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2009-08-20

Nina Paley Lays it Straight on Yellow Submarine

Nina Paley is completely spot-on with her assessment of Yellow Submarine. She also brings up a point that's dear to her heart, the state of corporate copyright law. How many of us grew up watching movies and cartoons that were on tv for free, playing endlessly? One generation's flops became the next generation's classics. Now that big money's involved in everything, these works are locked in vaults and hidden away. Does that make any sense?

You can't watch Bugs Bunny cartoons on tv for free anymore. That alone should tell you something's wrong. Anyway, here's what Nina Paley said at Cartoon Brew today:

Yellow Submarine is one of my favorite films, which is saying a lot because the story is pretty lame. But the design makes up for it 1,000%. THE DESIGN. So they’re going to remake it without the one thing that makes it brilliant: the design.

Fortunately the original will still exist. I just wish it were more accessible. It’s very rare to see the Yellow Submarine these days, not because of real scarcity but because of distribution monopolies. My Parsons students have never seen it. In my generation everyone saw it, because it was a box office flop and therefore cheap to broadcast on TV. We all loved it, because we could see it, because its corporate owners didn’t think it was valuable. Then it became valuable because we loved it, so its corporate owners locked it up, so they could sell it to Zemeckis and Disney.

This remake is brought to you by information monopolies. Enjoy.

6 comments:

Chris Sobieniak said...

Sad really. I can remember when I first saw this film on PBS in the 80's.

Chris Sobieniak said...

It's a sad world we live in when things aren't free on TV anymore.

Daniel Thomas MacInnes said...

Free cartoons should be a basic human right. That should be enshrined into law somewhere. But DVD box sets are so profitable, and the media concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. So the rest of us lose out.

I keep hoping that the internet will reverse this trend, and democratize media again. Youtube and downloads have replaced tv reruns on weekends.

hire said...

I can't watch Bugs Bunny cartoons on tv for free anymore

Chris Sobieniak said...

I keep hoping that the internet will reverse this trend, and democratize media again. Youtube and downloads have replaced tv reruns on weekends.

It pretty much. It's weird thinking there was a time when we didn't have to go all the way to get what we wanted but now we do.

Doug said...

Its funny, I got to thinking about this movie a bit and my whole feeling regarding a mo-cap Zemeckis takeover of my memories and then I thought ... ya know, when this thing was originally created it was an attempt to latch onto the magic of the Beatles and cash in at the box office on their coattails. They really had little to do with it, until they saw what Heinz Edellman and crew had done and then they got behind it somewhat. So really it is just another attempt at the same thing.

The difference now being that art trimphed over commerce once in 1968and I cannot fathom that happening again with this director or method of filmmaking. Perhaps I'm just too cynical?

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