1857: Emoji Movie

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
Revision as of 11:40, 3 July 2017 by 162.158.154.67 (talk) (more details, typo fix. Deleted "where is the joke?" tag, as the explanation identifies the joke (the pun))
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Emoji Movie
Some other studio should do the Antz/A Bug's Life thing and release The Dingbats Movie at the same time.
Title text: Some other studio should do the Antz/A Bug's Life thing and release The Dingbats Movie at the same time.

Explanation

Megan asks Cueball if he knows about the upcoming The Emoji Movie. The movie, set to come out on July 28, had been widely reviled on the Internet for its lack of original plot, characters, and jokes.

Cueball replies by saying its not the worst section of Unicode to make a movie about. The emphasis on "worst" suggests that, while it might not be the absolute worst, it's still pretty bad. Megan then says she'd watch a movie about Combining Diacritical Marks (See 1647: Diacritics). Cueball quips that this series would have too many characters. This is a pun on the word "character", which has the double meaning of a fictional character, or a symbol which corresponds to a grapheme (e.g. letter, digit, punctuation mark).

Although part of Unicode contains emoji, Unicode is not limited to emoji and emoji are not limited to Unicode. Unicode is only a standard so any device will display the same thing, be it letter, number, punctuation or symbol, and there were many vendor conventions for emoji before Unicode. Randall has also mentioned emoji in Unicode in 1813: Vomiting Emoji.

The "Antz/A Bug's Life thing" in the title text refers to the twin films phenomenon, in which two films with very similar (or identical) concepts are released within roughly the same timeframe.Dingbats (as opposed to the more familiar wingdings and webdings) were character sets used by typographers in box setting. (Randall could have picked a number of movies from the year of the two ant movies, 1998, for instance the pair Deep Impact/Armageddon are also clearly twins.)

Transcript

[Megan and Cueball are walking together while Megan is looking at her smartphone.]
Megan: Did you see there's an emoji movie?
Cueball: If they have to make a movie about a section of Unicode, it's not the worst choice...
Megan: They should do a whole series. I would watch the Combining Diacritical Marks movie.
Cueball: That series would have way too many characters.


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Discussion

I think I'd rather watch the Wingding movie. The Emoji movie looks absolutely horrible and already worthy of being on the next season of MST3K. OldCorps (talk) 18:17, 30 June 2017 (UTC)

This comic is published one day before unicode (ver 2018) emoji submission deadline. Is it worth being noticed in the explaination? Gleeee (talk) 02:48, 1 July 2017 (UTC)

I'm wondering whether there is a newer version, but for Unicode 6.0 a move does exist already: https://vimeo.com/48858289 --162.158.88.206 07:11, 1 July 2017 (UTC)

I just was on KYM, and by curiosity ran into the discussion about the movie (tl;dr: Nuke it from orbit). Decided to look up the newest xkcd to forget it quickly. Randall, I hate you. 141.101.105.30 19:26, 1 July 2017 (UTC)

Damn. Beer is not rendering. What do I need to update? -- Hkmaly (talk) 00:19, 7 July 2017 (UTC)