The... Hard Knock Life

Holy crap! I have never read any of the 'Little Orphan Annie' comic strips, but now I kind of wish I had if the last strip in it's now ended original run is any indication of how fucking insane it is.

To start, most people will know of the character via the musical film Annie. The poster for that movie is on the right if you have a hard time picturing it. It was famous for giving the world the songs 'Tomorrow' and 'It's A Hard Knock Life', which later went on to be mocked by Mike Myers in whatever Austin Powers movie it was mocked in.

But god damned. I thought it was just a story about a little girl being adopted by some rich dude, and the trials and tribulations of them as they do things and everyone ends up being happy.

Well... prepare to be blown away. The ending of the strip goes about like this:

Annie has recently been kidnapped by gangsters. They've killed people, and it shows the end result in the strip, so it looks like Annie is in trouble. Cut to some detectives or something telling Warbucks (the old rich dude), that she is most likely dead... and fed to sharks.

If that was the final week of the comic strip, THAT is how it would have ended. But the ending is far more awesome than that!

It goes to explain that Annie was saved by a war criminal known as 'The Butcher of the Balkans'... and he is contemplating killing her to make sure she doesn't talk to anyone about his location. But no... he can't do that to a child.

Damn.

What does he do? Well, he decides that wherever he goes, he will take her along with him. So instead of being kidnapped by gangsters... she is now being held captive by a fucking war criminal, who might kill her so he doesn't have the burden of her any longer.

This is almost as weird as Tin Tin wearing a monkey! But damn, I want to go and read some Annie!

The... Spider-Man Is Dead

So the big movie news at the moment it seems is the fact that Spider-Man 4 has been canceled, and in it's place, a reboot which will see Spidey back in high school and showing us (again) how he gets his powers. Great.

I already saw that movie. It was called Spider-Man and it was only released less than a decade ago.

Anyway, i've noticed a few blogs and so forth going on that Sony might try to get James Cameron to do the reboot, and after him having both the number one and number two top grossing movies of all time under his belt, it isn't that stupid to be thinking of getting him.

Problem is if they even tried to, he most likely wouldn't accept as he has already given it a shot at making Spider-Man. As this article from Tech Land shows, a few of his storyboards have made their way on line. The article talks up some of the ideas for the movie such as Peter Parker being all aggressive because of his Uncle's death, and even going so far as to include a sex scene between Spidey and Mary Jane.

It seems that they only heard this third hand and don't really know much about it considering the article. You see, back in the early 1990's, Fox had the rights to Spider-Man and Cameron was approached to do the movie. He worked on it for a while and you can find his script treatment that he did out on the net. He came up with a multitude of ideas for the movie, and many people think that Raimi took alot of the ideas for the movie that he eventually directed.

This isn't true. In the first Spider-Man movie, only one idea apart from the core Spider-Man mythology stuck. Biological Web-Shooters. Cameron thought the idea that a rather ordinary teenager (he is, regardless of how intelligent he is) could not conceivably come up with a super-adhesive that mimicked spider webbing.

How could he create that shit? It's a stupid idea that he did so in the comics. The only reason it was in the comics is so they could create tension by having him need to reload a cartridge into a web shooter when he ran out. Especially when he is falling.

The idea to just have him develop biological web shooters was brilliant and it isn't any wonder why they kept it. I'm pretty sure they've even put it into the comics now, but I haven't read a Spidey comic for many years now, so I can't say.

Why didn't Cameron end up making the movie? Because of rights issues or something, I can't remember that well what happened. I believe that Fox eventually lost the rights to the movie, which were later picked up by Sony who went on to make the film trilogy. When he lost the chance to do Spider-Man (something that he had apparently tried to get underway a few times), he developed his own comic book like superhero, except he made it a superheroine... thus was born another reason that made it hard to find the awesome Dolph Lundgren movie... Dark Angel.

It is similar to how Sam Raimi, when failing to acquire the rights to make a movie about 'The Shadow', he decided to make his own superhero movie, and thus was born Darkman. The difference between Dark Angel and Darkman was that Darkman was actually good, whereas Dark Angel relied on Jessica Alba's body.

The... Tin Tin Is Fucking Insane!

I've just found a posting from a website called ceebeegeebee, where they're showing a few panels from a Tin Tin comic. Tin Tin is usually a wholesome comic that a lot of young kids can get into, but it does stray into some dark territory on occasion with it's storylines.

But holy fuck! Tin Tin is fucking insane!

Holy shit! What?! You need it's skin? Click on the link above to get the whole thing in context with a few other panels, but in reality, it still doesn't explain why Tin Tin is so incredibly insane and morbid.

For those that can't be bothered clicking on the link, let's just say that the whole incident comes about because a monkey takes Tin Tin's dog, Snowy. Tin Tin formulates a plan to get the dog back, by going and shooting a different monkey (which I doubt did him any harm), and then skinning it and wearing that skin... so he doesn't arouse any suspicion from the monkey that took his dog.

He then goes off to trade the monkey his safari hat for the dog, which the monkey agrees to... by talking. Oh, and Snowy talks as well...

Once he has the dog back, he goes back to camp... still wearing the monkey fur... and strangely enough... well, take a look:

That's right... he goes back to camp and freaks out his extremely racist depiction of a guide (whilst his dog talks to us), but take note: he is still wearing his fucking safari hat! Did he kill the other monkey and take it back? Why not just shoot the first monkey, and leave the monkey that did nothing to you alone?

Wow... Belgians are fucking insane.