Summary
➡ The text discusses the animation quality of the movie “A Bug’s Life,” comparing it to the graphics of PlayStation games. The writer also talks about the movie’s forgotten status and its removal from theme parks. They discuss the design choices made for the characters, such as the removal of mandibles from ants and the addition of extra arms to grasshoppers. The text also delves into the topic of viewing formats, like widescreen and full frame, and how they can affect the viewer’s experience and perception of a movie.
➡ This text discusses the experience of watching movies on different devices and the impact it has on the viewing experience. It also talks about various movies and attractions at Disney parks, including the Country Bears and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. The text also mentions the transition from DVDs to Blu-rays and the quality of viewing experience each provides. Lastly, it discusses the concept of appointment TV in Japan and the continued production of Atari games into the early 90s.
➡ The text discusses the evolution of video games, focusing on the Atari 2600 and its lack of popularity in the retro resurgence. It also talks about the potential for video games to match the visual quality of movies, using the example of a hypothetical Bugs Life game matching the movie’s graphics. The text also mentions the possibility of games becoming more popular than the movies they’re based on, like Goldeneye. Lastly, it discusses the length and voice cast of the Bugs Life movie.
➡ The text is a conversation about various actors who have lent their voices to animated movies, with a focus on Dennis Leary and Kevin Spacey. The speakers discuss the actors’ careers, their roles in the movies, and their personal controversies. They also touch on the potential of AI in voice acting and the impact of controversies on the perception of an actor’s work.
➡ The text discusses the story of “A Bug’s Life” and its connection to Aesop’s fable “The Grasshopper and the Ant”. The original fable teaches the importance of hard work and planning ahead, with the grasshopper suffering in winter due to his lack of preparation. However, the text argues that Disney’s adaptation changes the message, turning the grasshopper, originally a sympathetic musician, into the villain. The author suggests that this change misses an opportunity to show how different groups, like artists and workers, can collaborate and benefit each other.
➡ This text discusses the inconsistencies in the portrayal of bugs in movies like “A Bug’s Life” and “The Lion King”, where bugs are shown as friends and not eating each other, which is not true in real life. It also talks about the intellectual differences between the characters, with some bugs being portrayed as smarter than others. The text also draws parallels between the plot of “A Bug’s Life” and other movies like “Three Amigos”. Lastly, it mentions how the movie is often cited in conspiracy communities due to its depiction of the power dynamics between the ants and the grasshoppers.
➡ The text discusses the potential political undertones in a Disney movie, suggesting it might be promoting communist values. It also explores the idea of the movie’s characters representing different social classes, with the royalty overseeing the working class. The text further delves into the implications of certain character behaviors and the humor used in the movie. Lastly, it touches on the influence of PT Barnum on American culture and his role in shaping the concept of celebrities.
➡ The text discusses the evolution of American pop culture, starting from the era of PT Barnum, who exaggerated ordinary things for entertainment. It also talks about the Chicago World’s Fair as a significant event in pop culture history. The text then shifts to discussing the Pixar movie ‘A Bug’s Life’, analyzing its themes and characters, and comparing it to other movies. The conversation ends with a look forward to discussing the movie ‘Doug’s First Movie’.
➡ The speaker is discussing their new series, “Saturday Morning Conspiracy,” where they analyze old cartoons for hidden meanings. They mention the show “Gem and the Holograms,” highlighting its themes of AI-generated music and visuals, and its occult references. They also promote their website, paranoidamerican.com, where they sell comic books, stickers, and coloring books, and host a podcast. Lastly, they tease an upcoming episode about the cartoon “Doug.”
Transcript
Ask about illuminati. Is it Disney mind control? Is it MKO Chapel? I go, this man gonna suck on a star. I go, this man nobody pinocchio speak for no pleasure island when traffickers need to fall in mind Captain hook a lost boy Neverland saving kids from peter pants to sun me survive nobody needs no one, no, I never took another breath this man. We go from real to real coaches there give me hope and no more field I cook it.
I got back to a cookies, everybody a cook. Is there a comp? Is there nobody? No kiosk overdone. Hello. Welcome to do the Occult Disney podcast. We take the mice and take microscopes up to the mice and look for things in their quantum realities. I’m pushing it. Yeah, I should just start. We take the mice and we slice and make it twice as nice. Okay. Maybe I need to start giving you that job.
I don’t know. This is Matt here. It’s always paranoid Americans there. How’s it hanging left and right? Well, I was describing where we’re at, but I guess that both are answers. Yeah, you can give a multiple choice answer if you want. How are you doing? A, happy, B, I’m pissed at you. C, I’m about to go psychotic. E, D, I’m hungry, isn’t. Statistically, c is the safest thing to go with.
At least when I was growing up doing scantrons, that’s what we were told, is that if you don’t know the answer, just fill in a C because it was better than a zero. As a teacher, at least once or twice I’ve had someone go C’s all the way down. It might not be passing, but statistically, there’s a higher chance of you getting a higher version of it. Yeah.
Here’s the thing. I did well in high school because I knew how to game the tests, not because I knew all that stuff that I’ve since forgotten. Right. What do you mean by game the tests? Just like you said, if you’re not sure, choose to see. This kind of question is going to have this kind of answer. That’s how you ace the sat without studying for it. The essays were pretty decent, too, because as long as you just know the structure, right, you set up the premise in the first paragraph, and in that premise, you cite like three supporting facts, and then you just drop a paragraph for each fact and then a paragraph for the conclusion.
And if you just know that structure, you could just come up with the dumbest actual concept. As long as you follow the formula, you’ll get a decent grade because most of the time you’re not getting graded on whether or not your stupid little high school brain has a good idea in it. It’s just whether or not you know how to think the way that the pression system wants you to think.
No. Once upon a time I had a social science teaching certificate and you have to take a test for that, which was three essay questions. History. Got it. No problem. Answer it. Like you said, government. No problem. Answer it in that manner. Economics didn’t even understand the question. Completely BS. The entire thing got the highest score on that one. So that’s testing, right? Well, that’s economics. Yeah. Really? He sounds like he knows what he’s talking about.
Such an abstract thing. Yeah, you just talk out toot out of your butt for that. But you know where they don’t have to write essays? On Ant Island. I saw no essay writing on Ant island. For a bug’s life. Our focus for today, they might have to because they were speaking in English. So I feel like there was an english class of some kind. Was there any writing, though, anywhere? Well, there wasn’t a city for the human stuff, of course, but.
Yeah, there was. But also when he goes to the little bug city. But I guess the writing. Yeah, because they had names of places in the little ant city that they go to, the little mixed bug city. So some of it was because there was matchboxes and old detergent boxes, but some of it actually had the text from whatever the little bug business was. So I guess there is a premise that they’ve got a full Alphabet there.
Yeah, because I don’t remember if it’s you or I talking about Toy Story, me with other people or me listening. I’ve got kind of an inundated with Toy Story in the past six months, but yeah, like the fact that they all know how to read. Where did they learn that they’re toys. Unless it’s just like the toy is like that character knows how to read, thus the toy knows how to read.
I don’t know. I got to say, the concept of bugs working together is terrifying. Even if they don’t know how to read and speak. If just like three or four different types of bugs that normally don’t work together somehow form symbiotic relationships. Bugs might actually be able to take over humans, you know what I mean? As long as they had like a full structure behind them. Yeah, I was seeing a joke meme like last week or something where it was saying, like most common animal by biomass in each state and each state was just ants, ants, ants, ants every state was ants yeah.
Add in some grasshoppers to help them out and not be the antagonist. Maybe a few ladybugs and, yeah, you’ve got a bug army. Are you terrified of antman? Not necessarily. Or the tick, but I am terrified of just regular ants. They actually do terrify me, especially red ants. How about the scene where Paul Rudd wakes up in his bed and security around his bed is like fire ants? I mean, that’s mildly terrifying.
Yeah, I guess so. It’s not that bad. It reminds me of, I don’t know if you’ve seen the new boys, but there’s like a little ant man version of that guy, too. But it’s a little bit more adult. No, I haven’t seen the boys yet. That’s past my date of, like, I’m not committing to TV shows anymore. All movies. Yeah, I was a sucker for the original one, but yeah.
So there’s a guy that also shrinks down to the size of an am, but then he goes inside of another person, sort of like inner space style, but then he just grows to full human size again before he jumps back out of the original person that he jumped into. So it gets pretty gruesome. Yeah, I guess Disney doesn’t want that in their marvel flicks, but it answers a question.
Right? Like, when you’re watching Ant man, it’s like, I wonder what would happen if he went inside of someone’s nose and then just know, went to full size. And you get that answer in the. Now, of course, today’s a bug’s life, but we’re not going to get out of this a bit without talking about the movie ants as well. Have you seen that one? I’ve seen it. Although I purposely blotted out of my mind and just watched Bugs life.
I watched Bugs life back to back and got the full sort of dose of it just because I wasn’t really sure how much I remembered came from the ants movie and how much I remembered came from a bug’s life. I saw ants, like maybe twice, like 25 years or whatever, ago. I don’t have a firm memory of it, but, yeah, that’s obviously the big production bugaboo of this.
Know, Jeffrey Katzenberger had been unceremoniously dumped from the company, and I probably paid eight fortunes to do that, so why should he complain? But, yeah, he burned all of his bridges with Pixar by producing ants and scheduling it a few months before this with the rebuttal that they were opening against the Prince of Egypt dreamwork animated movie. So it’s just a bunch of gutter sniping, I guess. I mean, this movie, I did get confused with ants quite a lot.
If I was trying to remember which scenes had which. And I don’t know if it’s because the movies are that similar or if that was just like the intended outcome was to kind of money the waters. Yeah. Because I think I mentioned when we said this was coming up next, there was a lot of it around this time, which did seem accidental, the whole Armageddon deep impact thing.
Of course a bug liked ants. Everyone’s like, that’s weird. Maybe it was the Ebert review saying that ants probably helped a bug’s life by showing, oh, you can have many stories in an ant hill because it is a very different story. I could definitely see that. If you went to see one and you legitimately liked it, you could go and see the other one. You know what I mean? I guess it didn’t feel like an all or nothing sort of thing here with the two movies.
Right? Like, you go and see one on Friday and you go and see one the next Friday. You could do that. Yeah, because ants is. I mean, I guess it’s a little bit more aimed at adults. I think it was actually rated PG. It does have better zingers written into it. But, yeah, watching it now, neither movie looks that great animation wise. I haven’t seen a bug’s life for several years.
So I did feel like I was mostly watching a PlayStation two game, which didn’t come across so much with Toy Story. So I don’t know if it’s the more natural environments or what does that. I definitely had the exact thought that when I was watching a bug story that some of the scenes I felt like a PS five game looked better. Like a real time PS five Harry Potter game looked better than anything that I was seeing on the screen.
And lots of parts of this movie. Yeah. And this, of course, being Pixar’s second feature. And I guess now this is like the sophomore slump thing, this movie is kind of weirdly forgotten. It’s been jettisoned from the theme parks at this point because they had bugsworld in California adventure for a while. But is that. I’m not. I haven’t been to California adventure. I don’t know, but it’s hard for me to anthropomorphize a bug and really like it.
I can’t think of a single bug character that I’m truly a huge fan of maybe the tick. We said that earlier. Yeah. Not even Anthony Cricket. Original Jimny Cricket. Maybe not the terrifying one from the recent live action, but maybe. But it’s. Despite his cricketness, I’m going to sit here looking for a bug. I really love what they did in this case, knowing what you’re saying was they took the mandibles off of all of the ants and went two arms and two legs for the ants, skipped the extra pair, whereas for the grasshoppers, they kept in the appendages and an extra set of arms to make them look creepier.
All that sort of stuff. It still didn’t work. They’re still creepy as hell. They’re still ants. Yeah. It had been a while since I’d seen this anyway, so I guess the way I’d kind of forgotten about this movie, this was not in rotation when my daughter was very young. I’m not sure even watched this, but I did see it in the probably opening night because I was all in on the CGI animation at the time.
I didn’t get the first DVD release because they said there would be a better one later. So I waited for the better one, which is the one I was watching last night. It’s got the bonus disc. Wow. It was funny when I put it on last night, too. The movie itself looked okay on DVD, but the menu screens looked like a hot mess. They were like pixelated. I’m like, wow, 1999.
Okay. It was a wild time, man. We weren’t even sure if the world was going to last another year. So the computer. That much effort into the DVD screens. That’s right. It also is an interesting spot where you can watch it in widescreen or full frame. You can choose. Usually when you do the full frame, it’s just cropping. I mean, nobody watches full frame anymore because everyone has a widescreen TV.
But then we still had those headache inducing cathode ray machines. But since this was a digital thing, I think they changed half of the movie to make the composition fit full frame. So I did watch it widescreen, but if you do watch it full frame, you’re technically watching it composed correctly still, which is kind of cool. When you say full frame, you mean a four x three? Yeah.
Academy ratio, I guess, or whatever. Because in 99, that’s how weirdos were watching me being one of those. But weirdos were watching widescreen, right? You’d have to get the special VHS for that. Yeah, you’d either get it cropped or you would get even worse than that was the pan and scan which is where it would be, like, cropped, and they’d kind of move it left and right. If someone was walking from the right side of a room to the left, they’d crop it, and then they’d move the image to make them follow.
But it always made you a little bit dizzy, or it always had this weird look to it. Everyone’s still confused about the Kubrick films because he shot them in four or three and then put the mat on to make it widescreen. So when they came out on video, they took it off. So it’s full frame. You watch full metal jackets, full frame. And he was like, yeah, okay.
That’s how you’re supposed to watch it at home. But he said that in the 80s, right? So now people are like, what is the correct way to watch the shining? Five different ways. If you watch that documentary. Probably more if you want to get. Sorry, I’m not trying to open up that can of ants. So what is the proper way to watch a bug’s life, since you have between full frame and wide frame? Well, that’s what I’m saying.
Pixar, technically, is like, both ways are the correct way because we recompose the full frame. Well, I don’t believe Pixar, though. What does Matt say? Oh, was Matt say? Matt’s never watched a full frame because I was that dork buying those copper colored, clamshell Fox widescreen VHS, so I was never going to watch the full frame. I prefer. I mean, everything I’ve got now is full screen. And if you think about it, our line of vision does feel like it’s more like widescreen than full frame.
That’s true. Although there is that classic Hollywood thing. I kind of got annoyed when I put on some of the Schneider cut of Justice League a while ago, and that one is actually made to be in full frame for whatever reason. I don’t really know why. And it was kind of annoying watching it that. So meanwhile, when I watch old TV shows on DVD, it’ll just stretch out my image to fit the.
There’s no. There’s no real right way to do it, I don’t think, when it comes to that. Although in the distant future, I feel like full frame is on its way out. Yeah, I think it’s mostly on the way out. That’s why the Justice League thing was so weird. It’s like, why are they doing that? That’s a choice, I guess. It’s supposed to be like an imac screen on your TV, but now it’s smaller.
So I don’t know. I mean, really, let’s take 80s comedy. You’re watching that pan and scan or in full frame, it doesn’t really matter that much. Unless it’s, like, after hours or something. You have to have a decent cinematographer or someone, like, thinking about the composition. If you just throw the camera on the ground and film some funny, it doesn’t matter all that much, I guess. It is interesting, with this movie in particular and just 3d movies in general, that you can render it out for every different flavor, right? Like, you wouldn’t have the IMAX version and then just downscale it.
You would actually render it out for every different frame rate and aspect ratio and everything. It’s kind of this concept of two people are talking about the same movie. They technically saw different mean depending on how much of a stickler you are for editing and cinematography. But you could make an argument that if you watched a Kubrick movie but it was zoomed in so far that it cropped out some of the more nuanced little foreshadowing things in the background that you might not actually be seeing the same exact Kubrick movie as someone that’s watching it untouched, essentially.
And then you can keep extrapolating that like a bug’s life, you know what I mean? Maybe someone that watched the four three version gets a different view of one particular scene that changes some of the context that you don’t see in the widescreen. And then extrapolate that to where they just made it for a phone screen versus an imac screen. And to be fair, I don’t think anyone says you should watch a 60s kubrick in full frame.
They’re thinking, like, basically a clockwork on where he starts. Another good example would be 3d. Because for the longest time, they were like, 3d TVs were sort of the big push that was like the extra bit that they could upsell you on. But that was also all the Blu rays that would be coming out. A lot of it was like. And you can get the 3d version of it.
And then they had, like, the passive glasses and the right left and all sorts of different aspects of it. And that too, was like, well, if the movie was made and they added 3d elements, some people felt like it was just like schlock that they added. It doesn’t add to the movie, right? But then there’s a movie like a happy death Day or there was, like, a bunch of horror movies that have come out that were sort of like remakes of horror movies that did the same thing where like, a big knife comes out at the screen.
That’s kind of the similar aspect, right? Because a lot of people that end up watching that at home, they don’t get the 3D. So are they watching the same movie? Are they getting the same experience? And obviously, the answer is both yes and no. But how far of an extreme can you bring that to, right? Like, can you watch a Kubrick movie on, like, a wristwatch? Does it still count as a Kubrick movie? There’s that David Lynch PSA where he says in his kind of homey style, if you watch the movie on the iPhone, you didn’t watch the fucking movie.
And David lynch, while his movies have lots of f bombs, he personally, you almost never hear him curse. So it was kind of shocking. So in that case, the obscenity is necessary before we dive fully down for my birthday movie. Over at the films and filth podcast, we follow a list. But for our birthdays, we had to choose something. Of course, I went with the country bears, which is impossible to watch in full frame on home media.
Disney cares so little about that movie. Even in 2003, they did not release it on widescreen. So there’s no widescreen. It’s only full frame. Yeah, you got to watch in full frame. I mean, it wasn’t widescreen in the theater, but they hated that movie so much, they closed the Disneyland version, the country bear Jamboree, like, six months before the movie started, opened or whatever. So they lacked the synergy there.
Blah, blah, blah. I do recommend it. The musical numbers aren’t great, but the rest of the movie is actually pretty good. I remember seeing and not being as disappointed as I thought. It was better than Garfield, which I think came out around a similar time. I mean, there’s a scene just for the style of humor it has, where Christopher Walken’s, like, realtor or whatever, he’s trying to buy country bear hall and tear it down because he hates it so much.
And he’s in his office, and he’s got a model of it on the table. He drops an anvil on it, and then you see him take another model and do the same thing. He’s got, like, 50 models in his office that he’s just smashing with an anvil. He was the actual Disney. Yeah. Yes. While doing Christopher walkenisms. While he’s doing. When Disney was in his back room with a bottle of scotch and a masseuse.
Right. That was legitimately one of the cool attractions there. It wasn’t going to excite you or anything, but, man, if you went to that at the right time when you just needed to get into some shade and eat, like, a turkey leg and just kind of, like, relax for a second. The country bears. I mean, maybe that’s because I grew up in upstate New York, and the country bears reminded me of friends and family that I had grown up around.
So maybe that’s part of it. Yeah. They’re retooling the Florida one now. But we went to Disney, Tokyo Disney, like, ten years ago, and that was actually the last time I’d actually been to a park. But it was pretty crowded that day, and my daughter was three and a half at the time. So I think we actually saw the country bears twice, and we had to ride it to small world, like, four times because we had a three year old with us.
So that’s pretty insanity. Was, I was thinking, and the one ant that maybe was a little bit endearing, but I still think it was terrifying. But honey, I shrunk the kids, which is also a Disney property. Right. They had the ant that they rode around, and it kind of acted like a dog. Yeah, they have that in ant man as well. But it’s kind of creepy there. And it’s creepy.
But I think that one actually got an attraction at Disney world that hung around for a little while. The honey, I shrunk the kid attraction. They had, like, a separate little part of it that it was just ants. Like an ant world with huge stalks of grass. And you climbed up and it almost was like this big jungle gem, but it was all themed, know, you’re an ant and there’s, like, ants all over the place.
I didn’t like honey, I shrunk the audience, though, called microcosm in Japan, because I guess they didn’t. Or microadventure, maybe. But anyway, I didn’t like that one because at the very end, as you may or may not remember, it punches you in the back. And I don’t like that. I think it’s a beast stinging you or whatever, but, yeah, I don’t think I’d like the 40 x experience where they douse you with water most of the time and shake you around at a movie theater.
Have you done that? It could be interesting. I don’t know. I don’t think I did the one where it jabs you in the back to simulate a beast thing. I think that was. Honey, I shrunk the audience, if I remember correctly, which did not endear me to that attraction. And then you’d go ride the revamped journey into your imagination. You’d have a bad time at the imagination pavilion.
All in all. Yes, you would have a better time at the Hollywood studios in the little bug playground. Yes. But I mean, the point is that I don’t even remember that much of a hoohah about the bugs life. There was more pushing of the ant in honey. I shrunk the kids within Disney properties than there ever was a bugs life. At least whenever working in the park. We’re east coasters.
California adventure. Had a bugs world for. Okay, I didn’t know that. 15 years, I haven’t even seen a picture. I just know it was there. And now it’s not. Because when they open, they’re like, one of our attractions is this farm you can climb on a model of a tractor. And people were very quick. Like, that’s not an attraction, people. So they changed it. But yeah, I do remember all that tech talk.
I mean, partly to say that this was one of your kind of like showcase DVDs in 1999. This is like if you wanted to show off your brand new spanking DVD player, you’d put it on bugs life or the Matrix, right? Those were the ones that really showed off the system. I mean, that wouldn’t impress anybody now would it? But at the time, yeah, sure look better in neither of them, really.
I mean, if I had to pick between the two, maybe matrix. But matrix also had that very green sort of color treatment, that kind of washed out any dynamic range that you would actually want to see to prove out how good your system was. The other reason you might put on a bug’s life is the marketing at the time. And I don’t even know what this means. They’re like, we’ve transferred the entire film digitally, frame by frame, to DVD, and it’s the first time that anyone’s done that.
And I don’t really know what that means. Isn’t that just how DVDs work? Well, technically, yeah, but in other ones, they could have transferred it to film or had some sort of analog interstitial between that, put it on high tape, you know what I mean? Even if they stored it on tape, maybe they just never let it touch magnetic tape storage when they were handling all the assets.
And they kept it all within magnetic hard drives. You know what mean? Like, it was probably from the prey computer to your DVD, I guess, is what they were saying, which I guess it’s everything now. Except for Christopher Nolan films, DVD is like the worst format ever. Now that’s actually basically a VHS. And I feel like VHS probably makes a stronger comeback than DVD does. Yeah, I still have a lot of DVDs, but I’ve been upgrading a lot of stuff to Blu ray.
It was funny, during the holidays I’d gotten some Blu ray DVD combos at like the used store, and my father in law programmed the thing to record television shows. And when that happens, you cannot play a blu ray, but you can still play a DVD. So for like three movies, we ended up watching the DVD version. Is there even a comparable version of that? Like recording it at home still? Do people still set their TV? I guess just DVR, right? It’s like, I mean, it’s stored on a hard drive or whatever, but people in Japan still watch TV.
Like appointment TV. It’s weird. Like, NHK, the national television station, will show like a Saturday or Sunday movie, like a western movie, and then everyone’s like, oh, NHK showed. It must be so like there was a big, like, everyone loved titanic again last know because they showed on national TV. I wonder if bugs life ever made it to Laserdisc? Or was this just too far removed? It’s like one of those things where you learn that Atari was still making 2600 games until 1992.
So maybe manufacturing or making new ones. They were making new games. There was still some poor SAP out there programming a 2600 game in like 1991, maybe not by 92. I think that was the last time they marketed games. But yeah, there might be a Bugs life Atari game out there. What was 91? Maybe like a beauty and the Beast one? I don’t know. Aladdin, maybe you could have a.
Yeah, go all the way. Was it Aladdin 93? I don’t remember. But it’s just weird how long tech goes. Atari 2600 games kind of got left out of the retro resurgence, right? People like, they might go back to eight bit, they might go to 16 bit, but almost nobody’s making new old games. Oh, yeah, actually that’s not true. There are people making those, and I think they’re not so popular to say emulate on your computer because you’re like, why don’t I just do a super Nintendo? That’s more fun.
But I think the thing with an Atari 2600 is people, if they have the hardware, they got the old clunky console, they have the joystick with the weird rubber. If you have that, you’re on. I remember this was 20 years ago, but being in someone’s warehouse apartment and watching 80s wrestling and then playing the Atari 2600 for reals and having a fine evening, I was always disappointed. I don’t know if it was my expectations had just been set too high.
But I don’t think I ever enjoyed an Atari 2600 game. One of my friends had like the Koolaid man game and it looks so, man, the box art looks so amazing. And they would hype it up on the back and then you go to play it and it’s just like, oh, this game’s got a red square instead of a blue square that you have to move from the left to the right.
Yeah. One of the guys I do other podcasts with, he has the superpower to speed run the Atari 2600 et game, the one that they buried like 3 million copies of in Arizona or whatever, because he explained he came from kind of a poor family. And so he got it like a year after the video game bust. And he can speed run it today. I’ve seen him speedrun that in Raiders of the Lost Ark on the 26th.
Are we talking like world championship level? Oh, no, not that. It’s just like watching him do it is insane. Okay. I don’t know if the ET has like competitive game. It has to, doesn’t it? It absolutely has to feel like he could be a contender. There’s probably a bugs life fast run because I distinctly remember multiple bugs life games coming out because that was also sort of like an interesting tie in where it was like, you can go and see this 3D rendered movie and then you can go and play this 3D rendered game.
But obviously the fidelity was nowhere the same as it would be today. But it was something because usually when you play a game or watch a movie and play a game anytime beforehand, again, ET, you’re going to have a very different experience. Right? Star wars was kind of cool. I forget the word for but all the lines or whatever. Geometric art or whatever. Anyway, nothing like the movie, but a bug’s life.
You’re getting something sort of similar to the movie. When I was going to the Wiki page, it was like, do you want the movie or the game? So apparently somebody likes the game. We’re getting close. If you look at Bugs life, right? Let’s just assume that PS Five existed when Bugs life came out in some weird reality where Hollywood doesn’t have the same technology as the gaming industry for the sake of a comparison.
But if you actually had blockbuster movies that people were seeing and like, wow, this is cutting edge, because when it came out, it was fairly impressive. It’s just not 20 years later, but when it comes out and you’re looking at it, imagine if you have a game that can have the same fidelity as that movie when that line doesn’t exist as much. Does it even need to be a movie? Or can it just always be a game? If they were to remake bugs life today, why not just make it into it? And I know it’s because some people don’t play games at all and they just watch movies and vice versa.
But it’s weird that right now even someone that just has a PS five could technically buy a new Bugs life game and they put it in and it just reenacts the movie. Right? But it could also do like a whole bunch more than I. Just out of curiosity, while you’re saying that I typed Golden Eye into Wikipedia. The movie is still the first link, but the three after that are all the mean.
There’s a reason why they sell all those IP to different game companies. And usually the games fall on their face, right? It’s like that LGN curse that started in forever ago, but even to now. But I guess the difference though is that what if the games and the movies are just one and the same? I almost feel like we were ripped off a little bit. That we didn’t get to be born after that was the norm.
But that’ll probably be the norm pretty soon. Yeah. Is there another example where the game is actually more popular than the movie? I would argue that’s the case with Goldeneye, especially if you’re talking like cultural cachet. But in any other cases where not like a video game movie. But first there’s a movie, then it’s the game and the game is a bigger deal. That might just be Goldeneye.
There’s probably a handful of them out there. That would be another one topic in itself. Because I think of bugs life, it’s still like you would think of the movie first. The game might be better than the movie. I don’t know. The movie is not that great. The Bugs life movie is not that awesome. It’s got some interesting themes to it, but overall it’s very expositiony. They explain exactly.
Oh, that’s prince so and so. Did you hear? Oh, they’re training for this. Everything is just kind of spelled out for you in kind of a clunky way. I don’t know if you picked up on that. You’re right. But this might be the film where I got the most properly brainwashed by Disney going into it. How so? Because I was pretty all in on Toy Story. Like I said before that I’d actually seen Pixar stuff at like museum animation fest.
I was like into Pixar and when this came out, oh, the technology has been increased, blah, blah, blah. They’re doing nature stuff now. And the reviews were all pretty good. And I go, oh, yeah, everything’s better. This is the best thing ever. I was very excited to get on DVD in 99. But, yeah, like you’re saying, I watch it now. I actually had to run back because I took a little nap in about an hour in.
It was also midnight. But yeah, it’s a little on the long side, too. That’s one of the things that makes itself very present from Toy Story. But especially in ants life or bug life, I’m going to do that a bunch of times, by the way, but in a bug’s life, because they can just have this camera just render for an extra four minutes. I feel like there’s a bunch of places here where they didn’t necessarily have to let that render another five scene here and another five minute scene there.
Whereas if it were all done, traditional animation, so much more effort and thought and care goes into what absolutely has to be in the movie. And in 3D, man, it’s like you could just hit the slow mo button and it just takes like, I don’t know, an extra hour to render this one little scene. And now you just added an extra, like three or four minutes in the movie, and you can do that a lot more and a lot easier with all this 3d rendering.
So I feel like a bug’s life fell victim a little bit to that. It didn’t have to be as long as it was. Well, I’m looking at the voice cast right now, and I wonder if that’s part of the reason, because literally everyone is in this movie. They have, like, too many big names that. What’s the names? Well, like I say, another place where I was probably all in on this when it came out was, I like kids in the hall, I like news radio, Dave Foley, voices flick.
So I was excited about that. It seemed like a counterculture move at the time for some reason, even though it’s not. I mean, news radio was on ABC. Was it? So he was already. He was also in the postal movie, which is one of UA Bowl’s best movies, if that even belongs in a sentence. Hey, for films and filth, we watched in the name of the king, a Dungeon seeds tale, and we liked it, actually.
We thought it was. I highly, highly recommend postal. It also has David Foley as a guy that basically runs like a racist Disney world. All right. Okay. It wasn’t bad enough to be on our list of bad movies, let’s put it that way. So it’s better than that. But our first bowl experience, I’ll tell you what happens after we watch Blood Rain. But yeah, we enjoyed our first uve experience, weirdly enough.
How many voices did you pick up on in this movie? Anybody? I think I heard Jason Alexander in there at one point. You might be mixing him up with. No, that was, it was John Ratzenberger. I recognize them, but I purposely don’t look them up. I wait for you to tell me who they. Yeah, I sort of assumed you did that one. I only picked up on this watch, and it was.
His final film role is Jonathan Harris was the English accented Mantis magician. He was lost in space. Dr. Smith. Right. The evil Dr. Smith. I guess he’s not evil later on, but pretty iconic. I didn’t know he was in there. Phyllis Diller’s the queen. Okay, that’s an interesting one. Who is the ladybug? Dennis Leary. Oh, my God. Okay. Yeah. Madeline Khan is gypsy the moth. Bonnie Hunt’s in everything.
I mean, it’s just like, you know, I’m going down the list. And Roddy McDowell, maybe it was his last film. Maybe Jonathan Harris did one after. But Roddy McDowell, planet of the know, Cornelius, he’s in it. Frank Welker, of course, does a voice because he does a voice in everything. But the other two big stars is Elaine Julia. Louise Dreyfus is Princess Ada. I didn’t really track that watching it, so whatever.
Actually, I probably thought she was an ants and not this one. What’s kind of wild to me is that Dennis Leary in late 90s is kind of like Dave Chappelle, modern day ish. And I’m not saying in terms of talent, but in terms of status and I guess like edginess, but I can’t think of a single truly Dennis Leary, edgy comedian that would make their way into a Disney movie today.
I know Denis Leary has done a lot of cool stuff. I always have a little bone to pick, I guess, which the comedy world does as well, because he had his giant album in the early 90s, no cure for cancer or something. I don’t remember what it was called, but yeah, and we all thought it was hysterical in junior high. And then a few years later, it’s like, oh, here’s Bill Hicks.
Okay. He just ripped off Bill Hicks complete shtick and stopped saying anything that actually meant anything. Okay. But then he’s in stuff like the ref. I mean, he’s good in movies. He’s a better actor than a comedian, I guess, but we all learned about him as a comedian. If there’s one thing that AI can bring to us before it destroys us all, it would be great to have an AI, Bill Hicks, that could just throw his opinion on current events.
If I could just see that before the robots kill me, I’ll be okay with it. I think he’s on my bricked iPod, a 15 year old iPod that only works in my car. And it’s got all of Bill Hicks albums on there. So I listened to those a fair amount, and I’m like, man, you just change the nouns, the proper nouns, and it pretty much fits now, so you can AI it yourself to a certain degree.
Him and George Carlin’s angry old man phase, I mean, all that stuff just change a few names, and then I just want to know what goat boy evolves into. 30 years, maybe. Yeah, good point. How long can he do that voice? It’s like the chili peppers, where Anthony Ketus just stopped doing his crazy rap monster voice because I guess wanted to save his voice or something. So now he just sings blandly all the time.
He’s just trying to stay low key to stay out of that me too. Movement, maybe. Yeah, maybe. I’m saying that as a chili Peppers fan. I’m like, dude, go back. What happened to the maniac rapping, dude, that’s your strength, I think. Okay. Oh, yes. Retroactively. And maybe at the time, Hopper, which I guess is named after Dennis Hopper is named after, is voiced by a now much more villainous man, which is Spacey.
You get some spacey, you could rename Hopper Spacey at this. It’s. It’s a missed opportunity. They didn’t get flea in here. Speaking of red hot Chili peppers and a bug, because he’s done voices at this point. He could have done the Frank Welker part, although I like Frank Welker being here, too. But, yeah, he was the insane enforcer for Hopper. Have that voice by flea, that’d be know.
And with Kevin Spacey, there’s not a lot of roles that change that much. After all of the stuff that kind of had come out about Kevin Spacey. Right. I can’t think of a lot of movies where it’s like, oh, but he was such a upstanding guy in this movie. Like, every movie he was in, it’s always, ah, he’s always been telling you about, like, he was always kind of wearing on his sleeve a little bit, I guess, pay it forward, which I never watched.
He was supposed to be like the nice guy. But again, didn’t watch it. Didn’t want to see nice Spacey, did I? I want to let him be frank. Right? I guess that’s the biggest bugaboo with him because some people, it’s like you could just kind of ignore them. Spacey in the late 90s, he’s good on everything that he did in the late 90s. You want to look at 2000 Spacey.
Yeah, that’s a hot mess. And now it’s fun to laugh at. Have you ever seen him doing the song mind games at like, a 911 benefit concert or whatever? No. That actually makes me like him even more. Okay, look up Kevin Spacey singing mind games. It’s amazing. He’s just like, he’s not a bad singer, but he’s putting it on like he’s the best singer. Yeah. And then him singing.
What other movies has Kevin Spacey been in that were Disney related? Oh, maybe Wiki will tell me that. I think it’s just bugs life. That might be the mean. I don’t think of him as a voice actor for the most. Funny. Funny how that works. Yeah. Somehow Disney always manages to attract flies to something that’s fly paper. We’ll say, do the poopy. Well, I already did drop an f bomb in this one, but.
So I’m just having a squiz here and not television. Yeah. I really don’t think he did much voice acting, although I will say I actually bought the first couple of seasons of House of Cards on Blu ray, like, last month because they were like $5 a season. Like, well, that’s supposed to be a good show. It is a good show. Haven’t started watching it yet, though. As I said, I have trouble committing to TV, but, hey, it’s there if I want it.
Good show. It was weird because if you were watching it, then you saw all this happen in real time and it’s like, no, but the cliffhanger. And you kind of knew that the cliffhanger wasn’t going to get resolved. Yeah, I only got the first two seasons and I could have gotten the third, but it costs more money. I’m like, well, then I won’t have a cliffhanger I have to worry about.
I think it’s between three and four. I think as the end of season three was airing or after it had finished up was when the controversy started. So when they came back, it was like a different show a little bit. Yeah. Because up to that point, everyone was like, this is the best show ever on television. Right. And nobody says that anymore. Well, I don’t know. Best show ever.
But some people said that. I mean, again, I haven’t watched it. Some people are idiots. Yeah, that’s true. I do remember a coworker who just kept liking things that would get, like, hard canceled. So he was really into that show. He really liked the band lost profits back in the day. Oh, boy. Yeah. And if anyone doesn’t know what I’m talking about, I don’t even feel like describing.
You can look that up. That was some bad news, but yes, now, perfect casting for your voice villain. Yeah, great. I mean, with AI, we can still have Kevin Spacey voicing villains forever. Yeah, that’s true. That’s true. He kind of has a good villain voice, even if it’s not the greatest voiceover there. There’s always been something nefarious about his voice. Yeah. And the look in his eyes. That’s why he’s so great in the usual suspects.
Right? Because, oh, this guy’s complete scum. Right. But he’s kind of trying to hide it through most of the movie. And directed by Brian Singer. That’s a. Yeah, usual suspects. Pretty good movie watch, but of lots of interesting people. A little problematic. It’s also got a Baldwin brother in it that has since turned into a super Jesus freak. Right. In retrospect, Venicia del Toro, just making choices. No one told him before he spoke English, I think.
No, he spoke English fine. That was just a choice. Okay. No one told him to speak that way. That’s what he does. I mean, that’s why you hire Benicio for the weird energy. I might be thinking about Antonio Banderas, which I believe didn’t speak English until after, like, a couple. That is correct. That is correct. Yes, it did take a move because El Maria. No, he’s in the second one, I think Elmircha Rodriguez’s first film.
So El Maria, I think Desperado might be the first one he’s in. I don’t remember. That is definitely some 90s memory on the mind there. I mean, we’re in the middle of it, right? This is Bugs life. So this is true. That same little moment in time. That’s why we’re talking about it. So the obvious thing that they kind of halfway based us on, as you mentioned before you started recording, is the AsoP fable the grasshopper and the ant.
And you said you had a bit of a rant on that, so I guess now is the time for that. Maybe then we’ll open up to the bigger metaphors. Yeah. So the original story, grasshopper and the ant without just reciting the exact thing word for word. But the premise is that the grasshopper is futzing around all summer. He’s playing his violin. And this is kind of a nod to the grasshoppers that they can play their back legs and make noise.
So during the summer, they’re spending all this time making all this noise while the ants are like these industrious little workers that are constantly just building up food and building up the colony so that when winter approaches, the grasshopper doesn’t have any food and he goes to the ants and he’s begging for some food. And they basically tell him like, oh, you were so good at playing music during the summer, why don’t you just dance during the winter? And it’s kind of like, go ahead and die.
That was kind of the response. And the original asop fable really was like cold hearted ants just saying, no, you didn’t study and you didn’t do all of the prep work that we did, so you kind of deserve the parish. And over time, that was cited as when Christianity started to get a little bit of hold. This was one of those stories that was cited as like, well, Christians are taught to show mercy and be more welcoming.
And if you see someone having a rougher time, lift them up. But in Asop fable times, this was, I guess, more of the norm of just like, you reap what you sow and you’ve made your bed, now lie in it sort of mentality. And my rant on this is that the real premise was talking about artists versus people that weren’t artists. So if you were like a musician or if you were like a painter, there was sort of this disdain for what are you actually contributing to society? And if you run out of people to sort of hustle money out of, then you’re going to expect the people that have been working in the industry to somehow subsidize whatever that you’re lacking.
But, I mean, that was like this very old school way of thinking in ASoP’s fables. But it’s weird that Disney flips that on its head, because, again, the grasshopper originally was like this sympathetic musician. And if you go back into the 17 hundreds and the 18 hundreds, a lot of people were representing the grasshopper as, like, a straight up musician. A lot of times it would have been like a female.
They would show a female with a lear or with a guitar. And that was pretty much representative of this grasshopper motif from ASOP’s fables. And the premise, again, was like, oh, they would have her playing a guitar out in the middle of the snow, or they’d have a chick playing a guitar, and you would see a leaf falling by her feet. And that was all representative of this exact same story where the grasshopper, once the leaves start to fall, once that last leaf falls, that means there’s no more food to harvest, right.
So if you’ve played music and you’ve kind of dicked around the entire time, you’re kind of screwed at that. Mean that the premise of Disney taking the musician and turning the musician into the bad guy, that is now, like, forcing the ants to work for know it inverts the original lesson of Asop’s fables, which was like, think ahead, plan ahead, store up your food for the winter sort of deal.
And then it kind of assumes that the grasshopper, I guess, at some point was like, we’ll just force the ants to gather the food for us. But the idea is that when we don’t see the grasshoppers on screen in a bug’s life, they’re off making music like they’re the artist class, right? Like they’re painting and they’re contributing in some other way out in the world. So then when they come back, it’s like they’re utilizing the ants industrious nature to fulfill their needs so they can go back out and spread more artwork.
We don’t see that part of a bug’s life. We just see that they come in and they Kevin Spacey the whole place up, and they threaten to squish, like, literally, they threaten to stomp on their heads and squish them and kill. You know, we don’t see them doing any of the nice stuff that the original story kind of implied, and it’s just weird. That would have been the animators and the musicians and all the creatives.
They would have been that grasshopper. But now they’re kind of like, turning the musician and the artist into the bad guy here. So that’s part of the rant. Yeah. One just. This is a little bit of background, if this story is apocrypha or not, but it says, in 1994, the Pixar story department had a meeting where at a lunchtime meeting, they conceived this monsters, Inc. Finding Nemo and Wally all at one lunch.
I’m like, that’s pretty wild. But more close to what you’re saying. It says, andrew Stanton and Joe raft hit on the notion that in that story, the grasshopper could just take the bigger, you know, which, again, that’s completely missing the point of the fable. But that’s. This doesn’t claim to be that story. Right. And I don’t think that’s true either, though I don’t know if a grasshopper wants to mess around with even, like, five or six ants, let alone an entire colony.
Yeah. The very premise of this movie, I feel, is flawed. Well, I guess finish your rant and I’ll go on my interpretation. That’s kind of the full rant, but it’s essentially that they took what was the sympathetic character, because if you take a step back and you don’t look at it in terms of ASop’s fables, because there was another version of Aesop’s fables, too. He had a bunch of them, right.
And there was different interpretations and different variations of similar stories. One of them was a dung beetle that had a similar outcome, except the dung beetle actually stored up some of his dung. But then a rain comes and it washes the dung away. So even though he thought he was storing it up. So in that case, he does get helped out. And there’s other ancillary stories where the ants end up helping the grasshopper, or I think one of, like, the original story was a cicada.
It wasn’t even a grasshopper. And then there was another one where it turned from a grasshopper into, like, a dragonfly, I think a russian version. And in a lot of those other versions, they do end up helping the grasshopper at the end, because there’s a mutual understanding that, okay, if you come inside for the winter, but you have to play music for us, because we don’t get music and we don’t get artwork.
So now you have to trade what you’ve got in exchange for what we’ve got. So the way that the story really evolved was to show that there’s, like, a mutual benefit between this art class and the worker class, and that they weren’t necessarily at ODs with each other, and it wasn’t like one had to take advantage of the other. They actually could share both at the same time.
But this Disney adaptation of it, it completely destroys any possibility of showing that these two things can kind of work together, which is what was prompting me of, like, man, maybe Disney’s actively trying to prevent the bugs from collaborating against us, which I’m kind of on board with because it does terrify me. If grasshoppers and ants and cicadas all got together and they were know, let’s. Let’s try and make a move here.
I mean, they could make us uncomfortable, I would put it at least that. Yeah. What was the thought I was running on there? Oh, yeah. I was sitting there thinking, that flick’s bug posse, they are the artists in this movie. They’re outside of the whole grasshopper ant dynamic. The artists are something else in a bug’s life. Well, I guess so. They’re like in the circus, right? But they also show that it’s a hodgepodge, so there’s nothing that would prevent, like an ant and a grasshopper and whatever else from all being in that creative circus crowd and flies and everyone else.
I guess it’s like a mad Max landscape where, especially in the first movie, the city is not great, but it’s still a little bit like modern civilization. But then once you drive out a bit, all hell breaks loose, right? So ant islands way out in the bush or something with the toe cutter showing up every now and again. I’ve grown up around a lot of ants, and I would say I think I’ve seen ants eating grasshoppers pretty freaking often.
And in this entire movie, there’s really no concept of bugs eating other bugs, which is also similar to the note in Lion King, right? In Lion King, they eat bugs because they don’t want to admit know technically, everyone in the Lion King would be eating each other. Like, the lion would be eating the board and eating the meerkat. It would just be nuts all the way around. So it’s kind of remarkable that they’re all friends the same way that in this reality, in Bugs life, you’ve got these bugs that are, like, interacting where normally you put any of these bugs in the middle of an ant hill, they eat the bug.
And it’s wild that everyone’s a vegetarian in this movie, like, even the ants and everybody. And I guess that it works because I don’t think ants have to be omnivore, right? Is it even herbivore and carnivore if they’re just eating other bugs? That doesn’t count, right, because it’s not really meat. Yeah. Can you be vegan and eat bugs? I say probably not, but it’s a fine line. But the point being that here in this, like in Lion King, it’s completely acceptable to eat bugs.
They eat bugs left and right. They’re squishing on them. In a lot of Disney movies, they’re eating bugs to show that, oh, that person’s gross. Or they’re like an evil wizard because they just ate a bug. Or someone squishes a bug, it’s always acceptable, but then, bam, all of a sudden you’ve got a movie where the stars are all bugs. And now we’re going to pretend that they don’t eat each other, even though there’s multiple threats in here of getting splat or squished.
So the premise that bugs die and get squished is out there, but nobody talks about, like, hey, why don’t we just eat? We’re all starving, right? Hey, when the grasshoppers get here, here’s what we’re going to do. Eat them. Freaking eat them. That’s an infinitely more interesting version of a bug’s life. But for obvious reasons, they didn’t do it. Yeah, because all they do here is build a bird, right? What if they built, like, a trap? Like a real trap.
Eat them. They’re good for the winter. They’re going to be fat ants by come April. Because the threat is the bird is going to eat the grasshoppers, right? But in reality, ants freaking eat grasshoppers. Ants eat other ants, cats. Something that, see, I know Esop’s fable, but I guess that’s not one that really stuck with me that much. I wasn’t thinking about that until I looked at the wiki.
Having watched the movie, watching the movie, I was mostly thinking, like, the bourgeoisie classes, the grasshoppers. Maybe like you’re saying you look at the artists as being diletons and just running around and making art and stealing your money or whatever, right? With the ants or the working class, the proletariat class. I don’t know if we assume that the grasshoppers are still the artist class, which they’re kind of not, but if we just assume they are because of a blend between the original ASOP and all the original stories and this Disney one, there is something interesting in the premise that the artists of our culture become these tyrants that rule all of us.
But all the tax money isn’t going to building up like a military industrial complex. It’s just getting built up for an entertainment industrial complex. Right. It’s all just about funding art. But it’s under duress. They’re threatening your life if you don’t raise money for them to go and do artwork. That’s where I’m wondering if that’s part of the intentional moving of the artistic qualities to the other bugs and flick.
I mean, he’s an inventor. That’s not art. Invention is art. Yes. The other ants need, like, an emergency director when a leave falls in their path, whereas flick is building, like, insane like, no other ant seems to have the intellectual fortitude of flick for some reason. He was like the ant. Einstein, I guess. Exactly. I mean, I guess they make the queen, the princess seem, like, not dumb.
I don’t know. That seems really funny when the ants can’t figure out how to go around the leaf, but that really makes it seem, well, stupid. Why do we even care what happens to them? They can’t figure out what to do with a leaf. They’re flat. If we’re starting to break down the logic of the intellectual differences between the characters. But, yeah, the gap between flick and the guy that can’t figure out how to get around the leaf when it falls is so wide that it kind of takes a little bit of the joke out of the sails.
Right? Again, I think it was like, I get the whole writer’s roommate. That’s a great joke. Yes, for sure. They animated. They put it in. But, yeah, when you kind of do it logically, it falls apart. Also, watching our gaggle of other bugs in this, since we just watched it a few weeks ago, I couldn’t help but also think of James and the giant peach and their collection of bug friends.
Yeah, the ladybug in particular, it almost had some similar looks to mean, you know, these are both satellites of Disney. Harry Selznick had his own studio and Pixar is very much its own studio at this point. So I don’t know if that was a cross pollination thing, but bugs pollinating. I did just have a general comparison. I wonder if they, like you were saying the ladybug. There seems only one way to do a ladybug, which is this way.
So if you’re trying to make a kids comedy and this ladybug in Bugs life that I guess was voiced by Dennis Leary, I totally didn’t put that together when I was watching it at first. It makes what you could call that one joke where I guess being the butt of a joke was kind of like the height of juvenile comedy in the that chick dressed or like a guy dresses up like a girl or a girl dresses up like a guy.
And then the big reveals. That’s the huge was. Ironically, there was a movie called ladybugs that I think had Rodney Dangerfield in it and someone else. It was about a really bad soccer team. And then he just has all, a bunch of boys dress up like girls and just dominate girls soccer. And that’s the whole premise of the movie. Right. But that’s no longer sort of like a funny premise for a movie, for mistaken gender identity.
But this is kind of, like, still peak 90s because the whole joke, which I still think is hilarious, it was still funny, is that they roll up on this ladybug and they’re, like, hitting on the ladybug. And then you find out it’s got Denis Leary’s voice, and it’s like, what? Just cause I’m a ladybug means I’m a lady. But I don’t know. I loved it. It was hilarious.
And as, like, a completely different tangent, the look of that ladybug has this weird retro 50s kind of style to it that almost looks like it came out of, like, a Bioshock video game. Yeah, I had one more story comparison. Again, I didn’t think of the grasshopper in the end at all. The other one I was definitely thinking about was three amigos. That might have been more intentional in this movie.
Go on. Three amigos. I have. Yeah. Okay. Martin. Chevy Chase. Right. It’s just Martin short. Right. This just looks at it from the opposite view. Three amigos. We start with our actors getting booted out of town, where in this one, we start with flick from know aggrieved. So. But sort of thing. They accidentally hire actors who they think are heroes. The actors think they’re doing a show. They screw up, they leave in disgrace.
They come back. Hopper is El Guapo. Got to say El Guapo. Of course, that aspect of this particular story in Bug’s life, I thought was kind of like one of the weaker ones. The way that they present it is that he’s explaining it to the two roly polys. And I guess they don’t understand anything. They don’t really explain why, again, why there’s, like, gaps in sort of mental fortitude between the bug classes.
But there’s, like, this whole sort of hierarchy of which ones are smart and which ones are dumb, I assume. Yeah, but I like that movie. As a kid, I could definitely see them applying that a bit from here. It’s just, I was like, that’s literally the plot of three amigos kind of overlaid into this movie. So kind of backward style. And this movie, too, I guess, going with themes, is often cited in conspiracy communities, probably just for one or two very specific lines.
But this whole premise that the grasshoppers are very few and that as long as they keep up this facade that the ants can’t do anything about it. Because all the grasshoppers kind of know that if the ants were to rise up against them, then just like you were know it’s like proletariat and the bourgeoisie and all of that. But part of me is like, is this movie pushing communist values? Or is it put know? Is this sort of like a marxist turn of Disney? Like, after Disney’s in the ground, they’re like, let’s see if we can make this dude roll over.
And they’re, let’s. Let’s put some communist manifesto in here. Or is it just like a straight up, generic version of if we band together? But as a kid, I’m just wondering, do you think a substitute teacher puts this onto the classroom, and the kids get the wrong idea, and they’re like, wait a minute. The substitute is a grasshopper, and we’re the ants get them? Well, obviously, I’m fully on the this is a communist allegory sort of thing.
So the working class is our friends, and the proletariat is small, and they treat us badly, which. It’s also a monarchy. Yeah, okay, that’s true. Right? Because they’ve got some kind of a lineage, and the queen and the princess essentially, are, like, overseeing everything. Whenever I see that, maybe I read way too deep into things, but I see a queen and I see a princess, and I see them overlooking the rest of the ant colony doing their work.
Then there’s this implication that if you were to take a break or cause a gap in the line and the queen starts freaking out, if she keeps freaking out and you don’t solve the problem, does she turn into the queen of hearts? And now all of a sudden, it’s like, off with your head? Because that’s kind of the implication I get whenever I see royalty overlooking the working class.
It’s usually because there’s an implied coercive threat. See, I think that sort of thing is kind of Disney shorthand. I feel like it barely messes the metaphor. Like you said, we never see the bad side. We just. We need to have faces. And one problem with telling a soviet friendly story, I’m going to specifically soviet it up here, is it’s kind of hard to have distinguished characters. That’s the whole thing.
When you watch Eisenstein’s films, especially the early ones, there’s no characters because they can’t have an individualist in these movies. Later on, he does Ivan the terrible, Alexander Nevsky. He gets away with it by using historical figures. I guess that’s what you could do in Soviet Russia. If it’s a historical figure, you can make them a little more individual. But if you watch balship, Potemkin or October, it doesn’t have characters.
Yeah, there was a bunch of cartoons that the Soviets put out. That was trying to combat western cartoons. And they did. They lacked a lot of that soul. Because they weren’t really allowed to be boisterous or have very contradictive opinions. It’s interesting to see. You can tell that it’s missing some vital element. Even though all the animation parts are there. And if you want to draw that Eisenstein line all the way in the 40s, he was allowed to go to Hollywood and never really made a movie there.
But took a film crew to Mexico. And they’ve reconstructed, I think it’s called Viva Mexico. So it’s Eisenstein, but it’s all Mexican, kind of like, way rural mexican imagery. And it’s pretty trippy. Fascinating movie, even in a reconstituted form. But again, he goes back to not really having characters. So it’s kind of like, I guess, being in the states and being in Mexico, he was like, well, I have to kind of pretend to toe the line a little bit.
By going back to my older style of filmmaking. And putting it on a different up. I had to look this up. But eating bugs is not vegan. Okay? Which makes sense. But, yeah, that’s a whole other rabbit hole. But it makes me wonder, like, where’s the line? At what point can you eat a. You could be a vegetarian. You could be a vegetarian and eat an ant. Because some vegetarians will eat fish, right? So if you eat fish, you can eat a bug.
So I got a bunch of just, like, random one off notes here. But Hopper, who is Kevin Spacey, the villain, also has one eye, which is just one of those occult tropes that you constantly see. The evil bad guy tends to be missing one of his eyes. And that’s sort of a nod to he’s out of balance. Like, he doesn’t have the full yin and yang. Which probably is what typically makes them evil, is that lack of being able to see clearly.
That his brother said that he promised their mom that he wouldn’t kill him on her deathbed. Which is pretty specific. Where, I don’t know, do grasshoppers eat other grasshoppers? I guess they would if they really needed to, but they’re hungry. I see ants eating grasshoppers more than grasshoppers eating grasshoppers. But that’s implied that the grasshoppers are also cannibalistic in here. Although I wish they would just pulled those strings a little bit more.
They put it out there on the table to make the implication but then all of a sudden, that disappears after that one phrase is met. I don’t know if they’re starving and he was willing to eat his brother out of spite, then, I don’t know. The grasshoppers could just pick, like, the weakest one, or whoever doesn’t play music the best. They just eat that guy. Also, the ants have this plan of, like, we’ll find bigger bugs to fight the grasshoppers.
And that makes me think that might work over a few iterations. But as you scale that up, it turns into that issue where always sunny, where you get, like, a mouse in the wall. So you get a cat, and you put a cat in the wall, but then the cat gets stuck in the wall after it eats the mouse, and it just turned. Like, at what point do you stop putting animals in your walls? Because you can just basically scale that up forever.
There’s also a lot of implications. That flick is going to die after he leaves the colony. He’s either going to starve to death or he’s going to get killed by another bug or squished. And I think, like, two or three people say that to him. They tell him he’s going on a suicide mission. One of the ants actually says, like, my dad says, you’re going to die. And they all kind of laugh about it.
I thought that was kind of very interesting because not always does a Disney movie make the implicit statement of, like, you’re going to die and then laugh about it. So it stood out to me as interesting. Maybe just because it’s Pixar, they’re allowed to do that. That was the other thing where I was drawing little communism lines in it, because that’s kind of the current North Korea thing where they’re trying to tell their people, this is the best place in the world.
We have it good. Everybody wants what we have and their enemies, right? So if you left our country, you would just fall apart. And, yes, maybe this colony in bugs life is North Korea. I almost want to rewatch it with that as the premise here. So it says more juchi. I should quit talking about the Soviets. Talk about Juchi, because then you do basically have a monarchy, right? There’s a direct reference to a poopoo platter in this movie being actual poopoo, and the flies eat it.
That one just got me. I felt like that level of humor just still speaks to me even later on in life because, man, I remember in the 90s going to chinese restaurants and ordering poopoo bladders, and it was always funny because they always talking about poop. Yes. I didn’t like seeing it on screen, though. But that’s just me. Yeah, that’s another first. I don’t think there’s been any other Disney movie where they’ve animated a character eating feces.
I also like how the fruit flies are like, we’re going to be dead by tomorrow. Should we actually watch this? Know. And they’re throwing fruit at the stage, which is kind of the fruit flies. I thought that was pretty clever. And I really like the idea that the flea circus is run by like a PT Barnum character. And they are kind of scamming the audience and just trying to get them to stay in the seats like classic Pt Barnum would do.
And I don’t know, man. I can go on a full hour or plus rant just on PT Barnum because he’s the one that said there’s a sucker born every minute. I think it is. He’s got a bunch of really amazing quotes out there and he’s kind of like, when it comes to conspiracy theories and occultism, I think he doesn’t get his proper due praise because he kind of instilled magical thinking into american culture in a very real, like, even when you think about Wild Bill Hickok and I can’t remember all the different people that he made.
Buffalo Bill. I think he made Buffalo Bill like this famous guy that was larger than life and the whole premise of superheroes and these crazy over the top protagonists and movie stars. PG Bartom was there, I think, on the ground, like before celebrities were even really celebrities. He was kind of creating that. He was like, I’m thinking, I guess that is the start of the prominent pop culture figure because before that, what do you have? I mean, I don’t know what there might have been.
Romans had probably like star gladiators and stuff, but especially in America, it would just be like political leaders, I guess. I don’t know. But even a star gladiator is not necessarily like putting on a show, right? I mean, they are, but they’re also straight up killing people and surviving from it. But PT Barnum would take the mundane and make it seem way over the top and lie about it on purpose.
Intentionally getting the asses and seats. That was his whole thing. But that is such a uniquely american feeling way of doing it. It was like the snake oil, but the snake oil was entertainment instead of being actual snake oil. And I don’t know, man, he is just like such a uniquely american brainwashing, mind programming personality that in my mind. Mkultra starts with Pt Barnum. It doesn’t start with the USS in World War II.
It might be interesting to really key that in with the Chicago World’s Fair as well, because that seems like another kind of ground zero for american pop culture, which I guess maybe it was Buffalo Bill there. Maybe I don’t remember that. You do have H. H. Holmes there. That’s always fun for the conspiracy theory guys, but World Fair is a great example. World Fair is a really good one, because that, too, is where they would show off all of the new inventions.
But it was like going to any other convention, right? They hype up all the good stuff. It’s almost like QVC infomercials. So they don’t show you it breaking down or like, taking out of the dishwasher. And it’s cracked and broken. They don’t show that part of it. Yeah, I guess that’s one disappointing thing about bugs life. You only see a little bit of the bug city, and you’re like, that’s the cool part.
It’s kind of like how I’ve only seen, like, the first 30 minutes of the Hunger Games movie, because once they left the city, I got bored. I was like, I want to see that city. Yeah, I wish bugs life was more like taking place on the side of someone’s house and going inside the house. That would have been infinitely more interesting. But maybe they were trying to distance themselves from Toy Story, which takes.
Yeah, that would have felt too. It’s like, here’s another part of the house with different sentient creatures, and then you’re going to wonder where the humans are. So I guess this gave them a reason to just not have a human show up at any point in the whole movie. I guess on the grand Pixar timeline that people like to make, a bug’s life might actually be, like, post apocalypse as far as humans are concerned.
Or maybe they’ve already left for the stars and the Wally ship. I don’t know. And there’s one other line in here which I do think comes up in conspiracy theories, a lot like this movie in particular. They’ll screenshot it, and they’ll be like, see this movie? Got it right. Or here’s Disney’s predictive programming. But even after the grasshoppers make a new deal and the ants are like, fine, we’ll still harvest you some food.
We’ll double down or whatever. There’s two aspects. One is that Kevin Spacey or Hopper basically is like, okay, now we’ve got food and everything’s good. But there’s that one ant that talked back and he just makes that his ultimate goal is to punish that ant, to talk back. But then there’s another quote that they say, and the quote is that it’s not about food, it’s about keeping these ants in line.
And I guess that’s like that illuminati sort of stance, right? Like the new world order where you’ve got these elites that are just like, ha ha. Even though we already control the economy and we already control all of industry, now we just want to watch them squirm just for our own morbid entertainment at this point. So they really assign this beyond the level of just the grasshoppers kind of being mean and taking their lunch money.
Now it’s like they’re just going to be nasty and they even say they’re going to kill the queen even after they get what they were coming for. So it was like, we’re going to kill them anyways. There’s one more thing that I had while I’m looking for. I’ll just say that one thing I did like how they scaled the movie. Like, the water droplets are extremely large. Apparently they built like a little Lego car and put a camera on it and would, like, run it through the grass to see how they should animate it.
So that’s cool. That’s cool. Technical stuff. The movie election came out a year after a bug’s life. Have you seen election? Who was in it? Matthew Broadwick. Yeah, definitely. What’s her name? Reese Witherspoon. Yes. Thank you. Very good movie. But Reese Witherspoon’s character’s name is Tracy Flick. And apparently they chose that because when she has her campaign buttons at the high school, it says pick flick, and from a distance it looks like an f bomb.
So I was just sitting there wondering. I was having those lion King sex in the air dust thoughts and being just like, you don’t see Flick’s name in this, but that just occurred to me probably because election came out a year after this image. Makes me think of mushroom harvest thing, where the golden rule is flick before you pick. Okay, there we go. That sounds fun, though. Are those good mushrooms? Okay, we’ll say lion’s main.
There you go. Anyway, I think I just spat out everything I need to say. I think you two are coming in. How much are we going to say about bugs life and. Well, looking at the timer, we had a fair amount to say. Yeah, this is a cult conspiracy talk, and this is one of the ones that gets brought up the most just because of this grasshopper ant dynamic where they’re like, they know that they’re kind of manipulating these ants into thinking that they have to work for them.
But this movie also sort of flips the Disney proxy on its head. Again. That’s two in a row, man. I feel like they’re dodging and they’re weaving here. They’re trying to throw us off the scent a little bit because first it was mulan. Right. And Mulan didn’t have the Disney proxy, which is where in the first five to ten minutes of the movie, we have a young child separated from their parent, or they’re like a legal guardian, some kind.
Well, Mulan, she volunteers to leave, and she’s also somewhat of an adult. She almost feels like she’s later in know she’s not like a young kid that gets left along. And in this one, it’s kind of ambiguous as to what Flick’s age is. But Flick kind of also appears to be old enough to kind of be by himself or live by himself. He’s not a child. Yeah, he doesn’t seem to have a family at all.
He obviously is able to run his own life to some degree. Like, in human terms, I would assume he’s like 20 something and there might even be something to it where I don’t know if it’s like I’m just expecting that Disney proxy to exist and it’s just not happening, or maybe that would have made this movie that much more better and engaging. If Flick was like a young kid inventor and he gets kidnapped or he gets separated from his parents and he has to save the colony.
I don’t know. I feel like it might have actually added an extra layer that it was kind of missing here. Yeah. I’m having just a quick look at our next movie, which is Doug’s first movie, which I guess does not break. Does Doug have a proper family? He does, yeah. I am actually somewhat of a Doug expert. I’ve got a Bluffington beats on vinyl behind. Like, I’m an absolute Doug fanatic.
So I’m kind of excited about this. Although Doug’s first movie was after Doug got sold from Nickelodeon to slash Disney. So this movie is actually the Disney version of the the Nick. There was never a Nickelodeon Doug movie, although this is the closest we ever got to a Nickelodeon Doug movie. And after this came out, Doug went like full blown new Doug. So this is like me watching the Mighty Morphins Power Ranger movie without watching any of the TV show.
As I did, I guess so. I guess you could sort of put it that way. Yeah. Although the difference between Nickelodeon Doug and Disney Doug is, like, completely changes in my mind. Although, I don’t know, in retrospect, someone that has no affinity towards either one. If you saw, like, an old Doug and then you saw, and they actually called it, like, the new Doug or the new Adventures of Doug, I don’t know if everyone would pick up on the stark difference.
I’ll be coming in completely cold, so that should make it for a good soundboard. Sometimes they say podcasting is good when one person can explain it to the other, so we can do that. And I’m not going to go and brush up on Doug, although I did start a new series that I hope to use to watch Doug and rugrats at some point. That’s like my ultimate. I’ll start.
I’ll start my plug out first. But it’s a Saturday morning conspiracy. The first one was on he man. The second one’s going to be on Gem and the holograms. But, yeah, like said, like, the ultimate goal is so that I can just review Doug and point out all the occultism of Doug at some point, because technically, Nickelodeon Doug doesn’t come up in Disney, so it wouldn’t fit into the Occult Disney podcast.
I feel like Jim never quite truly was outrageous, but whatever. So, Jim, the theme on gem is actually kind of wild because gem represents two topical things. One of it is the advent of AI. And AI generated music and visuals because that’s essentially what Gem had. Jim had this huge mainframe called synergy, which was an like, avatar that could generate any music and any visuals and project that onto Gem.
That was why they were the holograms, because synergy was generating this holographic reality and projecting it. And it kind of feels like sora and suno and all of the AI tools coming out that are being used to create entertainment. And then Jem also has a lot of occult nods because she’s got this seven pointed star earrings that glow up, and it’s a whole thing with the seven Pleiades, and it’s actually way deeper than you might expect.
Yeah, last time I saw that show was, what, 1987 or something? So I probably wasn’t picking up on any of that at the time. And there’s a live action movie, which isn’t great, and they’ve revamped it into a comic book series, and the comic book series isn’t bad. Okay. Did you give folks your website and all that? That was just the Saturday morning conspiracy. Yeah, paranoidamerican. com. That’s where you can find all my other stuff, a bunch of different comic books and stickers and coloring books.
And I’ve also got a podcast called the Paranoid American Podcast. So if you’re listening to this now here on the Occult Disney podcast, just go ahead and do a little search for paranoid American. And you can see some wild interviews that I’ve got with people on there. And we do a bunch of occult book reviews. And yeah, some of them are not as friendly as the things we get into here.
It gets a little bit darker and scarier and grittier, but this is my nice little retreat into the world of animation. Yeah. And then I roll off into the world of movies and TV shows. For the most part. I do podcast support. Patreon at Podcastio Podcastius. I talk about really good and really bad movies. We’re just doing the country bears now on films and filth. The Citizen Camp podcasting, the Twilight Zone on time enough.
Podcast and podcast 1999, where we look at the series space 1999. Okay, folks, so pop in next time and you’ll get a Doug expert and a Doug a fight talking about Doug’s first movie, killers. Killers. We got all your favorite conspiracies, all the sticker sheets, paranoid american stickers. They’ll make you smiling, snicker, false friends and secret society. All of these and more sticker sheets. Explore the unique with paranoid american sticker sheets.
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