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Day 2: another day, another CGI nightmare.


Miss AshleyJ

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The greatest mark of quality in fiction is "Verisimilitude", how realistic, how believable the story your telling is. The tag line to the first of the Richard Donner "Superman" films is "You'll believe a man can fly" for that very reason. Donner wanted to approach the movie in such a way from a cinematographic angle that you would believe everything you saw on screen. 

 

The greatest sin in fiction is being so god awful you can't build Verisimilitude to begin with...

 

Rapsittie Street Kids; Believe in Santa does exactly that. 

 

aired in 2002, then lost until 2015, from what I can gather, this only came into being from a perfect storm of luck. The creator was a scientologist, he met fellow scientologist Nancy "Bart Simpson" Cartwright, and she went through some contacts or something to get other celebrities to be in the production... including Mark Hamill, Jodi Benson (Ariel), Paige O'Hara (Belle), Grey Delsie and Walter Emmanuel Jones (the original Black Ranger on Power Rangers.)

 

Another detail I discovered is how this "masterpiece" was animated... on a program designed for Windows 3.1... in 2002...

 

Now, going back to Verisimilitude, the first problem is that the characters look and move like they were animated on 16 bit software. Forget bad PlayStation jokes, this thing looks like is was rendered on a SNES. there are no curves, their faces are flat and at several moments, the textures do not render correctly.

 

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One of the first scenes is Jones' character, a young boy names Ricky (who raps nearly everything he says... and yes it gets really annoying real quick), walking down the street. But he's doing so in a way that makes him look like he's walking on air. other times the characters literally clip through themselves, Nicole (voiced by O'Hara) has an entire song where she sings about how great she is... while moving her arms in such a way that her hands pass through both her neck AND each other... that and the fact her face looks like she ran head first into a wall ala a Tom and Jerry cartoon.

 

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Now, The Christmas Light came out direct to video, a phrase that is not often associated with quality in western animation... This, got NATIONAL AIRTIME on a WB cable network and in syndication to major local stations, such as ABC in both New York and Los Angeles. 

 

Story. Ricky wants to give Nicole, a girl he likes, a teddy bear his late mother had given him... She rejects it because she's a spoiled little B'tich and tosses it into the dumpster. The first few minutes or so make it seem as if Ricky is the protagonist, but it ends up giving more time to Nicole, who spends the rest of the show trying to return it after she finds a letter Ricky wrote to Santa about how much the bear meant to him. 

 

 

Oh, and then there's Ricky's great grandmother... who keeps speaking in absolute gibberish, except for one word per sentence. They "claim" it's because the audio was corrupted, but it just sounds like she's trying to summon Cthulhu or something... 

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