randomosity

Was out to the kino to catch some­thing that I could claim as some degree of expos­ure to the Ger­man media scene. The red­light dis­trict prob­ably could have provided some spe­cial, ;-) exper­i­ences, but went the other way. What are the kids watch­ing — some­thing Ger­man only. I found ‘Lissi und der wilde kaiser. It advert­ises itself as a par­odie of the clas­sic ‘Sissi’. I can only say that it takes ser­i­ous license. As it turns out, it’s aimed at a little more mature audi­ence than the nor­mal anim­ated show goer. I booked early. Cir­cum­stances. And with Ger­man effi­ciency had an assigned aisle and seat. Showed up close to time as I recalled that there is a suf­fi­cient period in advance with com­mer­cials, not trail­ers. Inside there’s three people in a 150 per­son theatre. My seat if right beside them. Another couple girls 13–15 come in and sit on the oth­er­side of my 13–15 year old male friends.
Two adults come in. They are the seats in front of my col­leagues. I can see that there is a sys­tem in the seat assign­ment process…but it sucks. Its starts from best seat and starts assign­ing in all dir­ec­tions. so you get 15 people all sit­ting right adja­cent to one another des­pite 100 extra seats. And my Ger­man cimen­a­go­ers just went with it.
Th anim­a­tion and screen play is superb. There were some real double entendres, and some rather low humour, but the story is simple. Lissi and Franzi are Kaiser and Kais­erin of Aus­tria. Life is great, he goes around col­lect­ing tax money all day to fund a life of osten­ta­tious lux­ury. Lissi is a bubble­head, but sweet and gor­geous. The anim­a­tion was superb and I was really struck by how well the expres­sions were capatured on faces.
Mean­while in th Him­alayas, the Yeti in the pro­cess of tor­ment­ing his smal­ler fel­low anim­als cre­ates an unin­ten­ded cos­mic earth­quake which turns out to be ceated by satan who ‘does him a deal’ — bring me the sweetest maiden in the world.
Life at Schon­brun is sac­char­ine sweet. There we also find the schem­ing queen mother (who of course finds Lissi point­less) and the Feld-marschal who dotes on Franzi. The couple play silly games and dur­ing a very seduct­ive cab­aret show by Lissi for Franzi, she is snatched by the Yeti. Mean­while the Queen Mother wants to head off to Rus­sia any­way yo find a bet­ter match. Franzi has no troops (all over com­mit­ted) so he seeks hunters to be on the lookout for the Yeti and Lissi. She suf­fers from the Stock­holm syn­drome, but not before send­ing a love let­ter off to Franzi in an empty beer bottle which he actu­ally receives. Unfor­tu­nately, cer­tain words have been lost by water smears and it reads as though she is leav­ing him and run­ning off with another. The Queen mother’s strange attempts to bewitch the Feld-Marschall have had strange con­sequences and the com­pany deiced to head for a rel­at­ive ‘Bussi Wittelsbach’s” place using the latest in GPS. Lissi being Bussi’s cousin, her and Yeti, escap­ing hunters also head for Neuschwan­stein.
We meet Bussi. Bummed out over­weight, stoned, rather down on life. Liv­ing a reclus­ive rock­star life. I love this Lud­wig II. Hunters fol­low Lissi and Yeti to NS, battle ensues to recap­ture for reward. Good slap­stick chase. At cli­max, hunters cease to be factor, but Lissi con­fronts Franzi, who can­not for­give her the let­ter. Evil reappears and neither Yeti nor Franzi will give her up…so another deal. Satan cre­ates two more women and turns all three into ducks. The Feld-marshall dis­tracts the evil force, which the yeti pro­duces a horn which Lissi will want to play and they make the ducks go for the horn, and thus Lissi is iden­ti­fied and force can­not have her.
Mean­while, Bussi is stand­ing knee deep in Star­n­ber­gersee try­ing to decided to end it all. But can’t he can’t even see the point in end­ing his life so stand there mor­osely bat­ting the water with his scepter. His des­pair­ing mad­dess is the sub­ject of humour. When satan is defeated at this palace Bussi thinks that is kind of excit­ing and the Queen Mother has these bewitch­ing opi­ates that she has been feed­ing the Feld-Marshall to find out about her son’s actions. They work well on Bussi who hooks up with the Queen mother and every­one is reunited as they should.

Great enter­tain­ment. Rude and cer­tainly pro­fane of many idols. Not quite def­in­ite that Bussi has to be Lud­wig II, or whether Lissi is Sissi, in which case the grand­father who is still about and looks an awful lot like Franz Josef is sup­posed to be. Is the QM, the real Sissi, or the mother of FJ who we know was a prob­lem. Is Franzi Rudolph — a pretty happy, cheery Rudolf. The rela­tions don’t really have a his­tor­ical accur­acy, but fun anyway.