Facebook Film Foolishness Part 5

While I was racking my brain for weeks to whittle down my original list, (And my other list, and my other other list) Jeff challenged me again with a fellow Facebook film fan Chris's more difficult “10 DAY MOVIE CHALLENGE.”

The rules are: you have to post an image of a NONHUMAN NONBLOCKBUSTER movie character that affected you in some way. Even if it was in the background or had only 5 seconds of screen time. Doesn't matter. ***NO JAWS, STAR WARS, ALIEN, THING, ETC. IT'S A CHALLENGE***

An issue immediately arose: a large percentage of my original impact list had characters like that. 

In fact swapping in a drunk dinosaur, a red knight, a Stranger and a skull filled bowling ball it would have been at 80%.

Therefore,  I figured I should get a jump on the group in case I got challenged.  Once I finished the first draft I noticed a large number of characters from my weird animated film collection on the list.  I felt like that was cheating, until the inevitable round of “oh crap I forgot…” yielded me enough movies to have an animated list and a regular one in time for the challenge.

The reason none of these made my first list was those needed to have a memorable impact the first time.  Some of these initial discoveries are lost in the past, and sometimes films have very different effects based on the viewer's age.  For example, what I viewed as a kid as only a cool 1976 Science Fiction film, with a fun Peter Ustinov bit at the end...

Became a horrifying distopia when I saw it again in my late twenties and was getting close to my own Carousel.

Given the nature of this continued insanity, how about making these puzzles.  I’ll post a year, a picture and a hint. The answers will appear in next week’s post.  

Here come the toons!

1964

Probably too well known to qualify for this challenge, but I don't care. I’ve loved this mixture of live action and animation since I was a kid and taught myself to make the *thrum* sound without bubbles while swimming underwater Up the Lake.

1970

The source material should be a “Book to Open your Mind” with its highlighting the importance of a balance of language and math skills. These personifications of boredom and apathy gave me the willies.

1977

A weird Bakshi fantasy, sci-fi mix with a hysterical George Award worthy twist ending. This guy was a melancholy robot a year before Marvin the Paranoid Android.

1977   

I played the big brother role to take my sister to a free showing of a toy based Chuck Jones outing in the Denville theater over the holidays.  This amorphous, gluttonous, giant blob terrified me.

1980

Aired on TV but sort of kind of a sequel to a Bakshi theatrical film so we’ll let it slide since these guys' song stuck in my head for years. It’s great to use when exercising or swimming.

1981

Saw this at a midnight show in one of several places I saw Rocky Horror right before it closed down. I think I was cursed.   A lot of the voice cast being from SCTV made it extra funny along with cool art and stories.

1983

More Bakshi fantasy with Frazetta art, whoah!. Cool story with a prehistoric Batman almost three decades before Grant Morrison did it. Rotoscope is always a little creepy, rotoscoped undead…brrrrrrrr.

1988

French science fiction is always cool and bizarre,  Ask Luc Besson.   Almost the whole freakin’ cast of this bizarre paradox and mutation driven thing could satisfy this category.  

1992

More Bakshi, more mixing live action and animation, yay!  While I'm obviously a fan of this animation director, I don't think I would have liked his original darker, more adulter version.  Film making is collaborative folks!  This neurotic spider private eye cracked me up.

2013

I laugh at this gag every single time I see it in a trailer, commercial or in this film.  It's wonderful that a movie exists solely to provide a wonderfully stupid parade of food puns. I'm laughing now.


Here's a teaser for next week: a character that walks the animation/real line from a 1985 film that introduced the world to the Tim Burton Danny Elfman movie making combination, and introduced the phrase, "I pity the fool who don't eat my cereal!" to my repertoire.

Come back next time for the answers and the “real” list.