Grape Flavored Karl Malden

There's exists a fine line between art and chaos, and when those two intersect, occasionally they create a magnificent thing. This is not one of those things. This is, however, magnificent in its own right for a lot of strange reasons which we'll get into immediately. Aside from what looks like The Incredible Hulk's grape flavored cousin bursting out of the computer screen, this thing raises so many questions, but the first and most important one is obviously...does this even qualify as a mask?

There's certain masks that often aren't actually masks, and I feel like this one here is a pretty spotty example of that. To me, a mask is a face that goes over your own face, and while there is a face here, albeit one popping out from the world wide web probably trying to tell you about ALL THESE GREAT DEALS, it isn't really technically a "face". And I can hear someone arguing, "Well, Cyborgs would count, right? Robots would count, right? So why doesn't Grape Flavored Karl Malden count?" and the answer to that is that yes, while robots and cyborgs would count, that's because they're still technically a face. Albeit a technological face, but a face nonetheless. But this? This is just a computer that happens to have a face on it. I don't know man, I don't wanna get into semantics or anything, but this is a slippery slope (or as I originally typed it a sloppery slip) because at some point, if we begin allowing stuff like this, it opens the doors to other ridiculous things like "a tire. but with a face on it!"

I actually have a fairly perfect example of this, and that's when I was growing up, my stepfather was a huge baseball fan, to the point where one Halloween he bought a baseball mask...and yes it was exactly what it sounds like. It was a baseball...with a face on it, as pictured to your right. This is the quintessential example of the problem I'm describing. We're just assigning faces to random ass objects now. And while anthropomorphization is hardly anything new, hell we've been doing it to animals for eons, but therein once more lies the difference. An animal has a face. An animal is a living, breathing sentient creature. A baseball is not. A baseball does not go home to its family after the game and have dinner and tuck its kids in. A baseball is not alive. Call me a purist, I don't care, but I believe that masks should be - give or take an exception now and then - face based, and that's all I'm gonna say on that. But back to the question at hand then, with my peace now having been spoken on that subject...is this mask really a mask? Well, it's definitely got an artistic talent behind it, nobody would deny that, so for the sake of transparency, I'll review it just as I would any other mask on this blog.

For starters, it's at least a well designed mask. The face has a lot of character, like a tropical Lawrence Tierney (and I think with that I have sufficiently surpassed my quota for old timey movie star references) with all his wrinkle lines and that ever omnipresent grump face. Hell, the mouth carve alone, with the inclusion of the teeth, is top tier design work if we're being honest. A+ solid grade stuff right there, my friend. But where the mask succeeds in the face region, it utterly falters and flounders in the computer region. The keyboard is lacking any and all aspects of an identity and the "computer" itself is nothing more than a flat grey box. And while I recognize this was likely from the era of computers being nothing other than flat grey boxes (I was there, I LIVED IT, man), they still could've carved some buttons or something into the design, you know? There's absolutely NO detailing whatsoever, and that's really unfortunate. It's like they did the face, realized what a great job they did and then thought "Yeah that's good enough."

But it isn't. It's never good enough. You should always strive for more.Always go the extra mile for that little bit of work that puts it over the top and makes it excellent. Mediocrity is alright for some things, but not for this, not when putting in just a smidge more effort would've made a world of design difference.

The whole thing also has a wonky cartoonish quality to it which, in all fairness, is likely the best way to portray such a ridiculous ass concept, because there's no way in hell this would ever be frightening as a hyper realistic design. But once you get past the design work overall, it's not bad. The face really wins it, and saves it from failing thanks to the lack of additional detailing on the computer itself, but where the real problem is is context.

Why is there a face jutting out from this screen? Context always makes things better, and for most masks, even when no context is directly given up front, you can infer enough to make up context for it. For example, giant fish monster? Clearly a mutated lake creature. Man with half his face missing? Clearly someone who pissed off a Grizzly Bear. Hideous man sized insect? Clearly Gregor Samsa. This isn't complicated, is all I'm saying. But with this...I mean, what kind of context could I possibly give it to even have it begin to make a lick of sense? I mean, a ghost that possessed a computer and is now trying to seek a host outside its digital realm? Maybe. But even that's a stretch. Maybe a computer virus trying to become personified. Eh, doesn't really work, I mean, his powers would only have any practical effect on the computer, right? There's just no real rhyme of reason why this mask should exist, outside of someone somewhere at some point in an office saying, "You know what'd be cool? A computer with a face coming out of it!" And, I mean, far be it from me to shit on someones creative process, but I've always been a firm believer that for something to exist, you have to signify its reason for existing. We, as human beings, may not need any purpose. We're just here. It's all a horrible genetic mistake gone terribly awry. But creations need a reason.

So yeah, it isn't exactly that this mask is bad, and it isn't exactly good enough to outrun the bad that plagues it, it's just so very "could've been better". The whole thing could've been better. They could've done more detailing to make it more visually interesting, they could've found a different angle to take for why this face is here, but they didn't. And that's alright, honestly. Sometimes stuff just misses the mark, they can't all be smash hits, you know? Can't knock it out of the park every time. You gotta take the good with the bad, and this isn't even bad, it's just so very mediocre. But even mediocrity is good on some level.

Grape Flavored Karl Malden might not be the best at what he set out to do, but dammit, he's the only one of his kind, and for that alone I applaud him. He's out there bein' different, tryin' somethin' new. 

That earns my respect.