#mockbuster

I'm shocked nobody tried this idea of putting the infamous Cars knockoff characters in the official character design style before. I spent way too much effort on this. Any others you'd like to see redone?

While I won’t deny that the film obviously uses many visual elements and some story beats from Tron, I would argue that it doesn’t rip off the plot and characters wholesale. The plot of Savior of the Earth feels pretty different from Tron in many ways, aside from the general concept of “guy who is good at video games gets pulled into a computer world and has to defeat a bad guy.” In fact, in this film there’s three characters pulled into the computer world.

Most of the characters in the movie don’t feel like they’re equivalents of the characters in Tron, aside from the protagonist “Keith” being somewhat similar to Flynn (but also basically having the role of Tron as well), and the villain’s main henchman looking like Sark. The villain himself isn’t an evil computer program, but a human mad scientist who wants to conquer the world by controlling computers everywhere.

In fact, what I find fascinating about the film are the many characters and events that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Tron at all. For example, one of the major characters in the digital world is a sexy submarine pirate captain, whose sister is a small robot girl named Sandy who falls in love with Keith, much to his chagrin.

(Sandy is basically my favorite character in the whole film.)

Of course, it’s entirely possible that these characters might be ripoffs from some other movie that I haven’t seen.

I think many of the reviews of Savior of the Earth I’ve seen are somewhat unfair to it. Yes, it’s probably not a very good movie, and the animation is basically of the same quality as an 80s animated TV series, but it’s not particularly awful either, and it’s pretty interesting in many ways. The one major flaw, however is the English dub, which is awful. Aside from the sound being of poor quality, the voice actors are utterly terrible across the board, and the script they’re working with feels pretty poorly written, often making it very vague and confusing about what exactly is going on in the film.

I would actually be curious to watch a subtitled version of the original Korean version, if such a thing exists, just to see if the acting is any better, and if the story makes more sense. I also suspect that the English version I watched might have some parts cut, mostly just because the film poster has a weird E.T.-looking creature that doesn’t show up anywhere in the movie.

Gulu Xiansheng or 咕噜先生 (1998)

I think this show is more worst than Disney's Shnookums and Meat

I felt weird drawing her naked so I gave her an outfit

I’ll post the whole movie here for your viewing pleasure

SUPPORT INDIE CINEMA 🗣️‼️🎥

My friend: Nah! We have a better movie! It’s called Toyz Goin' Wild!

Me: What’s that?

My friend: You’ll see.

Toyz Goin' Wild:

Me after seeing Toyz Goin' Wild:

We've got another poll for the next entry, and this one's special. I've got some real notorious candidates (And by notorious I mean everyone hated and/or still does hate these) on the list, and I want to see which one you guys want me to suffer through the most. Pick your poison!

...but then it turned out they just bought the model from TurboSquid and so can you too (link in the source), it’s called “Dino Beast”:

So now they released a sequel to their movie, Ape vs. Mecha Ape, and the design of the titular Mecha Ape is also amazing. Suspiciously so.

I couldn’t find the model on TurboSquid, but I thought it looked familiar.

Searching for figures online where I live it’s very common to come across bootlegs, now more than ever with 3D printing technology, some people may get their hands on the file of a model someone else did and either sell the 3d printed figure or the file itself, most likely without the original artist’s knowledge. Add to that the popularity of Godzilla vs. Kong, wich featured a Mechagodzilla, and you come across stuff like this:

Meet “Mecha King Kong”, as online sellers call it. I assume they won’t call it “Mechanikong” because if you know who that is you probably will know this isn’t an official thing. I can’t find who the original artist is.

Now the bodies look completely different, but the head...

There are some differences, like the eyeballs, the forehead, the jaw, and the lenght of the “airvents”. But many of the details are so similar I simply can’t believe it’s just a coincidence:

Now, if the guys at The Asylum are one thing, it’s legaly savvy. There is a reason they’ve succesfully been in the mockbuster business for DECADES. I’m sure they didn’t steal an asset like these neobootleggers probably did, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the “Mecha Ape” and “Mecha King Kong” 3D models have a common origin somewhere down the line.

If there is something I take from all this unprompted cashing-in on robot gorillas, is that if the Godzilla vs. Kong sequel were to feature a robot Kong (Mechanikong or otherwise), audiences and bootlegers would welcome it with open arms.