Cakebug Tranch

Quick query about Arnold's worst pun ever: ""Here's Subzero! Now... plain zero!" Isn't he giving Subzero a promotion? I mean, if you're using 'zero' as the pun, then something that's sub zero is lower than zero, and has to move up to hit zero. So, Subzero has been improved to just plain zero with his death. Not well thought out there, Arnie.

Not much to say about this movie for me - I remember liking it as a kid (having seen the edited for TV version which was clearly 15 minutes shorter) but found it a slog this time. One thing I'd like to bring up, though, is in that final fight between Richards and Captain Freedom. There's been some confusion above about what the nature of that fight is, but it's pretty clear that it's all digitally created. Jesse Ventura is a retired stalker who is now an announcer, so when he comes out of retirement, he does so being forced to wear a new costume that Captain Freedom never had to wear in the past - this is clearly an attempt at jazzing up the show for ratings, which perhaps suggests that the ridiculous costumes and gimmicks of the new stalkers are recent additions, whereas Captain Freedom considers himself a pure, old-school version of the stalkers. When he enters wearing his tin-man costume (which comically squeaks like it needs the tin-man's oil can), he refuses to wear it and refuses to buy in to Killian's deal. So he leaves, and has nothing to do with that final fight. Knowing Captain Freedom is out, they do a motion capture session on one of his old fights and superimpose it on a stuntman who stands in: then they mirror the motion capture and make the stunt man act out the fight as dictated by the computer. Point is, there is no one in the final fight: Arnie is with the rebels and Jesse is gone. And I was wondering - given that both Arnie and Jesse were superstars at the time, do you think this is the prototype version of the current 'Fast and Furious' deal where the Rock and Vin Diesel won't sign off on losing a fight to the other? In the world of the movie, neither Richards or Captain Freedom physically lose a fight, it's explained by being a CGI recreation of them. Jesse Ventura wouldn't sign up for a fighting-based movie where he gets bested by Arnie, and Arnie never loses in his movies, so this ending satisfied both guys that no one really won or lost. I guess the Professor and Jim Brown (both big stars themselves) didn't have as good an agent... PS - I spent the whole movie only hearing this Jesse Ventura:

Congrats on your upcoming 1000th post, FTCLTL!

insert more puns here

You're not kitten

Reminds me of this.

Well, you know what they say. If you love something, let it go. If it comes back, you probably have an infestation.

I thought you guys would be bro-dents for ever.

Martin Short as the Cat in the Hat is excellent voice casting.

Here's my Paw Patrol name-drop: I was in a production of 'Our Town' in 2011 with a nine year old kid who grew up to be the original voice of Ryder in the first few seasons of Paw Patrol. I told my kids that, and they were not as impressed as they should have been. But since, I've told kids on my tee-ball team that I was friends with Ryder and they were amazed.

We tried Thomas (because one of the kids' grandfathers is a train engineer) but they never seemed to care much. It feels like a bullet dodged. My guys didn't like UmiZoomi much because of the bad guys who'd come around and mess things up - can't remember what they're called. My daughter would scream and run out of the room every time they came on so it was always a matter of finding one episode that didn't have them in it. Of course, they're not as bad as the biggest straight-up sociopath of all children's television: worse than Oscar the Grouch! Of course I'm talking about...

Oh, I miss Octonauts! My son pretty much aged out of that a couple of years ago and my daughter was never really interested. They also liked for a while. And . Right now they're into , which, while an assault on all my senses, is still better than . That one makes my nose bleed. And let's not talk about how long my kids will sit and watch Spongebob. I wish I'd had Cameron's foresight of banning it from our home.

Preach, sister

I was watching lousy childrens' television yesterday (that's what parents do a lot of the time) and discovered that Ryan (Lucas Grabeel) has a new gig! That's right, Ryan plays... PS - I won't let this thread die

I want to see an alternate version of this story from the cats' perspective, where we realise that Warren T. Rat's real name is actually Macavity the Mystery Cat, and the cats are after the mice because they're messing with the Jellicle Ball. Cross-over mash up! Get Dame Sir Andrew on it!

Yes, we all know that those old timey steamers plying the high seas between Hong Kong and New York City run on a precise nuclear-clock like timetable. This is a very reliable plan.

So the mice were just trying to straight up murder the cats, and the China boat was a convenient way to ease their consciences? If they just wanted to get the cats in the water, why wait for the boat horn at all? And if the ship is moving by, shouldn't it have weighed anchor entirely before moving? I clearly need to watch this scene again, but yeah, I'm not gonna.

But don't they jump into the water and then get on to the anchor? I might be misremembering this. How do they get over to the anchor? HOW!@!@!! Why don't they jump onto a pontoon or a buoy or a dinghy or a passing seagull? If the plan is to hear the whistle then let the mouse free and then make the cats jump on the raising anchor at an exact moment, this isn't 'American Tail' anymore, this is a 'Fast and Furious' movie. This makes the climactic train scene in 'BTTF 3' look pedestrian. This plan is BANANAS

Okay, I have a stupid question but mostly because I was drifting in and out by the last half hour plan. I must have this wrong, because it's so stupid that it can't be right. The mice are all worried about the cats, and Madeleine Kahn's rich mouse says, 'we need a plan', and then Fievel says 'yo I have a plan', and they all agree to the plan and enact the plan, which is a living Rube Goldberg machine of an idea, where you wait for the whistle and then you release the thing and then the big mouse goes boom and the cats run and they jump off the pier and then they go to China. Is that really the plan? What happens if the cats, instead of going to the pier, go, oh, I don't know - anywhere else? What if they choose not to forcibly emigrate? What happens when the mice figure out there are more than eight cats in America? What happens if the cats say 'okay, that thing that chased us wasn't a real mouse, let's jump off this anchor and go back and eat all those mice'? But no, the cats love the plan, they nail it at every turn. Off to China we go. Welp, we're on an anchor, guess we go to China now. And they're going to be on that China boat for fucking months before they get there. Why do they give up before the anchor's even finished going up? Plus - if stray cats are found on an open-ocean-going vessel, that little bastard's going straight over the rail, no discussion. This is a death sentence. And please tell me the China angle had nothing to do with the stereotype of Chinese people eating cats. Right? Surely not. But then why China? Well, actually, not China, Hong Kong was British then. The magic cockroach wouldn't need to learn Chinese money, they used Hong Kong dollars. And why did the magic cockroach go too? The mouse of Minsk has no beef with him! Surely I've interpreted this all incorrectly. Right? RIGHT? There's no way this is actually how this movie ends. I had a fever dream and really it is much more logical than this.

Peter Stormare plays Czernobog in 'American Gods' and he's fucking perfect. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_5H-BmxpTo

Oh goodness, yes. Without them it would have been even more depressing, if that's possible.

Oh, sure, it's definitely a musical, but it could also very easily be the same film with the songs cut entirely. Someone suggested earlier that some of the songs seemed shoehorned in, and I'd agree with that - there were long, vast stretches of no music: it wasn't integral to every scene.

I will say that I appreciated that when Fievel and Tanya sang 'Somewhere Out There' (which I only really remembered from the radio version that plays over the credits), they sounded like a couple of little kids. None of this 'Simba had years of voice training on the Serengeti before he busts into song' shit here. But yeah, skirting very close to the 'not actually really a musical' line, I'd say...