Was Childs the Thing? Killer Film Analysis from Rob Ager Settles It

John Carpenter’s The Thing is an undeniable classic and one of the greatest horror films of all time. The famously ambiguous ending is the perfect cap to a perfect horror movie. Often, when a movie leaves you with an ending like that, there’s never enough evidence to support a definitive reading. This doesn’t appear to be one of those cases though.

Rob Ager, a filmmaker and writer from Liverpool, England, has put together a pretty damn convincing case for his interpretation. The analysis is an absolute must-see for fans of The Thing and filmmaking in general. There’s a lot to learn from here.

If you liked that, you should check out Ager’s site, Collative Learning. He’s got quite a few more film analysis videos and much, much more on a variety of topics. Lots to see and learn from here. If you’re looking for a few places to start, I really dug this short take on Hellraiser, this dissection of the middle part of Pulp Fiction, and this massively detailed thesis on The Shining.

Oh Look, Max Landis Made the Best “Death of Superman” Movie

“The Death and Return of Superman” was a comic book milestone for all the wrong reasons. It was one of those rare events where the hype broke into the mainstream and even major news outlets were reporting on the presumed death of an American icon. Nevermind that superheroes rarely stayed dead even by this point – non-comic book readers weren’t privy to that yet. All the attention set a lousy precedent for the industry and there’ve been many, many, many attempts to replicate its impact.

In spite of all that, “The Death and Return of Superman” was, to put it gently, crap. The bar for final Superman stories had already been set pretty damn high by Alan Moore with “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow,” but “Death…” manages to smack its head on the bar and fall over bleeding and concussed.

I don’t think there’s a better possible treatment of the story than what Max Landis (writer of the awesome-looking film Chronicle), producer Bryan Basham and crew have put together here:

Can you believe we almost got an adaptation of this story directed by Tim Burton, starring Nic Cage and written by Kevin Smith?

Looking forward to seeing Chronicle and definitely rooting for Landis after seeing this. Here’s hoping for more videos like this one. There’s certainly no shortage of material for it.

Awesome Hawaii Time-Lapse from Page Films

Lance Page is back with another time-lapse project, this time featuring South Point, the southern-most tip of Hawaii and the USA altogether. Have a looksie:

Lance really captured the beauty of the island, so if you haven’t been to Hawaii, just watch this on a balmy day and you’re set. The South Point video is just as jaw-dropping and moving as his previous time-lapse, the now-famous Portland Nights video. Great tunes from Hisham Dahud and Derrek Domino and props to Troy Page for location audio and production assistance.

Find out more about the making of this video and check out the production photos over at Page Films.

Mongrel Digs: AudioPorn Central

Ear, Pop.  Jared Yanez made this.

AudioPorn Central has quickly become one of my favorite daily stops on the internet. It’s a music blog that updates six times a day with music videos, streaming tracks and free downloads. I found the site while searching for mash-ups and it was like hitting the jackpot. There aren’t many days that go by between mash-up posts. In fact, here’s a nice one from yesterday by João Brasil that’s available for download:

CAVALO DE PRAISE – FATBOY SLIM VS. PATY – JOÃO BRASIL – FOLKATRUA VJs/BOOTIE RIO from bootie rio on Vimeo.

And here’s another good’n by DJ Schmolli, posted here:

And another by Phil Retrospector, posted here:

Killing Kids from Phil RetroSpector on Vimeo.

(That reminds me, I’ve heard that MGMT song in maybe fifty thousand mash-ups yet somehow managed never to hear the original version. It’s going to be weird finally hearing it the way MGMT actually intended.)

These are just a few from their mash-up selection, right out of the first two pages. I’ve spent days going through and I haven’t reached the end.

Besides the mash-up cornucopia, AudioPorn Central‘s turned me on to some awesome stuff most every day. Like today, for instance, this and this are pretty damn stellar.

But I’ve gotta say, the one thing they’ve posted that’s earned my undying gratitude is a mash-up of two cherished icons:

Thank you, internet.

Anyway, if you like music and need more of it, this’d be the place to go.

Stunning Portland Time-Lapse from Page Films

Lance Page, filmmaker, Mongrel regular and Portlander, has gotten into time-lapse photography recently and he’s just posted his first major project: a jaw-dropping night-time tour of downtown Portland, OR. There are some gorgeous exterior city shots and he even caught some great footage of Occupy Portland in action. Andrew Parish (also a Mongrel regular and Portlander) contributed one of my favorite tracks of his and it goes along beautifully.

So hey, check that out:

And head over to Page Films for more on the making of the video and more of other things as well. You have fun over there, buddy.

Much Ado About “The Return of Hydro Man, Part Two” (Conclusion)

Don’t let the costume and the wisecracks fool you; Spider-Man has always been a tragic hero, right from his origin in Amazing Fantasy #15. It was the death of his Uncle Ben due to his own inaction that taught him with great power comes great responsibility. He’s out there every day risking his life for others but it will never make up for the one he failed to save.

Sadly, he’s only accumulated more guilt over time as friends, allies and lovers are stolen from him at every turn. Gwen Stacy is a famous one, but before that her father was killed during a fight between Spider-Man and Dr. Octopus. Amazing Spider-Man #655 takes place after Spider-Man’s failed to save yet another supporting cast member, J. Jonah Jameson’s wife, and the bulk of the issue takes place inside his guilt-induced nightmare where he’s confronted with a city-full of characters he’s watched die throughout his years as Spider-Man.

Point is, tragedy is par for the course when it comes to Spider-Man. That old Parker luck is a bitch.

There are several reasons that “The Return of Hydro Man, Part Two” comes off particularly cruel and unusual. Peter already saw Mary Jane “die” after the Green Goblin dropped her off the George Washington Bridge. He searched the river but couldn’t find a trace of her. It was as if the water just swallowed her up. Then she comes back and all his hopes come true: she declares her love for him, she accepts his identity as Spider-Man and she marries him. Then she’s taken from him by another villain, a water-based villain, who escapes with her into a river. Finally, it’s revealed that she isn’t Mary Jane, she was never the real Mary Jane, and she dissolves into water right in front of Spider-Man.

See a theme here?

The emotional gut-punch that inspired this whole piece was the clone Mary Jane’s big death scene. Here it is on the Youtube:

That’s pretty damn intense! It even ends with waves crashing down around Spider-Man and flushing him away, like a deranged adaptation of “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider.” The voice acting deserves special attention here. Although Sara Ballantine as Mary Jane delivers a more resigned performance (probably as dramatic as they could go without making the kids at home cry), Christopher Daniel Barnes as Spider-Man friggin’ kills it here. That “MARY JAAAAAANE!!” howl is heartbreaking! He really goes for it when the show calls for extreme emotions. It’s still the voice I hear when I’m reading Spider-Man (same as Kevin Conroy from Batman: The Animated Series is still the one true Batman voice for me).

Here’s the first picture I made after I started obsessing over all this, featuring the hydro clone Mary Jane’s last words.

Hydro clone Mary Jane's last words to Spider-Man before dissolving, art by Jared Yanez, inspired by Spider-Man: The Animated Series by Marvel Films Animation(Click to view larger.)

I’m sure the show’s writers felt that it was important to make it clear that the real Mary Jane also loved Peter Parker, so if/when he found her again we’d feel secure in their eventual happy ending. The problem is, there can be no happy ending for Mary Jane and Peter Parker after this.

Let’s assume that after the last episode, Madame Web follows through on her promise and returns Mary Jane to Peter Parker. Let’s also assume she hasn’t been conscious in limbo for the last two seasons, spending weeks (possibly months) floating around alone (or worse, alone with the Green Goblin). For the hell of it, let’s just assume this whole experience hasn’t had any negative psychological after-effects for her.

Even if Mary Jane was returned, sane and safe, how is Peter supposed to re-do his entire relationship with her?

How’s he supposed to say “I love you” for the first time – again? How’s he supposed to reveal his identity to her – again? How’s he supposed to propose to her when the last time he married this woman she melted in front of his face?

How are they supposed to have a happily ever after when he’s already rehearsed it with a clone? And after it ended with her evaporating?

The happiest ending I can imagine for the series could not involve Peter Parker and Mary Jane winding up together. Not unless they wind up in the same sanitarium together.

The more likely and far more tragic ending is that Mary Jane never comes back. Peter Parker just wakes up exactly where Madame Web picked him up, still soaking in his dead wife’s moisture, unsure if the Secret/Spider Wars were just a dream. Nobody else remembers the Secret War or Madame Web and he gradually makes himself forget, ashamed of his imagination for constructing such a ludicrous fantasy. Mary Jane never reappears and he’s forced to come up with an explanation for how his wife disappeared all over again. Time goes on, Aunt May eventually dies (perhaps due to the heartache of seeing her nephew go through such trauma) and Miles Warren resurfaces with his Spider-Clone.

And though he’s forgotten, maybe there’s still a sense of familiarity, as he lashes out against his clone, this fresh new reminder of the horror his marriage ended in. Maybe there’s some recognition when the Carnage symbiote seizes him, bonds with him. But more likely, his mind would have long since shattered and no recognition of his younger self being brought through time to defeat him would remain.

Yes, I’m proposing that the Spider-Carnage reality from “Spider Wars” (Part One and Part Two) was, in fact, not an alternate reality at all but our Spider-Man’s future. In the end, Spider-Man becomes his own (and every reality’s) greatest villain. And he’s stopped from destroying everything by his past self, snatched from time right after the moment that truly pushed him over the edge: the perverse false resurrection and second death of the woman he loved.

Spider-Man reaches for his dissolving hydro clone wife, art by Jared Yanez, inspired by Spider-Man: The Animated Series by Marvel Films Animation(Click to view larger.)

So that’s the last of the pictures I made. I hope you liked ‘em and I apologize for the written supplement reaching novella-length. I was surprised by how great an adaptation Spider-Man: The Animated Series wound up being and the inclusion of out-and-out bizarre sci-fi tragedy put it over the top for me. I’m sorely tempted to write at least an outline of my version of the lost “episode 66,” filling in all the missing details and wrapping up the series conclusively (after all, Spider-Carnage did disappear through one last portal…), but really, it’s probably about time for me to stop thinking about Spider-Man: The Animated Series.

At least for a little while.

***

Read the rest of Much Ado About “The Return of Hydro Man, Part Two” here:

Much Ado About “The Return of Hydro Man, Part Two” (Part Three)

It’s one thing to lose the love of your life. It’s quite another thing to lose them twice. But the ways that Spider-Man loses Mary Jane in The Animated Series would be enough to drive anybody blind, frothing mad.

We never get to see Peter Parker really have to deal with the fall-out of “The Return of Hydro Man.” Shortly after watching helplessly as his clone wife dissolves, he’s whisked away by his fairy godmother Madame Web to lead the world’s greatest superheroes against the world’s greatest villains to liberate an alien world in “Secret Wars.” (And sure, I suppose we could interpret all the Secret/Spider Wars as one epic psychotic fugue brought on by the trauma of soaking in your dead clone wife’s residue. Like Lost Highway with less sex and more tights! But let’s just take that part at face value for now.)

We do get to see how dangerous a blind, frothing mad Spider-Man could be in the series finale, “Spider Wars.” When we meet Spider-Carnage, he’s already razed New York City and he’s less than half an hour away from destroying every reality.

The big inside joke of “Spider Wars” is that Spider-Carnage was turned evil by the Clone Saga, one of the comic’s most infamous storylines. In Spider-Carnage’s reality, Professor Miles Warren, the man who cloned Hydro Man and Mary Jane, takes things up a notch and clones himself a Spider-Man. But when it’s later revealed that the supposed clone may be the real deal, the “originaL” flips out. We’re also led to believe that the Carnage symbiote is what pushed him to go all-in on the reality ending scheme, but no other symbiote-possessed character ever had ambitions for trans-universal murder.

It’s never suggested that Spider-Carnage had the same clone-wife experience as our Spider-Man, but it would explain the massive leap between down-on-his-luck superhero to would-be reality murderer. After all, it is one thing to lose the love of your life, twice. It’s a whole different thing when they’re stolen from you – when there’s somebody to blame.

So, let’s talk about the folks responsible Spider-Man’s hydro clone wife debacle – Hydro Man and Professor Miles Warren.

Both characters deviate from their comic book versions in important ways that make their connection to Spider-Man less personal. This is actually something The Animated Series pulls off really well with many of the villains; in stark contrast to the movie adaptations, where the villains are all people directly tied into Peter Parker’s life, the cartoon used the ‘boss’ villains to connect all the dots. Most of the villains come into play when the Kingpin or Norman Osborn or some other crime boss hires them and they only start hating Spider-Man after he butts in to stop ‘em. I really dug this approach because it dodges the issue that gets brought up in Batman stories in particular, where it’s questionable whether or not Gotham would be full of supervillains if Batman wasn’t there first. In Spider-Man’s case, most of the costumed lunacy would be going on regardless of his involvement.

Hey, that’s New York for ya.

In the comics, Hydro Man was Morrie Bench, some guy that got knocked into the ocean by Spider-Man accidentally while an experimental generator was operating, giving him hydro powers and a reason to feel entitled to punching Spider-Man’s face. In the cartoon though, Morrie is an off-kilter brute obsessed with Mary Jane. He gets his powers in a freak accident (sans-Spider-Man) and then figures he can woo Mary Jane with stolen goods, brute force and moisture. It’s an interesting take, in that Morrie comes off as the adult version of Peter’s high school bully antagonist, Flash Thompson. Flash winds up an okay guy in the cartoon and the comic, but if he was a bit more unbalanced, couldn’t find a decent job and still felt entitled to the hottest girl from school, he could’ve wound up like Morrie.

While Spider-Man has to do most of the fighting, Hydro Man is really Mary Jane’s supervillain. She’s the one he’s after. And so, fittingly enough, she’s the one to defeat him by tricking him into exhausting himself on a hot roof far from water. He evaporates and we assume that this won’t be the last we see of him.

Except it is the last we see of him. It’s revealed in “The Return of Hydro Man, Part Two,” that Miles Warren took a sample from that roof and used it to make his clone Hydro Man. Which suggests that the original is kaput.

Yeah, Mary Jane killed Hydro Man. Killed him dead. Apparently the no-killing rule just doesn’t count at all for folks with hydro powers.

So you can imagine how hard it must be for Spider-Man when the Hydro-stalker steals his wife from his honeymoon, diving into the ocean with her while hysterically insisting that she was “made for him.” Now try imagining how hard it must be to find out that he’s telling the truth.

That brings us to Professor Warren and my third picture. Here’s Miles, Morrie and Mary Jane.

We Were Made For Each Other, art by Jared Yanez, inspired by The Return of Hydro Man from Spider-Man: The Animated Series by Marvel Films Animation(Click to view larger)

And yeah, I know Warren didn’t have the glasses in the cartoon, but he has ‘em in all the comics I’ve got, so, tough.

Warren’s better known to comic readers as the Jackal. Unfortunately, as the Jackal, he’s really hard to take too seriously because he looks like this. For a time he dressed up in this green furry man-jackal suit until he decided he was done with the laundry bills and just had himself mutated into that form permanently. Kinda silly, until you go back in his history and read the bit about him actually creating a man-jackal creature at one point who escaped and eventually murdered his wife and children. So, sure, when you remind yourself that it’s essentially Dr. Frankenstein dressing up as his own monster after it killed his family, it gets a little unsettling.

But the Jackal stuff doesn’t interest me as much as the Professor Miles Warren stuff. He was much creepier before he started dressing like a big-eared Grinch.

In the comics, Warren was a professor of biology at Empire State University when he met Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy. He fell in love with Gwen, his student and Peter’s girlfriend at the time, and at one point collected her DNA (along with Peter’s) for future use. When Gwen Stacy was killed in the fight between Green Goblin and Spider-Man, Warren went nuts and blamed it all on Spider-Man. He then tricked his lab assistant, who had just successfully cloned a frog, into helping him make clones of Gwen and Peter. When he discovered what was going on and confronted Miles about it, he suffocated him in an attempt to shut him up. Unable to bear the guilt, he blamed the crime on the Jackal, a new, evil personality he could hide behind, and after making his Grinch costume he began a long career of harassing Spider-Man. He’s actually the villain who manipulated the Punisher into trying to kill Spider-Man in his first appearance.

Oh yeah, and those Gwen Stacy and Peter Parker clones managed to stick around. You can go through the whole sordid history over at the Jackal’s Wikipedia entry. It gets pretty nuts. And when you read it, don’t imagine this all playing out in a comic book or cartoon. Imagine your watching a David Cronenberg adaptation of these stories. Imagine living with the psychological repercussions of dealing with this insanity.

The main point I want to make is that this guy is about as creepy as Spider-Man villains get if you put yourself in Parker’s shoes. Imagine, you’re in college, you’re dating an amazing girl, and you notice one of your teachers leering at her. Unbeknownst to you, he’s obsessed with her and has collected DNA from the both of you for his experiments. When your girlfriend tragically dies, your creepy old professor blames it all on you, then repeatedly, incessantly clones the both of you with varying degrees of success. Imagine having to watch your girlfriend die all over again, only this time her flesh dissolves and she melts into a nasty puddle of goo. Oh yeah, and you get to watch clones of yourself dissolve into viscous gunk also.

That’s gotta **** you up.

You may have already put two and two together here and figured out that “The Return of Hydro Man” is actually a loose adaptation of the original Miles Warren / Gwen Stacy clone story. As bad as cartoon Spider-Man gets it, comic book Spider-Man’s gone through a hell of a lot more weirdness over the decades. But at least Peter Parker didn’t marry the Gwen Stacy clone. They didn’t have a long relationship that gets capped off in one afternoon when it’s revealed she’s a clone and she promptly disintegrates.

The cartoon Miles Warren doesn’t have the personal history with Peter Parker (or the glasses or all the Jackal BS), but his anonymity in the cartoon is sinister in another fashion. This guy doesn’t even know Peter Parker, doesn’t have any plots against Spider-Man, he just happened to be interested in cloning and decided that the best way to go about that was to start with Spider-Man’s girlfriend and her stalker.

Just a wacky coincidence! Nothing personal!

Except it gets personal, deeply personal, since in the end, Miles escapes with a scrap of Spider-Man’s suit, foreshadowing an obsession with Parker DNA, the Clone Saga and the eventual origin of Spider-Carnage.

The Miles Warren of the comics is psychotic, brilliant, and obsessed with Peter Parker and his dead girlfriend on a genetic level. Peter Parker’s seen himself die by the truckload thanks to the Clone Saga. If he weren’t in a comic book, he’d be in an asylum at this point.

The Miles Warren of the cartoon, however, may have pushed him far enough to make killing reality seem like a good idea.

Next time we’ll wrap things up with the last couple pictures I made, a tragic alternate ending to Spider-Man: The Animated Series and our final farewell to Spider-Man’s hydro-clone wife.

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Much Ado About “The Return of Hydro Man, Part Two” continues in: