Hacker Cinema
Invader ZIM
2001 · TV series · 11 min episodes · 2 seasons
Created by Jhonen Vasquez
AnimationComedyScience FictionFantasyFamily
Zim dreams of greatness. Unfortunately, though, he's hopelessly inept as a space invader. Desperate to be rid of the annoying Zim, his planet's leaders send him on a mission to infiltrate Earth, providing him with leftover, cobbled-together equipment. To their consternation, Zim succeeds in setting up a base on Earth and infiltrating human culture, posing as a human child as he plots the planet's downfall. Only Zim's archnemesis, Dib, recognizes that Zim is an alien, and of course, nobody believes Dib's claims.
4 positive2 neutralfrom 6 commenters
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7 comments on Hacker News
I'm just reminded of an old Invader Zim episode where Zim harvests and consumes(integrates) lots of human organs to "be more human." He ends up having like 5 livers, 20 spleens, etc. Just absolutely ridiculous.
The school nurse when examining him says "perfectly healthy with such plentiful organs."
That's where LLMs are at. "Perfectly human with such plentiful words."
> Where do you expect stock photography to be used? Only in mock-ups and design pitches?
As if something's existence alone justifies its (mis)use...
I'm reminded of the Invader Zim Hamstergeddon episode when the tanks arrive and one of the soldiers shouts "We've gotta use this stuff on something!"
Humans don't naturally have glacial attention spans, pun intended.
The disaster is too slow-moving for human time scales to prepare for until it's too late. And our current systems of business and government aren't covering this natural blind spot when they're similarly incentivized to focus on short-term results/re-election.
On a lighter note, watch Invader Zim's Walk For Your Lives [0] episode which cleverly speaks to this problem in the subtext.
[0] https://zim.fandom.com/wiki/Walk_for_Your_Lives
> ... And ultimately, the story, characters, and writing can matter more than the art.
That is a highly subjective conclusion, and worth consideration.
I still remember watching Ren And Stimpy as a kid, and later Invader Zim and have a way of recalling the skits/ gags in a way that I can only due to those shows hook was the art: mainly because how remarkable it looked for it's time. Ren and Stimpy was something like a cross-between Dali and Goya surrealism (specifically the grotesque works when they did close-ups) that to this day stand up; I recall they sold the rights and it was on some other channel when I was in university on cable tv and it looked like a badly made knock-off as a cash grab so after the short lived nostalgia you realized how bad it was because they didn't take the time to do it like in the 90s.
The same can be said about the Nick era plot/art of Vasquez's work with Invader Zim, it looked like the harshness in his comics and the later Netflix stuff (while more advanced in it's appearance) suffered so much,
And then their were the early Rick and Morty eps where both the art is mediocre and generic, and even the characters are clear back to the future rip-offs but the plot and story and execution is so well done that it doesn't need a huge art budget (the Unity episode specifically).
It's interesting that even storefronts run by the same company don't always have the same reliability. Microsoft fucked over thousands of gamers when they pulled the plug on Games for Windows Live, yet I can still download episodes of Invader Zim I purchased on the Xbox Live Store in 2006.
FWIW, Netflix released a special episode in 2019 reuniting a lot of the key people back with the show. It brought back some great memories and hasn't lost its touch. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invader_Zim:_Enter_the_Florpus
See "The Wettening", an Invader Zim episode.