Sky High, how are you?!

I think it was the playwright Chekov who said something to the effect that if a character puts a gun on the table in act 1, someone will get shot in act 3. In some films, like Disney’s teen superhero film Sky High, this applies to everything that gets mentioned. Any specified superpower, any object, any desire, any detail exists only because its important. In some cases, this is ridiculous, but in the case of this film, the sophisticated viewer just plays along, plotting out the plot by recognizing how each of these elements has to become important.

Some notes on this film, now out on DVD (and viewed via Netflix here):

• The film is fun. Not great, not important, but a nice silly little piece.
• This film contains performances by both Patrick Warburton (voice only) and Bruce Campbell. Conceptually, this is the collision of matter and anti-matter. They both fill almost the same character role in Hollywood. Campbell is the guy who is cocky because he pictures himself as larger than life, and he is; Warburton is the guy who is cocky because he pictures himself as larger than life but isn’t. Both are really good at what they do. Anyone writing a character who can’t tell if it should be Warburton or Campbell hasn’t figured out the character.
• The opening and closing credits of the film are done in a font called CCAstroCity, my favorite comics-style computer font. Designed for the fine Astro City comic book series, the font carries the sense of being comics and can be used for serious comics, but it’s not deadly sombre. It’s precisely the right font. Folks can see it in a lot of About Comics works. But, if you look on the DVD at the original opening scene, you’ll see another font, exactly the wrong font. It’s one called Comic Sans, which Microsoft made part of Windows. It’s not a real comics font; it looks like what someone who doesn’t actually work with comics lettering would think that comics lettering looks like. Folks who don’t do comics use it all the time when trying to make something comicsesque (such as the Sin City movie posters), and it makes comics folks cringe. Y’know how Mark Twain said that the difference between the right word and the almost right world is like the difference between lightning and a lightning bug? The same goes for fonts.
• The bus driver in the film is named Ron Wilson. They state that repeatedly. Thing is, there is a comic book artist (well, ex-artist these days) named Ron Wilson. He’s considered a minor figure in the field, but he’s important to me, because he was key in inspiring me to eventually become a comics creator. He was the first comics creator I met, the one who made me realize that people actually did these things. Where did I meet him? On a bus, of course.
• There was one point on which the film’s logic fell down, however. Spoiler Alert for those who have not yet seen Sky High. There’s a villain in the film with the power to build tech devices quickly. who goes through a lot of effort to recover an early, broken creation. It’s quickly repaired and reused. But with the superpower, why go to all that effort? Just build a new one!

I really shoulda edited this entry down. This is the junk I think about.