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wish-i-wasnt-a-coward · 3 years

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Family Cuddle Pile

a/n: I actually wrote this a while ago but it was perfect for the request. Theirs like, no content for this ship an I love it so much! Thank you for reading :) @arodynamic-enby

Pairings: romantic Anxceitmus and kid!Patton also super background Logince

Warnings: tattoos, less than ideal parent mentions, food mention, and light cursing

Word count: 1,844

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Remus flopped out of bed, throwing his body carelessly across the room. He hastily threw on his clothes. Short shorts, ripped fishnets, a vest that was more patches than original material, really big clunky shoes, and a ripped up band-t. He also hooked his favorite bone earrings in his tattered earlobes.

He stomped into his apartment’s kitchen. He grabbed a stale piece of bread he soaked it in coffee. Yawned and grabbed his bag, racing out the door.

His brother was waiting for him at the tattoo shop, sketching a new idea. Unlike him, Roman only had a few tattoos, including not one, not two, not three… but three Disney quotes, a frog on a mushroom, a rose on his arm, and a constellation. Most of his tattoos were covered by tasteful burgundy overalls and a white button-down shirt.

Remus’ tattoos were also mostly covered by his clothes. But he had a tattoo sleeve depicting the garden of Eden, a matching frog on a mushroom, a quote from one of Roman’s books, medically accurate bone structures on his hand, a realistic spider on his neck, and a snake wrapping around his non-sleeved arm. And those were just the visible ones.

Suffice to say, the twins were very different.

Remus threw his bag onto the floor in the backroom, “Ro, when’s the first appointment!!” he yelled. “Your’s? At 11. FYI, Jan n’ Pat are coming over at 12, for motivation” Remus smiled, fuckin’ superb.

He busied himself in collecting the ink and preparing the tattoo gun. The client wanted a fucking orange on their wrist, it should only take an hour or two but Remus was not excited to do a frickin’ orange circle.

The prissy orange bitch came in and Remus got to work. They didn’t move much and only cried a little bit when the needle started jabbing at their skin. Remus liked this part of the process, stabbing people consensually was his favorite thing ever… also the art part but stabbing people!

Almost exactly an hour later the door jingled open. “Dada!!” a tiny voice called back into the store. “I’ll be there in a minute patty-cake” Remus called from his spot hunched over the client's arm.

He added the final touches to the fruit and helped the orange bitch off the chair. Roman swept the client away, Remus practically ran to greet his partner and son.

Janus wore a leather corset over a black collared shirt and baggy pants, their long platinum hair framed their face under their signature hat. They were holding hands with a toddler wearing mostly pink and blue, his blond hair (that matched Janus’) was a mop of curls barely held together by a few butterfly clips.

“Dada, Dada!!! I got you a flower” the little boy cried, letting go of Janus’ hand and stumbling towards the tall man who scooped him up. Patton giggled and held out a sweaty flower clenched in his chubby fist.

Remus accepted the flower with a gasp, ”this is really for me?” he said joyfully. Adjusting the small boy in his arms Remus turned towards Janus who was looking at the pair with a disgustingly sappy expression.

“What are you lookin’ at hot stuff?” Remus teased. “Shut it you,” Janus said, pressing a kiss to Remus’ check. Patton made a noise, “icky” he said pushing Janus away. They laughed, “yes darling, we’re very icky”.

“When’s verge-“

“he’ll be home at 4”

“Dope”

“Stop by the Sleepy Café before you bring Pat to the apartment?”

“Can do scootal-lo!”

Remus turned back to the little boy in his arms, “looks like you're stuck with me squirt”. Patton beamed and snuggled into Remus’ chest. Janus smiled again, “I’ll see you, boys, at dinner,” they said, ruffling Pat's hair and peaking Remus on the lips quickly so as to not upset the toddler. “Bye-bye Janny!!” Patton called after Janus as they left for work.

“Righty-o,” Remus said, carrying Patton into the back room. “I know Ro’s got a couple coloring books, wanna do those for a bit?” Patton nodded and reached towards the ground to be put down. Remus plopped Patton on the couch and pulled out the book and pens as well as a sketchbook off his own. They sat together coloring and drawing until Roman came back to hug Patton.

“Ah, my favorite nephew!” Roman said, scooping up the little boy. Patton laughed and pulled Roman’s hair. “Roro, can I color your arm pictures??” he asked, pointing to Roman’s rose tattoo. Roman plopped the toddler back down on the couch and handed him a pen.

Patton went to work on the rose, scribbling reds and pinks and greens across his arm. Roman gave him complements each time Patton paused, and each time Patton shushed him and went back to work. Remus finished up his sketch, adding it to the pile of tattoo ideas they were eventually going to put up-front, and sat next to the toddler.

“That’s really good pat-”

“Shhhhhhhh”

Remus nodded and mimed zipping his lips. He liked spending time with the kid. They weren’t biologically related but who gives a fuck about blood, unless it’s outside of your body, then it’s fun.

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“I don’ wanna” Patton wined his dad sighed “I know bubbles but we gotta go home to Papa and Janny, isn’t that fun” Patton considered this, “but Roro’s pretty arm picture” he argued. Remus scratched the back of his neck, “Pffffff- Ummm, how about this, we go home now and I’ll take you back to the shop tomorrow after pre-school”

Patton brightened considerably, “ok” he chirped. “up please” the toddler’s chubby hands reached towards Remus who obediently scooped him up with a coo. After all who was he to say no to uppy hands.

“See ya tomorrow, have fun on your date with the nerd” Remus sang as he snatched his bag juggling the still fussy Patton in his other arm. “Fu- Frick off Re. Say hi to your partners for me,” Romans said affectionately and waved as his twin left the building.

Remus happily trotted out into the road. The tattoo shop was located on a quaint little street in the more commercial segment of their town only a short walk from Janus’ job.

A light drizzle floated around them and the air was warm and comforting. Patton squealed as a large drop of water hit him in the head, prompting a laugh from Remus.

A jingle sounded through the peaceful cafe, the brown room was illuminated by those cool old fashion lights and a lovely array of pastries made the air smell of chocolate and blueberry scones. But the scones, as delicious as they were, weren’t the snack Remus was here for

“Hey babe- Remus why are you soaking wet”

“Puddle” Patton screeched.

“Kid’s right, Puddle.”

Janus pinched their eyebrows, “ya know what, I’m not even surprised anymore. Just make sure Patton doesn’t catch a cold” they scolded.

Remus nodded and saluted in mock seriousness, “yes captain” he said and pressed a kiss to Janus’ face over the cash register, “I’ll see ya in a bit” Remus grinned and led Patton back out of the cafe.

Janus sighed lovingly as they watched their boyfriend and son turn to cross the street, Patton’s hand clasped around Remus’ happily. “Stop looking so happy, you're scaring the customers” Remy teased from across the counter. “Ha, Ha,” Janus glared and went back to work”

Janus’ apartment was a cute two-bedroom space on the fourth floor of the building. The furniture was an interesting combo of vintage and things from the side of the road. The vintage parts came from their parent’s house, their father had died two years after Janus’ had run away and hadn’t thought to write them out of the will.

The three of them had made a date out of customizing the few pieces that Janus wanted to keep. The customization mainly included darkening everything and adding more gothic touches. Virgil had done the fabrics, Remus the painting, and Janus moral support/ director.

The three partners had also painted the kitchen/dining room/living room black with one yellow wall. Janus and Virgil’s room was dark purple instead of black with highlights in the same yellow. Patton’s room was the only one that didn’t look marginally like a cave.

The walls were a cream-yellow that lit up in the morning sunlight. After Janus announced that they were going to have a baby Remus had spent three hours painting the grey ceiling with white fluffy clouds. It was one of his favorite projects.

Patton of course had no regard for the work put into the entirety of his home and was the usual menace of a toddler. And today a toddler with cheerios, truly a sight even god would tremble before.

Remus plopped down next to Patton who was pushing cheerios around his highchair tray with an intense focus. He smiled at the little boy and flicked on the tv, “got any requests pip-squeak?” Remus asked. Patton looked thoughtful, “dead lady!!” he cried excitedly hitting the tray with his fists, cheerios flew everywhere. Remus nodded, understanding, “Corpse bride coming up!” he picked a few cheerios from the couch “you really are Verge’s kid”

When Janus got home Patton was curled up on Remus’s chest. Both slept soundly despite the dead folk on the screen in front of them singing about the wedding.

Janus smiled, their family was fucking adorable. They slipped off their shoes and snuggled up into Remus who hummed happily and pulled Janus into the hug still asleep.

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Three hours later Virgil trudged up the four flights of stairs huffing indignantly with each step. Of course, he could take the elevator… but it might break down and he would be stuck for hours. Or someone could get into the elevator with him and he would have to interact with a stranger. So stairs it was.

He rummaged around his baggy hoodie, running his fingers through his dark purple hair in annoyance when he couldn’t find the key. Once he found it Virgil carefully (as he did everything) opened the apartment door. His combat books clunked satisfyingly against the hardwood floors as he entered his house. Virgil felt the tension leave his muscles, he was home. He glanced across the room, looking for his family.

Virgil’s face lit up like a god damned Christmas tree.

Across the room, both his partners and his son were curled up sleeping happily. Drool covered Remus’ face and Janus was snoring, they were the most precious thing Virgil had seen all freakin day.

The three of them woke as Virgil wrapped his arms around them, Patton squealed in excitement. “Hello, darling” Janus mumbled sleepily into Virgil’s arm. Remus just groaned and nestled into the hug. The toddler wriggled between his dads squealing profusely. “Shhh, s’ sleepy time” Remus mumbled, rolling deeper into the cuddle pile and shutting Patton up.

Virgil smiled and pressed a kiss to his partner’s cheek. “Mmm, love you” they purred. “Love you too Jan,” Virgil said, nestling his face in their neck. Virgil knew he would have to start dinner soon but that could wait, for now, cuddles.

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world-of-puppets · 4 years

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Puppetry Lost Media

In honour of reaching 50 followers last week (now 55 followers, as of writing this) I decided to cover two subjects of great interest to me: puppetry (of course) and lost media.

Everybody online loves a good old bit of lost media. Whether it be being a part of the many searches for the media in question, or watching documentaries about them on sites like YouTube. I’ve been mildly addicted to the latter kind of content for a while. From what I’ve seen, though, there aren’t many videos or articles out there specifically covering lost puppetry. So, in no particular order, here are a couple of pieces of lost puppetry I found while scrolling through the lost media wiki.

銀河少年隊 - Ginga shounen-tai AKA Galaxy Boy Troop (1963 - 1965)

Osamu Tezuka is one of the most pioneering figures in Japanese art and animation. Starting as a manga artist in the 1940s inspired by the animated works of American studios such as Walt Disney and the Fliecer Brothers, he adapted and simplified many of the stylistic techniques of both artists to create his own signature style of big shiny eyes, physics defying hair and limited animation. A style that would go on to heavily influence the world of anime and manga as a whole.

But animation and graphic art were not the only mediums Tezuka would dabble in. Ginga Shounen-Tai, or Galaxy Boy Troop in english, was a television series that aired on the public broadcast channel NHK from April 7th, 1963 to April 1st, 1965. Running for 2 seasons with a total of 92 episodes.

The series was a mixture of marionette characters that utilised the Supermarionation marionette technique, popularised by Jerry Anderson’s Thunderbirds, and limited traditional animation. The story revolves around a child genius named Roy who leads a rag-tag group of heros around the galaxy in a rocket ship in order to revive the earth’s sun and later protect it from alien invaders.

Out of the 92 episodes that aired, only episode 67 still exists in its entirety with French subtitles, and the full episode can be found on YouTube with English subtitles uploaded by user Rare TezukaVids. According to user F-Man on the Tezuka in English forums, footage of episode 28 exists but with no audio, and episode 87’s animated segments exist without the marionette segments. F-Man also claims the reason for Galaxy Boy Troop’s disappearance is due to Tezuka not being proud of the series and having all episodes of it destroyed.

Personally, I think it’s a shame that pretty much all of this series is gone. From what I’ve seen in episode 67, it looks really charming. Tezuka’s signature character design style was adapted suprisingly well to marionettes, and the puppetry itself isn’t that bad either. I love the little face mechanisms like the blinking eyes, flapping mouths and others. It gives the puppets a lot of personality and charm. Like, just look at this old mans eyebrow mechanism and tell me you wouldn’t want to watch 92 episodes of this show;

Tinseltown (2007)

Tinseltown was a 15 minute sitcom pilot created by the Jim Henson company under thier Henson Alternative banner. The pilot was commissioned by the Logo Network and aired as part of the Alien Boot Camp programming block in 2007.

The pilot (and likely the series, had it been picked up by the logo network) features a cast of both puppets and live actors as characters. The premise revolves around Samson Kight, an anthropomorphic bull preformed by Brian Henson and drew Massey, and his partner Bobby Vegan, an anthropomorphic pig prefomed by Bill Barretta and Michelan Sisti, as they attempt to balance thier lives working in Hollywood with life as parents to thier sullen 12-year-old foster son, Foster, played by Paul Butcher. Other human characters included Mia Sara as Samson’s ex-wife Lena and Francesco Quinn as the family’s manservant Arturo.

The Tinseltown pilot used to be available on the Logo Network’s YouTube channel, but was later removed for unknown reason. Since then, the pilot has not been made available online. However the characters Samson and Bobby have made appearances in other Henson related works, such as the improv stage show Stuffed and Unstrung, where they played the role as the shows producers, and in a 2011 video on the Jim Henson Company YouTube channel celebrating Jim Hensons 75th birthday.

I find Tinseltown pretty interesting as I feel like it should be more noateable or known, considering that this is (as far as my knowledge goes) the first Jim Henson Company project featureing openly lgbtq characters as its leads, and would have been the first Henson show to do so had it been picked up. As someone who’s interested in lgbtq+ representation in creative media such as animation, I realised that there’s not many examples of canon lgbt characters in puppetry. The only ones aside from Samson and Bobby I could think off the top of my head would be Deet’s Dads from The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance and Rod from Avenue Q. Though, obviously, there could be more I’m not currently aware of. I don’t think the Tinseltown pilot was a masterpiece or anything. After all, there’s probably a couple of good reasons Logo didn’t pick it up for a full series. But I think it be cool if either Henson co. or Logo made this available online again, if just so we could appericate it as an interesting little footnote in the history of lgbtq rep in puppetry.

With that said, considering the pilot’s obscurity and the fact that it’s main couple haven’t been used in any Henson Related projects in almost ten years, as well as the possibility that there may be legalities preventing the Henson company from releasing it such as Logo still owning the rights, it’s unlikely we’ll see the Tinseltown pilot anytime soon.

Sonic Live in Sydney (1997 - 2000)

Sonic the Hedgehog is a fictional character no stranger to multiple interpretations of him and his universe across a diverse range of media. From the more light-hearted and comedic stylings of The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog and Cartoon Networks Sonic Boom cartoon series, to more serious faire such as the Sonic SatAM cartoon and the Sonic Adventure videogame duology. One of the more obscure and stranger adaptations of the character came in the form of Sonic Live in Sydney, a one an a half hour live show hosted at the former Sega World Sydney amusement park in Darling Harbor, Sydney, Australia. Originally beginning as a live show with actors in meet-and-greet style costumes, the show eventually was replaced with a puppet show during its last two years.

The shows plot was set in an alternate timeline whos continuity was a mix of the SatAM cartoon and Sonic the Hedgehog 3, where Doctor Robotnik’s Death Egg crash lands in Sydney, Australia instead of Angel Island and attempts to take over before being foiled by sonic and friends. According to Phillip Einfeld of Phillip Einfeld Puppetoons, the company that made the puppets, Sega felt the costumed actor version of the show wasn’t dynamic enough, and wished to replace it with a version featuring live puppets with animatronics. Both versions of the shows plot are identical.

While Sonic Live in Sydney’s soundtrack is available on YouTube, and some photos of the show are available on the Lost Media Wiki, no footage of either the costumed actors version or the puppet show version have resurfaced. The show was closed down in 1999, possibly due to cost, shortly before the Sega World park as a whole in 2000. So unless there is someone out there who viseted the show between 1998 or 1999 who recorded the show via a handheld camera, footage of both incarnations of the show are likely forever lost to time.

On a personal note, I don’t have much to say on this one other than how gloriously peek gaudy 90s Sonic the set/puppet design is. I have no doubt finding footage of these puppets in action would truly be a silly delight to behold...

Legend of Mary (year unknown)

This one is a little different from the other entries on this list as while the film itself in its entiraty is available on YouTube for anyone to view, the information surrounding Legend of Mary, specifically its year of release, remains a mystery as of writing this.

I have mentioned the film before on this blog so I’ll keep it brief here: in summary, Legend of Mary is a short film retelling of the Nativity featuring the Rod puppets of Austrian puppeteer Richard Teschner. the video was uploaded to YouTube by user canada 150 archive. I looked up the people credited in the film and was able to find most of them, but didn’t find Legend of Mary listed in thier credits, and was unable to find the film on sites like IMDB, tMDB or Letterboxd. I reached out to Canada 150 archive asking if they had any info regarding the Legend of Mary’s release date, and after a coupe of months, they replied saying they didn’t know.

And that’s as far as I got on my search for answers, if anyone of you guys has any information regarding Legend of Mary, then it be of huge help in finding the release date.

Sam and friends (1955 - 1961)

Sam and friends was the very first puppetry television series created by Jim Henson alongside his colabarator and future wife Jane Nebel. filmed in Washington, D.C. and airing twice daily on WRC-TV and the NBC affiliate in Washington, D.C. from May 9, 1955, to December 15, Sam and Friends would mark the first apperence of Kermit (though not yet as a frog) and paved the way for Henson’s iconic and revered legacy in the realm of puppetry on film and television.

With the impact this show had in mind, it may come as a shock to some that almost half of Sam and Friends, specifically, 42 of the 86 episodes, are considered lost. With 16 existing, 8 documented, 9 known from memory, plus 8 existing Esskay commercials and 1 memory-known Esskay commercial. Some taped episodes have been shown at venues such as the museum of the moving image while others have been erased. It’s unknown if copies of these erased episodes still exist.

This post would become far to long if I were too list every episode missing from Sam and Freinds, but if your curious, the lost media wiki article has a comprehensive list of all lost episodes.

Annnd that about it for this post. This type of content is pretty different from the stuff I usually post. So I’m egar to see what you guys think about it. If you enjoyed this article, want to see more like it or have ideas for what puppetry-related topics I should cover in the future. And again, thank you all so much for helping me reach 55 followers. Your support really does mean a lot to me, and I hope you enjoyed this as a follower milestone gift.

Anyways, hope you enjoyed this dip into lost puppetry, and have a happy holiday season!

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dweemeister · 4 years

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Movie Odyssey Retrospective

Alice in Wonderland (1951)

There is an abandoned building at 1127 E 31st St. in Kansas City, Missouri. That 1922 building, made up of red brick and mortar, would have met the wrecking ball long ago, if not for its historical value. For one year, it housed the Laugh-O-Gram Studio, founded by Walt Disney and the first job in animated film for several people who would become instrumental in shaping the American animation industry. Alongside Disney, the Laugh-O-Gram staff included:

Ubbe “Ub” Iwerks, who co-created Mickey Mouse and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit with Walt. Ub stayed with the Disney studios as an animator or special effects specialist through Mary Poppins (1964);

Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising, who founded Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies with Warner Bros. in the 1930s under producer Leon Schlesinger, later moving to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM);

and Friz Freleng, who joined Harman and Ising and Warner Bros and MGM as principally a director, while introducing or developing most of the central Looney Tunes characters.

All of these figures would shape the environment for animated talkies into the midcentury. But Laugh-O-Gram could not survive the financial obstacles that led to the studio’s closure after only a year. Go back and watch the Laugh-O-Gram shorts and you will find imaginative, rowdy stories paired with movements as fluid as animators not named Winsor McCay (1914’s Gertie the Dinosaur, 1918’s The Sinking of the Lusitania) could draw in the early 1920s. Laugh-O-Gram’s last film, Alice’s Wonderland (1923), was never released commercially to the public and – considering its hybrid of animation and live-action footage – demonstrates the influence McCay had over Disney and his fellow animators.

Later in 1923, Walt submitted Alice’s Wonderland to Margaret Winkler, whose Winkler Productions was the leading animated short film distributor of the time. Winkler had just fallen out professionally with Pat Sullivan, the co-creator of Felix the Cat. Needing a quick replacement and charmed by the animated frenzy surrounding the hybrid animation/live-action Alice, Winkler signed Walt Disney and his Laugh-O-Gram team (including child actress Virginia Davis) to produce the Alice Comedies short film series (1923-1927, including 1923’s Alice’s Wonderland) in Hollywood. These films, Disney’s first taste of commercial triumph, shared little resemblance to Lewis Carroll’s novels Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, except for the curiosity of the title character and the fantastical situations she might find herself in. After the end of the Alice Comedies series and the formation of Walt Disney Productions (now Walt Disney Animation Studios), Walt wished to adapt Carroll’s books – which he had been familiar with since his childhood in Missouri – into a feature film. Outside forces delayed the project, including the box office failure of Paramount’s live-action Alice in Wonderland (1933) and the creative and fiscal burdens that his studio had to bear during World War II.

During this time, Walt resigned himself to the fact that any animated adaptation of Carroll’s novels, more interested in illogic and wordplay than any sensible storytelling, would not reach the artistic heights of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). His long wait to adapt Alice in Wonderland as a feature film would end in 1951, with the film co-directed by Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, and Hamilton Luske. A stellar voice cast, mixture of storybook and unusual animation, and an acceptance of its own absurdity make Alice in Wonderland one of the best non-Golden Age Disney animated features.

Alice (voiced by Kathryn Beaumont) is a child, probably ten years of age give or take. She is one of the youngest protagonists in Disney’s animated canon and a rare human female lead without monarchical ties or aspirations. Her story is simply a fantastical dream of her subconscious’ creation. Thus, freed from the limitations and expectations of the “real world”, Alice in Wonderland – and the novels it was adapted from – is an episodic series of nonsensical encounters of the various characters that inhabit Alice’s Wonderland. This posed a dilemma for the Disney animators and the army of writers on the film. How does one make Alice, whose only notable characteristics include her naïveté and incurable curiosity, a more interesting character than what Lewis Carroll wrote? With the animators and writers finding no answer, Disney’s Alice is just as reactive (as opposed to proactive) as Carroll’s characterization for her. Inane things happen to and around her, infrequently because of her own initiative; anyone expecting the studio’s first female lead to write down names, possess a sharp wit, and kick ass might need to recalibrate said expectations given the source material.

This discourse wades into questions about literary fidelity in cinema – no standard formula exists for how literature should be adapted to a film. To adapt Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass as faithfully as possible would be to invite structural and tonal chaos. Carroll’s numerous poetic asides, extremely abrupt (and, to me, exhausting) tonal shifts, and his near-complete dedication to exposition whenever nonsense is not present does not make for a digestible film. The Alice in Wonderland that audiences have enjoyed since 1951 presents its developments far out of any Carroll’s narrative order. The tone and individual moments remain Carroll-esque, but, upon release, British critics savaged the film for degrading Carroll’s best-known works (more on this later). Yet by my judgment and familiarity with Carroll’s books (which, to reiterate, are not concerned about character development) Disney’s animated version is the best cinematic adaptation in line with the Carroll’s artistic intentions.

Alice in Wonderland is best seen as a quasi-Disney package film filled with one-upmanship in its animation. A distracted Walt was barely aware of day-by-day developments during production, and thus did not rein in some of the animated excess Alice in Wonderland is now justly acclaimed for. For the second consecutive entry in the Disney animated canon, Mary Blair’s concept art (1950’s Cinderella, 1953’s Peter Pan) is principally responsible for what the background animators would adopt. In the bookend scenes outside Wonderland, the lush, foliage-filled backgrounds recall her work during Disney’s package era, and are easily the most “realistic” backgrounds since the inimitable Bambi (1942). Once the film descends into Wonderland, the background animators, attempting to convert her concept art into cel animation, attempt (but fail to) replicate the characteristic flatness of her concept art.

But for everything else integral to Blair’s artwork – the lack of straight lines, highly stylized architectural and natural features, and detonation of colors – the background animators (who would be assigned specific scenes) faithfully render her style as closely as they can without completely making Alice in Wonderland a modernist phantasmagoria. The film is an overload of colorful experimentation. Just choose from any one of the scenes involving the White Rabbit’s house, the Caterpillar’s toadstool hideaway, the tea party, or the Queen of Hearts’ domain and one is subject to a visual cacophony of inspired production design and artistic audacity. It can be overwhelming, but Wonderland’s locales represent some of the greatest examples of settings-as-character in almost all of animated cinema.

Alice’s Wonderland, however, is nothing without the characters that dwell within. Some of the most impressive character designs of Disney’s mid-century animated films appear in this film, thanks mostly to two of the “Nine Old Men” – Ward Kimball (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1971’s Bedknobs and Broomsticks) and Frank Thomas (1940’s Pinocchio, 1977’s The Rescuers) – and Norm Ferguson (“Dance of the Hours” in 1940’s Fantasia, 1953’s Peter Pan). Because of the sheer number of characters that Thomas and Kimball designed and directed on this film (and this is not even mentioning several other fellow directing animators), I will focus on two specific characters of theirs.

For Norm Ferguson, he is the sole directing animator of the Walrus and the Carpenter, the characters from the eponymous segment imparted to Alice by Tweedledee and Tweedledum (itself an adaptation of Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter” poem within Through the Looking-Glass). As a study of differences, the designs of both characters give their personalities away even if one were to mute the audio or view a still image. The Carpenter – scrawny, scruffy, and short – telegraphs his dimwittedness and gullibility from his opening moments on-screen. Adding to that visual characterization is that he shares a voice actor, J. Pat O'Malley, and a squeaky, honky timbre with Tweedledee and Tweedledum. O’Malley also voices the Walrus, but adjusts his delivery to a throaty bass, interspersed with the coughing one expects from a chain-smoker, let alone a chain-smoking walrus. The Walrus – appropriately rotund (as walruses should be) with a kitschy suit – is a charming fellow, but beneath that charm are his occasional all-knowing smirks that belie selfish intentions. Ferguson’s clashing character animation for both, in addition to the morbid comedy of “The Walrus and the Carpenter”, are a brilliant complement the abridged poem used in the scene. Alice in Wonderland would be Norman Ferguson’s penultimate film with the studio before his retirement due to complications with diabetes.

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With Alice in Wonderland, Frank Thomas is the directing animator for the movie’s antagonist for the second straight Disney animated feature. The techniques and artistry used for Cinderella’s Lady Tremaine and the Queen of Hearts – voiced deliciously (and boisterously) by Disney regular Verna Felton (Dumbo’s Mrs. Jumbo and the Elephant Matriarch, Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother) – could not be any more different. Where Lady Tremaine was heavily rotoscoped in her movements and facial expressions, there is nothing realistic about the Queen of Hearts’ physicality. As a buxom bundle of waving limbs, she has arguably the most fleshy and expressive face in a 1950s Disney animated feature. In that face, in Felton’s iconic voice acting, we find a crazed monarch who desperately needs to see a therapist to contain her volcanic temper. Thomas’ character design sells the Queen of Hearts’ mood swings – perfunctory courteousness, egomania, pettiness, and bloodlust (“Off with his head!”). Thus, she becomes Disney’s closest analogue to the uptight and pretentious narcissists that the likes of Bugs Bunny or, to a lesser extent, Daffy Duck might have brought down to size in a Looney Tunes short film. How fortunate that the Queen of Hearts only appears in Alice in Wonderland’s concluding stages; an entire film dedicated to her (please do not pass this hypothetical along to a Walt Disney Company executive) would be a wearisome indulgence.

The last masterstroke of character design is thanks to Ward Kimball. Kimball, shortly about to revert his focus from feature animation to television and the Disney theme parks, was the principal designer of the Cheshire Cat. The wide-grinning Cheshire Cat, voiced by Sterling Holloway (Kaa in 1967’s The Jungle Book, the original voice of Winnie the Pooh), is a distinctive swirl of purple and pink stripes, his yellow eyes giving off a blazing glare. As opposed to the Queen of Hearts, the Cheshire Cat – no more or less peculiar than any other inhabitant of Wonderland – rarely stands on his hind legs. Instead, he prefers to perch himself, stomach-first, and limit his non-facial physical movements. With Holloway’s mellifluous voice acting, the physics-bending Cheshire Cat is not the sort to be vengeful or unleash verbal fire and brimstone. But with his capabilities of troublemaking for his own personal entertainment, he is the least predictable and perhaps most dangerous character of all. Depending on the viewer, the Cheshire Cat can be seen as a darkly comic figure and/or the film’s greatest source of malevolence, however restrained.

After watching Alice in Wonderland more than most Disney animated films over the course of my lifetime, I still struggle over how to categorize Kimball’s magical cat. Certainly, Cheshire Cat is an antagonist, but do his actions place him in the pantheon of Disney villains? Reading Carroll’s books and noting – however circuitously – Cheshire Cat helps Alice become “unlost”, perhaps being considered a trickster will suffice.

The soundtrack to Alice in Wonderland contains the greatest number of songs (sixteen from a potential thirty) in the entire Disney animated feature canon. That is partly due to the length of these compositions – clocking in, in several instances, at just under or over one minute – and that more than a handful of these songs are adaptations (partial or complete) of a Lewis Carroll poem. Disney hired a battalion of Tin Pan Alley composers and lyricists to pen/adapt songs around Carroll’s poems, but just over half of the songs were composed by Sammy Fain (“Secret Love” in 1953’s Calamity Jane, “Love is a Many-Splendored Thing” from the 1955 film of the same name) set to Bob Hilliard’s (“Civilization”, also known as “Bongo, Bongo, Bongo (I Don’t Want to Leave the Congo)”) lyrics. Among their mostly original compositions, Fain and Hilliard are responsible for the title song, “In a World of My Own”, and “Painting the Roses Red”, among several other earworms utilizing Carroll’s poetry.

Debatably Alice in Wonderland’s ultimate earworm is the original song “A Very Merry Un-birthday” by Mack David, Al Hoffman, and Jerry Livingston (the trio also composed “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo in 1950’s Cinderella). Because of this song’s affiliation with a certain ride at the Disney theme parks, you, the reader, might already be very familiar with the song’s melody without ever watching Alice in Wonderland. Sung raucously by the Mad Hatter and March Hare (incredible voice acting by Ed Wynn and Jerry Colonna, respectively) alongside Alice, the “unbirthday song” is even more jaunty, celebratory, and devilishly catchy than “Happy Birthday” itself. With this lengthy soundtrack, Alice in Wonderland’s songs completely overshadow and are referenced across Oliver Wallace’s (the notorious title song and score to 1942’s Der Fuehrer’s Face, 1963’s The Incredible Journey) score. For such a riotous and absurd movie, the film contains an equally riotous and absurd soundtrack to empower all of its nonsense.

The qualities that have made Alice in Wonderland treasured by many (including yours truly) today are the exact same ones that British literary and film critics took issue with in 1951. This Alice eviscerates Lewis Carroll’s literary vision and it is too “American”, these critics wrote. Walt Disney, years removed from his namesake studio’s Golden Age animated features (an era where he might have considered the words of academic and critics), now could not care less.

Walt’s distaste for academic and critics in the second half of his career began after musical and film critics pilloried Fantasia (1940). But his disdain for such individuals was fully realized after their response to the innovative and controversial Song of the South (1946) – which Walt intended as a hurrah for the American folklore that colored his childhood. Even upon Song of the South’s release, protesters and picketers decried the film for sentimentalizing the lives of black people in the immediate postbellum American South. “The master-and-slave relation is so lovingly regarded in your yarn,” New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther wrote, “… that one might almost imagine that you figure Abe Lincoln made a mistake. Put down that mint julep, Mr. Disney.” Disney took this wave of criticism over Song of the South personally, and convinced himself that supposedly communist enemies from rival studios and hostile sociopolitical circles were inflaming these attacks against his films and his studio. How dare these people, Walt must have thought, tell the inventor of Mickey Mouse and the man who gave Hugh Harman, Rudolf Ising, and Friz Freleng their first jobs in animated cinema what he could or could not do artistically. Walt Disney could justly say he laid the foundation for American animated cinema in Kansas City – before Burbank, before the overcrowded studio in Hyperion – all those years ago, which must have fueled his pride and dismissal of his naysayers.

In an earlier decade, Walt – especially when noting that Carroll’s work was integral to his start in animated film in the 1920s – might have publicly lashed out to the polarized response that met Alice in Wonderland. Now, Walt had compartmentalized his feelings. And as Alice in Wonderland made its way through theaters, a long-gestating animated feature featuring a canine romance was finally moving forward. Another film, made possible due to the windfalls from Cinderella, had just been greenlit, and would not see completion until decade’s end.

Although not successful in its theatrical run, Alice in Wonderland became the first Disney film to rejuvenate its reputation in the popular mindset through television. TV became widespread in the United States and Britain after the Second World War and, with it, Walt Disney would use the medium to broadcast his older films, to alter popular perceptions of his own persona and personal history, and to employ idealized images and storytelling in telling the story of his namesake studio. Removed from the cultural discourse dominating airwaves and headlines in the early 1950s, viewers in the decades following Alice in Wonderland’s release can now appreciate the film’s role in the Disney animated canon. Alice in Wonderland is a demented classic that, because of its narrative-unfriendly content, has influenced few films following it. The film adjusts Lewis Carroll’s books in ways that pay homage to his writing, but also to chart a colorful course for viewers and Disney fans as cinematically as possible.

My rating: 9/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. Half-points are always rounded down. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found in the “Ratings system” page on my blog (as of July 1, 2020, tumblr is not permitting certain posts with links to appear on tag pages, so I cannot provide the URL).

For more of my reviews tagged “My Movie Odyssey”, check out the tag of the same name on my blog.

This is the twenty-first Movie Odyssey Retrospective. Movie Odyssey Retrospectives are reviews on films I had seen in their entirety before this blog’s creation or films I failed to give a full-length write-up to following the blog’s creation. Previous Retrospectives include The Kid (1921), Cinderella (1950), and The Sound of Music (1965).

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eyeodyssey · 5 years

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Death By Formula

Most animation in America takes a great deal of influence from the style of Disney studios. Personally speaking, I believe that Disney films established a form of manipulation in what came to be the narrative formula of feature-length works, ultimately doing long-term harm to the medium in a cinematic context. There are no instances of emotional nuance, there are only segments where you are plainly instructed to either feel happy or sad. The moments that are commonly highlighted in these films as being mature and dark are just instances of said emotional manipulation. The emotional and narrative contents are plainly black and white with no complexity. These animations were made for family viewing, but as the medium progressed popular media primarily chose to copy from this formula, leaving marginal potential space for the commercially influential sides of the medium to grow and mature. This is primarily an issue in the American industry, the content of mainstream American feature-length animation is notably held back. This does not cover independent creators, but works that are studio financed. This also does not cover animation for television. On the other end of the scale, there is the fact of how this staleness effects the adult side of the industry. During the 70s, there was the obvious boom in adult animation with the films of Ralph Bakshi. These films did mark a standout moment in the US side of the medium’s history with their harsh political themes and intentional diversions of the norm. These diversions even continued into Bakshi’s transition to family work with his choice to lead a creator-driven Mighty Mouse series, which resulted in a surrealist program that was made under the guise of a revision of an established animation property. I think really highly of this certain series for obvious reasons along with the early Space Ghost Coast To Coast (though that goes off-topic, sidetracking into tv animation). Content that especially sold Bakshi’s work, however, were the instances of sexuality, coinciding with the porn boom of the 70s. As things continued, companies tried to copy the success of Bakshi’s films to mixed results. While you did get on one end a fairly bizarre Roger Corman-led animation that ended up playing out like the visual accompaniment to a long-lost vignette from Frank Zappa’s Live At The Fillmore, most films simply followed a game of telephone of what elements could sell a sex romp. Decades of this game of telephone later and dick jokes are still considered a major selling point for the rare theatrical adult animation from the US. We choose to accept a general complacency that lies between a stark contrast of the sugar-induced emotional shallowness of Disney and the mindless sex of a mainstream producer’s loose grasp of what qualifies as “adult” from the generation loss induced concept of a Bakshi film, selectively ignoring the cultural contexts of said sex and violence and only seeing the copycats with their meandering efforts like King Dick and Once Upon A Girl. While shorts and features like the films of Jan Lenica including Rhinoceros (based on the Ionesco play of the same name), Fantastic Planet, Out of an Old Man’s Head, The Story of a Crime, Aardman’s Babylon, The Death Lullaby, Midori and Akira all came out before the 90s, sex romps like Sausage Party are marketed as landmarks as late as the 2010s by studios and film news sites. It’s the sign of an industry that has meandered in a schoolboy conservative state since the 1940s from the influence of an overbearing capital that demands two immature extremities. These issues can arguably be seen as a reflection of the same problems that are affecting the American film industry as a whole. Back in the 1970s directors were already complaining about not meeting the funds necessary for creative cinema. With the hyper-commercial nature that directors have to face, animation can be seen as an extreme reflection of the ruins that will eventually be left by a diehard loyalty to restrictive formula. Abide by the three act structure, you must have the high points at this part, you must have all the low points at this part, there must be a moment of audience gratifying revelation at this part, the hero must overcome everything bad and save the day, etc. This is partly from how animation is a medium that the artist must devote their life to, so it’s basically encouraged to lead a career in complacency for the sake of surviving.

Most American feature-length animation as we know it now is viewed solely as popcorn entertainment with no lasting conceptual artistry. I believe that in the current climate, subversive extremity is outright necessary. It needs subversion in thematic and emotional content where audience members can be confused, baffled or even enraged. A true work of innovation is met with anger or (at the very least) lack of understanding from mainstream audiences, people who dismiss said work from their own confusion. See cases like Eraserhead, the entirety of Stanley Kubrick’s filmography, the first Godzilla film, Ken Russell’s The Devils, etc. This is one reason why I greatly respect the films of Hiroshi Harada, he is an animator who didn’t base his work from industry marketability but the creativity of fellow underground creators. For this reason, his films are commonly hated by most anime and animation fans. Jan Švankmajer is another director in this sort of field that I've had interest in for a while, though he oddly enough doesn’t actually consider himself to be an animator. Stan Brakhage can also fit in this field, with his use of directly painting onto film stock on a frame-by-frame basis.

#The Life of EyeOdyssey

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archivewr · 5 years

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From official Wade Robson Website

He was a prodigy before he probably knew what the word meant. He has a list of clients that tops off around Britney Spears and *NSYNC. He is Wade J. Robson, a creative entity with 13 years of experience in only 19 years of life. You’ve seen his work all over television, motion pictures, music videos, sold out concerts, award ceremonies and elsewhere. Wade is on a path to greatness which is only the beginning, and the man you’re meeting today is transcending all boundaries, well on his way to conquering higher levels of entertainment and mesmerizing not only a nation but an entire world.

Wade, Australian by birth and American by choice, made an entrance into entertainment and never looked back. Putting in countless hours of work at an amazingly early age, Wade was able to advance far beyond the realm of classic childhood, becoming a professional long before most people reach amateur status. At three years old, while many of us were still only beginning to walk, Wade was memorizing the dance steps of Michael Jackson’s infamous “Thriller” video. At five when most of us were still learning to tie our shoes, Wade was dancing circles around competitions and performing in front of capacity crowds with the King of Pop himself. By the time he was nine, he had appeared in three of Michael Jackson’s biggest videos-“ Black or White. “Jam” and “Heal the World.” From this point there were Academy Awards performances, television appearances, rap albums, music writing and production, dance classes (teaching them, that is), acting roles in major motion pictures and choreography. And then he turned sixteen. This was around the time when he received a request to choreograph for Britney Spears. After seeing his talent first hand, Britney chose not to continue to use Wade just as a choreographer. Instead, he would direct her entire stage show, choreographing her every move, remixing the music, directing the video segments and designing the sets. His outstanding work ethic and eagle’s eye to detail presented him with opportunities that made apparent his arrival to the top of his class. He has since choreographed and appeared with Britney in the first Pepsi commercial and he choreographed, wrote and produced the jingle and co-directed Britney's second Pepsi Commercial, which aired during the 2001 Super Bowl, danced in the extremely popular GAP commercial campaign, masterminded *NSYNC’s 2001 MTV Music Awards performance and their 2001 Pop Odyssey Tour, as well as their dynamic showings at the 2000 Billboard Music Awards and their 2000 No Strings Attached Tour. The relationship with Britney and *NSYNC continues to flourish, as Wade co-wrote and produced 4 songs from *NSYNC’s multi-platinum Celebrity album, including the Grammy nominated single “Gone.” As well as “What It’s Like To Be Me” from Britney Spears latest album entitled “Britney.”

When asked about Wade’s talent and capabilities, Chris Kirkpatrick of *NSYNC offers, “He is a total perfectionist.” When Wade is asked himself, he responds, “I have my vision, and I will not stop until it is fulfilled. It’s gone past just dancing. It’s about creating a story line that draws people in and wont let them go.” This story line has since been adapted for immensely popular artists such as Mandy Moore, Pink, Usher, Tyrese, Youngstown, IMX, Mya and Dream. Wade has gone from being the man behind the scenes to the creative force driving the vehicle of success for today’s biggest superstars. And by the way, he’s now nineteen.

Now, that was the past. Let’s talk about the future.

Wade has had plans to write and direct feature films since he was 12 years old. Now those plans are turning into reality. Wade is extremely confident that he is the one who is going to bring back the movie musical for good. But, that’s just the beginning. Wade’s understanding of mental and visual transportation is boundless. The tools he has gathered from his stage directing are invaluable. Tools such as, knowing how to create a product that wholly represents the client, no matter who or what that client is. Wade has learnt how to control and communicate with his crew wonderfully. He also knows how to make an actor feel completely comfortable in a role. Wade J. Robson has an uncanny talent for knowing what people want to see. Some of Wade’s latest projects include - An Mtv dance show, which he wrote and will executive produce and star in. A short film that Danny DeVito’s film company, Jersey Films will produce. Wade is co-writing the film and directing. Wade is also developing a musical feature film with Disney that he will direct. And last, but not least, Wade has written and produced new music for Dream and Christina Vidal’s upcoming albums. ‘Who is Wade J. Robson,’ the answer almost seems elementary. He is nothing less than an entertainer of unlimited creative capacity who found his route and continues to blaze his way through while moving to the speed of lights, camera, action.

(official Wade Robson Website)

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farwamustaqeem · 5 years

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NEXT KIDS WORLDWIDE

Award Winning Filmmaker And Radio Personality Tim Green Introduces Next Kids Worldwide Streaming Radio And TV Network And Cooling Out With Tim Green On Air! Hollywood, California: Award winning filmmaker and radio personality Tim Greene (WWW.TIMGREENEFILMS.COM) has launched Next Kids Worldwide.Com (WWW.NEXTKIDSWORLDWIDE.COM ) which is a new one of a kind commercial free radio and TV streaming platform that will give millions of kids from all around the world in six languages a change to let their talent shine and view positive entertainment 24 hours a day from the stars of tomorrow. “I was looking for an innovative way to positively motivate and engage the millions of kids, families and communities who are constantly streaming music and video content on their cell phones and laptop computers. With over 15 years of broadcasting experience in major markets like Los Angeles, Philly and Japan I’ve learned that kids love content made for them and by them, and now millions of kids all around the world ages 3 to 12 will have a streaming Radio and Television platform that they can call their own as well as submit original music and videos for consideration to be aired. Parents can send their kid’s original songs and music videos to [email protected] for consideration. Next Kids Worldwide® will also be releasing a Holiday Mixtape featuring new soon to be classic Holiday Songs called “Jingle Beats Volume 1”. Kids can also submit original Holiday Themed Music and Videos for consideration. Not to be confused with Kidz Bop, the Next Kids Worldwide® Mixtape will feature original songs & videos made by kids for kids. Listen Live right now at: https://mytuner-radio.com/radio/next-kids-worldwide-456244/ music is the soundtrack of family life and Next Kids Worldwide® hand selects the music and videos that air on our network so parents do not have to worry about a computer randomly choosing the next song that plays which may introduce your kid to content meant for adults. Parents also do not have to worry about paying monthly subscription fees because Next Kids Worldwide® is absolutely free to everyone with no commercials whatsoever. Our tagline is “Strive For Excellence” and we also give free Next Kids Entertainment & Edutainment Workshops for families with kids who want to break into the music/entertainment business in communities nationwide. To date we have given out over 400 Laptop Computers and other prizes to kids who have great grades, but their family may not have the finances to buy a computer during our 30 city tours in under served neighborhoods because we at Next Kids Worldwide always believe in giving back to communities nationwide for over 15 years. We are also currently negotiating multiple deals for NEXT KIDS WORLDWIDE® Global Merchandising including a Next Kids Clothing Line, Kids Sneakers, Next Kids Record Label, Toy Line, Next Kids Worldwide®Awards Show, Bluetooth Headphones, Breakfast Cereal, Snack Foods Line and Hip Hop Soda Pop” Say’s Greene. We urge parents & kids to help spread the word by sharing our link on TIK TOK, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat & other social media sites. Generation Alpha (children born after 2011) does not sit in front of a TV set anymore, they stream all of their entertainment on mobile devices by millions of views and Next Kids Worldwide® will be the commercial free digital destination for kids and families worldwide. With a keen eye for spotting talent, setting up over 200 meetings in Hollywood for talent and being called the Walt Disney of Hip Hop by reporters, Tim Greene will seek out bona fide performers and Kid Influencers for the YouTube Generation. Next Kids Worldwide® talent will also star and act in short films to help keep their viewing audience engaged and entertained. “Getting major inspiration from Tyler Perry opening his massive “Tyler Perry Studios”, Oprah Winfrey launching the “Oprah Winfrey Network” and Ava DuVernay launching her own independent film distribution company “ARRAY”, I thought to myself why not use new technology integration to reach well over a billion underserved kids around the world with fun filled short themed entertainment where they can not only watch the stars, but really have a chance to be a star” Says Greene. Next Kids Worldwide® creator Tim Greene is a Sony Innovators Award finalist, a former top rated radio personality in Los Angeles at KKBT (FM 92 The Beat) and Stevie Wonder’s KJLH, in Philadelphia at WPHI 100.3 The Beat and was producer and host of the TV & Radio show “Dance City From Hollywood” that aired on Bay FM in Japan. As a mega award winning filmmaker Tim Greene has been a panelist at The Los Angeles Film Festival (Directors Guild Of America’s Main Auditorium-Low Budget Summit), The Philadelphia International Film Festival, The Pan African Film Festival, The Black Hollywood Film Festival , Peachtree Int’l Film Festival (Atlanta), Southwest Georgia Film Festival and Arlene's Grocery's Film Festival (New York). Tim has been featured in Backstage Magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, The Business Of Film Magazine, Show Business Magazine (New York), Power Networking, Filmmakers Alliance Magazine, New York Beacon, The California Crusader, The Los Angeles Sentinel, Los Angeles Wave, Our Weekly and The LA Weekly. As a songwriter and record producer, Tim has produced 17 single releases. As a former talent manager Tim is known for discovering 73 year old “Rappin Granny” and took her from the streets of South Central Los Angeles to starring in the Fox TV kid’s series “Beetle Borgs”, which was created by Haim Saban of “The Power Rangers” fame as well as over 35 national TV commercials and 17 feature films including The Wayans Brother’s “Don’t Be A Menace”. Tim Greene also served as the Grand Marshal for the 17th “Kingdom Day Parade", which was seen on KNBC TV in Hollywood California. Tim has received a Certificate Of Commendation from The City Of Los Angeles for “Young People For Young People”, “Men Who Cook And Care”. As a celebrity tennis player in Hollywood Tim has won Tennis Tournaments with The Make A Wish Foundation (Beverly Hills Country Club) and John McEnroe's “Love Match” Celebrity Tennis Tournament (Riviera Country Club). Streaming content creator Tim Green is set to release his latest radio and TV project entitled “Cooling Out With Tim Green” which is an interactive show geared toward women ages 18 to 54 years of age worldwide. The shows will also feature celebrity interviews, makeup Monday and so much more. You can check out a sample of the show at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgBJPVgIg9o To interview Next Kids Worldwide® creator Tim Green for any Television, Radio, Newspaper and Blogger segments call: Amy Wiseman/Josh Bernstein At: (323) 736 – 7731 OR EMAIL: [email protected] WWW.NEXTKIDSWORLDWIDE.COM WWW.TIMGREENEFILMS.COM [email protected] Media Contact Company Name: Next Kids Worldwide Contact Person: Tim Greene Country: United States Website: nextkidsworldwide.com

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newyorktheater · 5 years

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Theater Mitu’s latest devised theater piece is a 70-minute tech-heavy sensory bombardment, a collage of disparate images, monologues, songs and sounds that are focused (if that’s the right word) on what a house means to people. Like the other work by the 22-year-old company that I’ve seen over the years – such as “Remnant” last year, and “Juarez: A Documentary Mythology” in 2014 — Theater Mitue begins with a serious theme, researches it extensively, conducting interviews with experts and regular people living all over the world, and then presents a jumble of a show that (as I’ve put it in past reviews) ranks conventional clarity as a low priority.

The main difference this time is that I got to talk to Theater Mitu’s artistic director Rubén Polendo and other members of the company, for an article for TDF Stages.

It made me appreciate “House (or how to lose an orchard in 90 minutes or less)” more than I might have otherwise. So, for example, threaded throughout a set that’s mostly the wooden frame of a house under construction, “House” includes 14 video monitors. They sometimes simply show on screen what the performers are doing live on stage, but often the monitors compete with the live action by showing old footage, such as a 1950s news segment about a housing development offering the new ideal American dream house, a 1952 Disney short of a cartoon house…. and even an old commercial for Cherry Coke.

The news story and the Disney cartoon are obviously relevant to the theme of the theater piece, but why, I asked Polendo, does the show include a commercial for Cherry Coke?

His response: “One of the spaces the old commercials inhabit is a place of memory. When they air, people not only remember that moment in their lives but they also remember where they were. It is unlikely that you would have seen that commercial in your car or on the street. You saw it sitting on your couch, in your house.”

In other words, “House” is intended not so much as a presentation but as a stimulation. As Denis Butkus, a Juilliard-trained actor who joined the company in 2011, put it to me, “House is a series of installations, not necessarily privileging story over anything else. We’re interested in emotions. We’re going to give you feelings, and you are going to make your own associations.”

The key to appreciating “House,” then, is not to expect to make sense of the piece as a whole, but to savor your reaction to specific moments that wind up meaning something to you – such as company member Kayla Asbell’s monologue based on an interview with a woman who visited the house she grew up in, now abandoned.

But how does one even take in these individual moments when they are surrounded by so much excess stimuli? The script is structured much like Anton Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” with four “acts” – labeled The Arrival. The Death of a Child. Foreclosure. Death of a House. “House” even presents some passages taken in whole or in part from Chekhov’s play, supplemented by excerpts from the many interviews. But the production is overlaid with what one could reasonably consider deliberate distractions. We listen to a busy aural landscape through the required headphones , as we watch the nine grave-faced performers (who are also credited as the creators), wearing identical yellow blazers and white go-go boots, speak in robotic cadences, or play a saw like an eerie musical instrument, or break out into a joyless space age dance. And then there are those 14 video monitors.

Polendo explained to me why Theater Mitu overloads. It’s an effort to re-create the way our mind processes the world. “The voices in your head are filled with memories and pop media and anything else that is rolling around in there.”

But surely good theater doesn’t attempt to present the whole of consciousness; it selects.“The art of writing is the act of leaving out,” one of my favorite teachers liked to say. Or, in the words of Isaac Bashevis Singer, “the wastebasket is a writer’s best friend. “

“House (or how to lose an orchard in 90 minutes or less)” is on stage at Mitu588 (580 Sackett Street in Gowanus) through September 8, 2019.

House or How to Lose An Orchard in 90 Minutes or Less by Theater Mitu Theater Mitu’s latest devised theater piece is a 70-minute tech-heavy sensory bombardment, a collage of disparate images, monologues, songs and sounds that are focused (if that’s the right word) on what a house means to people.

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nancygduarteus · 7 years

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The Algorithm That Makes Preschoolers Obsessed With YouTube

Toddlers crave power. Too bad for them, they have none. Hence the tantrums and absurd demands. (No, I want this banana, not that one, which looks identical in every way but which you just started peeling and is therefore worthless to me now.)

They just want to be in charge! This desire for autonomy clarifies so much about the behavior of a very small human. It also begins to explains the popularity YouTube among toddlers and preschoolers, several development psychologists told me.

If you don’t have a 3-year-old in your life, you may not be aware of YouTube Kids, an app that’s essentially a stripped-down version of the original video blogging site, with videos filtered by the target audience’s age. And because the mobile app is designed for use on a phone or tablet, kids can tap their way across a digital ecosystem populated by countless videos—all conceived with them in mind.

The videos that surface on the app are generated by YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, which takes into account a user’s search history, viewing history, demographic region, gender, age, and other individual data. The algorithm is basically a funnel through which every YouTube video is poured—with only a few making it onto a person’s screen.

This recommendation engine poses a difficult task, simply because of the scale of the platform. “YouTube recommendations are responsible for helping more than a billion users discover personalized content from an ever-growing corpus of videos,” researchers at Google, which owns YouTube, wrote in a 2016 paper about the algorithm. That includes many hours of video uploaded to the site every second of every day. Making a recommendation system that’s worthwhile is “extremely challenging,” they wrote, because the algorithm has to continuously sift through a mind-boggling trove of content and instantly identify the freshest and most relevant videos—all while knowing how to ignore the noise.

The architecture of YouTube’s recommendation system, in which “candidate videos” are retrieved and ranked before presenting only a few to the user. (Google / YouTube)

And here’s where the ouroboros factor comes in: Kids watch the same kinds of videos over and over. Videomakers take notice of what’s most popular, then mimic it, hoping that kids will click on their stuff. When they do, YouTube’s algorithm takes notice, and recommends those videos to kids. Kids keep clicking on them, and keep being offered more of the same. Which means video makers keep making those kinds of videos—hoping kids will click.

This is, in essence, how all algorithms work. It’s how filter bubbles are made. A little bit of computer code tracks what you find engaging—what sorts of videos do you watch most often, and for the longest periods of time?—then sends you more of that kind of stuff. Viewed a certain way, YouTube Kids is offering programming that’s very specifically tailored to what children want to see. Kids are actually selecting it themselves, right down to the second they lose interest and choose to tap on something else. The YouTube app, in other words, is a giant reflection of what kids want. In this way, it opens a special kind of window into a child’s psyche.

But what does it reveal?

“Up until very recently, surprisingly few people were looking at this,” says Heather Kirkorian, an assistant professor of human development in the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “In the last year or so, we’re actually seeing some research into apps and touchscreens. It’s just starting to come out.”

Kids videos are among the most watched content in YouTube history. This video, for example, has been viewed more than 2.3 billion times, according to YouTube’s count:

youtube

You can find some high-quality animation on YouTube Kids, plus clips from television shows like Peppa Pig, and sing-along nursery rhymes. “Daddy Finger” is basically the YouTube Kids anthem, and ChuChu TV’s dynamic interpretations of popular kid songs are basically inescapable.

youtube

Many of the most popular videos have an amateur feel. Toy demonstrations like surprise-egg videos are huge. These videos are just what they sound like: adults narrate as they play with various toys, often by pulling them out of plastic eggs or peeling away layers of slime or Play-Doh to reveal a hidden figurine.

Kids go nuts for these things.

Here’s a video from the YouTube Kids vloggers Toys Unlimited that’s logged more than 25 million views, for example:

youtube

The vague weirdness of these videos aside, it’s actually easy to see why kids like them. “Who doesn’t want to get a surprise? That’s sort of how all of us operate,” says Sandra Calvert, the director of the Children’s Digital Media Center at Georgetown University. In addition to surprises being fun, many of the videos are basically toy commercials. (This video of a person pressing sparkly Play-Doh onto chintzy Disney princess figurines has been viewed 550 million times.) And they let kids tap into a whole internet’s worth of plastic eggs and perceived power. They get to choose what they watch. And kids love being in charge, even in superficial ways.

“It’s sort of like rapid-fire channel surfing,” says Michael Rich, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and the director of the Center on Media and Child Health. “In many ways YouTube Kids is better suited to the attention span of a young child—just by virtue of its length—than something like a half-hour or hour broadcast program can be.”

Rich and others compare the app to predecessors like Sesame Street, which introduced short segments within a longer program, in part to keep the attention of the young children watching. For decades, researchers have looked at how kids respond to television. Now they’re examining the way children use mobile apps—how many hours they’re spending, which apps they’re using, and so on.

It makes sense that researchers have begun to take notice. In the mobile internet age, the same millennials who have ditched cable television en masse are now having babies, which makes apps like YouTube Kids the screentime option du jour. Instead of being treated to a 28-minute episode of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, a toddler or preschooler might be offered 28 minutes of phone time to play with the Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood app. Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood is a television program, too—a spin-off of Mr. Roger’s—aimed at viewers aged 2 years old to 4 years old.

But toddlers and preschoolers are actually pretty separate groups, as far researchers are concerned. A 2-year-old and a 4-year-old might both like watching Daniel Tiger, or the same YouTube Kids video, but their takeaway is apt to be much different, Kirkorian told me. Children under the age of 3 tend to have difficulty taking information relayed to them through a screen and applying it to real-life situations. Many studies have reached similar conclusions, with a few notable exceptions. Researchers recently discovered that when a screentime experience becomes interactive—Facetiming with Grandmère, let’s say—kids under 3 years old actually can make strong connections between what’s happening onscreen and offscreen.

Kirkorian’s lab designed a series of experiments to see how much of a role interactivity plays in helping a young child transfer information this way. She and her colleagues found striking learning differences among what young children learned—even kids under 2 years old—when they could interact with an app versus when they were just watching a screen. Other researchers, too, have found that incorporating some sort of interactivity helps children retain information better. Researchers at different institutions have different definitions of “interactivity,” but in one experiment it was an act as simple as pressing a spacebar.

“So there does seem to be something about the act of choosing, having some kind of agency, that makes a difference for little kids,” Kirkorian says. “The speculative part is why that makes a difference.”

One idea is that kids, especially, like to watch the same things over and over and over again until they really understand it. I watched the Dumbo VHS so many times as a little kid that I would recite the movie on long car rides. Apparently, this is not unusual—at least not since the age of VCRs and, subsequently, on-demand programming and apps. “If they have the opportunity to choose what they’re watching, then they’re likely to interact in a way that meets their learning goals,” Kirkorian says. “We know the act of learning new information is rewarding, so they’re likely to pick the information or videos that are in that sweet spot.”

“Children like to watch the same thing over and over,” says Calvert, of Georgetown. “Some of that is a comprehension issue, so they’ll repeatedly look at it so they can understand the story. Kids often don’t understand people’s motives, and that’s a major driver for a story. They don’t often understand the link between actions and consequences.”

Young kids are also just predisposed to becoming obsessive about relatively narrow interests. (Elephants! Trains! The moon! Ice cream!) Around the 18-month mark, many toddlers develop “extremely intense interests,” says Georgene Troseth, an associate professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University. Which is part of why kids using apps like YouTube Kids often select videos that portray familiar concepts—ones that feature a cartoon character or topic they’re already drawn to. This presents a research challenge, however. If kids are just tapping a thumbnail of a video because they recognize it, it’s hard to say how much they’re learning—or how different the app environment really is from other forms of play.

Even the surprise-egg craze isn’t really novel, says Rachel Barr, a developmental psychologist at Georgetown. “They are relatively fast paced and they include something that young children really like: things being enclosed and unwrapped,” she told me. “I have not tested it, but it seems unlikely that children are learning from these videos since they are not clearly constructed.”

“Interactivity is not always a good thing,” she added.

Researchers differ on the degree to which YouTube Kids is a valuable educational tool. Obviously, it depends on the video and the involvement of a caregiver to help contextualize what’s on screen. But questions about how the algorithm works also play a role. It’s not clear, for instance, how heavily YouTube weighs previous watching behaviors in its recommendation engine. If a kid binge-watches a bunch of videos that are lower quality in terms of learning potential, are they then stuck in a filter bubble where they’ll only see similarly low-quality programming?

There isn’t a human handpicking the best videos for kids to watch. The only human input on YouTube’s side is to monitor the app for inappropriate content, a spokesperson for YouTube told me. Quality control has still been an issue, however. YouTube Kids last year featured a video that showed Mickey Mouse-esque characters shooting one another in the head with guns, Today reported.

“The available content is not curated but rather filtered into the app via the algorithm,” said Nina Knight, a YouTube spokesperson. “So unlike traditional TV, where the content is being selected for you at a specified time, the YouTube Kids app gives each child and family more of the type of content they love and anytime they want it, which is incredibly unique.”

At the same time, the creators of YouTube Kids videos spend countless hours trying to game the algorithm so that their videos are viewed as many times as possible—more views translate into more advertising dollars for them. Here’s a video by Toys AndMe that’s logged more than 125 million views since it was posted in September 2016:

youtube

“You have to do what the algorithm wants for you,” says Nathalie Clark, the co-creator of a similarly popular channel, Toys Unlimited, and a former ICU nurse who quit her job to make videos full-time. “You can’t really jump back and forth between themes.”

What she means is, once YouTube’s algorithm has determined that a certain channel is a source of videos about slime, or colors, or shapes, or whatever else—and especially once a channel has had a hit video on a given topic—videomakers stray from that classification at their peril. “Honestly, YouTube picks for you,” she says. “Trending right now is Paw Patrol, so we do a lot of Paw Patrol.”

There are other key strategies for making a YouTube Kids video go viral. Make enough of these things and you start to get a sense of what children want to see, she says. “I wish I could tell you more,” she added, “But I don’t want to introduce competition. And, honestly, nobody really understands it. ”

The other thing people don’t yet understand is how growing up in the mobile internet age will change the way children think about storytelling. “There’s a rich set of literature showing kids who are reading more books are more imaginative,” says Calvert, of the Children’s Digital Media Center. “But in the age of interactivity, it’s no just longer consuming what somebody else makes. It’s also making you’re own thing.”

In other words, the youngest generation of app users is developing new expectations about narrative structure and informational environments. Beyond the thrill a preschooler gets from tapping a screen, or watching The Bing Bong Song video for the umpteenth time, the long-term implications for cellphone-toting toddlers are tangled up with all the other complexities of living in a highly networked on-demand world.

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/07/what-youtube-reveals-about-the-toddler-mind/534765/?utm_source=feed

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ionecoffman · 7 years

Text

The Algorithm That Makes Preschoolers Obsessed With YouTube

The architecture of YouTube’s recommendation system, in which “candidate videos” are retrieved and ranked before presenting only a few to the user. (Google / YouTube)

But what does it reveal?

Kids videos are among the most watched content in YouTube history. This video, for example, has been viewed more than 2.3 billion times, according to YouTube’s count:

youtube

Kids go nuts for these things.

Here’s a video from the YouTube Kids vloggers Toys Unlimited that’s logged more than 25 million views, for example:

youtube

“Interactivity is not always a good thing,” she added.

youtube

Article source here:The Atlantic

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likefusion · 7 years

Text

This Week in Content Marketing: Yes, Apple Will Buy Disney (Someday): PNR: This Old Marketing with Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose can be found on both iTunes and Stitcher. In this episode, we discuss the rumor spreading through Wall Street that Apple will buy Disney. We also explore Netflix's newest billion-dollar business model and six publishing trends Reuters says brands need to pay attention to. Our rants and raves include an overly harsh critique of brand studios and the need to question your choices; then we close the show with an example of the week from Mint. This week's show (Recorded live on April 17, 2017; Length: 1:02:16) Download this week's PNR This Old Marketing podcast. If you enjoy our PNR podcasts, we would love if you would rate it, or post a review, on iTunes. 1. Our sponsor (08:33): PowerPost – Welcome to the Age of Power Publishing: As content marketers, we understand the importance of creating content that not only educates, but inspires consumers to take action. As a result, we have entered a new era of “brands as publishers” – where brands are increasingly becoming publishers in their own right. With brand publishing and content distribution come several key steps to the publishing process. But the elongated process of content creation, review, scheduling and tracking analytics can often take more time than we have. Built by marketers for marketers, PowerPost is a time-saving tool for companies who manage content for multiple brands with multiple users – whether it's a regulated industry or creative agency. With PowerPost, your team can publish from one location across all of your online platforms, quickly and efficiently turning your brand into a power publisher. To help more brands excel at publishing, join us for a webinar on May 9th with CMI founder Joe Pulizzi. We have also created a comprehensive e-book, with insights from 50 experts in the content marketing field, and their strategies on conquering the five pillars of brand publishing: content planning, workflow, distribution, analytics, conversion. Claim your download at powerpost.digital. 2. Notable news and upcoming trends: Wall Street wonders whether Apple is wishing on Disney's star (11:55): Business Insider's Markets site reports on the theory that Apple's cash pile of more than $200 billion makes it a prime candidate to purchase Disney – a move that would solidify its position as a leader in the entertainment content space. There's no telling whether either party is actively considering a deal, and Robert is skeptical. Yet, I'm just excited to see industry speculation catching up to PNR, as this is a topic we've been talking about since I predicted an M&A play between the two companies back in 2015. Does Netflix have a new billion-dollar opportunity on its hands? (22:02): Another Business Insider article caught our eye this week, which offers a discussion on the revenue-generating potential of Netflix selling merchandise based on its hit shows, like Stranger Things. The speculation is based on the company's recent job posting for a head of licensing, which focused on how merchandise could be used to sustain interest in its shows. As I see it, Netflix has a number of valuable content brands on its platform that it isn't fully tapping into. If the company wants to scale its growth even faster than it already is, Netflix should be asking, “How else can we monetize this audience?” Robert agrees, but also finds it fascinating that, culturally, we are still surprised when product companies look to add a media arm to their business. Six strategic lessons for publishers moving “beyond the article” (32:06): A post on theMediaBriefing summarizes a recent Reuters report that explores ways that news organizations are going “beyond the article” through tactics like distributed publishing, messaging apps and chatbots, virtual reality, and mobile-first video. What resonated most with me was the example set by conversation app company Quartz, whose Creative Director Brian Dell went on the record to say that the aim is not to marry commercial to editorial but, rather, to offer a great Quartz experience. The discussion also reminds us all of the value of thinking about what we might need to stop doing, so we can free up more time to innovate and deliver greater value to a very specific segment of our audience. 3. Rants and raves (40:14) Joe's shout-out: A quick word of praise for our friend Craig Coffey from Lincoln Electric, who is featured in the latest issue of Crain's Cleveland Business. The Q&A interview includes a discussion about Lincoln Electric's stellar content marketing effort, Arc Magazine. Among the many great takeaways here is Craig's perspective on the need to rely on external writing talent: “Unlike us, they can get outside the conversation about our products … We want to entertain, educate, and inform. Then we can sell,” he says. HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Is Print Still Relevant? Lincoln Electric Says Yes Joe's rant: I've started to see some of my friends announce where their kids are going to college. While I'm thrilled for them, the subject also gives me a bit of pause. Personally, I'm not a fan of blindly encouraging students to pursue the default mode – where going to college is the de facto expectation – without giving them the option to question whether or not it's the right path for them. Similarly, I think far too many marketers have been taught that marketing is this definitive thing, and we all need to learn how to operate within it. Instead, I think we need to start questioning our preconceived notions and, perhaps, start fresh with a “tabula rasa.” Robert's rave: Doug Kessler, a close friend of the CMI family, shared a recent content example from his company – Velocity Partners – that Robert feels is well worth raving about. The effort, The New Media Message: Why Innovation Stories Deserve Innovative Formats, highlights the need for storytellers to explore and play to the web's unique strengths, rather than trying to squeeze innovative media ideas into old media formats. Robert's rant: An Adweek article came to Robert's attention via fellow Angelino, Doug Schumacher (@MemeRunner). The post takes branded content studios to task for operating under the belief that they can just, “render the creative, hit send on [the] programmatic buy, and win” in the content space. While he agrees with some of author Brian Tolleson's points about valuing the skills, passion, and talent of creative professionals, Robert challenges his notion that agencies and entertainment studios have cornered the market on leveraging these attributes to create high-quality brand content. 4. This Old Marketing example of the week (54:43): Digital personal finance software service Mint officially launched in September 2007 and, in just two short years, the company had amassed a following of over 1 million users, with a few thousand new users signing up daily. The company achieved this by establishing a content brand, MintLife, as a way to help its customers get answers to their personal finance questions. Mint initially built a strong following on a tight budget by inviting finance bloggers to contribute content, while also sponsoring other finance-related blogs – efforts which helped the company quickly grow its subscriber base to more than 20,000 consumers. Then, to continue to fine-tune the creative process in a cost-effective way, the company seeded its content on popular distribution sites, like Digg and Reddit. In an interview with Kissmetrics, Mint founder Aaron Patzer said that by the time MintLife was released, it was driving more traffic than their competitors were to their entire websites. And, according to an article on Contently, demand was so great, that Mint's systems couldn't initially handle all the subscribers who wanted to try its beta version. Mint responded by creating even greater demand, enabling interested subscribers to show their passion by posting an “I want Mint” badge on their blogs or social media profiles – efforts which helped boost the search ranking for MintLife content, and generate enough buzz to gain the attention of Intuit, which snatched up the young company in 2009 for $170 million. It's a fantastic This Old Marketing example of how to establish a thriving business by using valuable content to build an audience. Image source For a full list of PNR archives, go to the main This Old Marketing page. Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute How do I subscribe? The post This Week in Content Marketing: Yes, Apple Will Buy Disney (Someday) appeared first on Content Marketing Institute. http://bit.ly/2ohhBsp

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lucyariablog · 7 years

Text

This Week in Content Marketing: Yes, Apple Will Buy Disney (Someday)

PNR: This Old Marketing with Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose can be found on both iTunes and Stitcher.

In this episode, we discuss the rumor spreading through Wall Street that Apple will buy Disney. We also explore Netflix’s newest billion-dollar business model and six publishing trends Reuters says brands need to pay attention to. Our rants and raves include an overly harsh critique of brand studios and the need to question your choices; then we close the show with an example of the week from Mint.

This week’s show

(Recorded live on April 17, 2017; Length: 1:02:16)

Download this week’s PNR This Old Marketing podcast.

If you enjoy our PNR podcasts, we would love if you would rate it, or post a review, on iTunes.

1. Our sponsor (08:33):

PowerPost – Welcome to the Age of Power Publishing: As content marketers, we understand the importance of creating content that not only educates, but inspires consumers to take action. As a result, we have entered a new era of “brands as publishers” – where brands are increasingly becoming publishers in their own right. With brand publishing and content distribution come several key steps to the publishing process. But the elongated process of content creation, review, scheduling and tracking analytics can often take more time than we have. Built by marketers for marketers, PowerPost is a time-saving tool for companies who manage content for multiple brands with multiple users – whether it’s a regulated industry or creative agency. With PowerPost, your team can publish from one location across all of your online platforms, quickly and efficiently turning your brand into a power publisher.

To help more brands excel at publishing, join us for a webinar on May 9th with CMI founder Joe Pulizzi. We have also created a comprehensive e-book, with insights from 50 experts in the content marketing field, and their strategies on conquering the five pillars of brand publishing: content planning, workflow, distribution, analytics, conversion. Claim your download at powerpost.digital.

2. Notable news and upcoming trends:

Wall Street wonders whether Apple is wishing on Disney’s star (11:55): Business Insider’s Markets site reports on the theory that Apple’s cash pile of more than $200 billion makes it a prime candidate to purchase Disney – a move that would solidify its position as a leader in the entertainment content space. There’s no telling whether either party is actively considering a deal, and Robert is skeptical. Yet, I’m just excited to see industry speculation catching up to PNR, as this is a topic we’ve been talking about since I predicted an M&A play between the two companies back in 2015.

Does Netflix have a new billion-dollar opportunity on its hands? (22:02): Another Business Insider article caught our eye this week, which offers a discussion on the revenue-generating potential of Netflix selling merchandise based on its hit shows, like Stranger Things. The speculation is based on the company’s recent job posting for a head of licensing, which focused on how merchandise could be used to sustain interest in its shows. As I see it, Netflix has a number of valuable content brands on its platform that it isn’t fully tapping into. If the company wants to scale its growth even faster than it already is, Netflix should be asking, “How else can we monetize this audience?” Robert agrees, but also finds it fascinating that, culturally, we are still surprised when product companies look to add a media arm to their business.

Six strategic lessons for publishers moving “beyond the article” (32:06): A post on theMediaBriefing summarizes a recent Reuters report that explores ways that news organizations are going “beyond the article” through tactics like distributed publishing, messaging apps and chatbots, virtual reality, and mobile-first video. What resonated most with me was the example set by conversation app company Quartz, whose Creative Director Brian Dell went on the record to say that the aim is not to marry commercial to editorial but, rather, to offer a great Quartz experience. The discussion also reminds us all of the value of thinking about what we might need to stop doing, so we can free up more time to innovate and deliver greater value to a very specific segment of our audience.

3. Rants and raves (40:14)

Joe’s shout-out: A quick word of praise for our friend Craig Coffey from Lincoln Electric, who is featured in the latest issue of Crain’s Cleveland Business. The Q&A interview includes a discussion about Lincoln Electric’s stellar content marketing effort, Arc Magazine. Among the many great takeaways here is Craig’s perspective on the need to rely on external writing talent: “Unlike us, they can get outside the conversation about our products … We want to entertain, educate, and inform. Then we can sell,” he says.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Is Print Still Relevant? Lincoln Electric Says Yes

Joe’s rant: I’ve started to see some of my friends announce where their kids are going to college. While I’m thrilled for them, the subject also gives me a bit of pause. Personally, I’m not a fan of blindly encouraging students to pursue the default mode – where going to college is the de facto expectation – without giving them the option to question whether or not it’s the right path for them. Similarly, I think far too many marketers have been taught that marketing is this definitive thing, and we all need to learn how to operate within it. Instead, I think we need to start questioning our preconceived notions and, perhaps, start fresh with a “tabula rasa.”

Robert’s rave: Doug Kessler, a close friend of the CMI family, shared a recent content example from his company – Velocity Partners – that Robert feels is well worth raving about. The effort, The New Media Message: Why Innovation Stories Deserve Innovative Formats, highlights the need for storytellers to explore and play to the web’s unique strengths, rather than trying to squeeze innovative media ideas into old media formats.

Robert’s rant: An Adweek article came to Robert’s attention via fellow Angelino, Doug Schumacher (@MemeRunner). The post takes branded content studios to task for operating under the belief that they can just, “render the creative, hit send on [the] programmatic buy, and win” in the content space. While he agrees with some of author Brian Tolleson’s points about valuing the skills, passion, and talent of creative professionals, Robert challenges his notion that agencies and entertainment studios have cornered the market on leveraging these attributes to create high-quality brand content.

4. This Old Marketing example of the week (54:43):

Digital personal finance software service Mint officially launched in September 2007 and, in just two short years, the company had amassed a following of over 1 million users, with a few thousand new users signing up daily. The company achieved this by establishing a content brand, MintLife, as a way to help its customers get answers to their personal finance questions. Mint initially built a strong following on a tight budget by inviting finance bloggers to contribute content, while also sponsoring other finance-related blogs – efforts which helped the company quickly grow its subscriber base to more than 20,000 consumers. Then, to continue to fine-tune the creative process in a cost-effective way, the company seeded its content on popular distribution sites, like Digg and Reddit. In an interview with Kissmetrics, Mint founder Aaron Patzer said that by the time MintLife was released, it was driving more traffic than their competitors were to their entire websites. And, according to an article on Contently, demand was so great, that Mint’s systems couldn’t initially handle all the subscribers who wanted to try its beta version. Mint responded by creating even greater demand, enabling interested subscribers to show their passion by posting an “I want Mint” badge on their blogs or social media profiles – efforts which helped boost the search ranking for MintLife content, and generate enough buzz to gain the attention of Intuit, which snatched up the young company in 2009 for $170 million. It’s a fantastic This Old Marketing example of how to establish a thriving business by using valuable content to build an audience.

Image source

For a full list of PNR archives, go to the main This Old Marketing page.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

How do I subscribe?

The post This Week in Content Marketing: Yes, Apple Will Buy Disney (Someday) appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

from http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2017/04/apple-buy-disney-someday/

0 notes