A Perfect Disaster

He is played obviously camp and dramatic, for a start, and there is the aforementioned "hate your hair/not likely/yikes yikes yikes/let me guess you have a great personality" summary dismissal of all his potential brides. Then he spends dinner asking Yzma about Kronk ("so he seems nice? He's what, in his late twenties?") and otherwise being slightly obsessed with him.

Then there is the whole Adventure of Doom with Pacha, him being ever huffy about the Kiss of Life, and then the restaurant gag where Kuzco takes to playing Pacha's fake wife and dressing up in ladies' clothing with great gusto (reinforced by the waitress' "bless you for coming out in public" remark when Pacha says they're on their honeymoon). Then when he is finally de-llamafied, we don't see him paired off with the obligatory girl from the lineup earlier, as might otherwise be expected in a Disney movie. Instead he is still single, but goes to found family it up with Pacha, Chica, Kronk, etc, which dare we remark is a very queer trope.

In short, I have no idea how a Disney movie with no white people (all the characters are Indigenous/people of color), a gay king, cross-dressing jokes, and the most offbeat plot of all time actually ever got made (can you imagine the Family Friendly Mouse doing that today? Let us also talk about Kronk because he is a brilliant deconstruction of both toxic masculinity and the musclebound henchman stereotype.) Other than that this was the Chaos Hour of animated movies in the late 90s/early 2000s, and yes.

Please, read this article if you have some time. This story is wild, and involves directors being pitted against each other Bake-Off style and a shockingly intimate documentary created by the wife of Sting who, himself was heartbroken by the decimation of the songs he wrote for the film including cutting a fantastic Yzma villain song sung by Eartha Kitt that is SO DAMN GOOD but would not ever have fit the more nailed-down Yzma we would eventually come to know and love. It’s so catchy though, I’m doubling up on calls to action but please listen now:

one of the most heavily forested states in the country with 20 million acres of forests oh my god poison ivy would be so powerful the second she got outside city limits fuck

there’s 20 million acres of this and she’s got plant powers no wonder they want her on lockdown

there are more than 6,000 shipwrecks in the great lakes how many supervillain origin stories is that good for

there’s a whole class of freighter just for the great lakes

“63 commercial ports handled 173 million tons of cargo in 2006″ aka holy shit that is a lot of opportunities for boatcrimes

mr freeze has a pretty tragic origin story but if you had to put up with michigan winters and then some motherfucker showed up freezing the town outside of freezing season you would have no mercy

MOTHERFUCKER I JUST PUT MY SNOWBLOWER IN STORAGE DO I LOOK LIKE I NEED THIS SHIT RIGHT NOW

imagine batman giving someone directions by pointing to his hand

“we believe killer croc is somewhere around here” he says pointing to the tip of his thumb

good fucking luck finding stats on abandoned buildings in michigan but holy shit are there a lot of them, no wonder they’re always having fights in abandoned factories and empty warehouses

“kitty why are you including that map of the railroads like it’s relevant” because when you’re trying to sleep and you hear a train in the distance it’s fucking spooky okay

i have no evidence that traincrime is an issue for batman i’m just saying the ambiance is there

michigan has plenty of abandoned theme parks for the joker to hijack

our most famous abandoned theme park is dinosaur themed so I GUESS WE KNOW WHERE HE GOT THE T-REX

we have a special kind of ice cream called superman ice cream and i think bruce would be really bitter about it and that’s hilarious

there are nine different species of bat in michigan and they have all lived in my kitchen at some point

michigan is full of mines both abandoned and active and bats love them

put an abandoned train station next to and abandoned mine and you have a totally plausible CRIMEZONE

and none of this is getting into the most compelling evidence

put a city in michigan and watch how fast no one gives a fuck

gotham, MI needs batman because who the fuck else is going to help

here are some more michigan batman facts:

we already have evil clowns

when i was a kid i used to slide down the slopes made by snowplows on my stomach which i feel is relevant to the penguin

there’s always a ton of cars from the 30s driving around gotham which makes perfect sense if it’s in michigan because that’s when we made cars and we’re not over it

rick snyder and his emergency managers are basically supervillains and i want batman to punch them

michigan is closer to kansas which means bruce can visit clark’s parents and then they’re emailing clark about what a nice young man he is and there’s nothing clark can do about it

batman vs superman: the deep dish debate

“who would name a city bludhaven” well we’ve already got bad axe and colon and gaylord and climax and grim and hell and frankenlust and gore and that’s just the first half of the alphabet

if someone said that a city in michigan had been hijacked by an evil clown that was only stopped when a man in an animal costume kicked him in the face would you even blink

this is meadow brook hall in rochester mi

this is the charles t fisher house

here’s the james scott residence