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Walk the Earth like Pookie in Three Ring Samurai.

Forgive me in advance for the rambling nature of this blog, I really don’t have a plan, I just have two words ‘Kung fu’.

For those not familiar with it, Kung Fu is a tv show with David Carradine playing a half Chinese half American boy raised in a shaolin temple after both his parents are killed by a tyrannical Emperor.
The story is based around his travels to seek out his family in America after his master is killed he must flee china wanted for killing the emperors son in an act of hot on the spot vengeance for the unwarranted killing.

He travels America looking for his family, evading the snare of the emperor and getting into scrapes and adventures, meeting interesting people along the way. With each new adventure a piece of his teachings is called upon to assist him and make sense of a world he’s only just coming face to face with.
Secluded all his life Caine is as a child with the fighting skills of a shaolin priest, through a series of flashback his past is brought to light to help him overcome and decide on certain courses of action to aid him in his adventures.

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I initially watched the show out of the blue, maybe as some form of research for 3 Ring, I know I definitely shamelessly ripped a lot off for the issue plan, I borrowed a lot of ideas and I in an upcoming arc and I decided to completely parody the montage of Caine’s training in the shaolin temple and make it Pookie’s ridiculous clown training, I just couldn’t resist.

I really, really loved the style; the way the story was structured in the first season was perfect, calling on back-story applying it to current plot. It worked really well because you learned more about him every episode in a way that felt very consistent. And every episode you learnt a valuable and somewhat touching lesson.

It padded the main plot nicely as we learned about Caine throughout his various adventures and then kept us interested in the search for his brother and the threat of the Emperor on his heels and for a guy that had never done kung fu before kung fu David Carradine isn’t half bad as an actor or a fighter coming from someone who knows kung fu. He wasn’t amazing and he did use a stunt double in season one I believe but ditched that for his own stunts in later seasons.

Long story short I loved the show and I wanted the same feel for 3 Ring Samurai, I wanted every arc to be a self contained movie, something that engaged people and had action and drama and suspense and just enough thread of main plot to keep people reading but not enough to overwhelm them.

Sadly the second two seasons of Kung fu really fell short for me and I must admit I almost breathed a sigh of relief, I’m not proud to admit I take pleasure in the downfall of other but I think a lot of people feel shadenfreud a lot more than they’d like to admit. I was relieved to see the show fall because to live up to that, for it to continue at that level of quality would have rendered my endeavours to emulate it seem futile.

I don’t blame the show for this, I blame the times and the idea that writing staff are disposable, they chose to change the writers for season two and with the nature of television in the seventies I feel like they had to make it more consumable for people to watch as re-runs.

Tv wasn’t like how it is now with netflix and the internet, you couldn’t choose to watch a tv show whenever you wanted, and watch them in order, you watched them when they were on, in the order they were on and if you missed an episode you had to watch it in a rerun. You couldn’t just buy the boxset on dvd.
So each episode had to be standalone and almost interchangeable in terms of the timeline of the story so someone could watch any episode in any order and still keep up and enjoy the show.
This change of writers and restructuring of the show is a noticeable decline in cogent plot and although I watched each season through it didn’t measure up in any shape or form to season one.

I don’t know why but my mind keeps drawing back to Twin Peaks and the dire mistake of revealing the mystery around the death of Laura Palmer half way between season two which without a doubt killed the show. Lynch himself said he never wanted to reveal the mystery and I and Edgar Allen Poe would have agreed that the greatest mystery is one that goes unsolved. It was the fault of the producers of the show that forced him to reveal the mystery and then have the show limp on to the end without much a hook to keep the show going.
It’s almost amazing to even think that an entire tv show could be framed around one murder or one person’s life like Kung Fu. But it can because people themselves can be unsolvable mysteries.
And every time the credits rolled over Laura Palmer’s picture I would feel a pang of sorrow for the mystery of her life and even more so for the tawdry reveal of that perfect mystery and then the shop bought replacement mystery awkwardly wedged in its place.

I think if Kung Fu were re-made today it would be an incredibly feat but also a really rewarding one, (Note to self, call Keanu Reeves ;)). This is the golden age of television where the possibilities for stories and budgets and scope and acting talent are virtually limitless and at a time where there is so much pressure on the structure of films and now games it’s really necessary.

So please forgive the faux fanboy ranting, I just wanted to give some perspective to the narrative structure and style of 3 Ring, think Kung Fu meets Fallout 4 haha.

Peace out people.

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The new Ghostbuster, a rant.

Ok call me an entitled whiney manbaby all you want, no seriously, get it out of your system, I don’t give a tenth of a fuck. We all know this movie is going to be garbage, every man, woman and child with half a brain who has watched the original films and TV shows (and possibly that shitty game, of which I only played like an hour of because it didn’t have an autosave function, I mean come on, what fucking game doesn’t autosave now, fuck if I’m going back to the start) knows this is unfettered garbage and the man behind it is a fucking shill, but that aside I can’t help but think he’s also a genius.

We know this movie will suck, that goes without saying, no it’s not because of the all female cast, no it’s not misogyny, it’s not the fucking patriarchy, all reboots suck. Find me one reboot that doesn’t want to make your childhood crawl up inside you and choke to death on legos. I watched the remake of Robocop and I almost genuinely cried, I remember going to dig out the old vhs of the original movie and just watching it in the foetal position. Man of Steel was so joyless and boring it was painful to watch, I just watched and laughed out of virtual horror, reeling and asking myself if this was actually a film or someone going back in time and punching Christopher Reeves father in the balls, Dean Cain is weeping softly somewhere as we speak.

Reboots are always shameless cash grabs that nevertheless make money, they’re not good, and they ride the coat tails of their predecessors to trick people into thinking that it’s actually entertainment and not simply unapologetic necrophilia.

But this time it’s different, Paul Feig has been a lot smarter, shifty and shameless and downright fucking reprehensible but smart. I think if I was him and I wanted to do a Ghostbusters remake, I’d punch myself in the face for even thinking it, but if I did it I would do it like this.

Look at it from this perspective; imagine if he did a straight remake? Or he got back the entire original cast to reprise their roles or even if he got an entirely new male cast and just did a straight up reboot. People would fucking hate, it wouldn’t matter if they used necromancy to bring Egon (Yeah I forgot his name sue me) back to life, it would be warming the bottom of the bargain bin. It would suck; it could never live up to the hype of the first two films.

Bill Murray knew it, that’s why he refused to do Ghostbusters 3, it would have been futile after the drop off between one and two, three would have bombed and brought down the whole series. Two movies were all it needed, then the TV shows and yada yada yada, t-shirts, toys all that bullshit.

If a Ghostbusters sequel ever had a chance it would have been then, now the fans are older and more cynical they would tear it apart like soft garlic bread on a sharing platter at Tess Holidays birthday. They would annihilate it.

So I don’t know if Feig is aware or not of this cultural backlash in regards to toxic ideas of feminism infiltrating all aspects of popular culture but he has picked the perfect time to capitalize on that particular dogma. But all that spaghetti aside, rebooting it with an all female cast is genius.

It’s genius because rather than trying to pander to the old fans that will never be happy he’s completely alienated them. Which not only created its own media firestorm, thousands of angry neckbeards like me raging about it over twitter and facebook and wherever, it attracted a whole new generation to see what all the fuss was about.

Women and hipsters drawn by the pangs of agony of nerds like me, like that of a predator hearing an injured animal came in droves to support a movie that caused this much butthurt to a whole generation of people. And they realised exactly what Feig wanted them to realise; that he made this movie for them.

There has to be a whole generation of young men and women that have never even seen Ghostbusters but it still enters their cultural lexicon, despite being too dated for them to actually watch and enjoy. So this appeals to them as not only a fun comedy but a shinier newer version of a movie that was in the background of their childhoods but never quite came into focus. This is their Ghostbusters, just like most people in my generation probably won’t have seen the original nutty professor with Jerry Lewis and instead watched Eddie Murphy do one and a half hour repetition of the same fart joke playing every character and possibly the garden furniture.
It both brilliantly cuts ties with the old movie but keeps enough elements to garner the outrage and the cash the name Ghostbusters might bring. I mean in all essence he could have just called it Spectreslappers or Ghoulgapers or anything who gives a fuck but he didn’t because he wanted this media hype, this media war to rage on giving him all the free publicity he needed.

They must know they’re pissing off a whole generation of people with this and only the most benign and banal of beta males and women that show a passing fancy for the original films but are not really diehard fans are on the fence or like the idea. I mean Emma Stone knew which is why she turned down a role in the film, she knew there would be a shitstorm and she wanted to stay out of it, but the ever one note (hurr hurr I’m a fat chick, aint dat furnny hurr hurr I done fell over) Mellissa McCarthy was chomping at the bit to make some money off this heap of pure heresy.

I only wish Amy Schumer could have been in just to add that extra hint of crap on this enormous faecal cake.

But and this is the big one; they are still going to make a killing. A fucking killing, the only way this movie could flop is if they cast Adam Sandler as Slimer and even then most of his films make shitloads of money despite circling the toilet bowl for the last fifteen years. There’s just too much hype around for it not to make money. Now I’m not saying it’ll do well review wise, it’s most likely going to be roundly binned or at least just indifferently shelved but I’m talking about cold hard cash here.

So I almost stand in awe of the sheer majesty of this media puppetry, either Paul Feig is just an incredibly lucky idiot or an evil marketing genius. My final conclusion as someone who prides himself on freedom of speech I would never call for a boycott or have the movie banned, you can’t ban a movie just for being bad. And at the same time I want to see how bad it actually is, I want to see it destroyed by people who loved the original films.

But in the end this isn’t ‘our’ movie, it’s the current generations movie and maybe just maybe it’ll capture a glimpse of the magic of the original films packaged and processed by the greedy grave robbers at Sony (you know the people that did that fucking god awful original Spiderman series gak!). We don’t have to like it, but it doesn’t and can’t really take away from the originals so what harm does it really do? It’s fucked up but what can you really do about it? If at least one kid walks out of that movie and says ‘Wtf was that pile of crap?’ and then goes and digs in his parents vhs collection and doesn’t find 80’s porn but comes across an original Ghostbusters movie, it’s done its part.
I’ve decided after careful consideration to give zero fucks from here on out.

Check out more of my little strips about Jeffrey Dahmer.

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