There's also Xehanort in the realm of video games.
So I guess the good villains are being relegated to TV and games.
Wait, he seriously didn't see the pink bear or king candy as villains?
He didn't see them as memorable.
No I mean for twists. He keeps including them for the twists.
Well the bear is definitely a twist. They are all happy and welcoming to Buzz and his friends at first and it's only because Buzz overhears their plan do they find out he's a villain.
Well the bear is definitely a twist. They are all happy and welcoming to Buzz and his friends at first and it's only because Buzz overhears their plan do they find out he's a villain.
No I mean for twists. He keeps including them for the twists.
King Candy being a villain isn't the twist. King Candy being Turbo is the twist.
surprised he didn't point out Bolt as one of the few Disney movies with no villains
still doesn't change the character itself being the main villain though, when he mentioned twists they were mostly about "the villain you didn't expect"
I will fight tooth and nail for Bolt being recognized as a good film!
as for Lotso it's more of a comparison with Stinky Pete. You already know what Lotso is up to early one vs Stinky Pete's third act twist.
As for KC, then that more doesn't fit with NC showing him with villains who don't do villain things until the twist.
King Candy was revealed not to long into the movie when he puts the Konami Code in to go mess with the code more, so even the people who somehow didn't know he'd be the villain were aware of his villainy. But no one expected him to turn out to be Turbo. Turbo's the villain you didn't expect, not King Candy. You can do that good to evil transition and still have a good villain but you need to give some indication that would make that transition seem less jarring.
I just rewatched Wreck-It Ralph (it was on TV), and I would say that King Candy wasn't revealed to be the villain in that scene in the code room.
In the early part of the movie, society/the world is the villain. The citizens in Fix-It Felix's game treat Ralph like a pariah (Felix is shown to be sympathetic, but torn). The citizens in Sugar Rush treat Vanellope like a pariah (and the other racers gave it to her much harder than King Candy did). When Ralph invades Hero's Duty and makes a mess of things, Calhoun won't put up with it. When Ralph invades Sugar Rush and makes a mess of things, King Candy won't put up with it. At this point, King Candy is literally no different from Calhoun, one of the heroes of the movie. King Candy uses the stick, not the carrot, to try and get rid of Ralph. He tells Ralph to get lost and go back to his own game because his medal doesn't exist anymore, it has been transformed into code. That's not villainy, that's par for the course.
After the stick fails to solve the Ralph problem, King Candy puts in the effort to try and extract Ralph's medal from the code. We're shown Vanellope's icon glitching off to the side, but we're not given any context as to what that means.
When King Candy goes to give the recovered medal back to Ralph and implores him to stop Vanellope for her own good, he's not revealed to be a villain. He lays out the previously-established facts that glitching can cause a game to get shut down, and that glitches can't leave the game, which means that she specifically will be the only one unable to evacuate, and she'll die. King Candy is a helpless old man getting physically dominated by Ralph, while he asks Ralph to listen to reason, and says things which are actually true. When Ralph smashed Vanellope's kart ("for her own good"), there was no undercurrent of Ralph getting played by lies from a villain, it's just that the world really sucks sometimes.
And when Ralph returned to his own game, the people of his game were still being massive dicks to him ("You left the game because of me, and then Felix left the game because of you, and now Felix is missing so we're all doomed, and it's all your fault. But here, I'm a big man so I'll give you exactly what I promised. I hope you choke on it.")
And then Ralph sees Vanellope's picture on the side of the Sugar Rush cabinet (Whaaaa?). He walks into Sugar Rush and confronts the butler, who reveals King Candy as the villain, with a flashback of him as a snarling villain in the code room, madly ripping wires out of Vanellope's glitching code block. This is the point (between Vanellope's picture being discovered and the butler's flashback) where the script abruptly flips from society as the villain to King Candy as the villain.
The scene in the code room was just laying groundwork for the butler's flashback. It gives context to the events in the twist, it doesn't provide an early reveal, or significantly telegraph the twist. It's like the "Turbo" references earlier in the movie. They established that Turbo went crazy and died because he couldn't accept the way things worked, and that Ralph risks meeting the same fate if he doesn't fall in line. The references don't imply that Turbo is coming back, but after he does, they provide some ineffective backstory (ineffective because people had no reason to be paying attention, just like they had no real reason to question King Candy in the code room).
I think it reveals as a villain because he messed with the code AND we see Vanellope's "code" thing which had its wires removed. So it's easy to put two and two together.
I took him having a secret code room as suspicious because if the status quo thing is to be believed, he shouldn't have access to his own game's code. That already cast some doubt on him as just another part of the game because he's been shown using what are essentially hacks. And I don't really consider the people who were dicks to Ralph as villains, just mean people who learn their lesson by the end. King Candy is the only one attempting to actively stop one of the protagonists of his own agency. The other antagonists would be the bugs, but they don't have any overarching evil play or scheme. They're just doing what they're programmed to do in an environment that they were never supposed to be in.
King Candy having access to the game's code isn't suspicious by itself, because he's the King of this world. He can open doors that others can't. Retrieving Ralph's medal is an exercise of power that King Candy doesn't feel inclined to give. The Konami code by itself isn't a hacking tool, it's a secret power built into a game by a game's creators (and the King barely uses and doesn't remember it, as he had to have it written down on a cocktail napkin so he wouldn't forget). We see Vanellope's broken code in that room, but we already know that Vanellope's code is broken, this is just another visual representation of it. There's no upfront indication that this was the means of how her code was broken in the first place, that it was a malicious attack from the abnormally-villainous King. We're even shown another example of broken code in the unfinished level where Vanellope resides. Games aren't always built with perfect code, as any gamer could attest. Glitches happen. Vanellope's damamged code block could just as easily be a hint as to how Vanellope's damaged code could be repaired, if the people of her world gave a damn about her.
King Candy is the villain as much as Felix or the villagers are, in that he could be less of an asshole. The villagers could respect that Ralph is a necessary opponent for Felix, and not shun him outside of work for being on the wrong side. Felix has a trophy case full of medals, and he could easily have awarded one of them to Ralph over some beers as recognition for a great game of darts. In the first part of the movie, all of the smaller assholes in the movie's world combine to make one large villain, which is society.
When King Candy laid down the hard truth of Vanellope's racing ban on Ralph, by all indications he was being genuine, and no more of a villain than Felix. He was acting in line with the real villain at the time, which was life. I think that if you latched onto the Konami Code and a glimpse of Vanellope's sparking code block as an indication that life isn't supposed to suck this badly, that it's all a ploy by King Candy, then you were reaching for something that wasn't being made obvious in the movie.
You suggested that the racers had no agency in being assholes because their memories were extracted and locked up by King Candy, but that only became apparent during the twist villain reveal. And it doesn't explain why the people in Ralph's game were assholes (and the apparent resolution of that thread really doesn't work for me, since nothing with the villagers was resolved between the time when that last villager gave Ralph the keys and basically told him to go fuck himself, and when Ralph and Felix came back home as buddies for their happy ending). Or why villains in general need to go to support meetings. Or why Q-Bert is homeless. King Candy was actively trying to stop Ralph and Vanellope, but there's no question that Calhoun would be attempting to stop Ralph from going off-script and trying to win a medal if that was still going on, so the only difference between King Candy and Calhoun at this point is timing. The real villain in the movie is very clearly life, until the writers pulled a twist and tried to pin it all on King Candy. The writers backfilled supporting scenes for both twists (King Candy as the villain, and Turbo as King Candy), but I just rewatched the movie, and I really don't think those scenes worked as advance warning for the two twists, and the two twists were both intended as twists, to create surprise value.
And the own agency thing was in reference to the bugs. They don't care about Ralph or anything outside of their programming.
I rewatched Balto when it poped up on Netlifx. Still holds up as a fun animated film I think.
I then watched the two sequels since they were also on netflix.
Not a good idea at all.
I used to love the talking animal movies but damn, I cannot remember this one at all.
The prevalence of humans makes everything that much weirder when the dogs are all speaking and emoting like people, and apparently geese are people but bears are not, or something.
movie is bearcist
The Polar bears can talk.
it's the black bears that are savage, mindless animals.
oh...
The Polar bears can talk.
it's the black bears that are savage, mindless animals.
oh...
The Polar bears can talk.
it's the black bears that are savage, mindless animals.
oh...
I once liked Balto because it was a "oh hey it's a movie where wolves are shown positively!" but as time went on it is really mediocre and really more of a furry magnet for some, and honestly I found better ways of "wolves being cool and awesome".
I actually liked both Balto sequels more than the original, figure that one out hah.
im sorry but furry magnet? why is this movie any different from the other hundred talking animal movies?
Surprised Doug wasn't so negative on Balto.
For me, the movie has mostly decent animation and is an easy sit for kids. It does its job even if its inaccurate as fuck.