2001 turntablist musical
Rating: 15/20
Plot: The evil Lord Ook and his army of Chinheads are up to no good, and it’s up to a team of intergalactic dental hygienists, with the help of an ancient weapon called the Wave Twister to stop them.
This is creative insanity, something clearly created by a group of people who grew up in the 1980’s like me, ate everything they could find (everything in the 80’s was coated in multiple layers of sugar), and then spat it back out again half digested. So this is a delirious hodgepodge of early hip-hop and breakdancing culture, Atari, Star Wars, Transformers, Playmobil figures, and loads of other things from that plastic-obsessed yet dazzlingly tacky decade that brought us shirts that changed colors when you licked them. Drugs were possibly involved in this, but maybe I’m jumping to conclusions. It’s the kind of surreal animation you expect to see on the Cartoon Network shows created by stoners for stoners, the sort of thing where the creative process must have been a bunch of people sitting around brainstorming and then deciding, “What the hell? Let’s just figure out a way to use every single one of these ideas!” So you get sci-fi dentistry, grotesque characters, villains who are a pair of babies with Mexican wrestler masks and talking worms with eyepatches for umbilical cords, space battles that would make Return of the Jedi shit its pants, the motorcycle gangish Chinheads, turntable battles, ostrich hypnotism, “tenticulated terror,” and a pair of DJ henchmen dismantling a sucka DJ. Musically, this is all record scratchin’ all the time which, if you like the genre, you’ll be fine with. The animation meshes well with the sounds, sampled bits are clever, and it’s all a little hypnotic. DJ Q-Bert, who plays Darth Fader in this (there’s also Wax Fondler, Butchwax, and Turbo Frog in there, as well as a creepy appearance by guitarist Buckethead), provides the music. Actually, I think the music came first and the movie was created around that which might help explain why the plot seems a little disjointed. Not that disjointed is necessarily bad here because it’s really not. This surely won’t appeal to everybody, but if you enjoy those stoner cartoons, have an interest in turntable or hip-hop culture, or enjoy space dentistry (say ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ahhhhh), you might like it.
Here’s another poster. I went with the other one because I liked the Activision reference. Pitfall! for life!
