Notes from my attic #1

I’m cleaning up my attic.

But listen.

In the early 1980s, the Reagan Administration eased the rules on advertising toy lines via cartoons. He-Man: Masters of the Universe, Transformers, G.I. Joe, Care Bears, and so forth, were the result.

Psychologists and other weirdos protested that these “program-length commercials” would pollute television and abuse and degenerate our innocent souls. Naturally, this didn’t happen; our souls were already so black and cold that we couldn’t possibly sink any further. We ended up with truckloads of toys, gullible little consumers that we were.

I have to say, I only really watched those cartoons because my brother did. Personally, I preferred Road Runner, The Muppets, Popeye. I also used to deliberately, against my will, watch cartoons that nobody else wanted to watch, because I felt sorry for those cartoons. I was a very sensitive kid.

The nook of my attic. Recognize Boba Fett’s ship? I’ll get to Star Wars at a later point, if I can find a way to reach the nook without breaking my neck.

That is all that if left of a B.A. Baracus figure. Right, the A-Team. My brother was a fan, so I was a fan. The team visited Holland in 1984–but only three of them. One, Hannibal, lucked out somehow and stayed home; he probably drew the longest straw or something. It gave me a strange feeling, I remember. It wasn’t right. I couldn’t be excited about it. Twenty years earlier, the exact same thing had happened when The Beatles visited Holland. Only three of them came over. I bet that if the Apocalypse happened, only three Horsemen would appear here.

A big, bloodthirsty crowd came to welcome the A-Team at the airport. It seemed like a huge event, the second coming of Christ (there you go, two biblical references in one post). Murdock yelled like a brain-damaged jungle creature, Face smiled and waved, and B.A. spouted confused gibberish at the unsuspecting kids. He seemed angry all the time. I hope he got himself sorted out eventually.

Let’s take a look at some of the sketchbooks I’ve found.

This late 20th Century marker drawing (circa 1978) depicts the artist being readied for his bath. A piece of soap can be seen on the left, the filled bath is on the far right. The violent, uncontrolled peeing and escaping turd, as well as the sneaky sideways look, are very typical of this period in the artist’s career, as he dedicated several other drawings to this particular subject matter:

Here is a self portrait from a later period, side by side with the actual model:

As you can see, I had a nice little Prince Valiant look going on. I had long hair to cover my floppy ears. I hail from a tiny rural village where the only people with long hair were women. Since I had an angelic face and feminine features, I was often mistaken for a girl actually–one of my big childhood traumas. I remember sitting on a sand hill, lost in thought, when a ball hit me. I looked, and this old man said to his granddaughter: “Ask that other girl if you can have your ball back.” You don’t forget things like that.

Donald Duck with a baby carriage. And why not.

I was a big Popeye fan. I dressed up as Popeye once for Carnival, a Dutch spring festival centered around “role-reversal and suspension of social norms”, as Wikipedia has it. Basically it’s just people getting drunk. I was Popeye, my brother was Zorro–photographic evidence exists of this, but common sense prevents me from scanning it. Anyway, I loved Popeye. Page after page, it’s Popeye fighting Bluto, Popeye in some perilous predicament, Popeye and Olive, Popeye just floating in the air and being hideously deformed, Popeye peeing violently, and so forth. I had Popeye figurines, bendables, Corgi cars, comics. I made my mother buy spinach all the time, up to the point where she said, “Wouldn’t you rather have french fries?”

I also owned a luxurious book that celebrated Popeye’s 50th birthday. I still remember the exact caption under one of the animation model sheets: “To aid the animation process, the characters were significantly simplified compared to their original comic book counterparts.”

That’s a comic from when I was 11 or thereabouts. Still drawing Popeye. And as you can see, I was happily butchering the English language, something that I still do, right here in this blog.

Until next time.