I am immensely disappointed that while discussing this show with others IRL no one understood why Lucifer aggressively playing a golden fiddle during a duel against Alastor is absolutely hilarious.
I am not a boomer I am CULTURED you swine.
I enter the Library of Books You Read As A Child. "Do you have… er. It was green, and there was a girl and a dog, and…" The librarian nods. "Of course. Which version do you want?" "Version?" "The one you read, with all flaws you didn't notice, or the one you remember loving?"
I have started playing Myst.
-It is scarier than I thought.
-Is it normal to feel like I should be taking notes?
It is normal to feel like you should be taking notes.
I don’t know if I can contain my “The Muppet Christmas Carol has better costume design than most Oscar-nominated period dramas” rant until after Thanksgiving you guys, I have…so many Thoughts
Ok, buckle up kids.
Basically they did not have to go as hard as they did here. A Christmas Carol covers 60 years of fashion through flashbacks and they still manage to do nearly everything right.
I’m mainly going to be talking about the human actors here because it’s harder to judge Muppet costumes proportionally, but those costumes are still on point 90% of the time.
First off, A Christmas Carol was published in 1843, and anyone who knows me knows I love the absolute train wreck that was mid-19th century men’s fashion. Do you like plaid? GOOD, BECAUSE IT’S ALL PLAID. Mixed with whatever else your little Victorian heart desires, color schemes be damned. Go wild.
This of course means I absolutely love Fred.
This outfit is hideous and it is also 1000% on point.
We also get to see him in a different outfit the next day, along with his wife and some friends.
First off, MORE PLAID, good for you. Second, I can literally find near-identical images of both these ladies’ dresses just by googling “1843 fashion plate”, I shit you not. To the damned year.
A good part of the story involves travelling through Scrooge’s life, so we get to see the costumes varying wildly over the course of several scenes. This was a time when styles were changing rapidly, and you had to keep up if you wanted to be fashionable and keep up appearances. Fashion changed so fast that you can often pinpoint an outfit to within a year or two like the ones above.
First, we go to Scrooge’s childhood school. Given the timeline that’s normally put forward Michael Caine is definitely not old enough to play Scrooge, but ignore that for now. Let’s say if Scrooge is 75ish in 1843, it’s about 1783 when we see him leaving school and going off to be an apprentice. We actually see a few years of Little Scrooge fashion, but it’s fairly standard stuff. Scrooge doesn’t have a super childhood and his clothing is pretty plain, but it’s totally on par for the time. Why this haircut though? It makes me sad.
Then we jump ahead a few years and it’s about 1789. The whole group is attending the Fozziwig Christmas party and have gotten tarted up like they’re about the storm the Bastille, including Gonzo and Rizzo.
Again, they look absolutely ridiculous and it is absolutely accurate.
Now, this is super ostentatious and a lot of people would have considered it way too French for their taste in this time period. But it definitely did happen (I’ve seen stripey bubblegum pink menswear in person) and like. It’s the Muppets. So, Rule of Funny.
Scrooge and Belle are dressed way closer to average Londoners of the time, and it’s worth noting that both are supposed to be somewhat poor. Fozzy pays everyone well but Lil’ Scrooge is still a skinflint and Belle is just getting by. They’re both looking darn good but their clothes are much more understated than everyone else’s and maybe even on the verge of out of style.
Even their hair is pretty good. Including his. Also, holy shit does this guy look like he could be a young Michael Caine. Like, he doesn’t actually look how Michael Caine looked when he was that age, but if I didn’t know that I would totally buy it. Wow.
Then we jump ahead another ten to twelve years or so. This is the period I know the least about, especially when it comes to outerwear, so Jane Austen stans please comment. I don’t think it looks too bad though.
Here’s a couple of fashion plates from 1801 and 1803 for comparison.
I’d also like to point out that there is a wide variety of costumes based on social class that we get to see in the 1843 “present” that you wouldn’t really notice. So while the Scrooge family that’s doing alright for itself is wearing the latest looks, the rest of the town is not. A few of the women in the crowd dancing around Scrooge during “It Feels Like Christmas” are wearing dresses a couple of years out of date. Not too far, but you can see some looks from the tail end of the 1830s before women started shrink-wrapping their sleeves onto their arms.
You can see something similar to these outfits from 1839 in the crowd.
Contrast this with Mrs. Cratchit, who is living in poverty and has put on her absolute best dress for Christmas; it’s silk but it’s ten years out of style.
This would have been the height of fashion in the early-mid 1830s.
And that’s important for making a world look real. Fashion was super important back then, but even so average people weren’t necessarily chucking their clothing out every year to keep up with the latest fashions unless they could really afford to. You would get there eventually, but you don’t want everyone in your universe, rich and poor, to look like they just stepped out of the latest fashion magazine.
It’s absolutely astonishing to me that they put so much effort into this. I don’t tend to go down the rabbit hole of nitpicking historical costumes in movies as much as some, but when a movie that you never expected does it very right it just throws me for a loop.
Was everything perfect? No, I don’t think any movie is. But this is the damn Muppets. They were under no obligation to do this. Add to that the fact that it’s one of the more accurate renditions of the story, to the point of including a ton of the original dialogue, both through the characters and through the narration, and they just created a masterpiece.
Me: AND YOU’VE BEEN CAUGHT AND ARRAIGNED
Judge: I’m holding you in contempt of court
I’m crying tears of joy
Me: AND YOU’RE GETTING ARRESTED, YOU’RE BEING DETAINED
Judge: Bailiff, please
I can’t just sit here with this graphic design BFA and this juris doctor and do nothing:
Can we all take a moment to acknowledge that "You don't really face oppression for your identity, it's just misdirected [x]" is one of the most ridiculous arguments to arise out of exclusionary discourses?
Like, buddy, pal, I assure you that the people who hate us for not fitting into their norm don't care why and how we don't fit, just that we don't. We're talking about people for whom a lesbian and a trans man are both equally "women who think they aren't" and so are ace women bc to them womanhood is connected to having sex with guys. People who think trans women are just effeminate gay men, except effeminate gay men to them are also just "men who want to be women" and AMAB enbies are either depending on the time of day. It's all the same to them.
These people are overwhelmingly not anti-[specific set of identities], but anti-queer. They might end up policing us in different ways simply because we end up being affected differently by their policies, but that's not generally due to any distinctions they care to make.
None of this is to say that there isn't also identity-specific discrimination, but simply that 99% what you call "misdirected" is, in fact, targeting exactly who they want to target. They don't care that to us, they're targeting different groups, to them there's only one group and that group is "other".
Art by Hector aka shitty watercolor
Archive Link (paywall bypass)
I will always reblog this.
that writing feel when the dialogue just starts flowing and you are but a humble instrument for the characters and – hey wait that’s the exact opposite direction i wanted this plot to take what are you saying no stop i
Daylight savings changeover is always on saturday night / early sunday morning?
Spell the name of the books with the bears.
Babe. Babbbbbe… it’s the second sunday.
Right. So it should happen tonight. I get that the first being a Sunday threw me, but.
Well if it was in the morning tomorrow, it would Monday.
What do you call the second after 23:59:59 on Sunday?
Monday. It’s Monday.
EXACTLY! It’s supposed to be 01:00 Monday!
the past several years (and yes I did change it to Nova Scotia just to be sure it wasn’t weirdly different there lol)
SPELL THE BEARS, DAMMIT. SPELL THE BEARS
I have a distinct memory of Mom getting me up for church two entire hours early as a kid thanks to screwing up the Spring Forward Fall Back mnemonic one year, and of celebrating my adulthood as a college freshman by staying up until 2am to watch the shift. It's Sunday 2am, and the season just decides whether you get Second 2am or No 2am.
We’re indoctrinated from childhood with the idea that staying home sick is somehow suspect or lazy, and that morally superior people never have their productivity schedule compromised lol, when the reality is that going out in public when you’re sick is a terrible thing to do to immune-compromised and chronically ill people (and “healthy” people) and staying home is a good thing and a right we should all have, not only for our own sakes but for others’
“Many people seem to think it foolish, even superstitious, to believe that the world could still change for the better. And it is true that in winter it is sometimes so bitingly cold that one is tempted to say, ‘What do I care if there is a summer; its warmth is no help to me now.’ Yes, evil often seems to surpass good. But then, in spite of us, and without our permission, there comes at last an end to the bitter frosts. One morning the wind turns, and there is a thaw. And so I must still have hope.”
— Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh (first published 1914)
Monty Python’s Breath of the Wild
The Legend of Zelda: Life of Brian
Only the true hero would deny his heroism!
Seriously, though, a Legend of Zelda style game where you’re not the Chosen Hero, but just happen to resemble them enough that you’re constantly mistaken for them and keep getting pulled into cleaning up their messes could be a pretty fun time, Pythonesque tone or no.
(The true Hero is, of course, out there fighting the good fight, but you never quite cross paths with them – you always miss them just nearly enough to be held responsible for whatever catastrophe they’ve most recently caused without having any opportunity to set the record straight!)
LoZ would lend itself particularly well to this because from BotW onward it's canon that a pile of near-replicas of the Master Sword are running around thanks to the palace armory at the time of the Calamity, and on top of that only a few people in Hyrule are going to be able to tell the difference without seeing sword beams because all relevant knowledge passed into legend. You can get the first random broadsword out of a likely-looking rock less than ten minutes from starting a new game.
Good luck proving that broadsword you just pulled out of a random rock isn't the Master Sword if someone decides you are the Hero.
Insistence that someone’s internal thoughts and perceptions must be a certain way is neither helpful nor safe, whether or not you agree with their decisions.
