Inside Ursula Hitler's Head 48: The Making of "Invasion of the Posh Spice Zombies"

Poop. I forgot to post this one along with the other Invasion of the Posh Spice Zombies videos. Well, better than late than never?

This video explains a lot (like, a lot) about how the Posh storyline came to be, and how I make my videos in general. There are some things I like about it, but in general it really didn't turn out the way I'd hoped. I was imagining it as a parody of those "making of" TV specials, but I don't think it really reads like that. It just seems like me going on (and on) about how I made this series, and it's not very funny. Generally I'm not crazy about the cartoons where "Ursula" herself appears. She tends to talk too much.

In this cartoon I talk about those green frames that Videospin randomly inserts in my cartoons, and I guess maybe I pissed Videospin off by badmouthing it because it went crazy with the green frames in this cartoon. I can usually edit most of them out pretty easily, but sometimes I can't cut them without causing audio problems and other times one slips by without me noticing it. That's what I meant when I say, "Whoops, looks like I missed another one."

Really, I think this cartoon kind of fails, as a cartoon. But if you're a hardcore fan (do I even have hardcore fans?) or if you're really curious about doing special effects with Videospin or something, I suppose it's worth watching.

I wonder if the real Wil Wheaton ever saw this cartoon. If so, I imagine he was very, very confused. Even I'm not sure what Lego Wil Wheaton was doing in there. It seemed funny at the time.

Inside Ursula Hitler's Head 47: Invasion of the Posh Spice Zombies, THE THRILLING CONCLUSION!

This episode is a mixed bag. It runs long, especially early on during Sweetie's monologue. But things get hopping once we learn the identity of the "anti-Posh," and the final conversation between Sweetie and Meany really clicks for me.

Somebody pointed out that Lux Interior is sort of a weird person to pick for the "anti-Posh". After all, he wore high heels and flashy clothes and he was kind of a glamorous creature himself! The real "anti-Posh" would probably be somebody who was more glum and anti-glam, maybe Leonard Cohen or J.D. Salinger or somebody like that. But Lux had died very suddenly just before this episode, and he was a hero of mine growing up so I wanted to give him a little tribute. Besides, Lux was the exact opposite of Posh in some ways. Posh is a trendy, boring dummy with no discernible talent, she's world famous for no reason at all. Lux was a trailblazer and a proud weirdo who deserved a lot more fame and fortune than he got.

Inside Ursula Hitler's Head 46: Invasion of the Posh Spice Zombies, pt. 8

Of course, as soon as I came up with the "anti-Posh" thing for the previous episode, I hated it. Noticing a trend?

Xtranormal was offline for a few days around this time, and when they came back they had new characters. I promptly dropped this weedy little specimen into the story and named him Skeeter. He's come back once or twice since, and things never seem to go well for the poor boy.

Inside Ursula Hitler's Head 45: Invasion of the Posh Spice Zombies, pt. 7

I show up as a improbably sexy cartoon girl and interrupt the storyline to crab about my life for a few minutes. I really was going through a pretty dark period around then, and I wasn't sure if this storyline was working at all. I had no idea how to end it, and this "anti-Posh" thing was all I could come up with. I'm not sure if I even knew what the "anti-Posh" was, when I posted this episode! I kind of suck at plotting, obviously.

Inside Ursula Hitler's Head 44: Invasion of the Posh Spice Zombies, pt. 6

Not much to say about this one, although I think I did a pretty OK job of putting all of those extra Poshes into the scene.

Inside Ursula Hitler's Head 43: Invasion of the Posh Spice Zombies, pt. 5

As I've said elsewhere, the whole thing about the Poshes using their magic panties to infect people with Posh Spice zombiehood was just something I came up with in a hurry because I couldn't do the animation to show the Poshes biting people like regular zombies would. It was a narrative decision I made on the spur of the moment, and almost immediately regretted. That's one of the problems with writing serially: once you've put something into the story you're just stuck with it, there's no going back and fixing it.

I'm not really sure what I would do now, instead of the magic panty crap. Maybe the Poshes could shoot magic rays out of their eyes or something. That'd be better than them flashing their magic panties, at least. (Almost anything would be better than that!)

Inside Ursula Hitler's Head 42: Invasion of the Posh Spice Zombies, pt. 4

The little rhyme the Poshes do here is paraphrased from a song in the Spice World movie. Before I did this cartoon, I think I'd forgotten there even was a Spice World movie!

By this point I'd settled on Videospin, the least problematic of the various video editing programs I'd tried. I quickly figured out how to do some crude superimpositions and frame-by-frame animation; that's how I added in the puke during the 4 PM puking.

This cartoon actually has a lot of editing tricks you'd (hopefully) never notice. Like during the rhyme, when the one Posh says "fun," it sounds a little odd... That's because it's actually a totally different Xtranormal voice, dubbed in saying that one word. For whatever reason, the regular Posh voice absolutely would not say "fun," no matter how I spelled it. Fun, funn, phun, phon, fon, fuhn. She kept pronouncing it "gun." Over and over again. "Just with me, I have no gun."

Sometimes there's something kind of cool about the weird way that Xtranormal characters talk, they'll surprise you and somehow make a line funnier or more touching than it would have been. And then sometimes they just won't say freaking fun, until it's 2 in the morning and you take some Zantac and go to bed.

Inside Ursula Hitler's Head 41: Invasion of the Posh Spice Zombies, pt. 3

Ugh. Back to the blurry look.

I rather like Lulzo's Posh Spice rant at the end. Somebody once said that you can usually tell when a writer is really having fun, it shows. I was having fun.

Inside Ursula Hitler's Head 40: Invasion of the Posh Spice Zombies, pt. 2

Wow, after those really blurry, pixelated, shitty-looking episodes I'd edited, you can really see the difference in a video I uploaded directly from Xtranormal! It's like seeing it in IMAX or something.

In hindsight, this really wasn't the best character model for a Posh Spice parody. I really needed somebody with darker, more severe-looking hair, and a pricier-looking wardrobe. I really wish that Xtranormal allowed you to customize your characters, but at this point I doubt that will ever happen. As much as I've found inspiration in the limitations of Xtranormal, I could really go nuts if I had a little more freedom to experiment with stuff.

Inside Ursula Hitler's Head 39: Invasion of the Posh Spice Zombies, pt. 1

The beginning of my most epic storyline so far, Invasion of the Posh Spice Zombies. I already did an entire video about how this story came to be, so I'll spare you from much more commentary about it. This first episode is really pixelated, it looks like crap. I'd dearly loved to post a cleaned-up version, but again, I just don't have the time to fuss over these things that much. Plus, nobody cares.

Inside Ursula Hitler's Head 38: Invasion of the Posh Spice Zombies - Prologue: The Return of Lulzo

Lulzo returns, with spooky crackling lightning effects courtesy of Blaze Media Pro. I wanted to use the hell out of that program while I still had a trial version!

As I said before, I really try to make Lulzo genuinely scary, which is an uphill battle given that Lulzo is a little Lego clown. Lulzo's inspired a bit by Tim Curry as It, by the Joker, by Hannibal Lecter and various Buffy bad guys. People have told me that they actually felt sorry for him here, but that wasn't my intention at all. Lulzo is lonely and he feels sorry for himself, but there's no good person underneath it all, he's not secretly yearning for redemption. Lulzo is just absolutely rotten, he lives to screw up your hard drive and ruin your day however he can.

It's really hard for me to tell how popular these cartoons are. One cartoon gets 30,000 hits. Another, like this one, doesn't even get 1,000. And then these cartoons get reposted in a lot of weird places, Google "Ursula Hitler" and you'll find Meany and Sweetie all over the web, on Russian shoe shopping forums and all kinds of crazy stuff like that. If you added up every single time my cartoons have been viewed anywhere, I wouldn't be surprised if they've had an audience in the millions. But how many of those people watched the first ten seconds, got bored and left?

Sometimes I almost feel famous. Other times I feel like if I rounded up every person who's watched this entire series from beginning to end, they wouldn't fill a Greyhound bus.