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dalt20 · 3 months

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Tooning In 12. Greg Bailey part 3 of 10

DL:So it says on your IMDb that you directed 52 episodes of a cartoon from CiNAR called We Are the Dogs in 1985. What was that?

GB:I have no idea! I started working at Cinar in Feb. 1992. I never heard of that dog show.

DL:Oh ok. Somebody musta vandalized your account. Moving on, Starcom the U.S. Space Force for DiC and Coca Cola

GB:I remember Space Force at DIC but never heard of Coca Cola

DL:They were the syndicator of the show.

GB:I didn't know that!

DL:They had a television department called Coca Cola Telecommunications. They had a relationship with DiC during The Real Ghostbusters until the film Ishmel flopped at the box office. Causing DiC to leave the partnership.

GB:Was DIC working on Ishmel? I don't know anything about that. I am not really aware of the property. Why did they leave the work relationship over the film or did Coca Cola close up their department? Sorry I guess I have more questions than useful answers.

DL:No, DiC wasn’t working on Ishmel but yes they left their work relationship over the film.And also I'm glad you ask for answers on my knowledge.

GB:Do you know why they left over the film? It was a live action film wasn't it. I was in Japan in those years so there are a lot of things that I seem to have a lack of knowledge about what was happening on this side of the world in those years. Especially in entertainment. It took me years to see films like Robocop after hearing everyone in the US talk about them all the time.

DL:It was because their deal was soured because Coca Cola was losing money from the film, a big loss. And they sold the film distributor Columbia Pictures to current owner Sony. Plus it was thought that DiC was eying a merger with Coca Cola.

GB:OK, I sort of understand now. I will have to ask around about it to see if anyone knows about it other than the executives. I believe this flop happened around 1987 if I see it correctly on Google in my quick look. DIC really went through a big upheaval at that time so it may be related. Jean Charlopin split up with Andy Heyward about that time. DIC Tokyo went with Charlopin and part of the split said that some work would be sent to DIC Tokyo for a season or 2 before DIC LA went off and did their work elsewhere. There was a lot of activity at the executive level and that ended my gig in Tokyo as well. The whole art department in LA also broke up and people went their own ways.

DL:Yep, that is correct.The ALF cartoons for Alien productions and NBC?

GB:I don't think I saw any Alf shows after they left DIC or did they end at DIC. Also Saban was part of the 3 way ownership at DIC. He bought out the music rights that DIC had and moved his company back to France. DIC really had no library to fall back on and soon had no more shows. Heyward had a lot of debt. 80 million seems to stick in my head right now and it doesn't sound like much now but with no library did it really have any value. Heyward promoted his golfing buddy Mike Moliani from director to an executive position. Mike over the years that I was there directed some pretty bad shows that were also very disorganized and had a lazy kind of pre production work done in LA. That's what I was saying last time that I would jump to do shows by Raynis because his shows were so great even if they were more challenging. The Mike Moliani directed shows were not interesting to work on as an artist and animator. It was ironic, jumping ahead 20 years later, the company I worked at Cookie Jar Toronto also bought out DIC and spent a lot of money for a company that still had no library. But I get ahead of myself.

DL:yeah. Saban bought the foreign rights to the shows only to sell them to C&D, the company of Jean Chalopin. Some jackass move.

GB:I don't know that it is a bad thing to have the rights. That's how animation companies make money. It was just questionable what Andy Heyward had after buying DiC without any rights to the music or any of the shows they made. Anyway, I am not the expert on all the executive dealings at DIC and I'm sure a lot of people have more insight than I do about that. So if Saban bought and sold the film distribution rights just to hold onto the music rights it sounds like he might have made a good financial deal pretty quickly. Sort of like flipping some real estate in a hot market.That must be how Charlopin had the rights to Gadget when they made the live action movie a decade ago.

DL:Yeah. And DiC brought Saban to court fighting with them about selling them to their former shareholder where they duke it out until it was settled in 1991 with Saban owning the rights to the pre 1990 DiC library.Revoking it from Jean Chalopin.

GB:That's funny. I believe Charlopin and Saban were old business partners at DIC France pre-LA days. I never heard that there was any bad blood between them. So I guess Saban just licensed the rights to Charlopin to make the live-action Gadget. I think they made a new animated series as well about that time. I didn't see the movie. One day I was listening to a culture critic talking about movie sequels. He said the worst movies are live-action movies based on animated tv shows. He said the Gadget movie was the worst one of those. So I guess he didn't like the movie much. I remember Bruno Bianchi's and Charlopin's names on the poster. Maybe Saban's name was there too but I didn't pay attention. I never met Saban but I had met Charlopin a few times in Tokyo just to be introduced basically.

DL:Actually they were as Saban would compose the soundtrack to Ulysses 31 and Mysterious Cities of Gold.Saban was not a producer on the film, but Chalopin and Heyward were.So how was the founder of DiC?

GB:What do you mean? "How was the founder"?

DL:Jean Chalopin,like how he was.

GB:Like I say I was only introduced to him briefly. He was kind of a nice-looking and amiable person from my brief meeting. He looked like someone very comfortable in his skin and well-suited to the jet-set lifestyle he was living. He was still quite young then. I would guess in his late 30's/ maybe 40 so he was an early boomer. I saw him last around the time the company was breaking up and he had come to Tokyo I guess to meet with Katayama and Bruno and discuss what the plan was.

DL:C.O.P.S. for Hasbro?How was working on that show?

GB:I think everyone in DIC must have worked on that series. It was another syndicated series of 65 shows so as usual they went through the studio at breakneck speed and the quality of syndicated shows was much lower than network Saturday morning shows. I didn't love the show much because it was kind of macho adolescent stuff with not much story value and no humor. I guess if you like that kind of thing it was fine but I never really liked the natural human-looking animated characters. It just looks like bad life drawing or something and makes me remember my early days animating at Hanna Barbera. I just read a byline when I searched on Google to refresh my memory. "Cops in 2020". So I guess it was a future cop show inspired by Robocop. Part of the pre-production work was done in Canada. In Ottawa I believe, because DIC had started doing some pre-prod work in Canada by that point.

DL:Yes, it was inspired by Robocop.As Andy would try to copy trends at the time.

GB:There was some kind of immoral feeling working on shows that were glorified commercials for toys. It did weigh on you and destroyed your belief that animation should be a good thing for kids, not just something to exploit them or make them bug their parents for more terrible cheap toys.A salesman always proposes a show that was a success last year by someone else. It is counter to shows created in a more creative environment where copying something already done would be at the bottom of your list of what to do. Does that make sense? In later years working in development I would see a lot of ideas or suggestions from the sales team about making a show just like Spongebob, or just like whatever was a success last year. It is really anti-creative. But syndication was just selling toys that Hasbro was making. I guess I helped to sell a lot of toys at DIC.

DL:So how did you feel when you left DiC Entertainment in 1988?

GB:I thought my career would end because it would be hard to replace the job with something as high-paced and rewarding. It was also a matter of leaving a very financially rewarding position because we got paid well. I was going to have to leave Tokyo, which I liked a lot. Although in another way it was time for me to leave because I had put my family through 4 years of living out of a suitcase. It was time for things like school for my daughter and living somewhere that my wife could work and get on with her career. Living in Tokyo was definitely making that impossible. I didn't think I would find another job as interesting as DIC but I had learned a lot of useful skills and information about how to control a production and get more input into the show in a professional manner. A lot of skills that were not known in Canada at the time.

DL:So you worked on The Raccoons,your first Canadian production you worked on.

GB:Yes, the first after coming back from Tokyo. I was living in Ottawa for the first time and Hinton Studios was doing Raccoons. I never became much of an expert on it because my time there was short-lived before I went to Cinegroupe in Montreal. I did some Raccoons and I just started on Ren and Stimpy for a week or 2. I also did part of a storyboard on Where's Waldo in that period I believe. I don't remember how I found that job though.

DL:So at Hinton Studios, were they drawing dirty pictures of the Raccoons characters according to rumors?

GB:What?! Animators never do that.

DL:Well TV tropes said so and i just want to know to clear up rumors,that's all.

GB:I always thought those noses on the bad guys Cedric and Cyril looked kind of obscene all the time. It would be difficult to make them do anything too dirty with those flaccid noses. Come to think of it they all had droopy noses even the Raccoon characters except the females. Must have been from all those dirty scenes they were involved in that never made it onto TV that left their noses limp.

DL:Ah. so you work on the Ren and Stimpy pilot, Big House Blues. Were you working with Bob Jacques?

GB:I think I was supposed to but I only did about 2 weeks and then had to leave.

DL:How was the experience and did you like the program?

GB:Too brief to get much out of it. I was pretty excited about the design and method they were using to work. I loved the show of course and often wished I had had more time on it. The model sheets were really great and the show felt really fresh at the time.

DL:So when did you get to go to Cinegroupe in Montreal?

GB:I left to go there right after I did Ren and Stimpy for a few weeks. I was probably working the next week in Montreal and commuting back and forth to Ottawa on weekends. I had worked at Cinergroupe before going to Tokyo for a few months on Ovid and the Gang as an animator. Anyway, when I left Hinton Studios for Cinegroupe it must have been 1988 or 1989.

DL:So what was Ovide and the Gang?

GB:Ovid was a co-production with Belgium. It was an original series based on a comic book style of characters. I can't even remember what the point of the series was or the relationships between the characters. They were very cute-looking characters though and the studio was animating the whole series with about 5 animators and 5 assistants. When I went there after Hinton they were doing a few series. L'Aventure de L'ecriture a show about French grammar and a series Little Flying Bears which is just exactly as the name implies. Everything was little something or other in those years. The bears had dragonfly wings. These flying bears were saving the environment. But I guess they didn't succeed because it's still a mess. But saving the environment was big in animation in those days.

DL:So by the way, did you have cable in the late 90s early 90s? Because these shows were broadcast on The Family Channel.

GB:I do remember them on TV but don't know if it was Family Channel or CBC. I probably only had basic cable at home. I'm not sure when the series finished. Oddly it was a co-production with Yugoslavia. Unfortunately, a few years into production the Yugoslavian war began and that turned into a bloodbath. I remember before the war everyone was talking about what a fantastic place it was over there with all those people living in harmony. The breakup of the country and the massacres just went on for what seemed like more than a decade. Anyway, the show kept getting held up because the co-producing company was telling us about the tanks sitting out in front of the company and it just got impossible eventually. It's weird how all this bad stuff is going on behind the scenes in these innocent cartoons on TV.

DL:Oh yeah. Well can’t believe that the Yugoslavian war was tied to the production trouble of Little Flying Bears.Also before I go, one more question. How was it when you went to work for CiNAR and Young Robin Hood for Hanna Barbera and France Animation.

GB:I heard once that the producer over there wanted to have Cinegroupe's production money payment sent to him in a location in a neighboring country. But that didn't sit well with Cinegroupe. I don't know if they suspected he would run for it with the money and get the heck out of the way of that approaching war. It seemed like the country was unfolding in slo mo at that point. This was before the war in Kosovo and Serbia. The co-producer was in Zagreb. It was a pretty city that held the international animation festival every second year alternating with Ottawa.

DL:Interesting.

GB:Robin Hood was fine. The first job there was on White Fang. I was an animation posing supervisor. Then I did timing direction on Robin Hood. Robin Hood went by pretty smoothly and it was nice working in a familiar US production method. I was able to bring in some of those timing skills from Tokyo into the job.And then I directed a few specials on Munch. Murmel Murmel and Boy in the drawer.I think that is the correct order of work at Cinar. It was called Crayon Animation in those days but it was owned by Cinar.

DL:Wait CiNAR was called Crayon animation?Also before then CiNAR was a dubbing studio before it started to produce its own productions in 1988.

GB:Yes, the animation part of the company was called Crayon Animation. Cinar existed at a different location downtown. They did the post-prod mixing and sound work and recording at Cinar. And the executive offices of Ron and Micheline were downtown at Cinar. The animation studio Crayon was in an old industrial warehouse space in St Henri in the mid-19th century industrial part of Montreal. If you've seen the movie or read the book The Tin Flute that is where it was. Lots of rail yards and on the old Lachine canal.Yes they did the dubbing and all sound work at Cinar headquarters downtown. They owned the building there, which was originally an old convent. Later on we moved out of the Crayon building and moved to a new office tower around the corner from the Cinar headquarters and sound studio.Ron Weinberg would often talk about how he started Cinar by driving around the US with a trunk full of videotapes of the movie Wicker Man and he would sell this tape everywhere. I don't know how he did that but that was the story. I don't know if I ever saw Wicker Man but at Burning they used to burn wicker furniture in memory of that movie.

#animation #animation interview #tooning in.#dic #dic entertainment #starcom #C.O.P.S.#haim saban #saban entertainment #80s cartoons #greg bailey #the raccoons #ren and stimpy #cinegroupe #Cinar #young Robin Hood #yugoslav wars #hanna barbera

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popculturebuffet · 8 months

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Sam and Max Beyond Time and Space Retrospective: Moai Better Blues (Patreon Review for WeirdKev27)

Hello all you happy freelance police and welcome back to my look at the sam and max telltale games! We're onto season 2 episode 2. After a little christmas in august we're having a science fiction double feature for halloween as this review ended up behind due to a new member of the family.

This is Maddie. She's 5, she's precious, she's very loud , and she's very attached to me.

But even new fluffy good girls with spangly collars can't stop the march of sam and max.

Following up from our heroes adventures in the north pole, this ep finds our heroes dealing with an adventure that's weird even by sam and max standards. And I want to let that sink in because we spent last season stopping a child star hynosis crime ring, starring in a one episode sitcom with a british chicken don knotts, inflitrating a mafia chuck e cheese, running for president against a horny lincoln memorial, murdering the internet and finally facing down with a sentient plankton colony via psychic powers and magic tricks on the moon. And that's not even getting into that guy who would never put his hands down. What was his deal?

So what lies in the greatest mountain of sam and max madness? Stoned Moai, triangular portals, sea monkeys, ghost godlfish, baby jimmy hoffa and horny statue love triangles. So join me under the cut for the madness.

We open with our heroes returning from the North Pole a month after the previous game, with it now snowing, providing a nice atmosphere to things. Before they can get back to the usual banter some fresh nonsense comes in: A triangle chasing their beloved friend Sybil.

It has a neat design too, red, pulsating with lines... it's an excellent triangle all things considered. B+

At any rate we need to stop it, so we go to the wisest sage for weird shit there is: Bosco. It's a nice way to keep him still useful while not having him be one of your item guys. Bosco is getting ready to bunker down from T.H.E.M.

But tells our hero their new foe is a bermuda triangle, an eldtirch shape that sucks people up to another place, and can only be stopped with most of the shapes. Most.. never come into play and are just for a good joke, like blue polyheadrons making them really want to roll them dice and maybe start a live play with a dungeon master with long hair and the voice of god.

The important one is red hexagons stop them.. and the game was REALLY unhelpful with this one. I did have my hints flavor blasted up to the maximum max could do without bursting a kidney.. but he just kept saying the shape and outright told me to go back to the office.. where it entirely wasn't. WE do have a new trophy though, boxing betty. So.. that's nice?

The solution lies in Stinky's diner, where i'd gone earlier since the Cops can't do buisness over the sound of screaming. Amateurs. Stinky can though even with the racket outisde and gives us a granite sandwitch that i'm pretty sure just.. sat in my inventory all chapter. Seriously you don't relaly use it for anything even when you think it'd be obvious like replacing a stone max's ear, and it's more just to set up getting a basalt sandwich from her later. It's on the kid's menu only though.

She is useful in that she has a stop sign for you and with some spray paint from your headquaters, you can make it deep red. Before we go though another beloved supporting character makes a cameo: Flint Paper. I just love how despite being grizzly and willing to beat up random strangers for money, as are we, Flint just.. cheerfully greets our heroes with a hey fellas every time. He's just so happy to see our heroes and they have a deep genuine admiration for him. Like with Sybil in the first episodes, it's nice to see someone our heroes actually like and unlike Sybil, it's nice to see there's at least one person they haven't traumtized. Yet. He's watching Bosco for Bosco's Mom who'se understandably worried about her son because you know, his whole deal.

For now though we go to stop the triangle in the name of love... only for hilariously this all to be mostly pointless as once Sybil stops, Abe shows up , gets sucked in and she goes after him. It's off to Easter Island!

Turns out Sybil and Lincoln are fine and are just enjoying the nice weather. Once again.. this is a dead end puzzle wise as the two are just there to move their subplot along. Unlike the sandwich though, it's at least entertaning.. and mildly creepy as Abe perves on one of the moai present.

Why the bermuda triangle lead to easter island.. is not something we'll be getting into here. What matters is the moai see sam and max as their savior. Well the middle one, a kindly lady moai abe's creeping ion, is. The left one has half his face buried and is contstantly upset, projecting storm clouds when pissed off that are naturally useful, and the right one is

And is largely useless, mostly just sniping at you.

Each has a power of the elements: Rain for the buried one, wind for the nice one and earth for the pedantic douchebag. The fire one was sadly was scattered to the winds long ago, but he did leave behind a son at least to carry on his legacy

At any rate before we can use the powers of nature itself for fun and profit, we have some problems: As it turns out the nearbye volcano is about to erupt and murder them all due to some understandable but tragic errors

Problem is someone's guarding his lair... and if you haven't played the game yourself, I warn you: You are not remotely ready. I sure wasn't. So whose in our heroes way? Why it's Jimmy HOffa in the body of a baby!

Yeah... look I love Sam and Max for being so gloriously weird. Weird as hell is one of my faviorite kinds of humor as long as their's direction behind the chaos. But It's still easily the biggest what the fuck moment the franchise has thrown me so far and that's with this happening last chapter

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Granted I got spoiled there is some sort of payoff to the Mariachis via a thumbnail, and there is some actual logic behind this.. but even for this franchise "Jimmy Hoffa whose in the body of an infant because he drank too much from the fountain of youth pointing a gun at yoU" is a bit much. And more to the point they NEVER explain why he's working for the episodes big bad.

I.. can't help but love it though BECAUSE it's such a uniquely stupid swing: they had this idea, found a way to have it logically make sense and then put it in the game in full, all while giving us a ton of great jokes as Sam cannot ressit teasing him on the fact he's a baby.

We'll deal with this teamster later, for now we meet the other rugrats on this island: Amelia Earheart, DB Cooper, and The LIndburgh Baby... .

Their mostly here to set up a surfboarding mini game which frustrated me. It's not the game itself, it's a fun enough little distraction if fairly hard to get the analogue controls down on my switch version. It felt like the kind of browser game i'd play as a kid.

My annoyance.. is that the game dosne't tell you that you get nothing for it until you've triggered the right story event. So I went through the whole thing for nothing. Thankfully I also enabled mini game skipping.... I still will TRY not to use it often as these are part of the game and thus need to be evaluated as much as the point and click parts, but in this case i'd already done the actual task so when it asked me to again. As for why again, the trick to getting rid of our little friend involves serving him a drink, using a tiki glass you can pick up at the bar those dumb babies are at. But he'll only take union waitstaff, so you have to play the game to get cerfitied by him. IT makes about as much sense as it sounds. Ah back to normal for this franchise.

To actually do anything though we need some fountain of youth water unfortunately there's something in it

So to take care of them we have to complete a few other tasks

First is the COPS. As i'm guessing is standard for every chapter,we have another driving VR Game from them, this time a fun rythum based one with the beats going as you drive on them. THey thought it'd change the world.. those poor dumb bastards. It's clearly a jab at guitar hero, but it's a decent challenge while still being a lot of fun.

With that we get a car horn and that's the key to our next puzzle: We need to help Glenn Miller, a wwII era band leader whose also now a baby, stage his comback by giving him that new sound he's been looking for. Since the horn plays i've been workin on the railroad, it's just the ticket. He just needs a whistle sound, which you easily get by dumping some gasoline disguised as a drink into a nearbye fire, setting off a tea kettle. He gives you a conch with the single recorded on it. Apparently The Bermuda Triangles also visited skypeia.

Using the dial, we can finally solve our pirahana puzzle.. in theory. In practice it's utterly frustrating if you can't figure out the trick, not helped by Max CONSITENTLY telling me to use the thunder storm moai.

Breaking it down: using the glen miller dial conch, you play it for the nice moai, which gets her whistling. Now when you tick off her half buried friend next to you, which naturally max does with ease and maybe too much glee.. in fact i'm starting a " Going to Hell For This" counter, for each time we ruin someone's life, torture them or what have you to progress, or just for funzies, as we did it a LOT last season and so far have done it a lot. Now I"ll make acceptions for say outright villians or people who deserve it. And even then it'/s about proportions. For example, pelting the soda poppers with urine and bleach? Acceptable, their the soda poppers. Need I say more. But even if Jimmy Two Teeth sucks a LOTTT, nearly driving him to unalive himself is a bit much, not helped by Max's reaction essentially being

He certainly thought it hard enough. So we'll count that one, still keeping leonard hostage after almost a year, sending santa to hell (even if he was possesed), and not bothering to actually help save christmas. So going into this episode we have

Things We're Going To To Hell For: 4 And we can add from this episode taunting that poor moai.

Things We're Going to Hell Fort: 5

So I assumed both from the hint ONLY mentoing the moai , who creates a little storm cloud when uspet and the wind we were supposed to blow it at jimmy hoffa. Instead... it does nothing. It just dissipates if blown too far and never gets near him. Instead we use the portals, which are frustrating as the game makes it clear the two near the entrance are connected.. but dosen't make it clear EVERY portal is connected this way.

The solution is to open one by the fountain of youth, then open another next to the underground moai, have the good moai blow the cloud and boom, a LOT of dead pirhanas and a free fountain of youth. Also

Things We're Going To Hell For: 6

And with that we can use the glass to scoop some up, give it to hoffa... and blink him out of existance. THings We're Going To Hell For: Still 6 (He Deserved It Yo) It's REALLY sad when killing someone by making them age themselves out of existance isn't the worst thing we've done today. Or even this month.

This event also moves along Sybil's subplot for the season and who boy. Strap yourselves in because I haven't seen a character nosedive this fast in many moons. So the whole episode, Abe and Sybil have been picnicking, only doing that on Abe's suggestion.. and only so he can oggle the middle good moai. Yeah after several episodes of at worst being out of touch and mildly annoying.. abe's somehow lept straight to the bottom and is perving on someone right in front of his girlfriend and THEN asks her to have plastic surgery to look more like the moai.

Sybil runs off in tears.. and SOMEHOW, SOMEHOW, this gets worse... as Abe THEN tries to hit on the moai. To her credit she shoots him down fast and we get a great response out of him, a casual "that's fair". So he's still funny he's just WAY more of an asshat. I mean granted we just committed two murders in a row, so i'd SAY we can't judge.. but those murders were to save a LOT of lives from death and were of a bunch of fish and a murderous infant man.

Anyways with this we enter our final puzzle set, continuing from the formula laid out last time. Sadly.. they also fall into a fairly trite, terrible stereotype. It's forgivable enough for the time.. but it's still pretty tone deaf. I can't blame them for fixing it as unlike the various lines corrected for save the world, this is a large part of the plot and thus really coudn't be futzed with.. but it's still not great.

Okay so for our final stretch our heroes run into your standard tone deaf "the natives are stupid and belivie anything is their god" plot only this time it's sea monkeys.

Yeah.. they.. really coudl've thought this one out a bit more. We have to convince them max is their god/chosen one/whatever instead, in order to replace an old advesary: Mr. Spatula, sam and max's goldfish whose mad he's died and thus is willing to take an island with him. Now you may recall, even if I didn't name him last time, he died. And he did. THIS IS HIS GHOST.

So to prove ourselves we have to do three tasks. The first is easy and I stumbled into accidently: We have to make the water into BANANG!, an energy drink powder bosco happens to have a lot of.

To get it away from him, we have to torment him.. again. This time we simply radio in, claim to be THEM

And Bosco goes deeper underground, there's too much panic in this town. So we got the powder.. but we also traumtized a friend for life so

Things We're Going To Hell For: 7

Next is adding an ear to a rock formation that looks like max. Once again the sandwitch is useless.. except as a clue. We finally need that basalt sandwitch for kidz, so it's time to use the fountain of youth water on ourselves.. and ONCE AGAIN the game gets frustrating as you transform back very fast from drinking it. The trick is to use a gong I honestly forgot about in Stinky's diner max reminded me of. I can't tell if I just suck at adventure games or this is poor level design.

Anyways we get the Basalt and get a really funnys equence with douchecanoe moai as it turns out dude just needed to blaze it and basalt gets moai REALLY good and fucked up. With that he casually laughs and dislodges a stalctite we use to finish the max.

We then finish this section. The stone feet of the buried moai are needed to anoit us. Also yes they have hands and arms stuck in there. We simply use the shell again, this time on a portal next to the best moai , she whistles, he taps his toes and we win. Kinda.

Problem is the island's still errupting with Mr Spatula planning to take us with it. The only way to stop it? Some clever puzzlery. We get a high preist medallion from the Sea Monkeys, dip it in some red slime, then shoot the triangle, using the portals to send the red triangle through it , eating the lava.. and presumibly murdering someone but we won't worry about that. Our ride home is gone though but Abe offers a lift while the moai celebrate.. before being sad they can't move. Then their abducted by what seems to be aliens!

Moai Better Blues... is a very mixed bag. The writing as usual is hilarious, and while it's a very

Sort of chapter, it's a FUNNY sort of what the fuck is this, from the various babies, to the black comedy shenanigans as usual, to our heroes riding out on Lincoln's head. It continues episode 1's mean streak, but the weirder setting and more over the top weird black comedy bits like unexistinsing hoffa help it feel far less opressive than last time. The deaths and what we do to bosco are way more over the top. Even abe and sybil's breakup, acompained by the mysterious maraichi's, is more funny than genuinely sad. I DO feel bad for Sybil, but abe is such a dick and he gets karmically punished for it as the moai lady SHARPLY rejects him, multiple times if you want, and he looses Sybil.

Gameplay wise.. it's a lot more obtuse. A lot more relying either on memory (Which isn't good for me but is at least fair) or hoping you figure it out and with most of the max clues being way less helpful. It's a pretty meh chapter all things considered and hopefully as we get spooky next time, we also get back to our quality. Speaking of which

Next Time: VAMPIRES! Just in time for the season. And since it's the 2000's their angsty emo eurotrash vampires! Oh BoY! Thanks for reading!

#sam and max #sam and max beyond time and space #sam x ma #sybil pandemik #abraham lincoln #jimmy hoffa #db cooper #amelia earhart #bosco #c.o.p.s.#video games #telltale games #skunkape games

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