Nicolascagember

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but all the Story Piles in September were about Nicolas Cage movies.

This isn’t because there was some hidden theme to the month; I don’t think he has some special Septemberyness to him. There’s no tea leaf messaging here, nor is there some sort of clever, greater point at work. In fact, I honestly can’t be sure why it happened. Back in March (March! Remember March?) I said, on twitter that hey, I could do a Nicolas Cage month, and immediately, friend of the blog Starlight Nixie threw her tiny hands in the air and started up a holler about most of the movies I’d already decided to write about.

Here’s another thing though: In order to keep from having a month where most of the Story Pile articles are about anime, I made a point to track, on my big ole tracker, a list of basically one anime a month that was that month’s anime. A horror manga for October, a con artist anime for August, and… yes, three different love manga for February. Whatever, don’t judge me.

Still, this presented us with a possibility; could I find an anime that could fit Nicolas Cage’s Story Piles? I know Studio Ghibli has a lot of really top tier voice talent – Willem Dafoe and Timothy Dalton both showed up in the dub of Tales of Earthsea, for example. It wouldn’t be that hard, with the man’s famous willingness to do any role that gets offered to him.

Despite this research though I couldn’t find any anime high profile enough to successfully hook in Nicolas Cage. He’s done some cartoons – he’s in the Croods and of course, he was in Into The Spider-Verse. Would I argue that Spider-Verse is an anime? What about Teen Titans Go To The Movies? In either case, sure, that’s an argument someone could make, maybe that’d be a thing…

But eh.

I don’t actually want to talk about Into the Spider-Verse much. It’s an amazing movie, looks great, fantastic sound design, good characters, expressive, funny, creative, brilliantly animated, exquisite in so many ways animation often isn’t, okay, that’s all I got. The enormously successful excellently realised award-winning superhero movie that made like a billion dollars is good. Cool, moving on. I don’t plan on talking about Teen Titans Go any time soon, but if I do, it’ll probably be kinder than is expected of me.

I did, however, find one thing that if not an anime is definitely closer to an anime than most movies that had Nicolas Cage in it.

Nicholas Cage plays the voice of Dr Tenma in the 2009 Astro Boy movie. Is this a good thing? Is this an anime? Is this close enough to count? Did I want to make a Story Pile article about Astro Boy, when I have already been surprised by movies that I thought were going to be terrible like Goosebumps?

Well, no, because I already have tomorrow’s movie lined up.

But still, there you go. Nicolas Cage has been Dr Tenma.

I wanted, at least for comedy’s sake, to include videogames that included Nicolas Cage. To my surprise, I couldn’t find any. I mean, literally, I can’t find any game that Nicolas Cage has been in. It makes some sense, of course — voice acting is its own skillset, and Nicolas Cage is very much someone who can always find more roles in movies. It’s not as simple as ‘actors move down a slope into videogame voice acting to get more work,’ but there are actors who are never going to show up on TV or in videogames just because that’s their choice and they have the means to make that choice.

The next step was to try and find videogames based on movies that have Nicolas Cage in them. Well, there’s the aforementioned Astro Boy game on the PSP, so not available for me to make a video about. There is another option, the Ant Bully game on the Wii and Nintendo DS. Neither are attainable in a meaningful pace for me, either.

I did however find one final footnote in this ‘Nicolas Cage videogames’ options.

There’s a videogame developer, named Nicholas Cage, who has been credited on three games. Two I can’t get, and one I’ve already played, so I could do an article on that.

Except that game was Wildstar.