So It’s Come To This

There is another episode of the Cutting Room Floor up. Get it now, while it’s hot, because this may be the last one you get for a while.

Happy Holidays from Trailer Pod Boys

The Christmas episode of “Trailer Pod Boys” is now on-line.

Check our here at the Trailer Pod Boys site.

Does Nokia Have The Guts?

Over at Daring Fireball, Gruber referenced this article at Engadget about the future of Nokia.

Gruber:

Count me as a Nokia pessimist. I think their leadership lacks the balls to move ahead strategically.

He may very well be right, but Nokia has been in a similar position before, and – like Apple – they had to hit rock bottom before bouncing back.

Nokia has been around since 1865. In the past century-plus, they have made everything from tires to cabling to toilet paper. In the 60’s they got heavy into electronics and telecommunications and later TVs, PCs and eventually mobile phones.

By the late 80’s, they still had a sprawling product line, but no real identity – they had been around so long, and produced so many different products, they were the Finnish equivalent of General Electric. Sure everybody knew who they were, but they weren’t dominating any markets. (I still remember visiting the Helsinki Zoo in 2001 and seeing a paper towel dispenser with “Nokia” written on it in Bell Bottom. They hadn’t made paper towels in probably forty years or more.)

In 1988, Nokia’s CEO, Kari Kairamo, committed suicide. The company went into mourning for a time and, soon after, the new management determined to focus their product line on mobile phones and infrastructure. They divested everything else. Imagine GM only making the Volt from now on. That’s how radical it was.

But that singular focus gave them the strength and momentum to dominate the mobile phone market for more than a decade. To the point where in the early 2000’s, there were rumors of Nokia putting Motorola and Ericsson out of business (at least the mobile phone business).

Now, a scant nine years later, Apple is the rising star. RIM is the established leader in business phones. Android is making interesting inroads, and Windows Mobile is scooping up whatever it can get. (I honestly don’t know how well the Pre is doing.) More and more people are buying smartphones over the cheap/free feature phones that are Nokia’s bread and butter.

Nokia is still producing a majority of the phones purchased in the world, but they’re essentially disposable, and their efforts at the mid- to high-end have been also-rans at best (I know they make some quality smartphones, but nothing that’s really made headlines in the past six or seven years). Their platform strategy is ancient and fragmented (Symbian? Maemo?), and their hardware designs are pedestrian.

They need to do what they did twenty years ago (minus the suicide, of course): step back, focus, divest and innovate. Essentially the same thing Apple did with the return of The Steve.

The only problem is that Nokia has a dominant position in the mobile market right now (and all the legacy/support problems that that entails), whereas Apple was barely hanging on  to a few percentage points of the PC market in the late 90’s and could afford to make a break from the past to move forward.

Nokia management had the balls to do it twenty years ago. The question is, do the have them now?

I worked in the Nokia Enterprise Systems division for six years. If their management during the years of 2000-2005 reflects their management now, I have to agree with Gruber – I’m pessimistic.

They had no strategy, no long-term vision. They thrashed back and forth between supporting competing product lines in a single division. The one thing they did really well was lay people off.

It would be a shame for Nokia to fail, in whatever measure, because they are such a big part of the fabric of the Finnish culture (at one point they employed 1% of the population – think about that). I hope the executives can see the writing on the wall and make some drastic changes before it’s too late.

Comic Wars: Episode 4

Welcome back to another issue of Comic Wars where, if it wasn’t in the movie, it doesn’t belong on the page.

(If you haven’t yet, please read episodes 1, 2 and 3.)

We catch up with our heroes getting cornered in the detention area just after freeing Princess Leia from her cell. And by this time, I bet Han is getting a bit tired of the mouth on that woman, and almost wishes she were back in her cell, if you know what I mean.

There’s nothing really out of line with the title page, other than all of the dialog is completely made up for the comic and would never have been written by Lucas (at least until the prequels).

Plus the fact that Han quips, “Now I know why they call this place Death Star” when there’s no way he knows that’s what it’s called. The only person he’s talked to who knows that name is Leia, and they’ve barely had time to start lusting after each other. Unless maybe when they were riding up the elevator to the detention level, there was a plaque that read, “Welcome to the Death Star, please select floor”. Or maybe the stormtrooper uniforms say “Property of Death Star” on the inside.

Oh, and now that I’m thinking about it, whatever happened to the poor guys whose uniforms they stole? As far as I can tell, they were shoved in the smuggling compartments and left there to rot. It’s not like Han did any smuggling after this point, so he probably didn’t look in those compartments too often, given that he was constantly on the run from bounty hunters.

I can just picture him giving the Falcon a thorough cleaning once the teddy bears defeated the Empire and finding a couple of naked bodies, fingernails worn down to nubs from trying to claw their way out. Unfortunately, Han had soundproofed the chambers so no one ever heard the cries for help. These two guys – plus the poor technicians, whose only crime was to be good at operating a sensor array – ended up dying of thirst in each others’ arms.

But, getting back to the story, Leia grabs a gun and shoots a hole in the wall leading them down into the garbage compactor:

Once again they completely miss an opportunity to use one of the best lines of the movie: “What an incredible smell you’ve discovered.” Also, once again Han says, “Holy –!” which we know was never uttered in any of the movies. So knock it off.

In the movie, Han is the last one down, by a few moments, so it’s not out of the question that he tries blasting his way out of the garbage room (although when Luke says they already tried that, I wonder why Han (or the audience) didn’t hear the blaster bolt bouncing around the chamber the first time. How long was that chute, anyway?) But here, Han even says, “These trash chambers are vacuum sealed” before trying to shoot. So, he knows it’s magnetically sealed, and shoots anyway? That seems suicidally stupid, even for Han.

And what kind of non-union, crappy Sullustan laborers assembled that hatch? I can’t tell whether it was designed to be an octagon or a hexagon, but there are seven radial struts, none of which are in any position to support each other. Chewie doesn’t look too happy about it, either. Maybe, being a Wookiee, he knows that the downtrodden slave races forced to labor for the Empire do shoddy work on purpose. Kind of like Oskar Schindler, but with Ewoks instead of Jews.

Here, Han, looking suspiciously like Superman, complains that they’re going to die in the stolen stormtrooper outfits. Is he really that vain? I mean, when the Imperial sewage crew is forced by the investigation team to dredge every compactor for human remains, is he afraid that they will point and laugh at the fact that there are crushed stormtrooper armor parts mixed in with the slurry that was once Han Solo?

This is what I was talking about in Chapter 3: If they went through the trouble to use the correct call sign for that stormtrooper earlier (“TK421″), why did they go and make up a new serial number for the garbage unit? We all know it’s 3263827 (I’m not the only one who’s memorized that, right nerds?). I mean, they don’t even have the correct number of digits! That would never have gotten past the Imperial Hatch Numbering Committee (and you just know there was a committee for that, don’t you?).

I’m not sure what “flying thru the five fire rings of Fornax” means, but I can only assume that it’s some crazy sexual maneuver that requires a flight suit, a lightsaber and a mynock.

This page displays some of the worst visual storytelling I’ve ever seen. Comics are at least 50% a visual medium, but the writer, for some reason, felt like he had to have Han narrate every intention, action, reaction and effect in the whole sequence.

Granted, the printed page lacks the motion of the movie screen, so you might need to tweak it a little to play out this joke. But there are better ways to do it. For instance, instead of extreme close-ups of Han’s face, you can have bigger shots of the stormtroopers finding themselves cornered and turning around to see that only Han (and possibly Chewie) is chasing them.

Or, assuming the artist is not up to the task (and he isn’t), you’ve got the fail-safe of all comics: the narration box. It would be simple, and appropriate, to have a box say, “Han chases the stormtroopers down the hall UNTIL … they are CORNERED and have to turn and FIGHT! Then, realizing that JUST ONE MAN – HAN – was making all the noise, they set about blowing him to SMITHEREENS!” Just insert the word “space” in a few random places, and Bob’s your uncle.

Or, failing that, just have Han think the things he’s saying, instead of saying them out loud like some kind of moron who speaks at length, very loud, to no one, while running full-bore in a life-threatening situation. So, in a sense, like every other comic book character ever.

As they say in the movie biz: Show. Don’t tell.

… and everybody knows what happens when you say “boop”*

*And if you don’t know, shame on you for not listening to the D-1-3 Show. Your new assignment is to go listen to all right now until you know what “boop” means.

Tune in next time to see Luke say, “Hurry, Chewbacca! We’re being attacked by the DEATH STAR!” No. Really.

Ladies’ Week

Over at the Cutting Room Floor, we review our penultimate zombie movie, Day of the Dead.

Episode 7 of Trailer Pod Boys is on-line

We’ve got some new ideas coming soon to the podcast, and we found something pretty freakin’ cool that every Trailer Park Boys fan would want – and it’s free! Our round table discussion looks at Episode 4 of Season 2 of Trailer Park Boys, “A Dope Trailer is no place for a Kitty”.

You can listen to it here at the Trailer Pod Boys website.