Formerly for game music, this is home to discussions about potential fighters in Super Smash Bros, a day at a time. It's a bold, scary new era for this series.
Here's the complete collection for my long-running Nintendo article series, Smash's Most Wanted:
http://smashmusicideas.tumblr.com/post/126429567840/smashs-most-wanted-collection
Also, here are my reviews of classic TV shows:
http://smashmusicideas.tumblr.com/post/141232131150/cheers-reviews-the-collection
If you'd like me to discuss or weigh the chances of a character (or write about anything else Smash-related), just use the "Ask Me Anything" link. It's fun!
It’s incredible I’ve gone for this long without discussing one of my favorite targets of mockery, ponytail-adorned actor Steven Seagal. While IMDb’s first line in his profile (which has existed since at least 2008) describes him as “boyishly handsome (often with ponytail)” and he’s headlined almost every single film he’s acted in, there are few people in the entertainment world who receive and merit the sheer and constant amount of ridicule and criticism, and just as few who’ve burned as many bridges.
Younger readers or cinephiles may look at his anomalous number of poor direct to DVD films and wonder how it is that Seagal - a large, not particularly fit man with a ridiculous rasp and and a penchant for character names like “Gino Felino” - possibly became a world-famous action star. Hell, I imagine film buffs older than myself are still unsure about the answer. Seagal’s career, as it turns out, is a rather fascinating look into fame and power in Hollywood, and how fleeting it ultimately is.
Like one of his unstoppable heroes, Seagal came in almost literally out of nowhere. He’d never acted before in a movie, and yet this 37-year-old martial arts instructor suddenly and almost inexplicably got a vehicle made especially for him in 1988’s Above the Law. While he would always claim otherwise, it was generally understood around Hollywood that he was “protected” by Creative Arts Agency co-founder Mike Ovitz. Ovitz, who’s securing of David Letterman in the Late Show was immortalized in the HBO film the Late Shift, trained with Seagal in the latter’s role as a Hollywood martial arts instructor and was interested enough to not only get him a shot, but many. The films - Law, Hard to Kill, Marked for Death, and Out for Justice (yes, they almost all use a similar title convention) - got bigger and bigger, until he finally got an A-list picture with Under Siege.
A novelty Die Hard knockoff on a battleship, Under Siege was a box office sensation that put the actor on the map. (Just a) Naval cook Casey Ryback has retroactively become the model of the Seagal character, a humble, perfect killing machine who’s soft voice and grimace barely contain an intensely violent fury. More importantly, Ryback had a secret past: he was, unbeknownst to the rest of the cast, a Navy SEAL and veritable one-man army.
Above the Law similarly gave Seagal’s Nico Toscani a prior life in the CIA, as well as a childhood spent in Japan. These weren’t just added for the film’s plot but to add a real life connection. Seagal, you see, claimed to have been a CIA operative, a master of Aikido, and the first white man to open a dojo in Japan. With his limb-breaking fight sequences, executives were apparently captivated, loathe to question or dismiss his legitimacy, especially with the undocumented efforts he was so calmly forthright about.
Of course, those turned out to be somewhat less than accurate, something covered in John Connelly’s 1993 Spy Magazine profile “Man of Dishonor.” A scathing profile of the actor, it revealed to the public the extent of Seagal’s lies and fabrications. He was emphatically not a CIA operative, he was not the first white man to own a dojo in Japan, and while skilled, his martial arts prowess turned out to be exaggerated. He was roundly disliked by early test audiences, and was despised on set. Most damning, it revealed (among other things) that he had a history of bigamy, multiple sexual harassment cases that were hidden by the studios, and multiple film associates who were members of the Mafia. The profile was catastrophic, and the public started to aggressively turn on him.
But as much damage as Connelly’s article did, it paled in comparison to Seagal himself. With his ego expanding even further, he decided that his sixth picture would also be his directorial debut. 1994's On Deadly Ground was a $50 million vanity project with aims to not only tell a blockbuster action story, but a powerful environmentalist screed as well. Instead, it became a massive flop that revealed him to the public as an extreme narcissist. Frequent complaints included its poor use of Michael Caine, Joan Chen, and R. Lee Ermey; its condescending portrayal of the Inuit people; and Seagal’s physically painful, four minute speech about saving the planet (which had to be cut down from eleven minutes after test audiences rioted).
The damage was permanent: Seagal’s time as a rising, world-renowned star only lasted seven years. While he’d get a few token wide releases - mostly for the sake of his co-stars, like Kurt Russell in Executive Decision and DMX in Exit Wounds - Seagal’s place in theaters was effectively dead. His films since quickly went from limited release to direct to video, where between one and four are released every year. It might be something like purgatory for a man who was spent his formative years as an actor groomed for the the upper echelons of Hollywood.
What makes Seagal so fascinating - and so easily and extensively able to make fun of - is the extreme disconnect between his characters and real life. He’s a public Buddhist who’s chosen to profess his spirituality with ego-driven blues albums Songs from the Crystal Cave and Mojo Priest, as well as the Lightning Bolt energy drink. He constantly demands a moral or social element in his movies, which is undercut by his misogynistic attitude, arm-breaking tendencies in his action movies (far more sadistic than what you’d see from Bruce Lee or Sylvester Stallone), and a history of attacking fellow cast members on set. At one point he refused to kill the fictional villains of his movies on religious grounds, but he’s also friends with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and various other Eastern European politicians with histories of human rights abuse.
Most visibly, he’s…well, kind of obese. I really don’t care to mock people’s weight, but it’s impossible not to with Seagal. His films, up until today, continue to present him as an invulnerable superhero with a mysterious past, but his massive size (which seems to increase in inverse proportion to his films’ budgets), leathery skin, and lack of movement make it beyond implausible. His attempt at a zen-like calm extends into a laziness where he won’t appear in his own movies for most of their runtime or perform such strenuous stunts as walking up flights of stairs (stunt doubles often take Seagal’s place in non-speaking shots). Hell, he often doesn’t even dub his own lines in post after his line readings prove too mumbly and incomprehensible to use.
Throughout all of this, Seagal has retained an unbelievable ego, which more than anything else is what makes him a target even among his own fans. Arnold Schwarzenegger has almost always had an element of self-aware goofiness, Bruce Willis is openly dismissive of his movies in a way that made him palatable in warmed-over premises, and Seagal’s quasi-rival Jean-Claude van Damme always projected a strong vulnerability and pain. By contrast, Seagal is simply a rampant narcissist; he never gets hit unless it’s part of a plan, he’s almost mythical among his fictional peers, and he seems totally incapable of mocking his self-image. So when he shows up, looking like a slow-moving monster wearing his own face as a stretched-out mask, it’s difficult to not just rail into him and his plus-size self-image.
And somehow that self-image continues to only get worse, from his reality show about being a real (if mostly ceremonial) New Orleans police officer to his tenure as an officer (who still ostensibly stars in up to three movies a year) under Arizona celebrity sheriff and asshole Joe Arpaio, to his rumored ambitions in running for governor. It seems as though “falling upward” is a legitimate strategy in his case, even with its limits for success.
Seagal, like many figures of public humiliation, is a man who constantly and very obviously struggles between his public persona and private life, between the the hero, star, and savior he wishes to be with the petty, violent jerk he is. He’s played so many different and broad ethnicities (Italian, Chinese, American Indian, sometimes with what might bea confused African-American inflection) that most viewers have no idea of his actual Jewish/Irish heritage. In his early years he took bits and pieces of his friends and associates’ life stories as his own, a chameleonic attitude at odds with the self-assured hero he presented himself as. And outside of his deaths in Executive Decision and Machete (the latter of which being his only villain role), he’s never died - hell, if you add the Onion Movie to that list of exceptions, he’s never not starred in a film of his.
This is usually the part where I add in a contrary detail to ease the blow, talking about his good side or things I like about him. That’s not happening today. To be honest - and I say this as someone who owns at least twenty of his movies, and at least two on Blu Ray - the only thing about him I like is the myriad of wonderful ways to make fun of him. Like his infamous episode of Saturday Night Live that led him to be declared the worst host in the show’s 40-year history, or his TV series True Justice as Seattle cop (and former solder and/or secret agent, natch) Elijah Kane, the latter of which is available on Netflix Instant. It’s certainly been my favorite article to find links for, reveling in every joke about his weird brillo pad hair, or that time he crossed paths with Eddie Griffith as a deadly gangster, or that time martial artist Gene LeBell choked him out on set after Seagal dared anyone to try.
Steven Seagal is a man who’s career was more accidental than anything else, a fluke that got out of control before the gears of Hollywood and a fickle public cut off their association with him. These days, he exists in public view in equal parts as both a figure of deep and specific nostalgia and a jester with no self-awareness, to be brought out and laughed at, and occasionally with, as a symbol of a more barbaric age. Like L. Ron Hubbard, he created a persona based on fiction and fabrication, only for that to lead to a real life and career that’s become vastly more fascinating, if also marked with schadenfreude. But as cruel as it may be, I like his intermittent presence in American culture; it’s a great example of the dangers, trappings, and failings of an overnight success story. And you can take that to the bank.