Month: June 2021

If there is any game that seems more prepared to become a cartoon, it is Cuphead. The entire game is meant to feel like a classic cartoon, from the art style, music, and mood. So the announcement of a Cuphead cartoon in the works made perfect sense, and now we’re starting to get an idea of what it will actually look like.

During Netflix’s Geeked Weeked crossover with Summer Game Fest, a teaser trailer was shown of what the Cuphead cartoon is going to look like. And fittingly it was narrated by King Dice’s voice actor, the one and only Wayne Brady. So far the early signs and Brady’s portrayal of Dice sounds pretty great!

Let’s not over-analyze a single clip, but this has the exact feeling of what a Cuphead cartoon should look and sound like. It’s goofy, there’s a lot of animation happening at once, and it looks like a classic cartoon while somehow feeling modern at the same time. The art style and sound of Cuphead is so incredibly important, and so far it seems they’ve nailed that.

Brady’s portrayal of King Dice is also fantastic. He has a skeevy air to him like he’s going to pull one over on you at any moment. Which, considering King Dice’s role in the game, makes perfect sense. If the rest of the show is as well done as this clip is then the Netflix version of Cuphead is going to be a must-watch cartoon for not only fans of the game, but fans of old-style cartoons in general.

An injury suffered late in the 2020-21 NBA season could cost Pascal Siakam some time when the following year tips off. The Toronto Raptors announced on Friday afternoon that Siakam suffered a torn labrum during the team’s game against the Memphis Grizzlies on May 8, and as a result, the All-Star forward needed surgery.

In a bit of good news, the Raptors said Siakam’s injury went off without a hitch, and he is now on the road to recovery.

A timetable of five months for rehabilitation and recovery would mean that things bleed into the 2021-22 campaign. The NBA told teams on Thursday that it anticipates next season will begin on October 19, and if Siakam is out for the entirety of the five-month timetable, that would put his return sometime in mid-November.

In a statement that applied to most everyone on the Raptors due to the unfortunate circumstances under which they played last season, Siakam hardly had his best year. Having said that, he still averaged 21.4 points, 7.2 rebounds, 4.5 assists, and 1.1 steals in 35.8 minutes per game. While everyone in Toronto will hope to take last year’s struggles and put them in the past, that will particularly be true for Siakam, and should he get back to the level that he showed in past campaigns, it’s not hard to imagine last year’s playoff-less campaign being a blip on the radar.

BTS is one of South Korea’s most beloved exports. The group has topped the charts world over, broken all sorts of records, and found its way into the hearts of fans globally. North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un is not among those fans, though. According to internal documents smuggled out of North Korea by South Korea-based publication Daily NK and then made public by South Korean legislators (as reported by The New York Times), Jong-un thinks K-pop is a “vicious cancer.”

In the documents, Jong-un says the music corrupts the “attire, hairstyles, speeches, behaviors” of young North Koreans. Furthermore, state media has declared that K-pop and other South Korean cultural exports will make North Korea “crumble like a damp wall” if left unchecked.

As The New York Times notes, “South Korean entertainment is now smuggled on flash drives from China, stealing the hearts of young North Koreans who watch behind closed doors and draped windows.” To combat this, North Korea enacted a new law in December that calls for five to 15 years in labor camps for those who watch or possess South Korean entertainment. Previously, the same crimes carried a maximum punishment of five years of hard labor. Furthermore, people who “speak, write or sing in South Korean style” could face up to two years of hard labor.”

Jiro Ishimaru — chief editor of Asia Press International, a Japanese website that monitors North Korea — told The New York Times, “To Kim Jong-un, the cultural invasion from South Korea has gone beyond a tolerable level. If this is left unchecked, he fears that his people might start considering the South an alternative Korea to replace the North.”

For my money, one of the best albums of 2021 so far is Guapdad 4000’s Illmind-produced, autobiographical 1176 on which the Bay Area rapper exorcises the demons of his youth and cleverly flips an Alice Deejay sample to reflect on his life of crime on “How Many.” Today, Guapdad dropped the deluxe version of 1176, revealing the big-name guest who was initially left off the tracklist: Rick Ross, who appears on the “How Many” remix.

That’s not where the connection stops, by any means. After the deluxe version’s release, Guapdad shared the video for “How Many (Remix),” which sees the two rappers throwing a private house party with a bevy of beauties bouncing their booties and bottles of Ross’s Bel Aire champagne providing the refreshments. There’s also a fun bit where the emblem on a Rolls Royce Phantom slides out of its concealed compartment, only instead of a little angel, it’s a tiny Rick Ross.

Aside from sober reminders of Guapdad’s rough and tumble upbringing 1176 also found the rapper celebrating his Filipino roots with the tender “Chicken Adobo,” which has since become something of an anthem.

Watch Guapdad 4000 and Rick Ross’s “How Many (Remix)” video above.

1176 Deluxe Edition is out now via PARADISE RISING/88rising Records/12Tone Music. Get it here.

Guapdad 4000 is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Right now is a great time to be Michelle Zauner.

She’s fresh off the release of her latest Japanese Breakfast album, Jubilee, which Uproxx’s Steven Hyden reckons might be the best indie album of 2021. She also just dropped her memoir Crying In H Mart, which debuted at No. 2 on the New York Times bestseller list. A few days ago, it was revealed that the book is set to get a movie adaptation, for which Japanese Breakfast will provide the soundtrack.

Then, there was this week, when she was one of the musical performers at Summer Game Fest, a new but already-premiere virtual event that showed off the best of what’s on the horizon in the video game world. This is far from Zauner’s first foray into video games, of course. She supported her 2017 album Soft Sounds From Another Planet with Japanese BreakQuest, a game that she co-developed. She’s also behind the soundtrack of the anticipated new game Sable, the release date of which was just revealed at Summer Game Fest: September 23, 2021. Zauner’s soundtrack for the game, by the way, will also be made available as a standalone double-LP release.

So basically, Zauner has more hyphens than just about anybody.

Ahead of her Summer Game Fest appearance, I got on the phone with Zauner to talk about what she’s playing now, what upcoming games she’s looking forward to, and her rich history with video games, both as a consumer and creator.

Last year was obviously pretty quiet for live music, but I would imagine that gave you some more time to focus on gaming. Did you get into any of those big viral games like Animal Crossing, Fall Guys, and Among Us?

I got into Animal Crossing. I played that for a while and really enjoyed it. The funny thing is, when you got to visit each other’s islands, it was kind of the first precious kind of social interaction that you could have [laughs] and I definitely was into that. I also played A Short Hike, and Spiritfarer. Those were my favorite games during quarantine.

Nice, and which games are you playing now?

I’m playing this game called Dawn Of Man, which is a caveman civilization game where you basically grow a caveman colony from the Paleolithic era to the Mesolithic era, all the way into the Iron Age, and they learn how to make composite weapons and they develop new skills like masonry and become agricultural societies, and it’s pretty fun.

That sounds sweet, I haven’t heard of that one.

Yeah, I don’t know if it’s a popular game, but I’ve been really into it.

What’s your earliest gaming memory or the game from your childhood?

The game from my childhood is definitely Secret Of Mana. That was what got me into RPGs and video games to begin with. It’s also one of the only RPGs I know that it has a two-player option. I started playing video games when I was like five years old. I had a Super Nintendo and I remember playing that with my dad. That was the beginning of realizing that video games could be art.

How was making your own game soundtrack for Sable different than making, say, a Japanese Breakfast album?

It was so different, honestly. I mean, it’s the first project that I’ve been a cog. That sounds really reductive, but I really appreciate being a cog in the creative machine. [Gregorios Kythreotis and Daniel Fineberg, the two-person team behind Sable developer Shedworks] are very much the directors of that project, and I just was so excited to contribute to someone else’s vision that I trusted. And to their credit, they were very supportive and pretty hands-off and just let me be creative and truly liked everything that I submitted for the most part.

It’s definitely a different vibe because first of all, lyrically, there are only like three songs with lyrics on the soundtrack, but you have to approach it from a place that’s not necessarily personal to you. It has to be this kind of universal feeling and it has to feel like it lives within the game. Also, a lot of the time for me, when I was writing, the narrative wasn’t all the way put together, so you have to kind of guess what’s going to cover the general idea of what’s happening.

It’s a coming-of-age story, so also my influences were super different for it. I was thinking a lot about Alan Menken and how he crafts this universal feeling and a song that everyone can relate to. That was actually a really lovely experience for me and took me to a very different place in my songwriting because I feel like so much of what I do for Japanese Breakfast is rooted in specific detail. I was doing these broad strokes of human feeling, like, what’s it like to feel uncertain about the future? Or coming of age, or discovering what path do you want to pursue? Instead of filling it with all these kind of little details, you have to sort of do these broad strokes but also make it compelling. So that was really fun for me.

Also, because it’s an open-world game, you have to make sure that the songs are really sprawling and don’t get grating. It’s very different from writing pop music where you’re always trying to find a hook that gets stuck in your head. It’s almost the opposite of that, because if you had something like that constantly for ten minutes while you’re exploring a place, it would get really f*cking annoying, so having to do more ambient sprawling work was interesting.

Do you have a favorite game soundtrack?

I really liked the Final Fantasy IX soundtrack and… what else? I was really inspired by the Chrono Cross soundtrack because I really liked that there’s alternate versions of the same song, because you go into a different time/world. So I kind of liked looking at the variations of those songs because I made a lot of day and night versions for this soundtrack. It was really fun to see how you can manipulate a song and keep it at the same key, but slow it down and create sparser instrumentation to make it feel like it’s a nighttime vibe. And of course, [The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild] soundtrack is incredible and does that as well.

Was there anything that surprised you about the process of making your own game, Japanese BreakQuest? By the way, that title is just [chef’s kiss sound].

Thank you [laughs]. I’m pretty sure that the label came up with that title. They approached me about it because my husband made these MIDI versions of the songs [from Soft Sounds From Another Planet] just for fun, and we were going to just release them on a cassette tape as a B-side kind of thing. When I sent it to the label, they were like, “You should make a game.” And I was like, “Oh yeah, I should make a game.”

They introduced me to this woman named Elaine Fath. She did all of the design and all of the development and a lot of the writing, and I kind of just helped her come up with the concept based on some of the lyrics and concepts on the record. I helped with the character design and some of the writing and then helped place all of the songs and stuff like that. But yeah, it was really, really fun and really cute. I’d love to do that again. It was a great experience.

Having been involved with games, both making one and making music for one, how has that changed how you look at games now?

I guess I just have a newfound appreciation of what goes into them. So much of making a game is things breaking and fixing them. I think I just realized it’s a really wild craft and just how much of their lives are invested in, getting to know Daniel and Greg from Shedworks and just seeing they spent over five years of their lives on this project. After writing a book and knowing what it’s like to work on a long-term project, it’s really awe-inspiring that they’re creating a world. They’re actually creating a universe. It’s really inspiring, the kind of work ethic you need. I also learned more about sound design from Martin Kvale, who has been a really wonderful collaborator to work with. It just made me appreciate it so much more.

Is there anything different about planning a performance for an event like Summer Game Fest, where music isn’t necessarily the main focus?

Yeah. They had me perform in front of this giant wall that has the gameplay behind me. And then also there’s a section where I kind of disappear and stop singing and then it gets to go into the gameplay. I was definitely very hesitant at first to just… I don’t really identify as a singer, and I was nervous that if I didn’t have a band with me that people wouldn’t be able to know that I had produced and composed the whole soundtrack, and think that I was just the singer. So I was definitely nervous about just being alone and singing, but I think that it went well and I’m really happy with the way that it turned out.

What upcoming games are you most eager to hear more about, whether it’s at Summer Game Fest, E3, or just in general?

Lena Raine just did this game called [Chicory: A Colorful Tale] that looks really cute. I’m excited to see that. We just dropped the Sims cottagecore expansion pack, [The Sims 4 Cottage Living] just dropped the trailer that they featured “Be Sweet” in. I just watched that today and it does look very good. And yeah, what else? What are you looking forward to? I don’t know what else is coming.

Well, there’s possibly more news about Breath Of The Wild 2 that some people think might be coming.

I’m definitely very excited. I mean, Breath Of The Wild is my favorite, like everyone else. Just the pinnacle of excellence. I definitely am very excited for that as well.

Jubilee is out now via Dead Oceans. Get it here.

Resident Evil is a series that we just can’t get enough of. From video games to movies, and now a TV show, Resident Evil is a franchise that has been covered from every possible angle. However, while the Resident Evil movies are certainly fun, they fail in one aspect: They never properly captured the personality of the characters they were supposed to be portraying.

With Netflix’s Resident Evil series, that may be changing soon. Lance Reddick, known for excelling in every role he’s ever been in, is going to be playing the role of Albert Wesker. To avoid potential spoilers for anyone that has somehow not interact with Resident Evil before, let’s just say that’s an incredibly important casting choice and Reddick is perfect for it.

There is a lot that’s really great about this choice. For starters, Reddick is perfect at delivering his lines in a way that is necessary for someone like Wesker. Depending on how they choose to portray Wesker, he’ll need to be someone that’s confident, cool under pressure, and at times a little unhinged. There’s no reason to believe that Reddick can’t pull that off.

Resident Evil first came out back in the ’90s as a horror/action game. It was Capcom’s attempt to make a Hollywood blockbuster-style video game. Let’s just say they managed to perfectly nail their assignment because Resident Evil is still seeing new releases to this day.

What would a Scooby-Doo spinoff look like without Scooby-Doo? Just ask Mindy Kaling, whose upcoming adult animated series Velma will give Velma Dinkley, Mystery Incorporated’s most underrated crime-solver, the attention she has long deserved. But Kaling’s Velma won’t be your mom’s Velma.

According to The Mary Sue, Warner Bros. Global Kids, Young Adults and Classics president Tom Ascheim shared some details about the upcoming HBO Max series at The TV Kids Summer Festival:

“We have a not for children, Mindy Kaling project called Velma because she was excited to reimagine what Scooby-Doo would be like if Velma were of East Asian descent and lived in a different world. And in that version, which is going on HBO Max first, there’s no dog and no van but we have our 4 key characters through a different lens and I think it’s great. Allowing our creators to play with our IP is super powerful.”

A Scooby-Doo spinoff with no Scoob? And no Mystery Machine? While that may have come as a surprise to some fans of the original series, it was the part about Velma being East Asian that really got people talking—not all of it good (which is both sad and unsurprising).

Some people had to be reminded that Velma was a cartoon, not a real person.

And that Scooby once drove a car…

Also: That Velma has been Asian before.

And, once again, that she’s not real.

The best news: The “no dog” thing means we won’t be subjected to Scrappy Doo.

A date has not yet been set for Velma’s release.

(Via The Mary Sue)

Click to download here.

(This is a teaser. For the full episode, become a Patron at Patreon.com/Frotcast).

Have you ever wanted to watch Mark Wahlberg play a reincarnated Japanese blacksmith who stabs a cargo plane in the wing with a samurai sword? Well then you should definitely watch Infinite on Paramount+. Have you ever wanted to listen to two guys discuss Mark Wahlberg’s Infinite on a podcast? Well then you should definitely subscribe to the Frotcast to listen to the latest episode.

That’s right, this week in bonus content, Matt and I are discussing Infinite, a movie Matt describes as “dumb guy Matrix,” which I tend to think is more Highlander meets Total Recall and Bourne remixed with Cloud Atlas. What’s undeniable, however, is that reincarnated Japanese blacksmith Mark Wahlberg forges himself a sword that he uses to stab a plane.

Our wide-ranging discussion on said topic includes, but is not limited to:

-Why Mark Wahlberg seems to be doing an impression of himself in the “say hi to your mother for me” sketch in this movie
-Why reincarnated warriors always seem to ride motorcycles
-Whether you can forge samurai swords inside a New York apartment
-What it says about our healthcare system that people are reduced to trading samurai swords that they forged inside their apartments for their psych medication.

Anyway, fun movie, fun show. This is the kind of #content you can expect from becoming a Frotcast Patron. If you like free stuff, well hey there’s lots of that, notably on our entirely-free Sopranos podcast, Pod Yourself A Gun.

Despite spending this week flying from the set of Star Trek in Toronto to the Tribeca Film Festival, Tig Notaro simply had to hop back on a plane and get to Los Angeles to say goodbye to Conan on Thursday night before the show ends its run. While joking that she chose host Conan O’Brien over her own children, Notaro couldn’t thank the late night host and his team for making her big break happen.

As Notaro tells it, she was struggling for years after getting either a “one shot” or “no shot” on late night shows. “I’d get feedback that my delivery was too slow– not enough jokes per minute, I heard. Too low-key, not mainstream enough.” But all of that changed after she made her first appearance on Conan in 2011 and was asked to return, which she said never happened. Via The Wrap:

“I remember leaving the studio and I got a call from my manager saying that your show had called to have me booked again immediately and that you wanted me to be a regular on the show,” she continued. “I couldn’t even comprehend that because of all the rejection I had gotten.”

“I feel like your show gave me this incredible opportunity to be myself, to try out weird things, and also, I’m certain, went hand-in-hand with me being welcome on to so many other talk shows,” the grateful comic concluded.

Of course, now, the shoe is on the other foot. Conan is lucky to have Notaro as a guest. The comedian/actor recently became a huge viral sensation thanks to her “badass” role in Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead. But much like her success with Conan, Notaro couldn’t comprehend what was happening with her new viral fame either.

“My friends were texting me images of Twitter, like ‘You’re trending for being badass and sexy AF.’” Notaro told Jimmy Fallon back in April. “And I was like, ‘What is that?’”

(Via Team Coco)

Russ takes a hard right turn on his latest loose single, “Lucky,” moving away from the moody sounds of his prior efforts this year like “Bankrupt,” “Private,” and “Status,” and even departing from more braggadocious fare like “Ugly” and “Small Talk.” Instead, he picks an uptempo, dancey instrumental with a four-on-the-floor beat to sing the praises of his latest paramour. He opens the track crooning about just how lucky he is, before switching to a quick-step rap cadence suggesting all the thrills he has planned for his romantic partner.

Commenting on the track’s YouTube stream, Russ thanked fans for supporting him, even on left-field departures like “Lucky.” “Thank you to all of you forreal!” he wrote. “I just like making whatever I’m feeling at the moment..it’s therapeutic for me so for y’all to get somethin from the music too means a lot.”

The New Jersey rapper-singer’s near-constant stream of new music is one of the reasons he called his career “pandemic-proof” last year as he continued to advocate for artist ownership. Of course, it probably helps that in addition to his music, he’s got multiple other streams of revenue, including his recently launched strain of cannabis, which he called the “best studio weed.”

Listen to “Lucky” above.