The film “Beetlejuice” lives unto a world itself……. nothing else looks like it.
And within the limitations of technology, you can do SOME THINGS but can’t go completely hog-wild.
I guess you can draft anything with animation– even further with super CGI effects, but sometimes “less is more” and you make up for it “with character”.
And stop-motion effects……. there is something “oddly more believable” with the herky-jerky movements while all-too-smooth computer animation just makes people “unsettled”.
Somewhere “between here & there” we seek to give the audience an explosively-entertaining movie WITHOUT “COMPLETELY LOSING IT”.
Remember, Beetlejuice is the kind of fiend “up to no good” behind the factory or gas station like a hangdog stink of bargain-basement derangement.
Pay him “his due”…… and don’t forget to call his name: “BEETLEJUICE” (X’s 3).
Well, I guess “that marriage arrangement” didn’t work out.
Here today, “gone to hell”.
Even as Beetlejuice sits morosely on a lawn chair in an apartment complex, moping like a little boy. All you needed was a pink flamingo in the yard—halfway between Las Vegas & Florida, maybe just here in Missouri for wild, spun-out times.
In a state of twilight “hangover”, his SUPER POWERS aren’t too super at the moment. Maybe just need some whiskey and a snort of cocaine to clear his rotten cobwebbed head, halfway dead “and right next door to hell”.
Just like “a piece of meat that keeps on living” as he ought to lay down on the mattress flung in the corner. Or maybe just watch some low-rent daytime t.v. with the ambulance-chaser ads and “for profit” rip-off colleges as “the big score” was a bust, this time.
As if looking up in the air and apprising “a better reality”, perhaps MORE VIGOROUS than cheap “family feed-barn” all-you-can-eat pizza buffets and the prizes you win out of gum-ball machines.
Life is like an empty beer bottle……. “you always know what you’re gonna git”.
For it’s THE GRIND of “living death” as society sets you loose with E-Z credit financing and no safeguards on huge Visa/Mastercard bills. Narrowed options on the marginal side of Jerry Springer existence, unresourceful and sensationally-vacant.
Slithering further and further down the cultural drainpipe….. as the inviting ground gives off the stink of rotten mortality like a yawning pit.
Beetlejuice scratches his crotch, then “gets up to piss”.
Chicks equal trouble….. misadventure leads to “the same damned place”. You can’t “take it with you”, even if you earned it. And storms rumble on the wing, a whirlwind of manic crescendo as the parking lot now starts getting pelted with hail.
Good day “to stay in” and whack-off. Happy Birthday, cretin.
Not all of the after-life can be drudgery, can it? Midnight at the ball and Beetlejuice would inevitably pose “as a valet”, driving off with people’s cars in a chauffer’s hat. The vehicles would be turned into twisted Tim Burton sculptures at the graveyard junk lot, incidental to the Bio-Exoricist sign down at the office. Crazy carousels and pitch-black skies, “just a night down at the bug-zapper” or just a fool’s paradise in unincorporated purgatory…… sleazy and corrupt like rotten nutball commercial time, graveyard hours only. I wouldn’t count on it, but “paid sandworm rides” aren’t a good idea in the “snake farm” business to recent arrivals. Don’t walk through strange doors and never lose the handbook…… you could die, laughing.
Glenn Shadix plays “Otho”, the masterful interior decorator with a jowly air of presumption and tremendous self-control. “Just so”, with hints of Alfred Hitchcock and lugubrious, droll wit.
I see a lot of Charles Addams in this guy—as the culture required boundaries and class distinctions to make such a world to exist, kind of a “mirror image” of the uncanny, propitious, classy, and weird.
The actor who played Otho “has passed on”, but that isn’t to say WE COULDN’T FIND AN IMPERSONATOR to make a cameo, perhaps in a low-rent “infomercial sequence” that shows you, even in The Netherworld, that “the more things change the more they stay the same”.
Ambulance chasers, “medical malpractice” shenanigans—the low-rent man is impressed by the trappings of class, if even the yuppie Dietz’s “lulled by appearances”.
Do the funky art school robot, German expressionism and severe artifice to dazzle, beguile, and confound. “A paranoid Android?”, Lydia would relate to this……
Hats off to the creators of this extraordinary creation in the old “Minecraft” game-engine.
I wrote this in their YouTube comments section:
You two creatives totally KICK-ASS!!! Love the sort of “dubstep” remix of the main Beetlejuice theme. With extra programming chops, I could see “a game”, inside THE GAME (– Minecraft)…… like the bonus levels in the old StarFox for SNES with looming, galactic slot-machines and a netherworld flag-rally, outpacing the sandworms.
Here’s an idea…….
However, this is way beyond the scope of “Beetlejuice, himself”……. probably still back on “PONG”, Asteroids, and FoozeBall in like, “the 4-bit swamp” of primordial gaming. If there’s money in it, why not a game on the smart-phone?
Here’s Beetlejuice trying to outpace the desperation of modern existence– you can say he’s being chased by “REMCO, the-goheadandgitit” repossession office for delinquent payments on his junky furniture. More, “my speed”……
Watch, as they were toying around with how to edit the ending. (A very “rough-cut”) before all the effects were “wrapped” in post-production.
You get a sense of “filmed possibilities” or unexplored tangents “mostly left on the cutting-room floor” like outtakes and miscues, taking on the appearance of an early student film.
This is called “coverage”, as in “COVER-MY-ASS” to hit all the bases once the essential celluloid is “in the can”, and what they director and editing team “have to work with”.
The moving image….. MOVIE MAGIC.
Somehow, this is all cobbled together by genius “big picture” thinkers to make a completed product, thanks to the contributions of hundreds.
You only see “the cream” on top…… as THE SLOG to get there is completely taken for granted by hyper-active 9 year-old’s. They say, too much “low-hanging fruit” will only make a youth SPOILED and quite sick with a media diet that leads to indigestion when they encounter the brutal facts of life.
Hell…… when there is no more room, “THE DEAD WILL WALK THE EARTH”.
Exurbs, countryside…… intergalactic elevators unto hellish, degraded, LOWER forms of non-existence.
Bleaker landscapes, stormy alien worlds……. uncanny, sure. Gray crud, a mountain of cancerous, ossified skulls like mineralized intestines, BURN BLACK.
Uncanny, sure…… as “a symptom of the sick, sick universe”.
Elaborate systems, wheels of time—if not five-pointed pentagrams and general unpleasantries as described by ancient occult orders. Returning, “by hearsay” with a crude road map of scribbles and strange-signage, like an old crumpled bus schedule.
Or even a community bulletin—“the trash pick-up service” as provided by the local netherworld municipality and other bureaucratic lore.
“Bring out your dead!”
No luck for “working stiffs”…… or even the husks of those whom “died” in the after-life.
For surely, they will be recycled into the flittering, antenna mind of a stag-beetle in this burrowing earth of mud, death, “and overall shittiness”.
Molten gold, leering goblin-faces, crystal skeleton keys….. so it is written.
Hierarchies of demons are described in dusty grimoires, a kind of neo-Roman army of legionnaires, trumpeters, prefects, captains of the guard along the walls of “DEATH CAPITOL”, the mountains of Hades rising in the distance…… but one has the sneaking suspicion that despite all the pageantry and ritual, your cremated bones will be pounded to ashes “and that’s the end of you”.
A cold shiver running down your greasy spine, like the root-evolution of a knotty horseshoe crab and nerve endings like the roots of a sub-world tree….. the BIG, LONG NOW like an endless droning silence as “the punch-line” is a ghoul pulling off their face to reveal a screaming skull.
The dimensions of reality “curl back in on themselves” like a riddle, a spiraling demise, a sacred geometry. An ironic punishment, but “with no answer”.
A form reveals itself…… Beetlejuice hanging off the trash-truck, out for “a joy ride”. Along the Helldarado of bones, BORN TO RAISE HELL and TOO YOUNG TO DIE. Though he’s over 700 years old, his infectious laugh plagues the pilgrim, the tourist, the lost.
Don’t hitchhike, Lydia. I’d turn around and shuffle away “fast as you can” in those funereal black rags and mourning garb. Draw a door in the air with your finger, grab the knob-sketch, and walk back through from whence you came—like Dorothy clicking her ruby slippers together and figuring “THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME”.
Spoken “3 times”…… NO, DON’T SAY IT!!! Not the “B-word”.
But there’s another word, “B” for “Box-Office BUSINESS”.
That’s 2 “B’s”. There…… at a sequel near you.
There’s more where that came from…… Keep watching, kids!
Smoke ’em if you got ’em…… no more reflective than a maggot at feeding-time and twice as verbal. Ashes-to-ashes & Dust-to-dust as the property is not dead, only “on break”.
And remember, hell is Universal– only worse for “fresh meat”, right-off the slab in the misbegotten scheme of things.
Life is a gas station and a bag of chips. He puts “The Jerk” in beef-jerky and will jerk-around “the cast-off’s” hapless enough to say the name of he-who-cannot-be-named.
“Video Graveyard”…… Netherworld Obscura…… Do you call on the dark?
Beetlejuice 2 Fan-Fiction 
