RAEKOWN: ONLY BUILT FOR CUBAN LINKS II - MY REVIEW

RAEKWON THE CHEF
ONLY BUILT FOR CUBAN LINKS PART 2
EMI, ICEWATER RECORDS

I’ll be the first to admit that the last few Wu-Tang related projects have left me kind of cold. Cold enough that when I was asked to review “Only Built For Cuban Links II” from original Wu-Tang member Raekown The Chef I was less than thrilled. The first Cuban Links is a classic Hip Hop album and easily one of the best of the solo Wu-Tang efforts. I fired up Cuban Links II and by the second song I was aware that this album was going to be a return to form from The Chef. For lack of a better term the recipe was right for Raekwon’s come back.

Raekwon doesn’t so much spit rhymes as he does sputter them. It’s as if the words formulate in his mind so quickly that his mouth can’t say them fast enough. Every verse feels like it’s about to fall apart as if at any moment Raekwon will blow it, throw down the mic and storm off. Instead each word seems to find a way to stay connected and that constant hyperbole rhyme style is what has separated him from his fellow Wu-Tang members. This isn’t the razor sharp delivery of Rza nor the laid back bong flow of Method Man, Raekown is a completely different beast and Cuban Links II captures that perfectly.

To put it in recipe form the Cuban Links II builds a hearty broth from basic but well orchestrated beats and then piles in the seasonings for flavor. Keyboards, sirens, guitars, bass, kung fu movie samples, all of it is poured into a pot and blended to perfection. With a basis like that it doesn’t take much for Raekwon to just sputter his rhymes out until he’s spent. Everything on this album has a certain punk rock desperation, a chaotic energy that’s strongly lacking in Hip Hop today.

The first real track on the album “House Of The Flying Daggers” wraps a hard and steady beat around a keyboard line that feel like it’s coming after you. From that type of tension the album slows down and gets almost creepy with the track “Sonny’s Missing”. What makes Cuban Links II so good is that it moves between peeks and valleys musically but never loses the ability to get your head bopping back and forth.

The album is strife with special guests as well, each adding their unique style to music that’s very much Raekwon. Too often when guests hit a record the music is changed up to fit their style. Raekwon has no time for that, he’s the chef, it’s his house and either rhyme with that or get the f**k out. Whether alongside his fellow Wu-Tang members, Beanie Siegel, Lyfe Jennings or Jadakiss everybody on this album has to push their flow a little harder to mix with the music.

Rza and Inspectah Deck do some of their best work in recent years on the track “Black Mozart”, one of my personal favorites. I’m also a sucker for any record with Slick Rick on it so when I stumbled on “We Will Rob You” and heard Slick singing the title to the tune of We Will Rock You by Queen I was totally signed up.

It’s hard to pick out all the great songs on this album mostly because they work so well as one solid piece of music. Cuban Links II is a true Hip Hop album, a creative triumph coming from a genre that mostly spits out boring pop hits. This is a grimy record that’s meant to be played in the street by the fans of Hip Hop who wait desperately for a change in what’s out there.

With Cuban Links II Raekown has managed to wring out what’s going on inside his brain and sift it through several producers including Rza, Marley Marl, J Dilla, Dr Dre and more. The result is an album that can stand proud with any of the other Wu-Tang offerings. If more albums come out like Cuban Links II we’ll all start to hear the faint heart beat of true Hip Hop beginning to get stronger.

JAY Z: THE BLUEPRINT - MY REVIEW

JAY Z
THE BLUEPRINT 3
ROC NATION/ATLANTIC

When you announce in your very first song that you’re part of why Barack Obama got elected to the White House it may be time to review the size of your skull and ego. Jay-Z is so preoccupied telling people what he has, who he is and what he owns that he forgot to make a good record. The Blueprint 3 should’ve been titled The Blueprint For Failure because it fails across the board with few exceptions.

For all his Hustler bravado this is essentially a pop record, an easily digestible radio friendly boring as all hell pop record. I don’t know what happened to the Vol 2 Jigga but he’s not here, not on this album.

In all my years of reviewing records I’ve seldom come across a worse opening track than “What We Talkin’ About”. Combine a lame roller rink “couples only” eighties song with Jay-Z bragging about how great he is and you might be able to conceive of how boring this song is. The album doesn’t really get much better after that, sticking mostly with paint-by-numbers bragging sessions over beats that feel like Jay-Z went to the “beat store” and bought only from the discount section.

According to Jay Z he is now the new Frank Sinatra because he’s rich, still runs with thugs and yet rubs elbows with big time celebrities. Listening to the sheer laziness of the lyrics on Blueprint 3 I can only assume he means Sinatra when he was old, cranky and forgetting songs on stage. The music here is not just sloppy it’s lazy, as if Jay Z decided to throw in everything but the kitchen sink without any plan to connect the dots.

I’m assuming part of the problem is that the king of self-delusion Kanye West, a man who asked to be called the new King Of Pop before Michael Jackson’s body was even cold, produced a large part of The Blueprint 3. You can just picture Jay Z and West listening to this album and telling each other how great they are while everybody else stands around scratching their heads.

Blueprint 3 isn’t a total loss. Songs like “Empire State Of Mind” or “Venus Vs Mars” remind us of how good Jay Z can be when he really tries and isn’t produced by Kanye. For the most part Jay Z doesn’t accomplish much on The Blueprint 3 other than to prove he’s lost his edge. The sly sense of humor and swagger is gone replaced by full blown ego.

I sat listening to the Blueprint 3 trying to understand how this was the same guy that wrote 99 Problems. I’m sure there are enough college kids who want to be “down” with Hip Hop to make Blueprint 3 a financial success but on an artistic level the once great Jay-Z has let the genre down badly.

THE LATEST X-MAN PERPLEXES THE MARVEL UNIVERSE

No idea this mutants name but if I had to venture a guess at his powers it would be that he dumbs a person down without them realizing it and then takes all their money.

THE FIRST PROBLEMS STEMMING FROM THE DISNEY/MARVEL ANNOUNCMENT

With all the hoopla around Disney's 4 billion dollar buyout of Marvel Comics I never figured the first real problems would come from DC Comics but I suppose looking at it the whole thing makes sense. With Marvel getting itself backed by the Deep Disney Pockets the ability to make money for the publishing group has skyrocketed. Movies, TV, Merchandise, hey maybe even COMIC BOOKS will all get a piece of the prize. The other part of that is now Marvel is in the limelight less than a year before Iron Man 2 hits the big screen. Almost to the day that the announcement hit Marvel started talking about rebooting Fantastic Four as well as putting Spider-Man 4 on the fast track.

Meanwhile over at the DC Offices they've suddenly been forced to stand in Marvel's shadow, something DC fucking hates. While it's true DC has and probably always will have a superior comic book universe they aren't doing well on the movie front. Sure the Dark Knight was a huge hit but Superman Returns failed horribly and now DC and Warner Brothers have to fast track another movie before the rites return to the Siegal Family.

On top of that DC keeps having these false starts whether it's the doomed JLA movie, the already shaky Green Lantern movie (with the horrible casting of Ryan Reynolds as Hal Jordan) as well as the unknown element of Chris Nolan doing a third Batman film. Fearing people will forget DC or at least not see them as just as filled with movie contenders DC has rushed these press releases about upcoming films involving the characters of Deadman and Lobo.

The problem here is that neither of these characters has been able to really support their own book much less a movie. Deadman is a cool character but a whole movie about a guy who floats in and out of people? I don't see that wrestling money out of the hands of the Avengers film do you? Even securing hack director Guy Ritchie to film Lobo is just silly. First of all I predict that Sherlock Holmes will be a huge flop. Robert Downey JR looks more like Prince and acts more like John McClain than Sherlock Holmes plus nothing Ritchie's ever done has excelled at the box office.

Secondly Lobo started out at as parody character and has pretty much remained one. True the upcoming comic run penned by Anthrax's Scott Ian might be cool but a whole fucking movie? Not to mention the plot of Lobo coming to earth and teaming up with a teenage girl sucks right out of the gate. Lobo doesn't learn about friendship from rambunctious teens, he shoots you then lets you watch him fuck your girlfriend as you die. Lobo is a vile character with no redeeming values so either you have a hero nobody roots for or a watered down version that sucks.

DC needs to CALM THE FUCK DOWN!! I know the Marvel/Disney thing is scary but try and remember that whenever Marvel gets in bed with another company they usually fuck it up. Stop trying to reclaim the limelight and just allow Marvel to be the quarterback for awhile. All the stuff going on in DC Comics is beating the shit out of Marvel's work and the movies will come if you let them. You force anything trying to wrangle the attention away from Marvel and you'll blow it.

So please DC, do what you do best and let Marvel mortgage their soul to the House That The Mouse Built. Right now you look like that kid in school who tries too hard to impress everybody and instead embarrasses themselves. Drop this Lobo and Deadman bullshit and focus on making a kick ass Green Lantern movie, figuring out how to make a new Superman and even figure out how you'll keep Batman alive if Nolan decides to balk.

BONO IS THE NEW NORMAN OSBOURNE

We were so close, so damn close

Earlier this summer the Comic Book Gods had smiled down on us and said: "Yes my children, we hear your calls and we understand." Thusly a great hand swept down and the stab-my-neck-with-a-rusty-screwdriver Spider-Man musical was called off. The idiots putting it on had let the budget spiral out of control and not even the vomit inducing pretentious interview with Bono & The Edge (who wrote the music) could save it. We rejoiced, held hands, sang songs and danced around large bonfires sending our praises and thanks to the Comic Book Gods.

And then the NY Post released this statement on Bono reviving the project:

No, the help -- or, more accurately, the cash -- is said to be coming by way of Bono, who, with The Edge, has written the score to "Spider-Man."

Bono's too smart to put his own money in the show, but word on the street is that he's tapped into his vast network of rich friends and business associates to restart production.

Designers and some stagehands go back to work today.

Bono feeds half of Africa, so raising a few more million for "Spider-Man" shouldn't be too difficult.

So if I have this right Bono is now the new Norman Osbourne. Here we have an egocentric, narcissistic cunt who hides his true evil behind supposed philanthropy and has focused his sights on destroying everything that makes Spider-Man who he is. All Bono needs now is the nappy red-hair buzz cut and a sharp silk suit. When he wants to become his alter-ego The Bon-Goblin he just gets a black long haired wig, puts on those stupid giant sunglasses, his leather pants and ruffly red shirt and gets upon his Edge Glider which not only shoots missiles but plays "It's A Beautiful Day" whenever he swoops down to attack.

My favorite part in this is that Bono isn't even using his own money, he's tapping the same reserves he uses for his Africa charity work. Apparently his ego is so out of control that he'll lose money for the people who fund his charity work in order to fund a project he doesn't believe in enough to use his own cash on.

Bon Osbourne the world

the world Bon Osbourne


I hate everything

PRINT IS DEAD--OR EXCUSE ME UNDEAD

What you see before you is an actual copy of a reprinting of the classic book Wuthering Heights and this time it's got the seal of approval from Belle and Edward, the two main characters from the please-let-this-thing-die Twilight phenomenon. For people that wonder why no other country in the world takes us seriously allow me to point at this and whistle. We're not only trying to shill a classic of modern literature by associating it with some of the worst written work ever committed to the page but we're also using TWO PEOPLE WHO DO NOT FUCKING EXIST!!!

For those who've stepped out of reality for a bathroom break Belle and Edward are made up, they aren't real, Christ of fuck the character of Edward is even farther removed from reality because he's a GODDAMN VAMPIRE. These two never strolled down to the library and checked out Wuthering Heights, they never read Wuthering Heights because THEY AREN'T FUCKING REAL!! NOT REAL!! NOT REAL!! NOT REAL!!!! Do we all get that now? Do the mall crawling children who graduated from the traveling pants to the horny teen vampire posse click with this idea or do I need to start using the cattle prod?

It's bad enough we have gone so far off the deep end with marketing technology and instant gratification to children that the very idea of reading is a punchline to them. Now we as a people are trying to hook them by ripping away what the original literature was about and reducing it to "Cool To Your Heroes" bullshit. Trust me when these kids crack open Wuthering Heights and nobody sparkles in the sunlight or goes from hot guy to werewolf they will drop the book like last years pants.

I was really hopeful after Harry Potter that kids and reading might start looking up. For all the fanfare when the dust settled the Potter books were extremely well written. Layered, complex, with great characters and multiple story arcs all fleshed out to the point you cared about the goings on. Let's not forget, JK Rowling created her own private world in which to tell her tale and she never fell back on "easy" fantasy tricks. It might be blasphemy to say it but I see the Potter books as the Lord Of The Rings for this generation.

The Twilight books on the other hand are really badly written. I understand they struck a chord with people but as literature they don't hold up. Sloppy writing, cliche descriptions, the two books I read were just lazily written. Seriously, they were maybe five steps from a coloring book. To use this as a bar in which other literature should be held or to shill the classics with them is insane. Add on to that the fact that Belle and Edward aren't real and all you can do is break out the lawn chair and hope 2012 comes early.

I hate everything

NEW BOONDOCK SAINTS II TRAILER

After years of talk and innuendo the long awaited sequel to cult classic The Boondock Saints has finally spit up a trailer. In the interest of full disclosure let me be the first to admit that while I enjoyed the Boondock Saints I was one of the few people who didn't think it revolutionized cinema. It was a cool story with some nifty action and some awesome dialog but at the end of the day it wasn't any better than any other movie just like it. The one thing it did have was the jaw-dropping awesomeness of Willem Dafoe's character. I would've paid to see a movie just about that guy. Anyway, here's the new trailer:



I don't know, maybe it's me but this doesn't look any good. Instead of a movie for a reason it just feels like an attempt to cash in on the unexpected cult following of the first film. First off there's no Willem Dafoe, which blows huge meaty chunks and removes about 1/2 of what made the last movie so great. Instead, in a typical Hollywood move, they've replaced him with a sexy "crazy" cop vixen. LAME!! I also tend to switch to red-alert-shields-on-full whenever a movie stars either Peter Fonda or Judd Nelson, this has both so Put All Systems On Alert Mr. Sulu.

This also feels forced, the dialog which flowed with such ease in the last movie seems to be being "written" as Boondock Saints dialog, an attempt to recapture magic that only happened organically and can't be repeated. Who knows, this may be the greatest movie ever made but for right now I'm still unconvinced.

FURTHER PROOF THAT COURTNEY LOVE MUST DIE.

BY THE PRICKING OF MY THUMBS.....


In reality the death of Courtney Love is backed by so many reasons it's really hard to organize them all. First up she's a cunt, like a full on face bashing shitheel who rose to power claiming to be an outsider and marrying the spokesman for forgotten youth and then spending all his money getting nipped and tucked to the point that her and the Cat Lady should wrestle in used tampons mixed with saline solution and silicone for the world championship heavyweight belt of being Truly Fucked Up Looking. Then there's the fact that she'd rather drink and drug herself into a coma than take care of her daughter, who she doesn't mind pimping for photo ops.

Moving on there's her unabashed mouth raping of the music world with all those goddamn Hole albums. I hate to ruin the party for gay men and ugly chicks everywhere but Hole suck large portions of steaming ass. Not one single Hole song is good and most of that shit was written by other people. I mean when you're album creates a vortex of suck so complete you make Kurt Cobain songs sound shitty you're like a freak of nature.

Then there's her acting, which makes me sick and of course all the shit she put Kris Novoselic and Dave Grohl through having to do with Nirvana. Granted before she had him murdered....sorry, cough cough....before he committed suicide, Cobain gave her controlling rights to the name and legacy but she's still to blame for most of it. As of this day September 3rd even this cunting moist open pussing sore of a human being has hit a new low. View the image of Kurt Cobain in Guitar Hero Rock Band Jammy Jam Session Woohoo Good Time Game 5--or whatever the fuck you call it.



It's not just that Cobain's image is in this game but that he's rapping, singing Bon Jovi and all this other stuff that goes against everything he was. God I fucking hate Courtney Love and if she doesn't die because her fake lips and boobs burst and poison her maybe she'll get hit by a car or die in bizarre piano-hits-street accident. Hell fuck I'd even be willing to whip out the Ouija Board and see if we couldn't call upon Mr. Cobain to go all Freddy Krueger on her fucking ass.

UGGH, I HATE EVERYTHING

HALLOWEEN 2 -- MY REVIEW

I knew Halloween 2 was going to be a bad movie simply because everything Zombie creates for the cinema is awful. I snuck into the movie because I wanted to see just how bad it was. I was certain it would rival the awfulness of Halloween but was unprepared for it to be so incredibly silly and lazy.

In my opinion Zombie's original Halloween should be required viewing in film schools worldwide because it fails on every conceivable level. From directing to costumes, everything in that film screams "MISTAKE". Halloween 2 on the other hand is so vastly different from the original it's not a failed remake of a classic, it's just a silly movie that plays fast and loose with the idea of making sense.

I will never understand Zombie's need to showcase human misery at obnoxious lengths. It's not a moral argument I have but more that this need renders Zombie unable to realize when a scene has gone on too long. When you can't do that then you have no pacing and the movie loses its power.

With the violent scenes you're either annoyed by the endless screaming or the never ending gore starts to look really fake. When it comes to the straight scenes there is no flow to them, they just end. Often they end really abruptly with no resolve or clue given as to why we had to sit through them. A good movie is made better by pacing, a bad movie can become decent with good pacing but a bad film with bad pacing is a disaster. Zombie can't pace a film ergo his movies are disasters.

When it comes to Zombie's wife I really bring her up out of total confusion. She can't act and her character has no business being in this movie so of course Zombie makes her the center piece. In Halloween 2 she returns as Michael Myers mother only this time she has come back to guide him in his quest to kill Laurie Strode so they can be a family again. Zombie tries to use this aspect to deepen Halloween 2 by having his wife appear to Michael holding the reigns of a white horse that means something to him a fact we're let in on in a very confusing and awkward way.

In reality Zombie's better half just stands around in a white dress and tries to look "crazy". As a director he can't decide what to do with her so either she's a real ghost guiding Michael or she's a figment of his imagination. It's really whatever Zombie needs for the scene--to hell with continuity.

Another massive problem with Halloween 2 are all the things that don't add up. When the movie starts it's a year after the first one and everyone is convinced Michael Myers is dead. Sure no body was found but most chock that up to Michael's body somehow being lost.

Well OK except just before the one year jump we watch the ambulance crash into a tree, Michael escaping from the back by kicking open the doors and then cutting the head off of the wounded ambulance driver. Now maybe I'm being a stickler here but it seems to me when that wreckage was discovered it would clue somebody somewhere into the idea that Michael was still roaming around somewhere. Most lost dead bodies don't decapitate health care workers or kick open doors. Again, to hell with continuity THIS is a Zombie flick.

During his year off Michael has apparently been roaming around because who would really notice him in a giant metropolis like Haddonfield, a town he killed 15 people in. At some point during his Woody Guthrie rambling period Michael managed to find a hooded coat that's too big for him and a messenger bag. My problem here is where exactly did Michael find these items. I'm sure Zombie would explain it by telling me Michael killed a transient for the coat and bag. Really? When was the last time anybody saw a 7 foot 300 pound homeless guy tooling around?

Even the beloved white mask is used badly. When we see Michael from a distance sporting the mask it's damaged but still whole. Not so in close ups where there is a huge gash that leaves part of Michael's face exposed. I could chalk that up to Zombie not caring except it actually works against him.

Apparently during his year long walk about Michael grew a full length mountain man beard. When we see Michael sans mask it's obvious he couldn't wear it over the beard. Don't worry though because when Michael is wearing the mask and we can see his face in close ups his beard is gone. I'm not kidding, it's that level of laziness.

Moving away from Myers the script and dialog are so awful it's actually more terrifying to watch the characters interact than it is to watch Michael kill anybody. Let's start with Laurie who is probably the only person in the world that benefitted from being attacked by a psychopathic killer. Laurie has gone from socially awkward square to a sexy party girl who sings along to the MC5 and wears Black Flag T-shirts. Now she's not only troubled she's cooooool!! Wow, how one dimensional can you get?

The girl portraying Laurie is so unskilled that instead of the character being unstable and sad she's just bitchy. To be honest I was kind of rooting for Michael to cut her throat just so she'd stop speaking. I was also in love with how she works at the local coffee shop owned by Howard Hessman. Zombie sets this place up as her refuge but then quickly forgets about it because he has shot number 204 out of 300 featuring Michael walking around a field with his hood up.

There are also Laurie's interchangeable and badly written "Girlfriends" who refer to each other as "Dicklickers" during conversations so forced any teen out there would shudder hearing them. Apparently Laurie and her two friends are supposed to dress up to go to some big farmhouse party. So much attention is given to it that you become sure a showdown with Michael is inevitable.

Nope, instead Zombie uses the party to give as a sequence of events that make no sense at all. Follow me on this and please, if you can explain it to me I'm willing to learn. For the entire film Laurie has been living with Annie (still alive and still unable to act) and Annie's dad Sheriff Brackett. They live in a big house way on the other side of town from the farmhouse party. We know this because Laurie has to drive to get there.

OK so at the farmhouse party one of Laurie's insipid friends gets into a van with some guy she's going to bone. Michael shows up and kills both of them but instead of heading inside to kill Laurie he walks all the way across town to kill Annie and then hang out at the house waiting for Laurie to return. That seems like an awful lot of energy and time wasted for a killer on the go.

The weirdest part of Halloween 2 is how Zombie deals with Loomis. It feels as if Zombie wrote the entire film and then on the first day of shooting exclaimed "Crap!! Loomis, I forgot all about him" so he just wrote a bunch of scenes and tried to force them to work. In the movie Loomis has nothing to do with anything actually going on, he should have donned a white suit and hung out with Zombie's wife.

The audience mainly watches Loomis ride in limos and promote his new book about the attack on Haddonfield by Myers the year before. Nothing he does has any effect on what's going on in the movie, it's almost like Zombie stuck him in there so people could have bathroom break or refresh their popcorn.

The best I can figure is that Zombie needed the Loomis character mainly for the book he wrote because it's supposed to be a major catalyst for the Laurie character. The problem is again how Zombie handles the entire thing. The day Loomis's book is released Laurie buys a copy and by reading it discovers she is actually Michael Myers sister.

OK I CALL BULLSHIT!!

I realize that Zombie is a bad filmmaker but this one part seems like he just gave up towards the end of filming. We as thinking people are supposed to believe that nobody filled Laurie in on the fact that this guy was her brother? Don't tell me nobody knew because apparently every single person involved with the book knew. I'm also supposed to believe that this little juicy tidbit wasn't leaked? Bullshit, there would be press everywhere trying to get a quote from Laurie.

Zombie might have pulled it off if he made Loomis's book a joke, something only Loomis's bloated ego believed in. Instead Zombie makes it a pop culture moment, a media frenzy on the same level as Octomom or American Idol. With that much press involvement somebody would've found out something. Not to mention it would have been much more compelling to see Laurie dealing with this issue and the guilt that her brother killed all those people. Zombie can't be bothered with compelling filmmaking, he has another lengthy murder scene to shoot.

Outside of all these gems are the perfunctory scenes involving white trash folks acting moronic and getting killed. Zombie also manages to maintain his abysmal music placement ability e.g. when Michael is going on a killing spree Knights In White Satin plays the entire time, I shit you not. Zombie has also decided that if he runs out of dialog ideas he can stick the word "fuck" in there to fill the void.

Zombie uses "fuck" the way teenage girls use "like" as a pause, a breath, a period, a comma and any other way he can slip it in there. For instance the wounded ambulance driver in the beginning of the movie says fuck over and over again for nearly a full minute. If you took all the "fucks" out of Halloween 2 you'd essentially have a silent movie.

Now here comes the weirdest part. There are two sections that, while still not good, shed light on the idea that maybe somewhere down deep Zombie could direct a movie without it being awful. The first is set in a hospital where a wounded Laurie has to try and escape from Michael. Granted this is a dream sequence but it's actually scary, there's real tension and fear in this part.

The second is when Laurie finds Annie who is still alive but dying quickly. Laurie's desperation and what seems like genuine sadness brings the only real humanity to the movie at all. You actually feel bad for Laurie and that's a big switch from feeling nothing for her at all. Sadly these are only two small scenes in an ocean of shit but they're done well enough I felt I should mention them.

Halloween 2 is a big silly stupid mess. A movie that is so bad I still believe Zombie just shows up on set and says "uh, I guess like...y'know, act or something". He is unable to master even the most rudimentary ideas of film making to a point where I begin to think it's performance art. That Zombie makes awful movies and then laughs at the idiot masses who think he's serious about them. If that's not the case then Zombie could go down in history as a 21st century answer to Ed Wood.

MY THOUGHTS ON DISNEY BUYING MARVEL

So Disney is going to pony up 4 billion dollars to buy Marvel Entertainment? I'd like to say that it's a great move and we as comic book fans will reap the benefits of this new merger but I just don't believe that. I might be able to see some good in this if Disney was buying DC or even Image Comics but Marvel is way too eager to roll over and do parlor tricks for anybody with a buck and that worries me. From their crappy merchandise tie-ins (has anybody seen the Marvel Seelys Mattress comic book?)to their shoddy way of redirecting the focus of their Universe whenever a new movie is opening Marvel has long since made the transformation from comic book publisher to dancing bear.

With Disney now holding the reigns it wouldn't surprise me if Marvel just rolled over and allowed their stomachs to be scratched by the big bosses. Marvel wants to make money and they'll bastardize anything in their roster to do it. They completely retooled their Universe to center around Iron Man right before the movie hit, they slapped Spider-Man around with Brand New Day, they gave Wolverine a son and all of his memories back, and currently they're dragging out this Dark Reign series in hopes of shilling more books. Any company that is so dedicated to the bottom line will be easy to control once they have serious corporate backing.

Marvel Editor Joe Quesada claims that the relationship between Marvel and Disney will be much the same as the one shared by Pixar and Disney. While it's true that Marvel comes to the table with a proven track record the way Pixar did I just don't see Quesada fighting for their freedom the way Steve Jobs fought for Pixar. Truth be told most companies don't act that way once the big guns step in. MTV was a mecca of artistic ideas and creativity until they were bought up by Viacom and then, well I think we can all see what's happened there. I'm more apt to see Quesada agree to Disney demands and then ry and put the "It's an exciting time" spin on it he does with everything.

I don't think the effects will be immediate or incredibly extreme e.g. Mickey Mouse becoming the new Spider-Man or Marvel Team Up featuring Daredevil and Goofy. If anything I think it'll be Marvel turning their focus more away from comic books and more into movies and TV. I have this feeling they'll continue to go with the cheap and easy moves for the Marvel Universe (e.g. Captain American Reborn) to turn the kinds of profits Disney wants as well as scaling back on some of the sex and violence. The big movies will get bigger and I expect to see many more so-so movies specifically for the DVD market. In one positive note maybe we'll get more animated movies, that would kick ass. Whatever does happen I think the purchase will allow Marvel to live up it's post Marvel Comics moniker:

Marvel Entertainment