He's a demon on wheels

[austin_dern]

I saw on the Cartoon Brew blog positive mention of the trailer for the oncoming Speed Racer movie, and the things that were positive about the comments -- particularly that they seemed to be capturing important parts of the spirit of the original, down to some of the original sound effects and that weird dialogue where even the characters who aren't speaking in code appear to be speaking in code -- I clicked to look at the trailer. At the AOL site housing the trailers I clicked the ``Watch Trailer'' link, which I imagined would let me watch the trailer. This brought up a warning that this content was not authorized for my area yet and one I clicked the nondescript warning button it presented a little movie panel which downloaded without any threat of ever playing.

So I tried again on the ``Watch the exclusive new trailer in HD:'' links, which offer, helpfully, buttons labelled ``480'', ``720'', and ``1080''. This probably means something to people who actually care about the difference between normal television and HD television, but my rough tastes still can't even tell for sure whether the audio is in stereo so the alleged improvements in picture clarity are lost on me. I did click on the 1080 link since usually with this sort of thing a bigger number means more extra double plus good, and soon Quicktime opened up a window several times the size of my computer screen. Apparently my computer is not 1080. (It doesn't look a day over 768.) I clicked on ``half size'' and waited for the file to download, eventually.

And when we get to the action, there's that exciting musical sting and bit from the opening credits of the cartoon, that checkerboard pattern, and then the image froze partway through a screen refresh. The trailer staggered on that way, with a few seconds of motion, a frozen picture, and then odd bits of dialogue. Occasionally the movement on-screen matched the dialogue, but often it was out of synch, and very often what would happen is there'd be a still or nearly still picture implying action while music or speech was going on.

Most likely this is just an artifact of my computer not handling such a huge video file as quickly as it needed, but you have to admit, the effect certainly captures the spirit of the original cartoon.

Trivia: Picric acid was first synthesized in 1771, and was used as an artificial dye for silk and wool. Source: Napoleon's Buttons, Penny Le Couteur, Jay Burreson.

Currently Reading: Starchild, Frederik Pohl, Jack Williamson.

Comments

[spaceroo.livejournal.com]

Most "Hi-Def" Quicktime videos these days use that "H.264" (or something like that) codec, which is really good at making G4s look bad. Bleah.

I just watched the trailer myself (at the correct speed) and... eeeeeh. It seems to bear a striking resemblance to those "Spy Kids" movies, without Ricardo Montalban. (Kaaaaaaahn!) Speed Racer isn't about brutally-detailed day-glo cars rotating in 3D, for crying out loud. It's about, well, not much, but it ain't about that. :^b

(Maybe I'm still smarting from sitting through that Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle movie the other day. To all those movie directors out there: Just because you *can* stop an already cheesy computer-generated special effect in the middle and rotate around the plummeting/exploding/karate-kicking object to get another view of it *over and over again* doesn't mean you *should*. Doing it doesn't make your lousy movie better. It was cute in "The Matrix" but we're done with that now.)

[rcoony.livejournal.com]

Hah, I find that frozen rotation effect annoying and overused too, but whenever I see it, I think of Wing Commander (unfortunately).

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

You can't deny such freeze-frames and occasionally looking at the frozen scene from multiple angles reflects what they did in the 1960s cartoon, though. Although there they were probably trying to cover up that they needed to move the commercial breaks around and used what had been a cliffhanger as a stretch of `animation'.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Maybe day-glo isn't quite appropriate, but if Speed Racer isn't about improbable-looking vehicles having hyperkinetic races in surreal landscapes then what is it about? Is an overlit neon spiral track really less in theme than racing through the rain forest to the top of a stone-robot-guarded pyramid against a duplicate Mach Five with an atom bomb in the trunk and a diamond hidden in its pineapple?

[spaceroo.livejournal.com]

Is an overlit neon spiral track really less in theme than racing through the rain forest to the top of a stone-robot-guarded pyramid against a duplicate Mach Five with an atom bomb in the trunk and a diamond hidden in its pineapple?

Racing through rain forests and pyramids and volcanos just has more, I don't know, "romance" to it then racing around a racetrack that looks like it was generated in "Rollercoaster Tycoon". I guess, I don't know, the original "Speed Racer" has this, "Scooby Doo" meets "Johnny Quest" meets "What's up Tiger Lily" quality. The movie seems to be more "Rollerball" (2002, not 1975) meets "Spy Kids" meets "Carmageddon". With a monkey thrown in.

I think I'll wait for "Wacky Races, The Motion Picture". The style of special effects they've gone for would work great for that.

[orv.livejournal.com]

The numbers are HDTV-isms. HDTV resolutions are specified by the number of vertical lines. So it's 480, 720, or 1080 pixels tall. The aspect ratio is always 16:9, so the width can be calculated from the height.

I suspect this odd arrangement comes from an analogy to analog TV, which had a fixed number of vertical lines (480 visible lines, in NTSC) but no fixed number of horizontal pixels, since each line is just a continuously varying voltage.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I figured it had to do something with screen lines, although since I've got ... oh, huh. I only have 960 vertical screen lines. Still no excuse for the window to be twice as tall as my screen.

I still think they're making up most of the resolution stuff.

[orv.livejournal.com]

Just to make things more confusing, there are interlaced and progressive versions of some of them. It's no wonder that no one has really marketed this stuff to consumers in a way they understand.