Pajama, Pajamaa!

Today was a YouTube day.

Due to some difficulties with the house keys, I got stuck at home, all dressed up with nowhere to go. Physically at least. There was Phillip K. Dick’s world of paranoid humans and androids (just got me a copy of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep aka Blade Runner), the world of Persona 4 (I’m at the part where we take down Mitsuo Kubo), and of course the Internet. Ah, the wonders of the Information Superhighway.

Anyway,  there was nothing new on Roleplayerguild. None of the threads I’m in had updates. If I didn’t get on YouTube, I’d have spent the whole day spamming in the Off-topic forums, refereshing endlessly to catch any updates. And if you’re not really getting what I’m saying, I’d have to put up a new blog entry about what I did the whole summer.

So there. Bored. Frustrated. Bored. I was halfway through Blade Runner, reading through the part where the main character gets all paranoid and starts questioning his sanity, when I decide to put the book down and check the Internets. I eventually land on YouTube and decide to do something I’ve been putting off for the last couple of weeks: Watching “Little Nemo, Adventures in Slumberland.”

The movie is based on a comic strip character by Winsor McCay. Nemo is a boy invited by the Dream King, Morpheus, to come to Slumberland and be his daughter’s official playmate. Nemo has wild adventures in Slumberland but his adventures almost always turn into misadventures that put him in almost lethal situations. It’s a good thing he wakes up just when things get dicey.

A good flying dream that takes a turn for the dangerously weird.

The movie, as movie adaptations really do, changes some parts of the original comic strip and introduces Nightmareland, the evil counterpart to Slumberland, duh. Nightmareland is ruled by the Nightmare King, and as with all villains, he wants to rule the world. It’s up to Nemo, wielding a scepter that’s as big as he is, to stop the Nightmare King and bring peace back to the world of dreams.

Apparently, I missed a lot of my childhood by not having the memory of watching this movie.  Almost everyone in the comments section raved about seeing this movie again, I felt left out for watching it for the first time (and I know, reading the comments section in YouTube is bad for your mental health). I think I kind of remember some parts, but that may be just me deluding myself.

The movie was still nice though. I could see why it scared a lot of kids. Some parts scared me too, and I’m freakin’ 20 years old.  The way Nemo’s dreams turn into nightmares is done seamlessly and is sure to mess up a 5-year-old’s head. Maybe it’s because Ray Bradbury had a hand in the screen concept. The guy always had a thing for turning kid stuff into something horrifying and scary. Or maybe because it was a collaborative effort with Japan. Anime has always been weird and freaky.

Anyway, this movie almost had a chance of being a Studio Ghibli movie, but Hayao Miyazaki had some complaints about the story and left the project when he couldn’t get his way. They still made one hell of a pitch.

No use crying over what might have been. The one I saw on YouTube is the disney-fied version. It also has some never-before-seen clips for those who have watched it on VHS back in the 90’s.  And here is part 1 of 16. Big thanks to the guy who bothered with uploading this movie two years ago.

I still wish I watched this movie back when I was still four or five.