➡ This is a discussion from the Occult Disney Podcast about the similarities between the movies “Madagascar” and “The Wild”. The hosts, Matt and Thomas, debate which movie is better and discuss the possibility of corporate espionage influencing the plot similarities. They also critique the 3D animation quality of “The Wild”, comparing it to PlayStation 3 graphics. The conversation also touches on their personal experiences with finding and watching these movies.
➡ The text discusses a movie that was a commercial and critical failure, despite being distributed by Disney. The film was produced by lesser-known companies and featured a voice cast of well-known celebrities, but none of their performances stood out. The movie made a small profit but lost money when marketing costs were considered. The director, Steve Spaz Williams, hasn’t directed much since this film.
➡ The text discusses a movie that includes a lot of humor, some of which feels forced or out of place. The movie also has a lot of repeated phrases and themes, such as finding one’s roar. The author notes that the movie seems to be trying hard to be entertaining, but often falls short. Despite this, the movie does have some redeeming qualities, such as its soundtrack and special effects.
➡ The text is a conversation about the potential of smell in media, like movies or theme parks, to create a more immersive experience. The speakers discuss their personal experiences with unique smells, such as durian fruit and the scent of various cities. They also touch on the idea of using scent in movies, like a specific wood smell for Pinocchio, and how these scents could trigger memories later in life. Lastly, they discuss the portrayal of humans and the environment in Disney movies.
➡ The text discusses the evolution of humor in Disney movies, comparing it to the humor in Looney Tunes. It notes that Disney’s humor has shifted from being based on extreme versions of the human condition to a more sitcom-style humor. The text also discusses the concept of running away as portrayed in Disney movies, suggesting that these films may unintentionally encourage this behavior. Lastly, it touches on the differences between living in captivity and in the wild, as well as cultural differences in behavior at zoos.
➡ The text discusses the cultural differences in how Disney movies are perceived, particularly in Japan, where the focus is more on the characters’ cuteness rather than their backstory. It also talks about the heavy use of product placement in movies, specifically in Disney’s ‘The Wild’, and speculates on the financial benefits for Disney. The text further discusses the difficulty in searching for the movie due to its generic title and ends with a critique of the movie’s plot, which involves a cult of wildebeests planning to sacrifice a lion to fulfill a prophecy.
➡ The text discusses a movie featuring a wildebeest cult and a prophecy. The movie’s plot involves a lion covered in chameleons for invisibility, attempting to save a koala. The text also mentions a few inconsistencies and plot armor in the movie, and compares it to the game Echo the Dolphin.
➡ The text discusses a game based on MK Ultra, which becomes more interesting when you understand its themes of psychedelics and mind control. It also talks about a movie featuring a koala character, possibly representing a cult leader, and a ritual that may symbolize an inversion of reality. The text questions whether the financial failure of a project means the magic ritual it represents also failed. It ends by discussing the concept of nested stories or metaphors in movies, using the example of a lion’s roar in a film.
➡ The text discusses the concept of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) using the example of layered storytelling. It explains how our brains remember the outer layers of a story, like Snow White’s tale, but often forget the inner layers. The text also touches on the idea of subconscious messaging, using the example of a comic book mentioned within a story. Lastly, it discusses the portrayal of animals in Disney movies, suggesting that they are often shown as non-violent in the presence of humans.
➡ This text is a conversation about various topics, including folklore about alligators in sewers, the design of dung beetles in a movie, and the upcoming discussion on the movie “Cars”. It also mentions the speaker’s past work at Disney, the concept of an online virtual world themed around cars, and the popularity of Club Penguin. The conversation ends with a plug for a comic book and music available on a website.

Ask about Illuminati. Says the chart in the yuppie ducks. Is it Disney mind control? Is this MK Ultra Deluxe? Occult Disney? Go wish upon a star. A co Disney Channel ball to Jafar. Oh, call Disney Pill Grand Pinocchio. Oh, Cold Disney as above, so below. Oh, Co Disney. Please enjoy the show. Hello, welcome to the Occult Disney Podcast, where we go looking for mice among all the wildebeests of the wild. Today’s movie, of course, is Madagascar. I mean, the Lion King, maybe Finding Nemo. All these were thrown at the movie at the time as, like, didn’t we already do this? It is the wild.

Hi, this is Matt here. Oh, there’s Thomas. How’s it going? Let’s get wild. Yeah. Is it. That’s a song in here, isn’t it? Okay, the songs date this movie to a great extent. I thought these are, like, only songs that would be in a movie in 2006. I don’t know if you felt that way or not, but I did. Yeah, it kind of annoyed me a little bit, but I could see past that. I transcended how horrible the soundtrack was. Oh, did you know this movie existed before it came up on our list? Kind of 20% of it existed, I think.

But I saw Madagascar now that I. I know that now that I’ve seen this one, because I was watching it and it was all new to me, but I was like, I swear that I’ve seen this movie. So afterwards, I had to look it up to make sure I wasn’t going crazy. And I looked at the Wikipedia article for the Wild, and sure enough, it said that a lot of people criticize it for just straight up ripping off Madagascar. But then I also found a crazy conspiracy Reddit thread that went way down a rabbit hole. I spent more time than I should have that said.

No, no, no. Madagascar was using corporate espionage to steal the plot of the Wild and then make that better. I don’t know what to believe. I do know that I saw Madagascar. That’s pretty much all I know. Yeah, Madagascar played a fair amount in my house, like, 10 years ago. Again, that’s what my daughter liked. The first one is okay. The second one, I think we watched, like, twice. So I guess it wasn’t. We like the third one a lot. That’s where they go to Europe and join the circus. So that one, I. I actually will stand behind the third Madagascar being pretty good.

Well, where does Madagascar compare to the Wild? It depends on. I think I have to give it to Madagascar in the end. I. I mean, Neither of them. Neither. That required some thinking. Yeah, it’s been a 10 year gap since I bothered to watch Madagascar. Right. I’m. Yeah, I’m just trying to legitimately think like, like Madagascar isn’t that great, right? The Wild, you know, spoiler isn’t that great. So I’m just like, which one actually is better? But I mean, it’s all these movie pairings. Bugs, life, ants. We’ve already talked about the movie pairs before. You know, Deep Impact, Armageddon, all those sorts of things.

You always get movies that are similar around the same time. Ants being the case where it was kind of corporate sabotage and revenge because Katzenberg was like, I’m gonna try and kneecap, you know, Disney’s golden boy, Pixar. It does seem like these movies weren’t just coincidentally made about the exact same premise where animals escape from the Central Park Zoo and essentially end up in the actual jungle. That’s the premise of both movies. They go to Africa. In this one, like mainland Africa, I think. I don’t know. Is that an island? It’s like they, at the end of the movie, like up the wilds, disappeared.

I’m like, what? That’s like one jungle area. There’s got to be more than that. I am wondering if we’re the first people to ever watch this movie. I know we’re not, but you found earlier reviews, but it’s just so not a real thing. So this is one of those movies I couldn’t find, like, I could not find this on the seven seas or anything. I did remember I went to a video store yesterday to get this. I remembered seeing it previously viewed several months ago and at the time being like, I don’t want to spend money on the C list Disney movie.

But here, here, here, we’ve done it. It was a three for thousand yen. So I also got the thing, which I didn’t have on Blu ray. And I got Amelie, the, the French movie, although I don’t think it has English because I live in Japan. I feel like part of you enjoys the hunt of finding the movies out in the wild. Yeah, yeah. No, I’m very excited to have found this one in the wild. Actually, that’s. It’s Geo. I. I was saying Geo and my wife was like, what’s Geo? And you have to pronounce it Gio or.

Or Japanese. Folks don’t understand it. But yeah, I basically went. I basically went into a blockbuster yesterday just to blow everyone’s minds. And 2024 and someone was like, oh my God. They actually bought the Wild. Someone actually purchased the movie. And maybe your name’s on a list. Does Japan care about that kind of stuff? Oh, no way, man. I, I, I can wear that Tigger suit I wore a few weeks ago, like out in public. People go to Disneyland dressed like that. You know, guys have, you know, like, cute little things on their bags. You can get away with buying the Wild.

Okay, okay. You know, let’s talk about weird pornography in Japan. If you gotta get real weird with that before they’ll put you on a list, you know. Well, what did you think about the, like, the 3D of this movie? Let’s get into some of, like, the technical stuff before we start breaking down, getting all Colton off on a million tangents. It felt like a demo that had potential, but was still a demo. That’s kind of how I read it, as I agree with that. I, there was one thing that caught me off guard is that there was a Siskel and Ebert review, and I believe that Roger ebert gave it 3 out of 4, and he cited that the 3D was so good that it was triggering the uncanny valley for him.

Which I guess watching it now, it seems like maybe the bar was a little bit low for Roger Ebert and uncanny valley. He also wore pretty thick Coke bottle glasses. Yeah. Yes, I, I wrote that. Is this like kind of a 2.5D going on here? So that, that was my note about it. Sometimes it was cool. Like, I, I, there were the sequence where he’s telling a story at the beginning about the wildebeest. I thought that was actually kind of cool. And the sequence that’s showing them travel, I thought that was actually like kind of a cool mix of some 2D stuff and some 3D stuff.

I think my rating scale now, maybe I need to come with a little animatic or something or a little overlay. But with all of the 3D rendered movies that we’re gonna end up watching, I based them on the generation of PlayStation. So this one, to me was PS3 slash PS4 in some areas. That’s kind of the rating that I would give this one. Oh, you’re bumping up to four. Okay. I’m firmly in three territory. I would have been firmly in three, except the hippo in particular was real. I don’t know why the hippo looked so good compared to all of the other animals, but it did have a much better rendering and shading and all that stuff.

But everything looked like the hippo would be a solid PS4. So is there a PS3 and a half. That was before they did like. Right. But there was. There was a PS3 and then there was a PS4 and then a PS4 Pro, and then a PS5 and now a PS5 Pro. So technically there are. There’s a four and a half and a five and a half coming. You could sign line to Vita if you want, I guess. Okay, I think we’re past the beat at this point, so let’s. Let’s just. PS3 is roughly where the wild’s at in terms of 3D.

It is interesting. I’ve never owned a PlayStation, but yeah, that makes perfect. That rating system still makes perfect sense to me. I still know what level all of those games are at. So just out of curiosity, I guess the best CG we’ve gotten so far is Nemo. I. I guess where would you put Nemo on a. On a PlayStation scale? The Nemo? Maybe PS4. Definitely not Pro. Definitely not PS4 Pro. And this is also real time. And there’s a lot of fact that it’s not a perfect scale. Right. Because when one of these consoles comes out, originally the games only look so good.

But then after it’s been out for three or four years and people have developed all the shaders and the engines and optimizations and tricks, now all of a sudden they look damn good compared to the first wave. So. But yeah, maybe. Maybe the same as the Wild esque. Yeah. And. And I guess one thing here it is. It is a different process at work. This is not made. This is another one like Valiant that is distributed by Disney but not made by Disney. The names on it are Hoity Boy Pictures, Sir Zip Productions, and Contra Film.

The only one that has a wiki link is Contra Film and that links to a man named Bo Flynn. So I’m not quite sure. And he seems to be the rocks producer, Dwayne Johnson’s producer. So I don’t really know what to make of that. But that, that’s. That’s, yeah, not made by Disney, but it is an American Canadian film this time. It says America slash Canada. But yeah, there’s like no production information here like how it came about or anything like that. It’s just. It was a critical and commercial failure. So yeah, no one liked it.

And this was one of those examples where it technically made more than it cost to produce. But those don’t usually include all the marketing and all that stuff. So I forgot what it was. Was it like 4 made 80 on 40 or it made like 100 on 80? No, no, the production it cost 80 to make and it made 100. So that’s massive flop once you factor that in. Yeah. So this movie lost money. I guess that’s why we did not see more films from the Oidi Toys that Sir Zip, Contra Film Productions, whatever that means.

And then yeah, we, we have to. Okay. The director is Canadian. Sorry for the Brit crowd, but his name is Steve Spaz Williams. Did anything else? Oh, he worked on the T2, the T 1000 and T2. That’s kind of cool. Okay. But that’s not directing anything, is it? He makes commercials now. So this is, this was his big time in the sun, it looks like for directing a movie. Sorry, Sorry to hear that guy, you know, he, he finished it. That’s nice. Some people don’t finish what they started. Where this I, I, Here we go. My.

I will give this to the Wild. It is a finished movie. Correct. And it didn’t feel like it was pulled in a million directions either. Yeah, I guess it did. Yeah. And you know, 82 minutes. I can live with that. Although I did have to break it up into two because I started falling asleep last night. But, you know, that’s, that’s what happens. I got the Blu Ray at the last second. This one, I had no problems watching it at like one and one and a half speed at all. So that, that definitely helps. Oh, I did have to watch.

Since I bought the Blu Ray, I did have to watch this at its proper speed. So yeah, that, that happened. I spent the full 82 minutes with this movie. Well, 79. I didn’t watch all the credits. Let’s see what I’m rocking through. Yeah, I, I don’t have so much of the stuff I usually have production wise. I guess we got the voice cast, which is maybe it. I feel like this is like exhibit A for maybe like celebrity voice casts are kind of a dumb idea. Did you catch all the voices in here? I saw on the IMDb briefly, but none of them really stood out as being really perfect.

It was all well known names. I recognized pretty much every single name that was in it. But I don’t think that there was any breakout stars except for the Snake. And I’m spacing on his name. I got the list here. The Snake was Richard Kind. Who is we? Yeah, Sitcom man. You’ve seen him at a bunch of sitcoms. Mad about you, Spin City. The only thing that I was slightly excited to watch this movie about is as an ardent Trekkie, it did have William Shatner doing a voice, so. And to my Knowledge. That’s the only time he’s done voice work in a movie.

I mean, he’s got his albums. You’ve listened to the Transformed Man? I, I not, I’m not going to assume you’ve listened to that, but have you listened to the Transformed Man? I’m not sure about the whole album. I do remember he had an actual music video, but this was how to be 10 or 15 or more years ago. Oh, this is from the late. I mean, yeah, he did it. Rocket Man Rock. Yeah, yeah, okay. In the 60s, he did an album like, I think he was still making Star Trek or just finished it at the time.

And it’s basically like Hollywood kind of lounge instrumentals of popular songs and stuff. And he’s just doing spoken word. He’s not really singing them. So the Notorious1 is Mr. Tambourine man, where he just screams Mr. Tambourine man at the end of the song in the same voice he would scream Khan in Star Trek, too. How the song ends. So you cannot tell if it’s a joke or not. So I, I, that’s something you can find on YouTube now, you know, in the 90s, I’m like, yeah, you can buy the CD, but you should not buy the Transformed van.

It’s, it’s not. But you should experience the Transformed man at some point. So. And I thought Shatner, actually, I was like, why didn’t he do more voice acting? He seems like a guy that should be doing voice acting. He has a distinctive voice. It’s, you know, weird intonation that. That works. Samson, the main lion was Kiefer Sutherland. I’m like, I don’t know why he’s voice acting. He just sounds pissed the entire time. Yeah, not great. And, you know, Shatner is an interesting case because I follow him on Twitter and I feel like, or, sorry, X, I didn’t mean to dead name you.

And I feel that he’s doing the exact same thing where I can’t tell if it’s the William Shatner character that’s acting this way or it’s the actual William Shatner that’s really like that. But it just, it seems so on Brand. I don’t, I really have no idea what to think about it. But any also has had a comment. I think it’s even his description. He says, I will not do podcasts or, like, don’t ever ask me about podcasts. And for someone that has such a recognizable voice, it’s kind of insane that he doesn’t have an ongoing podcast or that he’s not guesting on other people’s.

Maybe the Wild turned him off of just doing voice, you know, that or just having so much money that you absolutely don’t have to do anything that even feels like a slight convenience. Anything that you don’t absolutely want to do. Which makes me wonder, why did he do the Wild? Out of all the thing, all of the, the, the barriers and the, you know, the, the quality checks that I guess he’s got, he’s got a, a high price to enter. But the Wild was able to make that happen. Maybe it’s just that Disney paycheck. Yeah. I have a feeling that this is, this seems to be a production company getting.

Maybe they’re hoping they’re going to be the next Pixar. So they’re, you know, just like really spending their budget on getting some big names in there. Right. Was that. I think the company was called Core C O R E. Oh yeah, yeah, that’s right. That’s right. They really do throw you off. Yeah, yeah. Core Feature animation. Sorry, I was reading all the production companies earlier, but Core Feature animation they have. It says films. I guess they made more than one. Oh, it is Canadian. Yeah. It’s just, you know, the poster in the box, they really do plaster Walt Disney at the top as hard as they can.

You know where else? Oh yeah, Jim Belushi. He’s someone I don’t remember hearing as a voice actor very often, but I guess he was okay. He was better in Kiefer Sutherland. Yeah. Eddie Izzard was mildly annoying. I don’t know much about Eddie Izzard at all. So Janine Garofalo, not good at voice acting. I think I said last week. Oh, it’s interesting. She’s a movie at this point and she was not right. I don’t know why, why they kept asking her to come back either. And that’s pretty much the, the big names. Eric Idol shows up for a bit.

Patrick Warburton shows up to deliver like a line. I guess that’s what he does in most of these movies. He shows up and delivers like one line. So the, the voice acting itself doesn’t seem like it would have been something that would have sold you on the movie or even really been all that memorable. There weren’t any like really crazy. There was one or two one liners that I, I wrote down. But overall it, it doesn’t pass the. Disney is trying as hard as they can to program you test. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn’t have that like neural linguistic stuff going On, I would say so much.

Well, funny you should mention that. It has one particular technique, but it just doesn’t use the anchoring to celebrity voices. Oh, you’re giving it to other people. Are they? Okay, I’m looking at what I wrote. I feel like I now that I said that I felt like I wrote something down along that line in my own quotations. I think this movie actually represents one of the better examples of what you would call an embedded loop or a nested loop in nlp. I’ll save that. Let me save that first. Okay, here’s what I did notice. I actually spent a few minutes looking to see if Patton Oswald had done any work on this movie, one of his comedy albums.

He does this bit where he’s called in to do punch up work for anime and movies where he’s just supposed to say goofy stuff that’s like off screen. Right? And I was like, was he working on this movie? Because there’s so much of that in this movie where they’re just like filling in somebody saying something that’s supposed to be funny from like off screen or whatever. But I, I looked and it doesn’t seem that this was the one he worked on, so. But it’s 100 guilty of that. Just all this dumb punch up dialogue. I don’t know if you caught on to that or not, but yeah, no, there’s a lot of weird injected humor.

And it’s honestly not bad. It’s cheesy. It’s all cheesy and it all feels tacked on, but it’s not horrible. It’s not the worst of comedy. It just, it’s all of it stuck out. I actually have notes for pretty much all of the main jokes that caught my attention. I didn’t say laughed at them, but I saw it. And I’d be like, okay, I see you. I appreciate you. You didn’t get me to laughing, but I see that you were trying. Yeah. The only quote I wrote down was just my own quote, which was, can we choose a song that will date the movie? Which they did three or four times.

I don’t know. I don’t know why this particular quote was the one that they decided to really emphasize. But there was a point in which the koala says, I’ve got popcorn up me bum. And that was like this big thing that they even gave a little pause for that. I can imagine someone writing that into the dialogue is like. And this is where the audience erupts in laughter. So let’s give them five seconds. To catch their breath and wipe their tears. And it wasn’t really that funny. But also, if I was like 7 or 8 years old and I heard that, I would probably be saying that on the ride home and getting in trouble for saying it too often at home.

Yeah. Well, I guess they do talk about finding your roar a lot too. As far as things that are repeated, which made me think of, you know, male impotency or something so ironic too. It’s the. It’s the. Ryan is trying to roar like a. Like a big tiger or a big lion, rather. And it just always comes out as his little meows, which is almost identical to the Lion King. You’ve got the same exact thing. It happens in a lot of these different. Different son and father line movies. But also it’s the. One of the silliest versions because they almost frame it as though they’re practicing that.

Like at one point, if he just learns how to do it, it’s literally just baked into your physical anatomy so that once your body just becomes big enough to have a deeper tone to it, it will. There’s no testing or trying or practicing that will ever get you to just have a deeper roar. At least if we’re talking like young lions and old lions. Right. Like there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t. It doesn’t prove anything. Yeah. Oh, by the way, just. You were asking, why is Shatner even in this? Turns out he is a founder of Core Digital Pictures which has what’s been closed since 2010.

So this movie, I guess really gave it a kick in the head. Did they come out with a movie after the wild? I can’t tell if they made the movies or. Okay. It’s first and only animated feature. Yeah. Is the wild they did it looks like they did a bunch of just special effects work on many things. Like it’s got Silent Hill, Saw to Resident Evil, Apocalypse. Harold and Kumar go to White Castle. But they didn’t make those. They’re just working on them in some capacity. So this is their only film? Yeah. Okay. I mean, no.

No surprises there. Another. Another weird comedy. Takon were the freaking pigeons. I didn’t get the pigeons. They were like super desi Indian. And I didn’t have any idea of why they had these Indian pigeons. They’re in Central Park. Wouldn’t they just all have New York accents? This kind of comes back too. I did make a note about it because they kind of take this vibe Again, if you’ve seen Zootopia, there’s The yak that Tommy Chong voices and. And it’s kind of this vibe as well, like, because he’s standing on his head, you know, flies buzzing around and that sort of thing, so.

Right. And it’s interesting that’s in multiple movies. You know, it stands out as though this was specifically created just to have a silly voice, just for some kind of comedic effect, as opposed to having any real role in the movie. And I think that that takes you out a little bit, that that destroys some of the programming, because I guess the silver lining is that if you are going to get programmed by a Disney movie, it at least has to be good. Like, it has to be a really engaging story, and the music has to mesh and the jokes can’t bring you out of it and break the fourth wall constantly because that sort of disrupts the programming.

My opinion. So silver lining, or, you know, like, you got to be really bored or really young in order for these to work on you. Maybe that’s also part of the magic, though, is that they’re not aiming it towards an older audience with discretion. Yeah. Well, music by Alan Silvestri. He did Back to the Future, so they. They didn’t go cheap on that either, I guess. So it seems they were definitely trying and just, you know, like, fumbled the ball a bit. Who? There’s an effort in the soundtrack, or not. Not the score, but the actual soundtrack you mentioned they have, like, all these needle drops, and that dates the movie to that particular time period, but it almost seems it would have been aiming towards people that got pregnant in high school.

Like. Like, these are the parents at the time. That sounds about right. Yeah. Like, all I remember. The only thing I specifically remember is them tossing in Coldplay. Of course. Here’s the soundtrack. What do you have? Real Wild Child, performed by Everlife. Okay, good enough. By Lifehouse. Eric Idle did a song. Oh, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. This seems even too late for that. Okay. It really is a truly odd movie in this whole. Kind of, like, Valiant, too. Valiant sort of stood out like a sore thumb in a way. This. Yeah, this is the other side of that coin, for sure.

This one is better than Valiant from a bunch of different standpoints. Although Valiant I feel like I’m gonna remember for a while because that one was interesting. These. These had pigeons that all had real roles, and it kind of taught you something about espionage and the importance of information warfare. The wild, like you mentioned when we were first opening this up, if you’ve seen Nemo or the Lion King or Madagascar or a whole list of other movies, then you’ve kind of already learned whatever lessons this movie was aiming to teach. I mean, if you have the urge to watch this, you’re.

You’re probably going to end up watching Madagascar, right? Like, you’re not. And it’s not gonna, you’re not gonna make the decision. That’s just what’s going to happen. Something I thought was funny in the box office, this opened number four the week it came out behind Ice Age the Meltdown. So even higher than it on the box office is a CGI sequel, which is seems kind of like adding insult to injury a little bit. Well, you’ve been fairly critical of Ice Age and, and of Shrek and someone, Someone in my Caught it on the Shrek. Yeah, you got called out on the Shrek.

And I, I don’t disagree. I think Shrek maybe holds up. But yeah, I, maybe we’ll revisit those in like a special. I think the other problem with Shrek is you get sequel, sequel, sequel. So you have to deal with Shrek’s kids and Shrek’s kids suck there. That’s. That’s my hot take this week. Shrek’s kids suck, but they’re not in the original Shrek. This is like a new, like flipping the. The sins of the father on their head. Like Don. Sins of the son against the father. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I, I’ll definitely throw that out there.

And then we got John Lithgow on the first one. So. Okay, that, that’s, that’s something that the first one certainly has. They offed him though. The Hindi. Bad, bad call for their part. Well, they, they had the theme park attraction, the 40 Shrek thing where I think they pumped in fart smells or something. Who wants that? Is that true? I hope to double check on the fart smells, but I think it might be true for the wild movie. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. The Shrek. The. Oh, okay, okay. Theme park. The theme park.

Okay, that. That makes more sense. That makes more sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That doesn’t have to be in the wild. That wouldn’t make sense at all. Just letting you know, just a little on the nose. Well, I, I totally pissed off my wife last week. We went to the kind’s home. It’s kind of like a Lowe’s or something, I guess in the States. And we were just looking at air fresh. And suddenly I had just the idea of like, for scented air freshener. And then I just had in my mind images playing of like, you know, People were having a meeting, a conference room, and someone just walks in and you know, blows that all over the place.

I guess you could do that in the wild, you know, make things sound a little more like the wild at. At Disney. We did play a prank on a couple, I think exactly two people in the office at one point and we ordered some durian extract. It was like a little vial of just pure, like, you know, concentrated durian. And yeah, we’ve just put that in a little bottle. But it just said open me or something. It looked like one of those little Alice in Wonderland things. And they opened it and it was just immediate gag.

But it also filled the entire room with that smell just from opening it. So yeah, I had dried durian once, it was fine. And it didn’t smell because it was dry. I think. Yeah, I think it’s the, the juice. I think it has. I might just be making something up, but something related to putrecide. So the actual scent that you smell from a decaying body is in this fruit. Oh, right on. Well, it’s like I saw an article a week or two where the. A corpse flower had bloomed in Australia and people were going to go see it and vomit apparently.

Like, I think I’d like to avoid that. There’s a few weird smelling trees around where I live. You know, I do, I know it’s a joke, but I really do think that smell o vision will be one of the next sort of frontiers of maybe cinematic is the wrong word, but media consumption, because it’s. And the only reason that it almost seems laughable is because every version that I think anyone’s ever seen so far attempted, it just doesn’t hit right. You can always tell that it’s like some artificial mist coming. And it also usually overpowers all your senses.

But the olfactory sense is so damn potent for establishing memories that if they, if they did it the right way, think about in this way, especially in a Disney context, you go and you see a really good Disney movie. Let’s just use an old one. You go and see Pinocchio or something. And every time Pinocchio’s on the screen, depending on how close or how far away you are from him, there’s a very specific wood smell. They, they make a Disney IP patented, you know, like steater, slash walnut mix or whatever. Whatever. I guess it would be pine.

Right. But whatever the, the Pinocchio was made out of and they made a very specific smell that doesn’t exist in nature. And then every time you would See them on the screen, it would come on, you could re release the movie and have that exact same scent and it wouldn’t change. Technically, the technology and the recipe for a scent doesn’t change, which is why they anchor themselves so well. But it also means that later on in life you can just like blast that at you at some point. You. You’re not even like in out of the context of watching a movie.

And it would make you think of that Pinocchio, especially if it was the only version that you would ever smelt that had that exact structure on it. I guess the theme parks do this to a certain extent because people. When people hear about, you know, Soarin the ride, the first thing they think about is, oh, yeah, it’s got that orange scent in it, you know, and when they change the movie, people, oh no, the orange scent is gone. Mine. Was the King Kong ride at Universal Studios going to be my other example. Yeah. This fake hydraulic smell to make it smell a little bit like subway system, I guess, except minus the feces and urine.

But it had like the other musky smell to it. Oh, and Kong himself had banana breath. That was gonna be my example. Okay. Yeah, I remember this because. Because I actually. I grew up in New York, so I remember when I went on the subway, it did have a very specific. It was mostly urine, though. I realized that later on. What’s the urine rating on the New York subway? 0 to 10. I don’t have a lot of to compare it with. I have been in some rough back alleys in San Antonio that smell way worse. And also in Boston, believe it or not, there was some.

I feel like there was entire alleyways in Boston that I didn’t realize were just dedicated urinals for everybody to use because you would just walk by and get a really big whiff of it. So I don’t know. New York, depending on the street, 10 out of 10. Let’s say it’s 10 out of 10. Yeah. I guess that’s got to be the standard, doesn’t it? Yeah, I just don’t. I don’t know if Chicago is. Does it harder or, you know, Philadelphia or what. I don’t really know who. The urine. I think the. I think the. The gunpowder maybe equalizes some of the urine.

It could be secretly Los Angeles, really? We don’t know. Well, yeah, well, I think the San Francisco fecal matter maybe overpowers even la makes it all the way to la. You know, they like the smell of it there. That’s right. Especially if it’s their own, but now it’s with anyone’s. They’re very inclusive like that. I went to San Francisco once. I had a good time. Anyway, the Wild, speaking of. Yeah, I’m sure it doesn’t smell good if you’re, if you’re watching the wild. So you have any of your rabbit holes you want to jump into then I guess.

Oh yeah. I’ll chronologically go through some of my notes and then we’ll go on tangents as needed. Disney is clearly stuffing in this fern gully, brother bear, humans are bad sort of feel. Although it’s, it’s weird because the animals absolutely love being captive. They love living in captivity of the zoo. And as soon as they get out into the real world, they show almost no benefit of any kind. All of the pent up frustration that Ryan’s got because he wants to go out and experience the wild and all that, once they actually experience the wild, it sucks so much that they’re all like, okay, now let’s sail all the way back home and bring ourselves back into the zoo.

So on that aspect, they almost make humans the good guys for providing this environment. Outside of that, I don’t really think we see much humans. But also they mentioned like Valiant, but they also mentioned in the very beginning when Ryan is hearing the story from his dad and he tells them that he was fighting this huge wildebeest. The wildebeest was like 1401ft and he had four horns. And you know, he was like sort of making this hyperbolic story about his coming of age. But he also says, and he hated the environment. Like that was just one of the things that lets you know immediately a villain.

And I don’t know, is there anyone that actually on the planet hates the environment that’s almost like hating freedom? Yeah, I’ve. I was sitting there for the Willoughby story, I guess thinking of like Carlos Castanata books, you know, his adventures with Don Juan sort of stuff, which seems he wasn’t being entirely great books. I mean. Yeah, but. But only if we were also talking about someone took psychedelics and then was reporting all of this, which actually would have made the Wild a little bit cooler. Oh yeah, sure. Oh, here’s something I noticed that Disney did. Must have shoehorned in since this is a made by Core, like Chicken Little.

They kind of took a crap on the way they start their movies. And it was this time Chicken Little they had what, the book and then the, the Lion King start here it was on the Disney logo itself, meaning it was probably added later it was like, oh, we need to be, we need to keep snarking up the beginning, you know. Yeah. Disney is, is doing this cringy self aware snark that I don’t think it really ever hits. And if anything it kind of dilutes that. That brand of Disney. I don’t know who started it or why it kind of started this like self poking.

It might have, might have just been in these last couple movies that we’ve seen. I hope it stops. It’s not doing what I think that they wanted it to do, which makes it feel like it’s even more light hearted than it is. But we all know that Disney is a global conglomerate that has its own sort of demonic egregore that outlives all of us. So they don’t have to pretend and sweeten it up at all, I guess than what we’ve been watching, you know, the Emperor’s New Groove and Home on the Range. We’re trying to kind of like open up the humor a little more, I guess.

And both of those failed miserably. So this is Attempt two, now that we’re doing cgi. You know, the humor though, it’s almost a sitcom rom com style humor. It’s not the same type of humor that I guess you could apply to some of the earlier Disney movies. Because a lot of the early Disney movies, the ones that I think were really, really good, they didn’t necessarily. They had some slapstick related humor into them, but a lot of the humor was just related to extreme versions of the human condition. Like if you imagine Snow White or Cinderella or Pinocchio or Beauty and the Beast or even even more recent ones, a lot of those were more serious.

And even in Little Mermaid, right. A lot of the humor was kind of based on Sebastian, you know, going through all these crazy. And even the scene I guess they cut, right. Didn’t they cut the chef in one of them where I guess in the remake they cut the chef out. But those like the humor was that, oh, this really happens, you know, even though we’ve got this cartoon little lobster guy or like a little crab that he’s gonna get cooked because humans eat these things. So isn’t that funny? And they didn’t. They don’t have a lot of that realistic humor.

Like I guess part of the humor in this one just would have been more references to how humans would kill them and eat them and destroy them for being outside of the zoo. Yeah, I mean it’s kind of like one. When you Go back to the shorts, you know, back to the 30s and 40s. The thing with Disney and Looney Tunes is always like, well, the Looney Tunes ones are going to be funny and have good writing. The Disney ones are going to have, like, the better animation was the shorthand, you know, and that’s not to crap on, you know, the fact that the Disney ones, especially Goofy shorts, have some good jokes.

And the, you know, Looney Tunes animation is cool. The backgrounds are simple, but they’re cool. So it’s not like. Well, another really good point there is that if you compare Looney Tunes and Disney, especially the originals, Looney Tunes went all out with the character voices. And Disney, they seem to design character voices in a way that you couldn’t really emote. Like, Mickey Mouse voice can only do so much expression. The same with Daffy Duck could only have a certain Goofy. Pluto doesn’t even talk. So all of their, their big sort of milestone characters, like their flagships, they don’t really have a great range.

And then you compare that to Bugs Bunny with Mel Blanc and all the different voices that he did even. I mean, I would argue that the Roadrunner has a more memorable voice and dialogue than Mickey Mouse. Mickey Mouse is almost memorable just because it’s funny, like, and not funny and like, we’re all laughing with you, but, like, almost laughing at you way throwing that, that is Donald, that we cannot understand. Daffy can be quite funny. Oh, right, yeah, but, but Donald is the Disney one, right? Yeah, yeah, Donald’s the Disney one. Just because Daffy’s a cool Mel Blanc voice.

Right? I think they’re all Mel Blanca. I assume I might be wrong on that, but haven’t thought about it for a while. Here’s something I thought was weird. When they’re talking about, oh, he’s nine and he can’t roar yet. So then I looked up how long do lions live? So then it’s like, oh, 14 in the wild, 20 in captivity. So yet nine. They, they put human ages on them for, I guess, clarity. If you, if you were told that you could live in captivity for 20 years or in the wild for 14 years, what would you pick? Is the wild fun? Do I have skills? Am I Thor Heider doll? Actually, I was just reading about him.

Right. I, I before Kon Tiki, 10 years before that, he and his wife did try to just live on an island with nothing for a year or two, and even he gave up on that. So is living in a city captivity? I guess that’s part of the Question. I think so, yeah. I think pretty much all. I think all humans live in some form of captivity. Unless you are, you know, a true wildebeest wild man, like a feral child raised by wolves. That’s why I was bringing up Thor. Hired all actually having a lot of skills.

I mean, you’re like, okay, I’m gonna just do that. And even he had to give up because it just. I guess once you’ve lived in the captivity of civilization, it’s hard to get out. Although at the same time, I. I skipped out of the country. So that. That suggests at least some urge to escape captivity, I guess. I mean, yeah, welcome to the new boss. Same as the old boss. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I. Living in Japan, one of the big perks for me is to kind of live between cultures, right? Because I don’t have to do American crap.

And then, you know, Japanese to. I mean, without. Obviously there’s things where you’re rude if you do it, but, you know, like, some things you can kind of pick and choose how you’re going to react. Like, I’m not Japanese, so they’re not going to care if I don’t do this weird, dumb thing. Well, I mean, speaking of you running away to Japan, this movie also feels like it normalizes the concept of running away and on multiple different levels. For example, the movie starts out with the zoo shutting down. And once the very last zookeeper leaves and they turn off the big light and they lock the last gate, all the animals come out of their cages and they all congregate together, which all, again, if you’re watching this as a little kid and you see the zookeepers are the authority figures, and everyone else in the zoo is kind of like your peer group, because that’s what most Disney group movies sort of frame it as.

They’re sort of instilling from the very first moment, hey, when the authority figures leave and they close the door and the lights go out, you can do whatever you want. This is Disney. So it doesn’t seem that much of a leap that the protagonist ends up running away from home, and then more animals run away from the zoo entirely, and then there’s really no recourse once they’re done having their fun. After they’ve run away, it’s just like, okay, now we can just go home again. And there’s. There’s no sort of repercussions for any of the decisions they’ve made to run away.

So I do feel that there might be intentional or unintentional this sort of subliminal messaging to, hey, just if, if you want to go have fun, just run away from home. I think Madagascar even follows that story beat. Or I think the idea is just to get out and see the city and then come back, and then they end up in Madagascar. And this one, it’s not even to see the city. This is one is to see the wild. Like, they’re, they’re just running away from the zoo. They’re running away from civilization entirely. And there’s, again, there’s no repercussion for doing this.

And they, they actually end up preferring captivity to the wild. So I, I, I’m struggling with that particular part of the message, but maybe that part doesn’t matter because that’s the outer shell, that’s the candy shell, that doesn’t have all the nutrients of the peanut inside. And there’s, there’s a woods, mountains not far from here where the ninjas used to, you have to go deep into the mountains to find the ninjas. Right. But I don’t want to go live in there. I could, I guess I’d go be a ninja. We have a ninja village. It’s like a theme park.

Kids are there, and it’s, like, dangerous. Like, your kids could totally get, you know, brutally injured there because they’re climbing around on ropes between trees and stuff. Do people in Japan enter the animal cages of the zoo, or is this a Chinese and American exclusive? I haven’t heard of that happening much in Japan. No. No. Zoo news. Yeah, I feel like that, I feel like that would make the news in Japan since weird stuff like that does. So I’m gonna say that. So no. So do you think it’s a respect thing or an intelligence thing or combination between the two? Let’s come.

I’m gonna say combine, but okay. I mean, you know, even kindergartens in Japan are just so regimented that, you know, it’s like, now we do this. I mean, of course I got kids that don’t want to do that because they’re two, but, you know, it’s like how you wash your hands and, you know, kids clean their classrooms in Japan, that sort of thing. There are no janitors. Yeah. I wonder how. Well the Disney, and I would assume not well, that the Disney programming works on, like, a strictly Japanese audience. It’s almost that outside of the States and Europe, watching a lot of these Disney movies, you’re so far detached and removed from some of the cultural implications and like, the, the foundations that they’re kind of based on that you can kind of watch it without being at risk of, I guess, turning into a hired assassin.

Also, there are like, a lot of it in Japan is just iconography, you know, Like, I was. You were talking about Pooh and Tigger, and when I did the Tigger costume, like, the kids, they recognized it, but they didn’t know, like, the name or that it was connected to Pooh or anything like that. Right. They just know, oh, Kawhi. Right. It’s a cute character. That’s all they got. And that’s all that matters sometimes. Right? I guess for me, it’s the Moomin thing. Like, Moomin is the finished kind of Winnie the Pooh I talked about before. My daughter loves Moomin.

I haven’t read a Moomin book. I don’t know if there’s a Moomin movie. We went to the Moomin village, so I’ve been deep in it. We saw a museum exhibit from the writer, but I still don’t know the details of a Moomin story. You know, there was another. Speaking of IPS and. And like known characters and brands and. And recognizability. There was this one particular scene as they’re going through the Times Square, and I had a. I rewounded a couple times to see if I could catch all of the different corporate logos that they were blasting you with.

And this movie has at least these ones were very clear. Kodak, Quaker, TiVo, AAA insurance, ABC. Which makes sense because that they owned, or Disney owned them at this point. Dodge, the car company, Coca Cola, McDonald’s, Toys R Us, Best Buy and Samsung. And there might have been a couple others that I missed in there. And I just thought that was interesting that they didn’t even make parodies of any of these. And I was. I wonder because I don’t remember exactly what different products came out at that time, but I almost would imagine maybe there was a, you know, instant oatmeal, the Wild Edition with little dinosaur eggs.

And maybe TiVo had a deal. And. But this I’ll. I’ll get into why this stood out to me so much, because there is an NLP aspect to this movie, and I think that this might be part of it. And also, just thinking back on the movie itself, it was one of the most memorable scenes of the entire movie. I remember them whipping by this McDonald’s in Times Square like three or four different times. And that stood out to me more than some of the action scenes. Yeah, the Times Square was definitely, like, very carefully rendered. I Guess I was thinking of product placement.

The scene, Wayne’s World where it just has the one scene where they have the product placement for everything. It made me think they’re kind of doing that in the wild. I mean, because once you get in the jungle you can’t do that anymore. Well, and, and this, this one. I don’t know exactly how all of the big business like boardroom deals work, but sometimes a movie will have to pay in order to put those logos in the movie. But then also other times they’re almost like advertisement spots. And I would assume that at Disney’s level there’s probably synergy with all of these different ones because if you notice, they didn’t have any like competing businesses and all that.

There was only one car company, there was only one food company, only one camera. You know, toys are. So I think that maybe these were all straight up designed to go with their, their product launches and everything, which also when they release a movie and it costs 80 million and it made 100 million and obviously they lose some of that on the marketing and all that. But they’re also getting all these kickback deals on all these ancillaries that we’re seeing evidence of this in here. So I wonder how much of this is creative accounting where it, you know, it, oh, it lost all this money and we can, you know, use it as this big write off.

But really it was their way to sort of take these cash injections from all these other companies. Yeah, it’s hard to search that too because the Wild is such a, you know, kind of like vague term. Trying to do a Google search on it. You have to be very specific. Right? Trying to find very specific answers. And the Wild. And there’s also been a lot of other movies that have the Wild or at least into the Wild. Yeah, yeah, Wild. It’s hard. I mean, yeah, it’s just, it’s really hard to search for this movie, which is an interesting choice.

I feel like by 2006 you would try and not give. I don’t know, we have movies like no M.O. disney’s M.O. is, is basically trademarking and copyrighting and owning the most generic of stories, terms and concepts so that everything that you can think of, it’s like Disney did it. You know, like they, they don’t have as much output as maybe the Simpsons, ironically. But I think that they do have this like they own brain space. And now if you ever were to search almost any word and then Disney after it at one point and almost in like the Monkeys Infinite monkeys in a room with typewriters.

At one point, Disney will own every single word in the human English language and maybe even Japanese at some point. They failed here, though. Point to DreamWorks. Right, because nobody remembers this, and you thought you’d seen it before because you’d seen Madagascar, so DreamWorks grabbed that particular vibe instead, you know, So I. I do wonder if Madagascar came out and they just kind of gave up on this one. Premiering four at the box office is pretty raw for an animated Disney film. Well, if we skip to the very end really briefly, because there’s not much of an end to it anyways.

It does seem as though at least it was focused. The movie didn’t feel like it was being pulled in a million directions. But then you have what felt like the initial climax of the movie. But then there’s supposed to be this whole return home and Atonement and the character where people learn things and, you know, it wraps up and it. It just kind of ends. They just sort of get on a boat and they’re sailing back home, and then the movie credits roll, and they never actually get back to the zoo. So you’re just supposed to assume that they make it back and the zoo’s like, oh, and you’ve got 50 wildebeest with you.

Yeah, we’ve already got a whole area for them just ready to go. And it’s totally normal that there’s literal lions and wildebeest all coexisting on this boat. Like how I almost wanted to know. I didn’t. The movie didn’t need to be longer and that I wanted to sit and watch even more of it. But it. It does seem like there needed to be another 15, 20 minutes to explain how they reintegrated. Yeah. I’m looking up Madagascar again, because I know the second one is. I feel like they don’t end up at the zoo at the end of that either.

Lemurs, I don’t think the penguins. Sorry, I’m Marty Regrets. I don’t think they go back to the zoo in Madagascar either. For a while, I think maybe at the end of the second movie. So maybe it’s just funnier to leave your characters out at sea. Is the thought literally. Or maybe this was the writing on the wall. Someone was like, damn, did you see that work print of Madagascar? And they were like, yeah, let’s just wrap this up, tie a bow on it. Yeah, that might be what happened. Because, yeah, there’s just so many. I. It is one of those weird things, because even Some like Armageddon, Deep Impact, like the stories don’t have the same beats, whereas this does, you know, for the most part.

Okay, well, speak. Speaking of the climax of this movie, I feel like maybe we buried the lead a little bit because we’re 50 minutes in and, and I’m only now mentioning that the, the whole conflict of this story is sacrifice is that there is a cult of wildebeests and they have this prophecy that once the koala shows up, then the koala will invert the food chain so that instead of lions feasting on wildebeests, wildebeest will then feast on the lions. And in order for this full entire prophecy to take place, they have to throw a lion into the fire of a volcano.

So there, there is a lot of pretty deep, like Moloch style sacrifice rituals, but it’s kind of buried deep, deep into like the very, I don’t know, last 20 minutes of the movie. And I wish that the movie had really focused on that. Maybe the movie opened up on them talking about this prophecy having a weird ceremony. That was so, that was really interesting. And it was also interesting that the, the cult that they had formed, this wildebeest cult, was sort of a cargo cult because. Yeah, I wrote Koala cargo cult. Yeah. I mean that if that was the premise that they leaned into Koala cargo co.

All right, guys, remember every day, I mean, I’ve been part of some of these production crews where they would come in and say, you know, whatever you’re doing, remember, here’s the plot, here’s the goal is that we want to make us really cool. Koala cargo cult movie. All right, go, go back to work or whatever. Then Shatner had a bigger part. Yay. Right. I think that would have objectively made this movie far more interesting and even more meaningful. Yeah, I guess it’s, it’s 2006. Keeper Sutherland’s riding the 24 wave, I think at the time. So, like, we got a big star, we got Kiefer, you know, not realizing that they had five other voices that would probably were a lot better.

So yeah, I just got a shout out for the Gods. Must be crazy. One of the better cargo cult movies out there. But not the second one. No, the second one kind of loses you a little bit. They were, it didn’t need. That was one of those movies that just absolutely did not need a sequel. I just, I, I, I think my folks rented it the second one when I was like, kid, I saw the second one like three times before I saw the first one. But that’s, hey, that’s what happens when you’re watching, you know, movies in elementary school.

You do stuff like that. You watch the gods Must be crazy too. A few times before you watch the first one, it might have been a rating thing. I think it had like, maybe that one was like GRPG and the other one was like higher rated or something. It was because the second one got more play on tv. I think I remember that being on TV way more often than the first one. Okay. That. I don’t feel so stupid for seeing that one a few times first. I, I do have the one, the one main quote, other than I’ve got popcorn up me bum, which was a throwaway line.

There was a really cool line. And this is while they are being brought to this volcano pit and they’re going to be sacrificed to this, this, like, volcano God that then makes them into gods. And he says, our shrine will become your tomb. And I just thought that was a really badass line. Like probably the coolest line in the entire movie. Yeah. Now, wildebeests are herbivores. Question mark. Right. But, but this is the, the inversion that they were talking about. No, I know. I’m just, I’m sorry. I’m just trying to think of it from a practical, you know, perspective where I’m like, I don’t think that’s possible.

Which explains the volcano ritual. I mean, maybe they’re convinced it’s possible because they do the ritual, but it seems like it would still be disappointing. After ritual’s done, they’re not going to be able to digest the lion. Were they going to eat the lion raw or they’re going to cook it? I mean, I assume that they’re throwing the lion into the lava. It’s, it’s getting cooked regardless of what. Oh, but they’re not eating that one. I’m talking about whatever line they plan on eating. Meeting after that. Oh, good question. Yeah, yeah. Because they’re just tossing all the animals in there.

So they’re not really. I guess that’s the thing, though, that they, and then they are convinced that that will cause the inversion. That’s biologically impossible. Well, that this actually answers one of the questions that. That was another. The, the only, the third of the quotes that I written down, and that’s that they’re telling them why you wouldn’t go out into the wild. And it’s because you can get hunted down, shot at, stuffed, or worse. And I was wondering what would be worse than all of these. Well, I guess worse would have been being eaten live by a bunch of wildebeest that don’t even have canines or incisors, that they would just be using molars to slowly mash you up.

I think that maybe that’s the answer to what would be worse than those. Okay. So they’d become kind of a sarlacc of sorts. Yeah. Out of all the ways that you could die, I guess I might prefer being eaten by a lion because it seems like it would go faster than. Than a wildebeest eating you. I get tossed in the lava. I don’t know how much would that suck? I guess you’d melt pretty instantly. I don’t know. I don’t know how lava works like that. And then hopefully I won’t find out because there’s a volcano. Yeah, well, I was gonna say that.

You know what’s crazy is there are some people that have discovered the answer to that question. This is not an unattainable knowledge. I mean, you don’t get to pass the knowledge on to anyone, but you get to discover it for yourself. Right, right, right. But I’m not sure, though. Anyway, I wonder if someone could be like, for science. I’m gonna jump into lava and I’m gonna try and explain what the process is so other people can know. And they just jump in and they’re just like, it sucks. And then they die. Oh, I was thinking you could stick your arm in lava, see what happens to the arm.

You know, that doesn’t count, man. That doesn’t. That’s like dipping your. Your foot in the pool. That’s not swimming. Don’t, Don’t. Don’t dip your toe in the lava. Okay. Don’t maybe jump in head first. I don’t know. I don’t know what the rules are for jumping into lava. Kids find out they play the floor is lava and sometimes they hit the floor. So ask a kid they know. Weird Disney movie logic. Not that it needs to be pointed out, but this is the main one that really stood out to me is that in this movie, a giraffe can fall onto a squirrel.

A squirrel can fall at least two stories directly onto its head and get knocked out and survive. But a young lion can only be thrown a few feet away, and everyone’s concerned that the lion is now dead. That was kind of interesting. And it that this movie also kind of cries wolf too many times. Or maybe it roars lion too often. There’s so many scenes when you’re like, oh, my God, that character is dead. And then they’re not dead. It happens like four or five times to different characters where they get knocked out and everyone is like, oh, my God.

The mo. The music slows down and it gets very serious. And then you see them kind of move around or cough or their eyes blink and it’s like, oh. Oh, my God. Okay. They didn’t die. But they show so many ways that animals actually die in the world constantly. But those things don’t hurt them. Yeah, it was some. Some folks have plot armor and others don’t, I guess. Yeah, good to have. He doesn’t have plot armor. Better check him out. There’s literal plot armor in this movie too, because they. They couldn’t figure out a good way to get Samson and get the lion into this Wilderbeast cult.

So I actually like this part, but it felt like literal plot armor where these chameleons crawl over his body and they give him sort of a cloaking suit where they emulate the environment that he’s walking in. So you just see the koala, like flying through the air because the chameleons. This sounds very complicated. It’s like a Rube Goldberg invisibility cloak. But the lion covers himself in chameleons. He turns invisible. And then this invisible lion goes to save the koala by making them hover through the air. And then they walk over, I guess, a crack, like a fissure.

And some of the heat escaping from the volcano causes the chameleons to stop or they jump off of the line. It’s again, Rube Goldberg esque. But I thought it was interesting the way that they did. That was one of the cooler scenes in the entire movie. But literal plot armor. Yeah, right. And they’re basically. They. They’re like. Yeah, we’re the. Basically the jungle CIA that. When we’ve been tracking you since you got here. So that was kind of weird. This is why I’ve been doing a theories on John C. Lily recently. But echo, I don’t know if you’ve heard of not.

Well, technically it is Echo the dolphin, but it stands for something that I don’t remember right now, but it represents this group that is trying to organize the. The world in like, logical ways, like little chess masters. Echo, like the game or the book, right? Yes, yes. Okay, I’ve done the game. The game got boring after a while, though. It’s. Yeah, it’s. It’s totally a game that is based on MK Ultra. So if you have to, like, appreciate the MK Ultra nature of it and most kids can’t Appreciate MK Ultra as they’re playing Echo the Dolphin on a Sega Genesis.

Oh, too bad. If you replay it now though and you know that it’s all about psychedelics and mind control. It does make the game more interesting. I think I might have played it on psychedelics once, but I still, I wasn’t thinking about MK Ultra yet. Yeah, games are honestly games and movies are not fun on psychedelics in my opinion. It depends. I’ve had a found a few but yeah, the ones you think are going to be cool usually are not. Staring at a carpet is likely to be as interesting or more interesting than watching a movie, right? Oh, the koala.

I thought it was kind of weird that of course there’s the toy with all the New York stuff, but he still carries around that liberty torch like through the entire movie, which is weird. And you know, it’s like. And then he’s. And then he’s a figure. So I’m like, is he like a koala Mithras or something too? Oh yeah, good connection that, that would actually make sense as being the leader of this cult that. That worships their God in a literal cave. That’s basically Mithras. Yeah, yeah. And then make. We even have a lot of the other elements that would play into this and the quality gets into it like real quick.

You see the maniacal look and now he’s Mithras. He’s kind of, you know, he’s a little hardcore. He’s willing to throw his friends under a bus or into a bit of lava. Well he doesn’t quite go that far but he at least allows for the situation to brew where that’s possible. There is some interesting Phoenician like maybe Carthaginian mythology represented here because you’ve got Leo the lion, the sun God that is going to be literally sacrificed into the depths of the. The inside of the earth. So now you’re going to have the, the molten core of the earth envelop the sun to invert everything so that now herbivores are carnivores and carnivores or herbivores like a true inversion of all reality.

So maybe there is like some really deep like gnostic occult like methods in here. But it didn’t work. Getting a truly like widen watcher in the woods. We’re getting a true ceremony at the end of this. It’s just, it’s under cartoon dressing so it’s like haha, this is goofy. The animals are rolling around. But yeah, when you take it, it’s basically like watching the woods sort of stuff. Well, that makes me wonder that I, in my undying sort of belief in capitalism, I almost feel that if you had a successful magic ritual, it would result in some sort of financial success as well.

Just because the energy would permeate through multiple disciplines. Like you wouldn’t just be successful in one category, like just, you know, critically or just monetarily. It would have to be all of the things. So maybe the fact that this put a studio out of business, or at least was there one and only attempt, is. Is that mean the magic ritual failed? Or maybe did it succeed in other ways? Since we’ve been moving on? I guess if you see Fantasia 2000 as being the second ritual, you know, as then the first, the premises. Fantasia got the Disney ball rolling.

Fantasia 2000 kind of, you know, fell on its nose a bit. And then Disney had several years of not doing that well. So when was the original Fantasia again? It was. It was 40. 39. 40. Yeah. Okay, so iron. This is kind of sad a little bit, but Disney’s original idea for Fantasia was that they would go around the country and play different animations paired with different music. Or at least it was born from that sort of a premise, which almost implied that it would be this constant thing that would almost change year to year, maybe every couple years.

But in reality, it took them 60 years just to make two versions of it. Right, but that’s saying that the original Fantasia is a very successful invocation. Fantasia 2000 was a non successful invocation. This could be an even less successful invocation if you really do want to consider the ceremony at the end as being that sort of thing. When. When do they have to re. Show and remake Fantasia again? I feel like they’re gonna have to make another Fantasia to make up for the last ritual performed. Is it every 60 years now? What’s weird though, because the company is now so diffuse, because even in 2000, Disney was a little more focused of a thing.

I felt like. And well, there’s like touchstone for the other stuff, right? Or. Or whatever. But I mean, you know, Disney is now it’s. Oh, it’s Star wars and it’s. Now it’s Alien. You know, I mean, what. It’s. They bought everything, so it’s like maybe they don’t need to. I don’t know. I don’t. It depends, I guess, what they want to do with their animated stuff. The. The next Fantasia is going to be like the ride the movies ride, where it is just a little bit of everything, maybe. And I would imagine it’s got to be cg.

And Toy Story maybe is the CG invocation, which is why, you know, Pixar is the only company that can really manage to do it. Well, for about 15 years with a few Dream DreamWorks outliers. There was another. I feel like it was a Shrek nod at the end of the movie, inexplicably, for the first and only time in the last five minutes, the animals start break dancing and coming up with, like, catchy dance moves that then last through the rest of the credits rolling. And that. It felt tacked on and it almost felt formulaic. Like someone was like, oh, you forgot to add this very specific part.

And they just said, gotcha. And they just added it at the very end. Yeah. I mean, this movie does seem to be just like. You could see the elements of the film. Chefs at work, but they’re just not very good chefs. This was like they pulled the box of movies off the shelf at the store, and it was like, oh, does anyone have two eggs and a cup of water and some oil? Okay, we’ve got this, like, where you take a couple Lego sets and mix them up and make something out of that. But you can still tell that part comes from the Rapunzel set, you know? Okay, well, I’ve got my NLP reference here, too.

And I’ve. And I tried to pitch it in a Disney way. I don’t know if it’ll work as well, but, like, so there’s this concept of nested loops or embedded metaphors, or you can. Like Taco Bell. You can mix those words up any way you want. It all kind of means the same thing. Nested metaphors and embedded loops. But in nlp, it’s a very common technique where you start one story, you get halfway into it, and then once you’re halfway in, you start another story, and then you get halfway into that one, and then you start another story.

And you can do that as many times as you want with the ultimate goal that the very inside loop will have an embedded command. The embedded command will be like, go by a paranoid American comic book or something. But. But I’ve seen this happen in real life and. And seen it work on, like, large audiences intentionally. Like, everyone knew that this was NLP sort of thing, but the way that it happened in this particular movie is that the movie starts out with the dad telling this fake story about wildebeest he doesn’t actually encounter. And then you find out almost halfway into the movie, like, on the nose, that really? The dad also, when he was young, he couldn’t roar, and he had this.

This weak little roar that everyone laughed at when he was trying to bark at this wildebeest. And the worst father ever, and his dad was disappointed. And then I almost imagine that that also extended like the same exact story happens to all lions and their. Their cubs, right? They all end up having this stupid little roar thing. But halfway into the movie, you see the dad’s backstory that this is where he originally came from. And then when we go back to the. The original, like the Outer Candy shell movie of the wild, they are in Times Square, and you’re seeing all of these different advertisements, and then it wraps up that leg of it.

And then we see the very end of the movie itself, where they defeat the cult and they sail back home, or you assume they go back home. So this, in a way, this is one of these little embedded stories, but here’s a better example of one. I’ve got one that’s got four different components to it. It’s not. Not super long. It’s kind of abbreviated, but I think it shows a better, more practical example of these. These embedded metaphors and nested loops and how they work. So it’s. It’s comprised on four different layers of story, which is about as complicated as you would need to make it.

And the. The idea being that stories three and four are so deep inside your unconscious mind that you’ll forget it here. Like, even listening to it or me talking to you right now, you’ll probably forget the inside stories, but you remember the outside stories. And that’s just a weird fascination of the human brain and how NLP works. So the Outer Candy Shell story, and this might be like explaining a joke, too, where it removes the humor. So maybe explaining all the components, it might take some of the magic out of it. The. The Outer Candy Shell Story number one.

Imagine it’s one of these once upon a times, and there’s this girl, Snow White, and she gets lost in a forest. And then while she’s lost, she finds this cottage where these seven doors live. And even though she doesn’t know it at the time, there’s a change that’s going to come from the world around her. And that reminds me of how Pinocchio finds himself. So there’s. Here’s the transition in the second story. We didn’t finish Snow White, and now we’re talking about Pinocchio inside the belly of Mons Monstro. This. This whale, right? The. The Jonah story, and he’s in there because he’s looking for his dad, Geppetto.

And even though it seemed completely impossible, he held on to this belief that he could find him. Kind of like how Cinderella spent her time tirelessly dreaming about this life that seems like it was out of her reach. But then one day, when she least expects it, this fairy godmother just appears. And it gives her this like, small little flicker of hope that she can create something magical which is identical to how Peter Pan teaches Wendy and her bro. So anyways, you can see that, like, this is the fourth layer. So now whatever you say inside of this particular story, when I say Peter Pan taught Wendy and her brothers how to fly and think of happy thoughts and believe in themselves.

And ultimately he did this by telling them all to purchase a comic book from Paranoid American. And Cinderella, well, she ends up discovering that magic was never about the ball or the gown. It was about her own self worth and courage. Just like Pinocchio who reunites with Geppetto and he finds his way out of Monstro. And sometimes the most challenging parts is like just figuring out where you can exist and grow. And finally, the original story on Snow White where she did change her life, but she didn’t just change her life, changed the lives of all the dwarves and made this exchange between the human element and these inner, like, earth elements, these jewels and gems that they brought up to her.

So all of those. It just seems like a objective observation of NLP that the outer story about Snow White and the seven dwarves will remain in your waking mind way longer if you try and think about what did I just hear? Because by the time you get into story three, once you think that the human brain can do two stories fairly easily, once you get into three or four, your brain filters out all of the stuff on those inside stories, especially if it doesn’t seem like it matters at all. But you might have a chance of thinking about buying a paranoid American comic now because it was embedded inside of those.

Yeah, I’m thinking. I mean, well, obviously people know this from this podcast, that I’m just a tangent machine and do I unconsciously do this with people? I bet I do. Like, just, I’m running this game sometimes so. Well, because all NLP is is a study on effective communication habits. It’s not magic. It’s just here’s how other people do it. Yeah, I guess it’s just you break it down and like you said, it takes the magic or the subconscious out of it a bit. But it’s good to understand when it’s when it’s happening. I guess that’s part of why I’m so interested in my, my synchro viewing.

And as you’ve mentioned before, you watched that movie in the middle of other things and it takes on an additional power, you know, speaking which I did not have any sync reviewing in particular with the Wild, because the night before that I watched Aliens and there’s just, there’s no connection that I can find with those two. I mean if I really wanted to work at it, maybe, but you know, I just, I find it interest. That’s maybe why I find this in the past few months have been like synchro viewing because it’s kind of nlping yourself with the things you’re putting on.

Well, because the dad’s name was Samson, I almost felt that there’s worth bringing up like some biblical references here too. And this is essentially the story of the prodigal son where the, the kid is dissatisfied and he does a bad thing and he, and he leaves home on, you know, bad terms but then comes back and is the family is the stronger because of it. The family of animals in this case, I guess, I mean we have to assume that the animals are part of his found family here. Right. Because you know, grandpa sucks. I, that was another ceremony.

You’re just talking about that in the smack middle of the movie. They also have the roar ceremony. I’m like, I’m sure circuses don’t do this, do they? I can’t. And then they have the weird mechanical wildebeest, you know, like it’s obviously a plan thing that happens often. Well, yeah, this is more Disney logic where they would have the threat actually be in the presence of humans. The threat between two animals. It’s almost like the animals are not allowed to be violent towards each other in the, the presence of humans. When humans aren’t around, they can do kind of anything they want.

Sort of like living in the zoo. Once the zookeepers are gone, they do whatever the hell they want. But once they’re in front of people now they can only be aggressive towards human made things like signs or robots or you know, like their, their captors. It’s, it’s interesting. It’s a pattern that I think I’ve, we’ve been noticing a lot more. I’ve been noticing in all these Disney movies we’ll watch so far that yeah, the, the animals in the presence of humans are rarely violent because the human is always supposed to be the bad person when you’re tying them up together.

A small exception might be the Jungle Book, might be Tarzan. But ultimately you know that the humans are gonna make out in the end on both of those movies too. Bambi’s mom got shot. I mean, I guess we’re just looking for the OG on that. Yeah. Where’s the. The sequel where the hunter’s family dies from lyme disease because the deer came too close to their house. There is a direct to video Bambi too. I don’t think it’s about that, but it was like made in like 2000, you know, nowhere. These Bambi’s Revenge. Yeah, yeah, I’ll have to go look up Bambi too.

Maybe they go closer to the book for that one. I don’t know. Well, I think that there’s public domain that’s coming up soon on Bambi. I would assume so. Some how hard would it be to just create a movie about an entire family dying of Lyme disease and going insane and they can’t eat meat anymore or something and they don’t know what’s going on. They think it’s a curse or something. But no, it was just a tick. Oh, well, did you have any other rabbit holes you wanted to jump into in your notes? No, just that I’ve got popcorn at me bum.

Okay. I guess that’s the takeaway from this one. So. Yeah, I just have little notes about the animals. I had to avoid crocs when I worked in South Carolina while leading kids around. Of course the crocs here I guess were nice sewer crocs or whatever. Oh, I did look into that because I mean conspiracy theories. This is one of the more light hearted ones about crocs or alligators being in the sewer system of New York. And I found, man, it’s. It’s so hard because there was an article from 1938, I think it was the late 1930s about someone in New York that originally thought that this was nonsense.

But they went down in the sewer system and in fact found alligators down there and took them all out. I think they shot them all. They killed them all. So that any other claims that happened after the 1930s, those ones were the silly claims because they had already all been taken out already. But Even that original 1938 report, I don’t necessarily believe it just because it’s old. That’s a lot. That’s sort of a pitfall a lot of people will fall for. It’s like, oh well, no one lied in the 30s. No one ever had any big lies back then.

But that this was written about in a number of different books and. And it was repeated in movies, and it turned into this sort of like a fun folklore to sort of spread around. But the idea was that either people were flushing alligator babies down the toilet or that they were getting loose and finding their way into these. The sewer systems. But I don’t know if there’s a definitive answer other than that article that said. Yeah, and in the 30s, there were some down there, but they only grew to, like, 2ft long or something, which seems like, you know, exotic animals that escaped and found their self into the sewer somehow.

But they got the chuds down there, right? I. I would believe the chuds as much as albino alligators in the sewer system. All right, where? The Morlocks, X Men style, Morelocks. They got to be down there somewhere. Mutants Under New York City. I don’t know the other one. I just thought the dung beetles were weird because they tried to make the design look like clothing. So they’re the only clothes animals in the movie. And German. I didn’t understand the German dung beetles. Yeah. Because they have, like, kind of hair, which is weird. And it was just the only animal that had no.

Well, I guess the chameleons also had no actual connection to nature as far as their appearance. But the rest of them, you know, generally, that’s what those animals look like. Were they just throwing shade at Germans, saying that Germans play with poop again? Okay. Yeah. I guess that’s actually a witty joke when you think about it that way. Someone was in the weirder corners of the Internet. That’s fine. Do what you want. Well, I guess we’ll wrap this one up today. That was last of my notes. I want to spit out the weird animals. So what’s coming up after this? Yeah.

Oh, what’s coming up for us? Cars. It’s Cars next. Okay. Should I be excited or should I be terrified? Oh, you haven’t seen Cars? I don’t think so. No. Okay. It is the first Pixar, which was wildly successful, so that wasn’t a problem on. You know, this was one of the first big projects that I actually got to work on when I was at Disney. One of the first IPS that I was able to. To utilize. I wasn’t doing anything fancy. I think it was, like, in park animatics and, like, marketing materials and stuff, but got to work with some of the Cars stuff.

So I. I don’t know if I actually ever saw it, but I stared at it and I knew all of the different character Designs for the longest. Yeah, we’ll have a lot more like solid production info on that one in general for sure. But it is the first Pixar where people watched in saying maybe this one’s for kids. Which was not the case with the earlier Pixars and definitely is not the case with the three that follow it. So I think it was the last of like Disney and Pixar like actually working together where the next.

The three films after as Pixar thinking they might end up being their own studio. So okay. Being bought. So it is an. It’s interesting. It’ll. It’ll be an interesting movie to talk about on multiple levels in case I don’t remember it for when we talk about cars or if we just go on other tangents, maybe as a reminder for me for next time. But there was a huge project that Disney was trying to push internally because Club Penguin was exploding at this point. And Disney absolutely wanted to make something that was more Disney ip, that would compete with Club Penguin and essentially like usurp it in a way.

And I think they had some kind of relation to it. But one of those ideas was to make an entire online virtual world, but it was car themed so everyone would have been one of these cars instead of a penguin. I don’t know if you even know what Club Penguin is. It was a pretty huge thing in the early mid 2000s. What? What is it? It sounds mildly familiar, but I’m not. Club Penguin was an online, like a cloud based social gaming site that was made for kids and you were just a little penguin and they had all sorts of little mini game.

It was like a flash thing, but you had all the little mini games and you can go around in this world. But it was also sort of a virtual chat room so other penguins could send you messages as you were walking around. You could be like, hey, what’s going on? And like type a little thing. It was. It doesn’t sound like much now, but it was. There’s got to be someone listening to this right now. On Club Penguin, my parents had to take, you know, like if they replenished me, it was. You weren’t allowed to use Club Penguin this week or whatever.

No, I was living my most in the wild at that. At that point in time then because that’s when I was doing the environmental education, running around the woods. So still. Still could not live in the full wild though. You know, I don’t think any of us are. Few of us are equipped for that. Well, no, you have to have that pure British blood, like Tarzan. Right, Right. And then you can work it out. That just shows that we are not at the top of the eugenics hierarchy. Well, he also started working on it from age six or something.

Right. So that helps with the whole premise being that it wouldn’t have mattered when he started. It was. It was the bloodline that was doing all the work. You already kind of did the perfect plug, I guess. But if you want to do one that’s a little more specific, go for what you’re up to. Yeah, well, I can’t. I think I. I did a plug for paranoidamerican.com inside my embedded NLP. So if you wake up in the middle of the night or you wake up tomorrow morning and you’re thinking about buying a comic book from paranoidamerican.com you will feel great about that.

You almost imagine yourself doing it right now. You can hear the mouse click, you can hear the finger tapping on the iPad purchase, and it makes you feel great and warm inside. I can’t describe the feeling, but it’s there. But also, even more important than that is the Illuminati comic that I released with Donut right now, as of recording, we are about halfway into the campaign. The campaign ends on December 11, 2024. In case you’re listening to this far in the future and Matt and I are dead, but you should still be able to find it if you just go to illuminaticomic.com and grab one, it’s literally going to be the best and most comprehensive comic book about the Bavarian Illuminati ever produced in over 200 years.

So, big claim, but we can back it up 250. I think we’re going on. All right, sounding groovy. I lost my thought train of thought there. Oh, well, I was listening to you. That’s why for me, I didn’t mention other podcasts I do today, so I guess I won’t mention it now. And I’ll just point to the rovingsagemedia.bangcamp.com where I do a lot of music. Some of it meant to program your brain. Some of it may be having nlp. I don’t know. I outsourced all my lyric writing for the past 10 years. I don’t think I can write lyrics anymore, but I can write music and performance.

So off to the wild, into the wild. That’s a different movie. I scribbled my life away Driven the right to page Will it enlight your brain? Give you the flight My plane paper the highs ablaze somewhat of an amazing feel when it’s real to real you will engage it your favorite of course the lord of an arrangement I gave you the proper results to hit the pavement if they get emotional hey maybe your language a game how they playing it well without Lakers evade them whatever the cause they are to shapeshift snakes get decapitated met is the apex execution of flame you out nuclear bomb distributed at war rather gruesome for eyes to see max them out than I I like my trees blow it off in the face you despising me for what though calculated you’d rather cut throat paranoid American must be all the blood smoke for real Lord give me your day your way vacate they wait around to hate whatever they say man it’s not in the least bit we get heavy rotate when a beat hits so thank us you’re welcome for real you’re welcome they ain’t never had a deal you’re welcome man they lack an appeal you’re welcome yet they doing it still you’re welcome.
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