But then we get a legitimately polite and kind email along the lines of: “Erm, hello? Are either of you two still, well, um, alive? Or is the comic on hiatus again? Or something? It’s… it’s all just a little confusing, you see, because there haven’t been any updates in a little while. Just curious!” And we realize that Oh, hmm, maybe we should post some… thing on the site every now and again. Just to remind everyone that this is still a thing that we are actually working on, seriously, no kidding!

So! Here’s a little scrap of content of sorts. It’s a script for a strip that John and I decided not to do. Perhaps it will give you a little insight into our writing process.

Basically, the gang is trying to figure out what to do with Cassandra. How do you deal with a mythological character that you’ve saved from the fires of Troy? How does she adjust to the present?

Seems like a solid enough premise, right? Well, for some reason we couldn’t make it work. I think there are some funny bits in the script we produced (which is why I’m sharing it at all), but ultimately not enough was going on to devote an actual strip to it. Also, we kind of just want to get on with the time traveling already; enough with the dicking around in the present.

Maybe it’s an idea we’ll return to the idea later. Who knows! Anyway, here’s the script:

TITLE PANEL: How Do You Solve a Problem Like Cassandra? (Part 1)

—

[Milo, Jen, Roy, and Cassandra are sitting at a table.]

Milo: A thorough investigation of this afternoon’s events have lead to the following conclusions.

—

Milo: One: Cassandra mistook the bathroom for a temple to Poseidon.

[pointing to a diagram of various objects being placed into a toilet: food (bread, fruits, vegetables, burnt offerings), maybe some scented candles]

—

Milo: Two: Our plumbing system is woefully out of date and ill-suited to process such generous votives.
Three: We are now completely toiletless.

—

[Everyone silently considers this very thoughtfully. Cassandra looks abashed.]

—

[Milo dramatically swings his body around to face Roy.]

Milo: ROY!

Roy: Gaah!

—

Milo: You’ve been leading the effort to adjust Cassandra to the 21st century, isn’t that right?

Roy [visibly disconcerted]:O—ostensibly, yes

—

Milo: [looking judgemental] Mm-HMM.

And does anyone here feel that Roy’s efforts in this particular regard have been … SUB-OPTIMAL?

—

[simultaneously]
Jen [pounding the table]: OH MY GOD YES
Cassandra [hands flung up in the air]: HE IS THE WORST

—

Cassandra: Everything here is TERRIFYING AND STRANGE.
Back in Troy, we had the common sense to keep the rivers OUT OF OUR HOUSES.

—

Milo: Then we are AGREED!
Roy is an AWFUL person who is AWFUL at everything.

Roy: [off-panel] Hey!

—

[Milo raises an ingenious finger with one hand and places a remote control device on the table with the other.]

Milo: But I have a solution!

—

Milo: Look: Cassandra is out of place place and out of time. She’s isolated and lonely.

Cassandra: I am?

Milo: You ARE.

—

Milo: Now, when you’re miserable alone, you’re just miserable. But when you’re surrounded by people JUST as miserable as you are…

Well, that’s what we call “community”.

—

Jen: Milo, what are you saying?

Milo: I’m SAYING that we are due for a trip to the DISTANT FUTURE…

—

Milo: Where we can all be miserable TOGETHER!

[He presses the button]

Inspired by other, greater individuals than ourselves, John and I have been considering for several months now how to best inflict our creative process upon you, dear readers. I think we’ve finally come up with something.

And so, with the hope that I’ve dissuaded at least a few of you from listening, I present to you the very first episode of Tempus Fugit, the Chronillogical Podcast!

The title of this episode is Scatillogical, for reasons that will become distressingly clear should you choose to listen to it.

Although we are billing this as a “podcast”, we can’t really promise these on anything like a regular basis. To be honest, it’s not entirely clear that we’ll be doing another one of these. The main difficulty in producing these things, we’ve discovered, is the sheer, mind-numbing drudgery—the drudgery of sifting through bucketfuls of old material to extract those few meager flakes of gold.

Also, the eerie horror of listening to a recording of your own voice saying vile, appalling things—things that clearly would never have passed your lips in a sane state. Mustn’t forget about the eerie horror.

Finally, a few notes of preparation, explanation, and clarification:

1. The intro/outro music is a track called Just What I Always Wanted by MizukisLastChance, from the ever-awesome chiptune repository, 8 Bit Collective.
2. John and I have potty-mouths. If you don’t like potty in your mouth, then we definitely recommend you give this MP3 a pass. Consider yourself warned.
3. Early in the podcast, we start talking about the film Metropolis. If you’re confused why we abruptly start talking about “the mediator between the head and hands” and robot sluts, it’s because we’re referencing to this movie. I just want to clarify that I do not generally bring up robot sluts in conversation as a matter of course.
4. You will hear the name David Schultz; he is a mutual friend of ours. Fun fact: he was the inspiration for the design of Professor Malloc!
5. We spend a lot of time discussing “pavilions”. Specifically, we are referring to pavilions as implemented at EPCOT Center in Walt Disney World. If you have no idea what that previous sentence meant, then I honestly have no idea what you will make of this recording. Good luck.

Alright, there’s clearly been too much ado here, and I need to wrap things up. Shoo, ado! Shoo!

Here, while I’m finishing up with the ado, take the podcast and enjoy.

Tempus Fugit, Episode 1: Scatillogical

The new face of Chronillogical! More effects! More danger! More Gordon! Man, I like Gordon. Like, a lot. And now he’s dead. (Oh but he is not dead in the future, before he traveled back to the present, do you see?!?) (Why, why do I say such inane things)

Anyway, it looks like Donly and crew have things relatively under control. What’s Roy’s take on this business? Stay tuned and find out in the thrilling conclusion.

(Aside: I’m actually growing kind of annoyed with Wordpress. It’s not bad software considering it’s built in PHP—but that’s like saying that kicking a child in the face isn’t too bad, because you aren’t kicking 10 children in the face. Or… something. Look, what I’m trying to say is that using PHP is a lot like kicking children in the face.¹

Anyway, I’m getting annoyed with Wordpress + Comicpress because it does a lot of stuff that we don’t want/use, and doesn’t do everything we would like it to. I’ve been considering building a comic publishing platform in Ruby on Rails for a while now; maybe one of these days I’ll actually get around to doing so.)

The upshot of all of this is: the rest of this week will probably be sort of boring for you, with only maybe a blog entry to hold you over. But between John and me, we should be able to deliver something interest next week! It should be exciting! So get prepared!

Click to large-make

Final dialogue may or may not revolve around Pokémon.

From even just this scant information I’ve imparted to you, you should be able to get a good sense of the kind of film Troll 2 is.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s go back to 1989, with the Italians out in Utah filming a low-budget horror movie (with a correspondingly low-budget cast). And so the thing gets shot, everyone parts ways, the Italians fly back home, a movie gets cut together. Somewhere along the way the name changes from Goblins to Troll 2. It gets released to VHS. The story of a thousand low-budget flicks, right?

Well, not quite.

By way of explanation, let me show you a chart. It is reasonably simple chart, plotting how good a movie is² versus how entertaining it is.

As you can see on the right side of the graph, high-quality films positively correlate to highly entertaining films. Pulp Fiction is fun to watch because it is by most reasonable measures a fantastic film. The Fifth Element: also very good.

Moving left, the films get a bit worse, and are correspondingly less fun to watch. Die Hard 2? Okay, but not great. Most movies fall into this category.

A bit further down the curve, there’s an interesting bump. By most objective measures, Armageddon was a pretty bad film. But much like Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing”, there is also something undeniably great about it. We are firmly in the realm of guilty pleasures. On an absolute scale, it’s still nowhere as entertaining as Pulp Fiction; but it is more entertaining than Over the Hedge, even though the latter is in some sense less of an Affront to the Art of Cinema.³

At some point, though, enough is enough. Case in point: most rational people simply cannot derive 80 minutes of enjoyment from Look Who’s Talking Too.

So far, I have been using Bruce Willis films as examples. But the inclusion of Bruce Willis (if even just as a voice actor) adds some baseline level of quality to a film. This baseline I call the Willis threshold; there are many, many films that fall below it.

Occupying the realm far to the left of the Willis threshold are movies like Manos: the Hands of Fate: unredeemably bad films, the sort you hesitate to call “films” in the first place, nearly-unwatchable dreck made only barely palatable by the inclusion of mocking commentary a la MST3K.

But the most striking part of my chart is the massive spike just to the left of the Willis threshold. This is the category of film that I’m most interested in for this post, and it is the category of film that Troll 2 squarely falls into.

Look at that chart! On an absolute level, Troll 2 is comparable to The Fifth Element in terms of entertainment value! It is So Bad It’s Good. I.e., it’s awesomely bad.

For this sort of film, it’s kind of pointless trying to convince someone of its awesomeness by describing the plot. I could tell you that it’s about a family that gets terrorized by a group of vegetarian goblins; or that the goblins are commanded by a spastic druid; or that the goblins keep trying to turn people into plants by hiding conspicuous green slop in their food; etc., etc., etc. I could try and tell you all these things, but they don’t really convey the genius⁴ of Troll 2.

Which is all to say: if you haven’t seen it yet, what the hell are you waiting for?

I saw Troll 2 for the first time two weeks ago. I had occasion to see it because a documentary called Best Worst Film—about Troll 2 and its cult following—was playing just around the block from me. The filmmakers were perspicaciously screening Troll 2 later that night in the very same theater, and after catching the documentary I convinced my friend Cliff to join me at midnight to see the cult hit.

I’ve told you about how great Troll 2 is, but I also want to spend some words on Best Worst Movie. It was a lot of fun to watch, and definitely entertaining.⁵ It focuses primarily on the charismatic George Hardy, who played the patriarch of the ill-fated vacationing family in Troll 2.⁶ We catch up with him and other former cast and crew members, discovering how their film has morphed into a cult phenomenon and how this transformation has affected their lives. The whole documentary is pretty lighthearted and fun, and it’s really hard to dislike Mr. George Hardy.

Most everyone seems to be in on the joke—that is, they fully recognize and have generally come to terms with Troll 2’s position on the curve I charted above. But this isn’t the case for everyone. There are a few awkward moments involving the director (an Italian, typecast as the eccentric foreign filmmaker), who seems unwilling to see his film for what it is. Honestly, he comes off as a bit of a stooge—a portrayal that’s probably unfair but is admittedly amusing.

Let me emphasize that the documentary is, essentially, fluffy fun. It does a great job at capturing the verve and electricity you feel at a midnight movie screening. At heart, it’s a poppy expression of fanboyish enthusiasm.

The documentary has are a few more poignant moments, but they really aren’t the focus; they tend to get swept up in the rest of the film. It’s a bit of a shame, really, because at times it feels as though a very human undercurrent of sadness or regret gets steamrolled by the ironic joy of this cult phenomenon. For example, in one particularly moving scene, the actor who played Grandpa Seth in Troll 2 (now an old man) reflects resignedly upon on his life and asks: “What is there to do with a life besides fritter it away?” It’s a rather shocking revelation, but it gets swept aside pretty quickly.

Then again, I can understand why the filmmakers didn’t focus on this stuff more: it’s a total downer. Still, the film probably would have felt more robust if these issues had been examined more deeply.

If Best Worst Movie is showing near you anytime soon, I’d heartily recommend you go out and see it with a friend or two. And if they’re showing Troll 2 later that same day, I’d highly recommend you make an evening of it.

Well when you say it like that, suddenly the whole thing sounds ridiculous! Magic feathers? Mayonnaise? What is this!

Anyway, happy Friday, crew. Stuff’s in the works, but the next update date is tee-bee-dee.

Flippin’ wizard hats, man. They ruin everything!

So here we are, hopping on the mini-comics bandwagon. This is the first of three — you will see the second on Wednesday, and then the third on Friday! Yeahhh!

Man, what is up with those magic feathers anyway? They are certainly volatile with regards to critical inquiry, I can tell you that!

1. Sorry this post is up a little later than I’d hoped. I wanted to talk with John before putting it up, and the earliest time we could talk was Sunday evening. Thus, the Monday post.

2. Sorry for the abruptness of the ending of the Troy storyline.

Part II: An Explanation

For those of you who have pay regular attention to this blogspace, you may recall a post from March in which I discussed our plan for Chronillogical’s narrative moving forward. One of the components of this plan was to wrap up the Troy storyline more quickly than previously intended. Perhaps our intentions were understated, and the extent of our streamlining caught people by surprise. But the essential logic behind our task was simply this: we wanted to get on with telling other time travel stories, so we cut away everything we felt was extraneous to the gang returning to the present.

That said, we’re not going to leave all these questions dangling. More on that in just a moment.

Part III: Moving Forward

We’re planning to focus now on making larger, more self-contained updates on a less frequent basis. These larger updates will vary in size and complexity, and as such I don’t think we’re going to be able to commit to a regular update schedule for them.¹

With a slower and more erratic update schedule, John and I feel obligated to fill the intervening periods with some kind of content to keep you engaged. We have a few ideas already: the one most pressingly relevant is our plan to do “mini-comics” in the gray-scale style of our previous filler strips. The first batch of mini-comics is going to focus on resolving some of those lingering issues from the Troy storyline’s conclusion. Perhaps you could think of it as a kind of extended epilogue? For example, we will be taking a look at how Cassandra is adjusting to life in the 21st century.

We don’t have a plan as to the update schedule for the mini-comics. One thought is to stick with the Tuesday-Friday thing. We may simply try to do two a week and leave the exact days unspecified and varying. We’re not sure now, but we’ll keep you posted.

We have some other content ideas up our sleeves, but we’ll wait a bit before we promise anything on that front.

Part IV: Conclusion

That’s it! If you have any questions or concerns about the stuff I’ve mentioned in this post (or elsewhere), ask away; feedback is always appreciated