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.

Behind the scenes of the making of: "Star Quest"

This post contains background information on the Star Quest video, which can be seen here on my YouTube channel, Tales from Weirdland:

It’s funny. As a kid, I wasn’t a big sci-fi fan. Or even a little sci-fi fan. There was Star Wars, sure–I loved Star Wars–but outside of that, nothing took my fancy. My brother, a real nerd, complete with jam jar glasses and an oversized digital watch that accurately showed all the moon phases, used to watch all the shows religiously: Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, V, and so forth; but me, I played with dolls and wanted a doll’s house for Christmas (which I got, thank you). My main memory of the 1979 Buck Rogers TV show basically is this hideous villain that appeared in one of the episodes: there was something wrong with him, his skin looked like mutant muesli. Boiled cancer. It made me lose all appetite for like, years.

He’s wearing his mask there–this is to protect you, reader. (I took that image from a blog, John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Cult Movies and Classic TV.) Google “Varek”, “Buck Rogers”, if you dare.

But anyway, the sci-fi genre wasn’t really for me.

And yet, I find that it’s exactly that, those old sci-fi shows and comics, that evoke some of the strongest childhood memories. Possibly because they promised an exciting future, somewhere in the background. Or maybe it’s like the songs you don’t really pay attention to: those get stuck in your head.

(A song gets stuck in your head when your brain is trying to finish it, to resolve it, but it can’t. To counter this, play the song in its entirety.)

That’s me, left, being my autumnal self in the early 1980s. My big brother is lost in a comic and unaware of reality.

Star Quest is an homage to this era of silver spacesuits, capes, medallions, bushy sideburns, tin foil antennas, robots made of gold-painted hard latex, and control panels that were really disguised mixing desks. I’ve always been intrigued by the technology from that period: those robust, bulky designs, built to withstand a bomb explosion apparently. 1970s telephones look like pre-school toys, with big buttons and thick, coated armor. The enemy ship in SQ is like that: it’s plated, heavy, a shark-shaped fortress:

Grand Vizier Rylox, captain of this evil ship, originally looked like the image above. His appearance resembled that of a Noh demon, but as much as I liked the design, it clashed with the 70s theme, so I abandoned it before I got to coloring the face. As I was redesigning the character, I wanted Rylox to look as if his face could be a rubber mask, or as if he was wearing prosthetics maybe. That’s why he has limited mouth movements in the video: it’s not bad lip syncing, it’s simply that the actor can’t move his facial muscles too well.

When Captain Logan is being addressed by Rylox via hologram, he just sternly stands there, listening. As Rylox himself wasn’t much to look at, with his small, black mouth, I had to vary the camera positions occasionally to prevent the video from losing its rhythm. That resulted in this tricky shot. I was very pleased with Captain Logan’s look actually: it’s a blend of Lorne Greene and a non-specific Filmation character (I was thinking of Journey to the Center of the Earth). To get the right 1970s feel for the video, I watched clips of all the relevant shows, but found that once you try to copy that style, you quickly venture towards caricature, parody, like that Starsky & Hutch film with Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson: it’s so SEVENTIES you actually forget it’s supposed to take place in the 1970s. A better approach is to just try to come up with a good design first, and then adjust it so that it fits within the fashion perimeters of that era. After all, in the 1970s, nobody looked or dressed like it was the 1970s.

That’s a fancy way of saying I more or less stole the outfits from the 1977 TV show, Space Academy.

The shark ship, before I forget, was originally supposed to be a city ship, a floating metropolis, housing thousands of people. (That’s inevitably in our future.) I thought it was a grand idea, until I discovered that a similar design features in Alien 2. So, exit city ship. The interior of the Starship Olympus was inspired, sort of, by E.T.’s ship.

Because I animate the old-fashioned way, by drawing everything on paper with pencil, I have to be economical when it comes to using paper. Hence these three heads crammed together on one sheet. The “Star Commander”, left, echoes 1970s Marvel comics: he doesn’t feature in the video itself but is simply there to suggest you’re watching a series. Also, he was the first character I started drawing when I set myself the task to go for a 1970s sci-fi theme.

The introductions were fun to do. Admiral Jericho is paired with Sola, in typical 1970s split-screen style. Again, these shots were intended to suggest you’re watching a running series instead of a brief one-off. I always think up small backstories for such glimpses, just for myself. Sola is being briefed by a Galruggian worker–”All cells have been replaced, lieutenant”–Jericho, in his lab, is testing out a new laser, making adjustments, taking notes.

Jim Booker and Captain Matt Logan. Matt, you say? Yes. My brother and I used to play with Lego Space when we were kids, and we had invented this show called Space Police. My main character in it was Jim Booker, my brother’s was Matt Logan, after, I suppose Matt Trakker (M.A.S.K.) and Wolverine. So my video is an homage to that too: that brief, golden flash that is your childhood.

Until next time!