ATTACK OF THE 50FT. WOMEN (NEW VERSION)

TV ANNOUNCER (VO): "Not Godzilla, not King Kong, but gigantic women as tall as skyscrapers wander the streets of our great city! Who are they? Where did they come from? What do they want? Scientists are baffled, and the police are powerless to stop them! All we can say for sure, is that they seem to be searching for something....but for what?"

TV ANNOUNCER (VO): "They're peeping in windows..."

TV ANNOUNCER (VO): "...scouring rooftops...."

TV ANNOUNCER (VO): "...and listening to what goes on inside buildings! But why!? What are they looking for!???"

TV ANNOUNCER (VO): "On the streets thousands flee in terror."

TV ANNOUNCER (VO): "Roads and airports are congested as a panic-stricken population attempts to flee. The question on everybody's minds is: 'Who are these women? What do they want!??' " 

INT. OFFICE BLDG.

CO-WORKER #1: "Oh, my God! One of those women is outside right now! We're all 

gonna die!"

UNCLE EDDIE (EXASPERATED): "(Sigh!) You're not going to die. Nobody's going to die, except maybe me. I'm the one they're looking for."

CO-WORKER #2: "YOU!!!??? The office boy? YOU'RE the one they're looking for??? Why?"

UNCLE EDDIE: "Weeeell, they're kinda' my old girlfriends. They were all too short, and I like tall girls, so I used to sneak vitamins into their drinks. I guess I over did it. "

CO-WORKER #3: "Well, tell them to go away!"

UNCLE EDDIE: "You can't just tell somebody 50ft. tall to go away! 

UNCLE EDDIE: "Look, just chill out a little longer, and when they can't find me, they'll go away. They'll never, ever find me here!" 

GIANT: "Eddie!? Is that you?"

The giant takes off her dress and does a sultry rub against the side of the building.

GIRLFRIEND #4: "Ooooh, Eddie! I've been looking for you...sooooo long!"

ON THE STREET: Eddie's car careens out of the parking garage. 

UNCLE EDDIE: "I gotta get outta here!"

Another girlfriend blocks the way.

GIRLFRIEND #5: " Eddie, there you are! Let's have lunch!"

UNCLE EDDIE (VO): "Good Grief!"

SCREEEEECH! The car screeches to a halt then takes off in a different direction.

MATILDA: "Eddie! It's me, Matilda! I still have your Tiny Tim records!"

SCREEEEEECH!

UNCLE EDDIE (VO): "Sorry, Matilda! 'Can't talk now!"

DAISY: "Eddie! At last I..."

UNCLE EDDIE (VO): "Sorry Daisy! 'Gotta go!"

Eddie's car races through traffic, takes lots of shortcuts.

UNCLE EDDIE (VO): "Sorry! Pardon me!"

UNCLE EDDIE (VO): "So Sorry!"

UNCLE EDDIE (VO): "Excuse me! Sorry!

UNCLE EDDIE (VO): "Beg your pardon! Excuse me! Pardon!"

UNCLE EDDIE: "Huh? What's this?" 

UNCLE EDDIE (VO): "I'll just park infront of this orange thing. They'll never find me here."

MILDRED (VO): "Soooo THERE you are!!!!"

MILDRED: "It's me...Mildred, your girlfriend! You were running away, weren't you? Oooohh, I'm so mad! I could..."

MILDRED: "....Ha ha! Just kidding! You know I could never be mad at you! I like you so much, I could just eat you up..."

UNCLE EDDIE: "WAIT!!!!!!!" 

UNCLE EDDIE: "Um, how 'bout a cup of coffee? You know, all sweet and everything, just the way you like it!?"

EXT. COFFEE SHOP, LATER: Mildred waits outside while Uncle Eddie goes inside to score some coffee. A passer-by stops to stare. 

MILDRED: "What are YOU looking at!?"

INSIDE THE COFFEE SHOP:

STARBUCKS EMPLOYEE:  "And what size will that coffee be, sir? Large, larger, or "grande?"

He looks back at Mildred (outside).

UNCLE EDDIE: "I'll have the MUCHO, MUCHO, MUCHO, MUCHO, MUCHO, MUCHO, MUCHO, MUCHO GRANDE please, with a couple of sacks of sugar and, oh yeah...a 2X4 to stir it with!

THE END

Many thanks to GARCIA ACCASBEL for the great girl photography! 

Garcia's site: http://www.flickr.com/groups/474990@N25/pool/page7/

A LEG UP OR CHILD ABUSE?

I'm proud of the way I brought up my kids. From my point of view my kids had a near ideal childhood immersed as they were in Shakespeare, Dickens, science, Kurtzman's Mad, Sid Caesar, Ernie Kovacs, Monty Python, Mr. Bean, Clampett and all that. Imagine my shock when Mike showed me this article (excerpt above) from The Onion, which claimed that kids raised that way led shabby, friendless lives, which would almost certainly culminate in depression and suicide. Okay, I exaggerate, but only a little.

Let's try another excerpt from the article (below) (click to enlarge):

Imagine my greater shock when I showed the article to my adult daughter, and she agreed with it. She said she did have trouble making friends in grammar school because nobody her own age read anything she read, or even showed any interest in it. She was glad for what she still thinks was a better than average early education, but she said it came at a  price, definitely a price. Man, I felt terrible!

So what am I to make of this? Am I a bum?

Read the whole article at The Onion site:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/cool-dad-raising-daughter-on-media-that-will-put-h,26132/

THANKS TO STEVE WORTH!

My computer's fixed!!!! Many, many thanks to Steve Worth for the repair! He not only fixed the machine, but he talked me through every step so I can do the next fix myself. Now I can put up photo stories and comics just like real bloggers do!

I'll try to do a photo story tomorrow!

BTW: Thanks to Kellie and Anonymous for the useful repair tips!

"CRIME DOES NOT PAY"

Dark Horse just published an anthology of stories from "Crime Does Not Pay," for my money one of the best adult comic books ever. I skimmed my friend Mike's copy of the book, and I got the impression that the book's stories were chosen for the writing, and not the artwork, but maybe I'm wrong. Jack Cole used to draw for this comic, and so did Paul Gustafson.

You never heard of Gustafson? That's a sample of his work above. He had a real cinematic style. How do you like that second panel where we see ordinary pedestrians waiting for a light to change from the vantage point of some evil force lurking in the shadows?

The comic was edited by Charles Biro and Bob Wood in the early forties. In real life, Wood lived the life he wrote about and ended up beating his wife to death with a steam iron. He went to prison for it, and was murdered by another inmate.

"Crimes by Women" looks like a pretty good title too, to judge by the cover. There were a lot of crime titles in those days.

Look at that policeman (above)! He looks like he was drawn by Kirby, but I think the drawing is credited to someone else.

"Murder Incorporated" (above)  looks like an interesting comic....

....as does "Crime Reporter!" I wish I could read these comics.

Geez, here (above) we have the shocking immediacy of seeing a man shot at point blank range from the point of view of the shooter.

I hate to seem like a prude, but maybe these comics were too strong for kids. They make crime and sadism look exciting in a way that EC comics never did.

How do you like the far away look (above) on the stabber's face? 'Probably an editor's change.

ASTRONOMY PICTURES YOU MAY NOT HAVE SEEN

Good Lord!!! This is the solar flare that made headlines when it escaped from the sun this June. It's amazing that the sun can lose that kind of mass so frequently and still continue to burn for billions of years.

Above, a peek into a sunspot. The little pieces of yellow "corn" around the rim are not currently understood. Click to enlarge.

Here's (above) the Sleeping Beauty Galaxy. The outer rim of dark gases rotates in the opposite direction of the stars! Why? Who knows? Maybe we're seeing the aftermath of two galaxies that collided.

Here's (above) a detail of the Orion Nebula, shot with the Spitzer Space telescope, which trails the Earth's orbit around the sun. It's farther away from the Earth than it's better known relative, the Hubble, and only takes pictures in the infra-red spectrum.

Above, an even smaller detail of Orion. Be sure to click to enlarge.

Above, what is thought to be evidence of seasonal running water on Mars. The water is believed to be just under the surface in this area. It's puzzling, because even the summers are pretty cold on Mars. Since Mars isn't very geologically active, where does the heat come from that melts the water?

If you were standing in an eroded crater on Mars this (above) is what you might see. It was taken by one of the Mars rovers. This is an impressive picture when seen large.

 What's the name of the nearest star? The answer in grade school textbooks is Alpha Centauri (above), but that's not exactly true.

Actually, I knew that even when I was a kid...I liked to read about astronomy, so I knew things like that. Once a commissioner of schools came to visit and he asked the kids in my class a few general knowledge questions. One of them was, what's the closest star to Earth? I shouted "Proxima Centauri!" and the commissioner frowned and called on another student, the class goody-goody, who answered "Alpha Centauri." I was humiliated in front of all the girls in class, but I was right. Alpha Centauri is a system consisting of a double star and one stand alone sun, all orbiting around a common center, and the closest of them all is Proxima.

This immensely disappointing picture of Saturn (above) was taken by Cassini. It reveals outward-reaching spokes of feint gas plumes, possibly from the moon, Encelydus (spelled right?).  I couldn't bring myself to publish the picture large...I almost didn't publish it at all. I like to think of Saturn as having clean, round rings, and the plumes bugger that up. I'll make an effort to put this picture out of my mind, and I apologize if I disillusioned anyone here.

Aaaargh! Another sad picture (above)! It's America's last space shuttle returning to Earth from the point of view of The International Space Station. The past generation of shuttles simply weren't big enough to carry large payloads into space.

Planetary astronomers are interested in all weather, including the weather on Earth. Here (above) a tornado attempts to form over a farm house in Kansas. I can only imagine how the people inside were reacting to this. The streaks on the pictures are wildly energetic hailstones.

BTW: All the pictures here are from the site called "Astronomy Picture of the Day," URL on the sidebar.

RAMBLING THOUGHTS ABOUT EARLY COMICS

Yep! More early newspaper strips! I thought I'd free associate on some surreal (if that's the term) pictures that Allan Holtz recently published in his blog, "Strippers Guide (link in the sidebar)."

Above, "Polly" from 1906. What strikes me about these pictures is the reminder that a hundred years ago newspaper readers routinely read what would be considered underground comics today, and didn't see anything strange in it at all.

Surrealism in comic strips goes way back. This French strip (above) is from 1895, and wasn't at all untypical. It's very tempting to believe that the whole surrealist movement was inspired by cartoonists.

Surrealism was all over the comics page at the turn of the century. Here's (above) a newspaper strip from 1907 which was all about weird role reversals. Wood whittles kids, cigars smoke people, flies trap humans with "human paper"....it was all kinda clever. I don't know if you could get away with that now. Today surreal subjects are associated with drugs.

Believe it or not sequential comic stories were somewhat common in European newspapers and magazines at least as far back as the 1840s. How far back depends on how you define the term "comics." The strip above is from Punch, 1868.

One of the things that prevented early comics from having mass appeal was that they were initially used as a kind of editorial cartoon, for the purpose of ridiculing political and cultural opponents. The medium never really took off till editors began to realize that comics could be family fare, funny in their own right, like the "Jocko" strip above (date: 1900).

I'll digress back to surrealism to hypothesize that Edward Lear (above) might have created surrealism way back when in the mid-19th Century. Lots of people drew weird before Lear, but he showed that weirdness could cross the line into fine art. Aaaargh! Come to think of it, Hieronymus Bosch and others did that too...I guess surrealism is a movement that has many fathers.

While I'm on the subject of Lear, what do you think of this painting (above) of Masada that he did in 1868? Imagine a cartoonist like Lear pulling off this kind of realism! Click to enlarge.

Here's (above) Lear painting trees in the style of...dare I say it?...Bill Peet!

CARTOONS OF THE 1930S

John K is a big fan of the early Terrytoons, and of Bill Nolan's "Oswald the Lucky Rabbit" cartoons (sample, above).  He's always talking about this stuff, and his enthusiasm is infectious. Now I've got the bug. Have you seen any of these cartoons lately? if not, you're missing out.

A word of caution: If you're not used to these old cartoons you might be put off by the slow, deliberate way that people talk, and by the lack of story and character. There's a reason they're like that, but writing about it would take more space than I have, so I'll have to cover it in another post.



Boy, old cartoons (above) like the one above are really cartoony. The artwork is uneven, though. The artist who did the crude Red Riding Hood at the start is obviously not in the same league as the guy who did the hilarious marriage sequence at the end. My guess is that some artists were hired because they could draw, and others because they were funny, even if they weren't exactly terrific draughtsmen.

The skipping Red Riding Hood scene does have one thing going for it, though. It was obviously intended to be funny. Scripts in the modern animation industry very rarely intend to be funny. Clever, mildly humorous, wry, topical, hip, etc....but hardly ever  funny. The director gave the animator a chance to do a funny skip here and he blew it...but he did get a chance, and that's something few current animators get.



Take a look at the "Uncle Tom's Cabin"-type cartoon above. Right after the start Topsy comes in doing a funny bounce. We cut to her hippo sister doing a funny run, then the two sisters do a duet. The duet wasn't all that funny but, hey, two out of three isn't a bad score.

The point I want to make is that this cartoon is structured to provide plenty of opportunity for funny animation. When these cartoons were made, funny drawings moving in a funny way was almost universally regarded as the purpose of animation. What ever happened to that idea? When's the last time you saw anything like that in a current cartoon?



By the late 30s the animation industry seemed to have grown smug. The backgrounds got more realistic, the characters acquired personality, every cartoon told a clear story, and animators could confidently draw almost whatever they could imagine. That's all great, but what happened to funny? Cartoons increasingly became humorous and professional rather than funny. Thank God for Clampett and Avery, who bucked the trend and insisted on funny at any cost.

That's a Clampett black and white above: "Porky's Surprise Party." Clampett believed in character AND funny. He refused to choose between the two, reasoning that you could have both. And you can.