The Extinction of Ice Age - Chapter Four: #StillRelevent

This is the post where I end up really flipping my shit. There's just something about the way that the later films try and copy what some people call the DreamWorks formula that ticks me off. This so-called formula involves celebrity voice actors, pop-culture references and crude jokes, as exemplified by DreamWorks movies such as Shrek and Shark Tale.

Ice Age was released a year after Shrek, a film that had a major effect on the world of animation. It introduced a more snarky sense of humour to animated films, along with jokes based on pop-culture, toilet humour and anything that would fly over the heads of kiddies. It also relied on casting people for their fame and star power rather than simply because they were good for the role they were in, though previous films of DreamWorks and some 90s Disney films had started to do that too.

Since Ice Age came out shortly afterwards, it obviously had a few DreamWorks elements to it. However, as I said before, it primarily comes off as a Don Bluth movie in CGI, or even a Pixar movie, just with a bit of a DreamWorks vibe. Unfortunately, by the time the sequels rolled around, the Don Bluth and Pixar elements were gone and instead they solely tried to copy DreamWorks. Not helping was that even DreamWorks ended up having problems when Shark Tale and Shrek the Third failed, causing them to go in a different direction afterwards and making the Ice Age films come off as incredibly dated in response.

This article will explore three things that the Ice Age sequels tried to copy from DreamWorks - the use of celebrity voice actors, the use of pop-culture references and the use of "mature" or toilet humour. The latter two will be explored in the same section since they overlap in some ways.

Questionable Casting Choices

Again, another issue that is more to do with the marketing and had its roots in the first film. The first Ice Age has a great voice cast consisting mostly of comedy actors in the lead roles. Same with the next two films. Though I highly agree with the statements of Billy West and Tara Strong that professional voice actors get the short end of the stick when it comes to animated films nowadays, keep in mind that film actors specialised in live-action used to get roles in animated films. Take George Sanders for instance. He was a live-action actor who got the role of Shere Khan in The Jungle Book and he absolutely nails it. Additionally, many comedy actors are good at doing impressions, thus making them perfect for roles where a particular voice is required (unlike what Chris Rock claims, voice acting does require a lot of effort and there are normally talented actors like Sandra Bullock whose talents don't translate well to voice casting – I'm thinking about Scarlet Overkill from Minions here).

However, the fourth film is when things get ridiculous. Oh sure, they end up with more talented comedy actors like Wanda Sykes and Nick Frost and even managed to get Peter Dinklage to voice Captain Gutt. Okay, maybe Keke Palmer and Jennifer Lopez have done some acting before (and even then J-Lo's acting record is extremely spotty, considering she has the occasional good film like Selena or Hustlers but the rest of her films aren't so hot). But then some "bright spark" decided "Oh hey, let's cast rappers Nicki Minaj and Drake in this film! And then market the shit out of them!".

Shame on you for that scandalous outfit! I mean seriously, what's the money bag supposed to be hiding?!

I don't care if Drake was in Degrassi beforehand. I don't care if Nicki Minaj is trying to get an acting career going. THEY ONLY APPEAR FOR A FEW SCENES. Maybe Drake's Ethan character has some kind of role in being a potential love interest for Peaches, but Nicki Minaj's main role is of some bitchy valley girl mammoth who could easily be removed from the film without making any difference to it whatsoever. And yet because of them being famous celebrities, marketing clearly thought it was worth marketing them over Peter Dinklage (whose character is the main villain for Pete's sake!), Wanda Sykes (who gets a lot of enjoyable scenes as Sid's filthy and cantankerous grandmother – a major supporting character and a brilliant one too), Keke Palmer (who voices Peaches and gets a major character arc in the film), Josh Gad (who voices Louis, a good friend of Peaches and a better partner than Ethan) and just about everyone who voiced members of Captain Gutt's crew (Aziz Anzari as Squint, Nick Frost as Flynn, Rebel Wilson as Raz, Alain Chabat as Silas and Kunal Nayyar as Gupta).

This is not the first time in the franchise that a major star has been credited over another actor with a more important role. That would be in the first film, in which Jack Black was credited above Goran Visnjic in marketing despite the latter voicing the main villain Soto and the former voicing one of his henchmen Zeke. But two things make this less irritating. First of all, they still credited Goran Visnjic as one of the lead voice actors. Secondly, Zeke still has a somewhat important role as he could be seen as an evil counterpart to Sid, similar to how Soto is an evil counterpart to Manny. As a result, it's easy to overlook the billing displacement as a result. The fourth film doesn't have these saving graces. Ethan and Steffie are just minor characters who only got marketed because of who voiced them.

The second film is also the first time in which they hire someone who is mostly known for singing, and that would be with regard to Queen Latifah voicing Ellie. That said, she already made herself well-known for acting earlier on in films like Chicago, and Ellie is an important character in the plotline. She essentially serves as Manny's future partner for the next few installments. Contrast that with Ethan and Steffie, who probably don't need major stars voicing them due to how little screen-time they have.

The fifth film continues the issue of voice casting. First of all, they hire pop star Jessie J to voice Brooke despite the fact that said singer has a “tough girl” image, something that Brooke herself does not project. And then (and this is the really stupid part) they hire Neil DeGrase Tyson to voice…wait for it…Neil DeBuck Weasel.

He even has the same facial structure and moustache that the real deal does.

Well that's certainly some originality, isn't it?! You get the scientist guy with barely any acting experience to voice what is essentially just himself as a weasel and…I'm not even going to try and add further comments. It's just bloody stupid.

Hey, no offense against Ron Jeremy. He does what he does best. ¬_¬

Oh, and he narrates the majority of the film too. He's also a figment of Buck's imagination, and Buck himself even takes Crash and Eddie into his own mindscape to meet him.

Given that there is a feature on the fifth film's DVD involving Neil DeGrase Tyson, maybe they thought that they could show off about being scientifically accurate and impress the science community in the process. It…has not worked to say the least. Especially since he's a physicist more than a biologist and I already mentioned the poorly-handled volcano scene earlier on. Yeah, he was the one who mentioned the stuff about the "magnetic crystals" that I brought up in Chapter 1.

If you ask me, they should have just stuck with the comedy actors and professional voice actors. And sure, the original main cast weren't necessarily known for being that kid-friendly in the first place, but John Leguizamo and Denis Leary had their moments. And they have their families as well, which would obviously make them want to work on something their kids could watch. I don't know, are Nicki Minaj and Drake family people as well? I know Nicki was dating that registered sex offender, I can tell you that.

Memes & Crap In The Prehistoric Era

Essentially starting with Disney's Aladdin in 1992 but really kicking off with DreamWork's Shrek in 2001, plenty of animated films have felt the need to make pop-culture references to "appeal" to their audiences. Ice Age was no exception to this "rule". Additionally, Shrek popularised the usage of "adult" and toilet humour in CGI, so other films copied that too. Again, Ice Age was no exception.

The first film isn't too heavy on the references. Sure, it has the aforementioned Star Trek reference with the Vulcan salute, as well as the usage of Rusted Root's "Send Me on My Way" (a song previously used in Matilda and Party of Five) for a travel montage and the dodos singing a cadence call (a type of military song that gets used a lot in the media), but they're in tolerable doses and don't overwhelm the plot as a result. And yes, they used Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby" and Smash Mouth's "Why Can't We Be Friends?" for the trailers, but not in the films themselves. As a result, whilst having some elements of a DreamWorks movie, it ends up being its own thing.

As for the filthy humour, it can come across as immature at times (as well as out of place compared to the tragic deaths we witness), but it seems that the creators were aware of it. First there's the scene in which Sid steps in poop and rubs it on the salad of some grumpy brontotheres, thus resulting in them chasing him down and Manny having to step in. Then there's the scene where Sid pretends to lose control of the baby's nappy and throws it onto Manny's face - whilst it turns out to be empty, it's still treated as ill-advised and Manny and Diego rightfully slap him for his troubles. There's also a hilarious moment in which Diego snidely comments to Sid and Manny that they're looking after the baby because, "they can't have one of their own, so they want to adopt". Gets me every time.

However, the rest of the films try and copy the DreamWorks formula completely, making the films even less historically accurate in the process. The second film for instance has a scene where vultures sing "Food, Glorious Food" from Oliver! when taunting the protagonists about eating them, and then there's the infamous scene of Crash singing a butchered version of R. Kelly's "I Believe I Can Fly" as he gets launched through the air and just before hitting a tree - a scene that got overused in many trailers promoting the movie. Though at least with the vultures scene, the heroes are just as confused as we are.

The third film isn't any better. Playing the Was (Not Was) song "Walk The Dinosaur" wasn't too bad (even though the song is actually an allegory for nuclear war), the two real life songs they use when Scrat falls in love are pretty good and having Momma T-Rex knock Rudy off the cliff as a piss-take to the infamous T-Rex vs. Spinosaur match in the goddawful Jurassic Park III was refreshing to watch, but the other memes just fall flat. Most notably, it has Crash and Eddie singing "Christmas (Don't Be Late)" by Alvin And The Chipmunks in helium voices for a quick gag, despite the fact that Christmas shouldn't technically exist at this time and neither should the chipmunks - not that it stopped them from making an Ice Age Christmas special featuring Santa Claus.

As for the "adult" humour, it piles on a lot more than with previous films and varies in quality. Anything that comes out of Buck's mouth for instance is just comedy gold, the scene with Manny and Diego trapped inside the plant is just priceless and Sid's apparent misunderstanding of genitals in two different scenes gets a chuckle out of me too. But the scene where Manny and Ellie have a talk and he awkwardly says that "round is foxy" just falls flat. I didn't even get what was supposed to be filthy about it the first time, and even now I still don't get it - and I'm an adult myself.

The fourth film, similar with the last few, tries to use modern pop songs and pop-culture references to varying effect. For instance, Manny sings "The Candy Man" from Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory during the piranha scene, yet another song that didn't exist at the time the film is set. A song by boy band The Wanted is used as the theme tune (though the music video happens to be about vampire girls instead) and a Keke Palmer song is used for the first part of the closing credits. As for the crude humour, Sid using the phrase "holy crab" when the giant crab attacked was just too on the nose, even though the word "crap" is technically acceptable in PG-rated works.

The fifth film is the worst with handling pop-culture topics by far. I mean seriously?! Hashtags and profile pictures in prehistoric times?! And then the Fall Out Boy song "My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark", and then a new song called "My Superstar" just so they can have Jessie J sing (in a particularly selfish move too, since she interrupts Peaches and Julian's wedding with it)?! At this point, they might have just called this installment Ice Age 5: #PieceOfShit.

All whilst this happens, the heart simply decreases until the films just become immature. They try and have an important message about family in each film, with the third film focusing on Ellie's pregnancy, the fourth film focusing on Peaches wanting to be more independent and the fifth film focusing on Peaches' upcoming marriage and Manny's conflicted feelings on the matter, but they now feel tacked on just to add a "heartfelt" story to what is essentially a montage of pop-culture references, crude jokes and Scrat failing to keep his acorn. In fact, I've seen plenty of negative reviews of the fifth movie that claim that they should have skipped the marriage subplot and just focused on the apocalyptic stakes. Compare with the first movie, in which the plight between animals and humans and the concept of mismatched strangers becoming like a family to one another take centre stage, whilst the "wacky" stuff is simply added for garnish.

The Extinction of Ice Age - Chapter Three: One Broken Family

One of the major features of the series is the "herd", the group that our protagonists are part of. The creators are determined to show off the message of family throughout the movies, with each movie focusing on an aspect - the first film involves the forming of the herd, the second film involves Manny finding a mate, the third film involves him and Ellie expecting their baby, the fourth film involves said child Peaches becoming an independent teenager and the fifth film involves her...getting married for some reason.

Dreadful last note aside, all of these are interesting aspects of family to explore and it would seem that the franchise does a good job of exploring it as a whole. Until we then get to these aspects...

Our Family...And Some Random Nerd

For a series that prides itself on "true family", they sure seem to put Sid through a lot of shit. He gets smacked around whenever he does or says something that annoys them and they get a laugh out of him getting injured in some way. It doesn't help that his original family kicked him out along with his grandma due to finding him to be "too annoying", and his new one is prone to having the same views as them on him at times.

Which is kind of ridiculous if you ask me. Sid was pretty much the reason they got together in the first place. He was insistent on looking after the baby. Plus, he encouraged Manny to put his past grief behind him and pursue the relationship he wanted with Ellie in the first place.

This was excusable for the first film. The heroes had only just met up with each other and therefore were going to be somewhat antagonistic towards each other at times. Manny was still grieving over his dead family and had a cynical outlook on life in general, just wanting to head south by himself before Sid came along. Diego meanwhile started off as one of the bad guys before having a change of heart. Sid also did some rather ridiculous things at times - Manny had to save him earlier on do to him rubbing poop all over the brontotheres' salad and Manny and Diego dope-slapped him several times after he pretended that he was throwing a poop-filled nappy at Manny.

In the second film, they're still condescending towards him at times despite the events of the first film. Diego for instance is rather snide about Sid's camp idea, claiming that he's "now an idiot in two languages", and he and Manny basically say that he's unfit to become a camp counselor. Manny also dope slaps Sid a couple of times. Though in some cases, it can be justified in that Sid unwittingly ticks them off at times, such as the moment in which he sings insensitive songs about Manny supposedly being the last of his kind out of a sense of misguidance. In fact, Manny and Diego do show concern when Sid tries to gain respect after the camp incident by leaping off the Eviscerator and Diego saves him later on when he's unconscious. It's also clear that they did take his advice to them to heart after all - Manny when it came to pursuing Ellie and Diego when it came to getting over his fear of swimming. By the end of the film, Diego pretty much acknowledges that Sid is both the one who got the herd together in the first place AND the glue that keeps it together, much to the latter's heartwarming delight.

The third film has the herd's journey into the lost world in order to rescue Sid from the Momma T-Rex, so they definitely aren't willing to leave him in danger - even if he turned out to be kind of ungrateful about the whole thing in a bizarre case of acting out of character. In fact, there's a bit of dramatic irony in that Sid believes they won't rescue him due to his screw-ups earlier on, even though we already know that they're on their way. The fourth movie once again brings back Manny dope slapping Sid, but again, those are balanced out with moments where the Herd shows they do care for him. In fact, in a twisted sense of kindness, Diego lies to Sid about his original family dying since he doesn't want to upset when with the truth that they just abandoned him again, though Manny ultimately feels that it is necessary to warn him.

So that's the first four movies. You're probably wondering by now, what am I making a fuss about in the first place? Did I just contradict my earlier point? Well, let's move onto the shorter works now. I'll start with the Christmas special for instance, which starts with Manny proclaiming that Sid is on Santa's naughty list due to him accidentally destroying his family heiloom rock. Okay, so he's legitimately angry, especially since Sid dismissed it earlier on. Diego however is just snide about the whole thing, claiming that he's on there simply because Santa doesn't have a loser's list.

Anyway, Peaches dope slaps Sid and tells him to get a hold of himself, and that they'll travel off to see Santa in order to get him off the naughty list (as well as prove to Manny that . A series of events lead to Santa's work getting ruined when Santa's entourage try to send the visitors away, and Sid pretty much gets the blame for it. Manny says that he will ground Sid and Diego dope slaps him when everyone gets put on the now-real naughty list. Wait, so what about Peaches? She was the one who came up with the idea in the first place? Why does the narrative favour her? Sure, eventually they sort things out and they all end up on the nice list, but I'm still left confused as to why Sid was depicted as the one responsible for the mess when many other characters were involved.

It gets worst when the plots are even shorter. From 2011 to 2013, Kaboom Studios (known for adapting various works in comic book form) released a series of short graphic novels to officially tie in with the Ice Age movies. Though technically they aren't canon, it is still worth mentioning the events of the first one Iced In.

The story starts with the characters waking up, and Sid getting the brunt of Manny and Diego's sleepiness-induced irritation. Diego flicks his claws out at him and Manny knocks him through the air due to him standing on his trunk and trying too hard to wake him up. Later on, Manny shows some irritation towards Sid's bragging due to the fact that they're trying to look for food. It's nothing too bad though.

It's once they get caught in an avalanche and trapped inside a cave in the process that things start to go from bad to worst for Sid. Inside, Diego makes some comments about possibly having to eat another another that cause Sid to start panicking, and if anything, Manny seems more annoyed than sympathetic when he asks if Diego really needed to bring that up. Diego just points out that Sid's fear of the dark will soon kick in and that will distract him.

Anyway, Sid doesn't need to worry for too long. As a repeat of the first film, he manages to start a fire and thus proclaim himself as "Lord of the Flames"....and just like the first film, he sets himself on fire. This leads to a plan from Manny and Diego that sure won't go in his favour.

[Let's be real - YOU thought the same thing that I did. Urgh... O_O]

We cut away to Scrat for one page, and then cut back and...yep, Diego has completely sheered the bottom half of Sid and thrown the fur on the fire. As I said, very interesting implications when you take it out of context. And as expected, Sid is not too impressed.

[Can I just point out that it was Manny who suggested the idea of shaving him in the first place? Look at that smug shit-eating grin underneath the fur.]

As with most Ice Age media, Sid gets a moment to impress the others in which he unwittingly suggests an idea for escape. Diego still seems pretty aggressive towards him though and he finds his stench to be unbearable.

By the end, all three manage to make it out. Everyone is happy - Manny has a tender moment with his family, Diego fistbumps with Crash and Eddie...and everyone is disgusted by Sid's naked legs.

[Insert image.]

Thus, they all abandon him and he is forced to catch up by himself. Even Manny and Diego are unwilling to help him out.

[Insert image.]

Here, Sid's treatment just comes off as a little too cruel. The longer length of the movies means that the characters have more time to express that they do genuinely care for Sid. The graphic novel on the other hand is about 22 pages long, meaning that there's only time for the mistreatment aspect. The later graphic novels are MUCH lighter with their treatment of him, but apart from Where There's Thunder (where he doesn't appear at all) and The Hidden Treasure (where he only shows up at the end), most of them still put more emphasise on how others find him "annoying".

The breaking point for me was the following scene used to promote the fifth film. When the meteorites start to head towards earth, Sid mistakes them for shooting stars and starts excitedly begging for his friends to make a wish. One of them strikes him and sends him flying into a tree. Manny smugly states that his wish came true and then when Sid spontaneously combusts (he gets better), Diego replies in the same smug manner "Mine too".

Wow, you're just gonna wish death on your "friend" like that? You know, the guy who's the WHOLE GODDAMN REASON you're together in the first place?! It's not so much family now as just a recreation of how Wiz and Boomstick treat Jocelyn and DUMMI in Death Battle!...which at least is meant to make them come off as sociopaths.

Boomstick: Jocelyn appears to be stuck up that tree. Maybe we should help her.
Wiz and Boomstick: Naah...
(Caption: At least these guys have the excuse of her being their intern...)

Sure, they once again have moments in which they act nice towards him, such as getting him cleaned up after he makes a mess of himself upon Francine dumping him and Manny congratulating Sid for preparing a good wedding for his daughter, but the meteorite scene is what stands up the most for this movie.

The problem is that the creators try so hard to emphasise how "annoying" Manny and Diego find Sid at times that as a result, it some comes across as abusive behaviour. In a way, it makes some of Sid's behaviour towards them in return come off as perfectly justified. Even when they have the moments in which they actually treat Sid well and accept him as part of the herd, you end up forgetting that upon seeing moments such as the fur-shaving incident and the meteorite scene.

Another thing that doesn't help is that Sid contrasts so much in personality to Manny and Diego that it's like the creators are targeting him simply because he's different. Manny and Diego are more cynical and grouchy and masculine, whilst Sid is more optimistic and emotional and effeminate. This has happened in several works before - notice how the more cowardly and sensitive Luigi in Super Mario Bros. is made the butt of jokes rather than his more outgoing and somewhat masculine older brother? Why are those types of characters made the creator's punching bag? It seems that it's not just to do with simply trying to provide schadenfreude, but also to make some awkward commentary on how they see masculinity and effeminacy and what they see as superior.

A Glut Of Love Interests

For once, here's something that doesn't have much to do with the "comedy" aspect that I've been discussing throughout the chapters. For some reason, the series becomes increasingly obsessed with shipping off its protagonists with attractive female counterparts, with each one having less personality as the series continues. For this part, I will just focus on the companions that they finally ended up with, as well as mention Scrat's temporary love interest (even though he's not part of the herd) and Peaches' male partner for comparison.

Manny's partner Ellie.

The original love interest of the series. Already, the idea was that she would be Manny's attractive female counterpart, with character designer Peter de Seve saying that "there had to be something sweet about her, so the audience and Manny would fall in love with her" (p. 63). Her fur is a lighter colour and the shape of her eyes makes Manny's look kind of goofy in comparison. At first glance, she's essentially a idealised female love interest.

However, Ellie does have quite a bit of characterisation and her romance with Manny serves as important to the plot. She's very playful and friendly, in contrast with his more anti-social and withdrawn nature, and she is initially under the belief that she is a possum. A major part of the film is that Manny believes that he and Ellie are the last mammoths on earth and he has a crush on her, but her misguided view on her identity, her misinterpreting Manny's comments as if he is "entitled" to have her and his lingering grief over his lost family get in the way.

She still continues to have a major presence in the third and fourth movies, despite not being as prominent as the main three. In the third movie, she joins them on their journey to save Sid, despite being heavily pregnant at the time, and shows the ability to think quick on her feet. In the fourth movie, she serves as a contrast to Manny with regard to how they parent Peaches - Manny is very overprotective and strict whilst Ellie is a lot more understanding. She also gives a pretty good speech to Peaches when the family get separated by continental drift, showing a proper understanding of her husband in the process. And throughout all of this, she develops from being somewhat of an oddball to being a responsible and caring mother figure who still has her energy and fire. The fifth film does cock up with her suddenly becoming as controlling as Manny with regard to the idea of Peaches getting married for some reason, but hey, that's just another reason to dislike that movie.

Scrat's "partner" Scratte.

Guess what? Scrat has a love interest too! Or at least he did for a while. Similar to his point on Ellie, de Seve notes that "Scratte had to be really appealing, so I visualized her pretty quickly, in that she's everything that Scrat is not" (p. 89). Whilst he's an scrawny and agitated loser who never has things go his way, "she's sweet, beautiful, calm, cool, and flies". Well, I'd argue she's not that "sweet" - she's pretty much of a femme fatale who's got Scrat wrapped round her finger, but the other points still stand.

Unlike Ellie, Scratte is clearly not a trustworthy type. And she's got an obsession with the acorn too. It's just that, unlike Scrat, she KNOWS how to get it. She fake-cries in order to guilt-trip Scrat into giving her the acorn, flies off with the acorn and leaves him to fall down, rips the acorn off his tar-covered front and even kicks him in the "nuts" after dancing a tango with Scrat over the acorn (I loved that tango myself). Interestingly enough though, the acorn itself is revealed to be almost sentient and actually sees Scratte as more of a love rival, having a sad song play when it seems that Scrat abandoned the acorn for Scratte.

And to really seal the deal, the relationship ultimately fails. Scrat is just too obsessed with his acorn to give it up for anything else, thus returning everything to the status quo. There's a bit of a call back to this relationship in the fourth movie in which Scrat is not interested in an illusion of Scratte that appears before him, but gets excited upon seeing an illusion of an acorn. Very different to how Manny and Ellie's relationship received a real upgrade and is still going strong. And I find that to be very interesting and fitting with regard to Scrat's situation.

Diego's partner Shira.

Shira starts out as the only attractive member of Captain Gutt's crew, so of course she'll be the one to turn good in the end. She's also introduced as a female counterpart to Diego, so OF COURSE he will be the one to convert her to the good side and fall in love with her. "was comparable to the concerns I had with Scratte, which was to be feminine, appealing, and in this case, an equally dangerous version of Diego" (p. 146).

Shira has a bit of a personality - she's rather sarcastic and somewhat of a tsundere, especially if you compare her with the more gentle Ellie. However, she is just a female version of Diego - it seems as if her gender and appearance are the only things that differentiate her from him. Plus, her plotline is essentially a repeat of Diego's - she starts out as a mistreated member of the bad guys before learning about true companionship and joining the good guys. Sure, the circumstances are slightly different (no babies are involved this time), but it's still a repeat.

In the fifth film, she doesn't have much of a purpose or personality at all and is simply there as Diego's partner. You could easily remove her from it and nothing would change except for the moments in which they talk about their relationship and having children. And as for the spin-off movie, she doesn't appear at all. Make of that what you will.

Sid's partner Brooke.

Sid's previous two sloth love interests were the atrociously clingy Sylvia (who only appears in deleted scenes) and the bland Francine. This was considered to be the better outcome.

Okay, now here's one heck of a super-rant coming up. This character has NOTHING to her. She's essentially just the "dream girl" archetype that sad nerds pine away for. Which in a way, was what the film designed her to be.

The main reason that this character pops up is because Sid has a failed date at the beginning of Ice Age 5 with the equally bland (and actually kinda bitchy) Francine. Cue this character, who is not given a proper reason to full in love with him at all. Everyone is confused by how the "loser" Sid and the "dream girl" Brooke could even be pursuing a relationship, but it happens anyway. Honestly, I was less wary of how a "perfect" woman like her would choose a "goofball" like Sid, and more wary of how someone genuinely as entertaining and surprisingly in-depth as Sid would go off with someone with no depth at all.

I'll just go into further detail on her here. Unlike with Ellie and Manny's romance, Brooke's just automatically accepting of Sid and there is no development that causes them to fall properly in love. They don't even have the same conflict that the previous pairings do - the main "conflict" is that Sid accidentally causes her and the Geotopians to revert to their original ages, meaning that they may not be able to pursue a relationship due to their age gap. It's mainly just a way of showing that Sid isn't shallow because he still likes her despite her old age (even though she still looks kind of decent in her "old" form, probably so they could kiss without it looking gross), a plot point that I easily guessed even before the Geotopia twist was revealed. Brooke may have been able to call out the Shangri-Llama for his selfish nature during the same scene, but anyone could have done that and it wouldn't have changed the scene much. After the plot is resolved, it seems that Sid and Brooke won't be able stay together during the ending, since Brooke has to stay in Geotopia to stay young AND because of the newfound age gap. In the end though, any tension gets thrown out of the window when the Geotopians miraculously regain their youth and Brooke is able to reunite with Sid anyway, singing a song called "My Superstar" that comes out of nowhere and selfishly hijacking the wedding of another couple.

It gets to the point in which, unlike with the previous love interests mentioned, the book doesn't even mention her character traits, instead involving art director Michael Knapp talking about how hard it was to animate her due to her dress and hair and that the end result is "a beautiful fusion of the creative and the technical" (p. 231). If that's all that anyone has to say on her this time, that's pretty damning evidence as to how truly developed she is.

It would have been really interesting if the fifth movie ended with Sid, after angsting over finding his dream partner, not managing to find one. But then he realises that he's been too hard on himself and that no matter whether he does or doesn't find "the one", the important thing is that he's got friends and family who look out for him no matter what. As a result, he learns the concept of self-love and gains more confidence in the process. It would have made for a really touching and emotional moment, as well as delivered a powerful and important message to its audience on how important self-love is and life isn't all about having to find the "ideal" partner. But no, apparently all three leads had to get laid no matter what, so we're stuck with him going off with a glorified flesh light instead.

Boomstick: (crying happy tears) Oh Mama, you're right! I shouldn't have been worrying about Dad after all!

Sid: (thinking) God dammit...

(Caption: Once again, past experiences come back to affect my views.)

Like Shira, Brooke also doesn't return for the spin-off movie, which just adds to the notion that she really was just a pipe dream after all. I would not be surprised if someone created a fanfic in which it turned out that Sid was hallucinating her the whole time due to his unfortunate breakup with Francine. It would have been better if he stuck with Momma T-Rex from the third film after all. At least she had personality.

Peaches' partner Julian.

Peaches' actual first boyfriend was Ethan, but that relationship failed. In contrast to Ethan, Julian has a gentler appearance without any punk aesthetics.

Now for a case of a male love interest being introduced to one of the female characters. Julian is not as bland as Brooke, but still not that memorable. I actually forgot his name for a bit whilst writing this article and have to look it up in the Art of... book just to jog my memory, which should say something about him.

Julian is super friendly, loves to give out hugs and has a free-spirited nature. The ultimate nice guy. He's also pretty important to the plot at times, such as when he helps the heroes to save the day. However, his whole character arc mainly focuses on his upcoming marriage to Peaches. That's about it. Though at least said marriage does play an important role in the "emotional" plot of Manny coming to terms with Peaches growing up. Of course, the main plot involves asteroids trying to destroy the earth so that overshadows it pretty quickly, even if it was supposed to be a "metaphor" for Julian "crashing" into Manny's life and "shaking up" the status quo.

Speaking of the marriage, that's another thing that clashes with historical accuracy to an irritating degree. None of the previous pairings involved marriage - Manny and Ellie simply became mates, as did Diego and Shira. The marriage is just shoehorned into the plot to serve as an "emotional core". The films have always tried to have an emotional core to them, but this one fails to actually tug at the heartstrings due to its contrived nature. They could have just had them become mates like the others, with Peaches planning to move away with Julian anyway, but no, that's apparently not dramatic enough according to the creators. It just makes the relationship less convincing as a result.

The saddest thing about this situation is that in the fourth film, Peaches has a molehog friend called Louis (voiced by Josh Gad before he was in Frozen as Sid's snowman counterpart), who was super sweet and shy and served as an interesting counterpart to her then-crush Ethan. Whilst Ethan was super cool and exciting but kind of aloof, Louis was awkward yet relatable and ultimately was the one there for Peaches when she needed him the most. He was also the butt of jokes like Sid was, so you really felt for him when things went his way. However, he's just forgotten about in the fifth movie so they can introduce a generic new love interest for her. Because god forbid that she should have an inter-species relationship with him when babies are the most important thing of all.

The Purge

No, not that one that makes up a horror movie franchise. This is about a situation that arrives in the spin-off movie. As I mentioned before, the franchise tries too hard to add new characters. The addition of Ellie and Peaches makes sense since it's essentially Manny learning to move on and start anew when it comes to family, Crash and Eddie were already Ellie's adoptive brothers anyway and Sid's outspoken Granny is a delight (and possibly one of the redeeming points of the fourth and fifth movies). But Shira and Brooke are only added so that Diego and Sid won't be "left out" due to Manny already having a partner, and Buck is added so that he can be "part of the family". The only members who left are Peaches, who went off to live with Julian just to prove that she could be "independent" now, and Granny, who stayed with the Geotopians in order to go off with a younger man...and then was made younger again by the fountain of youth (probably so the writers could get away with having them in a relationship with each other).

The spin-off film tries to rectify this issue by removing the excess characters until we just have Manny, Sid, Diego and Ellie. Unfortunately, they still cock up with this. All excess characters are simply not mentioned, presumably because the writers were too lazy to explain what happened to them despite there being a recap of the first five movies at the start on it. In fact, Manny even refers to Sid and Diego as "outcasts and losers". Thus, we end up with the horrifying implications that Diego and Sid went through messy break-ups, even if the film refuses to state these implications. At least we already knew that Peaches and Granny left in the previous movie.

The business with Crash and Eddie is particularly asanine. They go on this adventure with Buck without the rest of the herd, and then ultimately decide to go off with Buck, with both them and Ellie "realising" that they don't need to rely on her anymore. Of course, that's what the filmmakers want you to believe. Given that Crash and Eddie only really have a significant role in the second film, are mainly defined by their connection with Buck in the third and fifth movies and barely have a role at all in the fourth film, it comes off less as character development and more as a easy way to get rid of characters that they don't know how to use anymore. Because, you know, actually thinking of ways to properly use characters is tiring.

Are they really planning to bring things back to basics? Or, since Disney is thinking about a seventh movie, are they planning to just rebuild from scratch? It's something that makes my hurt thinking about it.

The films try so hard to focus on family. They really do. And the first four movies pull it off well (the first three more so). But by the fifth film, the message wears thin. And then the spin-off movie equally screws things over. Whether it's because of Sid's continued mistreatment despite his backstory, the introduction of two (or three, depending on your opinion of Julian) pointless love interests and the bizarre addition and subtraction of team members, I have to wonder whether the creators really did care about the application of family themes or whether they did it for the simply excuse of an obligatory "message".

The Extinction of Ice Age: Chapter Two - Resurrecting the Same Characters

This section is about two supporting characters from the Ice Age franchise that were both hilarious and awesome when they first appeared, but then got ran into the ground due to being used over and over again. The saddest part is that they were the most popular characters in their debut appearances.

So here they both are, in order of series debut. Oh, the good times we had with these characters before their downfalls...

Scrat The Squirrel

One of the few moments he'll get with that precious acorn. He'll lose it ten seconds later.

Scrat is essentially the mascot for the Ice Age franchise as a whole. Actually, scrat-ch that (oh god, the pun, it burns), he was the mascot for Blue Sky Studios as a whole. He is a hapless rat-like sabre-tooth squirrel - believe it or not, similar creatures existed, albeit not in the Ice Age itself - who only wants to bury his beloved acorn for the winter, and yet that little menace seems intent on giving him as much grief as possible.

Originally, Scrat was only going to appear in the opening film sequence as a device. He would have been there to demonstrate the vast and impressive nature of the Ice Age itself, and the scene ended with him simply being squashed by the other animals as they migrated south for the winter. Chris Wedge, director of the first film and voice actor for Scrat, says in The Art of Ice Age that:

"The whole story was going to be that at the end of all this effort, Scrat gets stepped on. That's it. [...] We were going to just step on him and walk away and start the movie. I thought that was pretty funny. Then Fox's marketing department grabbed onto the sequence. They decided it was going to be the teaser trailer for the movie. I said 'You are going to give all of it away and deny the audience the fun of this!' But they said 'No, this is the movie.' They were so right. The preview audiences loved the sequence so much that they were disappointed that they didn't see the character again." (p.11)

In response to positive test audience feedback for the little guy, the creators added several more sequences involving him. The opening was still kept in, but seeing Scrat getting squashed was not the last time that we would see him.

In a sense, Fox were right. Scrat is easily the most popular Ice Age character of all time, even more popular than the main characters themselves. It's gotten to the point in which most of the trailers focus on him instead, despite the fact that he only appears for a few minutes each time. He even becomes the focus of the spin-off short films, with comedy classics like Gone Nutty and No Time For Nuts. With these two in particular, they were both nominated for Oscars for Best Animated Short and the latter short even won the Annie Award for the same category.

He was just that though. An extra character. He had his own sub-plots but he was mostly there for comic relief, rather than actually having a major role in the story. And that was fine. We all know what happens if you try to shill a character who works best in small doses - just look at the tanking reputation of the Minions from Despicable Me and Shadow the Hedgehog from the Sonic games for proof. The shorts are especially good for allowing him to have the spotlight without it coming at the expense of everyone else.

Here's a major problem though - the later films were starting to lack in plot. Obviously they do have plots, but they need something to get them moving and are often filled with padding. The Scrat sub-plots are entertaining, but they can sometimes just be their own story and be separated from the main plot. Which, in a way, is kind of a problem since it not only cuts down the storyline, but also exposes its weaker points in the process.

The "solution" to this apparently was to essentially make Scrat cause some world-wide disaster that would end up affecting everyone else as a result. All because of his acorn fetish. Continental Drift focuses on him causing the titular event, despite the fact that this was already explored in the short film Gone Nutty, and then wiping out Scratlantis. The fifth film ends up with him going into space and nearly causing the apocalypse back on Earth, and then wiping out all life on Mars at the end.

This doesn't solve anything at all. If anything, it's the point where you stop laughing at Scrat's antics and start screaming "Leave the acorn! You don't need it!". The plots are still weak, but now we have extra Scrat since that's what the audiences want to really see. Heck, you could just easily remove the "main" plots and just make them Scrat-centred movies without the main characters, since they're clearly putting more effort into the sub-plot than the main plot on occasion. It's worst in Ice Age 5 though, since the hijinks overlap so much with the main plot that you cannot separate them from each other and have to pay attention to the poorer main story as a result. In fact, the recent Scrat shorts start to just serve as promotions for the movies, rather than be stories in their own rights.

Scrat causing an avalanche and volcano eruption in the first film was fine, since they're just gag scenes. Him causing the flood in the second film was also acceptable, despite it making up the film's plot, especially since he actually saved the day in the end. The disasters he causes in the fourth and fifth movies however are just too much. By trying to make him move the plot along, he comes across as more irritating than endearing, and the fact that his life is now made to revolve around the acorn makes us wish that he can just be put out of his misery already, as Ice Age 2 tried to do. Instead, the fifth film just leaves him in space, with no proper resolution to his subplot at all.

The spin-off film has no signs of Scrat at all, which just adds to its detriment. It only goes to show that they were simply relying on the character to hold the films together, rather than portray him as a character in his own right. Yes, I know that he's no longer appearing because Ivy Silberstein claimed on Twitter that the Scrat design was stolen from her, but my point still stands.

The whole business with his creation is also sketchy. Silberstein claims that she first designed "Sqrat" on the 19th May 1999, but writer Michael J. Wilson claims that his three year old daughter Flora helped come up with the idea of Scrat being a cross between a squirrel and a rat and being obsessed with acorns. Meanwhile. the Art of... book claims that character designer Pete de Seve received inspiration for the character from research he did at New York City's American Museum of Natural History and that story artist Bill Frake developed the character's personality from a local squirrel that kept on disrupting him whilst he was working at home. It's hard to pinpoint which of these is the most accurate story - even Silberstein's "Sqrat" name seems more like a corruption of the "Scrat" name rather than the other way round. But if she was in the right, it just provides a cautionary tale of relying too much on a character who you may or may not have the rights to.

Buck The Weasel

This case isn't as bad as the Scrat situation, but it's still notable in my opinion. Buck is an insane yet awesome survivalist who bears an uncanny resemblance to his voice actor Simon Pegg and is brilliantly voiced by him at the same time. When we first meet Buck in the third film, he's intent on hunting down Rudy, the dinosaur that took out his eye. The whole thing is just one big reference to Moby Dick and Captain Ahab, only this time Ahab finally gets a happy ending.

Buck serves as a guide to the herd as they go searching for Sid, who has gone missing in the land of the dinosaurs. Along the way, he provides some of the funniest lines in that film, with the case of the "ugly pineapple" being the most notable. He can't stay with them forever though, and after his mission is fulfilled, he goes on his way with a warm farewell. It's a surprisingly touching scene and one with an important message - some people will just choose to be loners and that's okay. It helps that he only really has a small cameo in the fourth film and nothing else.

And then the fifth film has to go and spoil all that. Whilst we do get a cool oner shot in order to re-introduce him, he gets awkwardly integrated into the plot in such a way that it has to revolve around him. The antagonists of the film are a family of dinosaurs that try to sabotage the herd's attempts to divert the asteroids, just because they have a bone to pick with Buck. A character with similarities to him is introduced, who pissed me off so much that I will be discussing him in a later chapter. And at the end of it all, he joins the herd anyway because the creators are just so desperate to emphasise the importance of "family".

Honestly, it was better when Buck went on his way in the third film. Sometimes, we can't keep in contact forever and we have to go about and do our own things. With Buck in particular, I felt that it matched his crazy survivor attitude perfectly. No wonder that the spin-off movie has him go back to staying in the dinosaur world.

Not that the spin-off film fixed things much. The film focuses entirely on him, being called The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild and what not, with the main herd themselves being relegated to minor roles at best. And weirdly enough, his voice actor is the only person to reprise their role. Everyone else gets replaced by a different voice actor. Even John Leguizamo, who previously voiced Sid in even the video game adaptations, doesn't return. It certainly brings up some interesting implications. Oh well, at least he got to star in the much better Encanto in the meantime.

Plus, they bring back Buck's link with Crash and Eddie from the third film, and then butcher that. He's now just there to bring them on an adventure and make them have an epiphany about whether they need to stay with the herd or not. The way he's handled just doesn't make him work as a main character. He might as well not be billed as the protagonist - rather just a supporting leader type.

They even bring in a new character who was apparently on a previous team of his, just so he has a female character to interact with. That doesn't work either. Buck was better as a lone wolf (or rather lone weasel) type as depicted in Ice Age 3. Adding a new teammate for him just doesn't work - and I feel that Zee was added just so they could add a new female character to what wasn't necessarily a female-heavy cast.

So yeah. Two characters who started out as amazing and now aren't so good as they previously were, all because they kept being overused. As I mentioned before, it's similar to cases like Shadow the Hedgehog, the Minions and even the Koopalings from Super Mario Bros., in which well-liked side characters have their roles expanded and become more irritating as a result. Word of advice - some side characters work best as side characters. They can't all take centre stage.

The Extinction of Ice Age - Chapter One: The Ice Age Does Not Work That Way! Goodnight!

There is no doubt that the Ice Age films are not the most historically-accurate depiction of the time period that they seek to rediscover. However, as the films progress, they become even less of a representation of what they were supposed to depict in the first place, and just start using it as an aesthetic for stories that have nothing to do with it. I will explore the pop-culture references in a later article, but for now I will just focus on the historical inaccuracies in general.

"Everyone Loves Dinosaurs, Right?"

According to TV Tropes, the creators were concerned about putting dodos into the first film. The response from most paleontologists? "Whatever, just please, no dinosaurs". As a result, the only time we see a dinosaur is during a scene in which Sid is disturbed to find one encased in ice.

Concept art of the dinosaur encased in ice.

It's not anything too major though - it's just an amusing gag. Otherwise, all of the animals we see are ones that would have been around during the Ice Age itself or, if nothing else, came around after the extinction of the dinosaurs. The second film even has a Gastornis mentioning that dinosaurs went extinct in order to counter Manny's point about large mammals like himself being too tough to go extinct themselves. After all, she's technically a descendant of the dinosaurs. She should know.

The third film however is all about dinosaurs. Sure, it can be justified in that the heroes travel to a lost realm in which a bunch of dinosaurs survived, but they still have dinosaurs. It kind of distracts from the original idea of the movies, which was to focus on creatures on the Ice Age that maybe some people weren't familiar with. Everyone is familiar with dinosaurs though. And we've received so many films involving them anyway - Jurassic Park, The Land Before Time, the dinosaur sequence in Animal World, Dinosaur, etc. For all I know, Ice Age 3 doesn't necessarily bring anything new to the table with regard to dinosaurs, apart from show ones that we don't often see such as the Kentrosaurus, the Harpactognathus and the Baryonyx. It just exists because people like dinosaurs and because the character designer stated that he "was running out of Ice Age characters" (p. 102).

Dinosaurs appear again in the fifth film, with regard to Gavin and his children Gertie and Roger. Despite being the main antagonists of that movie, they don't really do much except plan to sabotage the herd's plans. They even change their evil ways in the end and help save the day. In this case, it seems to be more so they can bring back characters from the third movie like Buck.

And as for the spin-off movie...why are you still even using the Ice Age title anymore? It's called The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild, but the fact that they go back to the lost world just suggests that it should have been called The Lost World Adventures of Buck Wild. They really seem to like the dinosaur angle at this point, even though the whole point of the first movie was that it tried hard NOT to show dinosaurs. It's probably why it was a Buck-centric film in the first place.

Other Time Periods Explored

At least with the dinosaurs, it seems that the creators did put effort into utilising them correctly. They showed off dinosaurs that aren't often seen in other movies and at least used the excuse that they were in a hidden world.

There is no real excuse for the other time periods the later movies try to explore. One example is the fourth film's depiction of continental drift. The real life phenomenon occurred sometime beforehand, and was a more gradual change. In this one, it happens within a very short time span due to Scrat's escapades with his acorn. This was perfectly fine as a gag in the Academy-nominated short film Gone Nutty, in which it served as a bit of a pay-off to what was already a brilliant short. But in the aptly named fourth movie, it's essentially the whole plot. All it is is just an extended version of the short's ending, only this time used as a "dramatic" way to move the plot along.

Director Michael Thurmier, who started with Ice Age 3, says that "every sequel it seems to get a little harder to keep the story fresh, because you have already done all these great gags. You have had all these great character interactions. You have explored territories and the personalities, but you have to keep mining new territories" (p. 140). I mean, that's all well said, but that's usually why you just move onto something else where you can explore these things, rather than resurrect the same franchise over and over again. You don't need to resurrect the same gags and make up new stuff at the expense of the quality that's already there. If you're running out of stuff from the actual Ice Age period to explore, LEAVE IT.

I call this section of this chapter "Other Time Periods Explored", but it's not just time periods. Festivities get explored too. We have the Christmas special A Mammoth Christmas and the Easter special The Great Egg-Scapade. The former focuses on Sid trying to get off Santa's naughty list (for something that was actually an accident) and the latter focuses on an Easter egg hunt designed to get back some eggs that Squint the bunny stole. It also explores the "origins" of April Fool's Day for some reason. I have genuinely mixed feelings about these specials. On the one hand, they go for a more secular route than the Christian vibes they were given during the Roman times and do a relatively good job at providing an Ice Age twist on this origins (moreso with the Easter special). On the other hand, it should be pointed out that these now-thought-as-Christian holidays actually started as Pagan celebrations - Christmas has links with Yule and the Roman festival of Saturnalia, whilst Easter has links with the spring festival of Ostara - and given the way that the Pagans were completely undermined in the past, it makes the changes in the backstory for Christmas and Easter come off as rather awkward. Besides, given that DreamWorks has done its own holiday specials for their franchises, it's most likely that Ice Age was simply trying to jump on the bandwagon.

Space, Mysticism & All That "Good" Stuff

Another item that is found frozen in the first film is a spaceship, which the baby gives a Vulcan salute to. Again, it is just that - a simple gag. Once we see that spaceship, the plot moves on and that's it. Otherwise, the first itself is relatively down to earth and the sequels, to a certain extent, stay away from science fiction and fantasy itself. The spaceship is just something that stands out for laughs.

For some reason, they decided to expand upon it in the fifth movie. This has been a sin that has occurred throughout the franchise - first it was expanding the role of the dinosaurs, and then it was turning the continental drift ending of Gone Nutty into a whole movie. This one is handled worst though. Scrat ends up inside an UFO that goes into space and ends up kick-starting a chain of events that cause asteroids to nearly wipe out Earth. He also meets up with alien squirrels with more advanced technology. Sure, this is all in space and the advanced technology aspect should make it more forgivable, but as I said before, this sort of thing distracts from the prehistoric aspect of the franchise.

It's not just space that gets explored. There is a place named Geotopia that pops up, which is essentially a lost world inside an asteroid that crashed long ago. The residents are all essentially zen hippies who are using the crystals in the asteroid to stay young. When one of the crystals is removed by Sid and he unwittingly causes the wall to collapse, they all grow old again, and only regain their youth once the fountain of youth is created.

Now, I was just like to say that I have nothing against mysticism in general. But it does NOT match up with the original idea for the movie franchise. In fact, it distracts from it. As I said earlier, the original movies were relatively down to earth, making the mystical elements clash even more. There was an earlier case in Ice Age 4 with the whole Scratlantis scene, but at least that was a quick gag scene at the end of the movie, rather than something that played a major role in it. It didn't help that the Geotopia plot is tacked onto Act 3, and yet is still made to feel like the whole movie.

The film is not only historically inaccurate, but also scientifically inaccurate with regard to its climax. Throughout the film, the herd have been trying to find a way to stop meteorites destroying Earth. The solution? Shove giant crystals into a volcano so that it erupts and the ensuring explosion stops the meteors from landing. There's some crummy explanation as to why they're doing this too - apparently, the crystals are magnetic and therefore their magnetism should send the meteors off course.

NO. JUST NO. When an asteroid goes through our atmosphere, it freezes up very quickly. The heat from the erupting volcano, clashing with the meteors that have gone cold from entering our atmosphere would most likely cause an unstable reaction that would cause more death. Never mind the fact that those "magnetic crystals" would supposedly repel the asteroids away. In fact, if the magnetism ploy hadn't worked, it would have essentially smashed the volcano to pieces and then caused a bigger explosion that would wipe out everything around it and render the plan a waste of time.

At least Ice Age 2 acknowledged scientific inaccuracy with regard to volcanoes during one scene. The mini sloths in that movie are aware that sacrificing "Fire King" Sid to the volcano probably isn't going to help much, but they decide to do it anyway since "it's worth a shot". It's a relatively minor scene compared to everything else, and the whole thing is just played as a joke at Sid's expense. Even the contrived way in which Sid suffers this sad fate is played for laughs. In Ice Age 5 though, the volcano scenario plays too much of a major role to be missed out on, especially since it's what's used to resolve the plot. Plus, they talk about it earlier on as if it's something scientifically accurate, without taking into account the combination of the heat and the cold. Not helping is the fact that they use a character who I highly dislike and will rant about later to explain this.

What happened to the producer's original point? Why did the franchise start with proper focus on the period being explored and then just start delving into other periods? In the first two films, it feels like they're actually staying focused, but in the later ones, the setting is just used as a "cool" aesthetic rather than anything else.

You can accuse me of getting too nit-picky about something that's meant to be a comedy anyway, but there's a difference between a well-written historically-inaccurate comedy and a poorly-written historically-inaccurate comedy. Take the Asterix comics for instance. In a similar vein to Ice Age, it very loosely depicts the time period that it's set in, in this case the time of the Roman Empire. But the excellent writing of the comics - excluding the ones from the 90s and early to mid 00s like Asterix and the Falling Sky, which bares an uncomfortable resemblance to Ice Age 5 with its alien plot and doesn't have the original writer - and the parodic and anarchic nature of them in general more than makes up for it. The same goes with Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which is essentially a spoof of the King Arthur legends. With the later Ice Age films, they're not spoofs at all. They are simply held together by a thin plot and some questionable pop-culture references, which I will delve into later.

And speaking of later, the stuff I will be discussing in the next chapters makes the problems I just discussed here seem pretty minuscule in comparison...

The Extinction of Ice Age - The Cold Opening

Why I'm Writing This

Sometimes a film does well, and sometimes it does so well that it starts a franchise. Unfortunately, said franchise can eventually be killed off with a combination of terrible execution and marketing, as well as not living up to the first installment.

This is sadly the case with the Ice Age franchise. It's been twenty years since the first film was released and received both critical and commercial acclaim, kickstarting the franchise off. It has also been six years since the fifth film flopped at the box office during the Summer Bomb Buster of 2016 and the franchise essentially ground to a halt in the process. Recently we had a new film on Disney+, but it's a spin-off that focuses on the supporting characters rather than the main ones, and the fact that the original creators Blue Sky Studios went under in 2021 meant that a different company animated it instead - specifically the one that worked on the divisive second season of gen:Lock.

For me, this is an absolute pity. The first Ice Age film is one of my favourite films of all time and was both critically and commercially received. It's funny, exciting and packs an emotional punch too. The second film (The Meltdown) is also a fairly enjoyable film, if not up to the same standards as the first one, and I thought the third film (Dawn of the Dinosaurs) was okay, if focusing a bit too much on comedy over an actual plotline. I'm not so fond of the fourth film (Continental Drift) and the fifth film (Collision Course) is absolute garbage. I remember the day in which I realised the fifth film was actually a thing and for once actually being depressed rather than excited. Other Ice Age fans clearly felt the same as I did because they just didn't go to watch it and it's considered to be one of the worst films of 2016.

The ratings on Rotten Tomatoes are a good indicator of the quality drop. The first film has a Certified Fresh score of 77%, which is very impressive (it may not be as high as your typical Pixar movie, which normally has scores above 90%, but I think it's still good enough). The second film goes into the Rotten category with 57%, but I feel that Rotten Tomatoes can be a little strict with the rating system at times - a film has to get 60% or over to be classified as fresh, so even a halfway score is considered to be bad - and I think a third category should be introduced for films like these that get mixed reviews (“under-ripe”, maybe?). But then the third film has 46%, the fourth film has 37% and the fifth film has a measly 18%. The recent spin-off film The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild was slightly better than the fifth one, but still received a paltry 22% and has dire animation, so it's safe to say that the franchise probably isn't recovering any time soon.

When things snowball out of control...

So for the next few blog posts, I will be analysing what exactly went wrong with the franchise. Many things will be taken into account and I will definitely be doing a lot of ranting, which explains why I be making separate posts rather than one long post like I have done previously on my blog. Above all, this will mainly be a way for me to find out when these flaws started to become apparent and whether the better-received first film had the first warning signs for them.

The History Of The Ice Age Franchise

I would like to start by discussing the production of the first Ice Age film, which I feel may have some of the answers to the problems that would later evolve with the franchise. Most of this information is from The Art of Ice Age by Tara Bennett, published by Titan Books in Britain and part of the Art of… series of books on film-making. However, the first fact/urban legend I will mention is an interesting one, and one that is not mentioned in the book. It is the idea that Don Bluth was originally going to make it.

Don Bluth, both legendary animator and the supposed former developer of Ice Age. [Note: Use own picture.]

Bluth is an animator most known for his turbulent history with the animation industry. Starting out as an animator for Disney, he left when he felt that the company was dropping in quality and started work on his own projects. This resulted in the classic films An American Tail, The Land Before Time and The Secret Of NIMH, all considered to be the starting point of the Renaissance Age of Animation, and he also created the hit game Dragon's Lair. Unfortunately, starting with the flop that was All Dogs Go To Heaven (though history has been much kinder to it over the years), he ended up releasing the duds Rock-a-Doodle, A Troll in Central Park, Thumbelina and The Pebble and the Penguin, all of which bombed at the box office. He gained some traction back with Anastasia (not a film that I like, but hey, it made money), before utterly bombing with Titan A.E. (again, history has been kinder to it over the years). That last film was indeed the last straw, as he hasn't really done much since then (though he's apparently planning a comeback) and he gave up on whatever projects he was planning at that point.

One of those alleged projects happened to be Ice Age. A film about three mismatched animals trying to return a baby to its father, it has some traits of Monsters Inc. (another film that I love) but also shares traits with Don Bluth's earlier films. Supposedly, Bluth's version would have been a straight-on drama in the same vein as his eighties classics as well as cel-animated. Now whether this is completely true or is simply a rumour, we may never tell - this wiki article in particular doubts its existence. But it if is true, it provides an interesting glimpse into what the film could have been.

I shall now discuss the story that was told in the Art of... book. Producer Lori Forte says that she was looking for ideas for potential new animated movies that 20th Century Fox, who owned Blue Sky Studios at the time, could invest in. At the time, there had been plenty of films about dinosaurs, but "there was an area, a world, a "big idea" that no one had really tapped into yet in animation - the Ice Age" (p. 6). Forte remembers being puzzled by this, since "it's such an amazing period with an array of beautiful, majestic creatures, most of which are now extinct" (p. 8.). And so in order to allow people to get a glimpse into this world, she teamed up with director Chris Wedge and scriptwriter Michael J. Wilson in order to create what she saw as a "beautiful, heart-felt" story.

This take on events is a lot more idealised than the previous take I mentioned, but there are still similarities between the story involving Don Bluth and the story told in this book. The original film was a lot more dramatic in scope, focusing on the tension between animals and humans and simply being an adventure story where three alienated misfits grew closer to each other as they tried to save a baby from sabre tooths. Instead of the humorous beginning sequence we got in which Scrat desperately tries to bury his acorn before being stomped on for his troubles, it instead began with protagonist Manny have a nightmare about the day his family were murdered by hunters - a scene that would get transferred to later on in the final product. Similarities can potentially be seen between this and Blue Sky's 1998 Academy Award winning short Bunny, a moving story about the titular widow which explores the concepts of grief and the afterlife with the deceptively simple tale of her being bothered by a pesky moth whilst trying to bake a cake.

Forte says that "all the stars seemed to align for us, except for one hiccup. Our script was an action-adventure and Fox wanted the movie to be a comedy" (p. 6). I assume that the failure of the gritty Titan A.E., which sunk their original 2D animation studio may have had something to do with this train of thought, or maybe they wanted to cash in on the 2001 monster smash that was Shrek. Either way, they wanted the final product to be less serious than the one they had so far.

The issue was fixed by bringing in screenwriter Michael Berg, who provided a "comedy rewrite". As said by assistant director Carlos Saldanha, Fox wanted certain sequences to be "funnier". That said, the emotional core was still there - Manny is grieving over the loss of his family and there's a touching reunion scene at the end between the baby and his father. After several more edits and preview showings, with one of the later major changes involving Diego's original permanent death becoming a temporary one, all they had to do was release the film and hope that it did well.

The final product was a massive success. It received positive reviews from critics and showed the world that Pixar and DreamWorks weren't the only animation companies who could release successful CGI animated movies. According to Box Office Mojo, against a budget of around $59,000,000, it grossed $176,387,405 domestically and $206,869,731 internationally to bring in an overall gross of $383,257,136. It was also nominated for the Oscar and the Annie Award for Best Animation Feature-Length Film, though it ultimately lost out to Spirited Away both times. Overall, it got Blue Sky Studios started in the feature-film business for real.

There is no doubt that I find this film to be perfect. However, Fox's obsession with comedy would prove to be a thorn in the side for the sequels, as the next few posts will explain.

How The 150th Death Battle Resonated With My Own Personal Issues

Something about fictional works can be empowering at times. There are works that allow people to have emotional or mental epiphanies about themselves. They end up feeling that a situation depicted in the work relates with their own situations and personal issues, even if it isn't an exact replica, and it can be life-changing. Recent Disney and Pixar films for instance such as Frozen, Inside Out and Encanto, have been brilliant at this. Think of the many people who felt that Elsa's "screw what everyone else thinks of me" song "Let It Go" resonated with their own issues - some members of the LGBTQ+ community even ended up seeing it as their own theme song.

Death Battle shouldn't be a case of this. It is not a work that is supposed to have a family-friendly message like your typical Disney or Pixar movie. It is a family-unfriendly series that primarily focuses on pop-culture characters fighting each other to the death and murdering each other in over-the-top ways. The hosts are amoral people who enjoy violence and analysing anything to do with killing. And with its 150 episode milestone, it primarily consisted of famous wrestler Macho Man Randy Savage fighting against famous drink mascot Kool-Aid Man.

Yet there was another side to the episode too. Throughout the course of Death Battle's first 150 episodes, there has been a subplot involving co-host Boomstick (a character I like so much I took my username from him) and his deadbeat father. I already did an article on it in December that served as a sort of timeline for the events linked with it, but I will do a short summary for the sake of this article too.

Essentially, Boomstick's father left the family when he was still very young, and it has affected him ever since. He angsts about the emotionally abusive way his father treated him when he was still around and where he could possibly be. He switches between wanting revenge on his father and genuinely missing him. Sometimes he even has crying fits about it. Not helping is the fact that he's the resident wisecracker, which results in plenty of awkward moments in which he tries to use that side of himself to cover up his more depressed side.

The smirk says "I'm fine", but the tears scream "HELP ME!!!"

This mask doesn't help much either. And after the fight aspect of the episode was over, he essentially just becomes a depressed and nervous thing of himself that's not in the mood for any jokes at all - when he's not angrily snapping out at the combatants and a guest star, that is.

Eventually, Boomstick arrives at what seems to be his father's place, but turns out to be his mother's. He's downright crushed at first, but Mama Boomstick points out that sometimes you "can't worry much about what you hope for, 'cause then you might miss the way things turn out", with her pointing out that he has two good friends for starters. Boomstick is still depressed about the fact that his father is missing at first, but thanks to his mother's encouragement and realising that she has a point about having the people he needs in his life, he ends up feeling better about the whole situation and thanks his mother for helping him out.

I squeed. I even teared up a bit. Here was a character who'd been suffering intensely from his negative thoughts on a past situation, and finally he was learning to move on and appreciate the things he had in his life. Plus, the moment in which he manages to smile despite his tears beforehand is just adorable.

But there was another reason I found myself getting emotional. You know I mentioned those scenes you watch that hit close to home and sometimes trigger personal memories? That was exactly what happened whilst I watched the ending.

No, I do not have a deadbeat father like Boomstick does. I have a pretty good relationship with my own one, even if he can frustrate me on a few occasions. Otherwise, we like listening to the same music together, laugh at the same jokes and have plenty of good times together. And I can pretty much say the same about the rest of my family.

However, even if my life could be considered to be ordinary, there were plenty of disappointments and traumas I suffered. Most of it was to do with bullying in one or two years of primary school and my first year of secondary school. But there were others as well, most of which resulted in tears. And unfortunately, I tend to have the memory of an elephant when it comes to even one-off incidents.

Keep in mind that these are just "key" moments - the bullying moments for instance lasted for a few weeks. Also, scratch the "two bullies" part in the "snowball" part - there were THREE. 

As you can notice, some of these incidents would not have been a big deal for anyone else, and one of them in particular didn't even have me as the target. But I guess my then-undiagnosed autism and sensitive nature in general caused my mind to bloat these incidents out of proportion.

I didn't brood on those issues too much at the time - except for maybe the PSA incident in Year 6, which caused me to avoid TV channels and radio stations with adverts like the plague for a while. After all, I was the "confident" member of the family, the one who always "bounced back" when bad things happened, in contrast with some of the others who lacked said "confidence". But when starting at university, something changed. I guess I felt that I should have handled certain things differently or ended up with a desire to "get my own back" on the people that tormented me in the past, because I could not stop thinking about those incidents. Sure, this didn't happen all the time, but there were moments in which they just "came back" into my mind at random, usually around winter or when something else in my life was stressing me out.

The thing with negative memories is that they can completely overcloud your better sense of judgement, especially if you're suffering some sort of mental illness such as depression. Being someone who suffers from anxiety and knows of family members who also have mental illness, I'm all too familiar with this happening. There were times in which I could not get the thoughts out of my brain and they would linger for days. Sometimes I'd end up with them whilst doing something that should have allowed me to be in a relaxed environment, such as taking a bath or going to bed.

These were memories that I would honestly prefer to forget, but even trying to think about other things or purge them from my mind didn't have a great effect. In some cases, I'd honestly consider whether going to a hypnotherapist to wipe them away, even though I'm pretty sure that hypnotherapy doesn't work like that. And obviously, trying to pretend that all is okay and that you're not having these unpleasant thoughts at all just accelerates the issue.

And I think the same applies with Boomstick. There were moments in which he'd suffer breakdowns linked with thoughts about his father, most notably in "Zuko vs. Todoroki" in which he both fails to pretend that everything is fine during the intro and overall breaks down crying a total of three times. By the time the 150th episode was reaching its climax, his negative thoughts on his father had completely overwhelmed him. He snapped out at the two combatants, despite being perfectly fine with the matchup beforehand and outright idolising Macho Man to the point in which he was willing to forget his past grievances with his father if they were one and the same. Even the reveal that his beloved mother was actually alive did nothing to help - all he could do was awkwardly state that he thought his father was with her.

However, once you're able to think more lucidly, you realise that there are plenty of positive memories out there. And sometimes, the negative memories are only a small amount compared to the rest. I feel that was what Boomstick learnt - the business with his father happened when he was super young, since he had received his final stepfather by the time he was four years old. The father had made his choice to leave; it really wasn't through any fault of Boomstick's own and he shouldn't have been kicking himself about it. Otherwise, there were people in his life that genuinely liked him like his mother and his friends (even if his friendships can be rather vitriolic at times), who have stayed with him throughout his life and had a major impact on it that way. He fondly remembers the times spent with his mother, especially the martial arts training, and currently works alongside his friends in a job that suits his (admittedly violent and morbid) tastes. The father was only a small part of his life compared to them. And it is this that helps him to accept that sometimes things don't work out and that it's best to just move on. He has a bit of a cry about it, but is soon able to smile due to the good stuff in his life. As I said before, that smile is absolutely heart-melting.

Yeah, I'm never gonna get tired of this screenshot. Don't be surprised if I decide to use it again for any later blog posts.

With me in particular, sure, those thoughts I mentioned earlier were horrible moments in my life that I wish never happened. But when I see the bigger picture, they're only a small fraction of it. For instance, those bullying moments only occurred in Year 7 or for a small portion of primary school. The bully in primary school ended up moving away and everyone was relieved that the class atmosphere became less toxic as a result. At least two of those tormentors from high school would later be expelled, so it seems that I wasn't the only person they wronged in any sense, and one of the others apparently redeemed himself. And most of the teachers did respond appropriately to the situation, including one who helped me after the "shut up" incident. From Year 8 onwards, aside for some smug brat who was more of a pathetic rival than anything else and some idiots yelling out the same old bullshit about me looking like a "Year 7", I never had to deal with any other cases of bullying. I made some really good friends, some of which I'm still in contact with. I got good grades for my GCSEs and A levels which I'm still proud of, and most of the teachers were pretty supportive, which helped too.

And as for my life in general, I feel it's gone pretty well. Some of the traumas were simply one-off occasions that never happened again, but my mind simply fixated on them because of how it works. But I have a generally stable family life and I would not trade it for anything else. Even my brother, who can be an absolute pain at times, has been pretty protective and supportive of me and we've had some good times together. Plus, I was able to remember several happy moments in my life too, some of which would seem insignificant to someone else too.

And these are just the positive memories I could FIT ONTO the page. I could also mention the time when my brother and I spent time home alone for a weekend and had fun pizza nights in the process, or everything that happened in September 2018, or...

So obviously I had a pretty major epiphany myself like Boomstick did. And I've taken it into account ever since watching that episode. No, I'm not going to play the glad game at all and pretend that everything's okay- that will just be a massive strain and just results in mental health issues getting worse, as Inside Out showed effectively. But I am starting to put my whole life into perspective. Looking at the two images I uploaded, I have significantly more genuinely happy memories to remember than unhappy ones, and the way I see it, that's kind of proof that my life's actually pretty cool.

I still have those nasty flashbacks on a few occasions, sometimes without warning. And they can still hit hard. After all, it's only been four months since I watched that video. But putting them into perspective compared to the uplifting stuff makes them last for a shorter time than they did originally. I can also safely say that I haven't had any brooding moments in the bath recently since October. And since I'm not focusing on how I could get "revenge" for what happened as often now, I can just focus on working towards a healthier mental state rather than simply "forgetting" what happened. Sure, it's likely to be a long road to full recovery due to how long I brooded on them for in the past, but hey, I have a therapist and I can simply discuss this with her. Especially since originally I would have felt too awkward about discussing the full details of these incidents with her, but now don't feel so tense about it. ;)

And as for the anxiety I suffer with regard to the state of the world in general, rather than just my own personal issues? Well, that's why I try and take part in more activist work.

It took quite a bit of willpower to write this post, since this did rely on recounting old memories I'd rather forget. I originally considered writing it around October, but a combination of recovering from a prolonged anxiety attack I had in the first week of that month and stuff happening in my everyday life (pretty good stuff though - I finally got a volunteering placement after ages of searching for one) meant that it was best to wait until the other blog post on Boomstick's situation was up. I even thought of waiting until the 10th October this year, a year after the original release of the 150th death battle, but I realised it would take too long and it was best to get out my thoughts as soon as possible. It's why I'm releasing it in January during the time in which I normally catch a bad case of the winter blues. But I did it. I finally managed to vent out stuff I felt too awkward about discussing in detail before and feel a lot better now, all thanks to a video that initially just seemed like it was going to be a goofy fight between a wrestler and a jug of kool-aid.

It's weird to think that I could end up relating with someone with a completely different background, view on life and reasons for angst in the first place, but as I said before, that's the thing with certain works - anyone can end up finding something that helps them mentally and emotionally even if their circumstances are different to the ones they witness in the work. And if it's a character that they really like, it's all the better when they can relate to them, differences in personality and background aside. Fictional works don't just help us to escape from our real life problems, they can also help us to face them. And even if it's a work like Death Battle that you wouldn't expect to be "inspiring" in the first place, there may be something in them that will come off that way anyway.

Anyway, that'll be it for me going on about my own life and my nerdy interests. Boy, I ramble on a lot. It's a new year and I'm looking forward to essentially moving ahead with my life and leaving the bad times behind. And in a way, I hope the same happens with Boomstick too. I know that he has quite a few other issues in his life too, such as his failed marriages, but having an epiphany over his family situation and the people who truly matter to him is certainly a good start and could lead to good things in his future. As his mother accurately said, "you just might find what you need", and in a way him and I both did that October. :)