Tim Burton will direct Dumbo movie

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Ten minutes to introduce the pathos of the situation and ten minutes of dramatic conclusion, sandwiching 45 minutes of pink elephants on parade.

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Oy. I found his Alice in Wonderland to be extremely painful. I shudder to think what this will be like.

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April 1st gets earlier every year

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Dumbo Scissor Tusks

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Iā€™d watch that.

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Iā€™d watch that.

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Well, now we know that this version will be free of awkward, racial stereotypes.

aaaannndā€¦ live-action ?!?!

I donā€™t see how this could go wrong.

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Johnny Depp as Timothy Mouse

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Early fake casting news:

  • The chameleon-like Johnny Depp will pull off another brilliant transformation to be Timothy Mouse. Expect shenanigans
  • Angelina Jolie will play the seductive Magic Feather
  • Dumboā€™s mother is a hotly contested role, will it go to Helena Bonham Carter or Betty White?
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You beat me to it by THIRTY SECONDS.

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Think of his awful Willy Wonka remake and then imagine just how badly he could screw this up.

I always explain Dumbo to new parents (when the conversation turns to watching old Disney) as follows:

Do you know how Dumbo learns to fly? He drinks a bottle of whisky, has a 10 minute pink elephant hallucination, wakes up in a tree full of pot smoking racially stereotyuped shuckinā€™ and jivinā€™ black crows who convince him to jump off a cliff.

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Great songs, though. And I love the early vocoded*-train-voice, and the animation of the tent-collapse. The song the roustabouts sing as they erect the tent is disturbing - basically ā€œweā€™re black, so we get these shitty jobs then drink our wages away on the weekendsā€. OTOH, you can contrast that with all of the white people in the film (including the white high-society elephants) - all of them, with the exception of Timothy Mouse**, is an asshole. Asshole white clowns, asshole exageratedly-Irish kid making fun of Dumbo, asshole white RingMaster. The white stork delivery man isnā€™t an asshole, but heā€™s incompetent, so thereā€™s that. Note that the roustabouts do erect the tents quite well in the rain, and the crows actually help Dumbo out.

* or whatever it is.

** and Iā€™m not sure what race he should be, but if we go with the ā€œdefaultā€, heā€™s white.

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You can see a demo of the vocoded (they used a device called a Sonovox) train sound effect in this clip from The Reluctant Dragon, with Frances Gifford pretending to demonstrate it. From a 2015 perspective, the crows make us cringe, but he had black actors talking in early-40s jive; for the time, it wasnā€™t ā€˜racistā€™. And as you point out, theyā€™re really the only sympathetic characters in the movie.

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Fair enough. And as adults we can appreciate cultural relativity, in the same way that we can appreciate the Sam character in Casablanca. But for kids, that appreciation isnā€™t there, itā€™s just a more obvious and in-your-face form of the institutionalized racism our parents and grandparents grew up with.

I understand it, I allow for it in my interpretation of culture and heritage, and I know that for a 6 year old none of that matters.

Nice! Plus: Robert Benchley. I like his shorts work.

NOTE: audio has a crappy click, but I canā€™t find any other version


Iā€™ve always wanted to read How to Wreck a Nice Beach but didnā€™t want to shell out the money (it doesnā€™t seem like the thing Iā€™ll read more than once, and Iā€™m starting to learn my lessonā€¦). Lo! Itā€™s finally available in my library system. Requested. :ballot_box_with_check:

:dancers:

UPDATE: reading this interview/article, I might be wrong about the ā€œread only onceā€ idea I hadā€¦

Hereā€™s another Sonovox demo, with Kay Keyser:

I recently watched it again for the first time in years. This is a 30 minute movie at most these days, thereā€™s a lot of filler and slow character development in what is currently a 64 minute movie.

They are going to have to add a ton of terrible background character work to cobble this into an 80 minute kids movie worth $14 in Manhattan.

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Butā€¦ DUMBO shooting down VonRichtoffen, DUMBO straffing the Japanese fleet off Oahu, DUMBO airlifting wounded soldiers in Vietnam. Thereā€™s so much to cover.

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