It's Gonna Be June

 Man, this month was both long as hell and whizzed by so fast.

Just today I saw The Mandalorian and Grogu movie. I have to confess, this was the first new Star Wars thing I've seen since Rise of Skywalker. My verdict? Way better than Rise of Skywalker.

I actually went out of this not sad, or disappointed, or angry at any of the choices made in this movie. The main complaint I've seen for this was that it was a standalone story that would've disappointed fans of the show because there was nothing new plot-wise or any character development. Well, it was more aimed for people like me, and if this movie existed solely to get me interested in watching the rest of the series? Well, mission accomplished. 

I wasn't exactly blind going into this, either. I knew Rotta the Hutt from the Clone Wars pilot movie was back (Jeremy Allen White giving a performance that would make Hayden Christensen proud), Zeb from SW Rebels making that rare jump from tv character to someone in the official canon, and Sigourney Weaver standing around and wondering what life choices she made that led her to be in this movie. And also Martin Scorcese was in this for some reason. You'll know him when you see him, he voices the Italian-sounding alien with big bushy eyebrows.

It was a solid Hawk and Chick-esque adventure with tiny puppet aliens that sounded too much like the Minions. I liked seeing more Babu Frick aliens, but their voices were almost too distracting. But if that was the main complaint I have about a Star Wars movie, it's definitely worth watching.

But the name Grogu still rubs me the wrong way because American Dad introduced a similar looking tiny alien thing named Rogu and he showed up first.

See? Way more worthy of the name. I wish the people running Star Wars came up with literally any other name for Baby Yoda. (Who was of course, adorable and an actual animatronic puppet!)

Other stuff I did? Conventions!

First up, the big Long Island TCG show! Man, this scene really pissed me off this past year or so. Streamers and resellers have ruined this hobby and I've barely bought any cards since more or less the last big show they had here last year.

Seriously. Crazy prices.

And this set of Gem Mint Van Gogh cards were going for $65K. Just insane.

And that's on top of seeing a Black Lotus in the flesh. But it wasn't from the sets people really care about, it wouldn't have been just in a penny sleeve in a big case with the rest of the rare stuff.

I was mostly there to see voice actors.

Was finally able to scratch a few names off my wanted list, like Eric Vale (Sanji from One Piece), Justin Cook (Kirishima from MHA), and Eric Stuart.

He joins Matthew Sussman, the original English voice of Meowth on this print. It's really sad that Rachel Lillis, the original dub voice of Jessie passed away, so I can't complete the set. I just need to wait for Michelle Knotz to come around again to get a Jessie on this.

Oh, and I met Professor Oak.

Yes, the real one. Stuart Zagnit actually cosplays as Professor Oak and he was as delightful as everyone else. It sucks that most voice actors charge extra to add quotes these days, or else I would've gotten him to add "now's not the time for that!" on this pic:

And then later in the month came Cradle Con!

The main event was a few cast and crew of the original GI Joe cartoon were there, and had a panel.

I don't have a lot of nostalgic attachment to that cartoon (I've always been a Transformers guy), but the highlight was hearing Bill Ratner, the voice of Duke, talk about the Barbie Liberation Organization, the people that switched the voice boxes of talking Barbie and Duke dolls. It happened one Christmas in New York City but it was enough to inspire a Simpsons gag:

It was a trip to hear Duke's voice talk like Barbie, and him imitating Barbie yelling "YO JOE!" If it weren't for my social anxiety (and I didn't want to pay the fifty bucks), I would've asked him about that Simpsons gag.

I still managed to pick up these Canari cards. They're from the then-recent Ascended Heroes set and pretty much the only card I wanted out of it. I got the Japanese one at the TCG show, and found the English one at Cradle Con. Thankfully they didn't break the bank too much because everyone wants the fancier (and rarer) SIR cards, but I like this art much better.

My other pickups at that con. Action Comics #454 has a notoriously silly cover:

I bought the original a few years back, but recently DC has been rereleasing various old classic issues, and for some reason they reissued this one, and with a blank cover variant to boot. I'm gonna have some fun with this one.

And while I didn't pick up any new pins at Cradle Con (gasp), I snagged a few at the TCG booth. The Mewtwo one from the official store, and a few from Wild Bill's. Had no idea they sold pins, and two for six bucks was a deal I couldn't pass up.

And finally, various other pics I got at Cradle-Con:

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Let's Take A Breather

So...what did I do this April?

Nothing much, really. Well, STUFF did happen. Easter happened, people died, some people went crazy.

I saw the Mario Galaxy movie, at least. My verdict? I liked it more than the first one. The first one had a better story, this one had more action. And way fewer random needle drops! But this was relentless. I read a review that called it "made for the Youtube Shorts generation" and I couldn't get it out of my head. A thing happens, they go to the next thing, repeat until the credits pop up. Nothing gets to breathe and lots of characters are just...there. Bowser in particular has an inconsistent arc.

But it's a treat for folks like me that love the deep cuts of Mario lore. So many times I was like Leo DiCaprio pointing at the screen to see this thing or that thing remembered, let alone on a big screen in HD. I wish we weren't spoiled on Star Fox or the SMB 2 villains, but they looked gorgeous. There were a few other cool cameos and Easter Eggs I won't spoil, but it's been out for almost a month, you probably know what they are by now.

No Wario, Waluigi, or the Koopalings, though. They're like the only major Mario characters that haven't shown up yet. They must be saving them for the next movie.

And if you're aware of Frinkiac, the site where you can look up Simpsons screenshots and make gifs out of them, someone recently made one for King of The Hill

And The Venture Bros.

Boompane and Spanakopedia, respectively, have been godsends for the meme community. But while Frinkiac worked with static images, you could make actual clips with these sites. With audio. And (just about) every episode of those shows are on there, even the Hulu reboot season for King of The Hill. That...kinda technically makes them pirate sites. Even if the clips can't be longer than a minute. So enjoy them while you can, folks.

And we were watching a Super Champion on Jeopardy!

Jamie Ding was on a 31 game streak, and was finally knocked out this past Monday. He came close to losing a few times, like in a really good one last week with Patrick. But his buzzer game was one of the strongest I'd ever seen, and a lot of his episodes looked like this Far Side comic.

Greg, the guy who beat him was a chess champion who was faster than Jamie was. Although to do so he needed a "buzz first, think later" approach. It was successful at beating Jamie at his own game, but the rest of the games he played this week, to buzz in and have a brain fart almost every single time while keeping the rest of us in suspense was...not at all frustrating to watch. It happens to the best of us, but every time? He was knocked out today by someone who was able to grab the Daily Doubles from him.

Weird Al sums it up better than I do:

And then I did have one great pickup this month:

A new cel! I've been wanting a Scooby-Doo cel forever, but they're usually pricey as hell. Old series, iconic series, iconic characters? Good luck paying for less than triple digits.

But this one I got an actual good deal on. It's from 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo. Most cheap cels from this show that pop up on eBay either have half of a character, or they're really tiny, or it's some no name extra, or it's Flim Flam. I found one that has most of Scooby (he's missing his tail), and all of Flim Flam. Well, it's no Vincent van Ghoul, but I couldn't pass this opportunity up.

The background is a reproduction, and it's not even from the original scene. It originally looked like this: 

I don't blame the seller for including a background that made the characters pop better. This particular cel is from episode 3, "Scoobra Cadabra," where for some reason they disguise themselves as used car salesmen in this scene.

The frame pops up at around 1:37 in the video.

Oh! And one of my Seattle cousins sent me this care package out of the blue

All cool stuff from the Funko HQ store in Everett, Washington. You might recall that I visited it during my Seattle trip last year.

And one of my other cousins that lives in Arizona took her family to Disneyland a few weeks ago and sent me this guidemap in the mail that I wasn't expecting at all.

You have no idea how happy I am that Disneyland still makes these. And it checks off a lot of my boxes: Disney theme parks. Guidemaps. Anniversary promotion (still in the middle of the 70th anniversary!). And Bluey!

Don't know what I did to deserve these gifts, but I welcome them.

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Number 39

 Last week I celebrated my 39th trip around the sun.

And I spent it sick.

Don't worry, it was just a cold and a mild sinus infection and I'm fine now. But those couple of days SUCKED. Started Saturday, finally got my smell and taste back around Thursday.

Well, on Friday I was well enough to venture into Manhattan again since my birthday week is one of the vacation weeks I get off every year.

If spice level 7 from Ichiran wouldn't clear the sinuses, nuthin will. Thankfully, it did.

And it was a bit of a spur of the moment thing, but I finally went to see the Museum of Modern Art. I always wanted to see it, and I'm glad I did.

And this is what you see when you go in.

I thought I'd breeze through the thing in like two hours. It's just looking at paintings, right?

Well, I was wrong. If you ever go, I'd set aside plenty of time for it. There's five floors, and I must've spent and hour and a half on just the fifth floor alone.

It's the floor with most of the works I wanted to see, no wonder I spent so much time there. I started there first and made my way down.

Van Gogh's "Starry Night" was one of the show stoppers. It was hard to get close to it, let alone get a good shot of it. But it is quite beautiful.

Picasso's works were everywhere.

As were Mondrian's. You see these in pictures for years, but it's truly something else to see them up close and in person. It's lines and squares, they shouldn't be fascinating...yet they are.

Monet's "Water Lillies" was another of the show stoppers. The main pieces took up the entire room. But there were too many people in front of it, so I couldn't get a picture of it. But I did get this smaller work, which was still pretty big.

And I finally got to see one of my favorite pieces in person: Dali's "The Persistence of Memory." You know, the melting clock painting. I couldn't help but go back several times to keep looking at it. You can really see the brush strokes that make these possible when you're up close.

But what they never said about this piece is that it's, uh,

Tiny.

The whole thing was about the size of a corkboard. I was like "that's it?" when I first found it. You see all these giant artworks, and then this one. But that makes it even more impressive how Dali was able to fit all of that on such a small canvas.

Mark Chagall's centerpiece of the Cubism room.

One of the many cool sculptures I saw.

Another fascinating one. Plenty of pieces challenge the definition of "representational."

This one blew me away.

Technically an artistic nude. Picasso got weird in his later years.

Fun fact: this was the first painting to enter MoMA's collection. And it was just hanging on a wall.

Right next to this famous piece, actually.

Of course they had a Georgia O'Keefe. The funny thing is that there's a lot of placards that are geared towards kids. The one under this one more or less said "hey kids, notice how Georgia O'Keefe worked with curves in this painting?"

Yes, yes. Curves. They knew what they were doing.

One of the first things I saw when I walked into the fifth floor was a screen showing the classic "A Trip to The Moon" silent film from 1902.

My attention span really is shot, I kept saying "when are they gonna get to the part where they hit the moon in the eye?" There's a big buildup to it and it really doesn't disappoint.

They even had a few drawings from it.

Other highlights from the fifth floor:

Then I finally made my way down to the fourth floor, which was where they kept Warhol's works.

You really do appreciate the artistry that goes into these pieces when you're allowed to get close to them. Well, as close as possible before the workers snip at you.

All 32 Campbell's soup cans were on display, and what shocked me was that they were all different! Not just which variety was on each can, but they're all subtly different. They weren't exact copies.

Two of his other works.

Jackson Pollack had plenty of representation, too.

"They're just paint splatters." Well, sometimes painting is more HOW you paint something, rather than what it looks like when it's done. Different methods of dripping paint netted different shapes and lines.

Or sculpting, for that matter.

And sometimes sculpting is stuff that's cobbled together.

A lot of times, art is rebellious. Sometimes it's the subject matter.

Other times it's putting a rope on a block and calling it art.

Or you're a troll like Duchamp where you bought a shovel that caught your eye, signed it, hung it from the ceiling, and now it's in a fancy art museum.

Plenty of photography was on display, too. This one caught my eye.

And this one.

I really felt like the further into the 20th century I went, the more Modern Art, and modern artists, got more pretentious. People just straining the definition of what IS art. A lot of it I didn't get, but it meant something to the artist. 

Then came the special exhibits.

First, a Wilfredo Lam exhibit.

I didn't know what to expect here, but these pieces just blew me away. I was sad that I was running out of time to get through everything, I could've spent all day in just this hall.

And then I found the Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera exhibit that had just opened.

And these were some highlights on the second floor:

Oh, there was plenty more good stuff, but I didn't want to show everything, now could I? I'm just sad I had to rush through the bottom floors because the museum closed at 5:30 and I got done with the whole thing with about fifteen minutes to spare. I couldn't even stop to watch some films or even go in some of the other special exhibits on the bottom floors.

But I have to share the other cool thing I did this month:

I met Doug Jones! Yes, Mac Tonight himself! About ten years ago, me and my buddy met him at NYCC, but I didn't realize he played Mac Tonight until AFTER I got home! I finally fixed that.

Just the sweetest human being. But I brought along a toy Mac Tonight to show him...and I forgot to take it out of my backpack until I was long done with this photo. I just hope another ten years doesn't go by until I can see him again and fix THIS, too.

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