Posts Tagged ‘WALL*E’

Hello, WALL*E!

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

Our good friends at Edison Square are now performing a new song about everyone’s favorite environmentally conscious robot, WALL*E, and they were good enough to provide us with a copy of the lyrics even before they appear on the Edison Square Web site.

The song, sung to the tune of “Hello, Dolly!” (what else?) goes a little something like this:

Hello, WALL*E!

WALL*E
Hello, Slinky
Well, Hello Twinkie
You’re so nice when I go home you’ll come along.
This is a swell, tea cup
These are a D cup
This one’s glowin’, this fan’s blowin’
They’ll all come along.
I am a bit lonely
And I wish only
That I had a friend who wasn’t just a roach.
So, crush that trash, WALL*E
Cannibalize some parts, WALL*E
WALL*E’ll never have a friend again.

EVE
Hello WALL*E!
Well, hello WALL*E!
I enjoyed when you put on that ancient song.
Hey what is that, WALL*E?
It’s a plant, WALL*E,
It’s still growin’, so I’m goin’
I must move along.
No more time for playin’
‘Cause I’m not stayin’
My directive says I must go home again, so

WALL*E
None of that, EVE
I’m gonna come along, EVE

Eve
I promise you’ll never be alone again

WALL*E
I flew away clinging on to a space ship
And through the atmosphere’s haze
I followed EVE through the maze of the space ship
Together we’ll show Captain the good old days

Humans
Those good old days
Hello, Well Hello WALL*E
Well hello, like my chair, WALL*E?

WALL*E
It’s sure nice but do you like my girlfriend’s gun?

Humans
Girlfriend’s gun

WALL*E
Please understand, Captiain
Can you stand, Captain?
AUTO’s gone insane, is over wrought, and glares like HAL

Humans
We can’t get thinner
If we drink dinner
So we must turn this ship Earthward once again
So…

WALL*E
This is grand, people
EVE finally held my hand, people

Humans
WALL*E’ll never be alone again

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Monorail Red Finally Running

Thursday, July 10th, 2008

The new Mark VII Monorail — known as “Monorail Red” to those of us who are tired of Disney naming all of their monorails “Mark” — is finally running at Disneyland.

The monorail was plagued by design problems from the start. The first monorail delivered by German manufacturer Der Wonderkin Monorailverks was underpowered, hard to control, low capacity, and H0 scale — not at all what Disney had in mind. Specifications were completely revised, fleshed out from a single sentence (“A cool new red one”) to more than 500 pages and an entirely new vehicle was fabricated.

When the new model was delivered, it looked great but proved to be almost as problematic as its predecessor. Said Disneyland monorail roundhouse supervisor Monorail Supervisor Fred, “We just couldn’t understand why so many poor design decisions were made by the vendor. Why was the steering wheel so big? Why was it oblong? And why did a monorail have a steering wheel in the first place? It was a mess. The cabins had no air conditioning and the windows barely opened so the cabins got suffocatingly stuffy almost immediately, and that’s when we found out that the designers had done all their research on west-coast American weather by visiting Seattle. Not very diligent if you ask me, but I will say that the Mark VII has excellent rain protection.”

The pluses of the new design — such as a top speed of more than 600 MPH and sleeping berths for long journeys — were not enough to convince Disney that Monorail Red would be show ready without significant modifications. The problems became such a joke at Disney that Pixar even included a passing scene of a broken red monorail near the beginning of their hit movie WALL*E.

So how did Disney finally get Monorail Red up and running? By taking matters in their own hands, that’s how. Said Disneyland’s chief railstock engineer Chief Railstock Engineer Brunhilda, “It was nothing you couldn’t fix with a chainsaw, duct tape, and a little paint.”

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New WALL*E Controversy

Monday, July 7th, 2008

Even as the U.S. domestic box office receipts for WALL*E pass the 27 trillion Zimbabwe dollar mark, new controversy is brewing over some of the film’s more disturbing content. “I was really surprised by all the cannibalism,” said Stew Eaton, dubious spokesperson for Americans Against Theaters Exposing Youth to Outrageous Ugliness. “The robot steals a dead robots shoes, which is bad enough, but then we see that he has this trailer filled with containers of parts of his fellow beings, and he uses those parts to feed his own desire to survive — literally cannibalizing the dead so he may live! At the end of the film Eve is dragged into the circle of hideousness and feeds WALL*E bits of his fellows until he returns to life, but when he returns his mind is gone — because he has succumbed to what is obviously prion disease, a condition common among cannibals who eat brains!”

Eaton paused for a moment and asked us why we had stopped eating our lunch, then continued without waiting for answer. “And it wasn’t just the robot! Think about all those people on that space ship. They’ve been there 700 years, we don’t see signs that anyone ages, but there are babies being born. Why isn’t the place bursting at the seams? Because they’re drinking soylent green Slurpees, that’s why! The evidence is everywhere, clear as the Fourth of July. This might as well have been the Donner Party cartoon.”

We contacted Disney’s Ethics Officer for comment, but he was at lunch — and his secretary was missing. Coincidence? We hope so.

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Wall*E and copyright infringement

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008

We have received several e-mails discussing the possibility that Pixar’s latest star, WALL*E is a proponent of copyright infringement. And it’s not just our readers who see the problem.

According to reporters at Unsubstantiated Rumor Magazine, former Disney CEO and Pixar unaficionado Michael Eisner has accused WALL*E of fostering music piracy by recording the soundtrack of a video tape. Noting that by making a copy of the music for himself WALL*E has “duplicated copyrighted content and distributed it to every sentient being left on the planet.” Eisner says he is willing to testify before the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee that, “the movie suggests to people that they can create theft if they buy WALL*E robots.”

Disney legal analyst and unofficial spokesperson Bill Manyhours responds to these allegations. “In the context of the film,” says Manyhours, “Hello, Dolly! would have been out of copyright for more than 700 years. Under these very specific, rigidly defined conditions, Disney does not see a legal problem with a user making a single copy of the soundtrack of the film for personal use, so long as no copyright protection schemes are circumvented. For the same reason, we do not see Wall*E’s attempt to hold Eve’s hand as theft of intellectual property even though he is clearly doing so in an attempt to recreate the action depicted in the film and this might, in another context, be considered an illegal digital-to-analog conversion.”

Manyhours added that, although he stands by his statements at this time, they may be impacted by pending Disney-sponsored legislation which would extend corporate copyright protection “into the foreseeable future.” He also asks us to remind our readers that making a copy of the portion of theWALL*E soundtrack that includes only the sounds of the portion of Hello, Dolly! that were copied by Wall*E is curently a violation of copyrights held by both Disney and 20th Century Fox, “so don’t even think about it.”

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More WALL*E inspirations

Friday, June 27th, 2008

In an interview with Underwire magazine, filmmaker Andrew “Mr. Stanton” Stanton revealed that not only was his new feature Wall*E a sequel to the classic Silent Running (as we discussed yesterday), it was also inspired by other classic Sci Fi films. For example:

Alien: This inspired the scene of WALL*E being chased through air ducts by overweight people armed with flamethrowers. The movie also inspired Stanton to cast Sigourney Weaver as a voice that “bursts from the chest” of a computer system.

Blade Runner: Referenced in WALL*E’s bizarre unicorn-dream sequence (which, at press time, it appears has been cut from the final print of the film — look for it to appear in a DVD “director’s cut” release).

2001: A Space Odyssey: The first half of WALL*E has no dialog because there is so much poetic silence in 2001.

Outland: Wall*E was clearly modeled after Sean Connery (though he’s armed with a fire extinguisher instead of a shotgun).

Planet of the Apes: WALL*E is cleaning up after the “damned, dirty humans.” Also referenced in the scene at the beginning of the film where WALL*E is dismantling the fallen Statue of Liberty.

Star Wars: WALL*E is actually Eve’s brother, but they don’t discover this until after they “kiss.” Also, WALL*E’s movements are based on those of actor Kenny Baker.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Stanton claims that “a close encounter of the fourth kind involves robots cleaning up after encounters one through three.”

Tron: As a nod to this film, Stanton suggested that Disney purchase Pixar.

So now that you know all about the film, go out and see it!

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WALL*E trivia

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

You may be interested to know that Pixar’s new film Wall*E isn’t a standalone feature. Although it is not widely known, this feature is actually a sequel of sorts to 1972’s Silent Running, which starred Bruce Dern as a space-faring gardener armed with nuclear weapons.

Silent Running is largely about three robots who are taking care of what is left of Earth’s plant life while certain other robots — not mentioned in the film — are trying to clean up the planet so that the plants can be reintroduced. The Disney connection is made clear by the robots’ names — Huey, Dewey, and Louie.

There are parallels in the films’ dialog as well. Silent Running: “Take good care of the forest, Dewey.” WALL*E: “Take good care of the planet, WALL*E.”

Tomorrow, we’ll look at a few more classic films that served as inspiration for WALL*E.

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WALL*E, corrections

Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

We have a couple of corrections to yesterday’s post on the new Pixar movie, WALL*E. Namely:

  1. The movie’s title is supposed to be in all caps — WALL*E, not Wall*E. (Apparently, Wall*E — with the lower-case letters — is street slang for wall paper infused with ecstasy.)
  2. We were less than accurate when we quoted some moron who said that Carol Channing is the voice for Wall*E’s ship’s computer. The ship’s computer is actually voiced by Sigourney Weaver. (Carol Channing played the title character in Alien.)
  3. The scene where characters vomit to the tune of songs from Yentl is in Shrek IV, not Shrek III, and in fact the song they vomit is not from Yentl, but is a medley from Funny Lady.
  4. We should have had a “spoiler alert” tag before the paragraph about Eve accidentally crippling WALL*E with the surplus rocket launcher, and should probably never have mentioned her subsequent suicide at all.

Sorry ’bout that!

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Wall*E product placement

Tuesday, June 24th, 2008

Reviews are starting to appear for the new Pixar film Wall*E, and although some are less than five-star (such as Roper and Phillips’ review, which includes words like “tiresome,” “forbidding,” and “the”), most are lauding the production (such as “Movie Reviews for Sale,” which says, “This is absolutely, positively, the best film I have ever or will ever see if I live to be a million.”)

But what people aren’t talking about is the copious product placement in the film. “It’s the first time that Pixar has really sold out,” says self-aggrandizing film historian and delusional semi-psychopath Fred Friedskul. “You’ll see products from A1 Fire Extinguishers, the BnL corporation, and Thinkway Toys. But even more blatant is that blatant blatancy of the product placement for the new remastered DVD release of Hello, Dolly! Seriously, has Barbra Streisand sunk so low that she has to to advertise her movies in kids features? As if the Yentl references during that Shrek III vomit scene weren’t bad enough. You wouldn’t catch Carol Channing doing this kind of garbage, which is why the fact that she’s the voice for Wall*E’s ship’s computer all the more ironic.”

Even so, we’re betting it’ll be the best Disney movie with a main character who’s a cockroach since Mickey’s Metamorphosis!

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Of animatronics and Wall*E

Friday, June 20th, 2008

It has been announced that after the release of Pixar’s newest feature Wall*E, a full-size animatronic Wall*E will be introduced into Disney’s California Adventure! This specially programmed, completely autonomous automaton will drive, make expressive noises, and pick up trash, just like its movie counterpart. Disney management says that it may even be allowed to interact with guests after it has completely cleaned its area of the park.

Unfortunately, just a few days after this news was released, Disney announced that it would be firing a significant number of its animatronics-department staff. This marks an end to Disney’s tradition of developing lifelike figures in-house or (in recent years) of outsourcing much of its animatronics work but not telling anyone. The released staffers will be replaced by specially programmed, completely autonomous Wall*E-style robots.

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Disney Animation 2008: WALL*E

Friday, April 25th, 2008

WALL*E, Pixar’s next animated feature, is scheduled to be released on June 27 at the 28th Annual Vegas Appliance Convention. The film stars voice actors Kenny Baker as the title character, and Sigourney Weaver as a spaceship crewmember desperately trying to convince everyone that WALL*E has acid for blood and is threatening to eat her cat.

Despite its rudimentary capitalization and unconventional punctuation, WALL*E is predicted to be a big hit with robots, androids, Al Gore, and the like. In fact, even though the movie is yet to be released, demand for WALL*E toys is so high that you likely won’t find a single on at your local Disney store (and, if you wait a little longer, you may not find your local Disney store in your local Disney store, either).

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