criterionforum.org

Before we're done here, we'll get the entire board addicted to the show.

Dan Harmon is answering questions at Reddit in an entertaining and illuminating fashion

domino harvey wrote:Dan Harmon is answering questions at Reddit in an entertaining and illuminating fashion

Someone needs to ask if the nods to criterionforum are intentional.

domino harvey wrote:This episode was without a doubt the most I've ever laughed at any TV show, ever. They had better put the deleted scenes on the DVD, because you just know they to have cut a ton of stuff for time

DON'T KNOW SHIT

Dan Harmon wrote:Nope. We couldn't afford to cut anything - time wise. This rarely happens to us, we usually have the opposite problem, but the editor's cut of that episode (usually up to five minutes over) was UNDER. We freaked out. That's when I contacted Justin Roiland about doing an animated tag. We had one other idea about how to "pad out" the episode, which Chris McKenna wrote, and it's pretty great, but it required picking up shots and we were too under the gun and about to wrap production. So we did a 90 second cartoon (90 is the max allowable tag length in NBC's format). I guess having all those rapid cuts, each with its own slugline, exaggerated the traditional disparity between page count and runtime.

Glee club dying (in a flashback from the last episode)--wish of the death of Glee the TV show?

Dan Harmon wrote:I have no idea what you mean. There was a glee club at Greendale, and their bus was driving on a rainy night, and a downed power line was hanging across the road, and the bus drove through it, and it sliced through the bus and decapitated everyone, row by row, so that the people in the back had to watch all their friends get decapitated, then they got decapitated, and then the bus drove into a pool of lava. And I guess the crazy thing is, the electricity from the power line somehow kept their nervous systems "alive," so they could feel the lava. They didn't escape the pain of the lava just because they didn't have heads. They felt the lava. It was terrible but it was not metaphorical in any way. I would never be that petty and envious of another show's popularity.

While the entire episode was packed full of hilarity, nothing made me laugh more than this line delivered by Donald Glover:

"You can yell at me all you want! I've seen enough movies to know that popping the back of a raft makes it go faster!"

Genius!

Worst idea for a magazine ever!

Holy crap that was great.

domino harvey wrote:Coming soon...

See, this is what I thought the shipping montages were addressing. In the meantime, where's that legit 30 Rock porn parody (even if it's not directed by Tracy Jordan).

Magnetic Attitude and more.

Characters like Magnitude having an instant fan following really just adds one more brick to the classic Simpsons era comparison house-- he's the new Disco Stu et al

Boy, it's a good thing this isn't funny at all

Aye, this episode was a bit disappointing. Especially as, unlike Modern Warfare, it couldn't decide what exactly it was after. There was little Leone and Western flavor and more Robert Rodriguez action.

But Allison Brie...

Ah, it wasn't as fresh as the first time they did it, but I still got several laughs from it.

Spoiler

She's a dance major. And she happens to like twinkies.

OK, only "several" for Community is perhaps a bit lean. Still domino, it would probably help if you watched Part 2 without wearing your "comedy westerns cannot be funny" glasses.

That entire climax was golden. Maybe you just don't like fun?[/joking]

The episode's problem: it felt like a Western pastiche by people whose point of references are po-mo Western pastiches (of the Tarantino variety). As soon as they announced the two-parter, I knew it would succeed or fail precisely on how well it nailed the Spaghetti Western, and it didn't really do it at all. I look at "Contemporary American Poultry" and how it came about: their original premise (a chicken tender shortage sees Troy run as President, with Jeff pulling the strings) bombed, so they quickly changed their entire focus. Here, I feel they loved the idea of a Leone parody so much they weren't willing to kill it and just go another direction. The last paintball episode jumped around with its sources of reference (a little 28 Days Later, a little Rambo, a little John Woo); here it tries to do just the Western and just flounders.

Luckily, it looks like the next one leaves it largely behind... unless they're going for some Heaven's Gate campus-extermination angle, and I don't think this show is willing to go that esoteric.

Yeah, the problem is that a show built on the accuracy of its references made a western episode that had no such esoteric knowledge-- this was a western homage made by people who've never seen a western. And it wasn't funny, of course.

Shrew wrote:But Allison Brie...

Yeah... my thoughts exactly.

I still liked the episode but I agree with the criticism that it mostly missed its mark in capturing the flavor of Leone. (Tellingly, my wife, who hasn't seen any Tarantino or Leone, turned to me partway through and asked: "So is this what Kill Bill is like?") There were some great jokes thrown in the mix (Wanted--Gay or Alive) but I can see how it's more difficult for them to land if you have problems with the episode's execution on a fundamental level. Surprisingly, the general fan reaction seems to be very positive ("even better than 'Modern Warfare'," "it felt just like The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly") so I don't think these paintball episodes are going anywhere.

Oh, and guys, those are my thoughts (about Allison Brie), you can't have them.

The reason why the western stuff didn't bother me is that clearly they're just using the general setting and situation for the episode and have no real interest in actual pastiche or parody with the first part before the commercial break being just lip service. Viewing it more along the lines of a Mad Max style parody makes more sense and better fits the show anyways. It's seems to me to be more of a parody of western influenced films than actual westerns.

That shouldn't matter though since the show was absolutely hilarious as usual.

I don't see the Mad Max angle, the writers were definitely going for a western parody with Pierce's hideout. I agree with the others that it would have been more successful if they had mimicked the dollar trilogy instead of its derivatives, but it still had a lot of great gags (I love the recurring joke about Jeff's forehead).

Anybody else think the Black Rider was a reference to Kiriyama from Battle Royale or am I just reading too much into it?

To turn a previous thought into an easy joke, I think the writers went to watch Once Upon a Time in the West, but made a mistake and got Once Upon a Time in Mexico instead. The stuff that worked the best was the stuff that actually did try to adhere to a Western, namely Pierce's saloon, and the credits. Everything else was a bit muddled, especially Jeff and Holloway's back and forth.

But that said, it does look like the second episode will be much more standard action tropes, so my hopes aren't totally dashed.

I was just giving Mad Max as an example, maybe I should have said The Warriors instead. Though you are definitely reading too much if you got Kiriyama from that character.