Man, the Censorship Bar really got in the way this time…with hindsight, a bikini might have been the simpler choice, and hardly covered up anything beyond what wasn’t visible in the first place. Or I could just have let her stay inside the tower…she could easily have done her transformation in there. The lack of space and freedom of movement would have hardly mattered – after all, it’s not like that kind of transformation sequence ever bothers with the laws of Physics or anything like that.
To add to that, the transformations remain off-screen, anyway. Such parsimony! Four level I and three level II transformations covered in only two panels, that’s bound to be some kind of Academy record. But I felt I had to…it would have been repetitive, and we already lost a strip to villainous re-branding.
But even with so much time saved already, Snuka is set on trying to save even more time by cutting further predictable/obligatory/repetitive steps from the whole process. Well, saving time would be one of the effects – I can, however, not absolutely rule out that Snuka’s more concerned with saving himself some pain/humiliation/bruises than with saving time. He’s a character with the license to be selfish, after all, and he doesn’t actually like pain/humiliation/bruises – even if that makes up most of the fabric of his life, tragically. Just like Anakin Skywalker doesn’t like sand, despite growing up on a planet that’s covered in it from pole to pole.
Whatever Snuka’s motivations might be, Latho is not easily convinced…it’s a bit of a stickler for traditions and established rules. Cutting corners isn’t Latho’s style…on the other hand, it’s probably really difficult to remain inflexible when your body is made of plush. How will Latho decide? We will know on Monday.
The usual bargain would be being allowed to skip the unnecessary padding BUT for Snuka to still get beat-up in the processes (and maybe a on-the-ropes shot of the other members for posterity’s sake).
Was the censorship (candy) bar even needed? Mopey’s arm seems to be in the right spots to coverup the important parts anyway (or easily adjusted if it wasn’t). Though if that was just a handy coincidence and it’d require reshooting the scene to get the arm in the exact right spots, I could see the censorship bar as something that was added in post-editing.
It would be fair if Snuka would have to pay a price for this later… the problem is, if you have such vast amounts of bad karma stored up as Snuka, you can never tell for which one of your misdeeds your newest painful or humiliating disaster is the payback. XD
I did actually add in the censorship bar retroactively! XD Originally I did think it wasn’t necessary, because Mopey’s arm covered up her breasts nicely (and conveniently)…but when I was about to publish, I had some doubts, and: I’ve actually grown quite fond of my censorship bar template in the meantime. XD So I added it in, more for fun than because of serious concerns…
Reminds me of all those Gatchaman episodes when I could clearly see the escape pod on the giant mecha beast, and was yelling at the screen, “Attack THERE! RIGHT THERE!” But they never listened…
XD Yeah, and that’s hardly the only thing. The writing on Gatchaman can be commended for the brisk pacing…but that was largely fueled by abysmally poor decision making on the part of basically every character. On either side. The plots only advanced that fast because everyone was always jumping to the wrong conclusions, and from there springing right into stupid actions… XD