OK, I gotta stop this and post about something else for a change...starting next time (I hope).
Even decay looks good when colored like this (above)!
A ghost threatens a child (above). Contrary to the common PC wisdom, kids love to see other kids threatened by supernatural creatures. It all depends how it's handled.
Maybe the world's next Napoleon (above) is attending a grammar school near you.
Thailand has some sort of ghost ceremony which requires kids to wear beautiful, colorful costumes. Boy, I'd love to see this!
A little minimalist for my taste (above), but I'd buy it!
Making the Minotaur (above) crazy is a nice addition to the old legend.
Dog ghosts (above)! Why not?
"kids love to see other kids threatened by supernatural creatures" So true! That's why the uncensored Grimm's fairy tales are much better than the modern paraphrases of them. The originals are much edgier, more disturbing in all sorts of ways.
ReplyDeleteAaaah, Halloween! I wish at the end of every month we had a celebration where everyone made costumes and wore them to parties. The world would be a much better place. It would give people common ground, a creative outlet, and a social event to look forward to. Isn't that the point of holidays and culture?
ReplyDeleteIf I'm elected President that would be my first initiative. My campaign slogan would be, 'A chicken in every pot and a halloween every month.'
I only like the last one for the painting technique and the pretty lady, but some of these look like Slipknot's masks.
ReplyDeleteBarring another unforseen catastrophe, Sarah Palin should be this year's most popular Halloween character.
ReplyDeleteYou should film yourself wearing some of the masks from your personal collection!
ReplyDeleteAmazing! Those Thai costume colors are flourencent, but not garish! Love it!
ReplyDeleteEddie, tell the story of wearing your favorite mask of the moment around halloween time, driving home in your car with it on and your kid's reaction when she ran out to greet you. Classic!
ReplyDeleteI once rented a full lion costume for a school thing complete with head from Western Costume(in the days when it was next to Paramount and had an incredible warehouse); after school I gave a friend a ride home and drove all the way down Wilton wearing the head, waving out the window in my grandmother's '73 Cadillac. I can still remember the faces of the other drivers at stoplights.
I love the Halloween stuff!
ReplyDeleteHere's another blog that might interest you:
www.trixietreats.blogspot.com
This is, yet again, a great post! I don't think you've done a post on old toys, though. Don't you collect them? Tell you what: I collect old toys and if you do a post on old toys then I'll post pictures of my rich rewards from hours of scrounging fleamarkets and yard sales on my blog. Waddaya say?
ReplyDeleteYou know, Eddie, there are a number of blogs that participate in "Halloween Countdowns," where they post something Halloween related every day in October, up until the big night itself.
ReplyDeleteAt this rate, I think you'd be a great candidate for just such a ceremony!
Think about it!
Tim: Looks interesting! Many thanks!
ReplyDeletePhantom: For some inexplicable reason I never collected toys, even the good ones. I wish I had!
Steven: Naw, I wanna post about some other things. Thanks for the search tip, though!
Jorge: What are Slipknot's masks?
Jenny: I have so many mask stories that are related to my kids... I don't know which one you mean.
Well, it's never too late to start collecting toys! I'm lucky though. I live close to a huge fleamarket that has toys from the '50s and earlier, super cheap. Kali said you have masks, though. Let's see some of those!
ReplyDeleteOh, and in case Jorge doesn't reply (don't post this if he doesn't), Slipknot is an unbearably crappy heavy metal band whose members wear masks.
ReplyDeleteI already retold this one to you last year(you remembered it then):
ReplyDeleteYou'd put the scary/gross Halloween rubber mask du jour on for fun to drive up to your house. Kid comes running out(she would have been about 2-3)-sees this...this THING: a gruesome, hideous, leering, slavering BEAST-MAN in her daddy's car-and goes running screaming back to the house.
The best part is that you, aghast at the too-intense reaction of terror you got from your offspring, leap out of the car to stop her-still wearing the offending mask, pleading with her to "see! hey! look! it's only dad" etc.--and of course your pursuit just makes it a million times worse til she's hysterical.
I can't remember at what point you thought to take the mask off...but I do recall your being both terribly chagrined at scaring her so badly and laughing at how absurd it all was(typical!).
I think it might have been a kind of Wolverton-style mask--an all-over head one. I believe you bought it in the mall which had a seasonal Halloween store like most malls do and had been fussing and jubilating over this ugly thing all day. Just couldn't wait to put it on. Quelle disaster!
Every Halloween until I was about 7 my grandmother in Missouri sent us kids a big box filled with wonderful goodies--seriously, it was better than Xmas: those great figural colored-wax candles--ghosts, witches, black cats, wax teeth, candy necklaces, pumpkins, noisemakers, little hard plastic figures and toys, jack-o-lantern candy carriers, all sorts of die cut hanging and table decorations--an entire boxfull!
And blah blah blah...et cetera. ; ) Sorry to monopolize your blog.
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/27/57399698_0382e92fbe_o.jpg
ReplyDeleteHey Eddie,
ReplyDeleteThis isn't appropriate to the topic but have you ever read the book "Economics in one lesson" by Henry Hazlitt? The whole time I was reading it I was thinking "Eddie Fitzgerald would love this book!" It is completely metaphorical, not mathematical...check it out. The first chapter is the best..Hazlitt explains free market economics by comparing it to a kid breaking the window of a bakery! Do check it out!
Everybody: Too...too sllepy (sleepy)...to..answer! Will...answer...tomorrow!
ReplyDeleteHalloween is a fun holiday! I love seeing how the children are going to dress. Some of the costumes are boring and plastic, but some of them are really creative.
ReplyDeleteI miss giving candy out to the kids - my apartment complex usually hosts a party for the kids and the mgmt gives them a big bag of candy.
Those pictures are really fun! The 10-year-old trapped in me thought the first picture (the pumpkin with the big nose) was really funny because it looked "dirty".
Jennifer: Like you I wish apartment managers woudn't try to co-opt halloween by giving out candy. The personal contact from door-to-door visits are a lot more fun!
ReplyDeleteNo doubt about it, cucumbers are a funny vegetable!
Max: I love the Hazlitt book, and it's very relevant to our time. I wish Hazlitt had revised it because it looses momentum after the excellent window analogy, but it gets it back eventually and is a good read.
Jenny: Interesting picture! A weird, robotic pumpkin presides over a tiny forest of Tim Burton-type, expressionist toys!
And the story about my daughter...I remember now. That was the time I bought a thin, latex mask that looked like it was inspired by the one the crazy guy wore in the original "Texas Chainsaw Massacre." That was the scariest mask I ever owned, and a lot of people I knew were creeped out by it. It was so thin that the latex cracked and became brittle after only a couple of years, and I had to get rid of it.
The problem with that mask is that it was genuinely macabre. I like funny masks better.
Phantom: Good idea! When I can figure out what's wrong with my camera, I'll take a picture of my mask collection.
Adam: I used to wonder if Halloween was morphing into a kind of adult Mardis Gras. Now I'm not so sure. You see more kids on the street these days, and that's a good sign. Kid holidays may make a big comeback. I hope so, because it'll be fun and will mean lots of jobs for artists, including cartoonists.
Hey Uncle Eddie, how are you?
ReplyDeleteHalloween used to be one of my favorite holidays when I was a child. Unlike for most of the kids that have used those fancy Halloween themed bags for trick-or-treating, my sisters and I had to use empty pillow cases and/ or empty ice cream buckets. It was great, since pillow bags could store more candy and fruit.
Where I live, there is another Halloween tradition at the local fair. Fright Night, as it was called and is a fine tradition that continues to this day, is when the fair temporary becomes a Haunted theme park, with the cashers, park attendants, & even the ride operators dress up as the creature or monster of their choice (they usually try to avoid wearing costumes of pop culture figures like presidents, or film, television, and cartoon characters, although as a kid, there was this one guy that had dressed up as Powered Toastman, so who knows)
Once I’ve turned 12, I was finished with the tradition of going trick or treating.
Naturally, I was bummed out. It wasn’t long before I was in awe with another Hollow’s eve tradition: watching horror movies with your best friends.
Firstly, depending on how many there were, my friends and I would go into groups of two to pick up the essential necessities for a fright night. You know the drill: getting drinks, horror movies, etc.
It was also the first time, at the age of 13, that I had first seen the Evil Dead movies (Evil Dead, Evil Dead 2, and Army of Darkness). The first film, The Evil Dead, depicts five college students on their vacation in an isolated cabin in the woods, which turns into a nightmare when they find an audiotape that is the key to unlocking evil spirits.
Its sequel, Sam Raimi lost the rights to Part 1 and for legal reasons could not show any footage from the first film. Instead, they did an extremely simplified version of The Evil Dead (spanning 7 minutes and 7 seconds of The Evil Dead II). The recreation of the final shot of The Evil Dead is the bridge into the new material, where the film picks up where its predecessor left off; Ash becomes briefly possessed by the demon, but when day breaks the spirit is gone, and Ash is back to normal. He makes an attempt to escape but is unable to. Fearing for his life, Ash barricaded himself in the cabin, attacking anything that moves and is subdued when two new couples arrive at the cabin.
At first, he is mistaken for a murderer by the four because the professor and his wife are missing and Ash is covered in blood. Ash is soon proven innocent as the evil forces continue to attack. Now they all have to work to survive the aggression and find a way to send the evil back to whence it came.
In the final film, Army of Darkness, picks up where Evil Dead 2 left off. Ash narrates how he and his girlfriend Linda (played by Bridget Fonda in a very brief cameo), both supermarket clerks at an S-Mart retail store, went for a vacation in the woods to an old cabin and they discovered the book Necronomicon Ex-Mortis, or "Book of the Dead" and upon reading it, unleashed demonic forces as detailed in the previous films The Evil Dead and Evil Dead II. After reading a spell to defeat the demons, Ash is sucked into a time vortex with his Oldsmobile, and is transported back to the Middle-Ages.
The end of Evil Dead II shows Ash being hailed as the "Hero from the Sky", the man destined to deliver salvation to mankind from the "Deadites", or those possessed by the evil demons the people called back then.
While the first film was extremely controversial for its graphic violence and gore, its following sequel was a balance of scurrilous and comedic moments. Army of Darkness, despite being a sequel to the two Evil Dead films, it is not as violent or gory, relying more on slapstick. It was more of a horror comedy film.
One of my favorite moments from Evil Dead 2, was this one, where Ash looses his mind: Evil Dead II - Laughing scene
Have a good one, Uncle Ed, and Happy early Halloween.
From an aspiring artist/ animator