"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: How It Should Have Ended, "How Godzilla Should Have Ended"

Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. By "the week," I mean from late Thursday at midnight to the following late Thursday at 11:59pm. Today's Show of the Week has a bizarre and difficult-to-pin-down posting schedule, but its latest episode debuted online last Friday morning. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, doesn't have a schedule that's as difficult to pin down. It airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

Starz Digital Media's How It Should Have Ended series/channel is always reliable for a few grins or light chuckles over its short parodies of laughable plot holes and denouements from recent Hollywood blockbusters. In its latest installment, HISHE tackles Gareth Edwards' Godzilla reboot, and HISHE writers/voice actors Tina Alexander and Daniel Baxter get in a few good digs about the collateral damage caused in the Edwards film by Godzilla's battles against the MUTOs (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms).

"Oh, sure, when Godzilla destroys half the city and kills the unstoppable threat to save the world, everyone cheers. But when I do it, everyone gets all grouchy and judgmental," whines the Henry Cavill version of Superman during "How Godzilla Should Have Ended." He shows up in MUTO battle-ravaged San Francisco to shame both Godzilla and the unusually cheery survivors and is still butt-hurt over Superman comics readers' negative responses to the violence in Zack Snyder's Man of Steel. (I'm starting to realize that the reason why the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake remains Snyder's most satisfying movie is mainly because of the screenplay by Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn, and not so much because of the contributions of the simple-minded neo-con that is Snyder. Have you ever listened to Snyder speak? All he says during interviews or commentraks is "Awesome" or "Blablabla's such a rock star.")

The animus towards Man of Steel is mostly because your latest film was such a goddamn slog, Supes, whereas Godzilla's isn't, although it's marred by Aaron Gray-Stanford-Brown-Whatever-the-Fuck's two-hour-long impression of a block of wood. As The Daily Dot astutely noted, Godzilla suffers from a boring white guy problem and is part of a long line of Hollywood tentpole blockbusters that opt for the least interesting characters as their leads. Out of a cast that includes Ken Watanabe, Bryan Cranston, Elizabeth Olsen, David Strathairn, Sally Hawkins and Godzilla, Edwards chose to center the film around the individual with the least charisma or personality? This is the same problem I had with Edwards' previous sci-fi film, his 2010 indie breakthrough Monsters. It's a film about Mexico experiencing first contact with giant alien creatures, and it's told not through the eyes of any of its citizens but through the eyes of the most annoying white hipsters since those douches who gentrified the barrio side of Arlen and slipped salmon into Enrique's fish tacos?

I wish "How Godzilla Should Have Ended" (which, like all other HISHE installments, boasts some impressive background art by Otis Frampton) focused on the Edwards reboot's boring white guy problem. But any HISHE short that has some fun at the expense of the tiresome 9/11 imagery in tentpole blockbusters like Man of Steel and Godzilla--and pits Gipsy Danger from Pacific Rim against Zilla in an amusing one-sided battle--is fine by me.