Dragons
Movies about dragons
Heavy metal songs about dragons
T-shirts with pictures of dragons on them
That episode of friends where Joey goes by the name “Dragon”
Seriously though, dragons are totally awesome. They are basically a tyrannosaurus rex that can fly and breath fire. How the hell can that not score a 10.0 on your awesome-crap-o-meter?
Think of any dinosaur movie, and replace the T-Rex with a dragon, and think of how much more kick-assey it would have been. In Jurassic Park, the T-Rex-Dragon could have just flown out of its pen and eaten the lawyer at the beginning of the movie. Then the whole stinkin’ movie could have just been about the T-Rex flyin’ around and burning crap. The best part of that movie was when the T-Rex was around doing stuff anyway.
In the Land Before Time, the little baby dinosaurs caused the T-Rex to fall to his doom. If it was a T-Rex-Dragon, it could have just flown back up, and then the rest of the movie could have been about the T-Rex flyin’ around and burning crap. Kick ass!
In the new King Kong movie, if Mr. Kong was fighting a T-Rex-Dragon, rather than a normal pansy-ass T-Rex, then the T-Rex-Dragon could have just set Mr. Kong and that chick on fire, and ended that movie right then and there. I would have 2 hours of my life back! Kick ass!
| Note: I actually acquired King Kong in HD for free when I purchased the HD-DVD peripheral for my X-Box 360, and I was actually building a bookshelf and I had King-Kong on in the background, and that was the only time I watched it. So, technically, I wouldn’t have those 2 hours of my life back completely. I would, however, have watch 2 more hours of the History channel. And that would have been cool because that was before they changed all their programming to be about gangs, UFO hunters, or old crusty dudes driving on ice or cutting down trees. At any rate, HD-DVD died, and now my peripheral is useless and worthless. I’m still kind of bitter about that. |
What confuses me though, despite the fact that dragons are several times more kick-assey than dinosaurs, there are innumerable movies about dinosaurs, but very few movies about dragons. The only two that come to mind is that movie with the English dude and Matthew McConaughey (I think it was called “Reign of Fire,”) and Dragon Heart, with Sean Connery as the voice of the dragon. Neither movie lived up to their full-Dragon-potential.
Now, Dragon Heart featured Sean Conner as a dragon, so seriously, you get a TON of awesome points for that, but at the end of the day, it focused on the “story” between a dragon, and a guy who hunts dragons. They form an unlikely partnership, make money by swindling peasants, then they save the kingdom from the evil king or some other boring crap. Blah blah blah, that movie suffered from a serious lack of having crap be on fire.
Now Reign of Fire, as the title might suggest, had a fair amount of stuff actually on fire. Crops were burned, shelters were burned, tanks were burned, and you certainly get points for burning tanks. But, as with Dragon Heart, the movie focuses on “plot” between “humans.” If the move focused more on “dragons” who were “burning things,” they seriously could have been more profitable than Cameron’s Titanic.
| Note: Hey, there’s a neat idea! Try to put a dragon in the movie Titanic. See where your imagination takes you! A dragon could have melted that damn iceberg without even trying. |
Video games also suffer from a dearth of dragons. Now to be fair, there’s no telling how many dragons or dragon-like creatures that I have killed in Japanese RPG’s or Zelda games, but that’s just not the same. In RPG’s, they breath fire on you, but rather than catch on fire, you just see a red number fly over your head signifying that you “took damage.” I’m sorry, dragon fire breath deserves more than just damage points. You could at least be on fire or something.
Cockamamie Japanese games aside, the only game where I can really remember fighting a dragon is Tomb Raider II. Now TR2 might have been the best Tomb Raider game made, out of the 50 or so that have been made now, and there’s a lot of stuff right about it.
First off, you play as a chick with an over-sized rack in shorty-shorts, and you whip out an M-16 and blow the hell out of a dragon at the end of the game. Kind of hard to argue with that.
To make things better, if the dragon breathed fire on you, you would actually catch on fire. And for those of you familiar with Tomb Raider, you’ll remember that catching on fire was really bad, which is also consistent with battling a dragon. The only down side was that this was one of those Asian dragons that didn’t quite have the whole flying thing down yet.
| Note: Bowser from Mario is certainly very dragon-like. He does breath fire, and he is reptilian. However, he does not fly, and he has a turtle shell on his back, so he’s more turtle than dragon. Sucks for him. |
Again, dinosaurs have appeared in video games over and over, but not so much luck with dragons. In the game “Turok the Dinosaur Hunter” you fight a laser-shooting T-Rex. Now don’t get me wrong, a laser-shooting T-Rex is awesome, but imagine how much more awesome that would be if you fought a laser-shooting-fire-breathing-flying-T-Rex. My imagination tells me: Pretty damn.
Actually, the Pranzer (spell?) Dragon series actually let you ride around and shoot stuff on a smaller sized dragon-esq creature that shot lasers. Even though a laser-shooting-dragon sounds awesome on the surface, it really wasn’t that awesome in the game. The real problem is that nothing ever caught on fire from the lasers. Fire breathing is superior lasers, I guess.
What I envision is a new open-world game with like awesome graphics where you have to battle a fire breathing dragon that flies around and causes everything to catch on fire. And once you beat the game, you get to play as the dragon, and fly around and catch stuff on fire. Kind of like grand-theft-auto, except with fire. Lots and lots of fire.
So there you have it. Dragons are awesome. Unfortunately, the only place you can find dragons now days are in Saturday morning cartoons, and they’re like sissy-friendly dragons. But one day, somebody will appear over the horizon, and they will make a movie or a video game about a dragons that fly around burning crap without relying on pointless things like “plot” or “non-burning-things.” Can you imagine how rich that somebody is going to be? My imagination tells me: Pretty damn.
Circa December 29, 2009