Daily Archives: May 14, 2025

Top Tens – Film: Top 10 Animated Films (7) Wreck-It Ralph

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(7) WRECK-IT RALPH

(2012-2018: WRECK-IT RALPH 1-2)

 

Disney film Wreck-It Ralph took us inside video games with its protagonist as the eponymous villain in a 1980’s 8-bit video game (reminiscent of Donkey Kong, with Ralph as Kong), who rebels against his role and dreams of being a hero ‘off-screen’. He sees his opportunity in another game of Hero’s Duty (a more modern first-person shooter game in the style of Halo and Call of Duty among others) – unfortunately, his efforts lead to one of its self-replicating alien bug antagonists escaping to yet another game, Sugar Rush (a kart racing game in the style of Super Mario). And things get worse from there…

The plot is fun but the true delight of Wreck-It Ralph is the exuberant abundance of video game references – in visual gags and characters. These are introduced from the outset – Ralph’s support group of video game antagonists (Bad-Anon) includes Bowser from the Mario franchise and Doctor Eggman from Sonic the Hedgehog, as well as M. Bison and Zangief from the Street Fighter. That’s just for starters – there’s Tapper (from the Tapper game, who runs an off-screen bar in the same style as his game for video game characters), Sonic the Hedgehog, other characters from Street Fighter, Pac-Man and ghosts (Blinky, Pinky and Inky), Dig Dug, Frogger, Q-bert and more. Even that most basic original video game, Pong. There are video game references in the most amazing (and fleeting) details, such as sound effects and graffiti – “Aerith lives”, “Shen Long was here” and “All your base are belong to us” among others.

Ralph returned for a sequel breaking (surely that should have been wrecking?) the internet – while fun, it did not quite live up to the original.

 

FANTASY OR SF

 

I’m saying fantasy – but technofantasy, given the premise is based on computer game characters, not unlike the programs in Tron.

 

COMEDY

 

Definitely a comedy – including many gaming in-jokes.

 

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

A-TIER (TOP-TIER)

Top Tens – Mythology: Top 10 Books (Special Mention: Revised) (14) Erich Von Daniken – Chariots of the Gods?

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(14) ERICH VON DANIKEN –

CHARIOTS OF THE GODS? (1968)

(RONALD STORY – THE SPACE GODS REVEALED 1976)

 

I’m not saying that it was aliens but it was aliens – ancient astronauts!

A modern mythology par excellence – and Erich von Daniken is its prophet!

The mythos of aliens as ancient astronauts was not original to Daniken and his Chariots of the Gods, which remains the Bible of the mythos, despite Daniken’s increasingly wild sequels. Indeed, he appears to have ripped off his theories from previous writers, perhaps not surprisingly for someone convicted and imprisoned for embezzlement and fraud (and he wrote one of his sequels in prison). However, Daniken was the foremost popularizer of the mythos, such that the craze (or cult) for it was coined Danikenitis.

While absurd, one can’t deny that the mythos Daniken popularized was – and remains – a hoot.

It’s the mythos in which “ancient locations, legends, gods, and creatures from ancient myth are connected to alien visitors from a radically more advanced civilization”, including “that these aliens influenced our history in some way, mostly through technological advances”.

“Proponents of this theory also espouse that ancient construction projects like the pyramids and Stonehenge are clearly too advanced and a little too fantastic for ancient man to have constructed without help…since there are pyramids in the Americas, Egypt, and China… you guessed it, they all got their idea from aliens. Other popular sites include the Moai of Easter Island and the Nazca Lines…this theory is often crossed over with Atlantis”.

Oh yes – and the Biblical God is an alien, the Bible is littered with references to aliens or alien technology (The Ark of Covenant was electrically charged! Sodom and Gomorrah were literally nuked! Ezekiel’s vision of flying wheel within a wheel was a helicopter!), and the titular chariots of the gods are of course UFOs.

I can’t have special mention for Daniken without including one of many books refuting him – Ronald Story’s The Space Gods Revealed and its point by point refutation of Chariot of the Gods.

 

RATING:

X-TIER (WILD TIER)

Top Tens – Tropes & Other: Top 10 Stone Ages / Stone Age Iceberg (Special Mention: 11-15)

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Kebaran culture (Levant and Sinai) microliths 22,000 – 18,000 years ago (public domain image)

 

 

(11) MEGAFAUNA EXTINCTION STONE AGE

 

The mammoth is dead – and we killed it!

Well, the jury’s still out on the cause of mass megafauna extinction – also termed the late Pleistocene extinctions – between human impact and climate change, although the consensus seems to support “at least a contributory role of humans in the extinctions”.

I mean, they do tend to coincide with the patterns of early human migration, particularly in the Americas and Australasia, but it was like that when we got here, honest!

 

(12) ROCK & CAVE ART STONE AGE

 

Yes, I’m an Altamira and Lascaux cave art fanboy – as I am of the Sorcerer in the Cave of the Trois-Freres, particularly as drawn by Henri Breuil. All hail the Horned God!

Cave and rock art comprise perhaps the most vivid visual icons of the Stone Age – and our best glimpses into the minds of our Stone Age forebears.

Speaking of the Sorcerer…

 

 

(13) SHAMANIC STONE AGE

 

There are different viewpoints of Stone Age religion or religious beliefs, but one of the two predominant viewpoints is that the Stone Age was fundamentally shamanic. That viewpoint underlies Weston La Barre’s The Ghost Dance, as well as Peter Watson’s The Great Divide: Nature and Human Nature in the Old World and the New. The latter essentially proposes that the native Americans remained locked into the shamanic beliefs and mindset they brought with them from Siberia – reinforced by the rigors of American geography and the larger number of psychedelic plants.

As for the other predominant viewpoint of Stone Age religion…

 

 

(14) MATRIARCHAL STONE AGE

 

Stone Age Venus! She is the goddess and this is her body!

You don’t get much more of a visual icon of prehistoric matriarchy and mother goddess worship than the famed Venus of Willendorf. Paleolithic – more like Paleolithicc, amirite?

Ironically, despite the prolific nature of Paleolithic Venus figurines, it is the Neolithic that tends to be associated with mother goddess worship or goddess-centric religions, typically overlapping with agricultural fertility, at least in popular culture – albeit an association highly contested within archaeology and anthropology.

Which brings me to…

 

(15) LONGHOUSE STONE AGE

 

The idea of the communal dwelling or longhouse, originating in the Neolithic albeit with a long history after that – and coopted in contemporary online discourse to signify oppressive matriarchal or gynocentric social conformity.