Weekend Discussion - March 15, 2025

Welcome to the weekend! Let's jump into the Saturday edition of Weekend Discussion.

Blowed up

I caught this movie last night and it was a perfectly cromulent Looney Tunes movie. The lesson that everyone should learn here is that you don't need multi-million dollar A-list Hollywood actors for an animated feature when everyday voice actors can more than carry a movie with their own talents.

Unfortunately, there's a reason I'm featuring it here and that's because it got next to zero marketing buzz and you probably don't even know this existed. Go see this and enjoy it before it bombs at the box office and David Zaslav responds by setting fire to the Looney Tunes archives.

Avengers Initiative

The wonderful Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur series has officially wrapped up and, however complicated my feelings are about it, it ended wonderfully. Here's a clip of the final episode's ending. And, yes, they were actually able to pull in Samuel L. Jackson to voice Nick Fury.

Extra innings

With Pixar's Win or Lose in the books, here's a behind-the-scenes vignette. However complicated my feelings are about it (is there an echo in here?), I really enjoyed this series overall. Nobody nails family dynamics like Pixar and if this had been cut into a feature movie and focused on Rochelle and Vanessa, it could have been one of their best films ever.

There is, however, one elephant in the room. Episode 7 focuses on Kai and, yes, this was the transgender kid storyline that was cut by the cowardly higher-ups at Disney. It is obvious, in many ways, that this was cut, from the short runtime to that special euphoric slowed-down animation that you get when you meet Kai. This story getting reduced to subtext is tragic and anyone involved in this decision at Disney should be ashamed.

Aloha

We're days away from what might be Disney's worst live-action adaptation to date (which is saying a lot), but we're also a few months away from... what could be one of its best. I think they might have something here.

Weekend Grooves

Take us home, Selena Gomez.

That's it for this Weekend Discussion! We're excited to hear from you, so join the conversation and dive into the Shacknews Chatty comment thread below. If you want to go new school and find different ways to leave your feedback or talk about whatever, join us in the Official Shacknews Community Discord. I'll see you all next week!

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?