Hey Buttbuddz subscribers, we’ve got some great news for you today! Emoji movie fans will be excited to hear that The Emoji Movie 2 has finally been announced, under the title of The Emoji Movie 2: Attack of the Bitmoji. The BUTTBUDDZ BLOG has even gotten exclusive information on this new motion picture, which I’ll leave my thoughts on.
1. Six years after the first movie, the popularity of emojis have gone down and they must fight for relevance against bitmojis.
First off, great plot idea here as a fanatic of bitmojis (not nearly as much as emojis of course). I think this will lead to some interesting conflicts and confrontations. However, I do wonder where the protagonists from the first movie will fit in.
I mean, Gene’s obviously in it as we can see by this released concept art:
Concept art for Gene with a cup of emoji juice. There are some stray marks on the left, which could potentially be social commentary on the smallest details being the most important. It’s very likely these marks will show up in the movie.
But what about Jailbreak? Hi-5? As much of a shoe-in as they seem to be, I feel like they should’ve been confirmed from the start if they were going to be there. Will Gene perhaps flip to the bitmojis which is why we have no art of other emoji characters? It’s entirely possible the movie will attempt to build a new cast of characters from scratch which, while questionable, could work out if they pull it off right. It’d also be a good excuse to touch upon the history of the bitmojis, since they were never mentioned in the first movie and that fact could potentially come off as a retcon to some.
And how about Alex, is he still here? It’s implied the movie will still take place inside his phone, but what role will he have? Will Addie make an appearance as well? It’ll have been six years after the first movie, so perhaps their relationship will have progressed since then?
2. There will be thought provoking statements and commentary on socialism vs. capitalism
This shouldn’t be much of a surprise seeing the bravery T.J. Miller had to incorporate themes like these into the first movie, but I think he did pick a particularly interesting topic in particular. You don’t see enough socialism vs. capitalism themes in movies, which is a shame because I think it’s a great topic to be putting in kids movies so they can make informed decisions later in life.
Socialism and capitalism are two different things, right? I’m theorizing that the emojis may represent socialism, with the bitmojis representing communism. It could potentially be vice versa, however, and we don’t really definitively know who the good and bad guys are. Maybe the emojis will revert to a primal, rampaging state due to their frustration of losing relevance and maybe the bitmojis will just be minding their own business only to be attacked. There’s plenty of possibilities that shouldn’t be counted out, because the rivalry could very well be a gray area.
3. Patrick Stewart will return to his role as Poop
That’s all we have for now. Hopefully we get more info soon, but in the meantime I’ll see you later, emoji fans.
Contrary to popular belief, the ButtBuddz is not actually a weeaboo establishment; For as much as we write about, say, Hidamari Sketch, we also like western stuff such as Swing You Sinners! as well. Anime (and by extension, anime styled video games) is only one piece in the pie that is “Stuff the Buttbuddz Like”, and a fairly small piece at that.
First off is the What Japan Thinkschart/poll mentioned in the original article; Luckily for everyone here, What Japan Thinks is a very good source. In fact, it’s such a good source that it even mentioned its sampling of the population and the statistics involved!
“Between the 29th of August and the 1st of September 2008 464 members of the CLUB BBQ free email forwarding service completed a private online survey.”
For reference, the amount of people who live in Japan is about 127 million people. The poll only represents the opinions of a mere 0.000003% of the country’s population. How can one say that it represents Japan’s opinion on Pepsi as a whole? Even if turns out that there aren’t a lot of Pepsi drinkers in Japan, Pepsi still makes non-anime-related efforts for their market such as their beloved mascot Pepsi Man, and all sorts of fun, Japan-exclusive flavors such as Pepsi Sakura, Pepsi Salty Watermelon, Pepsi Blue Hawaii, and Pepsi Mont Blanc, among many others.
This is only a small sample of the many Pepsi varieties that have been released in Japan over the years.
This leads into our next topic; Pepsi’s advertisement in the anime Tiger & Bunny. First off, judging an anime (or any piece of media, for that matter) by its name is like judging a book by its cover; It’s not an accurate way to tell if the show is good or not.
Rather than talking about the title, let’s get onto the show itself; The lady featured in the advertisement, Blue Rose, is actually sponsored by Pepsi for the entire anime. She’s also a superhero, so she’s basically the anime equivalent of Pepsi Man.
“The taste that goes first, Pepsi NEX!”
While I haven’t actually seen Tiger & Bunny either, if we calculate the review scores to get an mean-average score for the show, it’s apparently as good as Batman Begins. (Or at least Rotten Tomatoes and IMBd’s opinion on the film.) This proves that Pepsi only approves the finest productions for its sponsorships. If you want to see what a truly BADsponsorship looks like, perhaps we should have a look at the works of Pepsi’s rival company, and the drink of brutes everywhere, Coca Cola.
CASE STUDY: MAC AND ME.
While Coca Cola brags that it’s appeared in many, many famous films over the years, the first film that comes to the mind of the average person is the 1983 film, Mac and Me. To say that Coca Cola sponsored it would be a severe understatement; It’s Coke in film form!
This is your body on Coca Cola. (And your brain as well, seeing as he’s trying to drink Coca Cola out of the ground. No, I’m not making that part up; That is actually what happens in the film.)
The film is about aliens that require Coca Cola to survive. While the plot of the film is basically E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, you would never be able to tell due to the sheer amount of Coca Cola and McDonald’s product placement in the film. (Did I mention that the film really likes Coca Cola?)
There isn’t a lot more to say about Mac and Me, so we’ll be moving onto the next topic: Western Animation. I will give “Why anime is Anti-Pepsi” some credit here with its Spongebob Squarepants screenshot that points out that the show is pro-Pepsi; It’s the most compelling argument in the article, and provides actual evidence for its claims in the form of the screenshot itself. (Although Spongebob being pro-fish shouldn’t come to as a surprise to anyone, seeing as it’s located under the sea to begin with.)
What IS a surprise though, is that they had a promotion with Pepsi that at least got to concept art level. Spongebob really is pro-Pepsi!
Clearly, while Spongebob and every other fish-related cartoon are pro-Pepsi/pro-fish and therefore good, does it hold up for the rest of the western animation? I’m sure the “patriots” at Hanna-Barbera would like to disagree with you.
If that’s not an excuse to bring our scooby_doo_desecration channel back, I don’t know what is, and yetanime‘s supposedly the anti-Pepsi one… As far as finding pro-Coke stuff for both types of animation went, (not counting fan-made videos for either, because there were A LOT of those; the same thing applies with pro-Pepsi videos, too) they actually had about the same amount of Coca Cola sponsored content; It doesn’t matter if you’re The Simpsonsor One Piece, you’re still not immune to being an advertisement for Coke.
Ultimately, anime is just as capable of being pro-Pepsi as any western medium can be. Likewise, western media is still capable of being pro-Coca Cola and unpatriotic. Anime is still part of Pepsi, and by extension, the Buttbuddz; Whether you love it, or hate it, it’s here to stay.
If you’re not into anime though, there’s still plenty of other content to enjoy here at the Buttbuddz. (Although I’d suggest checking out our YouTube channel instead, as it’s more balanced content-wise than Butt with a Blog currently is; The last few articles haven’t been helping with the over-abundance of anime on the blog at all.)
Remember to subscribe to your local Buttbuddz today!
Apparently everyone’s been waiting years for this article, but if this was released earlier, not much would’ve changed; The Magical Girl genre -as a whole- has been rather “stagnant” within the 2010’s, with all of it’s reboots, and sequels, and other things. In this analysis, the influence of Crime Does Not Pay that’s slowly seeping it’s way into the genre will be looked at with a critical eye, and plenty of appreciation of it’s brilliance.
Crime Does Not Pay is a theatrical crime-genre series of short films by MGM that ran in theatres from 1935 to 1947. The Crime Does Not Pay series revolves around one-off short stories starring police officers, detectives, and criminal justice workers of all kinds solving the crimes surrounding them. It also had a spin-off radio show that ran from 1949 to 1951, and a crime-genre comic series by Lev Gleason Publications that -while both have the same title- are not actually related.
For example, the comics have a consistent character in the form of Mr. Crime, a brutish narrator character who also eggs on the criminals of the comic’s short stories.
However, -as the writer of this article doesn’t own the “COMPLETE SHORTS COLLECTION” and also wasn’t able to find any of the films on the internet aside from Don’t Talk, a WWII-Propaganda piece about industrial espionage and defense manufacturing- most of the information regarding Crime Does Not Pay used in this analysis had to come from the radio dramas based on MGM’s films, and assorted IMDB articles.
As far as Crime Does Not Pay‘s influence on the magical girl anime genre goes, it wasn’t always there. While their worlds still have cops and other law enforcement, traditional crime series elements ended up taking a backseat to the sparkles, teamwork, occasional romance, and threats too huge for many criminal justice fields to even deal with, let alone defeat: That’s where the magical girls come in after all. It would take years before Crime Does Not Pay would ever influenced their genre.
Enter the early 2000’s, the very end of the “classic” era and the very beginning of the “Modern” era. After Sailor Moon ended in 1997, Toei Animation had been going through new magical girl series on a regular basis; At one point, they demanded an anime producer by the name of Washio Takashi to make a series for them, as they needed something to fill another show’s soon-to-be-empty time slot. However, there was problem; Washio Takashi wasn’t familiar with any “shoujo” genres, let alone the *~Mahou~* Shoujo genre.
Hoping to solve his writer’s block, Takashi watched a few episodes of his favorite classic crime series, Crime Does Not Pay for inspiration: As the daunting tales of detectives and crimes filled his head, he decided to bring a lot of elements from the show into his and Toei Animation’s Izumi Todo’s newest magical girl show; Futari wa Pretty Cure.
Futari wa Pretty Cure ended up premiering on TV Asahi in February 1, 2004. (Even though the show looks an entire decade older than it actually is.) The anime stars two girls: Nagisa Misumi, and Honoka “The Queen of Knowledge” Yukishiro. Nagisa, -like a true crime detective- doesn’t play by the rules, but by a sense of justice; She hates that innocent people get hurt for things they had nothing to do with.
Nagisa’s outfit has pink in it, therefore making her the main character.
Honoka, on the other hand, is a member of the chemistry club, therefore making her a professional chemist not unlike how many of the crime solvers in Crimes Do Not Pay are professionals at their jobs.
Solving crimes with chemistry!
After finding two talking cellphone critters, and becoming magical girls as a result, Nagisa and Honoka use their newfound powers and friendship -as Cure Black and Cure White respectively- to stop evil such as brutes, card-counters, and card-counting brutes.
Nagisa and Honoka’s great criminal-catching skills in action.
Similarly to Crime Does Not Pay, there’s thrilling action sequences that show up deep into Futari Wa Pretty Cure‘s episodes. Unlike Crime Does Not Play, though, they don’t use guns and punch people: Instead, they turn into magical girls,and punch people. (They even punch/kick people more than they use stock footage attacks.)
If you’re not absolutely convinced that Futari wa Precure‘s inspired by Crime Does Not Pay…
In the end, justice wins every time: The crimes get solved, and Nagisa and Honoka -like Crime Does Not Pay‘s narrators- reflect on the mysteries of the human psyche and the crimes surrounding them.
They don’t call her “The Queen of Knowledge” for nothing.
Futari wa Pretty Cure ended up being a massive success, spawning not only a direct sequel and two movies, but countless spin-off seasons as well, each detailing the lives of various different teams like the original Crime Does Not Pay does with it’s crime solvers with each new short film; One film it would’ve been police inspectors, another would have FBI agents. Precure (the abbreviation for the franchise as whole) seasons past Futari wa Pretty Cure work much the same way; One season you’d have a chemist like Honoka, but another season you’d have a character like Splash Star‘s artist, Mai Mishou, instead. While the amount of Crime Does Not Pay‘s influence varies from installment to installment of the franchise, sometimes it gets even more obvious than it was in Futari wa Pretty Cure itself.
Mai Mishou, now finished with her latest forensic sketch.
A good example would be from the tenth anniversary season, 2014’s Happiness Charge Pretty Cure, which makes its influences incredibly obvious through it’s use of “Precards”; Not only dues it reference Futari wa Pretty Cure‘s similar (but unnamed) cards, but some of the cards, -such as the detective or police Precards- are references to the original Crime Does Not Pay series itself. (Complete with being able to be used by the non-magical forms of the protagonists, for that nice, classic crime fiction feel!) Conveniently, there’s clips of these forms already posted on YouTube, so here they are for the sake of evidence.
However, many modern-day magical girl shows (especially those from during the 2010’s) chose to follow in Puella Magi Madoka Magica‘s footsteps instead in being gritty and dark, choosing to revel in the dark themes of shows prior except on an even huger scale than shows like Sailor Moon had ever done. And as we all know, edgy shows/comics/other works -magical girl genre or otherwise- don’t look highly on law enforcement, and it would be highly unlikely that these shows would take influence from classic crime fiction such as the short films of Crime Does Not Pay. (Which were initially made to stop the influence of 1930’s gangster films, the “edgy” works of it’s time.)
[Pictured: The current state of newer works in the genre.]…Well, that, and there’s virtually no results for “magical girl police” or “magical girl detective” online, modern-era shows or otherwise; That means no shows are taking OBVIOUS influence from Crime Does Not Pay either. This, however, leaves the question of whether or not modern Magical Girl shows will continue to take influence from Crime Does Not Pay after the genre gets over it’s Hot Topic phase: Will the genre get its own equivalent of Crime Does Not Pay to combat it’s Public Enemies and Scarfaces? Only time will tell at this point. (But I sure hope Crime Does Not Pay‘s legacy in the magical girl genre will be able to continue, especially as it’s arrived fairly “late” in the grand scheme of things.)
Futari wa Pretty Cure ended up premiering on TV Asahi in February 1, 2004. (Even though the show looks an entire decade older than it actually is.) The anime stars two girls: Nagisa Misumi, and Honoka “The Queen of Knowledge” Yukishiro. Nagisa, -like a true crime detective- doesn’t play by the rules, but by a sense of justice; She hates that innocent people get hurt for things they had nothing to do with.
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