WHAT IF TIME TRAVEL WORKS?

I don't believe in time travel, but you have to admit that it has great story potential.

A lot of time travel stories have the practice heavily regulated for fear that someone might change the past and thereby alter the future. I prefer to imagine that safeguards will be in place and that time travel will become a safe and popular entertainment like amusement park rides are now.

People who elect to ride into America in 2014 will take blasters with them to protect them from Al Capone's gangsters. Capone died way before 2014 but only the A students will know that and besides, as long as they stay in their seats, nothing they do...even with lasers...will effect anything in our era.

The tracks will take their cars down suburban streets and into houses where they can see how people in 2014 lived. Even the most mundane things we do in our time will appear exotic and awe-inspiring to the time travelers. Of course they'll be invisible, so no one in our time will know they're being watched.

Everything will turn out fine as long as the cars keep moving and so long as no traveler attempts to get out or leave something behind.

The problem is that someone (above) always breaks the rules. Someone will find a way to get out of the car and mess with the people in our time.

Will they still be invisible after leaving the car? I don't think so. Of course, coming from the future they'll no doubt find ways to avoid being seen.

You could be walking down the street in 2014 never be aware that a mischievous future person was near-by.

If we're lucky the worst that will happen is a prank where some future person deliberately loses a 2014's set of keys.

But it could get worse. A girl might deliberately cause an accident just to see what happens when two gasoline cars collide.

"After all," she'll reason, "it's not as if I hurt two real people. These people in 2014 are just shades. They lived their lives and passed away a long time ago. Why can't I have some fun with them?"

Hmmmm. The future had better figure out a way to prevent passengers from leaving the car. Of course a really determined person could still make trouble. They might be able to sneak an android into 2014, someone who could pass as a local but who still takes her orders from the future. It could get nasty.

Yikes!

KIRK DOUGLAS AND "THE BIG STORY"

This is a post about 'The Big Story," a brilliant puppet film about Kirk Douglas. There's lots to say about it but none of it will make much sense unless I first discuss the 80s/90s TV show that paved the way for it, a British leftwing comedy called "Spitting Image." It was a topical show about what was then current in British newpapers. I don't think it ever played in America.

Above, some of the Spitting Image puppets. They were life size which allowed for the use of real life backgrounds. It was a great idea!

One day two of the show's ace character designers, Tim Watts and David Stoten, pitched an idea for a Spitting Image-type parody of Kirk Douglas. It would be a stop-motion short made with armature puppets. Tim Watts may (I'm not sure) have already pencil animated the film in 2D while he was at Cal Arts. Anyway, the producer, Rodger Law, agreed to bankroll it.

The Gods must have been on the artists' side because they were able to get one of the best impressionists ever, Frank Gorshin, to do Douglas' voice. He may even have influenced the writing which was based on real dialogue from Kirk Douglas films. I'm a Gorshin fan and so far as I know it was the best thing he ever committed to film. 

 Here's the finished short (above). Do yourself a favor and take a minute and a half to watch it.

 Okay, what did you think? Not too shabby, eh? The film got the 1994 Oscar nomination but lost to a Wallace and Grommet-type 2D short called "Bob's Birthday." The Bob film was great but I still would have given the laurel to The Big Story. It contained ideas and techniques that seem fresh even today, and which might have strongly influenced  computer animation when it came along.



The short payed off for Rodger Law because it allowed him to do several amazing Lipton commercials in the Spitting Image/Big Story style. That's one above.

Actually, I'm just assuming that Law was responsible for those commercials. Maybe it was Uli Meyer. I'm not sure.

Now here's where the story gets weird. The Spitting Image style rode a wave of popularity for several years then inexplicably ran out of gas and died. Oh, the caricature style lingered on in magazine covers but the film applications withered on the vine. "Why?" you're asking...but I don't know why. It just did.

That's tragic! It was a style that would have worked great in the Pixar era. Unfortunately the two styles never coincided.

Imagine what might have come about if Douglas' greatest animation fan, John K, had been green-lighted to do a Douglas-type 3D feature!

MANLY WALL DECORATIONS

My own taste for framed wall pictures is for art, architecture, and aviation and space subjects, but lately I've been wondering if the walls of at least one room in the house should be devoted to sports, specifically manly sports.  Something rousing...you know, something to get the adreniline going. 

That's Max Baer. He was reputed to have killed two men in the ring. 

Maybe cartoons about manly sports is the way to go.

How about a framed picture of a race horse?  I can think of no subject better than the great Sea Biscuit. Look at his peculiar, out of scale hind legs. People used to say, "You can always tell which horse is Sea Biscuit. He's the one that doesn't look like a thoroughbred." 

On the other hand look at his front half. It's the aspect of a champion.

Above: Secretariat. Pictures that show that horse's famous neck muscles are highly prized.

Maybe a framed picture of a Royal Straight Flush.  Who knows? Maybe it'll give me luck. 

I like chess posters even though I seldom play the game. This one explains the strategy. 

THE DISRAELIS, FATHER AND SON

That's Benjamin Disraeli above, the flamboyant Prime Minister of Britain during the reign of Queen Victoria. My connection with him dates back to high school when I fell in love with an anthologized essay of his father's:"The Man of One Book."  I had no idea who the author was, I just liked the style and the content of the piece, and made an effort to copy it.

I was vastly impressed with the elder Disraeli, how he seemed to love learning, and how he kept his focus and stuck to his point without ever failing to entertain. This blog is influenced by that style, though the style has been so corrupted by other influences on me that you might have trouble finding it.



The father had an enormous influence on his famous son, Benjamin. Thinking about them calls to mind the close relationship of John Stuart Mill and his dad...it's the rare case when a boy and his father are virtually the same person. It's hard to talk about the younger man in the abstract, so I'll include a wonderful scene (above) from a film about Benjamin Disraeli called "The Mudlark."

George Arlis played Benjamin Disraeli in another terrific film called "Disraeli," which I won't attempt to excerpt here. Nobody I played this film for liked it nearly as much as I did. I admit that it's a strangely uncinematic and old-fashioned movie, and that it probably played better on the stage than on the screen. I forgive the faults because it has one of the virtues of the elder Disraeli's essay style; a narrow, relentless focus on the character of its subject.

Anyway, here's (below) an excerpt from the essay I liked so much in high school:

If I remember right, the essay ended with the admonition: "Beware the Man of One Book."

In my case the one book was really one author, Bertrand Russell. Starting at the end of high school I read everything of his that I could get hold of and eventually I began to think like him. Now, all these years later, I've come to disagree with him about almost everything. The amazing thing is that I still love the guy. He taught me how to think, even though I've come to different conclusions.

Read Disraeli's essay at: http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/42777/

CARICATURING BOXERS

You'd think boxing would be the easiest of all sports to caricature for the papers. After all, the posing is often pretty extreme. My guess is that boxing is actually one of the most difficult sports to caricature.

The problem is, that some poses that look great in photography often don't work well in newspaper cartoons. Why, I don't know. Even when they're superbly drawn as they are in this Mullin sketch (above) they sometimes miss the mark.

If the newspapers would allow a caricatured blow by blow of a fight like Jack Davis did here (above), readers would probably love it.

Haw! Maybe they'd love it too much. It could provoke a lot of street frights.

I wonder if short, funny, animated caricatures of real newsworthy prize fights would work on TV? I could picture it on ESPN. In "Boo Boo Runs Wild" John K proved that animation was a great medium for things like this.

Tying animation to real prize fights would certainly offer challenges. For one thing, it would put a limit on how far the animator could exaggerate. In real life the kind of punches that do the most harm in the ring are often jabs and short, close-in blows (above) that aren't very photogenic.

That doesn't mean it can't be done.

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And for the vets on Memorial Day...

THANK YOU!!!!!!!

BACK FROM THE HOSPITAL

I regret to report that I had the heart procedure done and it turned out that I didn't need a stent, just a funny-sounding drug. I should be happy about that but before I went under the knife I described the problem to friends in such gruesome detail that they were half convinced I'd never survive, and that had consequences.

They treated me to lunches, laughed at my bad jokes, gave me caricatures (above, from John)...everything to ease my transition into the next world. Gee, under the circumstances my survival seems somehow...ungrateful.

Here I am (above) flat on my back in the hospital, checking out the colorful plastic on the wall. Geez, you'd think Lego had designed the room. Immediately after I was wheeled into the operating room.

It was incredibly futuristic; something like the one above, but even better. I got this picture from the net.

It was something like this room, too.  Absolutely gorgeous!

For comparison here's (above) the kind of bare bones room I had my last operation in. Boy, what a difference!

In general the cardiac ward looked like a futuristic synthesis of three styles. One of the styles was an updating of the cool headquarters that SPECTRE always has in the James Bond films.

Then there was the Frank Lloyd Wright influence, especially in the nurses stations. I couldn't find any adequate pictures of those stations on the net so here's (above) a detail of a living room designed by Wright, which some of the stations resembled. The stations communicated dynamism, intellect, efficiency and fun.

The last influence was Lego. Lego should seriously consider branching out into real world architectural design. The Lego people somehow manage to make plastic glorious and fun, and hospitals are full of plastic. Wright's influence perfectly fits the Lego world and the best synthesis I've seen so far was my cardio ward. 

Well, that's it for now! Many, many thanks for the kind comments from readers!

BTW: John put up a blog post about my surgical woes: http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/

UNDER THE KNIFE!

Yikes! I'll be under the surgeon's knife in a couple of days so I guess it'll be midweek before I'm back to Theory Corner again. It's to fix a heart problem, maybe with a stent.  That meant major surgery in my Dad's time, but this is 2014 and the procedure might require only an overnight stay in the hospital. Thank God for fiber optics!

What they're doing requires threading a tube into the groin and up the coronary artery to the heart. Can you believe that? I swear, every medical thing nowadays has to do with the groin. Wait and see...even dentists will figure out ways to involve the groin in what they do. What is this groin fascination? And I have to be partially awake while this is going on!

Anyway, I'll be back in a few days.