My Favorite Films, Part 2

GREASE (1978)

Not exactly The Warriors (see previous entry here: https://talesfromweirdland.tumblr.com/post/157788924410/my-favorite-films-part-1), but it’s still about gangs. I saw Grease in the 1980s, sick at home from school (well). I was about 9. Heck did I know that most of the actors were well past high school age. When you’re 9, even 12 is old. 12 is ancient. 12, that’s one foot in the grave already. You don’t know the difference between 16 or 40. But I loved Grease. Its spirit, its bravura. I was always hoping for someone in my class to suddenly jump on a table to start singing, start belting, with all of us joining in right on cue and doing our little solo parts, but no fairy dust ever landed on my school. My friend jumped on a table once and slipped, he was out for like a month. Grease simply encapsulates a part of my childhood: the sunny and hopeful part, the part where every face is friendly and nobody dies.

LA VERITÉ (THE TRUTH) (1960)

Speaking of reflecting a time, as we seem to be doing, this dark film represents pre-tourist Europe to me, when buildings were black with soot and thick, dusty curtains hid the cracks in the walls. Look at the book that the woman on the right is reading: La femme solitaire. Intellectualism wasn’t a dirty word yet, it was a proud affliction. Elitism was something you’d strive for. Screw the dumb masses and their poor taste, but give them all the liberties they deserve–elitism for the people. That’s 1950s/1960s France, or rather, Paris, where this film takes place.

I’m a fan of Brigitte Bardot. In fact, I think I’ve seen all of her films, even the bad ones. More a natural phenomenon than an actress, she starred in films that mostly were spins on her public persona: reflections on and reactions to the phenomenon. In Vie privée/A Very Private Affair (1962), we see scenes from her mad fame: the constant stalking by paparazzi (a relatively new thing at the time); the hostility from authorities, parents, newspaper editors, moralists (when a man was murdered on a train at Angers, she–who had perverted moral standards!–was held partly responsible); the hysterical world of cinema; the deceptions and betrayals. In Don Juan (1973), she’s a seductive, destructive siren. In En cas de malheur/In Case of Adversity (1958), she is an indifferent prostitute. In every film, in fact in every scene, she has the same expression on her face–her own: a kind of sultry pout. “She doesn’t act,” director Roger Vadim (her first husband) said. “She exists.” That’s not to say she couldn’t act: especially in her later films, when disillusions with fame had given her a kind of world-weary gravity, she holds her own against whoever she is paired with: Marcello Mastroianni, Sean Connery, Michel Piccoli, Jeanne Moreau. La Verité is a shining example of what she was capable of, and also a great film. I love the monochrome interiors (is it ever daylight?), the darkened bistros, the sooty Parisian buildings. It’s a film that starts off dark–and then gets darker. In a rare moment of nostalgia, she herself regarded it as one of the best films she had been in. The first time I watched it, it was without subtitles, and I didn’t really understand what was going on. People would suddenly kiss, or fight; they’d flee, their bags packed; they’d meet up in secret, or so I thought. All that intrigued me, and ever since then the film to me still has this air of vagueness, of mystery. A window into a lost world.

Bardot’s public persona, more than her artistic persona, ran counter with her actual personality. Though seen as the face of sexual liberation, she was a traditionalist who preferred playful eroticism to explicit sex, masculinism to feminism, austerity to extravagance, and who supported De Gaulle at the height of the French civil unrest in May 1968. Her breakthrough film, Et Dieu… créa la femme (1956), made at a time when skin=sin, was a world-wide scandal, and the term “sex kitten” was invented for her–yet she downplayed her own looks and was sooner to agree with her critics, who wrote that she had “the face of a housemaid”. She was never styled, her uncombed, beehive hairdo and cat-like eyeliner were her own casual inventions, she went around barefooted and wore jeans not to shock but because she felt comfortable that way. (A creature of spontaneity, she was the first to glamorize the natural look: there aren’t many photos of her wearing elegant dresses, jewellery, girdles, high heels, etc. In other words, she wasn’t a manipulative vamp.) Unlike, say, Marilyn Monroe, she had never sought fame, and when she became famous, she quickly learned to loathe it. She routinely rejected huge offers to appear in US films. She spoke English the way other people eat with chopsticks. A private person who liked to pluck guitar and brood, she was always followed around, scrutinized, harassed: when she landed in Saint-Tropez in the late 1950s to hide, it promptly became a jet-set hotspot.

Eventually, aged 39, she did something unthinkable in our fame-obsessed society: she resolutely quit acting. She hasn’t been in a film since. Instead, she dedicated herself to animal rights, further enraging people, though of course she has to be admired for it. Today, with the industrialisation of animal cruelty, she’s perhaps more disillusioned than ever, yet she regrets nothing, and thus, in a way, she also is more beautiful than ever. That’s Brigitte Bardot, one of my heroes.

EYES WIDE SHUT (1999)

Seldom did a film connect as strongly with my subconscious mind, my essence, as this one. The sinister Venetian masks, the bizarre rituals, the dark doings that go on in the night, for some reason it all feels very familiar to me. It feels like the natural order of things. I’ve never felt more at home than during the scene from which the above image was taken. (I’m never more myself than when I dream.) I watched it all hypnotized–a deep truth was being shown here. One wrong look and someone in a backroom crosses out your name with a special pencil. An accidental misstep, a forbidden word that you, naively, speak out loud, and you suddenly find yourself set apart, branded. Shadows suddenly move as you approach them, bystanders seem to give you brief but penetrating glances. You never quite grasp what’s going on, if you’re breaking an unspoken rule, but you know you’ve stumbled upon something that you shouldn’t have seen. Eyes Wide Shut kickstarted my admiration of Stanley Kubrick, and my interest in the unseen.

RETURN OF THE JEDI (1983)

Sure, The Empire Strikes Back is a better film. Granted. But this was the first episode I saw, and it made the biggest impression. There was fantasy–no, there were movies, and there was Star Wars. The franchise wasn’t the peak of the pyramid, it floated slightly above the peak even, it was its own separate entity. And Return of the Jedi, in particular, showed me the fantastical and the grotesque like nothing had ever done. Everything else simply paled in comparison. Jabba the Hutt was my favorite character, but I loved his whole entourage. It was as if someone had designed all those creatures and aliens with me in mind. Right now, for my YouTube animation channel Tales from Weirdland, I’m working on an elaborate, ambitious Star Wars video, a crystallization (of sorts) of my 30-odd years with the franchise. It will probably be the biggest video I’ve made yet. My channel, by the way, can be visited here:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqje4E9YkfGV9IA19AeHygw

Oh, look at that shameless plug. But it’s my own blog, so I’m allowed. And anyway, I’m proud of my videos. And I fully realize that this text will survive me–that 200 years from now, someone might read this and wonder. My end game would surprise you, esteemed reader.

That said, I should head back to my Star Wars video now and start scene 71 (man). There’s a lot of work to be done still, but hopefully I can upload the finished video around May 2017, 40 years after the first film. (I didn’t plan it to coincide with that actually, never even thought of it, but now that I’m aware of the anniversary I’m trying to get it done by then.)

Next time, I salute you.

My Favorite Films, Part 1

In random order.

MULHOLLAND DR. (2001)

Mulholland Dr. basically is a broken TV pilot. There’s no structure, no arch; characters are introduced in grand, rich settings, only to abruptly disappear as the sequence of images that makes up this movie slowly unwinds, like forgotten thoughts. It’s an impressionistic movie, held together by a very stifling sense of danger. The two leads, Naomi Watts and Laura Harring, have always felt to me like twisted mirror images of Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes:

In fact, Laura Harring even wears a blonde wig at one point, just like Jane Russell in Gentlemen, in an attempt to mimic her companion:

But where Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is glittery and frivolous, Mulholland Dr. is dense and nightmarish. Every tear seems to hold weight. It’s a different kind of Hollywood; a town that has fallen between two realities, a carefully lit limbo in which the characters float and fade randomly, like ghosts. Books have been written about what it all means, but to me the pull of the film is exactly this vague, shadowy, old Tinseltown vibe, with its lonely suicides and stranded dreams. Naomi Watts’s character is named Betty, after Betty Grable I assume, and Diane, perhaps after the 1956 Lana Turner film; Laura Harring is Rita (Hayworth) and Camilla (as in Greta Garbo’s Camille (1936).) Maybe this is all claptrap–it probably is–but that a movie can inspire such claptrap, that’s a rare power. (After all, the Mona Lisa isn’t necessarily the greatest painting in the world.)

THE WIZ (1978)

From a nightmarish version of Hollywood we move to a nightmarish version of New York. The Wiz is a musical, but there’s nothing jolly about it. It’s a sinister film. Dorothy and her companions travel through a strangely empty city, where Art Deco has gone to die; and whenever they do encounter other characters, they are often hostile in a quiet but persistent way, casually cruel and colorful, like bizarre survivors of a nuclear holocaust. It seems like the clock is stuck at 6 o’clock in the evening: the sky is overcast, the streetlights are on, though they shine for nobody. Sometimes darkness falls, at random times. Everything seems broken, smashed to pieces, derelict, abandoned. There are subtle hints of racism: taxis drive off when black people approach them. Of course The Wiz isn’t a great film–it’s a failure in many ways–but  it’s so wildly imaginative, and it so perfectly reflects the sounds and colors of my early childhood, that to me it’s a lost classic.

THE WARRIORS (1979)

I didn’t see The Warriors when it was released (I was too young, and anyway the film was an obscurity), yet it strongly evokes my childhood: that is, fears and fantasies I had about nighttime in the city. 1970s New York could be dangerous: it was the New York that superheroes wanted to clean up. The gangs in The Warriors (the “armies of the night” as the poster has it) consist of deadly clowns, and they’re gently being riled up against the heroes by a floating, seductive voice, a motherly voice, that fills the airwaves like that of an omnipresent dictator. She issues a soothing kill order. Seeing those pitch black streets and graffiti-riddled walls that form the backdrop to all this fighting and running, I’m reminded of this bit from Daniel Westlake’s 1972 novel Cops and Robbers:

“A recent fad among the kids has been to write nicknames on walls and subways and all over the damn place in either spray paint or felt-tip pen, both of which are very tough to get rid of, particularly from a porous surface like stone. The fad is for a kid to write his name or nickname or some magic name he’s worked out for himself, and then under it write the number of the street he lives on. “JUAN 135,” for instance, or “BOSS ZOOM 92,” that kind of thing.

The fad had hit the school building. As high as a child’s arm could reach, the names and numbers were scrawled everywhere on the walls, in black and red and blue and green and yellow. Some of the signatures were like little paintings, carefully and lovingly done, and some of them were just splashed and scrawled on, with runlets of paint dripping down from the bottoms of the letters, but most of them were simply reports of name and number, without flair or imagination: “Andy 87,” “Beth 81,” “Moro 103.”

At first, all that paintwork looked like vandalism and nothing more. But as I got used to it, to seeing it around, I realized it gave a brightly colored hem to the gray stone skirt of a building like this, that it had a very sunny Latin American flavor to it, and that once you got past the prejudice against working up public property it wasn’t that bad at all. Of course, I never said this to anybody.”

The film is supposedly based on Xenophon’s Anabasis (circa 370 BC), which goes to show that the purest classics don’t have a sense of time or place–they are eternally true.

This ends Part 1; Part 2 will follow shortly. Naturally, the reason I mention all these films is because they all, in various ways, have inspired me and ignited my own creative endeavours. What creative endeavours, you say? Why, how about my animation channel on YouTube, Tales from Weirdland:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqje4E9YkfGV9IA19AeHygw

How to get more YouTube views

That’s the perennial question for every YouTuber, isn’t it. How do you find your audience–who is out there, and how do you get their attention? It always strikes me that YouTubers who frequent internet forums with these questions seem totally unaware that they themselves are somebody’s audience, too. They’ve come to think of themselves as “creators”, as separate entities floating in space, woefully out of touch with the people on Earth. What does your audience want to watch? That isn’t the right question to ask. What do you want to watch?

f you’re desperate for viewers, try this: use thumbnails with half-naked girls. Use suggestive, sensationalist clickbait titles: “The day I almost DIED”, “The REAL REASON nobody buys APPLE anymore”, “Russia HACKED me!”, and so forth. Leave your links everywhere, spam people. Clutter your thumbnails with red circles and exclamation points. Congratulations, you’ve attracted 2,000 viewers now and lost all your dignity.

Walt Disney used to say, “Quality always wins”. It’s not entirely true, but as a strategic philosophy, I like it better than the one described above.

I’ve recently set up a second channel, a separate channel, called Humanivideo.

Every day I upload a few classic copyright-free cartoons, usually Popeye or Betty Boop, cartoons that I loved as a kid and that I still rate highly. I could have named the channel Retro Classics Spectacular or Vintage Cartoons Galore Paradiso, but me being me I had to give it a weird, unappealing name of course. The channel art is supposed to be ugly, but, again me being me, I took great care into making it look ugly. Originally Humanivideo was intended to be just a budget channel, a promo tool, a “gateway” of sorts to my real channel, Tales from Weirdland, but again, me being me, I’ve taken on the role of amateur curator and try to present these cartoons well, with nice thumbnails, the best video quality, some handy information in the description box, and more.

And another thing is, by uploading old cartoons to that side channel I can keep up a regular uploading schedule, and thus please YouTube’s algorithms, which are inherently animator-unfriendly as they reward creators who upload often and publish longer videos. (Animation is months of work for minutes of screen time.) In a way, it’s like I’m sending out Popeye and Betty Boop as vedettes every day, as travelling salespersons. “Go and tell people about Tales from Weirdland!” You just have to be a little creative in the marketing department.

The 1939 Popeye cartoon Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp (1939) is one I remember very well. Of the three Popeye Color Specials by the Fleischer Studios, that is the one that made the biggest impression on me as a kid. It was actually one of the first things I looked for when I discovered YouTube. There’s a wonderful balance between the funny and the creepy, and the music is great and suggestive throughout. I love the vibrant colors, even though they faded somewhat. The backdrops are all little pieces of art, and atmospheric, the sight gags are nifty. “The laaaamp….” “I’m a feesh!” I’m positive that the cartoon helped to shape my artistic character.

Another animated short that I have really fond memories of, is Betty Boop’s Birthday Party (1933). It’s just a wonderful piece of work, with all these rubber hose characters bouncing and swinging, and singing. My grandfather was one of the first people to own a VCR, and this was one of the first cartoons he taped–for me. I watched it endlessly, and even now, many years later, the birthday song occasionally gets stuck in my head. “This is Betty’s birthday party daaaaash….” 1933–Marilyn Monroe was 5 years old. The Golden Gate Bridge was being built. And Hitler, well…

Look at the birthday cake though: Betty Boop is 14 years old.

I’m always fascinated by the voices in these cartoons. They’re the voices of ghosts. They’re coming to us through old wires, resonate through hollow tubes, their tinkling merriment long gone. You’re listening to the dead, but they themselves don’t know that they are dead.

Betty Boop cartoons were pretty raunchy actually, for their time. Before the Hays Code in 1934 (officially the “Motion Picture Production Code”), which imposed moral restrictions upon motion pictures, it was basically: be as suggestive as you want; you can tease, be naughty, show glimpses of underwear, wink, nudge. This Code lasted until 1968, after which Hollywood degenerated into the Gomorrah that it is now. The Betty Boop cartoons never recovered from the restrictions: in the later cartoons, she’s demure and boring, and most of the stories center around her dog and his wacky shenanigans.

The reason that the Code affected Betty Boop cartoons, by the way, is because they were theatrical cartoons: they weren’t shown on television–there was no television–they were shown in theatres, before a main feature or as part of a Saturday matinee. “Many people don’t realize that”, as my brother used to say whenever he had finished some trivia-filled monologue to an uninterested audience.

Above: obvious sexual harassment in the 1932 Betty Boop cartoon, Boop-Oop-a-Doop. “Do you like your job? Hehehe…” In another cartoon, Koko the Clown and Bimbo also join in on the leg rubbing, shamelessly.

So anyway, that’s my Humanivideo channel. It’s my own little Library of Congress. Like Tales from Weirdland, Humanivideo features videos that I’d want to watch myself. That has always been my main interest in doing all this, this YouTube stuff. Perhaps you’ve noticed, non-existing reader, but I never ask viewers to like, subscribe, share, and so forth, i.e. encourage viewers to “take action”, as it’s called in YouTube guides. Broadly speaking, my philosophy is that if I have to remind people to do all those things, something’s not working right.

The only thing I take into account when uploading new videos is: what are the best times to upload? The answer, apparently, is Thursday/Friday in the afternoon, as this gives Google/YouTube the opportunity to process your stuff in time for its busiest hours in the evening. So upload between 12-3 PM when you’re in LA, and between 9-11 PM when you’re in Europe. Saturday is OK too, or Sunday if Saturday isn’t possible. But I’d avoid Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday, unless you’re a big YouTube star, in which case it doesn’t matter obviously.

Right.

Currently I’m working on a pretty elaborate, ambitious Star Wars-themed video. Should be good. Anyway, until next time. Oh, by the way, the girl in the thumbnail above is called Eve, and she’ll make an appearance in a later video.

Behind the scenes of the making of: “Humaniwubba”

I have strange dreams sometimes. Dreams are always strange–they’re dreams–but mine can be strange in a strange way. I had a dream in which I was Sherlock Holmes once. I was at a crime scene, everyone was looking at me for an insight, an explanation, and I had no idea what to do. I just stood there, hoping nobody would notice I had no idea what to do.

Other reoccurring dreams: I’m back in school again, exams are coming up, I haven’t attended any classes in years, I start to panic. Or my teeth are dropping out. Or I’m flying, but I can’t land without dying.

And then people say: “Live your dreams.” No thanks.

One time I had a dream in which someone asked me to kick a ball, and right before I kicked it, I noticed it had a little face: it wasn’t a ball. That dream somehow blended together with an old video game I remembered, and the result is this video, Humaniwubba.

It’s a nonsense word, “Humaniwubba”. I was known for those when I was very young–“Humaniwubba” is from when I was 11–but later on too. Nonsensical words always perfectly express what I want to say. A couple of those nonsense words later turned out to actually mean something: I used to say “Zambezi” for example, because I liked the sound of it; years later I discovered it’s a river in Africa.

I don’t know why I went around as a kid uttering the names of African rivers.

As you can see, we’re off to a good start. Love this blog.

That’s the skyline of the quaint little town where Humaniwubba and his friends reside. His friends are called Goom and Sandor. I didn’t know this either, but my files say it, so it must be so. Goom is the little blue fellow: I did his voice myself, and it took such a toll on my vocal cords that I was hoarse for a few days. (I accidentally wrote “horse” first: “It took such a toll on my vocal cords that I was a horse for a few days.”) I was so hoarse, I needed a hearse. A hearse pulled by horses. I did all the voices for this one actually–Humaniwubba and Sandor too. I do that sometimes, but never credit myself, out of modesty, or shame. I did the narration for Silex the Barbarian, and the Skull King’s voice; and Zernak is me too; and those two Converters. I’m Dutch, so if there’s an accent, now you know why. The great thing about doing voice work myself is that I don’t have to endlessly explain to myself what I want.

Backdrop for the scene where Goom hands the ball to Humaniwubba. The camera pans down. I restricted myself to only using the 15-color palette of the old 8-bit ZX Spectrum home computer, as you do. I didn’t have one of those, but I was aware of its existence through ads and stuff, and its limited colors always intrigued me. Every screenshot had a unique look. Imposing such restrictions upon yourself forces you to access different parts of your brain, to be creative; you become an artist without habits. I really had to think about the color arrangement when I made this video–strategize almost.

The video’s general look was stolen from inspired by an old PC video game called The Neverhood. Not many people have played it, but my brother was a fan. He used to say, “Come on, look, this is great,” but I felt I was too old for video games then and wasn’t interested. It was a point-and-click adventure made entirely with clay, very creatively done, very inventive. I suppose the word “Humaniwubba” made me think of Hubba Bubba chewing gum, which in turn  made me think of clay, which made me think of claymation, and then The Neverhood. See, this is why I opened this blog post talking about dreams.

Why are there Beatles in this video? There’s a bit where Goom appears to refer to the film The Wild One (1953), more specifically the scene where the character Chino (Lee Marvin) says: “That’s better Johnny. You know I miss you. Ever since the club split up, I miss you. We all missed ya… Ya miss him? Yeah! The Beetles missed ya! All the Beetles missed ya!” It’s supposedly where The Beatles got their name from (though I doubt that). Anyway, this clip is shown in the Beatles Anthology documentary, which aired on TV in 1996, the same year The Neverhood came out. I could easily make things even weirder than that, but I don’t want to completely alienate my modest Tumblr audience just yet.

That’s the original pencil drawing of the scene above. Forgot to add that, so here it is.

Might as well add the original skyline drawing too then. The style, with its hatched shadings and rubbery buildings, actually reminds me of those old Krazy Kat newspaper comics a bit. Krazy Kat seemed to live in a cold, alien world, filled with abstract objects and a random daytime/nighttime cycle. The comics had a dark, dreamlike atmosphere, a surrealistic quality that presented itself as the most ordinary thing in the world. I’m sure there’s a trace of those comics in this video.

You can see the Humaniwubba video on my channel, Tales from Weirdland (plug, plug):

Behind the scenes of the making of: "Converters (Not Transformers)"

More junk treasures that inhabit my attic (see Notes from my attic #1-4). Mogwai, Christmas 1984. Gator, M.A.S.K., summer 1986. I remember everything. Silent witnesses of joyful, relatively carefree times.

Transformers hog up most of the space in my attic it seems. My first Transformer was Tracks. This was in 1984. Tracks came in two colors: red, and blue. Initially I wanted the red one; it seemed cool, funky. And very red. But my brother picked the blue variant, so, having been drilled to do what others do and think what others think, I did the same. Of course, the red Tracks is extremely rare and worth roughly $1,000 now.

I liked Tracks though. He looked nifty. But I quickly discovered he wasn’t one of the main players in the cartoon. It was a cameo here, a bit part there, and sometimes you’d think it was him in the background but oh wait, it’s just Sideswipe with Tracks’ colors because the cartoon studios have outsourced the animation to some small Asian country in an effort to cut costs. Oh well.

Anyway–soon after, I started making my own Transformers comics:

“Fire de laser.” I remember sitting in front of the TV, pausing the VCR and trying to get those models right. I was quite pleased with the fruits of my labor actually, especially Soundwave’s dynamic attack pose. Of course, I never finished the comic. I didn’t have a story to tell, I just wanted to learn how to draw explosions and how to suggest glossy, metal surfaces and glass windows. That always was my main interest in cartoons like He-Man, Transformers, et cetera anyway–I was always absorbing styles, learning tricks, trying to hone my skills.

Many years later, and here are the Transformers I did for my YouTube channel, Tales from Weirdland. That was a fun video to do really. I hadn’t drawn any Transformers since, well, since that comic probably. The character on the right is Crack. He’s rusty, dusty, his colors are faded. He coughs. The left one is called Knockoff, and the idea is that he looks like a bootleg Transformer. I owned a few of those: they were dull, cheap, their color schemes were off, and they transformed into a clock or something equally lame. I’ve always been fascinated with the jumbled world of art forgery: knockoffs, bootlegs, fakes. Glimpses into an alternate universe.

The one thing that always struck me about those old Transformers cartoons, were the mountainous backgrounds: they were hand-painted, and quite atmospheric. They looked pretty good actually; even as a kid I attempted to mimic that style, as you can tell from the comic. The image above is from the Converters video–I just had to include mountains, or else it wouldn’t feel like a 1980s Transformers cartoon to me.

This is Crack’s transformation process. I based it on Bluestreak or Smokescreen, or one of those busty Transformers anyway, but still it was very tricky to get this right. Obviously you have to cheat a little. The car is an old Chevy. Initially, I tried to have him clap his hands one time right before his wheels hit the ground, cool breakdancer style, but it looked not so much cool breakdancer style as “Look, this animator obviously doesn’t know what he’s doing”.

This is how Knockoff transforms. It’s more of an optical illusion really, but that’s OK–ever seen Megatron change into a gun in the cartoon?

For the video I didn’t want to just use the existing Autobot and Decepticon symbols, so I designed my own. They are warped, yet still recognizable.

Original pencil drawing of Optimus Prime clone Principus Alpha. I draw everything with pencil on paper, then scan the result and tweak it a little in Photoshop. Transformers aren’t rigidly mechanical, they are kind of robust, organic: they consist of curvy lines and plump spaces.

It’s glimpsed in the first scene of the video: the power plant that the “Disrupticons” are heading for. This was a simple, compact drawing, as it had to register quite quickly.

The video’s end title is also done in the style of Transformers: I could easily have left it and spend those few hours on a new video, but I always want to do something extra, add some special element where nobody expects it. There are a zillion Transformers parodies on YouTube, but they’re all kind of jokey jokey and lazy. What I like in parodies, is earnestness, veracity. The best Transformers parodies are those 1980s bootleg toys.

Lastly, one thing that always intrigued me as a kid was that many of the characters in the cartoons looked nothing like their toy counterparts. At the toy store, they formed a ghoulish parade of mutilated freaks and misfits, merchandise from another reality:

I toyed (hehe) with the idea of having one of my Converters look like one of those complex monstrosities, but couldn’t find a way to make it work. And anyway, Transformers just don’t transform in a believable way. You have to cheat, or you end up with complicated, lumbering, ungraceful creatures, like the Transformers in the Michael Bay films.

Here is the video: