Scooby Gang X Drain Gang

Another Friday, another grab-bag, helped by a couple of interesting tidbits that came in late yesterday's news. Plus I have actually listened to some music that isn't my own for a change, so there'll be some of that, too.

We've Got Some Work To Do Now

First up, the best entertainment news of the year so far. As per the NME, there's a Scooby-Doo live action series coming to Netflix. Or you can have it straight from the Great Dane's mouth, so to speak.

There have been a lot of Scooby-Doos. "Three theatrical films, and more than a dozen animated series" according to Netflix, which isn't even counting the numerous, long-running comic-book series, the novelizations, the games, the toys... It's a major franchise.

Still, even the most ardent Scooby Gang buff would have to own that most of them haven't been all that. And yet, news of another always stirs... something. The heart? The imagination? Not sure exactly what, but I was more excited when I read the headline than seemed reasonable. 

And that was before I even noticed the really exciting part: "Produced by Greg Berlanti".

Greg Berlanti is the guiding hand behind a whole raft of TV shows, chief among them, from my persepctive at least, Riverdale and The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina plus pretty much the whole of the DCTVU, including Supergirl and Titans, all of which I very much enjoyed. He and his production company seem like both the obvious and the perfect drivers for the Mystery Machine.

Berlanti is producing but the Showrunners are Josh Appelbaum and Scott Rosenberg, whose credits include the much-maligned live-action Cowboy Bebop. I liked that one a lot more than the critics or the installed fanbase so that's not a warning flag for me, although I guess it may be for some. 

Granted, the lived show wasn't anything like as subtle or nuanced as its source material but the anime was "hailed as one of the best animated television series of all time". Scooby-Doo is well-loved but I don't think it can claim the same aesthetic status and as I suggested earlier, the bar for revamps is already set pretty low. I'm confident this one will clear it with room to spare.

There's no release date yet. I'm not even sure if they're shooting. It was reportedly "in production" in 2024 but who knows what that means?  Whenever it comes, I'll be there for it.

Let's have a break for a song, shall we? And for a change it's one everyone's going to recognize.

 Ashes To Ashes - Magdelana Bay (Original David Bowie)

 Magdalena Bay are critics' darlings just now, or they were last year at least, and they richly deserve it. Triple-J churns out an endless stream of covers, by no means all of them memorable or worthy of their originals but it's a high-profile promo slot for artists and some people really get competitive about it so there are some standout performances. 

This is top of the range. It starts out sounding a little flat (As in unemotional, not off-key.) but when Mica Tenenbaum starts to sing... oh boy. She really works her way into every corner of Bowie's peculiar phrasing. 

As Mathew Lewin, the other member of the duo, observed, "It’s a great kind of weird, experimental pop song". They haven't made it feel any less weird but I guess forty-five years have smoothed away some of the odder angles.

Even so, it still sounds weird. Imagine what it sounded like in 1980!

Oh No! He's Back!

Some people may count this as good news. I don't think I would. It is news, though, provided you're inside a certain bubble, which everyone reading this either is or has been at one time.

Yes, John "Smed" Smedly has returned. Whether his latest venture will bear any more fruit than the last two remains to be seen. Certainly, the precedents aren't encouraging. 

The much-hyped "Hero's Song" was cancelled before it got a full release, although Smed did get some credit for giving all the money back. As for his six-year stint with Amazon Games... anyone remember what he did there? I don't.

He left Amazon in 2023 and since then he's been quiet but it seems he hasn't been idle. He's back, alongside another name you might remember from Sony Online Entertainment, Matt Higby. Higby was Creative Director for Planetside 2, a game I think I played twice. Maybe three times. He also worked on pretty much every other SOE game at one time or another. His full credits include EverQuest, EverQuest II, Free Realms and Clone Wars.

The two of them have been cooking up something from pretty much the moment Smedley quit Amazon so I imagine he went straight from the one to the other. These people never seem to take a day off. 

As to what they've been working on, no-one's saying, yet. MassivelyOP are speculating it could be some kind of military shooter, based on what's showing on a couple of monitors in the background of the publicity shots. If so, it's of little interest to me and anyway I imagine, whatever it is, it's years from being something any of us will play. 

More More More - The Molotovs

A little less than a year ago, I did a whole post about the Molotovs, which seems like an odd thing to have done, in retrospect. I think it was the raw energy that got my attention. That and the covers they were doing at the time.

They did have a couple of originals even then and now here they are with their first, official single, a self-penned number called More, More, More, demonstrating that you don't always have to cover other peoples' material to be a covers band. 

Honestly, if this sounded any more like the Jam... well, there's no good way to end that sentence because it would be impossible for anything to sound more like the Jam than this does without actually being the Jam. I bet it sounds more like the Jam than Bruce Foxton and Rick Buckler's From The Jam ever did, and they were the Jam!

Whether sounding exactly like a specific band from the late 'seventies makes any kind of sound, commercial sense is up for debate. I think the retro needle has swung well into the 'nineties now, maybe even the 'aughts. 

Then again, Britpop was built on a foundation firmly laid down in the 'sixties and the Jam were mining tthe same sources for all they were worth, back in the 'seventies, so I guess it's all there and thereabouts the same thing, seen from space. 

It is endlessly fascinating to me that these sounds can just go on and on, fascinating and attracting people of a certain age. It's as if something happens to the brain in mid-adolescence, making neurons fire every time there's a valve amp with the gain turned up, a guitar with too much treble and and a barking voice that sounds like it ought to be flogging china down the market.

I like it, anyway. I mean, I've heard it a million times but I can always hear some more. Some More. More More even.

Less, Less, Less

That's what I'm asking for. I can't face another ninety hopefuls all in one go. Yes, it's the Glastonbury Festival Emerging Talent Longlist again. 

There's a playlist if you can face it. It's over two hours long. I haven't even started on it yet and I'm thinking this year maybe I won't. The returns seem to get slimmer every year.

I scanned the full list, which was surprisingly hard to find, to see if there was anyone on there I'd heard of. Usually there are a few. This year the only name I recognized was Dirty Blonde and I don't much like them. Too rawk for my refined tastes. They are good, though.

Given they were the opening act on the Big Top stage at last year's Isle of Wight Festival, it would seem they're also overqualified. I'm sure the publicity will be welcome all the same but it's a bit like those established acts who enter Eurovision, only to come 23rd. More risk than perhaps the reward could ever have been worth for them. I mean, the big payoff from the ETC is £5k and a slot on one of the main stages. Dirty Blonde might have been in line for one of those anyway. A 2pm slot when no-one is paying attention, sure, but still... 

I don't have anything left but music now so if you're not into digging the new scene I'll bid you goodbye. For the few that remain...

The Wolf - Witch Post

You know those songs that go on too long? Yes, I know. It's most of them. Well, this isn't one. I could have this on a loop for hours. Maybe I'll make one and post it to YouTube. People do that. I'm learning all sorts about making videos and content just now. I could branch out.

Also, it's one of those songs you just can't hear loud enough. And the video is great, too. Really, it's got everything. I wasn't quite as keen on their first single but the last one was good and this is way better again. All the videos are good, too. They could be something, maybe.

I think that's about it. Oh, alright then. One more, since you ask so nicely. Would you like Yung Lean being shot full of arrows or would you rather have Sept hanging out with their girlfriends? Difficult choice, I know. Let's have both, then.

It's always both, isn't it?

Babyface Maniacs - Yung Lean

Remember when Yung Lean was off the radar of anyone under twenty? And Drain Gang sounded like it was probably something from an Anthony Burgess novel? Yeah, well, those days are long gone.

All the critics call Yung Lean a rapper but I'm not sure that's what he's doing here. Or anywhere, really. Then, why would I know? Whatever he's doing, he's not doing it for me. I like it all the same.

Braces - Sept

The song goes back to 2022 but the video is brand-new. It's a real mood piece, the song. The video is more of a vibe. I'm not one hundred per cent convinced they go together.

The lyrics, all of them, run like this:

I said I liked you, I said I missed you
Never forget you, said I won't let you
I did it wrong
And now I cannot believe

Just like my braces
You're caught between my teeth
Like

You're in a hurry, I'm cold cut
Say not to worry, I love you, but
I didn't know
How could you see me so clean?

You hate yourself
But you don't know what that means
Like...

 

I dunno. They look like they're all having a much better time in the video than that would suggest. 

I could listen to that one a loop, too. I really ought to look into how to make those. Like I need another project right now...

You Do Know You're A Cat, Right?

I don't keep a list of things I never imagined existed. Who does that? If I did, though, a DC comic teaming Superman with Top Cat would certainly be on it. And now I'd have to cross it off because such a wonder, if that's what you want to call it, does in fact exist. 

As of a couple of hours ago, I can also confirm that I've read it and it is... not good. Okay, it's bad. I mean, I cut it as much slack I could but there just isn't enough slack to cut. It's just bad.

I probably ought to make it clear I didn't go looking for a Supes/TC collab just to prove one couldn't exist. I was just following up some reviews I'd read of the Supergirl back-ups in recent editions of Action Comics. 

I'd seen those on a blog I follow by the name of Supergirl Comic Box Commentary. I tend to disagree with most of the reviews there, although I enjoy reading them, which is why I like to check the source. It was while I was doing that that I caught sight of the cover of the  Superman/Top Cat Special.

My first reaction? Disbelief. My second? Thrilled. 

Not by the cover, that's for sure. It's horrible. By the concept.

These are two of my favorite fictional characters of all time. I grew up with both of them and in their own very different ways I consider each to be an influence and a role model. I own more than a thousand comic books featuring the Man of Steel in some version or other and I own  - and have watched, multiple times - all thirty episodes of the one and only, 1961 season of Top Cat.

I also have enough experience with both comic books and animation to know that absolutely no crossover, no matter how outlandish, ludicrous or ill-conceived, is ever completely off the table. If you can think of it, someone is going to try it. (Generally applicable almost anywhere, that one...)

Just because TC is an anthropomorphised cat who lives in a garbage can in a back alley is no reason to think he couldn't or shouldn't team up with an alien being powerful enough to lift mountains and turn back time (Superman cannot turn back time. Other superheros who can turn back time are available.)

It is theoretically possible that someone could write a good story featuring a team-up between a three-foot tall talking cat in a vest and a hat with holes cut in it for his ears to poke through and a six-foot tall hunk of beefcake in spandex and a cape. We do, after all, live in a post Howard the Duck: The Movie world. Anything is possible. It just hasn't been done yet and certainly not in this comic book.

I won't attempt to summarize the plot. I'll just say it revolves around the last living Kalien, a race of sentient vegetables living on Earth as the leafy green we know as kale and the villainous billionaire CEO of a global internet shopping business, who just happens to have a really Greek-sounding last name. Whatever that leads you to imagine, the reality is worse.

Oftentimes in comics, a bad plot can be saved by some snappy dialog or some great art. Not here. Top Cat has to have one of the most distinctive "voices" in the entire funny animal kingdom. Granted it's not all his own work , given his whole persona and presentation was lifted almost verbatim from a signature performance in a 1950s TV show, but it's still one of the most recognizable around and, I would have though, one of the most easily imitated. 

Not in this comic book, it's not. I have to wonder why anyone would even bother to borrow a well-known character from another medium if they weren't going to make use of any of the things that made that character famous in the first place. FFS, it doesn't even look like TC. If he wasn't wearing the hat and vest I wouldn't know who it was supposed to be.

Still,it could be worse, right? It can always be worse. They could have teamed him up with Batman.

Ah. You're ahead of me. 

I have a twist, though. The Batman/Top Cat team up, which precedes the one I've been talking about in continuity (Seriously, though? Is any of this canon?) and explains how TC got to be in the same world as the superheroes in the first place, is actually much better! I'm not saying it's good but it's definitely better.

For one thing, TC is drawn as both more recognizably the character we all know and in a style more appropriate to a superhero comic. I don't mean he wears a costume... well, okay, I guess he does... it's that hat and vest again... but he's taller and slightly less cartoonish and just fits the Gotham milieu. Plus I would one hundred percent know who he was supposed to be from his face, without the hat and vest. 

Not that anyone ever saw TC without his hat and vest... oh, wait... that actually happens here, too.

There's a nice bit of interplay between Batman and TC and later between TC and Catwoman and amazingly it all stays broadly in character for all of them, insofar as anything featuring those three characters together ever could. TC still doesn't really sound much like himself but he doesn't sound entirely wrong all the time, like the version that Superman met, either.

I enjoyed it, anyway. There were a couple of good jokes and I liked the way it looked. The story, which is only an eight-pager, appeared as the bonus feature in Adam Strange Future Quest Special, another crossover. In the main feature, Adam Strange teams up with Jonny Quest and his crew but I didn't read that. Jonny Quest wasn't shown in the TV region where I grew up so I get no nostalgic buzz when he turns up in other media, something he seems to do quite often. I'm happy to pass.

The story ends with a "To be continued in Top Cat" teaser, which does somewhat suggest TC was about to get a DC title of his own. That was back in 2017. We're still waiting.

Of course, TC has already had his own comic book. Several, in fact, published, on and off, by Dell, Gold Key and Charlton and running from the early nineteen-sixties through to the mid-seventies. I have a few copies tucked away somewhere. Gold Key, I think.

After that, a company I'm not familiar with, Murray, picked up the franchise until the end of the decade and then, once again to my complete surprise and mystification, it seems in 1983-4 Marvel put out more than thirty issues of something called Top Cat's T.V. Comic Show. I was not only very active in comics fandom at the time, I was working in fricken' comic shop but I don't recall ever hearing about it, let alone seeing a copy.

Which brings us almost full circle, back to comics I didn't know existed, a very long list indeed. But it's not quite the end, not yet. There's still one more team-up featuring the cat in the vest-and-hat I need to mention. It's by far the most natural pairing and the most recognizable version of Top Cat DC has published so far.

I don't have quite the same level of nostalgia for Scooby-Doo as I do for TC, mostly because I was a few years older by the time the original sseries surfaced on British TV, but as I've mentioned a few times here in the past, I do still have a pretty large soft spot for the Scooby and the gang. My favorite iteration by far is the one in Scooby-Doo, Mystery Incorporated. but I like the OG Scooby series a lot, too. 

The original seems to be the main basis for DC's Scooby-Doo Team-Up, a fairly long-running title in which the gang collaborate with a whole range of DC superheroes, as well as just about any other I.P. DC holds the rights to, including Jonny Quest, again, and Top Cat.

The Top Cat team-up was first published in issue #29 and then again, split acoss two digital issues as #57 and #58. It's a far more authentic take on the familiar characters from the TV version. All the Top Cat regulars appear, staying firmly in character, with dialog that wouldn't feel out of place in the show. The plot, involving a ghost that - no spoiler warning required - turns out to not to be a real ghost at all, is the Scooby Gang's schtick but the way it's handled is very much according to TC.

I read all of three of the above comics today and enjoyed two of them. I'd still quite like to see that missing Top Cat comic, too, the one that never seems to have appeared.  We could have followed a more time-worn, cynical TC, searching for his lost pal, Benny, trapped in a world he never made.

They could have made a movie out of it.

Then again, maybe not...

Forthcoming Attractions

I had a post almost ready for today but then I happened across something I felt I just had to share. I also had a couple of other things I've been waiting for a chance to mention and so...

Here we are!

I heard about it from NME, where I get most of my non-MMORPG gaming news these days. As it says in both the news report and the video, there's a demo out in a few days. Next Tuesday, to be precise. August 15 to be even more precise still.

Although I could scarcely be happier about the existence of this thing, I confess I'm somewhat puzzled by the format and the provenance. It's in the style of a first-generation Playstation game but the demo will be available on PC only, through itch.io. 

Since it's a fan-made project, I'm guessing it will only ever be available that way but who knows? I'm more interested in whether it's going to go on being available at all. 

As the developers hasten to make clear, "Blue Rose Team does not own the rights of the series." I'm not sure how far that disclaimer will take them, especially when they haven't even managed to get Mark Frost's name right: "Neither David Lynch nor Mark Forst are affiliatied with this project".

Proof-reading shortcomings aside, the video looks tone-perfect so I hope Messrs. Lynch and Forst .. er, Frost... are willing to let it slide. I'm looking forward to playing the demo and I'll no doubt have more to say about that when I'm done.

Speaking of looking forward to things... it's been a while but it's (almost) here!

It's the final season of Disenchantment, perhaps the least-loved of Matt Groening's creations but my own personal favorite. I'm very sorry this is going to be the last we see of Bean and the gang but at least they're getting a proper ending.

Season 5 Episode 1 debuts on Netflix on 1 September. There are ten episodes, the same as in all previous seasons, making a nice, round fifty in all. 

Other than that I have nothing to add because I've deliberately avoided finding out anything else about it. The last thing I want to do is spoilerize my own fun.

And finally...

I spotted a mention of this yesterday in one of the comic-related blogs I follow. I thought at first it must be a joke but it's not! It's real!

Sometimes I feel like a while back, around the turn of the millennium maybe, someone or something started tapping into my subconscious for tv and movie ideas. I mean, there's no other rational explanation, right? Otherwise, how do you explain something like that? 

It may not be great but it's sure to be a lot better than this. I mean, how could it not be?

At this point, I'd like to say "And that's all I got, folks!" Except it's not. But it is all I'm giving you. 

For now...

Friday Grab Bag - For Realz This Time

Yes, for once I am going to stick to the plan and fire off a bunch of pithy observations on things I've watched, played, listened to or read about this week. I am not going to spiral off into long-form essays about any of them. Nope. Definitely not going to happen.

The Peripheral

I'd had The Peripheral in my Amazon Prime watchlist for a while but it wasn't until Wilhelm mentioned it in his Binge Watch post back at the beginning of January that I realised it was an adaptation of a William Gibson novel. I'm not a big William Gibson fan - I read Neuromancer and Count Zero back in the eighties but I can't think of anything else of his I've read since - but he does give major name recognition to a project, enough to bump the show off the watchlist into "Currently Watching". 

I finished the season a few days ago. Wilhelm described the story as "somewhat choppy", which I think is an understatement. "All over the bloody shop" is my take. I should make it clear that I really liked the show. It looks great, the script is sharp, the characters are well-drawn and engaging and the acting is uniformly excellent. The problem is pretty much none of it makes any sense at all, particularly the final episode, which is total gibberish from beginning to end. 

Added to that, the tone lurches and yaws from one extreme to another. At one point, early on, the whole thing was so freighted with the possibility of sadistic violence I had to question whether I was going carry on watching at all and then, when I did, pretty much nothing unpleasant ever happened again. The violence shifted to the level of a Marvel movie. Which I prefer, so I'm not complaining, but it's not what you'd call consistent.

As well as lots of sub-plots not being resolved, the first season ends with a set-up for the next that I frankly do not understand at all. I hope they get a second season just so I can find out what the hell I just watched.

Velma

No, I haven't seen it. I'd like to but it's not available on any platform in the UK. Well, it might be. The results of a Google search on the topic are confusing, to say the least. Suffice it to say it's not on any service I have access to and I don't want to watch it enough to sign up for a VPN. 

Of course, if I took advice from the reviews, I wouldn't waste my time watching it anyway. For a while Velma enjoyed the unique privelige of being the worst-rated show of all  time on IMDB. In a follow-up article, NME attempted to explain why everyone hates it so much, the answer apparently being that it manages to piss people off pretty much equally on both sides of the culture wars with its hamfisted, box-ticking attempts at diversity recognition. 

As a long-time Scooby Gang fan, all of this just makes me keener to check it out so I can make up my own mind. I've seen the trailer and it doesn't look that bad. I'm happy to wait until it finally turns up somewhere I can watch it without having to pay money or jump through hoops. And even if it turns out to be as awful as everyone says, I'm sure the franchise will survive the hit. I mean, we got past Scrappy-Doo, didn't we? Eventually.

If anyone's seen it, do please tell us what you thought.

All Hail Our AI Overlords #1

Seems like every week brings news of another frontier down. Every day, sometimes. There was the the endless iteration of Seinfeld on Twitch for starters. I'd link directly to it but in a hilarious turn of events, worthy of the iconic show itself (He says, as someone who never found Seinfeld in the least bit hilarious...) the supposedly never-ending broadcast is currently off air following an unintended violation of Twitch's community guidelines.

It seems there was a hiccup with the GPT-3 Davinci model that was generating the never-ending stream of non-sequiters and wisecracks and in moving to the less-sophisticated Curie model to cover the outage, some "homophobic and transphobic remarks" found their way into virtual Larry's stand-up routine. The actual content, as per the clip linked above, is so back and nuanced as to be more of a reference to a reference of the concept of a violation than an actual violation in progress but hats off to Twitch's algorithm for being so intolerant of intolerance.

The strangest thing about this story is that, as someone who never really got the point of Seinfeld, I could immediately see the point of Watchmeforever. As soon as I found out it existed, I straightway checked it out and I found myself watching for almost half an hour. I found it almost exactly as amusing as the actual show. I laughed twice, which would be about par. 

Curiosity satisfied, I can't imagine sitting and watching the AI Seinfeld with any more enthusiasm or attention than I ever watched the real one but I know exactly what I will be using it for when it comes back on line - as a replacement for Test Match Special. 

I used to have the equally endless, self-generative chatter of the cricket commentary on in the background while I played mmorpgs but changes in the way the game is played has put paid to all that. These days, even Test cricket is supposed to be fast, vibrant and exciting and all the other, shorter forms are positively manic. The days when you could have some old buffer droning on about busses and pigeons in a desultory attempt to fill the hours of dead airtime as the bowler slowly ambled back to his mark for the hundredth time are long gone, sadly. The AI-generated waffle of Seinfeld and his pals should make a fine replacement.

All Hail Our AI Overlords #2

For all Nick Cave's protestations, I suspect the dawning of the age of the singing robots is at hand. Which would be fine with me if it was all the robots' own work. I'm very much in the market for genuinely artificial performers. When it's more of what we already have, though, I'm starting to see Cave's point.

This week we had the dubious pleasures of Poe the Passenger's "viral AI generated TikTok hit ‘Hologram’". According to NME, the band “Programmed a bot to listen to 1000 hours of Imagine Dragons / Linkin Park music & then make a song like it.” The result notched up almost four million views on TikTok before being muted. The same tune was released to YouTube for the first time four hours ago. At time of writing it has 190 views, which seems about right.

Meanwhile, David Guetta made headlines with his live deep faking of Eminem. It seems there are already plenty of places you can go to have your favorite songs covered by your favorite singer, even if they haven't yet found the time to go into the studio to record them and Guetta has been experimenting with the possibilities. 

I'm not quite sure how I feel about all this but I do know that how I or you or Nick Cave feels about it isn't going to figure at all in how it rolls out. As David Guetta went on to say in an interview with the BBC, AI is going to be the future of music whether we like it or not. Also the future of a lot of other things but let's stick with music for now. 

Guetta is spot on when he says "every new music style comes from a new technology". That is demonstrably true, going back at least as far as the invention of the piano and probably back to the first time some smartass kid thought to stretch a goathide over a pot, thereby putting the guy who banged two rocks together out of a job. Whether he's also right about the role of AI as merely a tool in the hands of human creative artisis, I'm not so sure. I imagine record company execs all over the world are salivating right now at the prospect of having all those juicy performances on tap without the nuisance of having to deal with any of those pesky performers.

I just hope if we're going to be deluged with virtual copies they're copies of people I actually like. I'm not in the market for any more Linkin Park or Imagine Dragons tunes.

Something About A Game I Used To Play

I'm really happy I no longer feel honor-bound to cover every development in Guild Wars 2, the way I did for the best part of a decade. It's freeing, I can tell you. If I did, though, I'd have had to post something about the recent changes to World vs World, in which ANet thrash around some more, trying to get PvE players interested in the RvR game mode they've consistently avoided for most of the lifetime of the game.

As the slow-motion train crash of the full rebuild of WvW rumbles on, the devs appear to be trying to divert attention from the lumbering, wheezing locomotive that is Alliances by throwing new shinies.onto the tracks. The idea, as usual, is to "incentivize battles", aka start more fights, which is what PvP players and devs always think is the solution to everything. This they propose to do both by making players work harder to take objectives and by giving them bigger rewards for trying, even if they fail.

There are two problems with this: 1) the rewards are still crap and 2) PvE players are never incentivized by more fights. They're PvE players. They're incentivized by fewer fights, which is why the meta over the lifetime of the game has always leaned towards the lowest level of engagement with the enemy possible, otherwise known as KTraining or PVD - Player vs Door. 

Fortunately for me, I neither have to play the game to see if any of this is actually having the intended effect, nor to write about whether it is or not. I can just forget about it, which is what I intend to do.

I'm also going to avoid raising my blood pressure to a dangerous level by refusing to engage in an in-depth analysis of the latest brilliant wheeze from whoever's wearing the Producer's hat these days, namely giving up on the whole concept of the Living World. It seems someone finally noticed that expansions make money and please players. Who would ever have guessed?

In the future, we'll be getting "smaller expansions more frequently at a slightly reduced price" and "additional content for those expansions through quarterly updates". If I was still playing, I'd be cheering just for the implied admission of failure, although on past record I'd want to see at least a couple of these expansions actually happen before I believed the change was going to stick. I mean, how many iterations of the content release cadence have we been through, now? Still, at least this is one that's been proved to work so maybe we can give re-inventing the wheel a rest for a while.

Shimmy Shimmy Ko-Ko Bop

And finally, a song. Just the one, this time. I don't want to canibalize my "What I've Been Listening To" post from next week. But if we're only having one, let's make it a good one. In fact, let's make it the best song I've heard this year. Hearing it for the first time earlier this week wasn't an experience quite on the mind-altering level of the first time I heard Venice Bitch, but it was damn close. 

There's no official video yet so we'll go with one of the many unofficial lyric videos instead. I should warn the words are very NSFW and deserve a trigger warning on top of that but don't let it put you off. 

And that's Friday all wrapped up.

Enjoy your weekend!

Cooler Kids Will Live Forever

Until Belghast mentioned it a couple of days ago, I had no idea there was a live action reboot of Scooby Doo in the works. Maybe that should be a re-reboot. Or a re-re-reboot. I've lost count of how many versions there've been so far.

Bel noted the new one "appears to have taken notes from the modern Archie/Riverdale CW Series", something that literally every article I could find on the web also chose to mention. Turns out it's more than just a few notes.

"Inspired heavily" is how the team behind the crowdfunded project put it. The first episode is the result of a successful, now-closed, campaign that ran a couple of years ago on Indiegogo, (not Kickstarter, as the Nerdist article link that took me to the pledge page suggested.) 

That goes a good way to explaining two things that puzzled me when I watched the show on Friday. Firstly, why it was free to watch on YouTube and secondly why it seemed just slightly not as slick as you'd expect for a property with this recognition level.

It does raise another obvious question, namely how come the rights owners are letting it happen? I can only infer from the FAQ that the plan is to keep the whole thing "unmonetized" so everyone (Warner Bros., Hanna Barbera and the CW are mentioned.) leaves them alone. Since the first episode is up still, I guess maybe it might even be working.

Although the Indiegogo campaign was just for funding to make Episode One, the pitch says they mean "to build an entire 10 episode season." The IMDB page, linked in the proposal has a dozen episodes pencilled in for the main characters.

Having watched the only episode available so far, I hope they succeed in making another nine or eleven or however many they can manage. I didn't think it was especially well-acted or written and the special effects were on the pre-revival Dr. Who level, but for anyone who loves the characters and the storied history of the Scooby gang, this take is nothing but pure fun. I loved every ridiculous minute of it.

All the central characters are solidly recognizeable, with Daphne looking almost exactly as you'd expect, Velma close, Fred not so much and Shaggy... well, you really wouldn't want a real-life version of the cartoon Shaggy, would you? Scooby doesn't get to do much other than sit in the Mystery Machine but he certainly looks the part. I'd say he was the dog's bollocks but that's actually where he doesn't look quite like the Scoob we all know and love.

A lot seems to be being made of this being a darker, more adult vision but on this very limited evidence I'd like to refer those people to the 2010 series Scooby Doo! Mystery Incorporated, which I've mentioned occasionally in the past. That was a subtle and thoughtful reworking with some properly adult themes, although you did need to stick with it for the whole three season run to appreciate the subtext.

I just hope the new series, if it does get made, doesn't emulate Riverdale too slavishly. Much though I love that show, it is totally batshit crazy. I don't mind that at all but I do mind the horror elements becoming so disturbing. I have literally had to stop watching Season Six because it was giving me nightmares. Yes, really. At my age!

So long as the homage goes no further than Jingle Jangle being the drug du jour in Coolville I think we'll be okay. More than okay, actually. The metatextual connection gives an unexpected frisson to my JJ tee! I shall wear it even more posily now!