Other top contenders for the title of this post were “Consider the Trench Coat,” “Understanding the Trench Trope,” and “The Wearing of the Trope Coat.”
Gathering the content for my earlier Fantastic Four post brought to mind something else I have been wanting to put together. This one has to do with costumes, or more appropriately disguises over costumes, at least in these early cases.
After putting together and talking about the post on Made for TV movies, I was talking to my grandfather (Papaw) about them. I call him every Sunday and have for nearly the entire time I haven’t been living in the same town. We lived on a dirt road in Texas and my grandparents’ house was at the end, we were about halfway down, hayfields, gardens, horses, cows, bees, emus at one time, all in between. He couldn’t remember watching The Spring, though he did say that was twenty years ago and he was starting to get old. He turned 89 this past May 4th.
I am not entirely certain, but I think a great part of it might have to do with what I associated “science” and “engineering” with when I was a kid. Even when I was little the idea of scientists in white coats was a bit weird. I had seen them made fun of in cartoons enough to appreciate a caricature. My grandfather worked in a hospital lab and for me such lab coats were for doctors. I never could put my finger on it until recently but as I have went back through the franchises I enjoyed as a kid, I finally realized who I wanted to be:
Continue reading When You Want to Know EverythingWhen I first constructed the schedule to get through all these readings there weren’t full days built into maintaining sanity. The plan was to have these large “scenic turnout” posts when I completed a full section. After trudging through the first few weeks I realized that in order to actually survive this road trip was to have at least one day each week that was devoted to specifically not reading anything.
Continue reading The Road to Comps Part 14: Scenic Turnout 2Today is another of those scenic turnout days from comps work. Instead of painting (I did that last week, and will post it after the next section break) I spent the day organizing and figuring out my bazillion bytes of animation data that I have spread across several hard drives.
This post will be filled with cartoon intros and very little thinking substance. While organizing and checking for new DVD releases I was checking the dates of some of my favorite series and noticed that they all happened about the same time. This isn’t a complete or exhaustive or even objective list. These are the series I remember watching, playing, and remembering from the three channels that we had on television.
Continue reading Saturday Morning Cartoons: A tribute to the long 80s.I have finally finished the first section of the comps list. This marks the end of the first “question” in theory if not practice. Most of my work crosses the subdivision created to make the list make more sense. Before I start to work on the rest (I am almost finished with the background section on the American Studies portion at the moment) I wanted to share some of the things I have learned about this type of work and how I manage to stay sane throughout the attempts to synthesize everything in print.
Continue reading The Road to Comps Part 7: Scenic Turnout 1I still haven’t put together all my thoughts on an action figure post yet (nor have I finished enough of my comps readings to make a useful post) so in the interim you get this, which, admittedly, is just an excuse to put all the Bebop and Rocksteady images I have in one place.
Continue reading My MAN! or How a mutant rhino reminded me who I was
