HELLS FUCKING ASSCUNTS YEAAAAAAAAAAAAH \(^w^)/

I had just come back from a two-month hiatus, too. actually I had totally forgotten I had submitted it at all BUT HEY TALK ABOUT GOOD TIMING.

It's nice to see a seven-year project come to fruition, even if the bits and pieces you actually spent working on it really add up to maybe four solid years, even if it is really stupid, even if the prize is worth 1/200000th what you spent on earning it. It's just...nice.

...now to start work on the Squishyfish Sanctuary :D



In other news, I just found another movie from my childhood on YouTube. I rented it ages ago, only remembering one non-creepy scene from when I watched it as a kid, and was surprised to find a sincerely bizarre and disturbing vignette near the middle of a movie otherwise about dopey, happy ants.

The sequence starts at 2:32 here, segueing into the two-headed worm scene which continues into the second part.

As jotted down at the time:

The protagonist ant is assigned the job of guarding the colony’s eggs, so when one rolls off down a hole, he follows. Once well inside, he finds a rock covered in dense crystal. This breaks off, and the rock shines bright enough to blind him, represented by the pupils disappearing from his eyes. As if the white, sightless orbs aren’t bad enough, he proceeds to stumble around in the dark, crying and singing—yes, singing—about how he’ll never see the light of day again. Makes the evil two-headed worm that wants to eat him and the egg after he’s regained his sight pretty mild by comparison, really. The failure to explain why the rock becomes sentient and starts following him around is notably confusing, as well.

In more recent terminology: It comes right the fuck outta nowhere, has no bearing on the plot to the point that it's since been cut by the (presumably less drugged-up) DVD release team, is way over the top in terms of ridiculousness PANTS-WETTING EXISTENTIAL TERROR (ESPECIALLY in the context of the movie), and once it's over, no one ever speaks of it again. I know the distinction may be overused on the whole, but the scene is truly and completely a mmmmmBIG-LIPPED ALLIGATOR MOMENT. And when that happens in a disturbing manner, it forms a brain splinter, since the kid can't link it to anything and thus can't figure out whether it was real or a dream. I am soooo glad this is one of the movies my mother watched beforehand and edited for us.

Oh, and you will never get that Vanterviper song out of your head. Never ever never. Enjoy.

ETA: aaaaugh oh God I forgot their noses moved like elephant trunks oh God oh God

Oh God, guys, this is it. Somebody finally uploaded a semi-decent copy of Samson and Sally to YouTube.

This is seriously one of the worst contenders of Nightmare Fuel I've ever seen. Ever. It's not charming. It's not sweet. It's not whimsical. It has no redeeming values. It does not stop. It's seventy straight minutes of film that's alternately frightening, bleak, depressing, horrifying, dark, and confusing, and consistently utterly fucked up. Granted, that also kind of describes The Mouse and His Child, but at least that has a happy ending and artistic merit. Samson and Sally has neither.

I lost my play-by-play review of it when the House went down (still sore on that), but I wrote 80% of the TV Tropes notation, so I'll copy-and-paste that here as a description of the most damning offenses. LJ-cut for spoilers, I guess?


( Like whales beneath me, diving down )


So, yeah. Yet another piece in the "Why does Del have terrible nightmares every night?" puzzle. Speaking of which, last night I dreamed I was in Horton Hears a Who, but instead of boiling the dust speck, the kangaroos decided he was an enemy of the state because he knew the terrible secret of the corn and blinded him and I had to lead him to the gallows to be hung and he kept getting hurt and screaming and...you know what, never mind, I think I still have some pomegranate vodka downstairs...enjoy, kids.

So I was doing my periodic trawl of the various Nightmare Fuel pages and noticed someone mentioning that the Nostalgia critic had recently reviewed We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story. They had a link to a creepy deleted scene, I followed it to the link to the full movie and I remembered that Megan had also asked recently if I had covered the film yet, so here we are by apparently popular request: We're Back!.

The Nostalgia Critic does as great a review as ever, so I won't say much. Just a few points:

--For the record, I do feel that it has merit as a film if you're into this kind of fucked up noise, but you know I am, and I know I have the nostalgia goggles tied on pretty tight most of the time.
--The "cage scene" link should be watched after the end, and watched in the middle of the distorted, disjointed pencil tests for maximum eeriness. While I can understand why they cut it, I wish they hadn't--not enough kids' villains do what they do because they have been shown the universe is cruel, insane, and senseless. It makes the ending particularly sobering, as it changes it from the triumph of good over evil to someone who was driven insane by a vicious act of nature being, essentially, killed by his own brother. Y'know, for kids!
--Also worth noting that Professor Screweyes and his entire plotline apparently didn't exist in the book the movie was based on. There's a special kind of crazy you only get in cartoons.
--I actually kind of dig the overwrought religious metaphor, because it's the weirdest fucking way I've ever seen Christianity interpreted.

Anyway, here are the links. Go nuts.

We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story
The "Cage" Scene (Professor Screweyes' Origins)
The Nostalgia Critic review


ETA: oh sweet baby Jeebus that is skunk somebody hit a skunk out there oh gawd it's burning my eeeeeyes

As promised, I picked up a copy of the original graphic novel of When the Wind Blows and scanned it to go with the movie. The two are almost identical, so expect an equal amount of quiet devastation out of this entry. Hooray!

Notes: --The book is huge and just barely fit on the scanner, so I apologize for any clipping or tilting. I was mostly just doing my best to keep it flat without breaking the spine. The two-page spreads suffered most, because I am not a purveyor of Photoshop magic and because one of them was actually glued together for some reason wtf why would somebody do that.
--Photobucket's automatic resize did a number on the pages, so I'd recommend taking this entry as a preview and downloading the proper-sized edition here.
--It should go without saying, but THIS ENTRY IS NOT 56K-FRIENDLY. Go get a nice cup of tea while you wait. You'll feel guilty about it in the last few pages, but it'll give you something to do.
--If you're here from TV Tropes, welcome! It's thanks to you guys that I know this exists. Have a cookie and enjoy the nightmare fuel.
--If you're not here from TV Tropes, you can still have a cookie, but don't use the blue towels in the bathroom. Those are for Company.


( When the Wind Blows )

I had trouble sleeping last night.

I expect the problem will persist.

And yes, I cried.

(This actually happened a while ago, but I forgot to document it. Remembered while watching Coonskin, the majority of which has apparently been deemed too intense for YouTube since I grabbed it. Hell, the hallucination sequence (5:30 on) was almost too intense for me...oh, Bakshi, you so nucking futs.)

My mother and I are driving somewhere, talking about disturbing cartoons...
Mom: That bizarre Felix movie always reminds me of the time in college when my boyfriend and I went to the only air-conditioned theatre in town because it was so hot out and ended up seeing a pornographic Felix cartoon.
Myself: Yeah, you've mentioned that before. It's a shame it wasn't Fritz the Cat, that would've been EPIC.
Mom: ...oh! You know what? It WAS Fritz the Cat! That was the name of it! I mixed it up with that other weird one!
Myself: You saw Fritz the Cat in theatres? YOU? THE Fritz the Cat? The most famous adult cartoon ever? The first movie to EVER get an X rating? THAT Fritz the Cat? BY ACCIDENT?!
Mom: It was hot out!

So, yeah, it runs in the family. Kind of like this, but with disturbing cartoons and a fifteen-year time delay on the zygote thing. I have yet to watch it, but I'll let you guys know if any scenes seem eerily familiar.

Also? My mom. Totally awesome. As if we needed any more evidence.


ETA: Removed link since I realized it was to the sequel to Fritz the Cat. The movie proper is also apparently too intense for YouTube. Pity.

(Don't miss the last post--snark ho!)

Sweet mothering truck, someone finally uploaded A Journey Through Fairyland on YouTube! Awesome!

If you're a friend or long-time reader of my journal, you'll recall my mentioning JTF before, as yet another one of Sanrio's utterly insane feature films. Sanrio was also the driving force behind both Unico movies, A Mouse and His Child, Sea Prince and Fire Child, and something else that escapes me at the moment. It's a hell of a track record, and JTF is no Nightmare Fuel exception. Unlike the others, I actually saw this movie as a small child. It was the source of my most enduring imaginary friend (Tribble the Black Squiggly Thing, as Treble the Clef Note was lost on me), and it was one of the first anime movies I ever saw. It was also the source of Baby's First Tentacle Scene. While it was my favorite scene, it was out of morbid curiosity as to what the inexplicable thing WAS, not out of interest in what it was doing. My, how things change...

Creepy fetish content aside, the quality's a bit of a wash, but it's still well worth a look if you like old anime, weird cartoons, or, well, tentacles. Really cute in parts and utterly insane in others, this remains one of my bizarre favorites and I've been wanting to share it for years.


In other "bizarre things Del was obsessed with as a kid" news, I found a slime mold today! When I was a kid, I read an article and pictured something akin to the Blob, and spent months trying to find one to keep as a pet. While they're not quite like I pictured, they're almost as amazing--a creature that's not quite plant and not quite animal, with amoebas and spores and all kinds of cool shit in. I actually noted its movement of about a centimeter from where it was before class to where it was after, and it left a red trail in its wake. Possibly it was upset that I poked it with a stick. In short, he's the coolest thing I've ever seen, his name is Archimedes, and I love him. I told the Bio lab tech about him and she was happy to take a look, but vetoed my suggestion that he could be a class pet on the grounds that they're difficult to maintain. That's okay, Archimedes is a ramblin' man.

This one's for you, Archimedes. In several months, you may have managed to amble off, but you will always squish along in my heart.


ETA: wtf the school just went into lockdown? more later
ETAA: Lifted. Freaked out now. Update from home.
ETAAA: I have no idea what that was about. They herded us into the center of the library and turned off the lights--no one knew what the lockdown was for and they were afraid of someone seeing us and shooting at us. Tensest fucking five minutes of my adult life. If I died because I spent an extra two hours at school hugging Pokemon eggs and downloading YouTube videos, I would be so pissed at myself as a ghost. Guess I'll find out later what happened, assuming for now that Archimedes grew to epic proportions and attacked the city. Need vodka now.

So now that school's out, I'm continuing to watch my way through DuckTales (awoo-oo). I somehow managed to leave off last time right before one of the few episodes I actually got to watch as a kid--and, coincidentally, the one that creeped me out on a number of levels. Why? Why. That singing isn't something that I forgot so much as let snuggle down in the folds of my grey matter as a damp, uncomfortable association to certain words like "siren", "Odyssey", "undulation", "eldritch", and "pants-wetting". Always a pleasant surprise before breakfast.

Anyway, in conjunction with having had a nightmare about one of the old-school Mickey Mouse comics the night before (there were these monkey scientists and death rays and...oh, never mind, you had to be there), it reminded me of one of the more bizarre Uncle Scrooge comics I found last fall. Carl Barks never shied away from the unusual and we love him for it, it's true, but this one is really uncomfortably close to Uncanny Valley territory. Now that I know how to convert CDisplay files into JPEGs, I figured it'd be well worth the minimal effort to bring you this rather offbeat offering, just for the halibut and also to recruit some more people into this fandom oh God I'm so lonely. Enjoy.

(Note: Despite the tags, I did not actually scan this. Credit for that goes to some kind anonymous Internet-goer. You know who you are, and we thank you for it.)

(Additional note: Have I mentioned lately how much I want to see Magica DeSpell in a Kingdom Hearts game? Oh God, that would rock so hardcore. So hardcore.)

( The Many Faces of Magica DeSpell )


Next up: Catching up on journals, then brushing the dust off my Screencap Adventure. Until then, peace out.

ETA: *WHEEZE* *WHEEZE* *WHEEEEEEEEEEEEZE*

OH MY GAAAAAAAWD :D :D :D

Ladies and gentlemen, the latest disturbing cartoon is on the chopping block, and I couldn't be happier.

Roughly four years ago, I read a review on the lolicious Cold Fusion describing a classic mystery cartoon case and the epic lengths gone to to resolve it. Being the animation fag I am, I immediately put this "Jack and the Witch" on my hotlist. However, as the movie a TV special and never released (in English, anyway), finding it was literally impossible...at least, until someone was kind enough to splice the bootleg English VHS audio over the Japanese DVD video and package it up for YouTube.

Cold Fusion does a better job of summarizing it than I could, but I'll go ahead and say this--grade-A, premium nightmare fuel in a variety of flavors. Seriously, it's not strict in how it WTFs, it's a nice big buffet of assorted weirdness. Besides that--and this can be rare in my line of collection--it's a good movie. It has a bright, smooth, kicky style of animation that the end credits suggest is based on pre-sculpted characters, it has a good half-dozen plot twists where the average kids' movie has one or two, it's imaginative, and even the voice acting is charming in that "Oh yeah, this is an early Japanese dub" kind of way. It was fun, in short. Unlike the godawful swarm of low quality that is Felix the Cat the Movie or the uneasy fetish-fest that is Raggedy Ann and Andy, I'd be perfectly happy watching this multiple times. Even if you're not fond of these entries in general, if you like cartoons, this one's worth checking out.

IN OTHER WORDS A++++ WOULD WATCH AGAIN GG TEAM.

In other news, I'm having enough trouble remembering/finding the details about a cartoon I heard about and forgot to hotlist that I'm now wondering if I actually read about it or just dreamed it. WE ARE OFFICIALLY OVER THE SWINGSET, KIDS.

ETA: Oh thank God, it exists. There are some things I really do not want my subconscious to be responsible for.

Someone was finally kind enough to post A Musical Adventure: Raggedy Ann and Andy to YouTube, and good God if it isn't a perfect storm of nightmare fuel. From the "act totally docile until the parents leave the room then GO GO GO TERROR MACHINE" switcharoo, to rotoscoping, to forced perspective, to oppressive environments/characters/palettes, to the animation going on unexplained drug trips, to one of the characters going on unexplained drug trips (seriously, watch the fucking camel), to this monstrosity, it really has it all. A++, would not watch again.

You can catch it here if you're into that kind of thing. And let's face it, you'd be pretty bored hanging out here if you weren't.


ETA: Aaaaah, this scared the shit out of me as a kid! I still contend it was worth the fear. Those trees have no fucking sense of personal space.

( In that spirit... )

Myself: (reading TV Tropes--more on that later) Hmmm, Joe & Mac. Long time since I played that game. It was always creepy when the bosses decayed as you hit them. There was a mammoth boss...oh God, did its trunk fall off and leave a gaping hole while it was still alive? Ha ha, nah, that's silly, my phobia must be embellishing my memories. But...I guess it wouldn't hurt to grab the ROM and check.

(About twenty minutes later...)

Myself: SCREAM SHUDDER SWEAR VOMIT VOMIT VOMIT VOMIT

And people wonder how I could possibly be afraid of elephants.

The sun should be up soon.

New Screencaps of Evermore up, hoorj! I'm really hoping to get this at least 75% done by the end of the summer. Considering we're almost half-done now, I don't think it's too much to ask.


Been cruisin' YouTube again, and turned up a trio of vintage creepy cartoons.

--Mickey Mouse and the Haunted House is a nice piece of oldschool Disney, back when Ub Iwerks was injecting his merry brand of macabre into everything he got his hands on. You can see him having a lot of fun, here. Man had a skeleton fetish, I swear. Also a touch of that good ol' 1929 casual racism, always fun for getting YouTubers up in arms.
--Four years later came Mickey Mouse and the Mad Doctor, which lifted and cleaned up a few elements from the first cartoon, then added several bucketfuls of extra weirdness for good measure. Featured within is a skeleton spider. With six legs. Think about it, and let your inner biology professor cry.
--This scared the ever-loving SHIT out of me as a kid. I couldn't understand what anyone was saying, just that obscure but terrible torture was going on. Nightmaaaaares. Friggin' Felix was always good for that.


Oh hey, I DID forget to annotate a fic. I THOUGHT I missed something. Well, I'll hit that later. In the meantime, here's my one Phoenix Wright fic, Clockwork. This is the snarkiest of the annotations so far, I think.

( There should be a mildly amusing tag here but I REALLY have to piss )

Watched an old Disney sing-a-long tape today because I vaguely remembered Professor Ludwig von Drake content in it from my childhood, and Ludwig von Drake pwns you and your foolish science. Was not disappointed. Was also, however, struck with a chunk of memory like a half-brick in a sock at...4:38, by this video. Went vaguely along the lines of: "Why do I remember that microphone? Wait. Wait. Oh God. THAT THING. WHAT THE HELL. WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT THING THAT THING WEIRDED ME OUT SO MUCH AS A KID. HOW COULD I HAVE FORGOTTEN THIS.". I also remembered the observation I made as a child that when the thing whistled, its mouth looked like the noisemaker I had ripped out of a broken baby doll. That observation seems a lot more fucked up in retrospect.

I would kill to have our old tapes back, I swear. There's gotta be so much more bizarre shit hiding in my memories, helping to spew out weird dreams and sculptures and phobias and fetishes and everything else that makes me tick like a faulty exhaust line. I HAVE TO HAVE SOMETHING TO BLAME, DANGIT.

(Also: Seriously. Pwns you and your foolish science. And so's your dad.)


Anyway, might as well tack another fic on here. Original is here. No spoilers, I believe, just astounding gayness.

( That's what you expect from me anyway, isn't it? )

Jordan sent me a link to one of the disturbing cartoons of his childhood, and God, is it ever disturbing. I'd actually heard murmurings of it on the Mystery Cartoon forum, but never sought it out. This was an error on my part, apparently. Go on--take ten minutes out of your day and watch Skywhales. You won't be disappointed.

Side note: Do NOT read the comments beforehand. Spoils the entire dang' thing.

Megan and I, when we were children, watched a strange movie about caterpillars in Canada. We've argued since about what language we saw it in--she says French, I say English. The only copy I could find online is in Spanish, so it doesn't make much difference, I suppose. You don't have to watch the whole thing, since it IS in Spanish and largely un-disturbing, but I battled gamely on, catching one word in twenty from my half-semester of high school Spanish, in search of my mystery cartoon memory: A horrible pink octopus with mean eyes on a log.

I reckon this is the first time my memories have ever done exactly what they say on the tin. Sure, sure, it's IN the log and not ON it, but man, go me. And WTF creepiness, go Mexico.

Another note of interest here is the aliens themselves--I had no idea what they looked like before watching it again, but the moment I saw them I went "Oh, yeah, those", and it was like I had never forgotten. Funny patchwork thing, memories...

On a whim, I Google-video'd up one of the alternate names for Journey Through Fairyland, a favorite disturbing cartoon complete with Baby's First Tentacle Scene. No good on turning up the entire video, but I did find a little slice of weirdness from it. It's one of those rare videos I have on tape, but not online, so I get an odd feeling of being inside looking out for once--it's other people that are speculating about the other 88 minutes of a cartoon, not me. Ha ha, I have the power!

--The creepy little black guy actually quite took my fancy when I was young, and was elected as my favorite imaginary friend. Unfortunately, it was lost on me at the time that he was a musical note himself, called Treble--I dubbed him Tribble the Squiggly Black Thing. Ah, how we abuse our memories. He also, for the record, has the most annoying voice in the WORLD in the dub, akin to Meowth's, but with less talent/charm.
--Even as a kid, I thought the protagonist was the dopiest thing alive.
--I'm struck with the sudden realization that between this and The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T, my complete inability to learn to read sheet music may be less of a weird mental block and more of an inbred defense mechanism.


I also found that someone's uploaded another video from my hotlist to YouTube under my radar, but I'll wait to post until I've seen it myself. 's only fair, after all.


In other news, I am really totally heavily in love with The Hush Sound right now. Download a bit if you can get it--I recommend Sweet Tangerine, A Dark Congregation, or The Lions Roar (which you can check a nifty video of here. Also, I am of the opinion that the Ben Folds song Bastard would make a kickin' House AMV/songfic.


That is all. For now.

As if I haven't had enough good fortune on the brain splinters front lately, I went to visit Megan and made another hit at her super-awesome local video store. Their kids' section is surprisingly lacking, but they have a ginormous section just for cult videos, and I turned up a copy of The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T. It was the first time since I was five or six that I've watched it, and it's officially 50% more fucked up and 800% more gay than I remember, and I remember it being pretty fucked up. While the entire thing isn't on YouTube, the more memorable clips are...

( I feel inclined to make this entry rhyme )

So, thanks to Zarla, I got word that Chirin no Suzu (The Ringing Bell) has finally been posted on YouTube! Anyone who actually pays attention to my gushing disturbing cartoon rants (which you apparently do, if you're still reading) might remember it as being on my hot list for a long time--a VERY long time. I spent the better part of two years scouring torrent sites and garage sales before finally finding it on...was it eMule? I don't remember. Anyway, I totally recommend it. It's only an hour long, and tres disturbing. It's definitely a children's movie, marketed specifically for kids, but it's violent and dark, just like I likes 'em.

Since I was just killing time, I read the comments and noticed a list of other disturbing cartoons. I have most of them, but I dutifully Googled the rest, and was promptly salivating over a German movie called Felidae, purportedly an ultraviolent (albeit cat-based) murder mystery involving animal testing, in the vein of Plague Dogs and Watership Down. Further in the vein of Plague Dogs and Watership Down, it's not intended for children.

You know what, though? I know children watched it. Sure, there were undoubtedly any number of kids saved by the rating, and any number more saved by parents watching it with them and going "wtf wtf wtf" within the first six minutes and turning it off, but I know how it works. One negligent store worker that disregards the rating, one negligent parent or babysitter that puts it in and leaves the room, and one kid that watches the whole...fucked-up...thing.

Keep that in mind as you watch, won't you?

No, seriously. Do it. The dream sequence in Part 4 actually scares me. Like, for real. You have no idea how seldom that happens. This is a rare event and you, my friend, deserve to pay it tribute.

...just...fuck, man. Fuck. Wufei, this one's for you.


(Addendum: It wasn't until I checked Amazon, noted the $35 price tag on Felidae*, and geared up for a long and painstaking search, then turned around and found the whole thing on YouTube that I realized how unaccustomed I've become to instant gratification in this business. This is the first time I haven't had to actively search for a desired rare cartoon in...I think years.

I could get used to this.

I hope I don't.)
----
*It may not seem like much, but it's quite up there in animated VHS terms. Most tapes sell for less than $5 these days, and $20 on up on an old release pretty much = ha ha yer screwed. Isn't it fun to learn?