Legend (1995)

Creators: Bill Dial and Michael Piller

Directors: Charles Correll, Michael Vejar, William Gereghty, Bob Balaban, Michael Caffey, James L. Conway and Steven Shaw

Screenplay: Bill Dial, Michael Piller, John Considine, Timothy Burns, John Consone, Carol Caldwell, Marianne Clarkson, Peter Allan Fields, Ron Friedman, George Geiger, Frederick Rappaport, David Rich, Bob Shayne, Steve Stoliar and Robert Wilcox

Cast: Richard Dean Anderson as Ernest Pratt; John de Lancie as Janos Bartok; Mark Adair-Rios as Huitzilopochtli Ramos; Jarrad Paul as  Skeeter; Robert Donner as Mayor Chamberlain Brown; Dick Bellerue as Smoky; Douglas Rowe as Sheriff Sam Motes; Bob Balaban as Harry Parver

Ephemeral Waves

[NOTE - Does contain spoilers for certain episodes]

UPN (the United Paramount Network) was an American television broadcaster that existed between 1995 and 2006, and had great success with Star Trek: The Next Generation, a considerable hit for them. Unfortunately, barring a few other shows, most of their programming only lasted for one season each. One such show, which could have become something of great interest, but is now an obscure curiosity, is the steampunk western television series that is not The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. (1993-4). That show, starring cult star Bruce Campbell, is the show that gained a cult reputation as a steampunk western television show cancelled after one season, making the actual show I am talking about, Legend starring Richard Dean Anderson and John de Lancie, even more obscure.

Legend instead stars Richard Dean Anderson, who helped executive produce the show as well. For my generation, at least in my household, he is most well known for the long running Stargate SG-1 franchise, a television series that spin off from Roland Emmerich's 1994 film and from my perspective was swallowed by it completely in terms of public consciousness. For 1995 however, I would not be surprised if Anderson was known for MacGyver, a show I am aware of because The Simpsons made it a running joke that Marge Simpson's sisters were obsessed with the television show, itself a behemoth in how long it had lasted between 1985 and 1992. Here for UPN, Anderson was clearly a bankable start to promote a fun action romp from and a wise investment to begin with.

The pilot by itself for Legend would have been a little gem if it never got twelve episodes, setting up the premise completely and even ending on the best conclusion for any of the episodes. Anderson is Ernest Pratt, a dime novel author in the 19th century Wild West who, despite his drinking and womanising, created the character of Nicodemus Legend, the ultimate hero and saint of a cowboy hero who uses imaginative tech to outwit his foes and is the polar opposite of his creator.

This is something which Pratt will regret as, having posed as his character for public events, the pilot has him accused for having redistributed an entire river for poor farm owners against a corrupt land heiress, forcing him to have to investigate the scenario. This leads him to the main location of the series, the town of Sheridan in Colorado, and Hungarian immigrant and scientist Janos Bartok, played by John de Lancie, most famous from my childhood for playing Q in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Beyond the joke that, eventually, a Q from one franchise is effectively playing a "Q" as famous from the Bond franchise, who creates gadgets for the hero here, de Lancie is playing a stand-in for Nikola Tesla, a scientist with radical ideas who like Bartok (but in real life) was screwed over by Thomas Edison.

Whilst his accent is erratic to say the least, de Lancie alongside Anderson help bolster the show with two great lead performances, Bartok the virtuous figure who can bring Nicodemus Legend to life with technology beyond the time period, be it an electric gun to a steam powered car, all whilst being able to bend Pratt's hand into being heroic. It is a shame that the third lead, Mark Adair-Rios as Huitzilopochtli Ramos, is not as distinct, especially as in a show that can be accused of having an all white cast, a smart and equally skilled Hispanic member of the trio is just as distinct in the little we get for the character, the straight man to Bartok's sincere eccentricities, and Pratt's womanising and hesitance to act.

Honestly, any issues from Legend as a series for me are that it is an episodic show, not an issue aside from that the fact that the quality per episode of the stories is a greater concern as a result than a continuous storyline that can fix itself. Production wise, even a television budget here is spun to have some spectacle, especially as the premise means that it can play with technology from beyond the era. It is especially helped by the fact that humour is inherently a core feature of the show, be it every time Pratt uses the hand glider being fraught with peril or Bartok's ill advised attempt to scientifically improve opening a locked safe. The show is at its best when it is about the characters, to which the cast and the scripts, when it is character building, is strong. Pratt is now stuck as his own character, even to the point anyone who would provide him alcohol would be ostracised by the town of Sheridan, leading to him having the barkeeper pretend it is tea and serve the liquor in a porcelain cup.  

It is to the character's advantage that, alongside nobility when pushed to, Anderson is really good in the role. Whilst the character is a simple one to get, you can even in this very cleaned up and simplistic version of the western get a complexity in a man who (as learnt) was a journalist, got cynical and liked his women, and got to writing Nicodemus Legend likely as a semblance of his old ideals as much as to make money. It is not insane to compare this character to how Mark Twain is different from Samuel Langhorne Clemens, the real man behind Twain the persona, or if this series had ran with this premise and a figure from the era like Jules Verne (or Twain himself) appeared and had to live up to their characters, like Verne acquiring Captain Nemo's submarine. Even in Pratt still loving and quoting poetry suggests even he, the coward and drunk, is still a good man, his Legend character a trap now for him but a necessary one he subconsciously built. The show gets so much reward from this dynamic.

Especially, say, when a cattle rustler kidnaps Pratt only to complain to his hostage that his depictions of stagecoach robberies is woefully inaccurate, all because no sane person would try to rob one from behind. Or the episode when a mother and child team of con artists manages to convince Pratt's publisher Legend needs a child sidekick, the show mocking a terrible trope of having cute child sidekicks to appeal to an audience that are usually hated. That both examples used are from the same episode shows how Legend the show was full of playful and clever work at its best. The same can be said for Bartok as, being the noble immigrant scientist who wants to help everyone, his almost naive interest in innovation matched by a desire for virtue is as lovable.

The side cast is also, thankfully, as strong. The fourth person (and lat) in the opening credits is Jarrad Paul as  Skeeter, a bellboy who is not in a lot of scenes is constantly surfcasting in a playful way, who also stands out because Bartok's constant electricity experiments has lead to his hair being permanently stood erected. The other worthy figures of mention are Bob Balaban, actor and director of one episode, as Pratt's contact to his publisher Harry Parver, and Robert Donner as Mayor Chamberlain Brown, who is also the town taxidermist and undertaker, measuring Pratt for a coffin before he is even expected to die or trying to shill a home to retire in to General George Armstrong Custer.

As that suggests, Legend does tackle real life western history with figures guest starring. The Custer episode does have to negotiate around his history of anti-Native American battle campaigns, but the show does make comments about this in the negative, alongside the episode referencing this being just before his ill advised last stand at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. President Ulysses S. Grant has an episode where his life is threatened, leading to a scene which references his drinking and deals with the fact, whilst sanitised, this period is set after the Civil War and the divide of the North to the South. Then there is the Wild Bill Hickok episode which becomes something special and one of the episodes which won me over. Why I include spoiler warnings, it recreates Hickok's legendary death, in the town of Deadwood with a Dead Man's Hand in cards, cutting from a fun episode to a sombre aesthetic and an alternative rock song, not as good as Bob Dylan's Knockin' On Heaven's Door for Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), which opens with the death of one of its lead character in his twilight years, but in the same ballpark of the tone. It is a sudden moment of real seriousness in this programme which has been playful and funny for everything before...only for the fact that, in this version, Bartok invented a bullet proof vest before they existed and Will Bill Hickok can fake his own death to retire.

There are flaws. When Legend tries to be serious, I do not think it succeeds. There is an episode about a fake Evangelical priest, played by Robert Englund of A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, which attempts the science versus religion debate, apt as (referred to in an early episode for a joke) this was also the era of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Like a lot of work however in this area, it always is a simple take on religion with it being part of cartoonish villains rather than anything complicated and morally murkier, poking the issue of moral corruption in religion even in a fun romp more precisely or even wondering about the history of scientists who still claimed themselves to be believers over the centuries. It says a lot that this same show, whilst the best scene in the episode, that the story hedges its bets with a narrative, about Bartok trying to create a cloud buster for rain, with the machine never working and its ending being left open. Either it was a literal deus ex machina, or a coincidence, or a cop out, but it is entirely your choice. Likewise, Ramos' episode is about racism, John Vernon playing a rich man who may be stealing Aztec artefacts, which is very simple and is very flat, sadly the last of the series and this leaving the show on an anti-climax.

In fact, when the show is being humorous, it is far more able to be complex because the premise allows for this and the jokes are good. It is not an exaggeration that the pilot has an ending that should have ended this sole season, a twist on walking into the sun as in the end of a traditional western only for Pratt to be convinced otherwise, all because his publisher threatened to cancelled his series if he did not stay. The paradox of a man being forced to play his opposite is poetic and dynamically rich even when played as a comedy, all entirely because it still stems from the cynical lead creating an ideal hero imbued with virtues, hence clearly having the virtues himself even if he presumed them to be lost. Most westerns also do not have the protagonist convince a hired gunfighter to not kill him by offering to bring him to his publisher for his stories. Legend does this, also in the pilot, and that scene is golden.

Even in terms of an action show, it is solidly made on a television budget and helped by the fact that, whilst westerns have had a waning interest past their golden era, they have always been made in the United States whether for cinema, revisionist or otherwise, for television and even straight to video/DVD/streaming productions. The western frontier, even now, can still be found because the United States has vast desert plain and wilderness that cowboys would have wandered on in the old days, and westerns were still being made at this point in the nineties and meant you could, as seen, access to good costumes, good production design and especially stunt actors who could do things like ride horses. Nothing in Legend, barring the CGI stand in for the heroes' hot air balloon for transport, looks terrible in terms of budget in the current day either, and whilst it never really gets bombastic in aesthetic, it does not need too. The real exception is, again, played for comedy with Pratt's scenes of writer's block trying to create new Legend stories, such as being chased in a ghost town by dwarf bank robbers or pursuing a villain on a hand glider, which are shot in sepia and look striking just from that one effect.

Sadly, Legend was cancelled, and honestly, it is peculiar that even happened. UPN, if you look at their programming when they existed, is mainly a list of casualties as a lot of their programming in various genres did not last more than one season, and in some cases not even all the episodes were shown. I admit that Legend itself in the later episodes is weaker at times, but you can see a show like this learn from its mistakes and grow in ambition, especially as it can have a quality production design and style without being too expensive. The biggest risk the show ever takes when it has an episode entirely set in San Francisco, an entirely different look, and that is one of the stronger later episodes because it is for a good reason, introducing Pratt's mother who is memorable, and having a go at interest plot points like the interest in spiritualism in that era. Even the problem with the show not having a fine enough grip on serious subject matter could be rectified, as even the humour does this better, such as the running joke of Native Americans betraying stereotypes by being business savvy or pointing out the lack of need in a rain dance due to the climate of their homeland. So yes, particular as this has a flawed second half, I would have been happy to have seen more of the show, entirely because even if it had not lasted longer beyond, we could have seen the show progress even more. We could have mended the disappointment of the show leaving on an anti-climax, even if it was only a couple of extra episodes or a second season, and the premise certainly had a lot of potential. I admit I prefer a continuous narrative for the most part in long form work, but it is "mostly" because examples like this show how it could work perfectly as a story of the week premise.

 

Broken (1993)

Directors: Peter Christopherson (with contributions by Serge Becker, Eric Goode and Jon Reiss)

Screenplay: Trent Reznor

The origin of Broken, a mythic production hidden in the history of the band Nine Inch Nails, originates from Trent Reznor hating his record label. This will not be the last time nor was it the first, his animosity with TVT Records just one of many. Famously or infamously from this era, Prince would being performing in the ninety nineties with "slave" branded on his forehead, calling himself "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince" and be very happy when Warner Bros. finally cut their ties to him by realising two three disc epics. Most disgruntled musicians do not get a fake snuff film created as the visuals for a new EP (extended play). That is why the short film is notorious and, alongside how it has been treated by Reznor himself over the years, is why it is being covered.

The Broken album itself, not an LP (long play) but less than thirty minutes, is well respected and certainly is held as significant in the early days of Nine Inch Nails, with many still thinking of songs like Wish and Happiness in Slavery among the band's biggest songs. It is, in hindsight, from all its lyrics and in context a fuck you from Reznor to TVT Records, where the infamous phrase "fist fuck" from Wish is now for me clearly what he imagined they were doing to him continually. Contextually, he had only released one album, Pretty Hate Machine (1989), a guy in his twenties who started recording material in his off time working in a recording studio, getting some interest as a result. Only in a few years, however, he felt his back was against the wall and felt the Broken album, recorded in multiple places for secrecy, was a needed act of catharsis. He however decided to go further than this.

That required the director Peter Christopherson, one of the founding members of seminal industrial band Throbbing Gristle, one of the founding members of Coil, and who was also a member of Hipgnosis, a British design agency whose legacy in album covers is significant. Structured with music videos interspliced in-between from other directors, the Broken film covers all the tracks on the EP barring the track Last and the cover songs that were included at the end of the album. The first images are in stark, gloomy black and white of a man awaiting his execution by hanging. Afterwards, we immediately cut to grimy videotape footage of a man being taken captive in a garage by another man, interspliced with scenes before of the later driving around in a car with the intention of picking up a victim from a working to poverty class area of a community.

The fake snuff film, which will get increasingly more brutal as various forms of torture will transpire, begins with the victim being forced fed gasoline/petrol, and I will elaborate now as a nod to how the film will follow from this that this short, in context of the period of underground and splatter films I have seen from the era, immediately sets itself up as something still unsettling and disturbing decades on before you get to how utterly disturbing the film will get. We will elaborate on that however a little later.

The first film-within-a-film is for the instrumental piece Pinion, and whilst I have reservations about the entire Broken project, almost all the films (shot in rich black-and-white baring Wish) are evocative and of an incredible artistic merit, this one in particular of striking simplicity following a toilet whose pipe is connected to the mouth of a gimp wrapped up like a rubber turkey. That is a really glib joke to suddenly place in what is a review of an incredible dark, still gruesome music art project, but the Pinion segment has to be called as it is in its strangeness, arguably one of Broken's most effective visual sequences and a perfect set up for what is the intro of the album itself.

The next, for Wish, is definitely the most embarrassing and sadly derails the twenty minute short. As an idea, a combination of a post apocalypse if inside one of the gay leather bars from Cruising (1980) and cast members of a circus acrobat show is sound. What you get however is a young Trent Reznor looking awkward in leather chaps for what is a tedious music video of a band playing, the kind I saw in countless videos in the early 2000s on Kerrang TV and developed an aversion of as a result. Help Me I Am in Hell is thankfully another instrumental piece set to an evocative and a needed change of pace, an intentionally surreal sequence of a man trying to enjoy his steak dinner in a room where he and his food is covered in flied. Both this segment and Pinion were directed by Serge Becker and Eric Goode

Next is however arguably one of Nine Inch Nails' most famous videos, notorious in itself for Happiness in Slavery, directed by Jon Reiss. This segment for me is a high point for the Broken project, both for its execution and arguably as much because it involves performance artist Bob Flanagan. Flanagan, a performance artist and writer, was born with cystic fibrosis, the agony of which he wished to overcome in his practice of sadomasochism, the pain he likely experienced in his constant treatment for his condition probably not as painful as hammering a nail into his own penis, something he did as part of his performance work and is witnessed in the documentary on his life and career, SICK: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (1997).

Flanagan's appearance alone already adds to this striking piece. It is still grotesque, a ritualistic suicide chamber where Flanagan eventually is completely naked and with what appears to be modified tongs in close-up clenching around his testicles at one point, willingly part of a torture machine that will eventually kill him. The images of a man entering this death chamber, lighting a candle and proceeding to his own destruction on a mechanised bed is impactful, down to that he is grounded down into literal worm food. Knowing the Broken EP is Reznor's anger at his label it is a very obvious metaphor for the grinder of the music industry. Helping it considerably though is how distinct and eerie it is, the music complimenting and complimented by the perfect images, including Reznor lighting his own candle and preparing to be the next person to enter. It is with good reason people know of this music video by itself.

The finale, set to the last original track Gave Up, cuts between another striking monochrome sequence, of police finding a house filled with rotting bodies and limbs in refrigerators as a crime scene, and the breaking point where the masked killer in the fake video proceeds to rip the victim to pieces. This includes castration (not explicitly seen), use of a blow torch (managing with pretty decent effects to make this work) and chainsaw dismemberment are among what transpire as the frenzy imbued in the song soundtracks this atrocity. As mentioned earlier, this is a bar higher than most extreme I have seen from this era for video or other formats, the closest thing to this extremity being the German shot-on-video film The Burning Moon (1992), which even then feels over the top and more obviously fake in comparison.

Altogether, I admire Broken in its disgusting glory, but I will admit that it does feel like it would have suffocated the music itself with how extreme it is. If the short film had been released, Trent Reznor would have caused a controversy that could have helped him in reputation but could have hurt him in a precarious period.

It succeeds as an uncomfortable experience, but a poignant detail is that, even when we still have the infamous music video for Closer to still appear, with a crucified monkey among other sequences, Nine Inch Nails changed drastically over only a few years after this. Broken the film is still too uncomfortably close to the likes of Cannibal Corpse's albums covers in terms of visceral extremity, where Pretty Hate Machine was more Goth nihilism, and Nine Inch Nails would change and be sculpted over the years into more interesting directions. The band is Trent Reznor, which fans are aware of, and he has changed. It is significant that, as a fan with a lot of the band still left to discover, the albums I got into Nine Inch Nails and Trent Reznor's work were Year Zero (2007) and The Slip (2008). This is long after Reznor hit mainstream success with The Downward Spiral (1994), toured with David Bowie, and combated drug addiction. Year Zero was the work of an older veteran, whose health and priority to it lead to a literal transformation to a performer utterly alien to the gaunt and pale twenty or so year old in the Wish video. This was not a time of nihilistic self destruction, but a dystopian novel in an album, one where the additional games played with fans in real life were as important. The Slip, once released for free as Reznor finally got sick of music labels and took his ball home, is not held highly but I feel in love with. This period also led to him eventually collaborating with Atticus Ross, which alongside April Fool's Jokes¹, led to a side of Reznor so different to the man from the Broken era, especially when he eventually co-created a soundtrack with Ross for a Ken Burns documentary on the Vietnam War.

The history of Broken the short is one as notorious for its history. Certainly in the early nineties when it was made, circumstances suggest even the creators were uncomfortable with what they had created. Director Christopherson felt uncomfortable with how effective the video was, especially as when you had a bootleg of a bootleg of the video when it was leaked, it would have looked like an actual snuff film. Meanwhile, this was also the time to the recording of The Downward Spiral when Reznor was living at the 10050 Cielo Drive mansion, notoriously the home where Sharon Tate and others were murdered by members of the Manson Family. Testimony from him says he found out about this and did stay at the mansion to record the album with knowledge of this, which in hindsight from a younger musician was a poor choice. It did however probably did not help when it came to Broken as, when he finally saw the final results, a thought occurred to him that how disturbing it was would have crossed a line that would, as I feel, have compromised attention away from the music itself².

Now, you could say it was hypocritical of him to do what he did, secretly leak tapes out, but in an interesting detail, the original hand-dubbed tapes were initially distributed to his friends, even having technological glitches intentionally added in order to let him know who leaked any copies that might surface. (He has even suggested that Gibby Haynes, lead singer of the Butthole Surfers, was probably the person responsible for the most prominent leak³).

Reznor, wisely, whilst never releasing the Broken short has made the project available continually, which I do not consider in the current day hypocritical for him as time has passed and, now that the notoriety is for the fans of Nine Inch Nails who would be interested, he has made a decision that does not suppress it either, be it secretly releasing the short on torrent on Pirate Bay, an attempt to have it streaming on Vimeo, even a secret link on the NIN website like as gruesome Easter Egg. The notoriety and secrecy is now the gimmick, and it is not in bad taste or wrong for him to do so, especially as a man who, alongside transforming considerably as a person over the years since the Broken EP in his own work, has been a vary savvy person who takes account of his audience, even releasing both free albums and also compiling fan remixes into canonical work. He is not a person to bury his past, and whilst I have my reservations about Broken, it is entirely because it feels at odds to the older veteran I came to his music from, this a part of this band's history I accept and I am glad is not ignored.

Abstract Spectrum: Atmospheric/Grotesque/Oppressive

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

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1) HERE

2) HERE

3) HERE

Night Dreams 3 (1991)

Director: Stephen Sayadian (as Rinse Dream)

Screenplay: Stephen Sayadian (as Rinse Dream)

Cast: Lauren Brice; Tom Byron; Harry Jabarr; Sharon Kane; Stephanie Page; Paula Price; Joey Silvera; Tianna

"Mention On the Waterfront and she gets randypants"

With his reputation mainly cemented in cinema by Cafe Flesh (1982), the career of Stephen Sayadian is sadly miniscule. Neither is it helped that, as most of his career is in pornographic films, they are a) maligned as a result, b) beholden to rights issues from porn distributors, who may not necessarily seen them more as mere titillation, and c) are at least difficult to access in the United Kingdom, where unfortunately our laws do not take this into consideration and it is financially impractical for any distributor to release such films as they would only be allowed in licensed sex shops. The one non-pornographic film in his career, Dr. Caligari (1989), is also worthy of rediscovery by itself, a weird film which proved Sayadian's vision was not restricted to filming real sex, able to tackle perversity with his canny trademarks, such as his also staccato and postmodern dialogue. Sadly, that film was a one-off.

After Dr. Caligari he returned to pornography for the last films of his directing career, shot on video work like two sequels to Nightdreams (1981), a collaboration with director Francis Delia but was affirmatively a Rinse Dream production. Nightdreams, in honesty, was a compilation of sex scenes, but Sayadian's background in advertising and poster design meant that, alongside his scripts, his visual eye is just as striking, embracing a palpably warped sense of strong colour and distinct props.

Nightdreams 3 is a film that compromises and accepts being entirely porn, a literal series of scenes based around a threadbare structure of a female doctor, Dr. Sledge (Lauren Brice), who deals with sex therapy and is openly a voyeur. All the film is shot in the same soundstage and, intercutting scenes of sex never seen fully, feels a likely piece to Nightdreams 2, which was shot the year before. If you are here for the ambition of the early Rinse Dream films, the first Nightdreams is still an aesthetically bold work, whilst this second sequel would be disappointing. Where it gets interesting is how in an extreme minimalism, Nightdreams 3 is a weird film. A deeply weird film even if it could have been more and also deliberately constructed as such, showing the director still has his touch.

The elephant in the room is that this is porn. Not said as a dismissal, and not necessarily ethics of the form neither in this particular review, nor in artistry, but whether a viewer can engage with watching other people having real sex beyond said titillation. Morals can take an important part in this subject of the virtues or lack of in porn - even if you are neither a pro-sex feminist or an advocate of Andrea Dworkin - but the notion of the viewer's gaze (not necessarily a male one) has an effect especially if you are bring a viewer's gender and sexuality to how they react to the sex. There is also the obvious, and less pretentious comment, of whether it becomes boring to watch porn if you have no intention to masturbate to it, which is a significantly more profound question than that sounds, as it asks whether pornography can grow beyond an ephemeral product to an actual piece of worth.

Artistry is definitely a concern here as Rinse Dream films are distinct in deliberately alienating their target audience, and in honesty, whether the form of pornography is defendable as art or not, I will argue what adult actors and especially adult actresses do in films, especially in the current day, is a form of physical performance that is not thought about. For actresses especially, who in a form of irony become the most significant figures in these films even with all the concerns of objectification and latent misogyny that might be involved in individual productions, they have a willingness to be bared in a literal gynaecological form that should be held in greater admiration, as few people would willingly do so filmed or even in their own bedrooms, and especially with the insane level of dexterity it requires sometimes, this means even more.

One thing that is important, and has been a huge moral issue, is that porn is a heightened and exaggerated form of sexuality, where the performers' bodies are fetished and exaggerated, the concern when we presume this is what sex is especially for impressionable people, presuming they can merely get to some of the positions rather than with conversation, having an open minded sexual partner or two, and a lot of good cardio. Even if you view this film as titillation, which to be honest Nightdreams 3 was clearly meant to be, Stephen Sayadian has always played to this exaggerated to an extreme. How you deal with Nightdreams 3 is that as a narrative, it is vague, but it is intentionally exaggerated, distorted, repeated and even done in off-putting and un-titillating ways.

There is the other issue of whether you can watch another person's body this much up close too. The real corpus, tangible and flawed human body is there even in all the strange positions, extreme kinks and silicon enhancement involved, and not everyone in comfortable with this. The issue porn has, beyond whether prolonged real sex can actually engage beyond the reptile brain urge to procreate, is also whether this exaggeration can mean anything else. I will not argue Nightdreams 3 will - go to Cafe Flesh for something more interesting - and stereotypes of porn's idealised erotic woman (and man too) are problematic. Non binary males and gay and bisexual women will at least have an issue with this film for how limited and frankly boring they might find the sex scenes between the female cast is.

What is interesting, if porn is a ritual of exaggerated sexuality, is how legitimately and deliberately weird the film is in its exaggeration. Where Nightdreams, the original film, had actual nightmares and Wall of Voodoo on the soundtrack, even a piece of toast playing a saxophone, this second sequel is repetitive, arguably the equivalent of minimalist music in its continuous repetition.

You still experience a feverish atmosphere with barely a set in this film, baring the alarming amount of unexploded artillery shells lying around a medical building which are never explained once, nor is the bust of Beethoven sternly watching over the sex on a bare metal framed bed that looks closer to a torture device. The world of Nightdreams 3 (which is mostly purple, blue and green) is a world drenched in hazed and scored to the type of dreamlike soundtrack that would birth the Vaporwave movement in the 2010s, only with bizarre squeaks and industrial noise that, set to merely white credits on a black screen, last at least a good couple of minutes.

The little plot follows an obsession of Stephen Sayadian's of strong woman, a porn director and writer who yet, for all the objectification of their bodies even in the non pornographic Dr. Caligari, always writes strong women with insatiable appetites for sex against men who are merely bystanders or frigid. The lead here is the same, an anti-heroine and doctor whose treatments for patients goes further than her female senior appreciates, only for her own sexual desires to be easy for Dr. Sledge to use to gain power over here.

Performance art is arguably the only way to explain some pornography. That exaggeration, a fetishishtic obsession with every peroxide blonde lock and piece of clothing, alien to gonzo work shot in cameras on the hoof, but still existing whenever a brazen (even deliberately kitsch) amount of colour or an odd prop is in the location. This is also a thing Rinse Dream ran with throughout his career, whose work in his graphic and photographic art sculpted his visuals, even his actors. Here he is subdued and clearly working on very limited means, but that does not stop everything having a striking look, from a clear fixation (unless of the time) of everyone male and female having slicked back hair, to the unexpected appearance of a bedside cabinet sunk slanted in the ground to be writhed upon. Lauren Brice in the strictness sternness in her features, and command, even evokes Madeleine Reynal in Dr. Caligari baring the distinct arm movements and penchant for cigarettes.

The dialogue as well is idiosyncratic, and whilst it takes a while to appear, you can relish the absurdity of lines of people being "ravenous for boy jerky" or Dr. Sledge being described as being "a cupcake full of strychnine ". It is inherently quotable, still as if he ingested the influence of post modernism in his mixing of antiquated slang with bold descriptive comments with a clipped style to them. The repetition applied to this as well as he will taking shots of certain dialogue and repeat them over scenes, which considering the film's video format, feels like how one would find material edited and repeated in loops. That repetition is something that can easily be perceived, reading this, as occasional. No, it is repetitional, constantly cutting to the shot of the line being spoke in the midst of sex scenes over and over and over again with an attempt at being hypnotic.

The result by the end, when Dr. Sledge seduces her boss to gain power control over her, becomes such a repeating barrage of stimulus that it does eventually drill itself into your brain if you let it. The other aspect, which is even more likely to have alienated him from his career in the media, is to continually add deliberately off-putting content. When he intercuts different sex scenes in the same time line, it does have a striking effect. Here, however, there is also an inherent creepiness to everything, and whilst there are no rat men like in Cafe Flesh, there is the grunginess of the entire environment and that most of the sex scenes are on the barest of metal framed beds. His interest in blurring gender, whether progressive in the modern day or not, is a surprising detail, one of the lead's patients a woman who wants to transition to a man. Nothing in the subplot, the barest of them, is inherently transphobic, only with the fact Dr. Sledge goes to have sex with the husband, who reacts negatively, and that the patient is merely looking strung out on "testostereeny" on a dirty floor as a nice bed was unfortunately not available.

The repetition and successive cuts also have a disconcerting edge, no longer lengthy sex scenes but the ending up instead a hypnotising effect that leaves you dirty. The film's final shot, when Dr. Sledge bends her boss into a submissive, is a close up of the other's mouth screaming, which after the repetition and constant use of the phrase by Sharon Kane of "Give suck", feels like a psychological breakdown than an orgasm. Out of what I have seen, Cafe Flesh is still more rewarding than this, and arguably Dr. Caligari is Sayadian's best work, as much for the fact you do not have the prolonged real sex scenes to disrupt the pace. But from initial disappointment came something peculiar with Nightdreams 3. Not a great film but one that, in the midst of limited means and whose existence can be questioned, is a good argument for auteurism, and one as already mentioned which is definitely a bizarre thing to experience.

Abstract Spectrum: Erotic/Grotesque/Minimalist/Repetitious/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

Lasagna Cat Part 4 - Sex Survey Results (2017)

Following on from Part 3.

[Updated 25/07/2021 - Out of sympathy for a comment posted in regards to this review, an additional note has been created.]

Major Spoilers Throughout

We conclude Lasagna Cat - from Garfield being crucified to shampoo bukkake - to an ending which somehow managed to top the following. If you the reader can forgive me for once making pop culture reference, if episode 07/27/1978 covered last time was the television ending of the anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995), Sex Survey Results is The End of Evangelion (1997). It makes senses, to explain the reference to those who do not know what I am talking about, if one considers how the original Neon Genesis Evangelion started off with lighter tone for its darkness, and became progressively bleaker in the second half, as seasons one and two for Lasagna Cat were. 07/27/1978 is the equivalent of the very divisive final two episodes, pushing for the unexpected and esoteric, but with one leading to a male protagonist finally accepting himself and finding happiness; 07/27/1978 was Fatal Farm admitting even with some cheek that having made a parody of Garfield for over ten years, they could not hate it still after all these years.

The End of Evangelion was infamously the alternative ending which manages to be even darker than what transpired, scarred viewers which what transpired in one of the early scenes with beloved characters, had extreme avant-garde (and even live action) moments, and was a bleak ending with a cyclical nature to it. How Lasagna Cat decided to finish an alternative ending for itself was a four plus hour experimental piece repeating the same knock knock joke with sex survey information polled by fans. That was followed by a conclusion bleaker than anything before, and managing to scar viewers with what happens to beloved characters even after what had transpired in the two seasons before.

At the start of Season 2, when creators Zachary Johnson and Jeffrey Max had sat on new episodes for years and decided to use them, they had created a trailer where they included a gimmick for Season Two, providing a toll free number and asking viewers to call, providing a name and the number of sexual partners. The mechanics of Sex Survey Results itself, having so much to work with and not even using all the calls they got, is exceptional when learnt of, including a programmed Excel spreadsheet to time and plan out what they were to do with what they acquired. The work is split into two parts, the first four plus hours of a never ending cycle. Jon Arbuckle, than Garfield and then Odie are reading a newspaper only to answer the door.  A male or female mannequin answers from the other side for each of the trio, a call from the toll free number becoming a knock knock joke, repeated until all nine hundred and ninety nine used are concluded.

Honestly, I did struggle to get through the entire first half, simple because four hours of this is long. I will get into a lot of the interest of this segment, but as an extreme form of avant-garde cinema, and it deserves that genre tag, it is difficult and between the times I have covered this web series, I have had to break it up into pieces over weeks. And it is not a joke either to say "avant-garde" because when Andy Warhol could film Empire (1964), six plus hours of a continuous shot of the Empire State Building, this is in the same area of endurance. Technically, Sex Survey Results is also an achievement in resourcefulness by Fatal Farm, acquiring a full motiom camera rig¹ to film the material in a set built as a living room, meant to be a continuous shot as each knock knock joke becomes the newspaper comic for each character. Baring the set itself, they recorded outside footage beyond the door too for an extended time period that goes from day to night in real time, leading as well to a cameo by an ice cream truck early on alongside other sights.

It was a spectacle in spite of the moments of frustration trying to finish the first segment. I  do not consider it a piece of "trolling" either, intentionally meant to annoy people, but a thank you to fans, like thank you credits, turned into something offbeat and playful. All the voices calls from men and women vary. Some are jokes, including Donald Duck making a call or Monday telling Garfield (in one of the few times he shows emotion) he has been his partner every day of his life. One cast member from the animated series RWBY (2013-)  calls in, and also unfortunately Max Landis. Hindsight has shown a time when Max Landis, son of director John Landis, was growing into a pop culture figure as a screenwriter and commentator, only in December 2017 for accusations of sexual assault to become known, making his call and number of sexual partners eerie to listen to. Fatal Farm themselves cannot help time taking an effect on their work.

The amount of phone calls, nine hundred and ninety nine as mentioned, are arguably too much to digest. Practically this is closer to an installation piece where you should drift in and out of it, particularly as when you isolate messages, for everyone which merely states what is asked of, many do have things of note. Many exaggerate fake numbers of sexual partners, usually the number sixty nine, and a few go for jokes that Garfield especially groans at for us, such as when Adolf Hitler calls in. The interactions to the callers are all unique, filming Jeffrey Max as Jon Arbuckle, with even Oodie pronouncing each name in dog barks.

The choices, even before you get to certain figures, make a fascinating analysis in themselves among those who are stoned or being honest after trying to pass off a lie. Whilst some of the female callers make joke calls and exaggerate, for the most part you could argue that the high numbers of partners many state are entirely true as, in vast contrast to many male callers, there is not as much a case of them not taking the call seriously or trying to be funny. Quite a lot more male callers use fake names, make ridiculous voices or even impersonate Donald Trump, a vast contrast in a lot of the calls being longer and more likely to fall into tangents. Also to the person who did a call entirely in Morse Code (which is thankfully translated), they deserve extra brownie points*.

There are of course a few choice inclusions, to which the caller who has gained the most notoriety has to be "Raymond", who three calls eventually get towards him elaborating on his history with early online forums online where he would role-play scenarios with other uses including vore. To some viewers, how explicit he is as he narratives this is enough, but it is also a fascinating anecdote of a type of sexual kink from the perspective of forums where that was a lack of restrictions preventing it.

The endurance of the first half, even if split into bite sized pieces, is an acquired taste. Baring violent distortions of the mannequins over time, it stays as this for over four hours until the last ten or so minutes. Then things go south quickly for Jon Arbuckle...

The trailer for Season Two, asking for the calls, set up its finale in that Jon himself was the first caller, the one thousandth at the conclusion to the first segment, greeting himself at the door. It might seem odd he says he has had two sexual partners, especially as just from the comic strips used in the web series the character is an isolated bachelor. It gains weight knowing Jon was originally a stand-in for his creator Jin Davis originally, Davis marrying twice and having children from both marriages. Jon inside the house corrects the other, that he has had zero, shutting him out.

An old Jon is there now, Max in old age make up and balding hair piece, a real orange-reddish furred cat in the window a stand in as Garfield before he walks away from the house. Here it must be stated that a) I originally did not like this finale, perceiving it as empty shock value, only to come to a greater appreciation now, whilst b) Fatal Farm openly admitted there was no profoundness to what transpires, that it was to be their equivalent of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and The Holy Mountain (1973) combined¹.  Unintentionally or subtly deliberately, there is a meaning to read. What transpires infamously is the death of Jon Arbuckle, by way of a naked shaman painted as Garfield², to his resurrection when a girl in a public bathroom gives birth to him into a toilet.

And when I describe that, the level of explicitness includes (as documented) the creative duo acquiring the bottom half of a very realistic sex doll and shooting a certain shot³. It is ridiculous. Probably the most over-the-top detail is what the girl says before leaving the child there. Originally intended to be spoken in English, the actress cast informed Fatal Farm she could speak fluent Polish, and thus the following (un-subtitled) is what is spoken:

This child isn't mine. This child is from the darkness. I bore the humanity's curse. I can ask for mercy, which I won't get. My soul will be consumed and thrown up and then consumed again. Forever. Sick joke, but no one's laughing. My blood will stay. Death isn't the end. I'm in hell. This is hell.

I was a sourpuss about this originally; now it is intentionally either silly or the lyrics to a Norwegian black metal album. Take your pick. In all seriousness though, they clearly were touching upon a theme even if playfully. I mentioned in a previous part how Garfield has continually been resurrected, and this is a literal extreme of this. The old Jon we see cannot be anyone else but his creator Jim Davis, looking in on a permanently ageless version of him, now entirely separate. An alternative version is suggested in two mannequin people giving him a taxidermied cat, a version of Garfield, his creation now decrepit and kept alive as a dead cultural object, evoking a comment I made back when talking the music used in the First Season. Namely, that any pop cultural item that is presumed to be popular and made an institution, rather than actually loved, is effectively in purgatory.

But, whilst gruesome and lurid here, even when Davis passes Garfield will survive. It has already reincarnated multiple times. The eighties animation where Lorenzo Music as the voice of Garfield became for most the iconic version is one form. Another, love it or mock it, is Bill Murray voicing a CGI version. From 2009 to 2016, an animated series The Garfield Show has probably been what children of the next generation have grown up on. Davis is old, and Jon Arbuckle (the original main character in the first strip) is maligned as a side character, but even Lasagna Cat itself is a reincarnated form which keeps the property alive, arguing that irony (though not accusable against Fatal Farm) and parody does not kill hated properties but helps them thrive. Even here, a form of resurrection that will keep people talking about the comic strip took place, only it involves Jon now being a foetus in a blue sweater opening his eyes in the final shot, watched by a real Garfield, before cutting to orange.

******

Conclusion:

Maybe the sex survey segment was too long, but that is more an issue that it was never designed to be sat through as a four hour plus film. With the ending though it is definitely a climax to end the series on. Whether the Lasagna Cat project was ever resurrected itself is entirely now with the issue that, between this and 07/27/1978, it had two perfect endings and it will be difficult to ever follow them up.

The other question to ask is whether Lasagna Cat is abstract or not as an entire project. Absolutely. Having returned to the web series with more positivity, I cannot help but see this as ambitious and weird just from what I have referred to during this four part review. The first season is just a parody web series, still one of the better ones from the early days of YouTube but something I would not have covered unless as a bonus to another stranger project by Fatal Farm. Between the additional material I have no covered, to the entire premise and structure of Sex Survey Results, it is the second season where creators Zachary Johnson and Jeffrey Max completely turned the web parody inside out. Comedy tends to be ignored for how absurd it can be, the weirder it can be more easily accepted, but if you stop to think how Lasagna Cat, whilst conventionally structured, has taking a popular American comic strip character and put them through a shot-by-shot Miami Vice parody to an intense epilogue, then this project can be viewed as a parody web series taken to its extreme. All playing with its own structure and having a significant amount of hard work from the creators on a project they were aware they could never gain monetary results from.

Abstract Spectrum: Absurd/Avant-Garde/Comedic/Grotesque/Mindbender/Parody/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

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1) PHOTO EVIDENCE

2) Played by a returning actor from their segment of Our Robocop Remake (2014), as he was comfortable doing full nude scenes.

3) An interview with Fatal Farm here can confirm this.

*) To the person who called in to Sex Survey Results in Morse Code, this review will provide them imaginary brownie points, and a thank you, if Fatal Farm themselves did not.

Lasagna Cat Part 3: 07/27/1978 (2017)

Following on from Part 2.

Directors: Zachary Johnson and Jeffrey Max (as Fatal Farm)

Screenplay: Zachary Johnson and Jeffrey Max

Based on the comic strip by Jim Davis

Stars: John Blyth Barrymore as the Speaker, Jeffrey Max as Jon Arbuckle

If the name is vague, this can also be called the Pipe Strip episode of Lasagna Cat, in which the following is recreated:

1st Panel: Jon Arbuckle (in his early, cruder design) reading a newspaper and extending his hand out to grasp for a smoking pipe.

2nd Panel: Jon staring straight at the reader, a thought bubble appearing saying "Now where could my pipe be?"

Final Panel: Garfield, significantly different and larger in his early design, smoking the pipe as Jon is read off panel shouting at him.

Then for an episode longer than all the others in Season 2 combined, as I view Sex Survey Results its own piece, we have actor John Blyth Barrymore, related Drew Barrymore and an actor in his own right, telling us of the philosophical and spiritual depth of this newspaper strip for over an hour whilst the entirety of Philip Glass' Kundun soundtrack for the 1997 Martin Scorsese film plays over his speech and images behind him in green screen.

Immediately of note, Fatal Farm duo Zachary Johnson and Jeffrey Max were not aware there was a sequel strip in existence which followed on from this joke. That strip can almost deflate this episode but is weirdly enigmatic to suit it. Namely that Jon takes the pipe from Garfield, is about to puff at it but reconsiders the idea, only to give it back to Garfield. On one hand, he probably does not want to taste what has been in his cat's mouth, but the final panel is the same one as before of Garfield smoking the pipe, as if inevitable.

I will argue this episode, the original final episode planned by Fatal Farm, was probably stretching the joke for an extreme, even in mind of the hard work and talent in the production feeling its girth at an hour. A clear reason why the length is necessary, though this is not probably the reason for this episode being an hour long, is that Philip Glass score. Glass himself is a unique figure whose work beyond his famous soundtracks is challenging to say the least - Einstein on the Beach anyone? - but the choice has more fascinating meaning. It is a soundtrack for a film where Martin Scorsese, a Roman Catholic, tackled a film about Buddhism, a film seen as extremely obscure in his filmography and idiosyncratic to have taking music from to say the least; it is a curious choice in Fatal Farm digging out soundtrack choices, and Glass' work of monkish chanting and repetition is naturally profound, making its use here even more inspired as a joke.

It sets the episode as being a pisstake. A person might find this tale of John Blyth Barrymore becoming obsessed with a humble Garfield strip a mean swipe at the Jim Davis creation's existence in pop culture. It can be viewed as anti-religious or at least a caution of reading into beliefs as it becomes a gospel for Barrymore. It hits close to home for me as this also entirely asks the question of critical thinking of any object, as it can be argued this joke can even be applied to "high art", be it the countless professional film critics who have talked of films like Citizen Kane (1941), or amateur opinions, such as the countless theories about The Shining (1980) that were numerous enough to create the documentary Room 237 (2012).  

What does it say when I am analyzing an episode on a satirical critique of the Garfield newspaper strips, which is about someone making a critique of its profoundness? It is an absurd thing to consider - yet this can apply to all work and all communication when you eliminate the notions of "high and low art". I cannot help but think of the fact I did a dissertation in university on David Lynch, an artist notoriously holding his cards to his chest to what his work means. Many a professional writer attempted to read his poker face, something I can attest to as I was reading such interpretations to write that dissertation. The idea of trying to dig deeper into a work is not something that comes from crazed theories and can be just as much a case of pot luck in actually succeeding in anything.

If I am to recreate this episode by comparing a Garfield strip to work talked of by intellectuals, how befitting it was a comic strip about a pipe. Here for once images are needed, as you dear reader should find the strip (the title is the date it was published for help, as for all the Lasagna Cat episodes), and René Magritte's The Treachery of Images (1929). Magritte's painting is a drawn image of a pipe but with text in French saying "This is not a pipe". The betrayal of images is that, yes, it is a representation of a pipe but it is not a pipe, as one cannot pick it up and smoke it. Knowing Magritte's history as a surrealist, it is a deliberate subversion of the onlooker's perception of image and reality. It also makes a metaphor for the issues of a person reading any object or symbol or concept in certain ways. This works both ways for me - if one reads too much into a concept, you can take questionable leaps of logic, but if you merely read the surface, even that which is presumed garbage culture, you can fall into a blindness. Obviously, the Garfield newspaper strip is clearly meant as a joke. However, the episode itself, even if it originates as a joke, turns into something more meaningful, which makes the idea it was the original final episode of Lasagna Cat more significant.

Copyright 1978 PAWS, INC. All Rights Reserved

One also thinks of is how much of the narration by Barrymore is actually true or not. Fatal Farm's script and Barrymore's performance deserve credit for being very convincing, where between material that is very over-the-top, they sneak in facts that sound credible and may not be scrutinised as carefully. Cats are not colour blind to red and green as suggested, but struggle within the spectrum of reds to pinks only. "Cat rage rooms", a term Barrymore says he learned from a veterinarian, when searched online just goes to Lasagna Cat or the fascinating concept of "rage rooms", built rooms for human customers to destroy to relive stress. This episode proves funnier in how it toys with this, suggesting a really convincing tone can even make the utterly ludicrous sound convincing still.

This episode also metaphorically is a light hearted take on the truth that, honestly, human beings require a faith to cling onto. Even in terms of entertainment, Star Wars fans, Star Trek fans, My Little Pony "bronies", many fandoms all belong to attempts at a faith even down to sacred objects and even uniforms. Barrymore's performance is tremendous. His character at times is a figure some might keep their distance from, but he also can be just an eccentric who has managed to find ideas as meaningful to him as the Bible or Karl Marx's Das Kapital would to another, his character talking of how he has both by a mere cartoon strip developed both a spiritual foundation to be virtuous and also be suspicious of capitalism, which is absurd from Garfield but would still be good if found from a real person. Also we don't bat an eye on humanist Gene Roddenberry creating Star Trek, the original sixties series exposing ideas of the united nature of mankind above war but still having William Shatner fight a lizard man with comical boulders.

Also, some of the ideas are sound to consider, especially imagining Garfield himself as a chaotic devil figure. Garfield, whilst meant to be the loved character over his owner, is regardless of being feline an arsehole if you think of all the moments of meanness and selfishness that have just been depicted in the strips used in Lasagna Cat. It is befitting that the only piece of Garfield merchandise I has as a kid was a second hand illustration, in a frame, of Garfield cutting up Jon's computer with a chainsaw out of spite.

07/27/1978's existence also has the emphasis that, as documented in the last review, Fatal Farm admitted they had grown fond of Garfield or found that it would cruel to just mock a newspaper strip that would be especially fond for children to read, the ten years devoted to this pointless if the point was to just make a joke. The episode, as mentioned, was meant to be the conclusion. It would have been perfect, as it ends on a fittingly sweet ending that contrasts all the darker jokes or moments of Jon having a shampoo bukkake from half naked men, Barrymore ending with the idea that in hundreds of years, when humanity changes and evolves, people (explicitly children) will still read a Garfield comic like the pipe story, and smile. Even if Garfield had went the way of a Francis the Talking Mule, a pop culture phenomenon that disappeared into the past, there would still be figures like myself resurrecting them out of curiosity if a reboot did not exist. Even the meaner jokes about Garfield online, the actual irony, is paradoxically sustaining the orange cat longer than just ignoring him, before you consider even into the 2010s he was still having animated series etc. to keep the franchise going.

Of course, this was not the final episode of Lasagna Cat Season Two. Feeling like it was its own beast, there is of course an alternative ending, arguably so, which presents a much darker take on this notion of resurrection after four plus hours of telephone knock knock jokes. That is for another time and the conclusion however...

To Be Continued...

Lasagna Cat Part 2: Season Two (2017)

Following on from Part I.

Ten years after the original Lasagna Cat web series, a very big surprise came to be where when a new season abruptly appeared, beginning with a trailer in February 2017. This trailer showed a considerable jump in production since the 2008 web videos, in which Garfield is secretly a Terminator robot and Jon Arbuckle (and viewers) were requested to call a call connected telephone number for a survey, where you would provide your name and how many sexual partners you have had.

The episodes were recorded not that long after the original series in truth, sat in Fatal Farm's archive until they decided now than never to release them. In that time, however, they grew considerably in reputation. Season One, as mentioned before, caught the attention of the likes of Adult Swim, and onwards they created the likes of music videos, commercials, and various odds and sods. There is also Our RoboCop Remake (2014), a unique anthology of individuals remaking scenes from Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop (1987) in idiosyncratic ways. Fatal Farm remade the scene where RoboCop shoots a would-be rapist in the penis, multiplies in their many to multiple would be rapists and many (now explicit) exploding penises. It is also the sign of how Fatal Farm improved in that, whilst they are still low budget filmmakers, they are technically accomplished and a resourceful pair, as their segment involved finding a hardcore fan that had an accurate RoboCop suit and police car.

The second season of Lasagna Cat also shows the same considerably darker and bolder sense of humour. The structure is the same as before - how the Garfield strip is replicated exactly, followed by the original for comparison, and followed by a musical tribute to Jim Davis, which are significantly more elaborate in most cases than before. Immediately out of the gate for example, you got 10/20/1984 - same as before, new background colour and a change in music cue notwithstanding, about Garfield mistaking Odie in a picture frame as a mirror. Only this time it turns into a shot-by-shot remake of a famous scene from Michael Mann's famous TV series Miami Vice. Specifically a notable scene using Phil Collins' In the Air Tonight, the one song just by itself which does defend Collins' solo career whatever your opinion on it. Re-sung by Justin Roiland, pre-Rick and Morty, the recreation even with cardboard boats and background buildings is incredibly accurate. This does open an issue where half the joke does not work without the reference, which could post as a criticism of the short, but creating a visually accurate depiction of a very sombre and intense scene with Garfield is funny in itself, and if you do know the reference (or see the shot-by-shot comparison), it is exceptional right down to Odie having actor Philip Michael Thomas' earring on the costume.

The jump in production also means that the musical choices I would argue are also more ambitious. Some obvious choices, like 50 Cent's In Da Club for Garfield's debauched birthday with a mouse stripper, but even Kenny G is used in a perfect way, over a pleasant tableaux of Jon on the telephone, and idyllic scenes of hunky Garfield, in respect to their creator. Possibly the best, excluding the big epic episode using Philip Glass and the Miami Vice parody, is Lady Gaga's Bad Romance, played over the tale of Odie becoming a fashion icon for wearing a paper bag on his head...only to get into scandal, become depressed and commit suicide, and not be permitted into Heaven because of the paper bag, thus ending up in a hell populated by Jon Arbuckle-man scorpion hybrids. That is probably one of the darkest tributes, and there are a few, but the unconventional music choice is striking too, making the fact it is in copyright infringement sad as unless the license was paid for, this could easily be compromised, thus marring a visual-audio combination which works exceptionally.

Interesting only one was ever problematic, another deemed too extreme for YouTube. Of all the possible controversial decisions, it was including the address of Garfield's owners Paws. Inc. and asking to contact them about "having breakfast with Garfield", using an altered version of the Deep Blue Something song about Breakfast at Tiffany's; that video is available online but usually with blurring and not on YouTube, which is a shame because it is one of the most distinct, Jon in a breakfast themed world with houses and suburban life made from food before a giant Garfield sneezes it all away. Fatal Farm with these episodes were willing to spend money on work they could never gain financial revenue from, which is a shame but also admirable in their creative choices and that they clearly did this out of passion.

This is an important point to make, that it was with passion. With these segments there is also a drift away from the original joke, namely to take the piss out of Garfield as a property. One still refers back to the original point, turning into a 1920s set tribute of Jon playing a loop to loop joke for way too long in front of a bored audience, but we have to consider how Fatal Farm's attitudes might have changed when they have worked for so long in this world. They willingly combed through strips for two weeks for the shortest, a parody of a 2008 meme called Colin's Bear Animation, an animation project from a third year Game Development student at Ontario Tech University, where it is recreated with a CGI Garfield moving, dancing, and then a play on the famous dismissal of the original to the teacher "Thanks for nothing", which Fatal Farm willingly spent a long time in trying to find a newspaper strip with that line. The jokes may have gotten certainly darker, but at this point, the level of devotion to the work they did not need to do show their views of Jim Davis and his famous characters having clearly softened. If it had not changed, no sane person would spend two weeks for this joke*.

The banned YouTube video for example, stemming from a joke about Jon being a "madman" for wearing socks in bed and, set to Fergalicious by Fergie, has him in an asylum in the tribute, smearing on the wall (and eating) his own faeces, and getting a lobotomy with a drill. But it is not a joke at the creation, but just a dark joke, a juxtaposition of something you would never witness. Likewise there is the shampoo bukkake, which is arguably the most ambitious alongside the Miami Vice parody as, between the many additional elements these shorts had (a Twitter account for Odie or a fake porn site for this one) to co-creator Jeffrey Max having to speak phonetic Japanese among Japanese actors, it is impressive. Admittedly that short is, yes, a recreation of a fetish stemming from Japanese pornography only with men in loin clothes violently shaking shampoo over a receptive and grateful Jon Arbuckle, with even pixilation of the bottles for effect. Who knows what the extras were probably thinking acting this out, but set to a Prince song, it is a memorable eyebrow raiser for sure. It is not a short that insults the creation however, which is important to consider.

In terms of what they actually mean, the truth for me is that Lasagna Cat has always been a joke first, as with the Ducktales parody and others, Fatal Farm finding the humour in juxtaposition. The real message if any is the subconscious changes, that in spite of the darker content and occasional mocking, the episodes are less glib, more lavish and with little of the expense of Jim Davis' artistic work. Even the Breakfast with Garfield controversy was a light hearted joke that was accidentally too effective. There is one major episode I have not mentioned, not Sex Survey Results, but the original intended finale for the project which is a one hour piece and does leave on an actual message for the series. This however deserves its own review...

To Be Continued...

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*) Listen to the podcast HERE, an interview with Fatal Farm, where this entire change of heart of explained in detail from themselves.