It's been a while since we looked at trailers for upcoming animated (or not) films together, hasn't it? Fortunately, there's a huge crop out in the wake of ComiCon and they include some unusual films indeed. And questionable book-to-film title changes. Lots of them.
First off, "Winnie the Pooh", a very unexpected and pleasant surprise in this overall dreadful summer, is in theaters now. This is worth mentioning because it was released on the same weekend as, and has been a teeny tiny bit overshadowed by, another movie based on a beloved British children's book.
By the way, great jarb there Disney.
Here, just to get it out of the way, is the full trailer for "Happy Feet 2: Farewell to the Flesh". You are probably already aware that I disliked the original "Happy Feet", and while I figured the sequel might improve things (this is the same George Miller who gave us the awesomely bizarre "Babe: Pig in the City"), this here trailer is... discouraging. Actually, there are several things I could say about it but I will instead say this: At about the twenty second mark, I figured the makers of this film are, in fact, f**king with us.
I love how this cute teaser for Aardman's "Arthur Christmas" openly acknowledges right from the start that it's hard to get excited about a Christmas movie in high summer. I also like how this reminds me a little of the late, lamented "Cranium Command" show at EPCOT.
One of the overlooked treasures of the young adult novel section at your local library is illustrator Brian Selznick's Caldecot winning semi-graphic novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret. The film, directed by no less than Martin Scorsese, comes our way in November. The trailer is a bit heavy on the slapstick (and the love-it-or-hate-it stylings of 30 Seconds to Mars Frozen Embryos), but everything else looks gorgeous.
A second trailer for "Tintin" was trotted around the internet recently and... disappeared mysteriously. Hopefully, this French trailer will stick around for a while. Is it me or does it look like they're still suspiciously reluctant to show the characters' faces?
So... here's "Puss in Boots". After this is over, can we be done with "Shrek" and everything associated with same? Please? I'll be good!
And now for our most far-flung movies. Although the film doesn't hit theaters until March, Aardman has dropped the trailer for "Pirates!" already. You may have heard that they are no longer affiliated with Dreamworks. You may have also heard that Nick Park and company have been wanting to make a pirate movie since at least "Flushed Away" (which originally involved -yes- pi-rats and wound up a bit of a mess instead). I'm getting a distinct "Look at what we can do NOW" vibe from this trailer.
Finally -FINALLY!- we've got our first look at PIXAR's "John Carter" (which anyone reading a blog like mine probably already knows is, in fact, "A Princess of Mars". And yes, that is on my summer reading list.) Obviously most of the "big" effects aren't done yet, so this looks a little generic.
And Fridge Logic: Why not use "Kings and Queens" here instead?
And speaking of PIXAR, here's the teaser for "Brave". Seeing as one of PIXAR's hallmarks is the fact that they like to research their asses off, I am giddy with excitement over this one.
As far as series, and me being giddy with excitement, hey there, "Legend of Korra" trailer!
And just because I can, here's a very special find. A teaser trailer for a film that never saw the light of day. Originally, "Siegfried" was to be a full-length animated feature, but the funding was cut. The story was eventually made into a graphic novel, but the trailer, with a look somewhat similar to early period Don Bluth films, shows us we missed out on something amazing.
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Sketch of the Day!
I said recently I hadn't drawn enough dragons. Came up with this turtle-dragon.
We've hit a milestone here at the Obligatory Art Blog. This is post number 365: a full year's worth of posts. I declare this small triumph to be awesome.
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I will admit I had almost no interest in "Rango" when it was first announced. Gore Verbinski and Johnny Depp making an animated film for Nickelodeon Studios of all things? The ads came out on the heels of things like "Alpha and Omega" and "Gnomeo and Juliet". The film was the first feature out of Industrial Light and Magic. Given some other films I had seen that were basically showcases for effects houses (what's up, "Disney's Dinosaur"), I wasn't convinced that this wouldn't be utterly terrible.
Then the good comments and positive word of mouth started up, and I became intrigued.
Then the negative comments flared up and I became genuinely excited. Funny how that works out sometimes, eh? See, it didn't take me long to notice that nearly all of those negative comments were coming from people who were having conniption fits over seeing and hearing cartoon characters smoking and cussing and shooting and drinking in a "children's film". In other words, these were people who are under the delusion that animation is only for children, and the very saddest thing about people who perpetuate the animation age ghetto is this: when they see something that flagrantly contradicts the thought that all animation has to be only for kids, instead of realizing that they are totally wrong, they fly into a rage of "think of the CHILDREN! Protect them from this FILTH!"
If "Rango" made people like that angry, I needed to see it on general principle.
And oh, what a wonderful film it is. It does take a little while to find it's groove, but when it does, "Rango" turns into one of those movies you feel like being a fan of just for the fact that it even exists. Seriously, how the hell did this movie happen? Can you imagine the pitch meeting?
"So Johnny Depp is a cartoon chameleon who is basically him as Hunter S. Thompson and he's never been outside his terrarium. He's lost during his family's road trip through the Mojave Desert. Said family is never mentioned again and Chameleon!Depp gives no crap about attempting to find them --wait, stay with me! He winds up in a mash-up of spaghetti westerns and 'Chinatown' that takes place in a town where everyone who would normally be a cute cartoon critter of ambiguous species instead is based on a specific animal. And did I mention that even though the characters are cartoon animals, everyone's going to be realistic as all get out with buggie eyes and flaky skin and ragged feathers and even the traditionally cute species will look like the contents of a barfed-up hairball? Oh, and there's guns and death and swearing and spitting and weird heat-hallucinations and mystic cacti and existential themes and Joseph Campbell's Monomyth and smoking and shooting and drinking! Also, the female lead is a lizard in a wig who introduces herself in a monologue full of SAT vocabulary rattled off at great speed, there's a lot of cerebral stuff about the various personalities we take on in our lives, and there is this one other character who spends all of his time onscreen with an arrow through his eye socket. We want to do this as ILM's first-ever animated feature."
"An animated existentialist spaghetti western with a barfed-up hairball who has an arrow through his head you say? Brilliant!"
In short, this is one of those very rare case where "WTF?" is a drat good thing. Now, you know I don't hate CGI, but after a while CGI animation tends to look... too "neat", for want of a better word. This is the first CGI animated film I have seen that sincerely did not look like anything else out there and that alone makes it a gem. I got more of a first-season "Ren and Stimpy" feel from the movie. And the characters, as already implied, look less like they were designed to sell toys and more like something unpleasant out of a Jim Henson/Brian Froud collaboration.
The whole movie is beautiful in it's own weird-ass twisted way. I love how every resident of the town has their own little abnormality or other shamelessly weird detail. (If your going to render every single scale or feather or strand of hair on a character, the creators of "Rango" realized, it's going to look weird and unnatural if they're totally symmetrical and all "pretty". This is a problem that has plagued Disney's early CGI films.) The film may have another of my usual bones of contention: a cast made up mostly of "names", but each and every one of the characters is terrific and ceaselessly quotable (my favorites are the "Monty Python and the Holy Grail"-ish strolling mariachi band who cheerily sing of the hero's imminent doom). There are some terrific little gags I'd have missed without pausing. And the animation is just straight-up pants-sh*ttingly gorgeous. My good God, that road-crossing scene.
I should re-emphasize that the movie is as weird as all get out. It's good that it was even made in the first place, but it may not be for everyone. I can already tell I'm going to see some comments from the other end of the "love it or hate it" pool, much as I did with "Fantastic Mr. Fox" (which is due for a re-watch since it never got a proper review come to mention it) and "Where the Wild Things Are". It's cool, it's cool. But ask yourself if you'd rather watch "Rango" or another damn two-hour-long toy commercial.
And far more importantly, I finally, after twenty-five years of searching, have my very own copy of The Double Disappearance of Walter Fozbek, written and illustrated by Steve Senn in 1980. Published by Avon/Camelot books. And henceforth to be referred to simply as Walter Fozbek or just Walter, because... that title. Imagine the fun of being a little girl circa 1985 and looking that one up in a card catalog or, God help you, asking for it in a bookstore. Anyway, I now have a copy in my giant skinny hands. And I have just read it.
(And not just because of the above illustration, which is very wrong on multiple levels.)
A long, long time ago in a Galaxy far, far away, I did a post about obscure Dougal Dixon works that had been dug up by the authors and readers of the website io9. Now unfortunately, most of the io9 discussion threads are unreadable now, but I do recall one reader's comment, prompted by the "human of the future" article, who missed the "far out, man" kind of sci-fi from the 70's. Sci-fi that really lived in the demilitarized zone between serious Science Fiction and Fantasy. Sci-fi that really didn't give a hoot about science at all (or maybe just a little) and was more concerned with blowing the reader's mind. Think "the Force is all around us; it connects every living thing" vs. "you can test positive for Jedi". (As you can see, this kind of sci-fi isn't all bad.)
So here we have a sci-fi book for seventh graders where a kid falls through a black hole and ends up in a world where, like, humans are extinct and the dinosaurs are the ones living in houses and wearing clothes and using money and driving cars and stuff!
Or, perhaps more appropriately...
As you might imagine, this is a story with vast, galloping herds of Furry Confusion. Before we get into that, here's what Dinosaur World looks like:
Weird, huh? The whole book, actually, is creepy in sort of the same way that -- I'm gonna go there! I'm gonna go there and you can't stop me! -- the "Cars" movies are creepy. Everything is clearly the same as it is in Human World, with maybe the barest differences, but the humans have been wholly replaced with something else.
And in Walter Fozbek, come to mention it, Human World ought to be Mammal World shouldn't it? Except during the course of the book, we come to find out that Dinosaur World is full of the exact same animals we have in Human World -- but the humans have been replaced by anthropomorphic dinosaur-people. Because the humans are prehistoric and the dinosaurs are modern here. Just go with it. At least the human replacements *are* anthropomorphized in Walter, so it isn't quite as bad as "Cars" (where the cars are just normal four-wheeled cars with faces who have desks and live in human houses and... just breathe).
There's a lot of things like this in the book I could talk about. But instead of giving myself a giant headache, let's enjoy the very 70's dinosaurs. The pterosaur-ladies and stegosaur-ladies seen in the previous post were very minor characters. Here comes a major one. Meet Dr. Krebnickle.
Dr. Krebnickle is the kindly scientist who helps solve the mystery of how Walter got trapped in Dinosaur World. But even better, he is an anthropomorphic Trachodon, which is awesome. Not to get too off-topic, but Trachodon's an interesting case; he was a staple of dinosaur books from my childhood and then suddenly wasn't in any newer books. The Dinosaur Mailing List explains what happened in this article. They don't mention it, but I think there's a very simple reason why Trachodon was so popular for so long:
Our old friend / frequent rip-off victim Charles R. Knight of course. He painted a pair of "Trachodon" once and because he was the all-knowing guru of dinosaur art, everyone had to copy him without question.
So, back to the lecture at hand, how did Walter wind up in Dinosaur World, where his cousin Ralph is a triceratops-person and everyone drinks Carnivore Cola? Here's the incredibly simple and obvious explanation:
So the lesson here, twelve year olds, is Don't Look At Animals Through Special Glasses That Allow a Physicist Who Has Captured a Black Hole in a Jar to View Other Dimensions. That leaves Walter with the problem of getting back home before anyone notices that there is a rampaging prehistoric creature loose in town. (Have to admit, I like the "Futurama"-ish touch of a planet of dinosaurs that fear the extinct humans as some kind of fantastic violent monsters.) Fortunately, Krebnickle has a Do Anything Computer that answers that problem with a poem. Far out.
What this means is that Walter and company must capture the lizard he saw so he can look at it through the Xenon glasses. More importantly, in 1980, dinosaurs are lizards. (sigh...) By the way, the aforementioned pterosaur-ladies and a gang of dimetrodon-people who weren't illustrated are dinosaurs. (sigh...) I guess it could be worse. There could be mammoth-people in Dinosaur World...
Anyway, Walter is found out and he and the lizard are both kidnapped by the prehensile-tailed tyrannosaurus in the above "very wrong" illustration. Fortunately, after some complications too ridiculous to mention here, they escape. Which leads to this happening:
Needless to say, Walter returns to Human World safely. The author can't resist one more act of crazy before we're done though. Check out his author photograph (and the plot summary by somebody who wasn't paying attention):
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Addendum: There is something dinosaur-people-y in the water this week. See also the AV Club and Vulture.
Hang on to your hats, gang. This is going to be a weird one. Gonna take both of this week's posts to cover it.
So... today we've got another post that's going to be largely based off incredibly fuzzy childhood memory. I have done suchpostsbefore, and I really hope this is another case where kind folks write in with more information and helpful links, likeso.
Today's subject is something I believe everyone my age watched and yet nobody seems to discuss: "CBS Storybreak". About the only places online with any extensive information about it are The Retroist and IMDB, which provides an episode list.
"Storybreak", often confused with the similar and far longer-lived "ABC Weekend Special", was one of several anthology series for children from the early 1980's. Each thirty-minute episode was based upon a book or folktale and the show went out of it's way to showcase children's literature that was either obscure or downright strange. The animators often played pretty fast and loose with the source materials, making some of the stories even weirder than they were. For most of it's run, the show was hosted by Bob Keeshan, and it ran alongside other more famous Saturday Morning cartoons of the era.
If you don't remember this series at all, your memory might at least be jogged by one of the most distinctive aspects of the show: The bitchin' opening credits sequence:
Hell and yes. Did you see that radical dragon-robot and the shiny pegasus? Bonus: VERY old-school sauropod.
The best-remembered episodes from what little I could scrounge up from discussion boards are, perhaps not coincidentally, the ones you are most likely to find while searching YouTube: "How To Eat Fried Worms", "Yeh-Shen", the truly mad "Arnold of the Ducks", "Dragon's Blood", and "Ratha's Creature" (the last one is the most likely to survive by the time you read this; it's been uploaded by the book's author). A few other episodes that stuck with me through all these years are "Robbut: A Tale of Tails", "Zucchini" (which is about a boy and his pet ferret; kids love non-indicative titles), "The Pig Plantagenet" (mad props to casually sticking such an obscure vocabulary word in a Saturday morning cartoon), "Hugh Pine", "Hank the Cowdog", the truly mad "Max and Me and the Time Machine" (traveling through time may transform you into a horse with glasses, naturally), "Witch Cat", "Grinny" (this one's often cited online as a source of nicely refined nightmare fuel), "The Monster's Ring", a very poorly disguised pilot for a "Raggedy Anne and Andy" cartoon...
...And season one, episode seven: "The Double Disappearance of Walter Fozbek".
Now, remember this was 1985. A budding paleoartist had very few opportunities to get an animated dinosaur fix. ("Fantasia" was "never ever ever" going to be released on home video, and about the only other options were the occasional Ray Harryhausen phantasmagoria on the afternoon movie or seemingly endless reruns of "The Flintstones".) When I saw the teaser for "Walter" at the end of whatever episode preceded it, nothing -but nothing- mattered during the following week aside from me watching this show. Kids are horrible little things, aren't they? My tiny seven-year-old brain only registered three words: "HOLY SH*T, DINOSAURS!!!"
Now, I'm sure "Walter Fozbek" blew my mind back in the day because from what I remember of my very oldest drawings, they looked a lot like how I remember the characters in the show (and I really hope somebody out there comes up with screenshots or something so that I can confirm this). Can I remember anything at all concrete about it? I do remember the whole thing was basically a funny animal cartoon (think "Ducktales") with 80's dinosaurs. There was some kind of weird plot twist involving this one human character, probably the usual Furry Confusion. Mostly, I remember being incredibly frustrated that I could not find the book upon which this episodes was based. This was long before inter-library loan or Amazon.
Well, thank goodness for Amazon, eh?
Twenty-five years later, I finally have my very own copy of The Double Disappearance of Walter Fozbek, written and illustrated by Steve Senn in 1980. Published by Avon/Camelot books. So if you'll excuse me for a little bit, I am finally going to read it. See ya Thursday!
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~*~ Intermission Time! ~*~
(And do enjoy this because, my goodness, the ad that starts around the 2 minute, ten second mark...)
One of my unstated goals here at the Obligatory Art Blog is to write a bit about things that I recall from childhood that I have seen mentioned almost nowhere else online. And recently I mentioned that it usually turns out to be very hard to write about such remembered things when there is so little information about them online. I may luck out and find a book or video on the subject (and you may have noticed that the book/video often is the subject), but this happens very rarely.
Fortunately, there are a wide variety of Jim Henson fan-websites out there in this vast digital sea, so it isn't too hard to find information about "The Jim Henson Hour". This was a truly ambitious series that, back in the late 1980's, looked and felt like something that had popped right out of the Aether in spite of everything just to make me happy. Just watch the introduction here, which is basically Jim Henson Productions saying, "Look at what we can do NOW!" over a very awesome late 80's pop-rock instrumental. You knew you were in for something special when you saw this.
The series has never been released on DVD largely thanks to the number of hoops whoever has the rights to the show would have to leap through in order to settle things with whomever owns the rights to the shows' various segments and characters. See, "Jim Henson Hour" was an anthology show. It was very similar in format to "Walt Disney Presents"/"Wonderful World of Color"/"Magical World of Disney"/etc. A few - a very,veryfew- of the individual features on the show have been released on DVD. One or two more are on Netflix Instant, and we'll get to one of these in a bit. And of course, a few full episodes are available on that great repository of barely-remembered 80's television, YouTube.
Now, it's funny how your memory works when you are eleven. I remember watching this show for an entire summer, loving it to death and so happy to finally have a "Muppet Show" equivalent to call my generation's own. This is just the kind of show that, had it appeared ten years later, would have gained a rabid cult following online. Chiefly, I remember the show going on for far longer than it did (this in spite of the fact that I only recalled a handful of episodes) and being way, way popular.
You can imagine my surprise to learn that the show lasted for a grand total of under four months. Poor thing was relegated to the dreaded Friday night death slot and was, well, WAY geeky. Save for maybe three of them, the new Muppet characters didn't click with people and most of the rest of the show was dedicated to the Creature Shop strutting their stuff in obscure story adaptations and other, stranger things.
And that brings us to "Monster Maker". One of the better-remembered episodes, this was based upon a novel by Nicholas Fisk, who, I was happy to learn, is responsible for one of my very favorite science fiction short stories ever. I'm not sure what the book is like, but the short film adaptation is essentially the Creature Shop's love letter to... itself. I say that because they were proud enough of their creature puppets in the episode to showcase them in many different later compilations.
And the puppets are amazing. "Monster Maker" is a very poignant viewing experience in the year 2011. In an age of CGI whatever you want, there it is, it's kind of mind-blowing to watch this film about a special effects house that has to actually stop and think about such questions as, "How do we get these little monsters to walk"? "Can we build a dragon puppet that's large enough to convincingly interact with human characters?" When facing the Ultragorgon dragon, Harry Dean Stanton (in full-on Harry Dean Stanton mode) has a wonderful monologue about believable creature design and animation. Heck, the Ultragorgon himself is fantastic; he's the one thing I recalled very clearly from "Monster Maker".
I hadn't seen "Monster Maker" in full since the episode of "The Jim Henson Hour" in which it was featured way back in 1989. So it is with a very heavy heart that I have to note that everything in it aside from the monsters isn't very good. It is worth watching, especially at a scant 45 minutes, but I will warn you that the story makes not one lick of sense. Also, the lead kid gets a Jake Lloyd Award.
Since most of the show's problems have to do with the story, it's Spoilertext time! So, what was the moral of "Monster Maker"? I guess it was, "Children, give up your lifelong dream. Even if your dream is to work in a very, very specialized creative field that is hard to enter, and the greatest person in the business has already taken you in as an apprentice which is basically a million to one lucky chance. Or, you know, don't give up on your dream. Follow it right into the sun, even if the guy who took you in as his apprentice turns out to have been playing mind games with you all this time and is kind of a terrible person. Also, after either giving up on your dream or not giving up on it, go back with your father. Even if your father is kind of a worse person who has always openly discouraged your dream and wanted you to stay in the family's boring-ass auto repair business, and who deals with incredibly shady people for... some reason they never elaborated on." I did learn this: if I am ever lucky enough to lead my own nominal studio, I am totally going to build a giant robot dragon puppet to use as a secret test of character on new interns.
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By the way, you'll notice that I am speaking about a barely remembered and way, WAY geeky late 80's television show while everyone else seems to be doing their Harry Potter retrospective. I, of course, did my Harry Potter retrospective posts twoyearsago. Derp.
----- Sketch of the Day!
Of course, this show reminded me that it's been a while since I drew any dragons...
I've been working on so many text-heavy posts lately that I felt it was high time for a post that focused on my drawings. Fortunately, I recently had the opportunity to visit the wonderful Maine Wildlife Park... briefly. The drawings you're about to see may seem a little rushed. I was there with someone who'd never been before and they were laser-focused on seeing the male moose. All told we stayed for maybe an hour after that so... yeah.
Still, in that hour, I managed to get in some quality life drawing time:
And the inevitable
Sad and/or Hilarious Things Overheard At The Zoo:
"I wish they had elephants here." - A person who either didn't read the sign or didn't quite "get" it
"Is that ALL your vocabulary?!?" - Some lady, directed at a bird. (WTF?)
"BWAAAARK! BWAAAARK!!! Cuck-cuck-cuck-coooooooo!!!" - Old man -um- communicating with the animals. There was also a crazy kid, totally unrelated, hissing at the Lynxes who were trying to sleep. There are times when you wouldn't like it if certain zoo visitors were maimed by angry animals and then there are times like that...
And the usual, "I don't understand what I'm seeing here so I will make wild assumptions instead of reading the f&^%ing signs!"
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Since this is a little short, here come the inevitable Links of Interest!
I was in no way aware of this never-made "Dazzler" movie and now I am kind of sad that it does not exist. Because who wouldn't want to watch a film where K.I.S.S. and the Village People are rival superhero teams?
The theme for the next Science 3.0 Blogging Contest is dinosaurs! Submit one (or three) of your dinosaur-involving blog posts or (even though I hate to be That Person) vote for me!
And, if you love dinosaurs and message boards, please join Hell Creek!
Several months ago, I went to a deep discount book store and was confronted with some eye-searingly bad discount dinosaur books. Now, those are still pretty bad, but I found another "winner" (and the amazing pair of puzzles seen above) when I returned to that store recently. This book isn't just eye-searing, it's EXTREEEEEEEME!!!!!
Oh man. Oh wow. This may be too much for your old Aunty Tricia. Staring too long at this raptor's four tongues is making my eyes water.
OK, so this thing right here is Extreme Dinosaurs, published by Atheneum Books in 2007, though I think this may be a different version than the one sold in Amazon. It's written by Robert Mash and illustrated by Stuart Martin. And I almost feel bad pointing out those responsible because... Sometimes, I can tell when a fellow illustrator is just, like, "f*** it." (Which is the exact opposite of the attitude you should have when illustrating a dinosaur book.)
Ah!
The... eh... Velociraptors from the title page make a reappearance here in EXTREEEEEEEME (I will stop now) pop-up form. At least their leader is down to just the one tongue. They still suffer from an almost Liefeldian failure of anatomy and from what Albertonychus has helpfully dubbed "gorilla suit syndrome" - there's a big, big difference between a dinosaur with feathers and a feathered dinosaur.
Speaking of maniraptors and anatomy fails...
Times like this, I wonder if the illustrator was given a tiny post-it note describing what the animal they must draw looked like. Martin received a note stating "Microraptor was a four-winged dinosaur-bird thing" and spat out this. Count the limbs!
80's Troodon and the 80's Deinonychuses (?) arrive right after the Velociraptors with feathers. Yeah. My eyes are rolling out of my head at this point. Love the 90's comic book cover "slashes" by the way.
You know what? I'm kind of in love with this picture because it is so horrible and over-the-top Darker and Edgier (tm) '90s that it's amazing. That there T. rex is all blood and drool and fanglorious teeth and large talons and teeny little eyeballs and guts and violence and blah. He is an unrepentant Killingyoubeeste. Also, he appears to be collapsing into a singularity.
"Pleeeeeasssse! Make PEEEace!"
Just like to remind everyone that this here book was written in the year 2,000-anything. Which brings us to our next illustration.
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I was lucky to find an edition of The Simon and Schuster Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Creatures while visiting a library in another town. As you may recall, this was an updated edition published in 1999 of The Macmillan Illustrated Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Animals. I said back then that the book wasn't significantly updated at all, it just had a very few new illustrations. Here are some examples. Sadly, I do not know who painted these, but they have a very Diz Wallace feel to them.
In the new edition of this book, as with the old edition, Birds is Birds. So it's oddly touching that little Sinosaurpteryx and Protoarcheopteryx tossed a wrench into this assumption. If you can read the text for Protoarcheopteryx, you can tell that the authors were having the hardest time admitting there's no longer a clear distinction between a "birdlike dinosaur" and, er, a dinosaurlike bird. Sinosaurpteryx looks downright embarrassed to be standing next to that Elaphrosaurus, who is still assumed to be a primitive ornithomimid in this book.
More amusingly, Baryonyx is still here lost among the Maniraptors.
And then there's this odd illustration of Tyrannosaurus. It's very different from the old one and, in fact, Tyrannosaurus is the only dinosaur to get a new illustration. I have no idea why but I love his face.
A very special quick holiday post, because this was too amazing not to share:
I feel like I have just been shown everything ever all at once.
This is "200 / Bi Centennial" by psychedelic animator Vincent Collins. I only know about it thanks to somebody on Facebook. It's been darn near impossible to find any more information about it other than:
A few more Links of Interest for the road since this post was so short:
* - Want. Want so hard. (Yes, I am a sucker for Dunkin' Donuts and slushy fruity drinks.)
* - The Onion AV Club has been reviewing every episode of "The Adventures of Pete and Pete" for a while now, but this entry caught my fancy because of it's opening. It's really hard to find more than very basic information about television shows from that weird period right before the internet took off; "(all) we’ve got (are) a couple of scanned articles, a cassingle that came in a cereal box, and some orange VHS tapes". Keep this in mind for something I'll be writing hopefully next week.
