Rebels: "Out of Darkness" (Ep. 1.6)

"Stay calm; it's all part  of the plan."

I was going to say, at some point you have to start revealing the back stories of the supporting characters, then I realized they've revealed the major points already on the male characters. Sure, it's only episode six, but they gave us the stories for each of the male characters by the end of the second episode.

1. Ezra: The protagonist. Orphan boy with special powers. Fantasy cliche hero. Same model as Luke, actually. And Anakin. And Harry Potter. You get the picture, I'm sure.

2. Kanan Jarrus: Jedi on the run from the Empire and trying to do it harm at the same time. Sure, we don't know everything about him, but that's really enough to place him in the spectrum of things. He's the mentor character. Flawed, but the best available.

3. Zeb: The strong man. One of the last survivors of his race. The Chewbacca replacement, down to the part where his race was exploited and killed by the Empire.

We get all of that in the first two episodes with nothing about the women other than that Hera owns The Ghost and is the pilot, and Sabine wears some pieces of Mandalorian armor.

We get to find out a tiny bit about Sabine in this episode. She was a loyal Imperial in the Academy on Mandalore, blindingly following orders... until something bad happened. Now, she has trust issues and hates it that Kanan and Hera keep her in the dark about things. The whole episode is an exploration of trust between Hera and Sabine.

There is some fighting of monsters, too.

And the repeated referring to someone called Fulcrum.

But, overall, this episode was back down into the "kids' cartoon" realm for me as the fight with the monsters had a very video game feel with even the characters referring to the combat as "wave one" and "wave two" and so on. So I'm back to waiting to see where the show goes after the brief moment of hoping that it was rising about merely being a cartoon for kids.

Rebels: "Breaking Ranks" (Ep. 1.5)

"Don't worry. I've been training to be a Jedi."
"Yeah, right. Who isn't?"

In this episode, Ezra goes under cover.

In many ways, this is the mirror to the Clone Wars episode "Death Trap." In that one, a young Boba Fett went undercover as clone trooper cadet; in this one, Ezra goes undercover as a stormtrooper cadet. In that one, Boba was attempting an assassination; in this one, Ezra is trying to steal something the crew of the Ghost needs to save lives. In that one, Boba betrays the friends he's made; in this one, Ezra risks his life to save the new friends he's made.

There's one other significant interesting difference:
Throughout the Clone Wars series, we see the clones being trained to work together, trained to be one unit rather than a bunch of individuals. And, as close as the clones were to each other, they still had to be trained to work together. In this episode of Rebels, though, we see the stormtrooper cadets being encouraged to work for themselves individually, even to the detriment of their fellow stormtroopers. [This might explain why stormtroopers never hit anything.]

Also, there's a brief bit with the Inquisitor, a bit which may be a reveal on what the underlying reason is for the method of training for the stormtroopers.

The only negative I have about the episode is the video game nature of the particular training event happening in "Breaking Ranks." And how easy it is after the commander built it up as the most difficult thing they'd ever face. Yeah, I know it's 20 minute cartoon, but it seems like they could have come up with something more interesting and dangerous enough to be believable.

"I'd rather die standing..."

I suppose you could say that I was a real Looney Tunes fan when I was a kid. It came on at 7:00 a.m. on Saturday mornings, and I got up, religiously, to watch it. None of my friends did that. At best, they might catch one or two of the cartoons before it ended three hours later. Often, when I would spend the night at a friend's house, I'd be the only one up on Saturday morning, which is why I know none of my friends got up to watch cartoons that early. I'd only turn the TV on, with the sound down low, sitting close to it so that I could hear, and sit and watch Bugs, Wile E., and Yosemite Sam in someone else's still-sleeping house.

Oh, and Porky Pig. You know, the stuttering pig. Not one time in all of my childhood did I ever think that people who stutter were being made fun of because of Porky's stuttering. That did not stop a wave of protests throughout the 90s, though, against the pig and the removal (at least for a time) of Porky's famous closing line "Th-th-th-that's all folks!" Evidently, people (or pigs) who stutter were not considered good enough to be on TV. They might offend someone else with same condition. It's good no one ever told Mel Tillis.

We have become a culture too scared to give offense and too willing to be offended. Any hint of offense must be met with an immediate and very public apology. It's ridiculous and has moved into the realms of being an unhealthy obsession. This reluctance to offend has become the largest barrier to free speech in the world. We're too busy self-censoring to even know what free speech is. It's all about fear.

Maybe Porky is an extreme example but, seriously, being offended by an animated pig is pretty extreme. Probably, being offended by any cartoon is extreme. What a way to hand power over your life over to someone else. But I don't want to get side-tracked on the psychology of why people are blatantly offensive.

The actual issue is that when we all try so hard to never offend anyone and spare everyone's poor little feelings then, when there is someone who is willing to be offensive and ridicule things that probably ought to be ridiculed (because, honestly, more things probably ought to be ridiculed; anything that people treat as religion, in fact, from actual religion to money to sports teams), then that person stands out, way out, and stands out in that way can make him a target for retaliation from people who have given all of their power away.

The problem is that too many people, almost all people, just go along. It doesn't matter if it's wrong or right, they don't give things enough thought to ever get to that determination. Religious people are the worst. I say that as someone who grew up Baptist and worked in churches for years. I say that as someone who lost his first church position because he spoke out against something wrong the church leadership was doing. I say that as someone who was told, "Teenagers are not a priority for us because they don't bring in any money. Unless you can figure out how to get their parents to come to church [and tithe], we're not going to support the program [beyond being a babysitting service]." I say that as someone who is no longer associated with an organized church because every organized church I've been a part of has been more concerned with money than doing its job. No, wait, only concerned with money. The "job" was only a means to bringing in money.

But, then, churches are another of the places that are primarily concerned with taking people's power away from them. Satire, in that sense, can be a way to give that power back to the people.

Charlie Hebdo was not unknown to me before the attack on January 7. I didn't read it (because, well, French), but I agreed with its ideologies. I admired those men for continuing to publish despite the very real (as the massacre demonstrates) threat upon their lives. As Stephane Charbonnier said in 2012, "I am not afraid of retaliation. I have no children, no wife, no car, no credit. It perhaps sounds a bit pompous, but I'd rather die standing than live on my knees." That's not actually a new quote, the part about dying on one's feet. It goes back at least 200 years... to another Frenchman. People, some small group of people, have always been willing to stand up and die.

I can't say that I'm not afraid of retaliation. I have children. I have a wife. I even have a car, a house note, and a dog and a cat. But... But I would rather die standing than have my children live on their knees. The thing is, if more people would take that stance, the people who would kill wouldn't stand any kind of chance. But most people just stop at fear. And refusing to think.

Look, I get that Charlie Hebdo was irreverent, and I remember just how un-funny I found Bored of the Rings back when I was 14 or 15 and thought it would be a good idea to read it (but I was 14 or 15!), but!
When irreverence is seen as a justification for murder, there is no place left for reverence.

"I am Charlie."
and
"I am Ahmed."

Ninja Mutants: An Extended Review -- Part Three: A Cultural Phenomenon

Does it come as a surprise that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles started out as a joke? I bet it doesn't to some of you. I think the joke was aimed mostly at Frank Miller, since much of the concept was based off of Daredevil, which Miller was doing at the time, and Ronin, which was Frank Miller's. There are other influences, but, really, those seem to be the biggest. The whole Foot Clan thing was a play on Miller's The Hand, which he created for Daredevil.

I thought it was a joke but not a particularly funny one. I had just started collecting comics seriously around the time TMNT first came out, not that anyone really heard about it at the time, since the first issue had a print run of only around 3200 copies. As Peter Laird said, "It was a goof." It was, they thought, a one-off. A gag. The evidence of that can be seen in that they, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, published it as an oversize issue, larger (much) than the standard comic book.

TMNT #1 is currently valued at around $4000.

But the first issue sold out, which lead to a second issue... and a third... Within a year, the Turtles, the gag, had become something so much bigger than Eastman and Laird could ever had imagined. It had taken over their lives. Three years after the debut in 1984, the Turtles were on TV, and Eastman and Laird were busy trying to run a multi-million dollar company, something neither of them had ever dreamed of. Or were exactly happy with. Laird quit drawing, the one thing that had always been a source of happiness for him. Eventually, Eastman sold his rights in the company because he wanted to do things not related to the Turtles.

That's an interesting irony, that Eastman sold his share, because he's the one that has ended up keeping his fingers in the Turtles pie, so to speak, although it's Laird that owns the company and all of that.

By the end of the 80s, the Turtles had become a thing. A rather big thing, in fact, spawning all sorts of copycat titles about things like Radioactive Hamsters and who knows what else. I was busy trying to avoid them. All of them. Rather unsuccessfully since I did a lot of working with kids during the summers. The Turtles were everywhere!

But I didn't have my first real encounter with them until my freshman year of college. I was doing a lot of painting miniatures for money at the time

and someone approached me with a request to paint a set of Turtles miniatures. [I wish I had pictures of those, but, alas, I do not.] They were pretty cool, actually, and it was $$$, so I took the job. Which required research. No, seriously! I had to know how to paint the various characters, not all of which were the Turtles. The miniatures were based off the original comics and had figures I was unfamiliar with. Even April was unfamiliar since, originally, she was a lab assistant (to an Evil Genius), not a reporter.

Which is kind of the point. Eastman and Laird didn't have any plans for the Turtles when they created that first issue of the comic series. When it took off, they made stuff up as the went, just trying to keep up with demand (and failing). What happened was that the Turtles underwent many, let's say, "creative re-boots." When they licensed them out in the mid-80s for the cartoon series, the origin was re-done and April became a reporter. When the work became (quickly) too much for Eastman and Laird to keep up with, they allowed other creators to put their own spin on the Turtles which resulted in many alternate stories and ideas (like one with the Turtles set in medieval Japan). They even had to bring in another creative team at one point to do a completely separate series just to fill in the gaps in the continuity of their own series.

The end result of all of this is that any time the Turtles have changed formats, they have been re-imagined. There is no definitive origin for them, not any more. Maybe not ever. Probably, though, the one most people are familiar with is what came out of the hugely popular cartoon, the one I thought was too dumb to sit through. [I'm just glad my kids have never wanted to watch it!]  In fact, most of the negative reaction to the current Bay movie is that the movie owes more to the comic books than it does to the 80s TV show. Perhaps that's why it didn't bother me. The movie, despite having 6' tall, talking turtles, is not cartoonish, and I liked that.

The important thing, though, is something that began as a joke 30 years ago is still here. And not just still here like it's over moldering in some corner somewhere; it's still a pop culture force. I have to say, that first issue, which I did finally read, was pretty brilliant. All of the early issues were. It was a great parody of comics, the same container of radioactive goo that created Daredevil also giving rise to Splinter and the Turtles. It wasn't quite as silly as I thought it was, after all. Okay, the cartoon was silly, but that comic series was... well, it was something new.

Obviously, people liked it, because the Turtles are still here.