But he wears a baseball cap! And he raps!
There have been some really lousy attempts at updating… well… pretty much everything. I know. I’ve reviewed some of them.
Now, here’s two that strike me as particularly funny.
First – the new Dick Tracy villain (yes, they’re still writing new Dick Tracy comics – no, they’re not particularly good) is a multiple-cell-phone wielding DVD and CD pirate whose flunkies have names like Handheld, Broadband, Download, Burner, and Laptop (the obligatory dame in the slinky dress – can’t ya just smell the double-entendre?). With hard-edged, beak-nosed Dick Tracy taking time off from his schedule of tracking down ruthless killers and diamond thieves so that he can rough up guys hawking bootleg DVD’s on the streetcorners, we can rest assured that serious crime isn’t a problem in the good ol’ US of A any more.
It’s an obvious MPAA kiss-up, but that aside it just doesn’t work in the fast cars and tommy guns world of Tracy. Besides which, there are some doubts to the veracity of the strip. As Tracy busts a streetside vendor who complains that he’s only trying to make a living, Tracy snarls, “Your living is costing the movie industry five billion a year.” And I may not be familiar with the sprawling urban centers where most of the bootleg DVD sales occur, but do bootleg vendors really try to sell their bootlegs by labelling Star Wars with bogus names like “Stair Wells” and “Store Wares”? Wouldn’t that kind of hurt their chances at selling?
And yes, I’m perfectly familiar with the fact that Dick Tracy is the home of Flattop, the two-way wrist radio, and Moon Maiden, but I think that’s a completely different brand of making crap up.
Second on the list? The Catholic church is using a Matrix parody to recruit new priests.
The Catholic church is using a Matrix parody to recruit new priests.
Hm.
I can’t really think of a punchline for that one.
Edit: I’m sure there’s a clever line attached, but has anybody else noticed that The Catholic Priesthood appears to be rated “R”?
August 20th, 2005 at 7:13 pm
I’ve never bought a bootleg, and I don’t pay them too much mind—cheap is one thing, but any movie filmed during a regular screening is going to suck almost as much as those Dick Tracy cartoons—but no, the ones I’ve seen in Manhattan do everything they can to look like the real deal with their packaging.
“Stair Wells” is pretty laughable—and possibly only there because they couldn’t get the official okay to use the real name. (Although the “Rocky XXVII” is interesting. Doesn’t making fun of movies like that also hurt the industry?)
I wouldn’t take this sort of thing seriously, if I didn’t think the MPAA itself was living in this Dick Tracy fantasy. Piracy is a problem, there’s no doubt. Hoever, that their answer, thus far, has been confiscating cell phones, implementing ineffective technologies, abusing exisiting copyright laws, and going after the crappy bootlegers who likely don’t hurt the movies half as much as the movies do—well, it just shows neither they nor Mr. Tracy really know how to address the problem.
August 28th, 2005 at 1:29 pm
Given that the Matrix is based on one of the Gnostic Chistian gospels (the gospel of Thomas) and that Neo’s outfit is based on a traditional priest’s robe (the cassock).... I really didn’t think this was much of stretch.