So this is thirty late-70's through early-90's Walt Disney World specials in thirty minutes. I remember SO many of these from when I was a kid. It felt like Disney made two of these specials every year (I don't even think they still do the yearly Christmas parade special these days).
One of the specials is a whole hour-long production with random celebrity guests and musical numbers dedicated entirely to the opening of Splash Mountain. A whole television special for the opening of one ride! Hell, Disney can't even get that excited about the Fantasyland expansion project these days.
More thoughts:
* - Let me guess. Little potential future robotics engineer who could have invented something that changes the world for the better instead learns the Power of Disney Magic! (Spoiler: Not quite, but close.)
* - They didn't know what the heck they were doing with Pleasure Island even back then.
* - For the 15 year anniversary of Walt Disney World, a random prize was given out at the ticket gate every fifteen seconds. You could randomly get anything from a pin to a free hat to free park tickets to a free Thunderbird! Holy sh*t! Right now the best WDW prize you could hope for is to be locked in a small room inside Cinderella Castle all night for one night. I don't even know if they're doing anything special for their 40'th anniversary.
* - Never mind that now: Two generations of Mouseketeers! Say, aren't today's kids long overdue for a Mickey Mouse Club of their own?
* - Totally Minnie: here to compete with Barbie and Jem. Yup.
* - Jeez, that free-roaming robot is terrifying!
* - But not as much as the "Too Smart for Strangers" clip they sneaked in.
* - I wish I could get excited about anything as much as the "Fantasia" crocodiles get about pizza.
* - My God, the Gepetto song is chilling...
* - I could swear I saw that "Spirit of America" parade as a kid. Now I've got the song back in my head. Great.
* - Giant. Babies.
* - That vulture is so ashamed to be with ChicagoTaio Cruise Pablo Cruise instead of soaring over the Serengeti.
* - Anyone know who the weird singing redheaded Justin Bieber lookalike and the really lanky guy who falls down the manhole are? (EDIT: Thanks Anonymous Commenter Person!)
Speaking of Weird Disney Things, I am so very happy to learn, right from the Mouse's mouth, that I didn't imagine this. Somewhere, Xzibit is shedding a single tear at it's beauty.
And then, on a totally different note that is too cool not to share, there's "InnerTube TV":
I had a fever dream on the morning I wrote this post. It wasn't nearly as awesome and random as "InnerTube TV". This was a very early and very weird pilot for what would eventually become "The Jim Henson Hour". Note the strange early versions of characters who'd be modified for "Hour". You can also spot characters in the house band who'd be modified and eventually show up in the equally all-but-forgotten Jim Henson production, "Faffner Hall". I like the incredibly catchy songs -- and the fact that Kermit is fully aware that this version of the show doesn't have a chance clicking with people.
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Sketch of the Day!
My new Sketchbook is huge...
The book (which I cannot wait to read) and Carnegie Collection Parasaurolophus are there for scale. It's a little tiny bit awkward carrying this size Sketchbook around, and it will fit no scanner there is, but I have been drawing more so that's good.
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Important: So... I might not have power or internet access by the time this publishes. Please be patient with regards to comment moderation, ect. Thursday's scheduled feature will hopefully make everything all better.
Thus far in my reviews of old dinosaur books (click the Hilariously Outdated Paleoart tag below), we have seen naked therizinosaurs, godless killing machine therizinosaurs, and Team Prosauropod therizinosaurs.
The Humongous Book of Dinosaurs gives us the rare and beautiful "WTF even IS this thing" Fish-eating swimmer therizinosaur (Segnosaurus, to be more precise). Love those psychedelic colors!
In the early 90's there was absolutely no question that the Oviraptors were gutless egg-thieves and baby eaters. There's even a comic depicting the assumed story behind the crushed-skull specimen of Oviraptor found on a nest. (Turns out that was her own nest, go figure.)
Anyway, we've got an odd-looking Ingenia and a couple of Citipati who manage to be Sparkleraptors without a single plume. Heck, the one in the middle could be in a Patrick Nagel painting. All things considered, Oviraptors fair a teeny little bit better than most of the other maniraptors in this book.
I said a teeny little bit. Ye Gods.
I've got more than just maniraptors to cover, though. Been saving a few images for last. First, what was all that about an old friend?
Holy hadrosaurs, it's our old Major Award winning buddy,Syntarsus! Love that hardly-elaborated on "curious crest" bit in the text.
The weirdest thing about Syntarsus and his Mohawk here is the fact that he's the only animal I saw in the HBoD who is totally consistent. As usual, he's the only theropod aside from Archaeopteryx (and remember birds is birds here) who gets to have feathers...
At least until this strange portion very near the end of the book:
The discovery of Sinornis and Mononychus put a gigantic spanner in the Birds is Birds mentality for those who were still 100% subscribing to it in the mid-1990's. The poor HBoD doesn't seem to know what to do, giving us exactly two feathered generic-looking little theropods and stressing that Mononychus "may have been a dinosaur or a bird", whatever that means.
Quick tangent: If you are a bird, you haven't somehow stopped being a dinosaur any more than a dolphin has stopped being a mammal. (That's the best analogy I can think of. Please get it, please get it, please get it...)
And then there's Avimimus, which was very poorly understood at the time and is here shown as some kind of anachronistic predecessor to Archaeopteryx. With a lizard face and little stubby hands.
I've saved a very special pair of strange images for last. They concern a small bipedal ornithschian. They're pretty much a culmination of everything crazy in all the illustrations we've seen on this long, long adventure.
Brace yourself, cause here comes nightmare fuel.
AAAAAHHH!!!
AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!
That fanglorious little bastard with the horrifying old lady hands is meant to be Heterodontosaurus. Clearly, this isn't the cute little fang-having fluffy runner we are familiar with now. And good lord, that snake-faced Coelophysis!
(Wait, the book's done? The book's done! It's really done!
Ah, crap, what do I write about now?)
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Before I decide on that, here's the finale to "Living With Dinosaurs"! What do you think? Will Dominic accept his father? Will we find out if the baby was born okay? Will Dog (seriously) reunite with his family? Will they explain, come to mention it, what was going on in that cave? Will Dom's cousin and uncle stop being total dicks? Will we ever learn why Dom hates all fish?!?
And the answers for those various questions (though to avoid spoilers, I will not specify which ones) are, "Eh... kind of," and "Fffft-hahaha! No."
Fun fact: the only time this film aired on American television was during that brief, strange period when Jim Henson productions were shown on Nick Jr. Oh what fun that must have been for the kiddies.
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Sketch of the Day! Hey, I've hit the final page of this Sketchbook!
Also also, a lot of nifty tidbits from "Dinosaur Revolution" (am I the first to joke, "but what happened to 'Dinosaur Reloaded'?" Ah? Ah? [there is a long and awkward pause] Nevermind.) have been popping up. This here animatic in particular is a thing of beauty.
Also also also, and more immediately relevant, I need to reiterate that I do not know which artist painted what in the Humongous Book of Dinosaurs(by the way, I cannot tell you how sick I am of typing that out over and over). I am sorry if it appears as though I am totally by accident and not on purpose picking on one person over and over. (TL:DR - John Sibbick is awesome. And now that I can put a name to his paintings, I realize I owe him much of my childhood as a dinosaur geekette.)
Which leads us (finally) into HBoD Maniraptor Week. Today, it's nothing but deinonychosaurs (everybody with large talons). Yup, the HBoD has inadvertently collected some of the strangest 80's 'raptors I've ever seen. With this in mind, we will ignore the fact that they are all running around buck naked. Feathers are an issue for Thursday (though it will end up being a big one).
This Velociraptor and Deinonychus look pretty happy to be running around naked (sorry) with a broken tail and broken wrists. Actually, they're not too bad for this time, come to think of it.
The same can't be said for the following:
Oh my...
The stiff-tailed kangaroo-hands iguana-faced kick-stepping deinonychosaur was quite common in the 80's. I figure this is all due to cheap illustrators copying each-other copying the famous Bakker image from the 70's.
Bu-bu-bu-but WAIT it gets WORSE!!!
Holy Zarquon singing fish. I do believe we've found the worst deinonychosaur ever drawn. Love the giant, deformed left foot claw.
And then there's this strange (though beautifully painted) image, which I know I've seen somewhere before.
If you remember way, way back to the first post, the HBoD tapdances around the issue of Archaeopteryx, because "dinosaurs can't fly". I found, I think, only two decent illustrations in the book of everyone's favorite transitional form, and they are... contradictory...
In this corner: reptile halfway finished evolving into a bird who is also a Sparkleraptor (E: and almost certainly the direct inspiration for Archen/Archeops). In this corner: winged maniraptor who gives no guano about you and your "evolutionary levels". You kids fight it out, let's check in on the troodontids.
Yikes! On second thought, let's not.
Especially since these are not the eyes of an animal that is stone-cold sober. (Bonus: There just so happens to be a very similar image in our copies of Predatory Dinosaurs of the World.)
Wait, do you guys see the same thing I do?
Eh, maybe it's just me.
Next up, feathers, eggs, and what's all this about an old friend?
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But until then, it's time for part three of "Living With Dinosaurs"! In the words of Nelson Muntz, I can think of at least two things wrong with that title...
Today, we'll look at how the many and varied artists of the Humongous Book of Dinosaurs illustrated some of our favorite dinosaurs. Every review of an old dinosaur book usually ends up here and usually ends up being a parade of naked maniraptors. We'll get to those next week (seriously). Instead, for a change of pace, lets start with a strange Anatosaurus:
This is so weird. I don't even know if the artist was clear on what a hadrosaur even is. Except the Ouranosaurus (technically an Iguanodon, but still) to the left of this thing is pretty good.
It's hard to tell is the almost-single row of plates on this Stegosaurus is because (a) of good old text/illustration dissonance, (b) the illustrator found painting the stegosaurus plates way too hard and kind of fudged it, or (c) the really, really wonky perspective. (Or (d), Zach's theory in the comments.)
HMoD is pretty vehement that pterosaurs are not dinosaurs (because, remember, "dinosaurs can't fly". That's another issue for next week.) However, they do discuss them and include some atypically excellent for HBoD paintings. Two of them are worth highlighting here for being a bit odd in hindsight.
Above, we have a pterosaur mother feeding her baby. Now, Mrs. T. is the only fossil that gives us any real insight into pterosaur parenting, if I am not mistaken, and it appears as though parental care wasn't a big thing for pteros.
This painting might just be outdated. This next one is just weird:
You don't see hanging, batlike pterosaurs often nowadays but this used to be a pretty common paleoart meme. It was especially common back when the description of pterosaurs in books focused on a seemingly endless list of what the poor creatures *couldn't* do: They couldn't really fly, they couldn't flap their wings, they couldn't stand up because their ankles were so weak (meaning they had to hang around as shown by their... weak ankles), they couldn't even move on the ground, and they basically had to hang around in high places waiting for a favorable wind to get anywhere. In short, up until relatively recently, pterosaurs came across as nature's cruelest mistake.
Back to the dinosaurs. Here's another strange-looking hadrosaur who, it just so happens, really looks like she and her babies walked right off the cover of the well-loved January 1993 issue of National Geographic.
Speaking of crested hadrosaurs, here's the HBoD bending over backwards in an attempt to explain the two very different-looking Parasaurolophi by two very different the SAME atypically excellent for HBoD artist, trying out two different color schemes in two different illustrations, from two different time periods (whew). Since they both have long crests, naturally the more colorful one is the female. Yup.
Finally, one of my favorite strange old theories/paleomemes: little ornithopods lived in trees! I'm still not quite sure what the reasoning behind this was aside from the fact that my books as a child always compared Hypsilophodon and company to Tree Kangaroos, but note that it appears in the original printed-page Jurassic Park.
Speaking of, next week, two -yes, two- posts full of strange maniraptors! And I think we just might run into an old friend...
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Hey, it's time for another episode of "Living With Dinosaurs" (see the last post)! In the first episode, we met Dom, and learned that he suffers from very severe asthma, is constantly tormented by his bullying cousin and condescending uncle, and he hates fish because... I don't even know. We learn that he refers to his unborn baby sibling as "The Bulge" because of course he does (though to be fair, so does the rest of his family), and that he'd both cause his mother to miscarry and also impulsively obliterate the entire food chain of the planet out of spite ("ALL fish!") if he ever found a Death Note. But surely those of you who came in late correctly assumed all of this from the title "Living With Dinosaurs".
Truly this is the second most morose and upsetting film involving Jim Henson creatures. Let's see what horrors await our sensitive inner children in today's installment!
Continuing our magical journey through The Humongous Book of Dinosaurs! I should have mentioned this last week, but I am aware that many readers have a lot of nostalgia for this series. As you may have noticed, I haven't said much about the text. This is due to there being a serious case of text/illustration dissonance (and I have nothing but the deepest sympathy for the illustrators; it thankfully hasn't happened very often to me, but I wasn't kidding when I say sometimes you get the equivalent of a tiny notecard describing what you are supposed to draw). Please do not take offense to my snarky attitude towards the illustrations. Thank you.
You have to admit, my fellow paleoartists (or paleontographers if you want to get all fancy-pants - though you should read Traumador's epic deconstruction of the term in the comments below before you do; if anyone wishes to discuss this issue further, please do so here), that part of the appeal of drawing dinosaurs is very simple: sometimes you get to depict giant murderbeasts fighting and maiming each other. The many, many illustrators of the oftentimes truly insane HBoD took unusual glee in such things. Check it out:
My favorite part of this piece is how mildly peeved that tyrannosaurus looks after being gored right in the privates (even though this tyrannosaur appears to be totally neuter, because this is a children's magazine).
You often see 80's Deinonychosaurs ganging up on animals twice their size. But you don't see them having the privates to tackle a big ceratopsian... ever, really. I think this is the first time I've seen such a thing.
A very 80's Spinosaurus messily chows down on an Ouranosaurus carcass. I'm more distracted by the huge, fat ass on that spino. Damn, that is a big fat ass! Maybe the artist is partially going by the "spine was really supporting a giant hump" theory?
I love this painting of a very weird ornithomimid because it shows a paleoart meme from my childhood that you almost never see anymore: supposedly egg-eating dinosaurs sloppily splattering and dribbling around the delicious yolk of the egg they are apparently trying to eat. We'll see a lot more of this later.
And here's Ornitholestes making off with a hunk of... somebody. At least he isn't chasing a flyer around for once.
Another very weird ornithomimid is taking care of that for him.
Next Time: A look at some of our favorite dinosaurs!
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How about this? To liven things up a bit during our journey through this crazy book, I'll share something I just watched recently and is just way too incredible to wait. I give you the lost "Jim Henson Hour" episode, "Living With Dinosaurs"; I'll be serializing it over the next few posts. Do be a dear and watch along with me.
Now, if you're a regular reader, you may remember me discussing how I was a little desperate for dinosaur-related film as a kid. That's why I was so very upset when "The Jim Henson Hour" was cancelled before I got to see this episode. In my mind, and based entirely on the title, it'd essentially have been the same idea as "Dinosaur Revolution" (which, by the way, looks very good).
Within two minutes of finally seeing "Living With Dinosaurs" now, I am unspeakably glad I didn't see it for the first time at eleven years old. Let's begin shall we?
As we saw in the last post, the Humongous Book of Dinosaurs consists largely of illustrations that are... at best mediocre. This is, admittedly, something one must expect when we're discussing a book that is, in fact, over one-hundred issues of a magazine merged together. If there's one theme to be found in the book it's that all the animals in it appear to be facing one common and ubiquitous natural enemy:
Perspective.
Foreshortening wasn't one of the strong suits of the huge group of illustrators working on this project. It lends a surreal air to the "Triceratopses circle their young to fend off tyrannosaurs" meme. That poor Trike on the far left looks like his skull is pointing in two different directions! Not to mention the very derpy tyrannosaurs. (Take a shot.)
A few more animals being attacked by the illusion of depth:
Jeez, at least his forefeet are semi-correct.
This Stegoceras almost looks like he's trying to escape being sucked into a vortex.
That face...
Fish look weird from the front anyway, but this...
How can Carnotaurus run like that on a leg that's broken in three places?
And then you've got these non-Euclidean 80's Dilophosaurs, one of whom seems to be both standing behind his fellow and on top of him at the same time.
I haven't talked much about the "History in Pictures" feature since I'm only focusing on the art in HBoD. Still, there are some great little moments:
Here Eberhard Farrs (sic) is apparently ready for the Gathering of Juggalos. Freakin' Brachiosaurs, how the hell do they work?
And this might be the greatest-ever portrait of Bob Bakker.
Next week: We witness senseless gore and violence!
