The Tudyk Trilogy: Wreck-It Ralph (part 5)
Aug. 8th, 2015 11:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
spiderbraidsBack with Felix and Calhoun, who are now flying above Sugar Rush in the newly repaired pod. Calhoun notices that Felix's face is still red and suggests that he should hit it with his hammer. Felix: "Oh, that's not blunt force trauma, ma'am. That's just the honey glow in my cheeks." Calhoun: "Okay..." Felix says what I'm sure many of us were thinking from the first moment Calhoun was on screen: "Ma'am, I just gotta tell you...You're one dynamite gal."
So what's the problem with that? Well, remember that hilariously tragic backstory mentioned earlier? Turns out the guy who got eaten at the wedding also liked to call Calhoun a dynamite gal, and in a rather amusing touch, he's shown wearing one of those big bulky soldier armor outfits throughout his entire courtship :-D (though "only" a tux at the wedding). Anyways, this triggers a major negative PTSD reaction from her, causing her to briefly dive suddenly, before making Felix get off the pod near the castle. And by near, he's still on a pretty long driveway to the castle. On top of that, when he finally reaches the castle and asks Sour Bill about Ralph, the green candy decides to do to Felix what he thinks should have been done to Ralph: Lock him up :-0
Wreck-It Ralph or Lost? :-)
(Disney Screencaps)
Walt Disney once said that "For each laugh, there should be a tear." Well, better get some tissues, you're going to need them...
Back at Diet Cola Mountain, Ralph and Vanny emerge with the kart, and Vanny's very excited about racing, even inventing a new word to describe what she feels: a "vurp" ("Vomit and a burp together, and you can taste it, and it's just like rising up...") But she has one concern: "What if the gamers don't like me?" Ralph: "Who doesn't love a brat with dirty hair?" :-D Ralph reassures Vanny that everyone's going to love her, "Because you're a winner. And you're adorable. And everyone loves an adorable winner!" Ralph gives Vanny a protip: "if you get nervous, just keep telling yourself: 'I must win Ralph's medal or his life will be ruined.' And have fun. Got it?"
Vanny drives off, with Ralph sitting on the back, but then Vanny remembers she forgot something, and stops the kart before running back into the mountain. Ralph is bemused by all this... and guess who shows up?
Ralph is mad at the King and starts chasing him, even tossing a really big gumdrop out of the way. King puts on a pair of specs: "You wouldn't hit a guy with glasses, would you?" Ralph hits him using the specs, prompting the King to say "Well-played" :-D
Back to business now. The King shows Ralph the medal, and Ralph's bewildered how he got it back before the race, but anyways, the King asks Ralph to hear him out first. King tells Ralph "Sad as it is, Vanellope cannot be allowed to race," and Ralph asks "Why are you people so against her?" King claims that he's only trying to protect her, and as he explains the consequences, we're shown a sequence illustrating them. So basically, if Vanny gets on the roster, players can choose her, and when a player notices her glitching and twitching, that could end up getting the game put out of order. "All my subjects will be homeless. But there's one who cannot escape, because she's a glitch." The racers plus candy spectators flood out into the station as the game is being unplugged (now THAT'S a sugar rush ;-)) but back in the game, Vanny is stuck up against some invisible barrier screaming like mad for help, before being sucked into a vortex. Pretty dark, huh?
Ralph: "You don't know that'll happen. The gamers could love her." King: "And if they don't?..." He decides to appeal to Ralph's "wanting to be a hero" side by adding: "I know it's tough. But heroes have to make the tough choices, don't they?" King asks Ralph to talk some sense into her before leaving, and I can't but help but think I've seen this before...
(Disney Screencaps)
In a nice subtle cinematic touch, the lighting is slightly darkened and the picture slightly less color-saturated, as Ralph walks sullenly over to the kart, looking at the signature, then looking at his medal. He hears Vanny coming and stuffs it in his shirt, and so we're all set for the most emotional scene of this film, and quite possibly of Sarah Silverman's film career...
Okay, so Vanny has a special surprise for Ralph, and she makes him kneel down and close his eyes before giving it to him. It turns out to be a medal saying "To Stinkbrain"... Ralph: "Gee, thanks :-/" Vanny: "Turn it over..." It says "You're My Hero" on the other side, ain't that cute? :-) She made it just case they don't win, but she discounts that possibility :-)
Vanny engages in some subtle foreshadowing: "Now rise, my royal chum! I've got a date with destiny!" She notices that Ralph isn't getting up very quickly: "Ralph, come on, move your molasses!" Ralph: "I've been thinking..." Vanny: "Well, that's dangerous :-D"
So yeah, Ralph tells her she shouldn't race, and Vanny glitch-flickers at Ralph's sudden change of heart, but she quickly discovers why and takes the medal from Ralph: "Where did you get this?" Ralph comes clean about talking to King Candy and ends up getting epithets like "traitor" and "rat" hurled at him along with the medal. Vanny threatens to drive off on her own, but Ralph takes her out of the kart and tells her what the King said about glitchy racers racing, but she simply refuses to care and calls Ralph a liar, and she's literally struggling to keep herself together at this point, because she's breaking up like a TV signal in a rainstorm :-/ Ralph has had enough of that, so he hangs her from a convenient candy tree, and tells her "I'm doing this for your own good!"
...And much to Vanny's horror, Ralph Hulk-smashes her puny little candy kart. Sounds pretty bizarre on paper, a low rent Donkey Kong smashing up a go-kart made of candy to bits, but Disney sure knows how to make you feel for everyone... Vanny only drops off the tree after glitching up and weakly says to Ralph: "You really are a bad guy," before running back into the mountain. Ralph is rather indifferent towards this, as he picks up his medal and leaves. And in a nice symbolic touch, we see the piece showing the kart's signature split into two.
Symbolism in action, folks...
(Disney Screencaps)
Back in the Felix cabinet, everything's quiet except for dinging at the train station, as Ralph comes home with his medal... to a completely darkened Niceland. Ralph makes his way up to the penthouse, where Gene is making himself a martini. Gene sees Ralph with the medal and he's like, "Took you long enough... too long in fact," as he mentions that everyone has left the building and Felix went out to look for Ralph, and mentions the Out of Order sign, before more or less sarcastically giving Ralph the penthouse key, leading to this exchange:
Ralph: "Listen, this is not what I wanted." Gene: "So what did you want Ralph?" Ralph: "I don’t know, I just...I was just tired of living alone in the garbage." Gene: "Well now you can live alone... in the penthouse."
Gene leaves with his luggage, leaving Ralph alone with his thoughts. Pretty emotional stuff, and the writers wisely choose not to sully it up with any pesky and superfluous dialog... They just show Ralph sadly walking out to the balcony and looking at the Out of Order sign, then after taking one glance at his medal, hurling it towards the sign, knocking one of its corners loose, and revealing the Sugar Rush cabinets in the distance. Ralph wistfully looks at the medal Vanny gave him, before taking a closer look at the cabinet... and spotting a familiar looking ponytailed girl on the side panel. And Ralph realizes that something is rotten in the land of Sugar Rush, and someone's got to take out the trash.
And yes, this is that very scene with which Kanye West compared himself to Vanny once...
Insert "I'ma let you finish" joke here ;-)
(YouTube)
Okay, speaking of taking out the trash, we cut back to Sour Bill sweeping up the pieces of Vanny's kart into a bin, when he hears Ralph ask him about the picture of Vanny on the side panel. The green candy, having no convenient answer, runs off, but Ralph quickly picks him off the ground and decides to use the Jack Bauer method to get some answers on what's going on in this candy-coated heart of darkness (his words!) He threatens to lick Sour Bill, and follows through on it. Sour Bill raises his voice above his usual monotone: "Feels like sandpaper..." He decides to stuff the candy into his mouth and suck on him for a while: "They call you Sour Bill for a reason :-)"
Okay, so Sour Bill reveals that Vanny was a racer before the King tried to delete her code, illustrated by the King tearing the connections out of the Vanellope icon and shoving it into the void. Ralph realizes this is why she's a glitch, but Sour Bill adds no one can remember anything else because the king also locked up their memories (with a chest, according to the flashback). However, he does add: "He’ll do anything to keep her from racing, because if she crosses the finish line, the game will reset and she won’t be a glitch anymore." He tells Ralph that she's in the Fungeon with Felix, and Ralph is surprised that Felix has been locked up. Sour Bill begs Ralph not to put him in his mouth again, so Ralph sticks him on the same tree he hung Vanny from earlier ("Stick around" :-D) before running off with the bin.
Calhoun is in a field of licorice looking for the Cybug. The screen on her sensor suddenly fills up with lots of bugs, puzzling Calhoun, until the ground under her gives way. She manages to grab hold of a licorice rope, as her sensor falls to the ground, revealing a really huge cache of Cybug eggs being laid by the Cybug: "Doomsday and Armageddon just had a baby and it is ugly!"
Fungeon, where Felix is discovering that trying to break his way out of jail with his hammer is not such a good idea :-D (We even get an awesomely bad impersonation of Ralph with it :-)) Ralph breaks in and at first, Felix is happy to see him, but then he then suddenly backs off and decides he doesn't want to talk to him. Huh. Ralph brings out the bin with the broken kart pieces and asks him to fix it up, but Felix insists "I don’t have to do boo...forgive my potty mouth." :-D He recounts his misadventures to Ralph, also managing to work in his courtship with Calhoun: "She gives me the honey-glow something awful :-)"
Back to the point, though: "You don’t know what it’s like to be rejected and treated like a criminal! Ralph: "Yes, I do. That’s every day of my life." After explaining that's why he left, he adds: "There’s a little girl whose only hope is this kart. Please, Felix, fix it, and I promise I will never try to be 'good' again." After a beat, he smiles and takes out his hammer. Ooh...
In another part of the Fungeon, someone's been naughty, and that someone is chained to a large glitch-proof cuff. Vanny perks up when she hears a thud against the door and Ralph crashes in with her now-repaired kart, leading to this simple, but poignant, exchange...
Ralph: "I know, I know, I know. I’m an idiot." Vanny: "And...?" Ralph: "And a real numbskull." Vanny: "And...?" Ralph: "A selfish diaper baby." Vanny: "And...?" Ralph: "...A stinkbrain?" Vanny: "The stinkiest brain ever :-)"
Coming up: Let's race to the finish! :-)
So what's the problem with that? Well, remember that hilariously tragic backstory mentioned earlier? Turns out the guy who got eaten at the wedding also liked to call Calhoun a dynamite gal, and in a rather amusing touch, he's shown wearing one of those big bulky soldier armor outfits throughout his entire courtship :-D (though "only" a tux at the wedding). Anyways, this triggers a major negative PTSD reaction from her, causing her to briefly dive suddenly, before making Felix get off the pod near the castle. And by near, he's still on a pretty long driveway to the castle. On top of that, when he finally reaches the castle and asks Sour Bill about Ralph, the green candy decides to do to Felix what he thinks should have been done to Ralph: Lock him up :-0
Wreck-It Ralph or Lost? :-)
(Disney Screencaps)
Walt Disney once said that "For each laugh, there should be a tear." Well, better get some tissues, you're going to need them...
Back at Diet Cola Mountain, Ralph and Vanny emerge with the kart, and Vanny's very excited about racing, even inventing a new word to describe what she feels: a "vurp" ("Vomit and a burp together, and you can taste it, and it's just like rising up...") But she has one concern: "What if the gamers don't like me?" Ralph: "Who doesn't love a brat with dirty hair?" :-D Ralph reassures Vanny that everyone's going to love her, "Because you're a winner. And you're adorable. And everyone loves an adorable winner!" Ralph gives Vanny a protip: "if you get nervous, just keep telling yourself: 'I must win Ralph's medal or his life will be ruined.' And have fun. Got it?"
Vanny drives off, with Ralph sitting on the back, but then Vanny remembers she forgot something, and stops the kart before running back into the mountain. Ralph is bemused by all this... and guess who shows up?
Ralph is mad at the King and starts chasing him, even tossing a really big gumdrop out of the way. King puts on a pair of specs: "You wouldn't hit a guy with glasses, would you?" Ralph hits him using the specs, prompting the King to say "Well-played" :-D
Back to business now. The King shows Ralph the medal, and Ralph's bewildered how he got it back before the race, but anyways, the King asks Ralph to hear him out first. King tells Ralph "Sad as it is, Vanellope cannot be allowed to race," and Ralph asks "Why are you people so against her?" King claims that he's only trying to protect her, and as he explains the consequences, we're shown a sequence illustrating them. So basically, if Vanny gets on the roster, players can choose her, and when a player notices her glitching and twitching, that could end up getting the game put out of order. "All my subjects will be homeless. But there's one who cannot escape, because she's a glitch." The racers plus candy spectators flood out into the station as the game is being unplugged (now THAT'S a sugar rush ;-)) but back in the game, Vanny is stuck up against some invisible barrier screaming like mad for help, before being sucked into a vortex. Pretty dark, huh?
Ralph: "You don't know that'll happen. The gamers could love her." King: "And if they don't?..." He decides to appeal to Ralph's "wanting to be a hero" side by adding: "I know it's tough. But heroes have to make the tough choices, don't they?" King asks Ralph to talk some sense into her before leaving, and I can't but help but think I've seen this before...
(Disney Screencaps)
In a nice subtle cinematic touch, the lighting is slightly darkened and the picture slightly less color-saturated, as Ralph walks sullenly over to the kart, looking at the signature, then looking at his medal. He hears Vanny coming and stuffs it in his shirt, and so we're all set for the most emotional scene of this film, and quite possibly of Sarah Silverman's film career...
Okay, so Vanny has a special surprise for Ralph, and she makes him kneel down and close his eyes before giving it to him. It turns out to be a medal saying "To Stinkbrain"... Ralph: "Gee, thanks :-/" Vanny: "Turn it over..." It says "You're My Hero" on the other side, ain't that cute? :-) She made it just case they don't win, but she discounts that possibility :-)
Vanny engages in some subtle foreshadowing: "Now rise, my royal chum! I've got a date with destiny!" She notices that Ralph isn't getting up very quickly: "Ralph, come on, move your molasses!" Ralph: "I've been thinking..." Vanny: "Well, that's dangerous :-D"
So yeah, Ralph tells her she shouldn't race, and Vanny glitch-flickers at Ralph's sudden change of heart, but she quickly discovers why and takes the medal from Ralph: "Where did you get this?" Ralph comes clean about talking to King Candy and ends up getting epithets like "traitor" and "rat" hurled at him along with the medal. Vanny threatens to drive off on her own, but Ralph takes her out of the kart and tells her what the King said about glitchy racers racing, but she simply refuses to care and calls Ralph a liar, and she's literally struggling to keep herself together at this point, because she's breaking up like a TV signal in a rainstorm :-/ Ralph has had enough of that, so he hangs her from a convenient candy tree, and tells her "I'm doing this for your own good!"
...And much to Vanny's horror, Ralph Hulk-smashes her puny little candy kart. Sounds pretty bizarre on paper, a low rent Donkey Kong smashing up a go-kart made of candy to bits, but Disney sure knows how to make you feel for everyone... Vanny only drops off the tree after glitching up and weakly says to Ralph: "You really are a bad guy," before running back into the mountain. Ralph is rather indifferent towards this, as he picks up his medal and leaves. And in a nice symbolic touch, we see the piece showing the kart's signature split into two.
Symbolism in action, folks...
(Disney Screencaps)
Back in the Felix cabinet, everything's quiet except for dinging at the train station, as Ralph comes home with his medal... to a completely darkened Niceland. Ralph makes his way up to the penthouse, where Gene is making himself a martini. Gene sees Ralph with the medal and he's like, "Took you long enough... too long in fact," as he mentions that everyone has left the building and Felix went out to look for Ralph, and mentions the Out of Order sign, before more or less sarcastically giving Ralph the penthouse key, leading to this exchange:
Ralph: "Listen, this is not what I wanted." Gene: "So what did you want Ralph?" Ralph: "I don’t know, I just...I was just tired of living alone in the garbage." Gene: "Well now you can live alone... in the penthouse."
Gene leaves with his luggage, leaving Ralph alone with his thoughts. Pretty emotional stuff, and the writers wisely choose not to sully it up with any pesky and superfluous dialog... They just show Ralph sadly walking out to the balcony and looking at the Out of Order sign, then after taking one glance at his medal, hurling it towards the sign, knocking one of its corners loose, and revealing the Sugar Rush cabinets in the distance. Ralph wistfully looks at the medal Vanny gave him, before taking a closer look at the cabinet... and spotting a familiar looking ponytailed girl on the side panel. And Ralph realizes that something is rotten in the land of Sugar Rush, and someone's got to take out the trash.
And yes, this is that very scene with which Kanye West compared himself to Vanny once...
Insert "I'ma let you finish" joke here ;-)
(YouTube)
Okay, speaking of taking out the trash, we cut back to Sour Bill sweeping up the pieces of Vanny's kart into a bin, when he hears Ralph ask him about the picture of Vanny on the side panel. The green candy, having no convenient answer, runs off, but Ralph quickly picks him off the ground and decides to use the Jack Bauer method to get some answers on what's going on in this candy-coated heart of darkness (his words!) He threatens to lick Sour Bill, and follows through on it. Sour Bill raises his voice above his usual monotone: "Feels like sandpaper..." He decides to stuff the candy into his mouth and suck on him for a while: "They call you Sour Bill for a reason :-)"
Okay, so Sour Bill reveals that Vanny was a racer before the King tried to delete her code, illustrated by the King tearing the connections out of the Vanellope icon and shoving it into the void. Ralph realizes this is why she's a glitch, but Sour Bill adds no one can remember anything else because the king also locked up their memories (with a chest, according to the flashback). However, he does add: "He’ll do anything to keep her from racing, because if she crosses the finish line, the game will reset and she won’t be a glitch anymore." He tells Ralph that she's in the Fungeon with Felix, and Ralph is surprised that Felix has been locked up. Sour Bill begs Ralph not to put him in his mouth again, so Ralph sticks him on the same tree he hung Vanny from earlier ("Stick around" :-D) before running off with the bin.
Calhoun is in a field of licorice looking for the Cybug. The screen on her sensor suddenly fills up with lots of bugs, puzzling Calhoun, until the ground under her gives way. She manages to grab hold of a licorice rope, as her sensor falls to the ground, revealing a really huge cache of Cybug eggs being laid by the Cybug: "Doomsday and Armageddon just had a baby and it is ugly!"
Fungeon, where Felix is discovering that trying to break his way out of jail with his hammer is not such a good idea :-D (We even get an awesomely bad impersonation of Ralph with it :-)) Ralph breaks in and at first, Felix is happy to see him, but then he then suddenly backs off and decides he doesn't want to talk to him. Huh. Ralph brings out the bin with the broken kart pieces and asks him to fix it up, but Felix insists "I don’t have to do boo...forgive my potty mouth." :-D He recounts his misadventures to Ralph, also managing to work in his courtship with Calhoun: "She gives me the honey-glow something awful :-)"
Back to the point, though: "You don’t know what it’s like to be rejected and treated like a criminal! Ralph: "Yes, I do. That’s every day of my life." After explaining that's why he left, he adds: "There’s a little girl whose only hope is this kart. Please, Felix, fix it, and I promise I will never try to be 'good' again." After a beat, he smiles and takes out his hammer. Ooh...
In another part of the Fungeon, someone's been naughty, and that someone is chained to a large glitch-proof cuff. Vanny perks up when she hears a thud against the door and Ralph crashes in with her now-repaired kart, leading to this simple, but poignant, exchange...
Ralph: "I know, I know, I know. I’m an idiot." Vanny: "And...?" Ralph: "And a real numbskull." Vanny: "And...?" Ralph: "A selfish diaper baby." Vanny: "And...?" Ralph: "...A stinkbrain?" Vanny: "The stinkiest brain ever :-)"
Coming up: Let's race to the finish! :-)
