Cool World

This is another one of those instances where something came out in my childhood which caught my interest but I didn’t have the means of experiencing it. Then years later as a powerful adult with an internet connection and a jonesing to reclaim my childhood via expired media, I am suddenly reminded of its existence only to track it down and finally close the book on it, knowing once and for all that it’s shit. Thank you, Netflix.

Cool World is one of those movies that purposefully comes out around the same time as another movie with a similar premise but one is clearly better like Babe and Gordy or Armageddon and Deep Impact. This is Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Cool World. Actually, Cool World came out about four years later so I guess instead of being developed in tandem, it was just being a johnny-come-lately.

This is the story about a GI who comes home from World War II to his mom, the only person he has in the world. He wins a shiny new motorcycle in a poker game and takes his mom out for a spin. They get in a crash and she dies. And then right there on the scene he gets transported to Cool World, a more low brow and adult version of Toon Town. Why him? Why then and there? Because a cartoon professor did it. Why? Because reasons. Because reasons will likely be the only explanation to around 80% of your questions during the course of the movie.

Flash forward to the then present day 90’s where Jack sits in a prison cell, drawing characters from his hit comic book series, Cool World. Herein lies one of the main ignored issues. Cool World is established later as an alternate dimension that is independent of our reality and has existed since long before Jack was even born. In Cool World he’s actually recognized as “the guy that thinks he invented Cool World.” So if he’s never been there, never seen it, how did he create something with the same name, same look and same characters? How is it that when he draws Holli Would in his cell, it’s actually also Holli Would in Cool World and it comes alive and beckons him into the paper Take on Me video verbatim? Next he gets spirited away into Cool World. Then what? We don’t know. How did it happen? What did he do in there? How did he get back out later? This scene has no reason to exist. All it does is establish that humans can travel to Cool World… which was already established. This occurrence gets totally abandoned as we cut to something else and by the time we get back to Jack, he’s being released from prison.   

Going back to present day Frank, he’s somehow working for the Cool World Police Department after deciding to stay there for about the last fifty years up to this point in time. He hasn’t aged at all. (No one ages there.) One of his usual calls he gets is to go cock block Holli Would, (the poor man’s Jessica Rabbit.) She keeps trying to get real guys to come to Cool World so that she can have sex with them. If a human fucks a doodle… Pfff, fuck-a-doodle-do… If they diddle a doodle- damn it. If a human has sex with a doodle, (there’s no way to say this with a straight face,) the doodle becomes real. Why? Because reasons. Why is it bad? Because reasons. They needed some kind of conflict so they pulled one out of their ass.

Holli wants to be human because I guess it feels better. But she doesn’t really stop to think about the implications like not being immortal and eternally beautiful. Though I never saw a single humanoid man doodle in her world and there's only one other humanoid girl so really what the hell’s the point in that lonely existence? Man doodle. Man doodle. I hate the term doodle in this movie. “Toon” is probably copyrighted though. The fact that doodles can turn real also begs the question what about all the shtty looking freaks that populate Cool World? How would it work for them? Why are you making me imagine a person having sex with this? Who would do that? How? What would that even look like as real after they presumably transformed?

Most of the cartoon voices in the movie don’t really sound like good cartoon voices. The characters that populate the world have a real spectrum of art styles going on. There are some that look like they’re from any old WB short, or a Little Orphan Annie or Mutz strip. There are people that look like they’re from Popeye and then there are people that look more or less anatomically correct and human-like in the style of Don Bluth. The world around them seems to flip flop between Burtonesque and Gigeresque which is a huge contrast to many of the extras. Why are there so many different styles clashing here? I really want the whole thing to look like a cohesive universe but it doesn’t. In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Toon Town was just one big collective place where all Cartoons ever made lived together so it made sense for everyone to look different. But this is a world not created by a bunch of different people (or anyone) so there should be some consistency in the same way the show Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends has a bunch of different weird creatures in it but they are all within the same art style.

Also, I like zoot suit wolves as much as the next guy but I think the maximum effectiveness of their presence in numbers is probably somewhere around three. Any more than that is diminishing returns.

All that being said, this looks awesome.

I also like the movie props that are semi cartoon and semi real in that they appear to be drawn but exist there on a two-dimensional plain like they’re on the side of a board

Another problem with Cool World, the world, is all of the contrived zaniness. The entire place is in complete anarchy. The movie will be having a scene and shit will be flying around in the background or doodles are clobbering each other the head with hammers and anvils in the foreground. This isn’t a place where characters live out their lives and you can write entertaining stories about it. This is just Wackyland. I realize it’s a cartoon world but they’re just going “Hey it’s a cartoon world! Look how cuhrayzee everything is! Woooooooo!

Why the hell is Frank the main character? I mean he had the potential to be but he just has little stake in the conflict. He’s trying to stop Holli but that doesn’t come off as all that interesting because they never explain why what she’s doing is bad. The only real motivation here is that toward the end Frank thinks she killed his partner. Jack, however does much better as the unwitting protagonist and antihero. His story is more interesting what with him being incarcerated, having a personal connection by being the comic book writer that thinks he invented Cool World, making the mistake of getting involved with a crazy cartoon lady and then rectifying his mistake at the end where he was blatantly made out to be the hero. But no, Frank has to be our story vehicle for some reason. It’s like having to watch Star Wars through the perspective of Chewbacca. Yeah, you could do it, you could even make it work but it still would have been much better the other way.

So Jack goes back to Cool World and has sex with Holli. She turns real and the two of them escape back into the ordinary world. (Jack lives in Vegas by the way.) When they appear in his house it’s accompanied with all manner of electric light shows. His two female next door neighbors come over to check on him and find that he’s apparently just hanging out in his house with his presumably new really weird girlfriend, Holli. I really feel like these two characters should have been introduced earlier in the movie. They’re obviously closish friends who care about Jack but because we’re just now learning about them, this seen and their reactions to what’s happening don’t have quite as much impact.

So, they go out on the town. Holli has little inhibitions or social grace. Back in Cool Worldshe liked singing and dancing so that’s what she does here. Before long, both he and she start exhibiting this weird phenomena where they begin to flicker in between doodle form and real form… which look nothing like them. Jack looks kind of like Wimpy from Popeye and Holli looks like… I don’t know, some stupid fucking clown. Needless to say they are a little dismayed by their collective identity crisis.

Holli runs off and just happens to come across the professor from earlier in the movie, now in the real world incognito. He tells her with some coercion that to fix the problem she has to merge the two worlds by unplugging a nexus point that happens to be at the top of a big neon billboard. Yeah, apparently there are just random nexus points or portals that lead from one world to the other scattered all over the place.

Frank comes back to the real world for the first time in fifty years to go after Holli. Now something else has to be addressed. The human world and everything in it is referred to in Cool World as “real.” So that implies that our world is used to justify Cool World by it’s own citizens as false, fake or secondary. In other words it has to be an imitation of something that already exists and is thus unnatural or manufactured. Otherwise any parallel dimension is just as “real” as any other. So this basically contradicts one of the few things they dared to actually explain. Which is it? Was Cool World created or not?

So anyway, Frank finds Holli and sees her odd blinking condition and then remarks “It’s happening.” What? What is happening? You didn’t explain what this shit was before and you aren’t doing it now. It might as well have never happened at all because you failed to give it meaning.

On the chase up to the sign, Holli knocks Frank off of the building and he hits the cement. Holli opens the nexus and a bunch of doodles from someone’s bad drug trip come spewing out all over the city like an alternate version of Fantasia’s Night on Bald Mountain segment. Jack transforms into a doodle super hero in the style of John K, and starts beating the shit out of everything, eventually fixing the nexus and restoring balance between the worlds. In the process he becomes trapped in some weird doodle limbo with Holli which is his dream and her nightmare.

Frank, who you write off as dead already, gets dragged by his unrequited love, (who wasn't worth mentioning up to this point,) back to Cool World where she actually watches him die. But that’s okay because they also forgot to mention that when you die in Cool World, you become a doodle and then I guess live forever. Because who gives a shit about things like exposition, foreshadowing and rules? If a conflict ever arises in your story, immediately resolve it with whatever you can make up on the spot. Or just forget it exists entirely. That’s always an option. This should have played out like the scene from American Horror Story where the girl gets hit by the car and her mom comes and frantically tries to drag her to the haunted house property before she dies so that she’ll be a ghost there. But in order to create a good scene like that, you have to ESTABLISH THE RULES BEFORE HAND. She acts like she knew this fact all along but conveniently forgot when it became important.

My final unanswered question is this: could he now cheat death by having sex with a human thereby turning back into a live human? I have to admit that as unclear and nonsensical as everything in this movie is, it sure does leave plenty of room for the viewer’s imagination.

Ocarina of Time: A Deconstructivist Adventure (Pt 2.)

Here's a comparative of the Oot Hyrule Castle versus the Super Smash Bros. 64 stage. They actually look more or less the same with a few small changes.

Here’s a shot looking straight down through the ground. That ball down there is actually the sun shining up through a black plane while it drifts back to the horizon. I never thought about it until I saw this. I guess I just assumed that he sun appeared/loaded at the horizon and floated across the sky, disappearing at the other horizon where it was gone until it loaded again. But apparently it’s always there, continually rotating around the skybox in the same sense that the real sun appears to work.

There’s typically not much to see in the dungeons because you’re inside rooms with solid walls and a ceiling, so you can’t fly over the tops of the walls and look beyond. But the Forest Temple has some open air cloisters so I tried those areas out.

I found a duplicate elevator of the one on the first chamber of the temple, just floating there behind the walls. No clue about this. Could be beta. Could be a glitch but again, I’ve never seen glitches like this in this game. Stuff doesn’t seem to move around and appear in weird places. It just doesn’t appear at all if anything.  

There’s also this water texture that is only visible as the water surface in this well. Yet there’s a ton of extra extending beyond the wall and into oblivion. I can also stand, walk and climb on invisible surfaces all throughout this area. I even found an area that injures Link when he walks on it. It makes little flames appear on his feet which is what happens when he walks on lava. For being outside the playable realm, there’s sure a lot of constructs here. Was this supposed to be a playable area or was it just a dumping ground for unused code?

One thing I thought was interesting was all of the instances where some object has to be recreated in several different areas as to appear further away or closer. This might constitute creating a flat bitmap image for something that’s really far away. For closer things, they seem to make simplified mockups. When I fly up to investigate, I often find hilariously large size discrepancies between the backdrop mockup version and the actual version.

Here’s the windmill. True size on top. Mockup on bottom (as viewed from the graveyard.)

The Lon Lon Ranch silo. This one’s REALLY bad. Like the Stonehenge prop from This is Spinal Tap bad.

Looks like they got Death Mountain about right though. (That speck in the air just above the peak is Link.)

Here’s a nice pullback shot to show the entirety if Bongo Bongo. Seeing this actually makes him more creepy to me.

The interesting thing about this boss fight is that you don’t enter the main room and immediately get locked in. You enter through a hole in the floor of a smaller chamber high above. So at any point during the fight with the levitation cheat on, you can just fly back up through the hole and leave.

I found a gossip stone tucked behind the roots of the Deku Tree which means it’s not accessible by conventional means at any point, young or old. Could be beta. Whatever it is, it’s sloppy because it’s not hidden that well but neither is it simple to get to. There’s another gossip stone on the tree’s right which I’d think would make this one pointless but I don’t know.

I can’t even begin to describe what I did in order to get in this completely empty shop in frozen Zora’s Domain but let’s just say it was an accident that happened while trying to do something else. I wish I could make a gif of this because it’s bizarre. Link is falling sideways into the background. If I hold down the levitate button, he rises headfirst toward the camera. At some point when he gets close enough, he does a 180 and begins going back into the background. So basically he “falls” and “rises” along this invisible U-shaped track on its side.

The levitation cheat also works in dialogue and cutscenes which makes them more fun. It even works in flashbacks. What the hell? This is interesting because it shows that throughout the whole game, no matter what’s happening on screen, you are always seeing in game models. The Link you see almost get trampled by Zelda fleeing the castle is the very same Link model that you control. Today, (and even back then on the Playstation since it had video capabilities,) your cutscenes are basically like watching a movie that was created in a vacuum. There is no direct in game content in them typically. Everything is recreated and staged with better looking models and graphics. This is probably more of a testament to the limitations of the N64 than anything. Not to say that it detracts or looks bad…

If you fly over the wall in the graveyard as young Link, you can see the pit that leads to Dampe’s tomb (black strip on the left of the map) even though there’s no headstone there and the ground above it looks normal. If you fly in the hole from under the ground, you go to the tomb and you can race Dampe’s ghost for the hookshot like normal… just as young Link. So yeah, you can go in a tomb that 
hasn’t been built yet and race the ghost of a guy that’s not dead.

Ocarina of Time: A Deconstructivist Adventure (Pt. 1)

A long time ago back when I could play video games whenever I wanted, I bought a Gameshark for the N64. I was starry eyed over being able to do whatever I wanted in any game, essentially making every game into a brand new sandbox game featuring the previous content. It would be great. In retrospect it kind of sucked. The only game I had that I could actually load cheats in with any amount of success was Super Mario 64 which for some reason is labeled “Super Mario Land 64” in the Gameshark game list.

Back then, there was more or less just one cheat that I really wanted: “press L to levitate” for the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I like glitches and unused beta content and discovering how stuff works and breaking games. I wanted to be able to fly around and go beyond the boundaries that the game sets and peek behind the curtain to see the inner workings and other stuff that you’re otherwise not supposed to see. Ocarina of Time is like the perfect game for this. It’s made in the 32 bit era which is interesting in that it was new territory in gameplay with many hurdles and limitations that had to be circumvented somehow. It’s got a decent sized world full of secrets and places that are supposed to be off limits for one reason or another. It’s also the video game that I’ve beaten the most and am quite familiar with.

I recently got my N64 and Gameshark Pro 3.0 out of their box to try and revisit this aspiration of yore. After several trials of fiddling around with the Gameshark and OoT, I found that even as an intelligent adult, I still can't make it work. It either won't load or just fucking freezes the game every time, just like every other game in my N64 library that isn’t SM64. The closest I got to a working trial was successfully loading the game with one cheat, (not the levitation one,) and starting in my house. But the second I walk out the door, The game crashes. What a crock of shit. Gameshark is a con. How does anyone do anything with these?

Then It occurred to me: why don’t I just try it on an emulator? Emulators didn’t exist the last time I thought about trying this, at least not for the N64 they didn’t. So, long story short, I tried it and got exactly what I’ve wanted for over a decade. And now since I was playing on a PC, I could take screenshots of all the weird shit I see and do. Despite wanting to see this stuff for a long time, I’ve avoided looking at any beta or glitch videos for this game because I wanted to have my own self-guided adventure like in all video games I play. So this is a pictorial documentation of my flying adventure across Hyrule, breaking the game wide open.

The courtyard where you meet Princess Zelda for the first time is one of the most interesting and detailed parts of the game. You have these three windows that you can look in and see actual interiors of the castle as opposed to just a flat picture of a window or shutters. Of course the interiors are only modeled to the necessary degree. Only the parts that you can see through the window exist. If you fly straight up and go through the sky textured ceiling, you can go over the courtyard walls and get a closer look at the interiors

Here’s the room with the pictures of Mario characters on the wall. Why is Bowser’s portrait elongated? Did they forget to hold down shift when scaling it? Note the conical shape of all the floors.

This is the hallway that Zelda is looking into through a window. The first really weird thing, besides the hall being just an interior fragment floating over an abyss, is that you can actually stand on the floor in here and run around. The second really weird thing is that those two guards aren’t just motionless models of the NPC castle guards. The designers took just the front panels of the guard models’ polygons and set them there like a suit of armor on display or a cardboard cutout. But in terms of the actual game, they cut in half or ripped the face off of two guys and then mounted them there.

One of the areas that I really wondered about in the game was the small stealth section area and courtyard within Hyrule castle. Specifically, I wanted to get in there when it was night. As an adult, this area doesn’t exist so I don’t need to wonder about that. But as young Link, if you crawl in through the drain at night, the area is inaccessible because it is blocked by two posted guards who throw you out if they detect you. You can’t walk past them. You can’t even fly over them. If levitating wasn’t going to work, I’d need to try another cheat. I tried the time of day modifier but it didn’t do anything. Then I tried the “show up in strange places” cheat which typically takes you to a non playable area upon activating it as you enter a new area. I went outside the castle and made sure it was night before activating it on my way back in. I appeared past the guards and out in the abyss but I was able to float back on the stage.

Well I did it. I got into the castle at night. Also the camera has broken out of the fixed camera for sneaking through the area and gone to the default in game camera.

Unfortunately this seems to be all there is. The rest of the place simply doesn’t need to exist when it’s night. What I really wanted to see was the Zelda courtyard at night but that area doesn’t have a dynamic skybox. In fact it doesn’t have a skybox at all. It has basically a ceiling colored with sky texture. Oh well...

Gerudo Fortress is one of the places you’re not supposed to be able to go when you’re young Link so I paid it a visit by flying straight over the assholes blocking the bridge. The place looks abandoned. There is literally no one in the town on the outside but if you go inside the buildings you’ll find that the carpenters that you’re supposed to rescue as adult Link are all already locked up there, (I guess this has been a habitual problem for them for years or maybe they just like being locked up in a village of exotic desert women.) They even beckon you over to their cells. There are also patrolling Gerudo guards inside. Everything is the same. It’s just the outside that’s different.

The funny thing is that if you get caught anywhere on Gerudo territory, you are not thrown in jail as you would be as an adult. You are instead promptly escorted off the premises and chucked into the frickin ravine to the water below. Damn.

On the top of the fortress is a chest with a heart piece in it. As an adult, you have to play the scarecrow song to get the scarecrow to appear on the roof and then use the hookshot on him to get up there. Since you’re not supposed to be able to get to any part of this area as young link, there’s no reason for this chest to exist but it does. If you look over to the left on the platform in the background, you’ll see a heartpiece sitting there. That’s not there when you’re an adult and it’s certainly not available as young Link so I can only assume it’s the heartpiece that’s supposed to go in the chest. But if it’s over there, then what’s in the chest now?

It’s an odd mushroom. A perishable trade quest item that you can only get as adult link and is never in a chest or even geographically anywhere near this area. This is just really weird. I went into a lot of places as young Link that I wasn’t supposed to be able go and everything still worked just the way it should which is why I’m suspicious of this instance. It looks more deliberate. It could be beta activity that the designers never even bothered to cover up because it’s in an area that’s already impossible to get to. This could have been an early idea and then they decided to put the heartpiece in the chest instead. Maybe you actually were supposed to get the mushroom here or maybe it was a placeholder for something. I guess it doesn’t really make much sense to get a perishable item from a chest.

Update: I went and looked up some beta and early concept stuff for OoT after my adventure and found evidence that young Link was originally supposed to be able to access Gerudo Fortress and the heartpiece there is apparently leftover from that idea. Likely the odd mushroom chest was too. So yay for me. I found and identified some beta content.