Things That Go Blog in the Night

In the '80s, the stereotypical Soccer-Mom accessory for the family mini-van was the "Baby on Board" sign, which even made an appearance as a the hit song of Homer Simpson's Barbershop Quartet group, the Be-Sharps:



In the 2000s, it's this thing: a series of cartoons representing the members of a family plastered across the lower-left corner of the family gas-guzzling SUV:



What's up with that? Are people so proud of their reproductive capacity that they have to advertise it on the back of their cars?

Believe it or not, this one is actually from the web site of a company that sells these things: and it's become so popular that people actually put this, just as is appears here, on their cars:

What strange irony that this past week featured both an attack on photosensitive visitors to the Epilepsy Foundation web site and the release of Speed Racer.

First off, the movie is a blast: completely different from the original Japanimation that I grew up with, yet true to its cheesy boy-saves-world-by-driving-a-race-car core. It doesn't try to be serious, it tries—and succeeds in a big, big way—at being way too much fun in an utterly original, extremely manic, totally overstimulating way.

With influences as far from 60s proto-anime as motion photography pioneer Eadweard Muybridge and photographic artist David LaChapelle (I hadn't heard of him, either), colors as bright and saturated as it is possible to put on film, a plot simple enough for the youngest audience member to grasp and the most intense flashing psychodelic imagery I've ever seen on screen, Speed Racer is like nothing you've ever seen before. The Wachowski brothers—as they did with "bullet time" in The Matrix—have created a new visual style that I'm sure we'll be seeing in ads for years to come.

As much as I liked the movie (and I'm old enough to have been a fan of the original as a 9-year-old in 1967), I have to wonder if some of the effects won't send some photosensitive epileptics out of the theater with headaches or in an ictal state. My 11-year-old son, who plays plenty of video games and has never shown the slightest sign of sensitivity to flashing or flickering images, said that he felt slightly queasy and had a headache after the movie. I'm happy to report that it was not due to an overdose of movie snacks, either: we had a proper meal of Lasagne before we went to the theater.