"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Space Dandy, "The Transfer Student Is Dandy, Baby"

Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

Musical episodes aren't my cup of tea. Usually, they're the kind of episode that's way more fun for the actors involved than for the viewer, especially a viewer like me who doesn't care for musical theater (and prefers musicals only when they're strictly satirical, like South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut or Community's "Regional Holiday Music"). But "The Transfer Student Is Dandy, Baby," Space Dandy's musical episode, is a rare case where it's vice versa. It helps that the songs aren't too awful. In most musical episodes, the enjoyment the actors must have had from reliving performing arts summer camp (or channeling it) while they worked on the episode just doesn't translate for viewers like me, whereas "The Transfer Student Is Dandy, Baby," penned by special guest writer Hayashi Mori, a playwright and J-drama writer, soars on the basis of Mori's solid writing, fanciful animation and a climactic musical number that contains lyrics like "Ass, ass, ass, ass, ass, ass! Come on, ass!"

Dandy, a middle school dropout, gets to experience high school when he pretends to be a transfer student at famous Baberly Hills High, "the setting for a lot of dramas," in order to track down a rare Category-A "Cliponian" alien and bring her to the Alien Registration Center (Cliponians are distinctive for transforming from plain-looking to attractive when they find their mates). The high school setting gives Mori and the animators a chance to reference all kinds of works. Your response to whatever past high school movies or shows are referenced during "The Transfer Student Is Dandy, Baby" gives away how old you are. If your thoughts during the episode were "This is an awful lot like Grease" or "Dandy's prom suit mashes up Travolta's suits from Grease and Saturday Night Fever," you were a '70s kid. If your response was either "I'm having flashbacks to Galaxy High School," "This training montage is straight out of Better Off Dead and the Rocky sequels (okay, Rocky's not exactly the high school genre, but whatever)" or "Dandy's giving off a creepy Wooderson vibe in these early scenes," you were an '80s kid like me. If you immediately exclaimed either "Glee!," "High School Musical!" or "A non-violent Kill la Kill!" and said something along those lines on Twitter, you're a zygote.

Speaking of age, Dandy may be in his 20s or 30s, but unlike many of the student characters in the two 21 Jump Street movies (which poked fun at how the undercover cops on the original Jump Street were too easily accepted as high-schoolers by civilians and criminals), no one at Baberly Hills cares that Dandy looks too old to be a student. Instead of Dandy's looks, what Queen Bee Sofia (Yuuka Nanri) and the other popular kids at this singing and dancing school are more concerned with is Dandy's singing and dancing skills. His musical ability doesn't compare to Sofia's, so the mean girl relegates him to the bottom of the social totem pole and designates him an "otaku," along with a mousy-looking alien girl in glasses named Hanahana (Yui Makino) and a couple of other supposed losers. Will Dandy and Hanahana be able to upgrade themselves in time for prom night? Will Dandy find the Cliponian and finally get that bounty he's yearning for? Will Dr. Gel finally be face-to-face with the pompadoured alien hunter he's yearning to capture?

If questions two and three ended in "yes," the series would be over (we have a lot more episodes to go). As for prom night, Dandy and Hanahana make like Donna Summer and work hard for the money in an '80s training montage parody that, frankly, was done to better effect in Wet Hot American Summer and on South Park, and together, all the otakus manage to bring an end to the school's evil caste system in a prom night number that immediately won me over with lyrics like a refrain that's "Ass is all!" in Japanese (FUNimation's English dub modifies it to "Booty is all!").

Even Sofia is won over by the "Viva All!" number as well, and she ends up joining the otakus in abandoning the caste system. Part of why "The Transfer Student Is Dandy, Baby" stands out as a musical episode is its brief length--it's over before you know it, and fortunately, it doesn't drone on for 42 minutes or more--but it's also a standout because of the way it delivers its pro-underdog message, not through any speechifying, which proliferated all the preachy American animated shows that dominated the decade that much of the episode is an homage to, but through irreverent lines like "Ass is all!"

Stray observations:
* In addition to a sight gag involving the teleportation device from the David Cronenberg version of The Fly and a jock whose character design is modeled after E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Slimer makes a cameo during Sofia's expositiony caste system number and is seen wearing a hat that resembles--but isn't quite exactly--the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man's hat.

* The shot of the school's Sentinel-like security guard robot stopping the merged jock bullies from Hulking out at the prom is my favorite example of how striking this musical episode looks.

* Was an entire subplot about a long-suffering janitor and his two-timing wife cut out of the episode? The duet between the janitor, who doesn't speak elsewhere, and his wife, who sings about an affair with some other alien, during the "Viva All!" number is all that remains of this obviously deleted subplot.

* Feminist viewers probably won't care for Dandy objectifying Hanahana to boost her self-esteem during the climactic number. But it'd be boring if Dandy were enlightened Alan Alda in space instead of the Johnny Bravo-ish jerk who frequently gets his comeuppance, and he gets that here when he fails to put two and two together and notice that Hanahana is the Cliponian who's been "chweeting" anonymously about her Cliponian heritage.

* Why hasn't anybody told me a Space Dandy score album was released in March? I'm crazy about the original music on this show, especially the Japanese duo LUVRAW & BTB's Zapp & Roger-inspired "Anatato" from "Even Vacuum Cleaners Fall in Love, Baby," and I'd love to include more of it in AFOS' "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" playlist.

A Space Dandy cosplayer at last week's San Diego Comic-Con (Photo source: Fuck Yeah Space Dandy)

Not a Burger Stand becomes a viral sensation and makes me ask, "Why doesn't this kind of joint exist up in Northern Cali?"

As someone who used to listen to No Respect repeatedly, I will probably nail this. (Photo source: Not a Burger Stand)

Down in Burbank, a city that, thanks to late '80s-era Nick at Nite's Laugh-In reruns, I can't refer to without channeling Gary Owens and calling it "Beautiful Downtown Burbank," the chalkboard specials at a burger joint called Not a Burger Stand have gone viral. Not a Burger Stand's specials, which the Burbank restaurant posts on its Tumblr and Facebook pages, are accompanied by terrific re-creations of TV and movie characters by illustrators Lila Gonzalez and Kyle Carrozza. These specials also offer the kind of wacky discounts that are atypical for a burger stand but aren't surprising to see coming from a restaurant that's right next to Hollywood and the voiceover industry: customers get discounts if they order in the voices of--or dress up as--the characters that Gonzalez or Carrozza drew on the chalkboard. It's a really clever way to both run a business and see how terrible everyone's Matthew McConaughey impressions are.

I wish one of Not a Burger Stand's specials was "Order the Cap'n Crunch Fried Chicken and Funnel Cake in Cap'n Crunch's voice and get 10% off," but nobody who was born after 1988 knows what Cap'n Crunch sounds like. However, these other specials would be fun to order, especially for someone like me who's a fan of many voiceover artists and actually practices doing a few impressions of celebrity voices. These discounts make me think, "Damn, we need a burger joint like this up in here in the Bay Area so that I can trot out my '60s-era Sean Connery or my Tracy Morgan and get 10% off a burger."

(Photo source: Kyle Carrozza)

If you're just like me and you've never seen The Lego Movie, and then you stumble into some business where you get 10% off if you sing "Everything Is Awesome," but you have no idea how the Lego Movie theme goes, it goes a little something like this:

I didn't weep for Oberyn, but I felt bad for all the Latino viewers out there who hate it whenever a likable Latino character gets killed off on white television. "Ritchiiiieeee!," screamed Esai Morales, right after he saw the end of "The Mountain and the Viper" that night, even though the Viper isn't named Ritchie.

(Photo source: Lila Gonzalez)

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Space Dandy, "Slow and Steady Wins the Race, Baby"

Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

Ever since the start of its second cour two weeks ago, Shinichiro Watanabe's anthology-like Space Dandy has been edging into more surreal and cartoony territory. The show often contains old Hanna-Barbera sound FX--they're the biggest example of how much '60s Hanna-Barbera slapstick shows like Wacky Races appear to be an influence on Watanabe and the other animators during Space Dandy. The vintage Hanna-Barbera noises are at their most abundant during special guest director Masaaki Yuasa's "Slow and Steady Wins the Race, Baby," the most stoner-friendly Space Dandy episode since "Plants Are Living Things Too, Baby," which was guest-directed by Yuasa protégé Eunyoung Choi.

The Korean animator's trippy plant world episode was so clever and imaginatively visualized that I wrote, "I'm now interested in whatever her next project will be." That project turned out to be Ping Pong: The Animation, Yuasa's 11-episode, one-cour adaptation of Tekkonkinkreet creator Taiyo Matsumoto's 1996-97 manga about high-schoolers whose lives revolve solely around ping pong (the manga was previously made into a 2002 live-action film I actually rented and watched right before the Yuasa version began airing, as an appetizer to the show).

Ping Pong, which is worth checking out on FUNimation or Hulu, overcame limited animation (done under a really tight, two-to-three-weeks-per-episode schedule) and some patchy earlier episodes to become an enjoyable and occasionally moving sports anime that drew much of its drama from quieter material (the loneliness of the Christmas season; athletes who are so obsessed with winning that they've forgotten about the joy they used to get out of the game) rather than from whether the ultimate victor would be the cocky and outgoing prodigy in a dorky bowl cut or his stoic and introverted best friend/ping pong protégé. Like the first and sixth Rocky movies, the original Bad News Bears, the original Bring It On and the TV version of Friday Night Lights, Ping Pong is the kind of sports story where the outcome of the final match ends up mattering the least. To borrow that old saying derived from sportswriter/poet Grantland Rice's 1908 poem "Alumnus Football," Ping Pong is not about whether its characters win or lose but about how they play the game.





Choi directed an episode of Ping Pong, as well as the show's rotoscoped end credits sequence of a walk and drive through Ping Pong's seaside town setting. Her closing sequence is a good example of Ping Pong's knack for dazzling visuals despite its limited animation and low budget (another good example is the show's opening title sequence, which features perhaps the best opening theme tune on an anime so far this year, Bakudan Johnny's "Tada Hitori (Only One)," a rugged-sounding anthem that suits Ping Pong's equally rugged visuals and perfectly encapsulates the show's emphasis on fighting for self-respect instead of fighting to be at the top). Just as "Plants Are Living Things Too, Baby" was, for me, a terrific introduction to Choi's work, the LeRoy Neiman-like Ping Pong was a terrific introduction to the work of Choi's mentor, who, towards the end of Ping Pong's run, received even greater exposure in America than the kind Ping Pong was getting on FUNimation when Adventure Time aired "Food Chain," a standout "Finn and Jake learning about science" episode guest-directed by Yuasa ("Food Chain" was also one of the first projects from Science Saru, a new animation studio founded by Yuasa and Choi).

Between Ping Pong, the Adventure Time episode and now this Hanna-Barbera sound library-reliant episode that's even more offbeat than most of the already offbeat previous episodes of the same show, Yuasa is experiencing quite a year as an animator. I have no idea how Yuasa can function from only a half-hour of sleep per night, which he did while juggling Ping Pong, Adventure Time and Space Dandy. While I don't think the story in "Slow and Steady Wins the Race, Baby" is anything special (if Ping Pong's a gritty but ultimately life-affirming show about plucking the day and not letting the need to win consume you, "Slow and Steady Wins the Race, Baby" is Space Dandy at its most cynical and Emo Dandy-ish), the crazy, stoner-friendly visuals Yuasa directed while operating on an amount of sleep that's too insane to even attempt are imbued with the same panache Yuasa brought to Ping Pong and "Food Chain." There's an early sequence at a crowded space food court that just looks sensational, and the endless amount of culinary delights amusingly amplifies the torment Meow experiences while suffering from an empty stomach.

The story behind the making of "Slow and Steady Wins the Race, Baby" is perhaps more interesting than the episode's story itself. Last year, Yuasa used his Facebook account to conduct a search for international animators to help him out on the Space Dandy episode. Two of the animators who submitted reels of their work to Yuasa and were chosen to take part in the episode were Ben Li and Jeremy Polgar, both staffers from Titmouse Inc., the American studio behind Superjail, Metalocalypse, the most recent season of The Venture Bros., the animated version of Black Dynamite and Motorcity, a short-lived Disney show I didn't expect to enjoy but wound up being amazed by its visuals and subversive undertones. So this episode doesn't just boast Yuasa as a guest talent. It also has veterans from Motorcity and a bunch of other enjoyable Titmouse shows.

"Yuasa-san was very open to us using Flash to animate our shots," wrote Polgar on Tumblr, referring to the same software that he and his co-workers deployed to bring Motorcity to life and turn it into one of the best-looking shows ever made with that software. The shots that Polgar referred to take place during a dazzling sequence where Dandy, Meow and the latest alien they've befriended attempt to sail by boat to the alien's homeworld using the strange physics of a planet called Pushy Boyfriend, which they've all been marooned on. The bizarre point-of-view shots in the sailing sequence are reminiscent of Yuasa's remarkable-looking ping pong match sequences on Ping Pong. Complain all you want about the limited animation on Ping Pong, but table tennis rarely looks as striking or as fun as it did on Yuasa's show.

I wish the episode's story was as remarkable as Yuasa's visuals and that it ended on a better comedic payoff for the two characters who suffer the most during the story, Meow and Carpaccio (Daisuke Namikawa), the aforementioned alien from a planet of talking fish called Girlfriend. The episode opens with Dandy, being his usual self-absorbed self, using whatever remaining cash he has in his not-so-fat pockets to buy himself a portable teleportation device called Mr. Teleporter instead of getting the starving Meow a meal, and during an argument with Meow, the Betelgeusian accidentally teleports Dandy's head--and only his head--to Planet Pushy Boyfriend.

On the planet, Dandy's disembodied head encounters Carpaccio, an astronaut who's been marooned on Pushy Boyfriend for 10 years. The little fish is trying to find a way to return to Planet Girlfriend, which has been stuck orbiting Pushy Boyfriend for nearly 100 years due to Pushy Boyfriend's clinginess gravity, so that he can warn his people about the sun inching closer to Girlfriend. After some fiddling around with the Mr. Teleporter gun, Meow winds up on Pushy Boyfriend as well, Dandy gets the rest of his body back and the duo helps Carpaccio return to Girlfriend, on the condition that he agrees to be taken to the Alien Registration Center afterward and registered.

Carpaccio arrives on Girlfriend to find that his 10-year absence actually lasted 100 years and that Yoko (Fuyumi Shiraishi), the lost love he's been aching to return to, is still alive, but she's now a Botoxed grandmother who doesn't welcome him back with open arms and is happily married to a dickweed of a fish. He returns to also find out that everyone on the planet is a climate change denier who won't listen to his warnings about the planet being burnt to a crisp. As the sun fries up Girlfriend, the depressed Carpaccio leaps right into the sun to kill himself (there goes another opportunity for Dandy to register another alien) and is greeted in Fish Heaven by a much more friendly Yoko. Back on the Aloha Oe, Meow, who gets offended whenever Dandy refers to him as a cat and insinuates that he eats fish, gives in to his feline side and wolfs down the meal he's been dying for: it's in the form of Carpaccio's broiled corpse.

The ultimate fate of the Frank Grimes-ish Carpaccio is supposed to be darkly funny, but instead, I felt awful for Carpaccio. Rejected by his climate change-denying planet and left without a purpose or reason to live, Carpaccio ultimately finds his purpose: as dinner on someone's table. Some viewers might view Carpaccio's unintentional transformation into a remedy for Meow's hunger as a meaningful act that Carpaccio will never realize is meaningful to Meow, but to me, it's just a bummer. The ending falls flat and could use a little more bite, no pun intended. I would have gone in an even darker direction and written it so that Meow gets what he wants, but then he chokes on a piece of Carpaccio and dies too. Like inept Dr. Gel and his assistant Bea, who, along with Planet Girlfriend, receive a fiery demise this week, Meow's no stranger to dying, so why not kill him here as well? But the flat ending doesn't detract from how much of a visual--and aural--treat "Slow and Steady Wins the Race, Baby" is and how, like when "Plants Are Living Things Too, Baby" made me want to see more of Eunyoung Choi's projects, this week's Space Dandy episode is another reason to delve further into the work of one of Japan's cleverest current animators.

Tip-Top Quotables: "Some couples have a song. Ours is the theme from Jaws," plus a few other great lines this week

My favorite monthly section in old Source magazine issues was "Hip-Hop Quotables," in which the Source editors printed out their favorite new rap verse of the month, from the first bar to the last. "Tip-Top Quotables," which I've named after that Source section, is a collection of my favorite quotes of the week from anywhere, whether it's a recent TV show or a new rap verse. "TTQ" won't appear on this blog every week. It'll appear whenever the fuck I feel like it.

* "Tell him that snoring is usually a sign of a condition called sleep apnea, which causes a lot of people to die in their sleep. Be like, 'Here, Google it.' And then he'll be so scared he'll never be able to sleep again."--Kumail Nanjiani, giving advice to an Esquire reader about how to deal with a roommate's boyfriend who snores too loud

* "We've got some very attractive rewards at every level. For instance, $10,000 lands you in a signature CNN mass-shooting coverage six-box. For $25,000, you get to take molly with Fareed Zakaria. What what! For $5 million, CNN will air a 24-hour, two-week hunt for your lost car keys."--Jon Stewart, announcing his Kickstarter to buy CNN

(Photo source: Wendy Liebman)

* "Tony played it like a failed Scientologist."--Sam Rockwell, recalling to MTV News his Galaxy Quest co-star Tony Shalhoub's hilarious performance as a constantly stoned, non-Asian TV actor playing an Asian character, which Shalhoub based on constantly stoned Kung Fu star David Carradine, '70s TV's most infamous example of a non-Asian playing an Asian

(Photo source: Pia Glenn, the writer behind the #TimeTitles hashtag, which is a mockery of this)

(Photo source: Hari Kondabolu)

* "That is not good. The only time when you are happy to hear the words 'Maggots were found' is when you are a maggot whose family was lost at sea."--Last Week Tonight's John Oliver, joking about a news report of maggots being found in prison food supplied by a shady subcontractor



* "Garner was an expert at pulling the viewer into the action and acknowledging the ridiculousness of most television storytelling without quite breaking the fourth wall. He was the guy who crawled out of the screen and sat beside you munching popcorn on the couch."--Todd VanDerWerff, Vox, "James Garner has died; these five roles will remind you of his greatness"

* "If Netanyahu is so bothered by how dead Palestinians look on television then he should stop killing so many of them."--Benjamin Wallace-Wells, New York, "'Telegenically Dead Palestinians': Why Israel Is Losing the American Media War"

So about that night when Sony Korea accidentally posted all of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 on YouTube…

(Photo by Russell McGovern, @pressthebigredbutton on Flickr)

Someone at Sony Korea is definitely getting both a J. Jonah Jameson-style tongue-lashing and their walking papers for this.

On Saturday night, podcaster and Portland Mercury blogger Bobby Roberts and a bunch of others pointed out on their Twitter feeds that Sony Korea's YouTube account accidentally posted The Amazing Spider-Man 2 in its entirety for free. Well, not all of the movie. The full upload, which Sony Korea immediately removed from YouTube once they realized the screw-up, was missing the mid-credits ad for X-Men: Days of Future Past. Amazing Spider-Man 2 director Marc Webb had to slip the Days of Future Past ad into his film's end credits in order to fulfill an obligation to his contract with Sony rival and Days of Future Past distributor 20th Century Fox.

(Photo source: OneHallyu)

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was an overstuffed and disjointed mess that was difficult to sit through for much of its bloated running time of two hours and 22 minutes, so I was in no mood to rewatch the entire movie right below Roberts' tweet, which he deleted when Sony Korea removed their accidental upload. And nope, not even skimming through the upload of Amazing 2 to revisit only my favorite scenes (and a few of my least favorite) improved the movie, which has become Sony's lowest-grossing Spider-Man movie in America (Sony studio execs' dissatisfaction with the sequel's U.S. box-office performance has caused them to put the kibosh on the studio's plans to do both a threequel and supervillain spinoff movies centering on the Sinister Six and Venom). This second (and this time, only partial) viewing of this extremely corporate product (as ScreenCrush's Britt Hayes tweeted, the movie "looks like it was made to sell pinball machines") failed to erase its flaws (SPOILERS), including...

The two Webb movies' misguided decision to make Peter Parker the Chosen One

Much of the original appeal of the character stemmed from Peter becoming a superhero by accident. When you make Peter a predestined hero like Harry Potter or Superman, you make him less of a relatable everyman. And who cares about all the boring new material about Peter's attempt to uncover the truth about both his dead but could-be-alive scientist/secret agent dad (Campbell Scott), who experimented on Peter and planted the seed for Peter receiving his powers, and his extremely dead secret agent mom (Embeth Davidtz)? (Why do I feel like Amazing 2 co-screenwriter Roberto Orci's bizarre adoration of Dubya the pampered Bush son was responsible for this shit, even though it was carried over from The Amazing Spider-Man, which Orci didn't co-write?)

Sony's inane attempts to build its own Marvel Cinematic Universe out of Webb's movies

Amazing Spider-Man movie universe, you may think you're the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but Amazing Spider-Man movie universe, you're no Marvel Cinematic Universe. Sony's postponement of the threequel and those baffling Sinister Six and Venom projects makes me hope that the postponement takes so long it causes Sony to lose the movie rights to Spidey and hand them over to Marvel Studios. For starters, Amazing Spider-Man movie universe, you have to have interesting villains on a par with Tom Hiddleston's charismatic Loki, which you don't. Speaking of which...

The overabundance of supervillains

Amazing 2 actually isn't a bad movie--that is if some nerd with a lot of time on his hands assembles a "Phantom Edit" of the movie and digitally replaces Jamie Foxx's obsessed Spidey fan character with Foxx's equally beaten-down but much less cartoonish character from Collateral. An even better "Phantom Edit" would be the removal of all material about Electro, Oscorp, the Green Goblin, that Michael Massee character who dresses like all those douches who always wore fedoras in high school and that Marton Csokas mad scientist character who's like a reject from Joel Schumacher's terrible Batman movies. Superhero movie writers and directors still haven't learned anything from the mistakes of those Schumacher Batman movies and other equally overcrowded and excessive superhero movies like Iron Man 2, X-Men Origins: Wolverine and of course, Spider-Man 3.

Part of why Sam Raimi's first two Spidey movies are superior to Webb's is because of their tautness: they pitted Spidey against only one villain in each movie. Like I've said before, Spidey's rogues gallery really pales in comparison to Batman's. I'll take psychotic comedians/showmen (Joker and Harley) and psychologically complex criminals (the Batman: The Animated Series version of Two-Face) over boring, one-dimensional monsters like the Lizard and Electro any day. So why did Sony have to subject us to five of those boring antagonists like they did when they awkwardly shoehorned an equal amount of antagonists into Spider-Man 3? Again, they learned nothing.

The inability to be moved by Gwen Stacy's death

Webb, the director of (500) Days of Summer and countless music videos, excels at two things in these Amazing Spider-Man movies. One of them is any moment where Spidey, whom I'm glad to see has regained his sense of humor after Tobey Maguire's less quippy portrayal, interacts with other New Yorkers, particularly the bullied little kid whose science fair project Spidey takes a shine to. (Spidey's scenes with kids he rescues are where Andrew Garfield--who's oddly derided for not being dorky enough by Spidey comics readers who have somehow developed amnesia about Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley's depiction of a modernized, '60s sweater vest-less Peter in their acclaimed Ultimate Spider-Man comics--is at his best as Spidey. The fact that Garfield would like to see Miles Morales--who famously caused the repugnant Lou Dobbs to soil his Depends because of his biracial heritage and is the second Spidey of color in the comics--suiting up as Spidey in live-action form makes me like Garfield even more.)

The other thing Webb excels at is the romance between Peter and Gwen, a more entertaining on-screen relationship than the one between Peter and Mary Jane in the Raimi movies. Amazing 2's unsatisfying story isn't the only reason why its B.O. grosses are lower than those of other Spidey movies. Killing off Emma Stone, the most likable and interesting cast member in Webb's reboot, has a lot to do with its underwhelming B.O. as well. The moment when Gwen's back and head hit the floor made me wince, mostly due to its brutal sound FX, yet this classic angsty moment from the comics that was supposed to raise the reboot franchise's dramatic stakes and shock the audience ended up hampering post-opening weekend word-of-mouth and was oddly unmoving. As Kyle Buchanan noted in Vulture, the film's decision to rush through Peter's depression after failing to save Gwen robs her death of its dramatic impact, whereas Stoick's death and the impact it has on everyone else--not just his son Hiccup and his wife Valka--are better handled in How to Train Your Dragon 2 and therefore, far more moving.

I'm a cold fish. I don't cry during sad movies. But How to Train Your Dragon 2 got me emotional. Dammit, How to Train Your Dragon 2! Instead of weeping and tearing up, my bottom lip tends to tremble like Clint Eastwood's in his "I could have taken that shot" crying scene during In the Line of Fire. When How to Train Your Dragon 2 cut to Hiccup and Astrid's friends mourning Stoick at his Viking funeral and being genuinely serious instead of being their usual comic relief selves, my bottom lip went crazy. The lip didn't quiver once during the cemetery sequence in Amazing 2.

The cheesy "Itsy Bitsy Spider" scene

The most Spider-Man 3-ish--and Schumacher-ish--part of Amazing 2 has to be the source cue by Hans Zimmer and "the Magnificent Six" (a collective that included Pharrell Williams and Johnny Marr) for when Electro plays "Itsy Bitsy Spider" on giant Tesla coils while battling Spidey. It results in the Garfield one-liner that's most reminiscent of the terribly written comedic bits from Disney XD's Ultimate Spider-Man animated series ("I hate this song!"). The other cheesy element of the Zimmer/Magnificent Six score is...

Electro's equally cheesy theme

The nu metal chanting that's supposed to represent Electro's inner dialogue ("He lied to me/He shot at me/He hates on me/He's using me/Fragility/Electricity/He's dead to me") brings back memories of Zimmer's horribly dated, Limp Bizkit-inspired nu metal score to 2000's Mission: Impossible II. (And then that M:I-2 score brings back memories of Will Sasso's brutal impression of Fred Durst on MADtv.)

The Zimmer/Magnificent Six score is a mixed bag, but it also contains the best thing to come out of Amazing 2: "It's On Again," the surprisingly good original theme by Zimmer, the Magnificent Six, Alicia Keys and Kendrick Lamar. Kendrick goes hard in his verse. It's one of many tremendous guest verses from Kendrick.



"It's On Again" marks the first time that an end credits tune in a Spidey movie doesn't suck (and man, has this franchise suffered from such atrocious-sounding pieces of music).

The Zimmer/Pharrell/Alicia/Kendrick tune deserves to conclude a better movie, like the one with Miles--and not Peter--in the Spidey suit that's currently playing in my head or the one with an Asian hero in the suit that's also currently playing in my head.