Making Planet Express look good

May 8, 2014 11:31 PM

In the future, making a delivery will require dedication, intelligence and observation. Or not. A sunny sweetly-drawn Jetsonesque animated short Johnny Express about interplanetary delivery that evokes Independence Day and War of the World. Written, directed and animated by Kyungmin Woo. Found on Gizmodo. Safe for work, but if you laugh at this you may be a very bad person (I did).
posted by viggorlijah (13 comments total)

Guess I'm a bad person too then.
The ending was a little predictable, I think he should have left behind one of those "we tried to deliver a package but you were out" cards.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 12:26 AM on May 9, 2014

Reminded me of this great passage from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy...

It is of course well known that careless talk costs lives, but the full scale of the problem is not always appreciated.

For instance, at the very moment that Arthur said "I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle," a freak wormhole opened up in the fabric of the space-time continuum and carried his words far far back in time across almost infinite reaches of space to a distant Galaxy where strange and warlike beings were poised on the brink of frightful interstellar battle.

The two opposing leaders were meeting for the last time.

A dreadful silence fell across the conference table as the commander of the Vl'hurgs, resplendent in his black jewelled battle shorts, gazed levelly at the G'Gugvuntt leader squatting opposite him in a cloud of green sweet-smelling steam, and, with a million sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruisers poised to unleash electric death at his single word of command, challenged the vile creature to take back what it had said about his mother.

The creature stirred in his sickly broiling vapour, and at that very moment the words I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle drifted across the conference table.

Unfortunately, in the Vl'hurg tongue this was the most dreadful insult imaginable, and there was nothing for it but to wage terrible war for centuries.

Eventually of course, after their Galaxy had been decimated over a few thousand years, it was realized that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, and so the two opposing battle fleets settled their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our own Galaxy - now positively identified as the source of the offending remark.

For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across - which happened to be the Earth - where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.

Those who study the complex interplay of cause and effect in the history of the Universe say that this sort of thing is going on all the time, but that we are powerless to prevent it.

"It's just life," they say.

But if you're going to borrow, borrow from the best, and add something to it. "Johnny Express" does.

Of course, it being the end of the academic year, expect a bunch more great short films from the students of animation schools to be showing up on Vimeo and YouTube. I'm looking forward to them.
posted by oneswellfoop at 12:35 AM on May 9, 2014 [2 favorites]

I would watch the hell out of an entire series of these.

Heck, I would watch a full length movie of nothing but this particular tragicomedy of scaling errors, but I'm a admittedly a terrible person.

If a five (hundred?) mile tall giant robot or monster crawled out of the ocean, sat down in the middle of a huge city and started scratching itself or doing something mundane and oblivious to its surroundings I would laugh. OK, I would probably scream "HOLY SHIT!!!" a lot, too, but between laughing myself stupid.
posted by loquacious at 1:34 AM on May 9, 2014

Great, now I'm watching Robot Jox and Pacific Rim fight scenes. It's not as funny as a thousand mile tall hapless delivery guy.
posted by loquacious at 2:10 AM on May 9, 2014

Thanks, lovely Friday comedown movie. Cheers. Now I can face the weekend. A bit.
posted by evil_esto at 2:47 AM on May 9, 2014

Jeez, that was awful!

I mean, not quality bad...but sad bad. Poor little purple folks.
posted by Fists O'Fury at 2:50 AM on May 9, 2014 [5 favorites]

Consumerism Kills.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:30 AM on May 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

I want a Choose Your Own Adventure version of that where I can make it have a happy ending. Well, happier. At least Tang Fu chu i: marel do senieal got his/her package.
posted by gubenuj at 6:12 AM on May 9, 2014

The part with the bicycle and the bicycle lock and then car and gassing up the car was sublime.

Loved the whole thing.
posted by mochapickle at 6:18 AM on May 9, 2014

I know it's fun to mock the hapless delivery guy but it should be noted that in the end, the package was delivered
posted by surazal at 6:43 AM on May 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

This is cool. Thanks for posting it.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 7:53 AM on May 9, 2014

Terrific movie. Thanks for the post.
posted by Dr. Wu at 8:24 AM on May 9, 2014

Do we have to post a spoiler alert to comment on the ending of a 5-minute cartoon? I hope not, but I guess this counts.

I'm just glad the soda can was rotated away from the planet at the end, so the little dude didn't have to see what happened to the rest of his species. Small mercies.
posted by vytae at 11:20 AM on May 9, 2014