Showing posts with label funny walks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label funny walks. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

DANCING TO WORK


Expect nothing in this rambling Theory Corner post to make any sense. I've been fooling around with Photoshop effects and become obsessed with this picture of a girl walking (above) at an angle. I can't get over the fact that the girl is askew but the world around her is normal.


Rotate the screen as shown above and the girl becomes normal and it's the world around her that's askew. If she dropped an apple it would roll down the hill to screen left. Interesting, eh?  I envision a city built on a steep hillside where people learn from childhood how to walk the way the girl's walking here. 

No doubt the inhabitants of such a town would travel horizontally most of the time. Going up or down would require too much energy. 


Now put aside the concept of a diagonal city, and imagine a normal city where everybody danced to where they were going rather than walked.  Of course high energy dances like the Lindy Hop (above) or Hip Hop wouldn't be very practical for distance dancing. For that, you'd need something less strenuous, something like....
   

...like the Peabody or the Madison (above).


Or the "Wild and Crazy Guys" walk from Saturday Night Live.

I imagine that walkers would think of lots of variations to make the walk dances more interesting.


Haw! A good dance/walk (above) is a thing of beauty!


In such a world what would happen if a boy and girl met on the street?


Well, I guess they'd dance in place while they spoke to each other.


After speaking they'd say good-bye and take off in opposite directions (above, left)...or they'd dance together in the same direction (above, right).


If they needed to stop and talk for a minute they'd go back to dancing in place. 


Sunday, June 23, 2013

WALLY WOOD'S WOMEN


This is about Wally Wood.


I love the way Wood used to draw women in glamor poses (above), even when they were casually walking down the street.

Even his sci-fi was full of glamor poses. A wife tearfully saying goodbye to a husband leaving for Mars wasn't above striking a calendar pose. Amazingly the off-topic poses didn't diminish the seriousness of the story.

Wood obviously did this because he thought it was funny, but I'm guessing that it was also because his photo reference (above) came from ads and mens magazines. 50s glamor was very stylized. Even ice-cream could be sold with bombshell poses. The era wasn't interested in looking natural, and neither was Wood.


Unfettered by naturalism Wood was free to figure out his own way of walking women. I like that better than the literal stuff we do now.

I imagine that this (above) is the way women really walk in heels.  It's different than what Wood did, but that doesn't mean Wood was wrong. Cartooning and animation aren't about realism, they're about caricature....


...and nobody caricatured better than Wood. Imagine how this walk (above) would have looked in animation. Imagine how much fun it would have been to draw. It would even have been fun to draw the discombobulated men she passed.


Surprisingly animation never picked up on Wood's unique way of drawing sexy walks. Too bad, the subject (above) was far from exhausted.


Animation's in a rut, don't you think? I yearn for something new and different. 



I'm thinking only of walks here, but I don't mean something X-rated. I mean something "G" or "PG" that's funny, and which a family could watch together without the parents falling asleep. 


Geez, all this is making me want to draw.



Saturday, August 11, 2012

COOL DANCES / WALKS


Oh, Boy! Let's watch some funny dance videos! Mike Fontanelli turned me on to this dance (above) from Eddie Cantor"s "Ali Baba Goes to Town."



Max Wall was one of the kings of the funny walk. This sample (above) starts slow, so I'd advise starting at the 1:30 mark.



I posted this walk video (above) about three years ago and I expected it to change the animation industry. Sigh! It didn't, but it should have.



Imagine what Vaudeville must have been like! You could see a whole live matinee like this (above) for just a quarter.



Don sent this link (above) in a comment. See what you think.

Friday, July 24, 2009

WALKING WITHOUT GETTING ANYWHERE


I was going to do a post about silly walks (above), ones that aren't in the famous Python sketch, but I got side-tracked into watching videos of mime walks, and now that's all I can think about. I'm going to learn the profile walk in these videos, and then do it in front of a dog. I have a feeling that it'll drive him nuts!



I posted three walk videos because each one contained some bit of information that the others lift out.



It does take strength in the legs to do this because, unlike real walks, you're putting your weight on a bent leg.






It's off-topic, but I couldn't resist putting a Moonwalk tutorial (above) in here. Actually this looks easier to learn than the profile mime walk. This guy does a good job of explaining it, don't you think?

Thursday, March 20, 2008

ART OF THE FUNNY WALK



Don't you just love a good walk? Walk acts were a whole genre in vaudeville. They were considered a type of "eccentric dancing." Cagney was good walker, so was Buddy Ebson, but I'll bet the best walkers were names nobody would recognize anymore. Here's a great one that Mike turned me on to (above): Dean Martin's uncle Leonard. Sheer bliss to watch!





Another great walk (above) by a guy named Wall. Holy Cow! It makes you want to burn your Preston Blair (well, sort of....)!