Let's Get Weird About...
Unhinged Conversations about the Art that Shaped Us
9 months ago

S2E9 - The Best Thing About Bambi is a Big Secret with Arielle

Transcript

Welcome back to Let's Get Weird About with Scott Palin. Today we have a very special guest and look I'm not saying I'm biased but this is possibly my favorite person in the entire world so this time we're talking about let's this time we're talking about Bambi with Ariel so join us won't you. I was gonna say it's been a matter of years and it's been even longer for me because I only recorded with other people once and it never made it online. Yeah people have been canceling on you they always like fall through yeah but I know that goes so if someone wants to ask the question who is Ariel what do you hope the answer is. I guess an inquisitive person who really likes science and nerds out about goofy stuff also avid maker I guess okay what sort of kid were you. Quiet not I mean like I was accused of being anti-social a lot by my mother and just you know rather be reading than hanging out with people. Sure okay so yeah big room with dogs which is not changed. Yes we have for dogs in our house right now. Yeah if anybody is confused Ariel in the same room because we live in the same house because we are married to one another. Yay! I'm not gonna bother asking where you grew up because we went to elementary school together for a minute. The story is that we were actually in element the our kindergarten class together and at the time I was going by a different first name and she hated me. He was a mayor. Yeah I was a nightmare so that when I met her later on I was way my different name. It was a revelation. It was like oh wait that was that guy that you hated. Well it's funny because you're like my real name is you know whatever it is and I was like I hate that name and you're like a keeper. That's true because most people were like oh I love that name but you you did it yourself yeah you constructed this life. I constructed. Yeah so we even have video of ourselves in like the elementary school like like the singing about a dog named drags. Okay in the cafeteria of the elementary school yeah. So you and I have just finished watching a movie. From that era. Oh no we are not that old. When I watched this movie a lot when I was that age is what I'm trying to say. I watched this movie so many times not because it was my favorite movie because it was my little brother's favorite movie. Yes so we're talking about the 1942 Disney classic Bambi. Is this the first real? No that was Snow White. No in fact yeah they Snow White and Fantasia and Fantasia came before Bambi. Yes and I'm missing out on another one that came before. Sleeping Beauty maybe. No because there was there were two films that came before it that both did flops or both kind of not particularly commercially successful. And that's one of the reasons I had to cut some of the time out the runtime out of this movie. They're on a budget. They will get because they didn't have the money from Fantasia and something else which is driving me crazy. Look at it. It's yeah and then this one also was released during World War II and so it also didn't do very well. Oh it's Pinocchio. Oh that didn't do well. It was during World War II. Somebody had money for going to the theater. It wasn't like these are bad movies. They were all critically well-liked although yeah yeah so they they had to cut like 12 minutes of planned animation out. Which honestly probably a good move in this case. That movie was. It's a good little kid movie because it's so short. No it's not. For the deal short. This movie fucking drags. Yeah have you ever seen kids television? It's pretty slow. Well no we watch we watch plenty of kids television. Like that's true. Kids TV has changed a lot. It's also not kids TV. It is specifically TVs from era from the media from the era that like movies were just slower and took a lot more like I watched Noisfrotto the other day. Like that's fucking movie. Nothing happens in that movie and it's two hours long or whatever and like literally nothing happens in it. It's just like pictures of guys walking into Hordeurs you know. Right. I watched a raid again recently and it's like you know it's a mystery thriller thing and it's even pretty slow. Yeah so it's it's something of the of the era itself rather than this particular movie but this particular movie also even compared to like sleeping beauty like. Well the plot isn't really a plot. It's more of like a year in the life of a deer. It's very broadly a coming of age story right. In the most broad sense. Yeah. There's definitely Lion King and Tarzan vibes. Sure. But and I do remember when Lion King came out the controversy like oh like Mufasa dying spoiler alert. It's not going to be like we haven't done this since Bambi's mother died spoiler alert and I was like oh yeah but that wasn't that big a deal was it but I guess apparently it was so kids can handle a great deal more dark content than parents give them credit for. Yeah that's not my biggest complaint with this movie. That makes it. Well so you saw this when you were a kid it was your brother's favorite movie. And he was three years younger than me so he loved this even as like a two and three year old. Sure sure sure. So I'm sure you had your fill of it being watched over and over and over again at the time right. Yes very much so. So do you did you have fond memories of it though because I can imagine like when it's your siblings favorite movie. Yes um it was okay like it was one of those things where it's like you know I'd be like I don't want to watch Bambi again but when it started it's like okay I'll watch it you know because it was like good enough you know okay and you know you have a kid screen they're probably gonna watch it. Sure I'm almost certain I had maybe seen that movie twice. Wow in my entire life because it was not one of the ones that we had. Wow um we had we had we had we had some of the older ones but like that was just not on the that was not on the the rotation for us. I think I must have seen it in school probably during during a movie day um and probably fell asleep during. Okay the only movie I fell asleep during as a child was Peter Pan that is any Peter Pan. Okay sure. I remember waking up and being like wait the crocodile what you know and I had never happened to me before it's like what you know so um yeah but yeah I always um I don't know I always liked oh to be fair do you remember Marty Stallford's Wild America? Not specifically. You had cable as a child. I did have cable as a child. I was watching the Discovery Channel. My mom she tells this story about like she's like I was going to be watching our local station KERA shout out um it would be Wild America and she was like two bears killing each other and you're watching it wrapped and I'm like changing the channel and I'm like go back go back I need to see it and I guess not much has changed I still love animals and work with animals and I spoiler alert became a biologist so yeah so did you have I mean I guess you once you grew out of the era or once your brother grew out of the era of watching this movie over and over again did you have a light you never you didn't revisit it. Oh no I hadn't seen this movie in at least 30 years probably more. Okay um this is surprisingly not an original IP this was based off of a book. I know I was so surprised when you said that I was like what's the book like now kind of it's actually aimed at adults it's not a kid's book. I'm curious to read it do you know how long it is? Uh no. Okay I'll have to check it out later. All I know is that it is now 101 years old because it came out in 1923 so um yeah but it's basically just a deer growing up in the forest. Another coming of age story. Yeah I don't know. I wonder if it's like the British Jack London kind of thing because like that was very popular at the time. Yeah I've read Jack London growing up and liked it but um you know it's one of those like the the mother deer dying it's like uh nature's red and tooth and claw and that was kind of one of the big themes. But then I okay another thing that's background about me I have what you might call redneck family in Arkansas and I just remember my grandfather we brought this movie with us when we came to visit them naturally because the grandparent videos were like all they had was Robin Hood. Yeah. Which was a good movie but that was it and they didn't even get regular TV because they lived in the middle of nowhere in the woods and so they had maybe three channels maybe yeah one of them was religious. Yeah yeah yeah. And so we were watching Bambi that we brought with us and my grandfather being kind of low-key upset that he's like this is gonna make people dislike hunters and it's really important that we hunt the deer and I understood that as a child and I don't know the the theme of like oh everything's great unless there's man in the forest and then they show a bunch of starving deer in the winter and it's like this is what happens if there's no predation. Well I mean he's your grandfather wasn't completely wrong because the hunter who is not shown even for a moment on screen is listed as one of the top 20 villains of all time according to the American film institute. No. I mean yeah because he killed a deer because he killed Bambi's mom right like Bambi's mom is like she's a rat with hooves to be fair my my principal relationship with this movie is the is the culture talking about it and like Bambi's mom is like the quintessential like sad moment in childhood until until Mufasa dies. Well I was going to say old Yeller that's the saddest. Okay that's true but that one isn't about me like but like Bambi's mom like there's a whole god damn episode of of animaniacs where with the little kid like watches a movie basically he watches Bambi with the serial numbers filed off because this is Warner Brothers of Disney and his old lady actress Maura a caretaker is like I got to take him to go see the elderly actress who played Bambi's mom to prove that she's still alive now here's the if that if that sequence had been made today she would have died of old age while they were there traumatizing. I love that that's up there with the beauty in the beast the prince turns back into a human but he's a dead human that's what I want to see like he's like oh he's a human and he's lovely then he's still dead. The way it shouldn't be well okay so the most hated villains really okay the way is not to say to just like the top like most top 20 yeah yeah well okay the other thing that because this is like it looks like a film about nature but really it's a film about sex kind of kind of because it's like and weird heteronormative in the broadest possible shit like the the lady rabbits always saying thumper what did your father tell you do we ever see thumper's father no no do we see his Basilic kids yes. Bambi's father doesn't show up and again into a first he shows up and Bambi's like he looked at me yeah which is like that's up there with the children are to be seen and not heard kind of thing and it's like oh this is a big deal my dad looked at me and then later after the mom dies he's like your mother can't be with you anymore so I guess I have to parent you now so nobody else is gonna do it but to be fair he would have been an adult by the time yeah the time line is very fucked yes I don't know if it's different because originally Scott was saying this was with you say rodeer in England that's the book yeah and so I don't know if their maturation cycle is different I mean based off of the way I mean like they're a white tailed deer can grow to adulthood in the year I'm guessing that a rodeer probably does as well they were definitely taking biological liberties with the growth cycle so that they could have the big dramatic moment happen after the starving winter like which would not I mean yeah but like me to be fair trying to like apply logic to a Disney movie is a little bit right right and puberty always happens off screen because no one wants to see that no what no we get to see awkward pure pure pure the pure best-sent symbol in briefly for about seven frames of animation yes he's throwing his man around and you see the silhouette yeah you get him that weird mallet stage it's great okay yeah so that that brings him back to the fucking like in this okay opening sequence when it's like the new princess here we find out that a squirrel in it no no we're gonna say no no no no we're not talking about the turp no no that's the best part of this movie we're gonna say for about 40 minutes in because it's the only thing I really liked okay okay so okay so at the end of the movie after the off-screen puberty happens the wise old can't get a bone or owl is angry at those kids fucking in his yard yeah and scares all the young main characters like it could happen to you like you could fall in love the horror which is kind of a hilarious take on the whole thing I mean like my interpretation of that is that it's meant to be funny because that's the like it literally is like the next scene right right but that but like which is so looney tunes you when you said that I was like yes that's exactly it like the whole like visual like show me this character has a boner without showing me this character has a boner thing when their entire body becomes resistant yeah yeah yeah oh my god yeah it's it was just it's one of those things where it's like this isn't weird to you as a child but looking back it's like oh yeah like they teach all these tropes to us at such a young age to make it not weird like the rapey other deer who's like trying to get fully in and like she's like oh baby save me and he's like oh it's my woman you know and it's like that was totally normal to me as a child it's like oh yeah that's how that's how nature do but that's not how nature do that's true they they they apparently got you were telling me they got the the sexual dynamics of white-tailed deer wrong yes but maybe that's the way that rodeo do it and like maybe yeah I mean I think it was very much more like mountain goat style yeah where it's like that's my like well and it's also weird in that they have this great prince of the forest who's like the fuck master I guess and all these other male deer that we see throughout the movie very few does and then I'm giving the allowance to the animators that they were trying to make them clearly deer what else would they be I don't know but they just to stop well no they're they're just establishing a standard model of like background extra deer like they don't they didn't have like five different outlines it shows one that's like the whole like the default person is like a white man thing it's like the default deer is a male with two prong antlers yeah I will I will contend that if you did ask 99% of people to draw a deer that they would draw them with antlers right probably I mean like it is weird like obviously in under modern attention to detail they would have provided a greater variety of deer's themselves but to be fair both male and female reindeer have antlers right and male reindeer shed their antlers in the winter which means that all of Santa's reindeer are female Christmas and they all have it all that makes me happy girl power I'm not I don't know if that's the biggest win in the world but yeah no it's not this is what we have to settle for this is this is our lot in life history is written by the winners and we lost it history so someone I love told me that once sorry Jesus Christ dragon out shit that I probably said like 20 years ago go down well you weren't wrong I will say there is another hero in this movie which is the fucking background painters yes the the the backgrounds in this in this field like if you legitimately if the movie was the one thing that we will get to later and then nothing no animated and creatures just the background just the backgrounds for an hour and a half I probably would have enjoyed it just about as much yeah it's it's up there like the intro because you see this panning animated and I thought I was like is that water color it's got like no it has to be opaque so it's acrylic and so they did such a good job like making it that painterly style yeah yeah it's 3D and just yeah the the the the multi plane camera that they used for a bambi I don't know this this is not the first time they used it because I know they used it in Fantasia I don't know if it was in Pinocchio or not but it was definitely they were the only animation studio in the world to have one of these and it's a mass absolutely massive compositing camera where you have in fact they've got multiple versions of it because there's both the zoom style and the pan style so you can have a single camera that moves sheets of glass with the registration marks on them so you can put the pieces of cell phone down and put them on multiple layers of of glass and have those move at different rates so they move past the camera to simulate parallax and then you can have registration with like including you can swap out layers of actual animation while you as you as you are panning the camera over something you can be swapping out the cell cell phone for particular frames to have an animated creature within this plane absolutely revolutionary an incredible piece of technology they had another one that went like the ones that was side aside for panning and they had the one for zoom which I think they use in Fox and the Hound I want to say oh yeah right that was the other movie that my grandparents had Robin Hood in Fox and the Hound not surprised at all but yeah so but the zoom ones cool because you have to remove the panes as you go through so you can actually go through like have things believe them leave the frame yeah yeah I was really caught up on the technical stuff because I was thinking a lot about the sound of old Disney especially the sound of when you get kids recorded for Disney like yes because they I was like I think these child before we watch it again yeah I was sort of thinking about it I'm like I'm pretty sure they used actual children they did and they did and it's it's funny because that was kind of a Disney thing other productions when they have kids actors they tended to grab adults and have them do a child of voice that's kind of a Hannah Barbarra thing to do so it's also definitely a Warner Brothers thing to do because that whenever they have a child character is just some guy Disney liked to grab actual children the problem with child actors is that they have absolutely no Mike discipline and they have like they haven't they haven't developed their ability to control the instrument which is their voice to make it like sound like they're yelling without actually just fucking yelling and under modern they it's interesting there's real phase there because the use of child actors also kind of dipped in the 90s and then came back for like television and stuff they were starting to hire like 12 and 13 year old to play a teenage characters against like this is you know Jeremy Shada was brought in for adventure time and kind of grew up under adventure time which is an era when like normally wouldn't have done that you would have gotten trust McNeil or or I'm liking on her name to play Twilight Sparkle anyway she's in everything and but under modern recording techniques you have a lot of dynamic range within a with an actual audio recording space so like for example we're recording on a nice fancy setup that I had that I have right now and like you you know I could get down to a real low whisper and it's gonna handle that I'm gonna raise the volume afterwards and I can also get quite loud without blowing things out and I can make that all happen you can't do that with old tapes like old tapes just do not have that range in them so and then also they don't it's not digital so every time they composite together the the audio from one track to another you lose more and more dynamic record yeah it's basically been recorded and so it just like squashes everything down so every single kid in a Disney film from this era sounds it's got this weird incredibly heavy distortion on them it's they sound like yeah they sat to me it sounds so much like punk rock like it's the exact same vocal distortion that that punk rockers use but it's on a kid's voice who's speaking and not like a guy like angrily yelling about how he hates fucking fascism really kind of want to see children doing punk rock I really don't but that's me fascism's terrible yeah but like I'm sorry no it's fine yeah so the the the technical qualities of this movie are fantastic the animations really good to apparently they like you know they went and saw real deer and all that stuff and they got the animation down a lot of the animals they got really well like the way the pheasants run I would and fly I was impressed with there were a bunch of just fucking made up birds because I know birds pretty well I think I saw a run at one point and I was like that's an actual bird one thing one thing they definitely got wrong though is all of those birds look like equally colorful on both the males and females when it's very like that's how birds work yeah they're all gay birds I guess they could all be gay birds that be very bad that is something that happens we know what happens in ducks a lot there's not enough ladies to go around the dudes just have it out sure yeah but yeah so there's a rabbits is right yeah I don't know I you said this movie is horny I don't actually think it's all right it's like one of the most chased movies that has to involve sex right like yeah it just has so many tropes in it I guess is what I'm saying it's where it's like oh that's my woman trope oh like that happens so many times like tacitly in the hole like you're my son but I'm not acknowledging you and then like this like you know and then they all get together and fuck each other at the end and I don't know it's it's kind of weird doesn't have weird vibes it does have weird vibes I to me like the it doesn't do anything particularly weird it's just that because they're so little there yes the things that are there kind of stand out because that's it yeah that's like there's nothing else there's there's a random storm which has really that's the other thing about you were talking about technical stuff with the artistry and also the sound of the children the sound of the music the score they got it's old school where they score every scene like here a bambi like falling over the log they write that into the orchestral score and it was really impressive and well the April shower song is lovely okay some of the other songs like the it's spring it's time to fuck song is so 40s yeah it's hilariously 40s I I assume they wrote it for this movie but it's still presumably it's so funny to be it it's also a strange in terms of Disney musicals it's it's in that tarzan camp of like doesn't have any diogenic or nine-digect music it doesn't have like musical music it's just that like every once in a while the movie pauses to like sing a song yeah for somebody off screen somewhere to sing a song about what's going on on the camera yeah but that it would have been better with Phil Collins to be fair but he wasn't I mean yeah hey Google when was Phil Collins born a bunch of people are yelling right Phil Collins was born on January 30th 1951 oh yeah he wasn't born yet yeah well but like by like nine years yeah so yeah it would have been really hard to get him but like I had to say okay so the the one plot point that anybody remembers about this movie is Bambi's mom dies right that is kind of the start of the plot to like it's 40 minutes I had to pause so that we could look as 40 minutes into this hour and 10-minute movie like like nothing happens for so long so long they're like oh look there's a baby deer oh look this baby deer is like has trouble walking he's still having trouble walking the the fucking rabbit says kind of wobbly any twice and I'm like to use the same snippet just because they needed two takes of that like I was like well we'll just have him use that he spends a lot of time not be able to walk and then he spends a lot of time watching a rainstorm happen and then he spends a lot of time on a frozen lake sliding around when he was young it reminded me a whole lot of training a puppy okay and we have a puppy right now that we're fostering adopted dog everybody if you can but it's like like jump over it jump over it oh try to stand up you know you can do it you can do a lot of that kind of thing and like being afraid of the thunder which is kind of funny because like I get it it's visual medium that had symbols crashing instead of a drum for the thunder yeah because they timed it so there'd be at the same time as the lightning so it was sort of a stand-in for both the lightning and the thunder sure and I was it was an interesting choice and one that didn't really bother me as a child but now it's like I'm like oh that was a choice yeah but yeah there's a rainstorm and then he can he flirts with the little girl or the little girl flirts with him she's kind of a sex past I am interested in somebody went through all like children's media and found out how often the romantic aggressor was the woman rather than the man how often that is because I think that there is definitely a bias in children's media that like boys don't care about romance and girls do it's like a very strong thing but then also there is definitely something to be said of like when a man pursues a woman on screen it does come off a bit different than when a woman pursues a man on screen and so if you want to not have sort of creepy overtones we don't need pep you'll appeal in here to be fair these are also coded as children yes because and I think it's more common in children like girls sort of hit the social for milestone sooner than boys do she wasn't really flirting with him she wasn't like making eyes at harassing him she was just being a little kid like she was being an extrovert the one who's flirting with him is fucking flower oh my god that's fucking weird as shit you can call me that if you want to and like bat batting in his eyelashes at bambi and then like like holding his tail and like being like all yeah that that's a very strange I don't know what they're coding flower in because he also comes off as a bit black right but like because okay so audience yeah where we're getting that is that flower has hands and feet like human hands human hands and feet he does not have pause and the these black of course because he is a skunk but the palms and fingers of his hands and feet are pink like a like a like a human like if you've ever seen a goofy movie and like no no no no the whole black they're completely black no they specifically and it's and it's it's the way that a person with darker skin their palms and and the souls of their feet are a slightly lighter shade it's called the collaborative skin hmm excellent and not like on anyone like that's you know how you don't grow hair on your palms or feet that's collaborative skin and it sweats differently yeah and and so flower the fucking skunk has this I don't know why it is a sort of upsetting it's like wait who are you I don't somebody's gonna have a dissertation about flower um because again he he definitely is flirting he's definitely flirting with bambi and then he he hooks up with the girl in the end well I mean bisexuals exist so I mean like it's that's not the end of the like like like maybe they had an interspecies thruple I don't know we don't get anything back from bambi that's true so I think he's yeah he's to be fair the most oblivious character anyway I mean as a protagonist should be but yeah so bit flowers fucking weird and I don't know about you I bumper is a fucking annoying guy's character oh yeah I think even his adult voice actor is annoying yeah he's a child and you're like a annoying child actor yeah and then he is like hey look at me and it's like oh you're still annoying I think that might be on purpose I think he's kind of supposed to be that kind of character where like you low-key hate him but he's also your best friend that is definitely a genre of guy that I that I have met in my life and maybe he's trying to make him that but yeah he's a yeah he's a he's a big it's a lot they're so little characterization overall because again nothing happens in this movie yeah it's just a bunch of I have a hard time not comparing it to Fantasia because it came out it was the it was the movie came out yeah it came out it was the next one to come out after Fantasia and it was in that era where they had found their footing in terms of animating the technology was there they had all all of them like main animators had like arrived at the like height of their skill maybe the height of their skill but they had like really gotten there to put where they could make beautiful animation and Fantasia is just a like the flimsiest of excuses for them to just do whatever the fuck they want right like they're just like we have these ideas and we don't really have enough it none of them could be made into a movie on its own so we're just gonna put them to music and make a movie out of it and it that really works bambi feels like they took one of those ideas and made it 110 minutes long like it it doesn't seem like a full movie in it it was a novel though but apparently from my understanding the novel is written for adults and a lot more happens in it and it's darker and grimmer I really want to read this now by all means too but it so there but that means it doesn't necessarily mean that there wasn't it could that could also be a boring ass novel novel too yeah really good I don't I didn't but like when you compare when you compare the two movies Fantasia versus Bambi Man Fantasia like blows Bambi out of the water there's so much better more going on there I like Fantasia well to be fair it's like you know classic music sure yeah yeah the the score is amazing it's I think it's it's got funny moments it's but anyway so when you put those two together it's like man Bambi does not I do not think Bambi holds up is my is my if very possibly if you were a two-year-old child or three-year-old child or whatever then just the the to be fair like I talk about it being horny it is very tame it's it's one of those like yeah like Scott said nothing happened nothing like I try to think of another movie it's just it's all undertones that I'm reading way too much into because nothing else have yeah because you're sitting there for a long time just absorbing allowing us to spend most of our time thinking about the best couple in the movie okay so early on I should say yeah the movie had technically started the credits for all for a while and there's a lot of singing choral stuff and Scott went into the kitchen it's actually it's also the we started with the credits it's old school style where the credits run first yeah and so Scott was in the kitchen just getting some snacks and I see the scene and I'm like oh no I have to pause it and rewind it so that he can see this because it's purely visual and if I hadn't tried to explain it it would not have done it justice so he's like oh like seriously it's like Bambi we're 40 seconds into the movie and then he sees it and he says he his verbal reaction was my exact thoughts that I struggle not to say allowed because I didn't want to ruin the surprise so what happens is that they're like they're like panning through the forest and we see like everybody all these woodland creatures they're waking up is like the general things like the start of the story except the owl is going to sleep right right and we see like squirrel stretched out on a on a branch who's like waking up and then from underneath the squirrel's tail up here's a chipmunk who pulls the tail back over like I'm ready I'm gonna stay asleep I'm sorry I'm it's too it's too early I don't want to get up yet but my initial the way it looks to me is they fucking the squirrel and the chipmunk are definitely together they're an item we see them several times throughout the movie I count it it's I think it's four times that we see them and they're always together I mean mind you there are other chipmunks out of the squirrels so possibly what these two are an item they are an item where's that movie yeah I want that movie and like you were saying it's like was it one animator being like this is me and this is my wife or like the other guy I'm seeing you know like and for Sonas it's like yeah all the animators were men at that time right I will I do not know enough off the top my head to tell you definitively but almost all of I mean probably well famously that there were the 12 old men which is like the core animation group in Disney who are like the guys who were there at the start all the way through like from you know snow white the seven dwarves all the way up through you know the rescuers and stuff like that and they were the the first guys who were animators and then they like they each went off to like be like professors and to write books about animation and like almost everything that Western animation knows about animation was taught to them by the four old men or 12 old men excuse me and so presumably that is the core group I can't say there wasn't also a woman there I would be surprised considering when and where this was but yeah so it's possible that they were just putting those in or just thought it was funny didn't understand but like there are the those those two characters are the best part of the whole movie yes yes hands down would recommend that sequel you sure yeah but yeah it says something about how little is going on in this film that like that's very noticeable and yeah something I didn't get as a child but I mean was enjoyable as an adult sure yeah I'm you got to find your joy where you can and it's like 40 seconds and it's like oh my god I have to back this up yeah it's and then it was like oh thank god it's not just me so is there anything else you want to cover with Bambi before we like to rest I guess a public service announcement there is a pre on disease called wasting disease that is infecting many if not most North American deer please just I mean the sad truth is like maybe donate venison because you could pre on diseases are nasty if we don't really understand them yeah and I mean that's and there's not really a cure for them so I just saw a really good description earlier today somebody described pre on diseases as like you know how you can like have a water bottle that's been in the freezer but it's not frozen and then you move it and then it just crystallizes all at once that's what pre ones do but in your brain yeah so stay away we still need to kill deer because there's been problems with them eating all the vegetation like the NIH campus you know like science forward had to go insert um norplant into all the deer on campus because they eaten all the shrubbery and we're starving and they you know I think the gun laws in Maryland are tighter or something but they're like well we can't just shoot them so they had to go around tranquilize and implant birth control into all these deer so that there wouldn't be so many and yeah it's so weird but this is what happens when you kill wolves yeah yeah we need the wolves in the mountain lions and the bobcats yeah I still need to read that the wolf buck about the reintroduction of wolves into I found out he wrote like a whole series of those oh yeah yes and so yeah I only got a little bit into it before I got distracted by something else because one of my friends started rereading a series or reading a series so I reread the series so I could talk to her about it yeah yeah it's it's been fun but yeah I do need to read I think it's rise of wolf eight okay check it out it seems really good yeah yeah in fact if I can remember too I will I'll put a link to the was it a the American life episode that was about it or was it something oh it was by Vox I think it's called this is love oh this is love okay yeah yeah yeah there's an episode about wolf 21 it will pull your heart story it's very sweet yeah oh that's okay one other thing I want to say is this is one of the few Disney movies where the dogs are the villains that's true yeah they see angry dogs and we there's a huge forest fire this predated smokey the bear by two years yeah they were ahead of the curve and it messed up our fire policies in forestry but messed up the like so like for the longest time the philosophy was don't let any fire happen ever right right right yeah and then California caught on fire one of the inciting incidents for the smoky the bear campaign was in during World War II Japanese subs fired on the uh they were that close yeah yeah yeah uh it's really underpublicized how like much access to America uh Japanese like uh military had to like the mainland um they but that means that the the the the fire basically they fired some shells at the coastline and started some forest fires uh they as my understanding there were no casualties associated with those forest fires they were only one of the few uh casualties to happen on the mainland was from uh a Japanese yeah Japanese fire bombing balloon uh had landed in I think it was Oregon and a like school group went down to investigate it and it blew up and it killed a bunch of people so yeah including I think the teacher yeah I think everybody yeah yeah group um okay that's okay I don't know how true this is so if anybody knows say something uh forever ago Scott is always doing this he's saying stuff and then I'll remember it and he'll forget it and then I'll be like thinking it's true and it might have just been something that he made up but it might be true so he told me forever ago try to be good about my sources it's just that in the intervening I don't know decades since I said this fact to I have forgotten where I heard it and wouldn't so when you said this I was like I just don't know that I can back you up on it because I do not remember the source okay so if anybody knows say something uh he told me forever ago that a lot of the no I remember the source now oh what was it it's Miyazaki Hayao Miyazaki one of the the guy who's like is the animator of Japan yeah he's he's the one who runs uh Studio Ghibli which is considered the the the Japanese Disney um he was inspired in his style specifically by Bampi ah he watched that movie and said that's fantastic I'm gonna do some of that and so it wasn't like when you framed that to me as like you said that this was the founding thing of Japanese anime and I was like well the big eyes are like so striking yeah but the big eyes aren't the thing only in Bambi like it's a it's a it's a style but but I like I remember I now I remember what the actual thing was is that Hayao Miyazaki cited specifically Bambi as one of his sources and he does do a lot of nature films too honestly if I was looking at his style versus Bambi what I would think is he's looking at the backgrounds because the backgrounds in Bambi are gorgeous and that is something that like um Studio Ghibli puts like huge amounts of effort into making their like luscious beautiful defictions of the to be fair a lot of animation does that like the um uh the lunit the roadrunner cartoon oh yeah yeah more of our cartoons are famous backgrounds in those and they're also beautiful they're more static to be fair but they're still beautiful and they're sort of like those are like watercolor right I think so they can be in the back yeah yeah um and it's got sort of a you can kind of see the paper texture of amber correctly they look for they're beautiful yeah the um the the specifically the roadrunner cartoon backgrounds are beautiful okay so this is talking about cartoon backgrounds um this is actually comic books but there is a um a comic book called I do not feel if it is how if the sea is hard or soft but I have always thought it of as cerebus cerebus the art work um which was one of the like it was a graphic novel series that was published in the 1990s and early 2000s it is it's one of those series that people have a lot of like very definite opinions about it's very hot and cold uh the guy who wrote it is a fucking like asshole huge asshole however it was quite it was quite um um successful on its day and uh it started off as sort of a gag a day joki script strip and then it grew into this like monstrous huge um overarching hugely serious dark epic oh like the difference between the first sonic animated series in the second well but like this is the same series like this is it started off I mean those are technically the same series too like they to error them interchangeably no they're hilarious yeah the I literally talked to a guy about this earlier and they're not I mean like they're produced by different production company okay okay um but like this is I mean like it's the difference between like a lot of web comics do this where they start off joki and then they turns in fact the trope is called cerebus syndrome because after this one thing but the uh at a certain point along the way the um the guy who wrote it out surged outsourcing all of his uh backgrounds to a different artist and then he apparently arranged uh that he said if I die before this thing's done we're gonna publish the rest of the books but it's just going to be the backgrounds just empty with nothing in them for the rest of the way through and I'm like I'm like I kind of would I would kind of love to read that version of it we're just like one day it's all of the characters stop but the world keeps going that's like a beautiful allegory for like it'd be very interesting and probably better than the last couple of books of cerebus so not it nothing that's not good there's a whole other thing about that um good to know so I I know unfortunately you do not have a lot to plug um because you do not live in internet life like many of other people that I did yeah I live under a rock it's fine um so there's microbes and isopods that are here is there anything but is there anything you would like to point our audience to that they should go check out that's cool oh uh the there's a bunch of good science channels on YouTube to check out actually uh yeah um so SciShow of you know Hank Greens and there's a new guy I've been watching a lot more lately I think his name's Max and his channel is called no lab coat required such an inspiration the kids are okay you know it's like oh you do such a good job Hubertman lab podcast has been like it took off it doesn't probably need any plugging but you know and then there's radio lab and support public radio guys and your local library and your oh yeah Libby is a free app that not all libraries participate in but many do and you can check out ebooks videos and more in the Libby app and it will return them for you so if you forget no late fees it turns them in for you and even if you never think you're going to take a book out you should get a library card just because it makes the numbers better it makes it easier for them to get funding yes all right well um in that case we will catch uh the audience sometime in the future there's no schedule with these there's come out when i'm done so bye thank you again to Ariel showing me bambi again it's by the fact that i didn't quite like it that much but it was still a fun conversation if you'd like to support the show tell a friend encourage them to listen maybe point them to your favorite episode but if you want to support us monetarily add on over to patreon.com slash first knowledge hope you want to find other shows for our network head to library.horse till next time we'll be talking about when it's next time we'll be talking to Ella Watts about full metal alchemist till then you

Thank you again to our guest, Arielle. You can find her at her local library and you should support yours.

Let's Get Weird About is a Library of Cursed Knowledge Production

You can find Scott Paladin at his website or, frankly, as Scott Paladin on just about every social media site. Just look for him.