Give a little whistle

I noticed in the video stores they're selling Bambi 2, apparently on the assumption that Bambi and the Great Prince of the Forest would give people too much hope that the production was made by people who had souls. I suspect that's just a regional alternate name, though, the way the ``Timon and Pumbaa'' version of the story is Lion King 3 rather than 1<sup>1</sup>/<sub>2</sub> here. Particularly, I noticed on the back just above the bar code the note, ``Bambi 2 Region 3'', which makes it sound like the young prince took on the Motion Picture Association of America and only lost in stoppage time.

Also intriguing me is Pinnochio 3000, recasting what I suppose is now a public domain story into the far future. Pinnochio, as you might expect, is a robot. It's computer animation, of course, but there's a sequence in which Pinnochio 3K is for some reason battling another character to see who can do the most imaginative thing with a holodeck -- oh, put that thought out of your mind, you naughty reader -- which is the kind of slightly corny thing I tend to like, even if ``surreal sequences'' in computer animation tend to look too much like screensavers to me.

And I spotted for the first time today a production called Back to Gaya, in which faintly kangaroo-headed miniature humans must battle some giant glowing special effect to save the world from blah blah. It's advertised as being from the ``writers of A Bug's Life'' -- the Pixar movie which, as you'll recall, you do not in fact recall -- ``and Hercules,'' I presume the Disney version. Also features the voice of Patrick Stewart, characters named Boo and Zino, and a group of oppressed floppy-eared humanoids called ``Snurks''. It seems all right, though the stretch I saw was near the end where one of the heroes is tricked by a friend back into the Snurk world despite his clear preference to stay with Patrick Stewart.

Trivia: Naughahyde is made of polyvinyl chloride. Source: Life Science Library: Giant Molecules, Herman F Mark. I don't know what's wrong with me; I had never considered where naughahyde came from before. It just kind of formed in unpleasant offices.

Currently Reading: Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, by Edwin G Burrows, Mike Wallace. Done!