Episode 564 - Happy 2022!
Jan 2, 2022
Happy New Year! It seems we've all decided to keep going on with the 20's so let's continue… Did you know the year 2022 marks 20 years that Drunk Duck has been around? YUP! The site is actually THAT old THIS year! No other comic host is as old and legit as us. They're all little babies. Even Facebook didn't exist when we stated, no iphones, no smartphones, tablets, no Youtube, Twitter, Tumblr, Pintrest, Instagram, Spotify, tiktok and so on. Jeeeeez man, we're freakin GRANDDADDIES of the internet. Even this podcast turns 12 years old this year.
Topics and Show Notes
Hopefully 2022 will be the year when we get our facelift, new looks, better features and keep being the cool, grown-up, mature and interesting alternative, to all the bland cooperate comic hosts out there.
At the end of the cast, we start getting arrogant and silly and describe ourselves as the gods of DD XD I can't believe we recorded that!
This week Gunwallace has given us the theme to Giovani Vigilanti - Catchy bass notes, strings echoing like percussion leading us up bouncing purple steps into an orange cloudy sunset lit sky. This tune moves ever onwards, always right, like a 16 bit sidescrolling fighter, towards inevitable confrontation with a level boss. We best him easily and keep rolling ever on.
Topics and shownotes
Links
Featured comic:
Stick Figure Apocalypse - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2021/dec/28/featured-comic-stick-figure-apocalypse/
Featured music:
Giovani Vigilanti - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Giovani_Vigilanti/ - by Urekgp, rated E.
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - http://www.virtuallycomics.com
Tantz Aerine - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/
Ozoneocean - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean
Banes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/
Kawaiidaigakusei - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/kawaiidaigakusei/
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Episode 563 - Merry Christmas
Dec 27, 2021
Merry Xmas from everyone here at DD, but most especially Tantz, Banes and me, Ozoneocean! Pitzy is away for a while on family business, it's the time of year and family comes first. Tantz is at home with her pretty Christmas tree in cold Athens, Banes is snug and warm in his place in snowy Canada, and I'm sweating my bum off in Perth Western Australia as the temperature gets close to 44C (110.66F), but I dressed up like an exotic santa anyway hahaha! Which I tried to draw but lost confidence in my skills because it's SOOOO bloody hot and I can't concentrate so I posted screenshotted pics from our Patreon video instead. I AM MELTING!!!!!! We have no particular topic this time, just a Christmas chat. It's mostly Tantz and I because Banes had to rush off to work, dedicated fellow he is. How did you spend Christmas? Was it hot there too? Cold? Did you actually get a white Christmas? I would LOVE a winter Christmas.
Episode 555 - Group shots!
Nov 1, 2021
This week we're talking about group shots and how cool they can be! I love drawing them, having all your characters together in the frame is so cool and fun- you can hint at character relationships, have them doing some sort of fantasy activity or just being awesome and posing together. We also chat about some of our fave group shots in film like the beginning of Reservoir Dogs, and the most prolific source of group images ever: album art!
Episode 554 - Return of the Living Dead Halloween Special
Oct 25, 2021
This year for Halloween we've decided to do another commentary! It's of the 1980s Zombie movie “Return of the Living Dead”. It's extremely 1980s in style. There are zombies, punks, yuppies, electronic music, toxic waste… It's quite an entertaining, quite comedic, nihilistic cold war zombie film with very good effects for the time that really hold up today. Even the gore is tasteful. I am NOT a fan of horror in any way, Banes and Pit lobbied hard for this movie… but even so it was not a bad film. The zombies are animated by a man made chemical contaminant, which is quite an 80s theme in of itself. They're not contagious like modern zombies, there's no infection or outbreak to contain. The problem here is that they're virtually indestructible because of the chemical that animates their flesh, they're also fully intelligent and fast moving, this makes the zombies far more menacing and scary than any modern shambling brainless decaying infected version.
Episode 552 - Tropes we like
Oct 11, 2021
Last time we covered tropes we hated! This time we're talking about clichés we actually like. It's quite a bit trickier because clichés are clichés for a reason (overuse) so it's not easy to like them, except in some cases… For me it's Isekai. That's a Japanese word for “another world”. This is a very old genre, it's basically a story where a person from our normal world goes to a magical world, we see this in ancient fairy stories, Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe and many others. until the mid 20th century it was the default way of writing any fantasy story. It has always been around, the Japanese were just the first to come up with a popular name for it.
Episode 551 - Tropes we LOVE to hate...
Oct 4, 2021
Tantz explains why she really hates a bunch of tropes that are super commonly used in things, stuff like very obvious plot armour for the protagonist so that you KNOW nothing can seriously hurt them so you stop caring what happens to them and in the story in general, child-led stories where the adults are all useless and ineffectual because it takes away your suspension of disbelief, and amnesia where a huge bunch of the story is erased so the writers can just repeat stuff over and over. Banes and I join it to talk about stuff we hate too!
Episode 548 - Foreign Influence
Sep 8, 2021
Translating cultural concepts so they can be understood in a different country can be really tricky, most people never bother. Often the audience is just left to guess what's behind certain concepts and idioms. As an Australian, growing up as a little kid we were bombarded by media from everywhere, but mainly Britain, the USA, Canada and New Zealand. There was so much about American media that was utterly alien to us and we were just left to puzzle it out, especially American high school concepts: The level of seriousness with which they regard team sports in schools, cheerleaders, jocks, jockstraps, school kids driving cars, homecoming, pep rallies, summer camp, proms, tick or treating, thanksgiving… We just had to make sense of those things ourselves. Some we could work out from context but others I never really understood and never really will.
Episode 547 - Franchise fail
Sep 2, 2021
There seemed to be a lull for a while after the 1990s and the massive sequel craze of the 80s, but nowadays we're back in full swing again with sequels, reboots and reinvisioning of film and TV franchises. Banes noticed a distinct pattern of behaviour that occurred around bad or failed franchises: The makers would chose to go against what existing fans liked about the property in the fist place, usually in order to appeal to new fans. When both new fans and old ones dislike what they do, they attack the fans and blame the fans for failure of their version. Then they'll search and find a new franchise to mess up. It's rare that people own up to or admit to failures anymore, it's usually always the fault of the fans for being too “toxic”.
