Archive for October 2nd, 2010
Governor Palin is not the new Anita Bryant, no matter how much drunks in Boystown parrot this
One of my goals in wanting to contribute to C4P is to communicate to Governor Palin’s supporters the most common pejoratives I routinely hear used against her here in Chicago, and most specifically my turf in Boystown (this article’s a cross-post over there on this subject).
The point of this is to give you an idea of the memes that are being manufactured against the Governor and propagated by the likes of MSNBC, CNN, and the rest of the lamestream media — with Anderson Cooper and Rachel Maddow being particularly tasked, it would seem, with supplying the gay community with these anti-Palin talking points. For those of you who say “I don’t care what awful things gays say about Palin, because they wouldn’t vote for any Republican anyway”, I remind you that a great deal of pop culture originates in places like Boystown…before spreading to the country as a whole, where Independents in particular pick up a lot of these memes because gays made it hip and cool.
Palin-bashing is entertainment here in Boystown for devotees of the MSNBC talking heads, and 80% of it’s rooted in the classic Liberal view that all female candidates must be destroyed, unless they subserviently toe the Left’s talking points line and do whatever the Democrat Party wants them to do. So the deranged misogyny, sexism, and assaults on the Governor for giving birth to Trig (some of the sickest attacks I have ever personally heard made on anyone), are just par for the course with the Democrat attack machine — and any conservative woman would find herself on the receiving end of these same trademarked assaults.
Should Disney have renamed "Rapunzel" to attract more boys to the cartoon?
Disney Fantasyland Expansion Plans (as of Spring 2010)
Old title (with the weird "Unbraided" idea that was supposed to make it like Shrek, until the Shrek franchise imploded and started losing money)
Apparently, little boys go running away screaming from princesses.
I, apparently, have no problem with them.
Or the Statue of Liberty either
All of us here at Buzzquarters are very excited for the new Disney “Rapunzel” film coming out this fall, even if it’s not called “Rapunzel” anymore, but is instead titled “Tangled”.
I can’t be the only one who immediately thinks of Prell, Vidal Sassoon, and Frizzeeze whenever I hear “Tangled”, long before I’d ever think “fairytale with girl who has long hair and meets a guy who climbs up the tower” in images “Rapunzel”, as a title, instantly conjures.
Word is Disney’s going to soon be renaming Aladdin “Wishes”, Cinderella “Cleaning Up!”, and Beauty & the Beast “Lots of Stuff Happens Where People Are Transformed Into Things But Are Okay in the End”, to make those movies gender-neutral in their titles as well, because marketing executives are such geniuses.
We went to Disney World this summer for Gay Days, and it was the first time any of us had been in the park in easily 20 years. Someday I’ll finish the write-up of that adventure (it’s going to be in the HillBuzz book, so you WILL get to read it at some point), but the short version is that we had a great time overall…and were fascinated by all the construction going on in the park as Disney enhances its Fantasyland area behind Cinderella’s castle to make the most of its princess-line of branding. It’s actually surprisingly how little of the classic fairytales is structurally in Disney World.
For some reason, we thought it would be like in that Shrek film where they went to the kingdom of “Far, Far, Away” and all the various castles were next to each other, with all the royal characters dancing around in an enchanted kingdom chock full of visual gags and nods to all the stories. This appears to be what Disney’s trying to get closer to, in the expansion plans like the one above.
As soon as we got to Disney World, in that big sea of red-shirts for Gay Days, we headed to the castle to have breakfast at Cinderella’s Table, where various costumed actresses come by and pretend they are Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Belle, and others.
The girls who play Snow White are real method actresses, and while none of the “princesses” ever broke character, the Snow Whites really took their roles seriously. Years ago, I dated a guy named Matt who had played Prince Phillip (Sleeping Beauty’s beau, and my all-time-favorite Disney prince, even before I met Matt) at Disney World and he said “Snow” is the most coveted and iconic part, so the girls who get to play her take it so seriously because it’s like being First Lady of Disney World. Well, after Minnie Mouse, anyway. But, we’ve always imagined those costumed characters to be big Teamsters in those air-conditioned suits.
When Snow came to our table, she asked us all where we were from and when we said Chicago, she said she didn’t know where that was but it sounds like a long carriage ride away.
“No, we didn’t take a carriage. We flew on a plane, and then took a cab to the hotel, and then slept there, and then woke up this morning, did other stuff, and then took a shuttle here,” Panda explained to her, while eating French toast that tasted like doughnuts via Disney Magic.
I fulled out my cell phone to take a picture of Snow with everyone and she asked if this was my magic mirror.
“No, that’s his phone. You can talk to people on it, or take pictures with it, but it’s not magic,” Panda told her, speaking loudly the way he does to foreign people so they can better understand him. ”See, watch, look at it and smile, and then it’s going to flash and you’ll see your picture”. I’m surprised he didn’t tell her not to worry about it stealing her soul.
“Oh, that is ever so magical! I will have to tell Dopey about that,” Snow White said, all-a-flutter, pretending she’d never seen a camera phone before.
Panda kept talking to her about Dopey, the other Dwarves, and started showing her pictures from his cell phone of random things from Boystown that he thought she wouldn’t know about too, until Robby told him politely that there were probably children in the restaurant who wanted to meet Snow, so maybe he could stop showing her pictures of buses, trains, and Sidetrack’s so that she could continue making her rounds.
“Well, she asked about stuff, so I didn’t want to be rude. It’s not like I said ‘Hey, come here and let me show you this’. She’s never seen a bus before and thought it was a dragon, so I thought she needed to know about reality”.
The same thing more or less happened with Ariel and Sleeping Beauty, too, with the latter doing a slick narcoleptic shtick and pretending to doze off standing up every minute or so.
The whole thing was delightful, and a really great breakfast (with no menu: once seated, the waiter, dressed up as a castle page, came over and asked what we wanted and said the kitchen could make just about anything, and we could have as much of it as we wanted…so Panda asked for French toast that tasted like doughnuts (but not doughnuts that tasted like French toast, of course, because that would have just been absurd), while the rest of us had various combinations of other breakfast foods) and we all delighted in the big castle-themed goings on in the room, with a great view out into Fantasyland and all the construction going on in the park.
Tiana, from the Princess & the Frog, wasn’t at the breakfast, but Disney did have her and her Prince in a little meet-and-greet gazebo that was very cute…and the actress and actor playing the parts were charming, and really looked their parts. It’s just a shame that movie wasn’t better. It’s on Netflix streaming for free now and I’ve tried watching it again to see if I’d like it better, but I just didn’t. There aren’t any songs I can remember, and I still don’t really understand what the Obama-like villain, Dr. Facilier, really hoped to accomplish with the whole thing. Aside from him looking a lot like Obama, and being full of as much razzle-dazzle, I don’t remember much about him or the movie in general.
Disney has deluded itself into believing the reason that film underperformed is because the title turned little boys off the flick and made them not want to see it, but that doesn’t explain why Beauty & the Beast, The Little Mermaid, and other female-titled Disney cartoons made big bank at the box office…when Disney’s claiming the “Princess” in “Princess & the Frog” was the culprit for the lackluster returns.
What they don’t want to admit is that Princess & the Frog was meddled with too much, watered down by focus groups and committee meetings, and suffered from too much involvement and consultation by the likes of Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Oprah and others in the black community who pressured Disney to change this or that, with threats of boycotts and protests if they didn’t. This robbed the movie of any soul — and I suspect eliminated a lot of the villain’s character, because he feels the most short-changed. Since he’s black, and the villain, it’s not hard for me to imagine Sharpton howling at Disney to cut out whatever dastardly things he got up to in the original script…and meddling like that could easily explain why the character feels so hollowed-out, one-note, and utterly forgettable.
I don’t care how old I get, I’ll always pay to see these Disney fairytale movies in theaters (and have an absurdist wish that in the future they’d do a tale based on King Ludwig II of Bavaria and his misadventures…adding a star-crossed gay Disney prince to the mix…so long as Disney keeps itself in the “including all demographics” business it got into with Princess & the Frog). I’ve never understood why it took them this long to get to Rapunzel, because she was a natural for the genre…even if portraying her at a costumed character breakfast would burden an actress with wigs from the Crystal Gayle collection of real waiter-trippers.
It’s a mistake in my opinion to have changed the movie’s title to “Tangled”, from “Rapunzel”, but when the film’s a much bigger success than Princess & the Frog the marketing department that pushed this change is going to crow about how they saved the film from Princess’s diminished returns.
This movie was going to be a hit no matter what, because it didn’t have crackpots and lunatics from the Al Sharpton brigade messing with it in committees and focus groups…and apparently real, professional, talented composers worked on the songs (instead of hack Randy Newman…who has been writing the same song, with the same music, for 30 years now, just rearranging the words to collect another check). Great songs. Fun story. Beautiful art. Characters from a classic tale given the Disney touch.
Calling it “Rapunzel” would not have kept anyone away.
But, I thought I’d ask all of you about this, especially those with children, because I honestly don’t know what kids like.
Would little boys have refused to go see a movie called “Rapunzel?”.
I was in grade school when Little Mermaid came out, and I think I just started high school when Beauty and the Beast hit theaters. I couldn’t wait to see them in theaters. But, then again, I loved the cartoon Jem and grew up to be gay, so maybe that’s why those “princess-named” movies didn’t turn me off.
Also, back then, Disney didn’t have its “princess-line” of merchandising revved up…so these movies weren’t branded “princess” and were still pushed as “fairy tale”, which was part of my cultural heritage from childhood and relatable to me, and my male peers as I can remember it. I recall a math class in high school when Beauty was nominated for Best Picture and our teacher complained about a cartoon making that cut — everyone in the room howled at him, including football player guys, because we’d all seen the flick and loved it. No guy was ashamed to have watched it because it was “girly”.
So maybe this aversion to princesses is a new development I haven’t paid attention to.
I’d really like your take on this branding decision…because I find everything that Disney does to be inherently fascinating, even if it might be another 20 years before I set foot in one of their parks for another breakfast with Snow White and the gang.
Cocktail Party Photoshop Fun: Help us complete our set
Use this image as the base so it's consistent across the candidates
We really like how this turned out, and the font Chrissy used for Mittens
It would be nice if the names moved side to side like this. Mitt's was on the left, Thune's on the right. This way, in the future, when we used these all together in something there's a nice visual play back and forth from side to side.
Chrissy-the-Hyphenated did a great job making images for Mittens Romney and John Thune.
She’s busy at the moment, but we would like to complete our cucumber-and-mayonnaise sandwich gallery for the other boring as paste Cocktail Party establishment candidates the lamestream media keeps pushing for 2012.
Add other names in comments below if we are missing people, but here are the ones we write about often that we’d like put onto sandwiches to match Chrissy’s Mittens and Thune shots (so that they all look like they are from the same set and it stays consistent):
* Tim Pawlenty
* Mitch Daniels
* Mike Pence
* Bobby Jindal
* Newt Gingrich
* Jon Huntsman
Can you make some sandwiches today, Photoshoppers?
Email: HillBuzz@gmail.com
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UPDATE: Thanks to all for the new additions to the Cocktail Party
H/t Bo
H/t Bo
H/t Bo
H/t Bo
H/t Bo
H/t Bo
Are we missing any sandwiches? Any soggy, squishy, Cocktail Party sandwiches?
Saturday Open Thread: October 2nd, 2010
Caroline Kennedy is a wonderful costume for Halloween 2010
What’s on your minds this Saturday?
What are people talking about in your part of the country?
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Today’s Halloween costume pic is one we think a lot of women (and even a few guys) could pull off: Caroline Kennedy
All you need is a red dress, an orange-red wig, and that I WANTS IT I WANTS IT I WANTS IT scream.
You could be little Veruca Salt from Willy Wonka as well, because we are all about repurposing costumes and getting our money’s worth from everything. Just as those Nancy Pelosi masks we see at some Halloween stores could be Babrara Boxer, Gloria Allred, and Leona Helmsley as well.
What other standard, store-bought costumes that you’ve seen could be repurposed into political figures?
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CAN YOU BE AN ELECTION JUDGE?
We’d like you to do something boring and probably a little frustrating today, because it will require you to get online and look around for a while and then make probably four or five phone calls until you get a straight answer…but we want you to look into being an Election Judge in your area for November.
November actually starts in October, folks, because here in Chicago we have non-stop early voting from October 11-November 2nd.
Democrats have plenty of Election Judges supporting them…but here in Chicago, and I bet in other urban areas, there are often no Republican election judges making sure Democrats don’t cheat and steal the election.
There was an issue in Missouri that came to light just this week where Democrats brought in a pack of 50 or so Somali immigrants (non-citizens) who spoke no English and tried to vote. It looks like they were actually able to cast ballots in the primary race that made a difference.
One of the things we learned in 2008 — and this will probably stun you — is that it’s not prosecutable to go after Democrats for cheating in primaries, apparently. Obama’s campaign rigged the caucuses, brought in non-state voters to cast ballots in Democrat primaries in many states, and employed all sorts of intimidation and foul play to game the system. But because these are just party primaries, they apparently don’t fall under the Voter Rights Act and don’t carry federal penalties.
Obama got in no more trouble for what he did in terms of 2008 voter fraud than he would have if he was running for student council president and pulled a Matthew Broderick and switched the ballots.
Conservatives need to stop defaulting things like Election Judges to the Left, and start making the time to do things like this. We know you are busy. Your kids have soccer or macaroni crafting or ballet or whatever to do. You have a job and a life. But you can’t keep complaining about Democrats cheating and getting away with election fraud if you don’t find some way to tell little Susie she just can’t go to American Girl Place on Saturday because mommy is going to do her part and be an election judge that day.
Taking one or two or ten of these shifts, every two years, is not going to destroy your family or scar little Susie. Maybe you could even take her with her and she’d get more out of the experience than going to soccer or ballet that week.
We know getting involved in all of this kind of sucks. It’s boring. The people you will have to deal with are weird. It is not a lot of fun.
But, this is your watch. If you want the Democrats to have a hard time scamming the system, good people need to get off their butts and not indulge little Susie FOR JUST ONE DAY so they can do something for their country.
Figure out how to become an Election Judge where you live.
Start by Googling: your county’s name, your state, “Election Judge”, needed, Republican, contact
We ran that exact search (Cook county Illinois Election Judge needed Republican contact) and got the email and number of the person we needed to speak to about becoming election judges here in Chicago.
It was THAT EASY.
We are making the time to do this because we care about seeing a fair process and are sick to death of Democrats cheating in these elections.
Can you help too?
