The Final Boss

Suburban Collapse

Arcade Fire collaborated with Spike Jonze to create this weird, moving portrait of suburban life slowly going to hell as the military rounds people up. I've never seen anyone successfully create a wistful apocalyptic tone the way Jonze does here.

Arcade Fire's indie rock soundscape perfectly compliments Jonze's images of bored, innocently destructive teens in the suburbs riding bikes and play-fighting. But the tone begins to darken as we see smoke in the distance, and armed guards everywhere. Then we start to get flashes of people being rounded up at night by people with guns, while our teen protagonists try to lead normal lives - still playing with bikes, still working at a fast food joint.

It's an intense, emotional snippet, and I wish I could see a feature film that captured this same mix of teen aimlessness and social apocalypse. The best part? You never know if there really is some massive social breakdown going on, or if these trucks full of military guys and cops are just an ordinary part of the suburban landscape.

Contact Annalee Newitz, the author of this post, at annalee@io9.com

Saturday Morning Cartoons

Ah, the early 80's. As we're thinking about the passing of John Hughes - I'm thinking of the other Breakfast Club. The one where we hovered around the tube watching cartoons while spooning Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs into our gullets.
First, this is the CBS intro to their Saturday Morning. Very video game. Hip.


There were an amazing number of Video Game related shows, and imagery aimed at us - well, that's what kids like, right? The network execs probably realized that if we weren't watching a cartoon about our 8bit heroes, we'd be playing them on our Ataris or worse, leaving the house to go to the arcade. And why not just make a half hour commercial for those games? the 'shows' fell between the ads for sugary foods and toys? Eh, I'm not going to crap in your memories, so here's some of that old fashioned video game goodness.


This Saturday, keeping in the theme is the Saturday Supercade... with all the individual openings to those shows. I don't really understand how these cartoons capitalize on popular arcade games of the time, since the stories and the characters just barely resemble the source material ... Supercade ran from 1983-1985. It was a series of cartoons, including Pitfall, Frogger, Donkey Kong, DK Jr., Q-Bert, Kangaroo, and Space Ace.

Can anyone tell me why Q-Bert is set in the 1950's? Frogger solves - mysteries? Really? I'm guessing this show eventually died because of the video game crash of 1983? And I'll assume that it took so long to create these shows that there was such a long backlog, they were compelled to keep airing the Kangaroo cartoon. There was another show, called Captain N - about a kid who was sucked into his Nintendo Entertainment System. Sounds a lot like Kidd Video -- but it's Nintendo this time. Here's part one of the episode called 'Game Boy'

This is more of an advertisement than the Transformers! It's worth watching just for Mega Man's voice talent. And maybe for the, er, flamboyant voice of Simon Belmont.... I can understand the choice if he was called Simon Halsted - but not Belmont.

Anyhow, hope you enjoy your cartoons.