Mods, I’m sorry if this belongs somewhere else, but it seems to me that anything Jack Chick-related usually gets put here in the Pit.
One of my all-time favorite Chick Tracts is “Dark Dungeons,” the one about how playing RPGs will lead to Satanism and death.
Well, I just saw a link to a 3D animated adaptation of “DD” done by Boolean Union Studios, and it’s AWESOME!
Eh. If you say so. All that dogmatic hate spewing stuff is anathema to me.
Wow, that was bad. Horrible voice acting and even worse animation. It looked like it was made circa 1992. And then the film itself… It started with “This film has been approved for some people by absolutely no one in particular” so I was at first thinking it was going to be a parody, but then it just played everything straight, so I don’t know what this piece of crap was trying to accomplish.
I do want to ask a question though. Chef Troy, why do you like it? I know you are not even close to being a fan of Chick (except for possibly being a fan of the unintentional comedy), so why did you like that short film?
Yeah, I’m with the armed simian here. It’s not parody, and doesn’t have the je ne sais quoi of a Chick tract.
And seriously, six minutes of credits for a twenty minute short?
I guess I see the sheer straight-faced awfulness of it as a kind of parody in itself.
I mean, you guys don’t think the people who made this AGREE with the sentiments therein, do you? Because I didn’t get that sense at all. It felt like mocking with a straight face to me.
Plus, Wil Wheaton liked it (his blog is where I first saw it) – surely that gives it some ironic hipster cred.
Nah, it’s just not funny.
If Wesley Crusher put the soundtrack of the thing on vinyl, I might give it hipster cred, but the thing just sucks.
Wait, no I wouldn’t. The soundtrack is even worse than the voice acting.
What I’m saying is that the guys who made this look like they failed out of DeVry.
No. These people were serious about this. If they weren’t, then they suck at satire, because nothing about this video suggests that it’s anything but sincere. Again, six minutes of credits?
I think that’s it. They suck at satire. These guys are untalented, that’s pretty fucking obvious, but they thought to themselves that if they played it straight the unintentional comedy that makes the Chick tracts a thing would come through. But the DeVry dropouts suck, so it doesn’t.
Huh… I still think they are hacks, but it seems like they are playing it straight for a reason:
I bolded “risible” because that makes it apparent they don’t respect Chick much.
It’s clearly a parody - they meet an ogre and mention “Mordenchainen’s Magical Watchdog”, then argue a bit over whether she actually cast it which is straight from Summoner Geeks (go to the 1:30 mark). Plus, there’s a Wilhelm scream when the first guy gets hit. Just a very lousy parody.
Having looked at their website, they have an entire section devoted to mocking Chick Tracts (as an animation studio…?) so yeah, looks like “failure to convey message due to abysmal technical skill”.
Seriously, I’ve created 3D models that looked better than the ones in that movie, and I’m a system administrator who fucks around with 'em in my spare time because it’s fun.
There were obvious parodic touches here and there: The preachers thick southern accent, “who brought the gasoline,” the shots of Mountain Dew bottles on the gaming tables and Marcie’s room. The end scene where they’re all staring at the fire is clearly meant to show she’s just as brainwashed as she would have been with the witches, if not more so.
The problem is it just isn’t that funny. Chick tracts are funny because they’re utterly sincere. When you copy them nearly straight, but without the sincerity, it’s pretty boring. The thing has novelty value, but that’s about it.
And yeah, way to many end credits.
The ending had a little merit --as they’re singing some hymn about Jesus, but the voices, instead, sound satanic. The only part that resonated with me was the voice of the preacher who nailed the pathos–sounding a lot like the young, straight-out-of-Bible college ministers I’ve met who evoke the Trinity of I’s: insecure, inexperienced, and ignorant.
I only give this production one half HAW out of three.
Normally I wouldn’t reply to comments like this, but since I actually read Straight Dope (though rarely the forums) I thought I’d weigh in.
We’re the first people to admit that Dark Dungeons isn’t exactly great art. We hoped that people would at least laugh at it. For the record, we enjoy Chick for the humor value, but we don’t believe any of it. Our site should be testament enough to that fact.
We’re amateurs and haven’t pretended to be anything else. DeVry drop-outs? Heck, I have an English degree, and this project was my first attempt at animation. It really shows in a lot of places. We put the movie together without a budget, and without any resources beyond people we actually knew. That’s why the voice-acting is somewhat uneven. Nobody is more aware of the flaws in the finished piece than we are. We had reached about the halfway point in our production, and we began to ask ourselves if the project was worth finishing. We’d kind of given up on it when one of the RPG-related blogs (The Escapist) noticed the site, and they seemed to like it. So we said “ok, maybe people will actually want to see this”. That encouraged us to actually finish the movie.
As far as the parody issue is concerned- the things people have said in the thread above mirror some of the discussions we had among ourselves when we started the project (though we were a bit more polite with each other). Straight-up rendition, or flat out parody? I didn’t want it to be completely straight, but at the same time we both felt that we should use the actual text of the Chick tract, that people would want that. In the end, we chose a compromise, playing things fairly straight, but with a few (hopefully) humorous modifications to the dialog. In the end, I’m not sure it was the best course to take, and I sometimes wish we’d done it another way.
We finished Dark Dungeons almost a year ago, and we’ve moved on to other projects, so I’ll live with the choices we made and the flaws in the work. I realize that none of the things I’ve said shield the final project from criticism, and it’s not my intention to do so. That’s part of the deal, after all- when you release something to the outside world and the rabid internet, you kind of have to take what people say about it. I also realize this is the flame board. Nevertheless, I wanted to provide a little context.
For people who liked it (laughed at it, laughed with it, whatever) we’re happy you did. For people who didn’t… we’ll try harder next time.
Thanks for reading,
Andrew Bean
Boolean Union Studios
Thanks for the feedback on the feed back, Boolean.
As you know, early efforts are generally supposed to suck, so that you can learn from them. 
I actually think playing it straight is the right decision, though. I think it’d be awesome, in fact, if some good actors (or at least, “after school special” level actors) with access to decent equipment (or at least you know) were to make a live-action version of the tract.
Honestly, I wouldn’t have even bothered mocking it if you didn’t have a “studio”. :dubious:
For these two lines, I’m gonna give you guys a free pass on this one.
I really don’t know how much effort you had put in it, so I’m not gonna bash it…but part of me really enjoyed it because I understood it to be parody based just from watching it…I saw it as a metaphor that compared your animation and sound to match the mind of Jack Chick himself…out-of-date and out-of-touch.
So…the burning question…did Jesus provide the gasoline?
Heh… because “Boolean Union Studios” sounds better than “Two People in a Converted Barn”.
Andrew