Thursday, May 12, 2011

2006 Gir and Martian Manhunter by J.Mitchell

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After a harrowing week or so, I am done with finals and the last few months of awful classes. Onward and upward to the championship round after a brief summer break. Plus, none of the posts I worked on over the last few days are available to me from Google, so I'm glad I had the foresight to back up that material before their cloudware evaporated for a couple of days.

I've never seen Invader Zim, so I had to research Gir at Wikipedia:

Gir is an Irken SIR (Standard Information Retrieval Unit) who was assigned to Zim in the series. Voiced by Rosearik Rikki Simons, GIR is Zim's only companion. GIR is a malfunctioning robot built by The Almighty Tallest out of SIR unit remains and whatever they could find in the trash and their pockets. GIR's creation was the result of a cruel joke the Tallest played on Zim when the other invaders were receiving their SIR (Standard Information Retrieval) units, which serve as their personal assistants. Rather than waste a perfectly good SIR unit on Zim, though, the Tallest instead gave Zim a "top-secret model", which they constructed on the spot, behind Zim's back. Shortly after being built, the junky robot activates and announces himself as GIR. The name "GIR" is a self-applied moniker that is never explained in the show. The most notable of visible differences between GIR and your typical SIR unit is his mouth, something that average SIR units lack. Because GIR's head contains various odds-and-ends (rather than artificial intelligence hardware), GIR displays a wildly erratic personality. He is almost completely irreverent, and rarely obeys Zim's commands, mostly due to distraction, disinterest or disobedience. When GIR does comply, the teal-colored parts of his body (most notably, his eyes shoulders and belly) glow red like normal SIR's, and he will usually refer to Zim as "My Lord" or sometimes "My Master", even "Vermin Lord" in 'Mortos Der Soulstealer'. GIR disguises himself in public by wearing a green dog suit which fools most humans, despite looking and acting almost nothing like an Earth dog. He also does things that a real dog would not do, such as talking, dancing and using jet rockets. A prime example of GIR's uselessness is his pre-programmed "defensive mode", which for normal SIR units is to repel hostiles. When GIR's defensive mode is activated on the other hand, he usually responds by assisting the enemy; in one case offering the enemy ice cream, and in another voluntarily jumping into a sack for abductors. Despite GIR's manic insanity, he sometimes displays a degree of competence higher than Zim's; such as correcting his master who announces to have succeeded after a failed scheme. Or in 'Walk For Your Lives' when he warns Zim that increasing the speed of a really slow explosion engulfing the city in an attempt to save it would just make matters worse. GIR continually annoys Zim, notably with his waffles, piggy, and love of "The Scary Monkey Show".

2 comments:

mathematicscore said...

This is pretty awesome. Invader Zim is delightfully unhinged and JLI era J'onn would be a great counterpoint to the shows world.

Shlomo Ben Hungstien said...

i like that line drawing of MM. it's simple yet it effectively conveys his personality.