"Wow, pinecone!" It's an apple.

June 26, 2024 12:14 AM

Tales In Mushroom Village is a Chinese computer-animated TV series from 2009. It's considered partly lost media. 2009 was 15 years ago, but that was the year Pixar's Up came out, and Toy Story was 14 years old by then, so the animation can't be that bad... right? Here's a trailer (2 minutes). Two compilations have been uploaded to Youtube (A, B, both 1h40m, Chinese with terrible English subtitles) How long can you survive them? There's also a trailer for a sequel series called Tales In Mushroom Village II: Alien Visitors, which you'd be forgiven for thinking was a completely different bad CGI thing edited into the original, but its oh so all too very much real.

I won't mince words: it's baaaaad, y'all. But it can be enjoyable to watch bad things, if you're of a certain diseased frame of mind. I have had that illness for a long time; maybe some of you are sufferers too. Each of the two long videos has five episodes.

Things to look/listen for in the first episode alone:
Disturbing character design throughout
"What a bad lucky day! You will be accused by me."
Unexpected cameos by Zelda music
Unnecessary transitions in a shot, to the same shot
Four Chinese sentences that get translated into "Ugh..."
The ice cream cone that becomes a banana in an edit
The door step that's clearly too tall for any character to climb
"Bad brother, compensate us..." "Mum, he must compensate us."
Endless rabbit whining
Rabbits here have tapering tails instead of cottontails
Baby rabbits suddenly spinning around the Fox elder's head
Sheriff Volcano-head
"Village head, my grandpa has said the misunderstanding is the devil! Or you'll be the devil!" "I have heard that impulse is the devil."
Naonao sleeps at night resting stiffly on his bed in his clothes with his baseball cap over his face
"Get up everybody...! Do cleaning...!"

posted by JHarris (7 comments total)

oh my god it's so CGI Palz
posted by DoctorFedora at 2:12 AM on June 26 [1 favorite]

It seems genuinely remarkable that this escaped both 2000s imageboard culture and the, at the time, blowing up youtube poop scene. I cant see how this doesn't fit right in with like, bart the general type internet stuff.

I have to wonder if it was memed locally? like was the division between chinese and western internet just too big at the time?
posted by emptythought at 2:13 AM on June 26 [1 favorite]

It's partially lost media, which probably explains some of it. It's been 15 years since it hit the airwaves, so in China we're probably just hitting the point where people who grew up with it have some nostalgia for it, creating a market for DVDs, which I'm pretty sure is where these uploads came from.
posted by JHarris at 2:23 AM on June 26

I mean, it's not that far away from Pecola and that got broadcast on American TV.
posted by JoeZydeco at 7:33 AM on June 26

I don't know if it's a cultural thing, but Pecola feels like it's night-and-day better than this.

I was cognizant that part of my reaction to Tales In Mushroom Village might be culture shock. These kinds of ultra-cheap programs seem more likely to show up in China, where, at that time at least, there were probably economic forces leading to their creation. In the US there's more media pressure towards weeding out these low budget shows, and the US is where I grew up and live, and it is possible that acclimation to that culture is part of why I find this show so odd.

But I think that's also why I like watching it? It's very different than the media that usually shows in where I live. And as time passes programming like this is only going to get rarer, TiMV is already nine-tenths lost media as it is (10 episodes preserved here, 100 made for TV).

Anyway, the media I'd put closest to this is Foodfight, and that was completely American in design and production. And TiMV has more soul than Foodfight did, although relative values of soul-having are inherently difficult to compare.
posted by JHarris at 8:58 AM on June 26 [1 favorite]

This whole endeavor screams "massive money-laundering operation" to me.
posted by hairless ape at 9:04 AM on June 26

it's okay for some lost media to stay lost
posted by scruss at 1:17 PM on June 26 [1 favorite]