While I was growing up, one of my favorite film franchises from the 1980s aside from Back to the Future was Ghostbusters. I was exposed to these films from a young age from my mother and my aunt, both of which who are still huge fans of the first two films to this day, as I am. My favorite film would have to be the original, as my favorite Ghostbusters villain in the entire franchise is the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man and my favorite character is Slimer, both of which were antagonists in the first film.
After the release of the fourth Indiana Jones film, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, my mother and I debated whether or not there would be a Ghostbusters 3, and at times the debate would pop up between not only her, but between friends and other family members as well. To answer the titular question as to whether or not we will get a third Ghostbusters film, we technically already have gotten one, and I am not talking about the 2016 reboot which I have not seen yet, but I might once it arrives on home media. If you want to experience the third film in the Ghostbusters franchise, you will need at least one of the items on the list below:
Playstation 2
Playstation 3
Playstation Portable
Playstation Vita (Playstation Vita is backwards compatible with Playstation Portable games released digitally)
Xbox 360
Possibly an Xbox One (if the software is backwards compatible)
Windows-Compatible PC with at least two gigabytes of RAM
Nintendo DS
Nintendo 3DS (Nintendo 3DS is backwards compatible with Nintendo DS software)
Wii
Wii U (Wii U is backwards compatible with Wii software)
If you have guessed that Ghostbusters 3 is a video game, then you have guessed correctly. The third installment of the Ghostbusters franchise was released back in 2009 and is based on a draft for a proposed third film written by Dan Akroyd and Harold Ramis, and as a nice bit of fanservice, brings back all but Rick Moranis to reprise their roles in the game, as well as a horde of classic ghosts, enemies, and references to the original films. Unfortunately, you do not play as any of the Ghostbusters, instead you play as a new recruit to the team, simply dubbed "rookie" by his superiors.
While I have not played the game, I eagerly hope to do so based on what I have heard, and I will follow up with another review once I have gotten around to playing it. If you would like to have an experience similar to watching a Ghostbusters film, then I would recommend taking to YouTube as there are fans who have edited the cinematics of the game into a movie.
In the premiere episode of The History of Aladdin, we are going to go back in time to the year 1986, the year composer-lyricist duo Alan Menken and Howard Ashman were hired by The Walt Disney Company to compose songs for upcoming films such as Oliver and Company and The Little Mermaid, hot off the heels of the success of the 1982 off-Broadway musical adaptation of the Roger Corman film, Little Shop of Horrors as well as the success of the musical Smile, which would later receive a film adaptation in 1986 starring Rick Moranis, Ellen Greene, and Levi Stubbs (writer's note: the film adaptation is a personal favorite).
(Little Shop of Horrors, 1982 Act 1 Audio-Only)
Howard worked with Disney with a simple goal in his mind, to bring the company and the films they created back to their roots, letting the music tell the story in conjunction with the animation onscreen similar to how it was done in films such as Pinocchio, Mary Poppins, and The Jungle Book. However, before he was signed on to compose The Little Mermaid, he was tasked with composing the opening song for Oliver and Company, Once Upon a Time in Central Park.
(Once Upon a Time in Central Park, Howard Ashman and Huey Lewis)
While working on the song, he was informed of another project which his frequent collaborator Alan Menken would also be involved in, an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid, a project Disney himself attempted when he was alive but shelved due to story complications. Howard and Alan began to work on a score of songs, with now classic songs such as Under the Sea and Part of Your World. Speaking of the latter, according to the documentary Waking Sleeping Beauty, Part of Your World was nearly cut from the final film due to lack of audience engagement during test screenings of the film. Had it not been for Howard intervening and literally giving threats to former President of Disney Jeffrey Katzenberg to keep the song in the final film, Part of Your World would have probably ended up in the deleted scenes section on disc two of The Little Mermaid.
(Source: Waking Sleeping Beauty, Howard Ashman and Jodi Benson, Part of Your World)
Another of Howard's contributions to the film was in the character Sebastian. Originally, Sebastian's character was supposed to be a stuffy, stereotypical English butler type of character, but Howard suggested "Why not make him Jamaican?" which also gave birth to the Disney classic, Under the Sea, a Jamaican-Calypso style song used for the "showstopper" song in the film.
(Under the Sea, Howard Ashman Demo)
To critique the score of the film, while not being a huge fan of The Little Mermaid myself, I do admit the entirety of the demo score is filled with Howard's energy and passion that he personally injected, from the original extended demo of the opening number Fathoms Below to the original demo of the film's finale. Howard also wrote at least two songs that while they did not make it into the final film, they served as prototypes of songs that did. These songs were One Dance and Silence is Golden, prototypes of Part of Your World and Poor Unfortunate Souls, respectively.
(Silence is Golden, The Music Behind the Magic, Walt Disney Records)
(One Dance, Walt Disney Records)
However, while he was ecstatic and passionate about his work on Mermaid as well as beginning work on the film to be released afterward, Beauty and the Beast, he was preparing to pitch a project he had wanted to do since he began work at Disney, an adaptation of the Arabian Nights story, Aladdin. In the next episode, we will journey to the early days of the film's production with a look at the original forty page treatment written by Ashman himself.
Sources:
Gillespie, Sarah. "John Musker Countdown Question 9." Part of His World. Sarah Ashman-Gillespie, 21 Feb. 2012. Web. <http://howardashman.com/>.
Waking Sleeping Beauty. Dir. Don
Hahn. Perf. John Musker, Ron Clements, Roy Disney, Christopher Emerson.
Walt Disney Studios, 2009. Amazon Instant Video. Documentary
detailing the events of the first half of what is known as The Disney
Renaissance, and the constant conflicts with Jeffrey Katzenberg.
Note: Videos were taken from YouTube from various sources as supplementary material, if you are the original owner of these videos and you request I take them down, feel free to message me at austinmmyers@yahoo.com
I have been waiting for such a long time to do this series of posts. However, I felt that I would not be doing justice to this topic if I did not do extensive research beforehand, as this pertains to my favorite animated film and its history as it faced multiple trials and tribulations throughout from its earliest draft in 1988 to the Broadway musical released in 2014. Of course, I am talking about the classic Disney film, Aladdin. Before we begin this magic carpet ride through Disney history, I would like to give thanks to the sources of my information and thank those who have helped me research this topic, such as the creator of the Aladdin Musical Blog as well as the site, The Lost Media Wiki, The Howard Ashman Website, and the two documentaries Waking Sleeping Beauty and A Diamond in the Rough: The Making of Aladdin as well as my two friends who have helped me with the research for the past three years. In this weekly retrospective starting next Thursday, I will be going over the complete history of Aladdin and dividing it into eras, such as the era of Howard Ashman's original treatment, the Menken-Ashman era, Black Friday and its effects on the film's production, the Menken-Rice Era, the release of the 1992 film, and conclude the retrospective with the history of the stage adaptation now playing on Broadway as well as how the film has impacted and inspired me throughout my life. If this series is successful, I may do a series of retrospectives on other Disney animated films such as Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Before we begin, I want you all to answer a question for me. Do you believe in and love the concept of magic, wizardry, and the supernatural? If you answered yes to this question, then I am pretty sure this is a character you will love reading about, and I must also warn you that there are spoilers lurking throughout this post, as was the case with Jean Valjean in the previous installment of Character Spotlight. This character's backstory... is a bit tragic, even more tragic than being arrested for stealing a loaf of bread and being imprisoned for almost twenty years. This character was orphaned at merely a year old, and forced to live with his abusive aunt, uncle, and cousin. His parents sacrificed themselves to protect him and to this day, he wears the mark of their murderer which also serves as a radar to detect when the latter is near, a powerful sorcerer who cast an unforgivable curse who is known simply as "He Who Shall Not Be Named..." as even his supposed name is a taboo among the citizens of the Wizarding World. This character, like Valjean in the previous spotlight, is known by many names such as "The Boy Who Lived" and "The Chosen One". Who do I refer to him as, you may ask? I simply refer to him by the name his parents gave him at birth, Harry Potter.
Harry Potter was born to parents Lily, a muggle (or non-magical person) and James Potter (a wizard) on July 31st, 1980 in the small town of Godric's Hollow, named after Godric Gryffindor, one of the founders of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. While his first year and three months were simply magical (no pun intended), the next decade was filled with sorrows and misery, as he was left with his only biological and brutally abusive relatives, the Dursleys. However, that would soon change when his uncle's house became flooded with letters from Hogwarts and an encounter with the half-giant who would become a lifelong friend of his, (and one of my favorite characters in the entirety of the series) Rubeus Hagrid. It was here where young Harry Potter learned he was a wizard, and not just any wizard, but the wizard who defeated Lord Voldemort in his infancy. Throughout his adventures over his tenure as a student at Hogwarts, Harry faces hordes of enemies such as trolls, basilisks, dementors, dragons, and Voldemort's army of dark wizards, the Death Eaters. However, in those battles against Voldemort, there have been some losses as well. Along with his parents, Harry has had to face losses such as that of his headmaster and mentor Albus Dumbledore at the hands of Professor Severus Snape, the loss of his godfather Sirius Black, and the loss of his friend and late brother in law, Fred Weasley. Later on, he married his best friend's sister, Ginny Weasley, and became Head Auror of the Ministry of Magic. I enjoyed reading about this character's adventures in my childhood, and was deeply saddened to see it end when I closed the final book after reading it, and I was equally saddened when the film series concluded after the events of Deathly Hallows Part II. The book series sparked my love of reading and literature, and the movie series was one of my many inspirations as an animator and filmmaker. Like Valjean, Quasimodo, and Tarzan, I will always hold Harry Potter in high regard, and I am eagerly looking forward to when The Cursed Child is released at the end of the month.
I cannot believe it, but PokeMania is back and it is bigger than ever, all thanks to a smartphone game known as Pokemon Go. For those unaware, Pokemon Go is an augmented reality (or AR) game developed by Niantic, Nintendo, and The Pokemon Company with the concept of catching Pokemon in the real world. Essentially, the game plays similarly to the main series of games available on Nintendo's line of handheld consoles, but through the use of a smartphone's camera one is able to see a computer generated image of a Pokemon to capture right before your very eyes, which I find to be absolutely amazing. I downloaded Pokemon Go the very moment it was announced to be available in the United States, and I have played it in short bursts daily for almost a week. To be completely honest with all of you, this is actually something I have been hoping and wishing for since childhood, and I am hoping that someday, a similar feature is added to the main series of games. I enjoy this game, and it is exceptionally rare for me to enjoy a smartphone game, the only exceptions being this and the iOS ports of the Ace Attorney games (on a side note: Capcom, when are you going to release an iOS port of Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney and the Investigations:Miles Edgeworth spinoffs?). Catching Pokemon is a bit addicting, and while I do enjoy it, I have a complaint or two to address. Catching Pokemon is easy, almost too easy for my tastes. Unlike the main series of games, you do not need to weaken the Pokemon to capture it, you simply need to throw a Pokeball at it and you essentially have it captured. The Pokemon you capture as you play are essentially underused, which is my next complaint. The Pokemon you capture are used to sacrifice for evolution candies. I felt bad sacrificing many Pidgeys and Rattatas to evolve their respective species fully. Why couldn't evolution and leveling up Pokemon be more like the main series games, where you use them to traditionally battle other trainers and wild Pokemon, which allows them to gain experience and evolve. Also, the selection of Pokemon (and it may just be the area I am in) is limited to Weedles, Pidgeys, Zubats, and Rattatas. In a future update, I would like to see a wider variety of Pokemon in my area, maybe some from Johto, Hoenn, Sinnoh, Unova, and Kalos, and I would love to see a more traditional battle system similar to the main series of games. Nintendo, Niantic, and TPCi, you are off to a solid start and I enjoy the product that you released. However, you still have a long way to go before this game is perfected and a smartphone/mobile device seller. I offer you some advice as a conclusion, improve the servers and the GPS, work on the bugs in this version, add more Pokemon, and bring back a traditional and complex battle system similar to the main series of games. If you can achieve this and fix these issues, then Pokemon Go will be even more successful than it is now, and people will be flocking to download the app for years to come. For those who are debating on downloading this game, I would suggest waiting until a properly stabilized version with more features is readily available.
I hope you all enjoyed this month's character spotlight that I posted last night. If all goes well I hope to do one once a month, and I need your help deciding next month's! In the comments write which of the choices you would like me to to a Character Spotlight on, whether it may be:
1. Mowgli
2. Harry Potter
3. Quasimodo
4. Kunta Kinte
I look forward to hearing input from all of you and I hope you enjoy next month's character spotlight!
Out of the dozens of characters I have read about over the years, very few have prominently stuck out over the course of my life, such as this one. This particular character is an underdog, a philanthropist, a Christian, and a redeemer. He is known by many names such as Prisoner 24601, Prisoner 9430, Monsieur Madeleine, Monsieur LeBlanc, Ultime Feauchelevent, and his name given to him at birth, Jean Valjean. Why has this character stuck out from all the other characters I have read about? What makes him so special? Before I can answer these two questions, let's go over his story and struggles as told in the pages of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, published in France in 1862.
Before his journey began, Valjean was a simple woodcutter who worked to provide for his sister and her starving children. However, that changed one Winter night. To obtain food for his sister's children, he threw a stone into the baker's window and stole a loaf of bread from the shop. As a result, Valjean is arrested on the charge of theft for five years, and is sent to Toulon prison under the name "Prisoner 24,601". However, Valjean strongly desired to return to his family, and made numerous escape attempts which only extended his prison sentence from five to nineteen years. At the end of his sentence, he is put on parole with a yellow passport in his hand. However, there was a bit of a "monkey's paw" to this yellow passport, as wherever he went across the countryside of France, he was unable to obtain lodging, work, and food, as the people he encountered did not trust him, except for one. This man was known as Bishop Myriel of Digne.
For the first time in nineteen years, he felt as if he were an actual human and not an animal. However, Valjean's thieving intentions lingered from the bread incident years ago, and he stole the silverware of the Bishop, only to be arrested the next morning. In a surprising turn of events, Bishop Myriel gives Valjean the silverware and a pair of candlesticks to sell, telling him that he used the candlesticks as an offering for Valjean's soul to God. While travelling, Valjean inadvertently steals a fifty-sous piece from a young chimney sweep named Petit-Gervais, which causes him to break his parole. Desiring to change his life, Valjean abandons his life as an ex-convict and in the course of eight years he becomes a successful mayor in the town of Montreuil-Sur-Mer.
Unfortunately, the shadows of his past loom over him as he is soon greeted by former Toulon guard turned police inspector, Javert. While it may seem that Javert was simply assigned to the town, he had an ulterior motive as he had a feeling that Valjean was hiding somewhere in the town. Needless to say, it was a bit of a shock to him when he found out his boss was the criminal he was searching for. How did he find out, you may ask? Valjean put it upon himself to rescue a man named Feauchelevent, who had been trapped under a toppled and broken cart. While rescuing him, he accidentally reveals his strength to Javert, who begins to piece together that Madeleine is Valjean. After rescuing the old man, Valjean manages to secure him a job as a gardener in a convent in Paris. Later on, he rescues a woman on the streets named Fantine and assists not only in nursing her back to health, but attempting to obtain her daughter from an inkeeper couple in Montfermeil. However, he is interrupted when he learns another man has been arrested under the false pretense that he is Jean Valjean, so he rushes to Arras and confesses that he is indeed the real Jean Valjean. Unfortunately upon returning to Montreuil-Sur-Mer, Fantine passes away from the shock of this revelation and Valjean is arrested once again and branded with the new number of 9,430.
Months later after faking his death, he arrives in Montfermeil and adopts Cosette. However, as was the case in Montreuil-Sur-Mer, Javert is once again in pursuit of him and transfers over to the police in Paris.
Years pass, and throughout, Valjean is caught in a wild series of adventures and events, from becoming a gardener in a convent to assisting in a student revolution. If you wish to learn about more of those adventures, Les Miserables can be easily found online or for free from a digital book seller such as iBooks, as the entirety of the novel is in public domain. Valjean unfortunately dies of grief an unspecified amount of time after his adoptive daughter Cosette's wedding. As he dies, he sees visions of Fantine and Bishop Myriel carrying his soul into heaven.
I asked at the beginning, why is Valjean so significant? Why is he of importance? Valjean shows that despite coming from a rough upbringing, one can overcome adversity and be successful. Valjean manages to go from being a thief to a philanthropist in the course of almost twenty years, nearly the same time span in which he was imprisoned. He evokes change in the people he encounters, change in those with rough upbringings such as Feauchelevent, Fantine, Cosette, and surprisingly Javert. The change he evokes in Javert is so powerful, it drives the police inspector mad to the point of drowning himself in the Seine, unable to accept the fact that this convict he has been pursuing is indeed an honest and changed man. Javert believed that "he should have perished by [Valjean's] hand", and was utterly destroyed when Valjean chose to let him escape rather than kill him when given the opportunity, another aspect of Valjean that causes him to stick out in my mind. Valjean is a man who highly follows Christian morals and values, in a time where science and education were becoming prominent in developing countries.
I leave you with this, no matter what the upbringing, no matter what the circumstances, and no matter what trials and tribulations one may face, any man can change, and any man can turn his life around. Prime examples have occurred through history, such as Abraham Lincoln, Walt Disney, JK Rowling, and Victor Hugo himself. I bet it has even occurred to many of you in life, or I bet many of you have seen or known people that it has happened to.
