Drawn Or Alive

The aesthetics & sensibilities of animator Peter Chung are not for everybody, but at heart he's always been pushing the medium to fulfill its potential to the utmost in the diversity of stories it can tell. MTV's experimentation with animation blocks such as Liquid Television in the 90s provided a welcome outlet for his blend of sci-fi allegory and kinky humour courtesy of the sexy secret agent Aeon Flux. In their hunt for a new futuristic franchise in a post-Matrix world Hollywood took notice of some of that, spying a similar combo of dystopian philosophising and martial arts action without picking up on the sardonic nuance essential to the formula. It's a sadly familiar tale of violated visions, cratered careers and executive dysfunction that'll have you so wound up in our telling you won't know whether to shoot us or kiss us!

With the passing of the years comes also the passing of a legend, as the nigh-on peerless voice actor Peter Cullen departs our mortal realm to join his deceased co-stars in that great recording booth in the sky. Suffice it to say our preplanned podcast celebrating 40 years of the animated cinema outing for the Transformers is tinged with more emotion and poignancy than initially expected! Nonetheless, we must do our best to set our melancholy aside and soberly survey Michael Bay's first live-action attempt to bring the Autobot-Decepticon conflict to the big screen. Maligned in many quarters for its tone and design philosophy; celebrated in others for its spectacle and the window it afforded into the wider Transformers universe. Can slick Hollywood pizazz measure up to rugged cartoon charm? It's a colossal clash of corporate cynicism in which one shall stand and one shall fall!

Maudlin, ill-advised attempts to recapture the spirit of Ghostbusters may seem a recent phenomenon, however examination of the pop culture fossil record shows evidence of this practice dating back to at least the turn of the millennium!  An extraterrestrial spin on the premise was the next logical step, even corralling attractive weirdos such as David Duchovny and Julianne Moore, and such was their confidence that a marketing blitz incorporating shampoo promotion and of course an animated spin-off followed close behind. Could this relative throwback adapt to the harsh environments of the early 2000s, when big film franchises were evolving more sophisticated traits? Magnificent monsters, fart jokes and soft drink spokespersons are examined under the microscope, while a deadly parasitic earworm is mercifully prevented from corrupting our dear listeners.

The long-awaited mobilisation of Patlabor EZY earlier this summer got us to thinking about the origins of this perennial favourite mecha police procedural, not to mention the last time it was revived with an all new cast. The anime already felt somewhat grounded in reality, so a live-action spin-off series would seem the next natural step for the franchise. Not if philosopher and part-time anime director Mamoru Oshii has his way! Beyond the safe confines of creative collective Headgear he went full maverick cop with a J-drama revamp both regretful and reverent of its legacy, shot through with his arthouse proclivities and bizarre sense of humour. Can this mismatched pair set their differences aside and get results? Keep that immaculately rendered giant robot-sized handcannon holstered or the chief will have our asses in a sling! 

Our mission statement becomes all too literal this time with a surfeit of shapeshifting monsters in animation and live action! Yoshiki Takaya's tokusatsu-inspired sci-fi horror manga was a hot ticket from the mid 80s into the early 90s, with a concerted effort from opposite sides of the globe to inform the public of the villainous dealings of the Chronos corporation and one alien-armoured boy's crusade to thwart their plans. A rapidly-paced OVA eventually morphed into a Western feature film directed by squelchy special effects master Screaming Mad George, and even involved a very game Mark Hamill to subtly misdirect audiences in its direction, though were these both the primitive stages before evolving into their ultimate forms later? Rubber-suited rumbles, scandalous CVs and camp creature cameos shall assuredly bio-boost your listening pleasure!

Your plucky podcasters speedrun a show together just in time for the arrival of a new animated entry in the Mario media multiverse, and how those times have changed! Illumination's 2023 effort seemed to deliver on all fervent fan desires, leaving 1993's somewhat maligned live-action flop flushed down the toilet of history, right? Three decades is a relative eternity in pop culture, in which attitudes can evolve and tastes can mature, beset all the while by the forces of nostalgia and franchise fatigue. Pratt & Day may be the new young hotshots in town but Hoskins & Leguizamo may yet have the edge of experience on them. Which will prevail as we plumb the depths of production hell, product placement and the year in dinosaur movies. Trust the fun-guys on this one!

Podcast pal Brian Smith, a Drawn Or Alive OG contributor, offers his expertise on British geography and comics as two funnybook legends of wildly different calibers find unlikely common ground.  For 75 years Dennis The Menace has tormented twerps and pestered parents from the pages of The Beano. Almost as old but just as mischievous stands chaos wizard and part-time comics writer Alan Moore, paying subtle tribute to the tousle-haired terror in his northern noir feature The Show.  Dennis has assumed many forms and guises across the decade, though how will his quintessential first TV series outing fare against the strange denizens of Northampton's underworld? We measure the menacing merits of each, before we succumb to the soothing sounds of the greatest song ever commissioned by a Middle England regional development authority!

After a brief bout of eternal damnation superhero films were being summoned back from the abyss at the turn of the millennium, still subject to the whims of cinema's dark masters before succumbing to franchise-building orthodoxy later that decade. From these fires arose Hellboy, Mike Mignola's demonic detective brought to life by Guillermo Del Toro's macabre imagination and a towering performance from Ron Perlman.  But would their charms extend to the realm of animation? A brace of cartoon tie-ins accompanied the big screen efforts, exploring the layers of Hellboy's comic origins, and with the cast of the well-received movies on hand it seemed a destined surefire hit. We peruse the fine print of this devil's bargain, beset by C-suite shenanigans and first film fumbles, to conclusively separate the men from the monsters.

A new year but the same old tricks, going two-in-a-row on profligate projects from cinema luminaries that took years to emerge. This also has us breaking the seal on the imposing vault of live-action adaptations of Japanese anime with one of its most storied sagas. Two decades sitting on the film rights to Yukito Kishiro's cyborg epic was enough time for mariner and part-time director James Cameron to grow weary of the prospect, enlisting Robert Rodriguez to assemble the spare parts into functional form. Amongst the dreary scrapheap of Western anime remakes how does this one compare with the perfectly enjoyable 1993 OVA from which it so liberally borrows? We steel ourselves for the task, with Niall on hand to expound on the fantastic tableaus from the manga which may grace the big screen any century now!  

Veteran of the force Joseph Wade responds to our call for backup in taking down the notorious criminal enterprise comprised of the many screen incarnations of yellow-coated copper Dick Tracy! For a newspaper comic strip Ol' Dick has quite the heinous rap sheet on the animated side outside of a Daffy Duck short. The live-action cohort exists in the shadow of Warren Beatty's hubristic effort, celebrating its 25th anniversary of biting on the style of Tim Burton's 1989 Batman film. Is there a place in this world anymore for an old-fashioned two-fisted dick and his gallery of gruesome goons? Our investigations uncover a sordid saga of death, money and the bizarre sex games of showbiz royalty, not to mention Joe solving the mystery of a cartoon cameo that's dogged him for years!