The U.S. Bureau of Fabulous Bitches

The LBT Project: The One With Animaniacs As Dinosaurs

figure 1 — Velociraptors

The U.S. Bureau of Fabulous Bitches was directed in the Fall of 2008 by the federal government to conduct an ongoing investigation into the scope of the Land Before Time (LBT) animated series. Our department is forging ahead on this by watching all thirteen movies in the LBT continuity. This is likely to be followed by reviewing the entire discography, fanfic community, and television show. You can read more about the project here. Our review of LBT One is here.

So, contrary to the belief of whiners, haters and skeptics everywhere, the USBFB’s bold Arcades-Project-esque efforts to explore the expansive universe of Land Before Time continue on this week with Land Before Time II: The Great Valley Adventure. And the story just keeps getting weirder and weirder.

First, the plot: like some deeply troubled kiddie version of the Matrix series, LBT Two keeps on trying to chug out a vaguely exciting plot where the first movie’s conclusion completely resolves the possibility of any conflict. In the original, the whole idea of the Great Valley is that it’s a perfect place away from the danger and climate change that’s devestating much of the rest of the world. To keep the lifeblood pumping in such a dead premise, the LBT Two universe kicks the continuity to the curb and turns the Valley into one hell of a dark and dangerous place: egg-robbers infiltrate the Valley, the Valley seems to be filled with a host of quicksand/tar pits that the main characters almost drown in several times over (drinking game?), and not least of which the walls of the Valley are so weak as to allow a small army of T-Rexes to invade towards the end of the film.

As a result LBT Two basically patches up a few plots into an increasingly improbably interlocking set of devices that add up roughly for the entire length of an hour and fifteen minutes. Littlefoot and his friends are chomping at the bit of parental discipline and decide to catch two thieving dinosaurs they see stealing stuff in the Great Valley. This leads them to a chase where they find an egg, which later turns out to spawn a baby TRex that wants to eat meat and creates some momentary conflict with Littlefoot’s pals. A landslide that they set off as they chase the egg-hunters opens up a door for adult “Sharptooth” to enter the Valley. The adults fight them off and the kids learn that they should stay in their place. Queue ending music!

As we revealed last week: LBT Two marks the beginning of the three-movie reign of Roy Allen Smith (producer for Muppet Babies, and the exceedingly shortlived Beethoven animated series), that, like the grand old post-Washington presidencies of Adams, Jefferson, and Madison, seems to have set the tone for much of the rest of the series. Great Valley Adventure is particularly notable in this sequence since it offers up a host of changes to the formula of the movie. There’s a terrifyingly off-key musical element that comes into play that appears to continue for the next eleven movies, and introduces a cute marketable baby TRex, Chomper, to round out the original team. Also, the movie is conspiciously designed for massive TV syndication — there’s scenes that have a dramatic plot twist followed by a slow fade to black before cutting to the next scene, at intervals of about 20 minutes. There’s also a noticable continuation of the flattening that largely blunted the pretty dramatic parental death/abandonment issues at the heart of LBT One. As one reviewer noted, “It is rated G since absolutely nothing offensive happens. In fact, not much happens at all in the show, but given target audience of young kids and given how much fun it is watching these characters frolic about, perhaps that is enough.”

Though, evidently absolute santiziation and an overt “obey your parents” subplot just isn’t enough. One totally awesome review from an angry parent that the USBFB reproduces in full from Amazon, because it is amazing:

“Teaches Small Chidren Bad Behavior!” (One Star)

My almost-three-year-old had been watching these movies for weeks and I didn’t figure out until recently that they have been teaching him bad behavior. First of all, one of the little dinosaurs screams constantly throughout these videos and this teaches little kids to scream just to make noise. The movies are also filled with smart-alec, bratty language that kids watching it will pick up on, like: “See you, wouldn’t want to be you”, and screaming, “Its not fair!” while stomping their feet. One of the movies has a scene where the kid dinosaurs are going to “Show the grown ups that we aren’t babies anymore” by disobeying their parents and venturing into a dangerous swamp that they were told to stay out of.

There are so many good children’s movies out there that teach good values and behavior. This is not one of them, however, and as a parent I recommend not bringing it home.

Perhaps even weirder, during the transition from LBT One to LBT Two, there’s almost an entire replacement of the voice acting staff. Beyond lending a totally different and higher pitched timbre to the dialogue in the movie — the only one of the original cast remaining is Candance Hutson, who plays the female lead triceratops character Cera. Interestingly, this entire staff is randomly replaced by the exact same team of talent that powered most of nerdy kid favorite Animaniacs. This by itself wouldn’t make the movie oh so unique — voice acting is a pretty small community and it figures that they’d all wind up on the same project together at some point.

But LBT Two was released in December 1994, only about a year after Animaniacs’ debut in September 1993, which places the recording of these two projects at around the same time. What’s awesome here is that all these voice actors were shopping around the exact same voices to different projects. Whether or not it’s because none of these projects were regular gigs at the time or otherwise is tough to say from the historical record.

What this means: for much of the movie, we’re treated to the uncanny experience of having Pinky’s voice embodied in the form of a dopey velociraptor (well, Struthiomimus) sidekick to the movie’s (British) villain. Dot Warner’s voice also makes a brief cameo in the form of an angry Maiasaur mother.

Pretty amazing. Stay tuned for next week — LBT Three: Time of the Great Giving.

Feature: Tim Hwang Drinks The Entire Berkman Coffee Supply For You

Since becoming a newly-minted full time employee of the Berkman Center for Internets and Society, I’ve become obsessed with the fascinatingly ungreen and terrifyingly advanced Keurig brand line of products that dispense coffee from those plastic containers that I can only assume are filled with magical pixie dust. Luckily, Berkman boasts a huge number of flavors, and I figured that it’s obvious for self-enrichment purposes to get around to tasting them all. The copy is reliably awesome, and the flavors virtually (?) indistinguishable. USBFB features our commentary, reviews, and incisive analysis every Tuesday until we’re exhausted. No coffee left behind.

This week: ESPRESSO BLEND, which the packaging describes as “Deep, dark and dynamically rich with toasty aromatics.” Intriguing! Toasty?

Espresso Blend is perhaps one of Berkman’s most popular Keurig plastic pods. In fact, by the time of writing, the box pictured above had been completely emptied of its contents, which suggests that this deep, dark, and dynamically rich coffee is being brewed at a rate of about one cup an hour on average. That’s alot of jolts.

And, on an initial taste, it’s clear why the world’s smartest minds on the Internet prefer it: Keurig Espresso Blend is some top-shelf shit.

Using the wine-tasting standards, Espresso Blend is amazing: the taste sensation is a cosmic explosion of dark roast fiesta in your mouth. It hits heavy and bitter, to let you know that it isn’t messing around, and then pulls back to reveal some subtle undertones of buttery, oaky, and faint hints of overripe lemon.

The fragrance, while not totally “toasty” as the packaging suggests, vaguely evokes burnt pancakes and sad mornings alone in sweatpants, which isn’t altogether unpleasant, really, when you just need to get your jolt and start kicking some fat ass on work.

The appearance is black. Or blackish-brown. I don’t know. Anyways, it’s a normal coffee color.

The only downside of this Berkman offering? Finish. Two hours out on consuming Espresso Blend will deliver some truly nasty career-prospect-killing coffee breath. Luckily, it’s fair trade, which I guess makes me feel a little better about it.

Rating: A-, truly the chartreuse Vespa of plastic-pod insta coffee.

The LBT Project: I Wish There Was More Dino Fighting

The U.S. Bureau of Fabulous Bitches was directed in the Fall of 2008 by the federal government to conduct an ongoing investigation into the scope of the Land Before Time (LBT) animated series. Our department is forging ahead on this by watching all thirteen movies in the LBT continuity. This is likely to be followed by reviewing the entire discography, fanfic community, and television show. You can read more about the project here.

So, we’re only one week into the project, but it’s clear already that I’m going to be a complete annoyance. Specialists need their own lingo, after all, and apparently referring to the movies as LBT, as in “LBT One is so much sweeter than the weird subplot that dominates much of LBT Four” is “obscure.” I just take my work very seriously.

The plot of LBT One is pretty simple: in the twilight of dinosaur dominance, geological cataclysm, and climate change, all the dinosaurs in the land are migrating for The Great Valley, a semi-mythical place rumored to exist where they can thrive. We’re introduced to Littlefoot, Cera, Ducky, Spike and Petrie, a diverse-group of kid dinosaurs that learn to work with one another (the directors tack on this ham-handed racism-is-bad subplot by having all the dinos live in a stratified, classist social system that stereotypes the other dinosaurs) and team up to reach the Great Valley after they are separated from their parents.

Watching it again though, what’s really striking is how phenomenally lame LBT One is. Really. Even for a kids movie, LBT One is shallow as the creepy puppet toys that were merchandised with the movie at Pizza Hut. The whole thing is mainly exciting for the totally badass few minutes where Littlefoot’s mother desperately fights off a maurauding “sharptooth.” More awesome perhaps is the endlessly amusing resource on this project, the terrifyingly comprehensive Land Before Time Wiki, which maintains a poorly written ongoing debbie-downer list of historical inaccuracies:

* “Tarpits are not just giant pools of tar, they are supposed to have a layer of water and sand. This way the creature being fooled would not realize it was a trap. Also, tarpits did not form during the age of the dinosaurs, they formed during the Cenozoic era.”

* “A Dimetrodon appears once in the film, which would have been extinct before the dinosaurs appeared. Also, Dimetrodon was bigger than the way it is depicted in the film.”

* And, favorite: “Tyrannosaurus couldn’t jump the way it did in the movie.”

What’s clear from the USBFB’s research though, is that LBT, James Taylor-like, has never, ever been cool to anyone. It was considered mass-market kitsch even before it got a chance. One Variety reviewer skewered the piece, calling the movie “one of the slowest hours ever to crawl across a screen. Animation quality is fine, but two-dimensional story will try the patience of all but the youngest viewers. Spielberg-Lucas aegis should lure initial business in 1400-screen release, but pic faces extinction soon after.”

Another wrote, “”Though LAND awes us with some wonderful animation and gorgeous backgrounds, the effect is ruined by shoddy editing and a lackluster story.”

And, in what is perhaps the most backhanded review on a kids movie ever, one New York Times review commented that “Luckily, it isn’t very long…it ought to win audiences’ hearts without wearing out their patience.”

Same goes for the production: as director Don Bluth recalled, “Spielberg said, ‘Basically, I want to do a soft picture that does not have a real driving plot. It’s about five little dinosaurs and how they grow up and work together as a group.’” The movie was aggressively blunted, “Nineteen scenes were cut, including front-on scenes portraying the children in severe jeopardy and distress. In addition, the children’s screams were replaced with milder exclamations.” And, ANIMATION magazine reported that “One of the principal sections that was cut was the Tyrannosaurus Rex attack sequence. Steven Spielberg and George Lucas apparently felt that it was too frightening and could even cause some psychological damage in very young children.” But instead of sanitizing the movie, the result is correspondingly schizo: Littlefoot’s mom gets axed, and ten minutes later we see Littlefoot frolicking around and laughing with all his new friends like nothing ever happened. The fact that their species is dying out, their home has been destroyed, their parents are dead, and they are lost and without food is rarely commented on.

Fascinating in a train-wreck kind of way, it’s worth commenting that this was the quality of work when the talented, successful people were still on staff. After LBT One, Bluth, Lucas, and Spielberg would never again work on the series — and were instead replaced by eighties-animation genius Roy Allen Smith for the next three movies (who, as IMDB indicates, was bizarrely involved as director in Family Guy and was layout editor for, successively, the “Mister T” animated series, “Thundarr The Barbarian,” “The Godzilla Power Hour,” and “Scooby Doo’s All-Star Laff-A-Lympics”)

All this, and the movie was still a financial success. Go figure.