monkeyman2020's semi-superfluous The Blog!

Okay, so. Basically. I know you already read the TL;DR. But. The Amazing Digital Circus Episode 9 hath been, how you say… spoiled. Shown to the world, adorned with a variety of leeks, so to say. And I am, seething about it a little, I cannot lie. But! I have only seen one (1) spoiler, and I don’t know if it’s real or not… but it’s still, you know, aggravating.

So! To cut down on any other potential spoilers, I will be perusing the sites of social media (YouTube, BlueSky, Tumblr) moderately-to-far less frequently! Only really opening them to see messages or to rewatch/review things I’ve already seen or look at accounts I know won’t spoil me. Overall, this means I’ll use these sites fairly less often.

Which, in some ways, I’m happy about! I don’t want to use social media too too much, and so this is a good way for me to detox a bit! Focus on my hobbies, my writing, my drawing, my miscellaneous, my etcetera! But on the other hand… you know. I still have things I want to do and stuff I want to watch that involve the media of the socials. But I suppose, seeing as most of those I follow are trustworthy and/or not at all likely to repost or talk about spoilers, my interaction with them will… continue to some extent, presumably?

I don’t know how much I’ll detox for, but, my interaction will noticeably lower to all those wondering. There’ll be some queued posts scattered about here and there, most likely to coincide with any further fanfic updates. Maybe a few non-queued posts, but, definitely a LOT less reblogs, I can say that much!

I guess I’ll see you all again… June 19th! Or 20th, depending on when the episode itself actually comes out (but most likely the 19th)! Or… later, if I just can’t watch it for whatever reason. Hm.

3. The One Who’s Running The Show (from The Amazing Digital Circus; Episode 8 to be specific!) — Getting into songs I’ve gotten into more recently (since I’ve loved the first two songs on the list for a looooooong while), and what other way to signify that with a song by one of my new favorite characters of all time, Caine?

I just LOVE the escalation of it all!! The slow start with the piano into the more bouncy middle section to the frantic and more fast-paced ending (punctuated by all of the circus members being, uh, well, tortured) with the main TADC motif?? It’s all just so… catchy. And the lyrics are really good as well! “Don’t need to scream if you ain’t got a mouth!” is admittedly a bit on the nose, but I didn’t mind it too much, especially when you have overtly amazing and/or rhythmic lines like “It’s time to see that this great marquee is the only place you’re ever gonna be!” which is both rhythmic and shows off a lot of Caine’s viewpoint and beliefs towards the main characters (if he isn’t just a main character himself; so, the main humans I should clarify… unless Ragatha and Gangle turn out to secretly be NPCs and disappear at the beginning of Episode 1 but that’s… an approximation of implausiblility).

Oh, and, of course, Alex Rochon/Caine’s vocals are really stellar. The emotion and general gravitas oozing from each line is really something to behold…! (Hey, isn’t “Oozing” that one character from Murder Drones? The one voiced by Elsie Lovelock? Ha, it’s funny because I’m using a sound-alike word to appear deliberately and comically wrong towards a show I know next-to-nothing about!) And I of course love just how… Caine everything is. The fact he calls them friends (in a way that comes off quite earnest), the fact that his first major violence towards the humans is literally in song form (illustrating both how jarring it is that he’s doing this and how little he has to change of his exterior disposition to do so [he’s definitely less receptive to listening to the humans afterwards of course]), though all of this has been said to the point where bringing it up is almost redundant.

If anything else! I loved listening to this song over and over again so much to the point where I added the album version that Gooseworx released (without sound effects and such) to my YouTube playlist immediately, since it came out a day (maybe even less) before it released on Spotify and the like. Caine’s Requiem is also quite good (though perhaps not to the level of this), but it’s not (yet?) released on albums… still! If you enjoyed this, and haven’t heard it, listen to it! It’s an ad song, but it’s still catchy and pleasant to listen to with a similar level of gravitas (and all of the main cast’s voices get to sing in it… plus Orbsman minus Gangle)! Really quite neat to listen to!!

4. Let’s Talk About Me (from The Muppets [2011]; seriously I think this is one of my favorite movies now oh my god there are some issues with it but I adore it anyway) — This song does sound good, yes, but it’s also just… really funny to me? Like, genuinely. It even appearing in the movie was hilarious to me. If you haven’t seen The Muppets (2011), and you’re at all interested in doing so/The Muppets in general… don’t read this section. Like, genuinely, watch the movie so you can preserve the comedic timing of it.

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…okay, I’m going to assume you either saw the movie, skipped this segment, or you just don’t really mind spoilers for The Muppets (2011).

The subversion is the funniest part to me. Like, the whole movie (up to the point of the song) you’re under the impression that the villain just… isn’t going to sing. They don’t seem to like songs, and they can’t even laugh really, and it’s not out of the norm for a Muppets movie to have no villain song (I don’t believe the first movie did nor like… any Muppet movie before this one? Which makes it even MORE brilliant oh my god; granted I haven’t seen like… everything but the first and Christmas Carol, but, still), and then this song pops up literally out of nowhere??

And the lyrics are… well, it depends on what your metric of “good” is to call them that, but they’re definitely more comedic-oriented. There’s just this air of… serious unseriousness to everything. I love it. I also love how, in the album version, they explain why Tex Richman (mister Texas T) dislikes The Muppets… and it’s related to his ability not to laugh. And I personally have a lot of experience making things that aren’t necessarily funny but could be seen as jokes (like fourth-wall breaking; I really enjoy them but I know they’re not for everyone) as genuine story features (as, in my main OC universe, everyone is aware of the fact they’re in a TV show/they aren’t real), and so making just that SNAP realization that “oh wow, this movie’s doing the same thing with Tex Richman (mister Texas T)’s laugh”… it’s just… wow. Golly. It’s like the movie was made for me!! Almost. Some parts are a tiny bit too cynical, but it’s still definitely in my top ~3 favorite movies of all time. (For the record, Phineas and Ferb: Across The 2nd Dimension is my top favorite, surprising to nobody, and Invader Zim: Enter The Florpus is my second favorite, surprising to a slightly higher number of people.)

It’s definitely not one of my favorite songs of all time (that I can recognize, at least). But I still do enjoy listening to it! Along with quite a few songs from The Muppets (2011), like the joke-y cover of Rainbow Connection (which, the original is genuinely stellar I should not understate it) or the barbershop quartet cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit where Beaker (the Muppet who can only say “mimimeep”) sings over any material that isn’t Muppet-appropriate… “Man Or Muppet”, obviously, aaaand… oh, literally like, almost ANY song from Muppets Most Wanted (2014) (the sequel to The Muppets [2011]), the soundtrack of that movie is REALLY really good and catchy (and solely written by the guy who wrote Man Or Muppet fun fact!)!!

As for similarly comedic songs, well… I like Epic Rap Battles Of Kitchenry by Annoying Orange (featuring M&M vs. the titular orange). Some of the lyrics are actually pretty clever! And it is quite catchy!! Don’t judge me!!!

5. Think Inside The Box (from Phineas and Ferb; specifically the episode “Elevator Irritator”) — Remember when I said there weren’t “more than a few” P&F songs that had Phineas singing solo to Ferb, rather than “none”? Well, that was because this song exists! Pretty great!! Unfortunately, it’s from Season 5 of P&F. Jeepers…!

Okay, so I’m not the biggest fan of Season 5… buuuut the songs are good! And catchy! A lot of them, at least. Or at least a notable majority. And this one in particular just feels very Phineas and Ferb-y. Which, I guess is because some of the songs don’t feel very Phineas and Ferb-y… buuuut, that’s not indicative of their actual quality, really! (Though I should also mention that Ferb has a single line in this song, so technically it’s not just Phineas solo. Though, Hey Ferb itself had background singers, so, I suppose they both aren’t just Phineas solo. Hm.)

The episode the song is from is… well, I could see what they were going for, at least? I don’t really like the line that segways into the song, which is a reference to SpongeBob (no yellow color unfortunately gosh darn it). I love SpongeBob, but, the way they did it (or maybe just the quality of the episodes/scenes surrounding it) didn’t make me think “hey, that’s a reference to that one SpongeBob episode!” but instead “did they… forget what show that was from??” Even now, I’m hesitant to even call it a reference. And the conclusion was convoluted. And I don’t like how they used their phones in the song because I don’t really like it when these characters have smartphones and it sort of undermines the fact that they’re stuck in an elevator since you’d expect them to have something that gives them perpetual signal at the very least…

…buuut the song itself is great! I like the rhymes, the rhythm, and the mention of the Oxford Comma. As touched on prior, it IS fairly catchy, and I do enjoy it for that. The lyrics are easy to get stuck in your brain while not being overly simple or coming off too dull. The song and lyrics feel like something you’d hear in Phineas and Ferb, which is good! At least compared to some of the other Season 5 songs which lyrics and melody can come off… different. Sometimes lackluster, but usually just… no-inherent-connotation different.

I realize I don’t sound too positive in this section, but, it really is a nice song! I’m listening to it on loop as I type this, in fact! (Though I listened to each song on loop roughly when I wrote their pertaining section, save for sections/songs 1 and 2 which I believe I wrote listening to either other songs [because I know them like the back of my hand] or them TOGETHER on loop rather than individually. They go really well together!)

Season 5 itself has a lot of other great songs, too! I also like “Commune of Nature” , and “Summer Is Starting Right Now” is one I had on loop for a WHILE after it came out, and “Mom’s Stuck On A Zipline” is… well, it sounds like a DCOM song (aka Disney Channel Original Movie song; ala ZOMBIES which is what it most reminds me of), but I enjoy it both unironically and ironically. It’s nice. And (character I don’t want to spoil if you haven’t seen “Book Flub”) is in it! And “Our Big Bird Mansion” is a song I do NOT like, it feels like a DCOM song that desperately wants to be seen as “hip”, but I Stockholm’d myself into liking it ironically and now it’s on my playlist, soooo…

Aaaaaanyway…! Thank you for the ask! I think I only have, like, 10 followers I could realistically send this ask to, so, that’s neat. (A bulk of them probably wouldn’t answer since they typically don’t answer asks like this… buuuut, there are a select few that I could definitely do this do! Or, with. By which I mean I can ask them the question. I don’t need to clarify all of this because the information I’m providing is intrinsically understood, do I?) I also enjoy the Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) of Mini Moon! (Is that her name? The post I read had that in the tags so I’m just assuming that’s what her name is.) Quite cute and/or adorable, depending on your metric! Me personally, I’d say it’s a mix of both!