A Salute to All of America, but Mostly Mickey's Birthdayland? Let's Watch the 1988 WDW Independance Day Special!

It's February and you know what that means: I'm going to Walt Disney World this month!  And as is of course tradition, I am hyping myself up by watching weird vintage Disney Park television specials.

And because I also felt it was kind of weird keeping a Christmas post up top for so long, here's a... Fourth of July special?  Well, why not?



A special with this much stuff is right for any season.  Highlights include wrong-sounding Mickey announcing the whole entire new Magic Kingdom land built for his birthday, the very odd "Spirit of America" parade, a look at the then-new Norway pavilion, the Electric Light Parade complete with circus floats, a special preview of the Disney/MGM Studios, and the triumphant return of our lanky tap-dancing friend Tommy Tune in a patriotic musical finale that seems to go on forever. 

I hope that everyone in the coming year brings as much enthusiasm to their creative endeavors as Uncle Jessie does playing percussion here.

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Art of the Week!

I drew Pluto from memory and this happened:

A Salute To All Nations, But Mostly America - Let's Watch "Walt Disney World's 15'th Birthday Celebration"!

I am going to celebrate a big momentous birthday in Walt Disney World!  And I really like to watch vintage Disney Park specials before heading down to The World.  I like to see what's changed, what's stayed the same, and what I missed out on.

And this time, I've found some really weird ones.  First up, we have a special celebrating what, in my opinion, was the most awesome Disney Parks anniversary of all, the fifteenth anniversary of Walt Disney World.  I think this might have even been one of my family's first trips.  Every fifteen minutes, someone entering the park would win a prize, and the decorations were terrific. 

This special doesn't focus on that at all.  Instead, we get half of the Golden Girls, a really strange tour of World Showcase, a reminder of how 3/4ths of the Monkees were everywhere in the 80's, a seemingly endless patriotic production narrated by Charlton Heston, and previews of upcoming attractions, including something about a "studio tour"...

Have a Trippy Independance Day...

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:

* - It was commissioned by the United States Information Agency in 1976 to commemorate the upcoming Bicentennial (of course).

* - Vincent is one of the last notable MySpace holdouts. He's quite a character and all of his films are incredible.

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.

* - ArtEvolved has the Carboniferous Gallery up! (Sad news though: I'm still working on my piece. Fortunately it can be added later.)

* - Speaking of outsized creatures, here's an awesome compilation of every Ray Harryhausen movie:



* - A segment from another obscure Chuck Jones' holiday special, "Yankee Doodle Cricket":



* - And while this is a bit old, it's still adorable:



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Art of the Day



No matter what your location, have a great and safe holiday!

America Plants!

When last I talked about my garden, it was overrun with tulips and onions. Those have since gone to fruit, but there are loads of wildflowers taking over the big garden:



You can see the "spent" onions, lots of Rose Campion (to think some people would call this a weed!), and some yet-to-flower daylilies and chrysanthemums.
I don't remember if I showed off my irises, but here's what's currently blooming in their part of the garden:



Some crazy Asiatic Lilies I don't remember planting! Really, I don't remember planting these. I do remember having lilies in this garden, but they were all eaten years ago by those horrid little red beetles whose larvae spend all their days eating lily leaves and (from the looks of it) coating themselves in their own feces.
Perhaps they weren't all eaten? It is a mystery...



I apologize for the blurriness of this picture. This wasn't a particularly good year for the Delphiniums. They are so pretty but one strong rainstorm and they flop over. At least the bees don't care.



On the other hand, my Clematis is having an incredible year. I've never seen so many blooms on it! They only lasted a week or so but what a show!

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Sketch Costume design of the day!

It's almost Independence Day, so how about some patriotic pants?



This was part of a costume I designed for a Fourth of July party called America Pants (for reasons un-freaking-known; but there's your title significance). Some of the rest of the clothing I made for the occasion can be seen here.

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Oh, hey, is that a Drawgasmic button at right? The party happens on July tenth! That's only days away! If you're in the St. Louis area, please go!

Bermuda Trip Report: In which Trish Feels the Lo-ooooooove...

Note that much of the following post will just be me repeating the text from this set of photographs, but it'll be a little more coherent.
So I went to Bermuda for a family reunion. We had planned this trip over a year ago, and we were partially inspired by this:

We knew that my Grandfather was stationed in Bermuda during World War Two for a while. After he passed away, we found this beautiful scrapbook he kept during that time period. It was remarkably well preserved. It turns out that, sixty-seven years ago (if I'm doing my math right; it was in 1942), he arrived in the archipelago on the same day we arrived. Very cool; we toasted him several times during the trip. We decided early on that we'd try to visit as many places as possible that he mentioned frequently.
We went to Bermuda by boat; specifically, the Norwegian Spirit. She's a big, beautiful ship and I am still digesting the cruise itself. It could easily fill another whole post. For the most part, trying to describe the fun my family and I had would be like trying to explain why that awesome time you had once in college was so much fun. There are a few specific events worth mentioning later. One of them involves Salvador Dali.

Really, the biggest highlight overall was the fact that it took me only this one week to fill an entire Arches Carnet de Voyage. I usually act like it's the hardest damn thing in the world to fill a Sketchbook in one month, so this was a pretty big deal.
Landscapes usually aren't my thing; turns out SEAscapes might be my thing. The one above might be my favorite. This little (Barn?) Swallow flew along our ship for a while, then flew off to God knows where in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Think about this for a second. I can add swallows to my list of animals who have unexpectedly turned out to be pretty badass.

We docked in King's Warf. This used to be the Royal Naval Dockyard and I'm not sure if it's still used by the military, but it was a very crucial Naval base not too long ago. All of the buildings are very old, but they are still in use. The building in the picture above is the old Commissioner's House, and it's now the main building of the Maritime Museum. The Museum contained a lovely collection of Wartime memorobilia, a herd of invisible sheep (seriously, I kept dodging their poop on the ground but saw neither hoof nor horn of them), and something called DolphinQuest.

This is how I spent my Towel Day, appropriately enough. On the one hand, you are a mere seven feet away from an alien intelligence. On the other hand, you are also seven feet away from tourists who have payed upwards of $300.00 to touch that alien.
Can't help but think that, when the human/dolphin communication gap is finally breached for good, we will not enjoy what the dolphins have to say about us.
Honestly, in hindsight, King's Warf was the nicest of all the ports we visited. We hit Bermuda's other two main cities: Hamilton and St. George. They were both very nice in their own respective ways, but King's Warf wasn't as crowded as either of them and was relatively quiet.
Also, we only had two and a half days to play on the islands. Of those days, everything was closed for a day and a half. See, we arrived on the Sunday before Bermuda's national holiday. Visiting Hamilton (or any city, really) when nothing is open and there are almost no people hanging out was eerie. Fortunately, we spent Bermuda Day snorkeling, and that made up for it:

I did the first painting after a shore excursion (funny how Norwegian calls them shore excursions even though most of them in Bermuda took place at sea) to the Seagardens, an offshore series of coral reefs. The second painting I did on-sight at Tobacco Bay, a well-known beach near St. George. Both places were amazing for completely different reasons and they are two of my top three highlights from Bermuda. I think I'm hooked on snorkeling. I just need to figure out the logistics of snorkeling off Wollaston Beach...
My third favorite place in Bermuda was the Crystal and Fantasy Caves park. This was my one "if I don't get to see this, I will be very sad" must-see place. It defies description but I will say this: you half expect to turn a corner and see a half-eaten Doozer construction. Jim Henson's art directors absolutely did not make anything up. I caught glimpses of "Labyrinth" and "Dark Crystal" as well as "Fraggle Rock" down there. Fine time for my camera to run out of memory.
I can honestly say that I was sad to leave the islands. But the ride there and back again is a story all it's own. I'll cover that in a future post.
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I just rescued all of Nessie's reviews and they can now be found on The All-New, All-Different Realm of Mad-Ness. Happy Independence Day!