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- Jul 27, 2022
- Joined
- Nov 29, 2020
nope. not even close. here, for elaboration:
I guess I should've seen it as inevitable that the built-from-the-ground-up-to-be-commercial TV show and its related media would disappoint me so much, but my God, the way that they took a giant, steaming shit over everything that made the original movie so great still pisses me off to this day. For example, the top-notch characterization that I raved about in my original post?
All gone. These wonderfully complicated and three-dimensional characters are dumbed down into simple stereotyped cardboard cut-outs of themselves. Hell, half the time they're not even stereotypes of the original characters, they're just stereotypes of....stereotypes!
Nani is never there except for when she’s darting through a scene yelling about how late for work she is. Because TV Nani apparently can’t tell time or wear a watch. Ever. And she’s late for work every single day. She also utterly hates Stitch and tries her best to never interact with him. Even when she’s mad at him she’d rather yell at Lilo about him, even though he’s usually standing right there and all Nani has to do is turn her head slightly to the right and address him directly, but God knows we can’t have that. I wish I could say that I was exaggerating, but in 65 episodes there is literally only 1 scene where she behaves affectionately towards him.
Lilo is a bore. She no longer takes pictures, she no longer surfs, at least not that we ever see, and I think Pudge the fish is only shown, like, once or twice. She is also obsessed with mummies and vampires and will usually mention this at least once an episode.
Jumba is only there to provide technology and to give exposition. Pleakley is a buffoon. His job is to scream in high-strung panic over everything and wear over-the-top costumes. (he makes Jumba wear them too). I’m talking costumes like matadors, hippies, disco dancers, whatever the writers thought would be funny that week. And no matter how long he’s there (Leroy & Stitch, the finale movie, claims 3 years) he never understands Earth any better at all. The original movie portrayed Pleakley as being misinformed and in-over-his-head, but otherwise studious and intelligent. He worked for the Galactic Federation, who we already know from watching the movie, rewards failure with termination, so if he were really the moron the show makes him out to be, he would have been fired long before the movie even took place.
This goes double for Gantu. In the movie he was a top captain, hyper-competent, able to capture Stitch within implied minutes of arriving on Earth. The only thing he actually did wrong was involving Lilo. Had he let her go immediately, he likely would never have been fired. He did everything by the book. Stitch was simply stronger than the technology he had available to him. In the show, he’s so ridiculous, it’s amazing he’s able to exist without a chaperone. He’s whiny, he’s silly, he’s not intimidating in the slightest, and Lilo, a 6 year old girl, can outwit him at every turn.
And Stitch. Poor, poor Stitch. In the movie, he’s shown as being very in control of his own body. He’s destructive, but deliberately so. He knows what he’s doing when he does it. But in the show, if he touches it, he’s gonna wreck it, half the time not even on purpose. It gets so bad to the point that he gets kicked out of the house in one episode and Nani threatens to get rid of him in another because keeping him has become too expensive. Half the time he’s used as a background gag. Lilo and Jumba will be talking and Stitch is just in the background crawling across the wall and eating a plant or something. He doesn’t really contribute too much until it’s time for the final fight scene with Gantu.
The show as a whole is very repetitive. Disney, having that "not knowing WTF to do with L&S" problem I mentioned earlier, decided that the best course of action, for whatever reason, was to make it a Pokemon ripoff, so the show is about Stitch’s "cousins", the 625 other experiments that came before him. They are dehydrated ping-pong balls that transform into a creature when they get wet and they have been scattered all over Kauai, as told in the pilot film, Stitch! The Movie. Gantu wants them to send off to an evil scientist that used to be Jumba’s partner named Dr. Hamsterviel (GET IT?! HAMSTER WHEEL?! PLEASE LAUGH) and Lilo wants them so she can name them and find them a new home. Every episode is basically this:
Rinse and repeat for 65 goddamn episodes, and presto! You have a boring, repetitive, generic ass show that spits in the face of the original movie for the sake of moving merch. Oh, wait, I lied. There are other kinds of episodes. I mean one other kind of episode. The crossover episode, where the characters of whatever concurrent Disney show join L&S in their chase for the experiments!The admittedly catchy theme song ends, and we open on an experiment pod that is reeeaally close to some form of water (puddle, wine glass, etc.) Will it fall in? No…no we’re good it rolled away…. no, wait! It’s rolling back! Oh no! It fell in! Flash of yellow light and an experiment appears! Back at the house Lilo and Stitch are involved in an activity (creating a new hula dance, playing a game, creating a slug circus, etc.). Nani runs in yelling about how late for work she is, and takes a second to remind Lilo to not get into any trouble, she’s now gone for the rest of the episode. Pleakley has just learned something new about humans and wants to try it out (cooking, a new outfit, reality television, disaster preparedness, etc.). Meanwhile, Gantu’s computer has just alerted him that a new experiment has been activated, so that means he's gotta go search for it while new sidekick 625 (Reuben) makes sarcastic comments. At the same time Lilo and Stitch have left the house. Both of them see the new experiment, they've gotta go chase it now. But oh no! Gantu sees it too! Now it’s a race to see who can get it first! Stitch for the win! Gantu falls on ass! Lilo figures out what power this particular experiment has (electricity, finding, cooking, possessing things, etc.) and gives it a corresponding name (Sparky, Finder, Frenchfry, Phantasmo, etc.). Just like in Pokemon, once you have captured an experiment it instantly stops being evil. Never mind the fact that in the original movie, it took Lilo 3 days to win over Stitch, you chase down a wild experiment, it respects the effort you put in and swears loyalty to you right away. Because TV show. And now that Lilo has figured out what the experiment is for, she and Stitch have to now use that experiment’s power for their own selfish gain, even though Jumba warned them not to. Because we gotta teach the kids a lesson so that we can ILLUMINATE TELEVISION (how about you illuminate my ass). Oh crap! Gantu’s back! He’s stolen the experiment! What are we gonna do?! Cue another fight scene with up-tempo theme music. Usually just Stitch though. Lilo is the brains, Stitch is the brawn. Okay! Experiment is back, and Gantu is defeated; time to find the experiment a new home. Holy shit you guys! Guess what?! Remember when I said the episode started with Lilo & Stitch involved with an activity?! The experiment’s new home is in some way related to that activity! If Lilo and Stitch started the episode at a pizza parlor with broken animatronics, they are gonna find the one experiment that can fix that. It’s Christmas? There’s an experiment for that. Halloween? There’s a conveniently timed experiment for that too. Need a plant to enter into the big show? Guess what this experiment does! The experiment goes to its new home and is accepted immediately and no one questions what this weird thing is and why it looks like it does. Everyone’s happy, the end.
Y'know, kinda like when Stitch invaded other Disney movies prior to the original movie's premiere.
Except THAT was an ingenious and endearing marketing campaign that was solely for the purpose of getting kids' asses into theatres to see the original movie. When the show did it, it was more like "HEY KIDS! WE ALSO AIR THESE SHOWS, GO WATCH THEM RIGHT NOW IF YOU HAVEN'T ALREADY SO YOU CANFILL UP OUR POCKETSSEE THEIR COOL ADVENTURES AS WELL!" Transparent money-grubbing practices at their worst.
And the attempts to spice things up by introducing their own characters also went disastrously.
There's Victoria, a girl who's setup to be Lilo's best (human) friend because she also likes weird things. "That actually doesn't sound that bad, Vyse" you say. And I'd agree with you.....if they didn't only use her ONCE after her introductory episode. I'm not kidding. Two episodes where she's a primary character and then she slithers away into the background. The dictionary definition of wasted potential.
Then there's Angel, experiment 624. Most likely the best known of the series' creations. I say "creation" loosely because she's literally just a female Stitch created solely for the purpose of making Stitch's dick rock hard. Worse, her arc's an exact carbon copy of Smurfette's - evil girl turned good through the power of love. But she holds nary a candle to the worst creation of the show:
Keoni. Fucking. Jameson. This bastard was apparently mandated by the Disney execs so that he could be an audience surrogate. He was so awful, that even the writers of the show hated him. Who's he, you might ask? Why, he's Lilo's love interest of course! Now, I think that bears repeating: LILO - the anti-social, maladjusted six-year-old who's obsessed with Elvis and has a doll whose ears a "bug laid eggs in" - has a love interest. Not just any love interest either. A RADICAL and TOTALLY KEWL dude who SKATEBOARDS!
They didn't even try with this shit, they DIDN'T. EVEN. TRY. I'm gonna tell you right now, that anybody would have given up on this show had it not been for the name. They made one of the most generic, boring, and repetitive monster of the week shows ever made, they took the name "Lilo and Stitch", smooshed them together, and then slapped it onto TV just like slapping their own greedy dicks. Even though you may not believe this, I hate the fact that I have to hate this show. In an era where every movie studio, especially Disney, is too piss-scared to make a tiptoe outside the proverbial box, it's actually nice to go back to a time when their products actually had a hint of originality, but this is not the way to do it. They should've used their own characters and called it "Alien Catchers" or something. So why slap Lilo & Stitch on this? Because that's what would make the most money, artistic integrity be damned.
In closing this novella of autism, let me say this: it really is a shame when the Chinks are better at capturing the spirit and tone of your movie than you. Fuck L&S: The Series, and fuck the Rat for letting it happen.
TL;DR: Disney made a TV show that not only disrespected the original movie it was based off of, it bludgeoned it to death with a blunt object, buried it in a shallow grave and then pissed on the grave.
starborn427614
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Aug 27, 2020
Always funny to see you bust out the master post, @Vyse Inglebard
Kit Marz
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Mar 31, 2022
This is off topic from whats being discussed, but my family and I were recently talking about how sad it was that Splash Mountain is gone and how the replacement seems underwhelming. We have a great love of those stories and were saying how ironic it is that Disney took actual black stories and replaced it with a race swapped European story.
Joel Chandler Harris would have been seen as a huge progressive in his day. He worked on a plantation with the slaves and grew to genuinely love them and their stories. Later when he was a writer for a newspaper he decided to publish the stories so a wider audience could learn about them and so they wouldn't be lost due to the stories only being passed down through the oral tradition. He used a pen name so he wouldn't take credit and kept the language how he heard it as he felt he appropriate the stories if he used proper English.
This is something I get really autistic over and find it so frustrating and disingenuous that companies are always wanting to have diversity, but really they just want to take white culture and darken it up a bit. There's actual black stories that people have never heard before and could be used to make something new and entertaining, but it's just easier to make a race swapped version of something we've seen a million times, so that's all we'll get.
Joel Chandler Harris would have been seen as a huge progressive in his day. He worked on a plantation with the slaves and grew to genuinely love them and their stories. Later when he was a writer for a newspaper he decided to publish the stories so a wider audience could learn about them and so they wouldn't be lost due to the stories only being passed down through the oral tradition. He used a pen name so he wouldn't take credit and kept the language how he heard it as he felt he appropriate the stories if he used proper English.
This is something I get really autistic over and find it so frustrating and disingenuous that companies are always wanting to have diversity, but really they just want to take white culture and darken it up a bit. There's actual black stories that people have never heard before and could be used to make something new and entertaining, but it's just easier to make a race swapped version of something we've seen a million times, so that's all we'll get.
anti SJW
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Dec 26, 2016
- Joined
- Aug 4, 2019
This style of political cartoon send me into atavistic rage.
Lone Star
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Nov 10, 2021
I did say "relatively" after all. I'm just saying for a Disney property with several sequels and several different T.V. shows, it didn't go to shit nearly as hard as some other milked franchises. I'd rather watch all the Stitch movie sequels than something like Hunchback II or Mulan II even once.
- Joined
- Nov 29, 2020
oh, taken on its own merits, the show and its related sequels (Stitch the Movie and Leroy and Stitch) are fine. Not great, but not terrible either. The problem is, they're not supposed to be taken on their own merits. It's supposed to be the direct followup to possibly the most....
^unique
^heartfelt,
and strangely melancholy movie that Disney had ever made up to that point. Haven't you ever noticed that there is practically NONE of the melancholy - a key ingredient to what made the original movie work so well - in the TV show?! The only piece of sequel media that comes close is Stitch Has a Glitch, and even that has its own flaws that keep it from meeting the original.
- Joined
- Aug 24, 2014
I quote one of the many negative reviews of Wish.
That's all I need to know about that dumpster fire.
- Joined
- Nov 12, 2019
but it gets worst
Bump Tist
This was all a backstory to *Magic Mirror*
SpiderBitch
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Mar 6, 2023
Literally Everything here is more horrifying than I could have predicted but-
"Asha becomes the fairy godmother" ... you mean the old lady weve never seen as anything but white??? Must be an ancestor to michael jackson. Or does she transform because Cinderella is canonically racist or something and wouldn't react well to a black godmother?
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- Joined
- Dec 27, 2015
That ending is atrocious if true. It's like they saw the Pixar theory based off the easter eggs to other movies being added more or less appropriately into the film's worlds, and thought they should do that with their own animated canon.
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- Jan 12, 2017
Holy shit it's more retarded than I thought. What a disaster.
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- Oct 14, 2015
I actually wondered about that cape thing we saw her wearing. I just thought it was a homage to the fairy godmother… of course it wasn’t.
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- Jul 27, 2022
I was just joking Disney about adapting The Pixar Theory.
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- Mar 14, 2021
That stuff about Wish makes me worry they're going to try to tie in either Kingdom Hearts or Lorcarna to make a Disney animated universe. In a sane world that decision would get the person who proposed it kicked in the heart but right now...
- Joined
- Nov 29, 2020
Again with blackwashing beloved white characters. Fucking hell.
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- Jul 27, 2022
I will unironically start going postal if they inject current year into Kingdom Hearts.
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- Mar 14, 2021
Given the most recent Final Fantasy I believe had their response to "where's all the black people?" be "it's medieval Europe, not here." I have hope. Honestly though I think Kingdom Hearts is in a weird state right now, it feels like there's comparatively little happening and I have to assume Disney and Square are screaming at each other behind closed doors.
- Joined
- Jul 27, 2022
Imagining Disney the esg wounded animal screaming is actually a pretty funny mental image.