Lions had basically memorized the wicked soundtrack over years of commuting with it on but dreaded a Wicked without Idina Menzel & the full length.  Tried & failed to watch the bootlegged live performance on the gootubes.  There was still hope, based on the music.  It was a long wait.

Mercifully, they got the original cast in "1 short day".  After 15 years of stops & starts, almost not happening, it was kind of a miracle the original cast was still below the female age cutoff.  It would have been a different world if the voice of frozen was still the witch.

Always a warm moment when an old pro is in the same scene as the current generation.  They were obviously more enthralled in working with the great Jeff Goldblum than the wizard, until he became evil.

Finally, after 2h27m, the extremely overdue & delayed flying scene arrived.  At this point in the history of movies, flying isn't a big deal but maybe it was a hit with generation Z.  It reminded lions of all their super powers, how they had to learn to use them responsibly.  It wasn't automatic.  Of course, lions won't be receiving the gift of flight.

It definitely suffered from sound effects & dialog stepping on the music.  Gone are the days of lifting music from movies.  Previously knew there was a convoluted turning point when the blond bitch became good & the green witch became bad.

Recalled a segment in the original soundtrack where the witch said "I feel wicked", ran amok & killed off the wheelchair girl.  The wheelchair girl was actually the witch's sister in the movie.  The show was split into 2 parts for the movie, probably to reduce the risk, after already not going anywhere for 15 years.  It did so well in the box office, all the pushback makes lions wonder if it's a case of the suits having a different agenda than the audiences.

 

Shot from the trailer wasn't in the movie.

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Also finally making it to the hard drive was Full Metal Jacket in HD, an essential viewing before the marathon.  After the terror of seeing it for the 1st time at age 13, signing up for the marathon made lions appreciate how most of those guys were there for the glory.  Basic training was a way to put their aspirations in check.  Marathons are in some ways harder than what those guys did.

It's another Kubrik one which was cropped from the way lions always saw it.

Young lion pondered how accurately the barracks were depicted.  Now we know they were accurate but all shot in London, hence the dreary weather.

As disappointing as the 16x9 was, the higher resolution seemed to make the facial expressions pop more.

 

It was more apparent in HD that he was going to shoot Joker.

Always noted how laid back things became after basic training.  Young lion pondered how these were the same guys in basic training.

Old lion pondered if the shooting of subsistance farmers really happened.  The door gunner scene was in page 75 of the book.  The book referred to it as a free fire zone where they could shoot anything they wanted.  Kiwipedia says free fire zones were areas cleared of all friendlies & anyone there was considered an enemy.  There was much conflict between soldiers about the free fire zones.

Old lion pondered how the sniper survived all the grenades & bombardment of her hideout.  The movie left no mistake that she was programmed hard, but old lion pondered what circumstances in the economy or the ruling party led to the programming.

Old lion noted the dynamic between Cowboy & Animal mother, as leaders successively got killed.

Reviewing the cliff notes, the movie was very loosely based on a 3 part book.  That's why it's 2 unrelated parts.  There's no mention of historical accuracy.  The cliff notes emphasized a lot of mental insanity & incompetence in the marines.  It made lions wonder how uneducated & primitive the volunteer marines of the 1960's were.  This was a much more agrarian population than today.  They probably shot guns their entire lives but knew very little math.

Archive.org obtained the rights to the book.  Skimming through the book, R. Lee Ermey didn't improvise as much as the internet says.  A lot of his lines came straight from the book.  There was a lot of hazing in the old days.  The book expounded on the number of section 8 discharges so private Pyle's malfunction wasn't as unique as it was in the movie. The book emphasized a lot of them being farm boys with no education or future outside the military.

The internet has no mention of a shooting of a drill instructor in the 1960's & suicides tend to be from typical problems of 18 year olds rather than the training.  Adolescence is the great filter for humans, a time of gaining great capabilities without the knowledge to use them.  The internet says it ended in July of 1995 for lions, though the peak incompetence probably didn't really end until 1996.

The trick with books is the 1st 1/3 is intended to hook you.  The last 2/3 are for page count.  That's what the basic training chapter does.  It's kind of a short story from 1 of those magazines which used to publish short stories.

Lions ponder what made Kubrick pick this book out of the zillions of Vietnam war books written by soldiers.

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The book expanded on the movie line "The drill instructors are proud to see that we are growing beyond their control."  The book said "Civilians may chose to submit or to fight back.  The drill instructors leave recruits no choice.  Marines fight back or they do not survive."

The old man was not a competent father.  Lions probably wouldn't have survived or at least wouldn't have attained any economic means if they obeyed the old man to the letter, didn't fight back, & didn't have any help from mom.  What began with an obsession with useless humanities classes, useless life sciences degrees, became an obsession with avoiding technology jobs, money being stolen & vengeance draining bank accounts.  There are stories of more successful animals completely moving out on their own.

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Rounding out the downloads was Army of Darkness, which looked like it used the same props as Xena.  Being the least serious movie of them all, & lions preferring the least serious, it was the 1st in.  Helas, it was the worst of the Evil Dead serials.  Joxer obviously got out of his cage & into the writing process.

Building up his powers for his magnum opus in Xena.

The stop motion skeletons were straight from Xena, by which time they were motion tracked.  Would be surprised if modern motion tracking wasn't using pose estimation to aid detection of the markers.  Matching markers to body parts & reverse engineering kinematic solutions from marker positions was the big challenge.  

Sam Raimi reused the same visuals for his entire career. 

 

After another big stop motion investment, it switched to actors in skeleton suits when they ran out of money.  They might have picked skinny guys to aid the illusion of skeletons.

She would have nothing to do with him in reality, unless they were in Wisconsin or something.

Lions believe Ben Heck likes these movies because they check all the boxes.  He's not attracted to anything besides the plot form.  He was definitely the perfect match for the evil dead pinball machine.  He has implied he never married because he wasn't attractive enough.  A high profile gootuber with a lot of money was probably a perfect match. 

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Lions were only briefly in an industry which pushed the limits of feeds & speeds like showbiz.  Since then, they've all been focused on cost reduction, obsolete parts, power saving.  As far as what was more entertaining: feeds & speeds.  That's why most animals go into the industry during the rotten years.  During the good years, they all come for money & hate the work.  Most animals don't come to make the cheapest toaster oven, unless they're economists.

AI isn't the feeds & speeds problem lions knew.  It burns through enormous amounts of clockcycles to do nothing or at best process an extremely low bandwidth of data.  It definitely utilizes the high end hardware, but the output during the current wave is text.

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The last days of Clinton.  The death of an animal is strangely sad, even with no connection other than a few gootube videos.  Rossguy's cats became an endearing memory for a lot viewers.

The background voice sounds like the same girlfriend he had after dumping the arabian.

Hussy revealed her sister retired 10 years ago, after a lucrative career.  She must have been in her 30s.  In previous videos, she was working after 2020, so might be doing gig work like most FIRE's.  She might have been in a demanding sales job.

The lion kingdom could probably disappear into the desert like that.  The decision was to keep working as long as possible or 58, because it's been easy money, there's uncertainty, opportunity cost, sending the family tree out with a bang, what if lions end up wanting something but not having enough money. 

It could be evidence of automation allowing more animals to retire early or the whole FIRE movement could end badly.  50 years ago, FIRE was unheard of.  That required winning a lottery or building an empire.  It could be the demise of pensions allowing some to get lucky where they were all equal before.

Ross Guy previously said he wanted to retire in his 40's.  He's definitely working like it, grinding out $8000 of videos a week, in addition to 2 jobs.