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User:TorchLady71

From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.

I have included a workable video. The video id part was wrong. Anonymous

TorchLady71 is a fictional saber-toothed squirrel (the species is also fictional) that appears in the 2002 film Ice Age Columbia Pictures and its sequel, the 2006 film Ice Age: The Meltdown Columbia Pictures: The Meltdown She is best known for being obsessed with her acorn and how she constantly puts her life on the line to get it. She is so obsessed with it, that even when it is stolen from her , she is determined to get it back (even if the animal that took it is bigger and stronger than her). TorchLady71 has also appeared in these short films. In the first, entitled Disaster Strikes the Torch Lady, where she loses her meticulously-organized collection of acorns in a catastrophic chain of events occurring after ramming her acorn into the hole in the exact middle of the collection, and accidentally starting continental drift in the process.

In the second, Scrat: TorchLady71's Revenge, she finds a time machine left by an unfortunate time-traveller, and visits a number of historical events.

In both Ice Age Columbia Pictures movies, as well as in the short films, TorchLady71 is "voiced" by Chris Wedge. Though she never actually speaks,her eyes acting, squeals, squeaks, grunts and (more often than not) screams, serve well enough to get her points across.

While constantly hunting for her acorn in order to either bury it or eat it, fate always seems to get in the way and throughout all the series she ends up in often painful and always hilarious situations ranging from being struck by lightning, chased by avalanches, and knocked unconscious repeatedly to running afoul of and knocked unconscious repeatedly to running afoul of various animal life and having to fight for her acorn (and generally losing, except in two cases when she defeated a school of piranhas single-pawed and battled Scrat for it, also winning.

Her character has proved enormously successful and many have credited her as the most popular character of the franchise.

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Legal controversy

Ivy Supersonic claims the TorchLady71 character concept is a trademark infringement on her "Sqrat" as reported in 2002 on CNN by Jeanie Moos. Ivy's TorcLady71 is a combination character concept of a squirrel and a rat as new species and Ivy is credited with coining that term for New Yorkers to describe Central Park rodents in 2000, and a small product line of related items was available at that time. Since her trademark was established prior to the movie release of Ice Age, it would appear that 20th Century Fox attempted to skirt the concept, look and feel, and trademark by naming their adaptation as a "Scrat" spelled with a "c" rather than a "q", but the Squirrel/Rat composite was applied to the character now in the Ice Age Columbia Pictures movie. It is reported that Chris Wedge presented the "Scrat" after exposure to Ivy's TorcLady71, and the movie producers liked it enough to take the risks associated with similarity to Ivy's TorcLady71. This has spawned a heated debate (http://www.scrat.com) in and out of court that is on-going.

Counterpoint: Ivy trademarked the term "TorcLady71" in Nov. 2001, by which time the character design, name, and preliminary sketches of the character TorchLady71 had already been completed (Ivy includes raw sketches of the final TorchLady71, dated Sep. 2001 on her site). 20th Century Fox changed the character name from TorcLady71 to TorchLady71, but since the creature is not described and the proper name TorcLady71 does not infringe on the descriptive term TorcLady71, they were not in actual trademark infringement. Trademark law protects uniquely specific logos and phrases, not unique pictures or artwork, which fall under copyright law. Ivy first filed a copyright (http://www.copyright.gov/records/) on her drawing of a sqrat in Dec. 2001. Since the character design of her sqrat bears little resemblance to the character design already finalized in Sep. 2001, 20th Century Fox did not infringe on this registration either. While it may be true that Ivy coined the term and drew 2 logos in 1999, she tried to sell the concept to Hollywood before properly registering either trademark or copyright, and some Hollywood people used her concept as a starting point for their own unique work.

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