I had never considered how Ralph Bakshi grew up on WWII propaganda, and now I feel like his filmmaking choices make a lot more sense. The level of heavy-handedness in some of his movies really is similar to wartime messaging. Absolutely unambiguous, and on-the-nose on multiple levels.
I remember watching this one as a kid, renting it from Blockbuster alongside 80s comedies and old scifi Anime, it was both alluring and utterly frightening for my younger self. Having watched again recently I'm struck by how goofy it is, something that is missing from my memories of it. It's always stuck with me for its brutality, even now on occasion those feelings, the scattered glimpses of it from my childhood still bubble up, the violence and eroticism congealing with Conan and old cover art from scifi novels to occupy a certain...aesthetic? Well, the one thing I can say for certain is that Bakshi knows how to leave his mark on you.
It's interesting that the farther we get from WWII the more taboo the German iconography from that war gets. You would think it would be the opposite as the memories and wounds (physical and emotional) would be fresher closer to the war and as we move further in time away the symbols would lose power but it almost feels the opposite. These things were very open in films from the 70s. units in Vietnam even openly displayed these symbols in some cases or gave names to their vehicles such as "der further" etc. 80's bands trying to be extra edgy would use them and even video games into the 90s such as Wolfenstein used these symbols heavily. now, even in historical context, these things are generally viewed as a very bad no-no, beyond simply being "edgy" and removed from video games in certain releases and censored in many cases, etc.
20 years ago, with the success of the Wizards SE DVD release, Bakshi was working on a sequel to Wizards centered on the child of Black wolf with the dark elf princess. who escaped. Bakshi said that the Wizards 2 would be a reflecton on the times which was the war on terror. and the child of Blackwolf would be like Osama Bin Ladin to the new world order imposed by the Elves and Faerie victors. a Wizards comic anthology was also planned but all this was shelved due to lack of funding and the major studios not wanting to take on the project. as Bakshi focused on his film Last Days of Coney Island.
It's a good thing he never made it then, Bakshi had a laughably childish understanding of reality on several levels and one can assume that he would have been just as pathetic with his extremely pedestrian understanding of the GwoT
What a strange adult animated film. Doubt it'd be made today. Then the 1980s happened and we got animated films from both the West and Japan like The Secret of NIMH or Akira. Good times.
Wizards sometimes feels like a string of sketches. Like they are just figuring out how to make a feature length movie, and it tips somewhere between sketches and episodic adventure.
I remember in the audio commentary in the wizards DVD, bakshi commented said in a German TV interview, he was asked why he used nazi symbols in the movie, Bakshi replied, well for him, nazism and germany = war, hahah, it offended the German interviewer. The movie was popular when it first came out but was dethroned with the release of star wars, in fact, while wizards was being made, star wars was being made in a neighbouring studio lot and Mark Hamill taking a break from star wars came over and was fascinated with wizards so much bakshi gave him a role as a fairie knight who gets shot by a assasin. . Also wizards and I believe there was a law suit between Vaughn Bode the creator of Cobalt 60 comics accusing Bakshi of stealing his ideas, but later Bakshi admitted that he was inspired by the Cobalt 60 comic and interestingly Wizards inspired Vaugn Bode to expand on his Cobalt 60 comic a decade later.
Avatar was a lot like Cheech Wizard, Necron 99 resembled Cobalt 60, and Eleanor was a DEFINITE Bode' Broad! Bode made Wizards as practice for his planned Lord of the Rings Wizards was good. LOTR was a stinker
Wizards was a success at the time. Just a slightly lesser success than Star Wars. Bakshi would get a free hand with other movies following this rotoscope success.
@@SusCalvin yep I remember it earned good bucks at the opening. but rapidly fell of the charts when Star wars debuted. Yah true with Bakshi, he made good with rotoscoping with American Pop and Lord of the Rings. watched Wizards in the cinema back in 78, Lord of the rings cinema back in 79 and American pop in a Hong kong late night midnight movie on the ATV world channel in the mid 80s.
In the Wizards RPG, they explained that dead dictators of the past were bound as demons in Scorch. So you could fight a high fantasy demon version of Idi Amin, Gobbels and Pol Pot.
I found it rather amusing to play "identify the movie that rotoscoped clip came from" I got "Patton", "Zulu", "Battle of the Bulge", and "Alexander Nevsky" Did anyone spot OTHER films?
yah remember watching this in 1978 in a Manila cinema and as a 11 year old, I was blown away by it, loved it. probably some of the most unique movies of the 1970s. and watched it many a time since then. and its funny back in the day it was considered a PG movie , a kiddie movie if this movie was made now this would be considered a R, and I doubt it if Wizards can even be made in today's political climate,
about 20 years ago , I remember writing a setting piece to modify the wizards setting to an rpg game system(Tw2000 2nd ed). and I remember extrapolating on how the Scortch society and armies were organized. So the mutants are divided by various tribes of varying degrees of power , organization etc. while Blackwolf may be the most powerful figure there are also others who dont follow his banner and even oppose him. Blackwolf's armies are not mechanized as a whole, in fact, i would say 90 percent of his troops are medieval, made of tribal levies ten percent of that are made up of his best troops which are equipped 1943 Wehrmacht style . whch are made up of demons, and some mutants. in fact, his generals officers advsiros are mostly demons. Mutants most of them never make officers just enlisted men and cannon fodder. also magic here varies with the hermetic magical arts prevailent in Black wolf and in the good lands. with Faerie arts in the good lands and Shamanistic and psionics prevailent in the mutant lands.
@@CloseingStraw97 yah that was 35 years ago. So basic TW2000 2nd ed. rules. but with a pts based magic system. Yah three kinds of magic, Hermetic, fae and Shamanistic. Hermetic is very much formulaic structured magic , fae is wild magic, and Shamanistic is spirit magic where the spirits teach you spells, Scorch wizards equivalent of Mordor encompasses a major portion of North America where the USA and portions of Northern Mexico. While Blackwolf has declared himself leader of all of Scorch he does not control it. and his power is contested by various mutant tribes who are more or less allied with him but have independence. Blackwolf has managed to civilize a few parts of Scorch like 10 percent with him establishing a few cities which resemble a mix of medieval central european and American mid 20th century living. Blackwolf's army 90 percent are made up of levies from barbaric allied mutant tribes iron age armies which are mostly equipped with sword and spear with a few mid 20th century type fire arms. They are used as cannon fodder. 10 percent if Blackwolf's elite which are made up of mutants equpped and trained like German ww2 troops complete with tanks and aircraft. and backed up by demons.
@@CloseingStraw97 basic system is TW2000 2nd ed. however the magic system uses TW2000 2nd ed. skill system but its called ability , the system is the same but just geared to casting spells rituals etc. also a spell caster has mana where he expends to cast spells and do rituals. 3 main systems of magic are Hermetic, Shamanistic and Psionics. Hermetic is more structured magic where your magic depends on your will , using your knowledge to do your magic, shamanistic is magic derived from spirits, using powers taught to you by spirits or using the spirits themselves to do your magic. and Psionics is magic of the mind. while a lot less versatile than the other two magics, it can be powerful. and psionics are mostly born with the gift people can be awakened with this power or artificially induced. through genetic manipulation. hermetic and shamanistic magic do not cross over. while psionics can also use hermetic and shamanistic magic.
I came of age in the 70s but didn't actually watch this film until I was in my late 40s. I wasn't particularly impressed, and considered it to be a poorly made film by an undisciplined director. For me, the climax, where Avatar shot the villain with a Luger felt empty. Maybe Bakshi thought he was subverting the expectation that Avatar would use magic. Frankly I had mentally and emotionally checked out of the film by the first half hour.
and also I remember in the early 1980s I saw a lot of ads in Dragon magazine for this RPG called Fireland supposed to be published by the K Society out of Tulsa OKH. but nothing came out of it. and the blurbs were very much a total copy of Wizards. and the official Wizards rpg was published in 1992, setting good RPG systems suck balls,
yeah people pretend that the word holocaust can only mean one thing. Its rather odd. Not to mention the mythology behind it. How long into the future will we have to go to be honest about it?
I think these weapons have the same problem a lot of steampunk has. No doubt the fictional technology is inferior to what it reasonable should exist along side.
Some of my friends like this one, but I sure didn't. It came off as basically hippy propaganda to me, presenting as idyllic the idea that people would just frolic out in the fields and have sex constantly, while being so anti-technology that something as simple as a record player is banned, and this is put forward as a positive. Though if that wasn't enough, the hero of the story is a complete hypocrite who still owns some of the banned technology, and he even uses an example of it to win in the end before tossing it aside distastefully. I also thought the rotoscoping and just straight up including WWII footage was lame, but then I find the short hand of just having slapping the swastika on the bad guys or otherwise to just make the bad guys be nazis to be a tired old trope. About the only positives are the examples you brought up as some of the goblins not being uniformly evil.
I think this was a premise of the movie. The fairy lands don't understand the threat, they think evil will get tired and go home after a token scrap, because that's what the mutants have always done. Towards the end we see a bunch of the remnant elf army, like some sort of partisan Polish Home Army dudes. And they sure have a mix of guns with them. And a wizard with a luger is how we have kept portraying wizards in our game ever since.
I really do hate how some many of the nazi symbols are treated, as you said, like talismans or magical things that can steal your soul. It gives them far too much credit
Whille alll this was going on in earth thhe Qu were rampaging through human colonies and going round thinking they owned the pllace until the Astromorphs gave them the ullimate twatting from whiich they never recovred.
This was such an odd movie the first time I saw it. We were expecting it to build to this big magical face-off between the brothers. Suddenly the gnome pulls out the luger, and it's like WTF, didn't see that coming. Don't know if a film like that would get as broad of an audience today with all the propaganda symbols.
Fritz will never be forgotten.
Look how they massacred my boy.
They killed fritz! They killed fritz!
its ok he was reborn as a cat
This is my new favorite channel
I had never considered how Ralph Bakshi grew up on WWII propaganda, and now I feel like his filmmaking choices make a lot more sense. The level of heavy-handedness in some of his movies really is similar to wartime messaging. Absolutely unambiguous, and on-the-nose on multiple levels.
I remember watching this one as a kid, renting it from Blockbuster alongside 80s comedies and old scifi Anime, it was both alluring and utterly frightening for my younger self. Having watched again recently I'm struck by how goofy it is, something that is missing from my memories of it. It's always stuck with me for its brutality, even now on occasion those feelings, the scattered glimpses of it from my childhood still bubble up, the violence and eroticism congealing with Conan and old cover art from scifi novels to occupy a certain...aesthetic?
Well, the one thing I can say for certain is that Bakshi knows how to leave his mark on you.
It's interesting that the farther we get from WWII the more taboo the German iconography from that war gets. You would think it would be the opposite as the memories and wounds (physical and emotional) would be fresher closer to the war and as we move further in time away the symbols would lose power but it almost feels the opposite. These things were very open in films from the 70s. units in Vietnam even openly displayed these symbols in some cases or gave names to their vehicles such as "der further" etc. 80's bands trying to be extra edgy would use them and even video games into the 90s such as Wolfenstein used these symbols heavily. now, even in historical context, these things are generally viewed as a very bad no-no, beyond simply being "edgy" and removed from video games in certain releases and censored in many cases, etc.
We’re just glazing over the fact that the epic climax wizard battle is just the good wizard pulling out a surprise gun and shooting the bad wizard?
It may have taken me some time to get over my initial reaction of "What?! He pulls a fucking Luger and that's it!"
Let me show you a trick mom showed me when you weren't around...
A feature length animated movie set up around one punch-line. Wonderful!
I just discovered this channel, and sometimes, I don't like what he has to say. That's good. Makes me think. Bravo!
20 years ago, with the success of the Wizards SE DVD release, Bakshi was working on a sequel to Wizards centered on the child of Black wolf with the dark elf princess. who escaped. Bakshi said that the Wizards 2 would be a reflecton on the times which was the war on terror. and the child of Blackwolf would be like Osama Bin Ladin to the new world order imposed by the Elves and Faerie victors. a Wizards comic anthology was also planned but all this was shelved due to lack of funding and the major studios not wanting to take on the project. as Bakshi focused on his film Last Days of Coney Island.
It's a good thing he never made it then, Bakshi had a laughably childish understanding of reality on several levels and one can assume that he would have been just as pathetic with his extremely pedestrian understanding of the GwoT
bro, you literally cover all the movies I grew up watching, its so funny to see for me
What a strange adult animated film. Doubt it'd be made today.
Then the 1980s happened and we got animated films from both the West and Japan like The Secret of NIMH or Akira. Good times.
let us remember heavy metal
Wizards sometimes feels like a string of sketches. Like they are just figuring out how to make a feature length movie, and it tips somewhere between sketches and episodic adventure.
I remember in the audio commentary in the wizards DVD, bakshi commented said in a German TV interview, he was asked why he used nazi symbols in the movie, Bakshi replied, well for him, nazism and germany = war, hahah, it offended the German interviewer. The movie was popular when it first came out but was dethroned with the release of star wars, in fact, while wizards was being made, star wars was being made in a neighbouring studio lot and Mark Hamill taking a break from star wars came over and was fascinated with wizards so much bakshi gave him a role as a fairie knight who gets shot by a assasin. . Also wizards and I believe there was a law suit between Vaughn Bode the creator of Cobalt 60 comics accusing Bakshi of stealing his ideas, but later Bakshi admitted that he was inspired by the Cobalt 60 comic and interestingly Wizards inspired Vaugn Bode to expand on his Cobalt 60 comic a decade later.
Avatar was a lot like Cheech Wizard, Necron 99 resembled Cobalt 60, and Eleanor was a DEFINITE Bode' Broad!
Bode made Wizards as practice for his planned Lord of the Rings
Wizards was good. LOTR was a stinker
Wizards was a success at the time. Just a slightly lesser success than Star Wars. Bakshi would get a free hand with other movies following this rotoscope success.
@@SusCalvin yep I remember it earned good bucks at the opening. but rapidly fell of the charts when Star wars debuted. Yah true with Bakshi, he made good with rotoscoping with American Pop and Lord of the Rings. watched Wizards in the cinema back in 78, Lord of the rings cinema back in 79 and American pop in a Hong kong late night midnight movie on the ATV world channel in the mid 80s.
This movie is still one of my absolute favorites.
One of my all time favorite movies
In the Wizards RPG, they explained that dead dictators of the past were bound as demons in Scorch. So you could fight a high fantasy demon version of Idi Amin, Gobbels and Pol Pot.
The voice actor performance of the opening narration 🤌🤌
I found it rather amusing to play "identify the movie that rotoscoped clip came from"
I got "Patton", "Zulu", "Battle of the Bulge", and "Alexander Nevsky"
Did anyone spot OTHER films?
yah remember watching this in 1978 in a Manila cinema and as a 11 year old, I was blown away by it, loved it. probably some of the most unique movies of the 1970s. and watched it many a time since then. and its funny back in the day it was considered a PG movie , a kiddie movie if this movie was made now this would be considered a R, and I doubt it if Wizards can even be made in today's political climate,
this is one of my favorite movies, i have the art of the artillery cannon as my computer wallpaper
Hey thanks for the video I watch Wizards a couple of days ago and i though it would a good video topic
about 20 years ago , I remember writing a setting piece to modify the wizards setting to an rpg game system(Tw2000 2nd ed). and I remember extrapolating on how the Scortch society and armies were organized. So the mutants are divided by various tribes of varying degrees of power , organization etc. while Blackwolf may be the most powerful figure there are also others who dont follow his banner and even oppose him. Blackwolf's armies are not mechanized as a whole, in fact, i would say 90 percent of his troops are medieval, made of tribal levies ten percent of that are made up of his best troops which are equipped 1943 Wehrmacht style . whch are made up of demons, and some mutants. in fact, his generals officers advsiros are mostly demons. Mutants most of them never make officers just enlisted men and cannon fodder. also magic here varies with the hermetic magical arts prevailent in Black wolf and in the good lands. with Faerie arts in the good lands and Shamanistic and psionics prevailent in the mutant lands.
I owned the wizards rpg. Never played it.
@@macmcleod1188 Yah same here owned the official Wizards RPG , well it sucked bad.
God damn you turned Twilight 2000 2ed into a fantasy game? I need to here more about this.
@@CloseingStraw97 yah that was 35 years ago. So basic TW2000 2nd ed. rules. but with a pts based magic system.
Yah three kinds of magic, Hermetic, fae and Shamanistic. Hermetic is very much formulaic structured magic , fae is wild magic, and Shamanistic is spirit magic where the spirits teach you spells,
Scorch wizards equivalent of Mordor encompasses a major portion of North America where the USA and portions of Northern Mexico. While Blackwolf has declared himself leader of all of Scorch he does not control it. and his power is contested by various mutant tribes who are more or less allied with him but have independence.
Blackwolf has managed to civilize a few parts of Scorch like 10 percent with him establishing a few cities which resemble a mix of medieval central european and American mid 20th century living.
Blackwolf's army 90 percent are made up of levies from barbaric allied mutant tribes iron age armies which are mostly equipped with sword and spear with a few mid 20th century type fire arms. They are used as cannon fodder. 10 percent if Blackwolf's elite which are made up of mutants equpped and trained like German ww2 troops complete with tanks and aircraft. and backed up by demons.
@@CloseingStraw97 basic system is TW2000 2nd ed. however the magic system uses TW2000 2nd ed. skill system but its called ability , the system is the same but just geared to casting spells rituals etc. also a spell caster has mana where he expends to cast spells and do rituals. 3 main systems of magic are Hermetic, Shamanistic and Psionics. Hermetic is more structured magic where your magic depends on your will , using your knowledge to do your magic, shamanistic is magic derived from spirits, using powers taught to you by spirits or using the spirits themselves to do your magic. and Psionics is magic of the mind. while a lot less versatile than the other two magics, it can be powerful. and psionics are mostly born with the gift people can be awakened with this power or artificially induced. through genetic manipulation. hermetic and shamanistic magic do not cross over. while psionics can also use hermetic and shamanistic magic.
Fuck yeah, Wizards! This movie is so underrated.
Are you ever going to do a video about heavy metal
I came of age in the 70s but didn't actually watch this film until I was in my late 40s. I wasn't particularly impressed, and considered it to be a poorly made film by an undisciplined director. For me, the climax, where Avatar shot the villain with a Luger felt empty. Maybe Bakshi thought he was subverting the expectation that Avatar would use magic. Frankly I had mentally and emotionally checked out of the film by the first half hour.
🚫 Capitalizing "holocaust" 👎🤢
✅ Capitalizing "Holodomor" 👍😄
The lies are being exposed like never before since Oct 2023
and also I remember in the early 1980s I saw a lot of ads in Dragon magazine for this RPG called Fireland supposed to be published by the K Society out of Tulsa OKH. but nothing came out of it. and the blurbs were very much a total copy of Wizards. and the official Wizards rpg was published in 1992, setting good RPG systems suck balls,
It would be interesting if you could compare and contrast 'Wizards' with the 2004 Japanese film 'Casshern'.
yeah people pretend that the word holocaust can only mean one thing. Its rather odd. Not to mention the mythology behind it. How long into the future will we have to go to be honest about it?
But at least we got a killer Blue Oyster Cult track out of it
Sounds cool
Nice
This is one of those movies you really dont want to watch sober.
Black Wolf loves Zima. The Fæ folk brew ale!
I think these weapons have the same problem a lot of steampunk has. No doubt the fictional technology is inferior to what it reasonable should exist along side.
Some of my friends like this one, but I sure didn't. It came off as basically hippy propaganda to me, presenting as idyllic the idea that people would just frolic out in the fields and have sex constantly, while being so anti-technology that something as simple as a record player is banned, and this is put forward as a positive. Though if that wasn't enough, the hero of the story is a complete hypocrite who still owns some of the banned technology, and he even uses an example of it to win in the end before tossing it aside distastefully. I also thought the rotoscoping and just straight up including WWII footage was lame, but then I find the short hand of just having slapping the swastika on the bad guys or otherwise to just make the bad guys be nazis to be a tired old trope. About the only positives are the examples you brought up as some of the goblins not being uniformly evil.
I think this was a premise of the movie. The fairy lands don't understand the threat, they think evil will get tired and go home after a token scrap, because that's what the mutants have always done.
Towards the end we see a bunch of the remnant elf army, like some sort of partisan Polish Home Army dudes. And they sure have a mix of guns with them. And a wizard with a luger is how we have kept portraying wizards in our game ever since.
It’s a poor version of Tolkien but it’s animated 😂!
I really do hate how some many of the nazi symbols are treated, as you said, like talismans or magical things that can steal your soul.
It gives them far too much credit
Sometime early in the 70's the boomers opened a portal to Hell.
That would explain some things.
Of course you've seen this; and of course you've read that.
Whille alll this was going on in earth thhe Qu were rampaging through human colonies and going round thinking they owned the pllace until the Astromorphs gave them the ullimate twatting from whiich they never recovred.
Never animate while you're high.
never animate unless youre high...
The animation is very unique, except the troll- and gnome-like characters are familiar, including the garish colors.
This was such an odd movie the first time I saw it. We were expecting it to build to this big magical face-off between the brothers. Suddenly the gnome pulls out the luger, and it's like WTF, didn't see that coming. Don't know if a film like that would get as broad of an audience today with all the propaganda symbols.
Wizard with a luger is how we have played wizards ever since.
@9:40 I mean, I think you can basically say that about every country/army/culture.