Three things

[brushwolf]

• So I finally got a chance to see the new Disney villainess thing that's started a little flap. Moving beyond the really obvious "gah! They did what? Does everything female in these movies have to be a pretty pretty thin young princess?" these aren't terrible designs, I don't think.
  
  There's some character design thinking going on at odds to my increasingly leftist tendencies; I'm a little uncomfy with how much I conceptualize fat as softening someone's villainy, but a physically larger villain is a dramatic silhouette and reads as more adult (which gets into the stereotype of everyone heroic being young). It seems a shame not to go anywhere with these versions, though, so I sort of wish there were prequels with these young villainesses, without all of the assets that they had in the original movies, grasping and manipulating and murdering (okay, it's Disney, so murder means pushing people off cliffs) their way to power. 'Cause man, villains make for great background stories and I really liked I Claudius.
  
  Plus with Ursula, we don't know how old she actually is. She might have been young centuries before the events of Little Mermaid. Hm... younger sea-witch... Greek epic... hey, crossover with Disney's version of Hercules? Referring to that mythological character as "Hercules" rather than Heracles makes me squirm, but I'm willing to do it for Harryhausen styled monsters.
  
  And I'm not even gonna comment about how, as an octopus, giving birth would kill Ursula so part of why she's held on for that long is that she's probably a lesbian, which completely fiddles with the Disney movie and what she's actually hoping to get out of Ariel. That way fanfic lies. Bad fanfic.
  
  
• As a kid I ran into this one really great track on a klezmer record which was just dynamite, really badass stuff, stuff that stuck in my head so much that now I can still hum it from memory. It occurs to me that the reason I liked it so much was that it basically was a surf tune. We're talking Dick Dale levels of surf tune. I can't remember the name nor which record it was on, and it's not "Der Yiddische Soldat in die Trenches" like what I thought - but that guess pointed me at proof in the form of "Ishai's Freylech" by the Flying Bulgar Klezmer Band, which is basically a surf tune. Not all traditional music would work as surf guitar, but some would.
  
  Did listening to klezmer recordings as a kid influence my love for surf guitar? Or could it be that I really liked some of those klezmer recordings as an ancestral echo of the 19th century Black Sea beach scene? (Which I'm now picturing as a horrific cross between Yidl Mitn Fidl and The Endless Summer, filmed in black and white with the requisite Eisenstein references.)
  
  
• Anyone else having problems getting anywhere from the front page of DeviantArt?

Comments

[wynkat]

ok those disney villianess in High *cough* drag *cough* designer couter dresses are just silly. Maleficent would rip that shit off her hips in a heart beat as pointless and in the way! and wow, Ursula? Really? the whole thing reads to me as stripping the women of their power by "dolling" if you'll pardon the word them up and making them "pretty" enough for sale. *shiver* they were fine the way they were! ugh.

But then I have opinions, many many opinions about those ladies and the disney princesses too. *sigh*

- klezmer surf music? ok, I know thats not what you started out with, but... brain warp. :D

[brushwolf]

That's the big criticism people have.

But from a design standpoint, it seems kinda horrible to have people create these big iconic badasses, and then have someone else (and it's obvious the someone elses were also really good character designers) come along and make them milspec standard thin fashionistas. But... I mean... the design of them as thin younger women works, so why waste it, wouldn't it be kickass to have stories about them as younger badasses?

Also http://youtu.be/_eqXTzRIfKk

[wynkat]

yes and yes to the good character designers and yes to all of that. - gah, I totally forgot that you pointed out the whole backstory thing, yes, I love that kind of thing anyway, so yes! that would be awesome. I mean we have Wicked which is fun in its way but silly. It would be so freaking cool to do the story of these woman as real badasses, I mean let them be bad! let them be real villians and see them grow into their potential. That would be freaking awesome.

And oh my gods! that video! I love you forever, thank you :D

[brushwolf]

Also, edited the original post to reflect the fact that yeah, I did actually pick up on the whole "and now we're going to make it so that everyone's the standard homogenized thing to sell small girls."