This Is Why I Hate Hollywood
November 11, 2008
I shouldn’t be surprised. After they butchered my favorite video game, fireballed my favorite tabletop, and made a movie so bad I almost built a deathray, I should know better than to give Hollywood the benefit of the doubt. But then they go and do this to Dragonball:
Now, don’t get me wrong; I hate Dragonball. The show is a coordinated assault on aesthetics, nay on rational thought itself. It does not only reject cohesive storytelling, it seems actively hostile to it. Because I appreciate good storytelling, I must loathe Dragonball, with every fiber of my being.
Even worse, it is often the first show that leaps to mind when you say anime to someone in the West. “Oh, you mean like that Dragonball show?”. I want to breed a skunk-porcupine hybrid to maul these people. It’s the same when I say I like weird fiction, and I get, “Oh, you mean like Stephen King?”. Are you actually trying to enrage me, or are you just that nescient?
But the point, as I belabour my way around it, is that only Hollywood would go and take something that is already terrible, and make it worse. Are they clever enough to aim for a cinematic version of arithmetic overflow, where the movie becomes so execrable that it wraps around and turns out awesome? Or are they as I always suspected, bizarre mindless creatures that spring forth spontaneously from a pool of radioactive ooze and filth somewhere beneath the streets of California?
The mind boggles. It boggles, dear reader.
