The kids over at Jossip were kind of prissy little bitches about this promo for the BBC's Beijing Olympics coverage, but we love it. Before looking into it, our assumption -- since, you know, we try to remember that white people haven't yet acheived worldwide hegemony -- had been that these monkeys and pigs and whatnot were characters in some ancient Chinese legend that we knew neither hide nor hair of, and that Jamie Hewlett (the Tank Girl creator who co-created the animated musical supergroup Gorillaz with Blur's Damon Albarn) had been pretty canny about using them to illustrate various of the Olympic competitions. (Yeah, kids at Jossip -- see how they throw that stick and then use it like an uneven bar? That's what happens in the Olympics too! See what they did there?)
Turns out that's only partially true -- this commercial seems instead to be borrowing the characters from Journey to the West, AKA the Legend of the Monkey King, which in turn inspired both Havoc in Heaven, the 1960's cartoon epic that marked the end of Chinese animation before the Cultural Revolution, and also (as a Jossip commenter notes) Monkey (or Monkey Magic), a cult Japanese kids show from the '70's that was shown in the UK but only sparingly in the States. Which, with its mix of history, technology, and high and low art, basically gives us chills. Which, we suppose, is what the Olympics are all about anyways.
Click on through for excerpts of both Havoc -- which is basically like if Fantasia had been directed by Clone Wars' and Samurai Jack's Genndy Tartakovsky -- and Monkey, which is basically like that plus, um, those live action Hanna-Barbera shows from the '70's.
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