to pony’s ex.. she dosen’t remember which one and apologizes for how bitchy that sounded, but we find out it’s Seahorse, Pony’s love intrest for the rest of the series and a hardcore emo rocker who even made her a song.. which is just him destroying everything and screaming. Eh i’ve seen people in emowear do far dumber. 
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If those are m and m’s their pretzel. Trust me I’m a professional lardass, I know my delcious candy coated choclates. Anyways our dynamic-ish duo head to Seahorse at his job at a relfectcor store, basically a phone store, and is basically a hollowed out shell of a human being with no real personality or free will of his own.. so THAT’S how we got Ted Cruz. Ponyhead natrually breaks down when he dosen’t recognize her at all, which is one of the few time’s i’ve actually cared about her feelings: I mean having your ex just.. forget you exist.. tha’ts rough buddy. I feel bad for her.. I didn’t know she had emotions. I thought her heart and brain were both a black hole.. mostly becasue I thought ponyhead’s hearts and brains were the same organ. Star does however manage to get the map they need to Tom. 
Our heroines find the Demonicsim site and a bunch of creepy guys in robes iwth red glowing eyes.. who are never explained honestly. More on that in a minute. So ponyhead distracts them with one of the greatest  gags in the series history
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I mean just.. look at it. The way the robe drapes, the way her nose sticks out much like a certain penguins, the way she decides to distract everyone with petty minute like voting on robes.. it’s fucking great. I may not like pony a LOT but she can be really damn funny> The issues that she often isn’t funny enough to ofset her jackassery. Here though even with my jabs at her.. she works and I like it.  So Star confronts Tom, wondering AGAIN if this is another half assed tactic to win her back.. and her flip flop attitude with tom is starting to annoy me. It fits her personality, and don’t get me wrong as i’ve made abudnatnly clear in past reviews his actions in blood moon ball and ESPECIALLY mr.candle cares were super not okay, so i’ts okay NOT to forget how badly things went last time when your considering getting back together with someone. It’s NOT okay however to hold it over someone’s head forever like any moment their going to snap back into being a manipulative doucheweasel when they’ve left you alone for around 8 months.. and Id id my calcualtion. The timeline of the show is pretty solid up to season 4: Season 1 was star’s 1st semister at echo creek academy, season 2 was her second and as it turned out final one, and season 3 covers Summer , fall and part of next spring. Though again how another summer dosen’t happen until towards the end of season 4 is dumb and I’ll probably rant about that at a later point. Point is since MCC was at the start of season 2, that means it happened around say january or feburary, with Demonicsim probably happening around say march. So he’s left you alone for around 8 months, silver bell ball included. It’s unfair to assume he’s still schemeing when he let you go months ago. H’es made it obvious via his .. everything he’d take you back in an instant, he’s just being patient and not pushing it because he’s no longer as big an asshole, and trying to be respectful. Cut him a break.  Thankfully this gets put down quick with Tom explaning he wants to be better for himself: Like last time he was inspired by her trying to be better herself, and wants to.. but as we’ve established.. he dosen’t know HOW to be nice or a better person. He wasn’t raised in an enviroment that was really condusive to that as nice as his own parents are. Their the exception to the underworld being mostly dicks not the rule, as we’ll see next time. I.. can relate with my own issues with anxiety , depression and, yes, anger. I too have trouble keeping it in and hate feeling bitchy all the time or depressed and just want it to stop. I think anyone with a mental ilness just wants it to STOP to be gone and to be able to live a happy life. But there’s no magic button that fixes your issues, your traumas or your mental health like that. No pill that can fix it just ones that help ease it down to managable. And as i’ve learned the hard way YOU have to work at it, YOU have to make the effort. There’s no easy way out. And while Tom thinks htere is here, it’s very clear it’s a huge risk, and Star’s right that he shoudlnt’ go thorugh with it and that he could seriously hurt himself. But Tom’s in pain and just wants to be happy, to be normal, to be not angry anymore and I gotta tell you if , even if it was risky, there was a way to cure my depression or anger issues or anxiety, not my atuisim tha’ts part of me and not something that needs a fucking cure just more understanding and awarness, but if I could cure those other three things? I would. It’s paart of me sure but it’s a part of me I HATE. So I understand why tom’s doing this even despite the danger: because he’s at his wits end, desperate and this will help he hopes.. it can’t get WORSE, so why not? Evne if he’s wrong here i’ts hard not to understand why he’s so stubborn about it , for me at least.  Star leaves, and takes Ponycloak with her and they go to punch trees: Both to relive and because Pony hates tree. Probably because she went to tree court once and they tried to send her to tree jail. 
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I mean she’ll probably get thrown back in there for this but still. Anyways the exerocisim comes. And NOW we can talk about this cult and.. while I understand why they never came back, they were really only necessary for this, I wish they had. I mean a mysterious cult with the power to restrain someone as strong as tom, acess to anti-magic chains the ONLY time we see something like this outside of the comission, and a hatred of demons includign referring to Tom as “Son of the blight” meaning they clearly hate and would destroy Wrathmelor if they could, yet also function as a perfectly legal orginzation the comission or the lucitors themselves haven’t swatted yet. There’s a LOT to unpack here they never did. The leader is also hliarious alteranting between creepy overlord and your dentist after a long apointment as a kid. But the ritual begins and it .. dosen’t go well with tom getting glowy blue lines and thrashing about.. just like me when i watched Ridciulous 6. I also felt my soul was leaving my body but that was just wishful thinking. The cultists run and star runs back to Tom and we get a truly powerful and romantic scene. Unable to free him, Star just.. holds him and is there for him as he goes through this. If she can’t help him she’ll be there for him. And it’s really touching.  We then cut to the hosptial tent at the cult, where the leader goes back to dad mode. Tom feels .. well worse, he just had surgery, as someone who had a tooth yanked out last month I can relate, and is suprised to see only one tiny soul demon as the sum of his anger. But it turns out, NOPE, being you know, the son of a rather powerful demon with a rather pwoerful b loodline, he’s FULL of them, and it woudl take 13 years to do this.. and tom’s naturally bummed because no one wants the equipvlent of having a wisdom tooth pulled a week for over a decade. Also because he now can’t get better.. but Star gently reassures him he’s already on the right track just by wanting to. As I said with most mental issues.. there’s no easy way out but it can get better if you put the work in and tom realizes.. there’s no quick way out after all. Just a long road.. but h’es not alone on it anyomore. But he at least gets a tiny demon in a jar and a toy out of the toychest for being a good boy.. and that’s nto me making shit up that’s the actual episode with him and star taking pinwheels and holding hands to Ponyhead’s annoyance. Which okay yeah they had a bad time last time I get tat Pony.. but your the last person to question ANYONE’S life decisions. Still I wish we’d had ane pisode of pony growing to accept them so we at least know WHY she’s so against it but oh well. 
Final Thoughts: This was a good one. Is it hte best the show’s put out? Probably not as the first part drags slightly but the second half at the demoncisim is just good character stuff, good comedy, and has a good payoff. I honestly like this way more on the second watch.  Though part of that is the context of the time: I admitted to being a starco shipper and having her get back with tom just felt like your standard “put a character in a relationship to complicate the main pairing” bullshit I always hate at this stage. Before anyone relaizes they like each other? Sure but at this point it was clearly just to drag things out. However with Marco getting progressivley worse and the two having good chemsitry.. I grew to like em.. and by the season finale, I just shipped all three together, before pivoting to marco and kelly. This couple grew on me for reasons w’ell geti nto as we go, even if it ended bad for reasons we’ll again get into. Oh we’ll get into them. With a knife. But yeah overall a great episode with a great concept, good character stuff, and some REALLY fucking funny gags. The show is damn good at comedy and I forget it sometimes. Next time we look at Tom, he’ll be in the background as Marco tries to help Kelly with a breakup. And sometime this month we’ll be looking at the halloween special which i’ll be watching for the very first time! So stay tuned, stay safe and Happy Halloween. 
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aion-rsa · 4 years
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Ted Lasso: Telling the Story of An American Optimist in London
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As the creator of Scrubs, Spin City, and Cougar Town, TV writer/producer Bill Lawrence is no stranger to “happy place” sitcoms. Yet Ted Lasso, his latest creation alongside Jason Sudeikis, sets a new bar for relentless optimism in TV comedy.
Ted Lasso is a fish-out-of-water story in which a fish decides he can do just fine on land too, thank you very much. Sudeikis stars as the titular American college football coach who takes on the challenge of managing a mid-tier English Premier League soccer team. The concept is based on a series of commercials that Sudeikis produced for NBC Sports to promote its EPL coverage. In the shorts, Ted Lasso is an overmatched football coach trying out his hand at a different kind of football where nobody uses their hands. 
Now an Apple TV+ series, Ted Lasso has gone from a one-off joke on American ignorance to a 10-episode sports-movie-style series featuring a fully realized version of the titular coach. And the new Ted Lasso is a master motivator somewhere between Mr. Rogers and Gandhi.
We spoke to Lawrence about developing the show, his love of sports movies, and why television could use an optimistic and curious American abroad. 
When you and Jason went about adapting this short into a bigger concept, what was your mindset? How did you think about turning him from more of a one-off joke into such a relentlessly optimistic full character?
All right, look, I have to give props to Jason. It’s annoying to be self-aggrandizing. But I was just chasing Jason Sudeikis because I think he’s an affable leading man and can be a romantic lead. He can be the kind of actor to build a streaming show around. I was just doing anything I can to get in business with him, and he pitched the idea of doing this character as a series. I knew the character from before and I initially had some hesitance, because I’m like, “Oh, it was really funny, but that’s a SNL sketch.” I love the show Police Squad, but they were only able to do 13 episodes of that Naked Gun police TV series because it’s the same sketch over and over. And Jason was like, “No man, I want to round this guy out and make him three-dimensional.”
We both connected over loving sports movies: Hoosiers, Rudy, Rocky, Major League, Bull Durham, Cutting Edge, whatever. Everybody’s got a sports movie that they dig on. And he said, “We can make ours. And how nice would it be, much like those classic underdog stories, to do a show right now that was kind of relentlessly optimistic and hopeful?” We still put in enough twists, I think, that even if people know the genre, know the tropes, it will surprise them a little bit and have more layers. But yeah, you do know that Ted Lasso is not going to end up dead in an alley at the end of season three. 
Did Jason always see the character that way? Was there an element of wanting to subvert expectations of the grizzled, always yelling, American football coach?
I will tell you that he had a very clear picture of who this guy was. Every writer sits around coming up with ways to procrastinate. So we had tons of time-wasting talks about subtext and stuff that are never specifically in the show. (Jason) said he was very aware of what he was doing in those promotional videos. Though they’re really funny, he was ultimately selling the Premier League. But he also knew there was an opportunity for more because he’ll tell anybody that listens that he got recognized more as Ted Lasso when he went overseas than for any movie, SNL, or anything else he ever did.
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Ted Lasso Review (Spoiler-Free)
By Nick Harley
And for the subtext I was talking about – here’s a way too deep metaphor. I worked in Europe on a show called Whiskey Cavalier. We worked in London and Prague, and the perception and joke about what Americans are right now is not that flattering and not that surprising. We wanted to kind of subvert that image a little bit. Right now, in public discourse, whether it be in politics or on social media, the ignorance with the quintessential American abroad is always coupled with arrogance. So Jason said you could do Ted Lasso if his ignorance was coupled with curiosity instead of arrogance. He’s self-deprecating and quick to learn. When you do that, he can still be a little bit of a goof once in awhile. The show works because he’s also, we like to say, “dumb, like a fox.”  He’s very crafty about human nature and about getting the best out of people.
You’ve mentioned your appreciation for sports movies a couple times now. Given how it’s such well-trodden territory at this point, how hard is it to come up with novel storylines or game action in sports stories?
Well, I’ll tell you, there are two things you have to do. One is, if you start from a place of “we’re going to tell a sports movie story that hasn’t been told before,” then you’re doomed. Because there’s no way anybody’s seen them all. I’m not afraid of tropes, especially if you get to do the trick that people think they know what’s going to happen because they know the genre and then you get to surprise them. That’s part one of what we did, I think, in some cases. 
Then part two is, when you’re talking about a sports movie, they’re limited by what is ultimately 90-minute running time, give or take. When you do a streaming show, you get to round out those characters. So even if you have what seems like a quintessential villain in Major League-style in the opening of a pilot, it’s understandable that in a movie, that’s all that character really has time for. In a series, especially one that Jason allowed to be an ensemble, you can show other levels to that character, maybe even make them sympathetic, maybe even given the type of crossroads where they decide which way they’re going to go, and tweak the convention a little bit in ways that you’re only able to because you have 10 episodes to tell the story.
I’m glad you brought up the ensemble as well because, for starters, it’s an excellent cast. But I think the show must have faced a sort of storytelling and casting challenge, in that it’s set in a professional soccer league, which is  obviously a male-dominated environment. How did you go about finding ways to introduce women characters into this world and develop them?
We had two things that we were really keen on, and one is that the best sports movies seem to transcend not only gender, but whether or not you love the sport. I don’t think I’ve ever gone out of my way to watch a professional boxing match. And yet, I can tell you the ups and downs of every Rocky movie. We wanted to do the same thing with soccer (or what they call football).
Beyond that, we knew we had to have two female leads on the show who didn’t exist only as ciphers, villains, or people that pay lip service to the player leads or whatever. We have a great writing staff, and one of the things I really dig is not only exploring Hannah Waddingham and Juno Temple’s characters, but kind of developing a real female friendship in a place doesn’t exist at the start of the series. It’s one of the best things about this, and it’s one of those things on the show that I wish I could take credit for, but I cannot, because it was written by the group.
How much did you know about the European soccer scene going in? What did you have to learn and ultimately take away from the experience?
I knew less than Ted Lasso. One of the jokes in the writers room was that when I was 11, I was on the state championship soccer team in Ridgefield, Connecticut. We won the state championship, but I was a goalie. And I was still not really clear on all the rules, so I was knocked off. In the writing staff, we hired Brits and soccer aficionados on the staff, not only for the fish-out-of-water stuff, but to actually know the sport.
We went out to a bunch of games (in England), and we got to use a real Premier League team’s (Crystal Palace F.C.) facilities for the games and stuff. And the passion level for their local team, I’ve only seen it rivaled here in some of the really psychotic college football programs that people live and die for. I’m used to being a huge sports fan, but even the craziest sports fan here pales next to some of these communities that live and die with their team, not only in sports, but socially at the pubs. The ups and downs of an entire community  ride around their team. It was really cool to see, and it felt both like an opportunity and an obligation to service it on our show.
Why did you choose Wichita State’s defunct football program as Ted Lasso’s launching point? Was it just kind of to honor Jason’s Kansas ties? Did you have to clear that with the university at all?
Yep. 100%. I know Jason is basing the accent on a former coach of his, and I know that he’s got giant ties back to Kansas City. He still does a charity called The Big Slick, that all runs through there. He wanted this dude to be a small college football coach, and we needed to find one that didn’t have a football program so that we could do it and not be in any kind of weird legal issues with representing players or actual coaches. Wichita State was cool and let us clear it and let us use their jerseys, but Jason was a driving force.
And when I say he’s a driving force for all these connections to his home, the amount of times on set that I would realize he was wearing a BBQ shirt or a specific shirt in reference to that part of the country that we hadn’t cleared… We had to go, “Oh, that’s a real place, dude. We’re going to need to hold on for a second and make sure they’re cool with you essentially promoting that.” And they always were, but yes, he was the driving force behind it.
To that end as well, how did you guys come up with AFC Richmond and all of its colors, iconography, and uniforms? Because if I could choose one job in the world to do, there’s nothing I would rather do more than create the style guide for a whole new sporting franchise.
We really geeked out, and I’ll tell you how. We knew we were going to invent a team, because even though the promotional stuff was done with Tottenham Hotspur, the second you’re dealing with a real team, you have issues of license and how you’re representing actual players. So we had to make one up. We fell in love with the area of Richmond as a place to shoot. That green you see in the town – all that is a beautiful suburban area. It’s just a great neighborhood-y place. Right now, that area was known mostly as kind of a rugby town and didn’t have their own football clubs. So we knew we could put one there without getting caught up in the, “Oh, B.S. There’s already a team there!”
Then we delved way too deeply into research to find out that greyhounds are big in the community of Richmond and their historical background. Then we nerded out trying different outfits, different color patterns, and then Jason even came up with pitching the fake sponsors on the jerseys. The other thing was partially knowing that the danger of doing any type of a sports movie type of thing is if you blow it and it looks really fake, whether it’s the  sport, or the action scenes, or the gear, or where they work or anything, that’s the second you lose that kind of authenticity and the show doesn’t work.
If Apple makes any AFC Richmond scarves available online, I’ll absolutely buy some.
Oh, dude. I’m going to gear up.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. The first three episodes of Ted Lasso are available to stream on Apple TV+ now. 
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