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!!!!!
EXTREME! BLOOD! DROOL! HORRIBLE PERSPECTIVE! TEETH! CLAWS! ANATOMY FAILURE! EYES! FUR! FOUR TONGUES!!! EXTREME!!!
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.
Aww...
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Sketch of the Day!
Went to lunch at Bugaboo Creek...
So I figure since I'm on the T/TR summer schedule, if I'm going to spring a Links Of Interest post on you, it's going to be a super long one:
I have no idea how I missed this but in 2007, John Updike wrote an article about dinosaurs for National Geographic. Turns out he knows his Avemetatarsalians (a better word to use than Ornithodirans it turns out, but sadly not as catchy) and gets downright philosophical about them. And I love, love, love the paragraph that opens the second page. Holy guano!
The only downside of the previous article is that the illustrations are the generic CGI jobs that are so annoyingly popular nowadays (who electrocuted the velociraptor?) The same criticism cannot be applied to these AMAZING (and very strange) Lord of the Rings stickers discovered by chance by author Ethan Gilsdorf. Be warned, whoever illustrated these stickers had a mental picture of Tolkein's characters that was... different. And very sixties. On the upshot, this will be how I imagine Tom Bombadil forever.
Speaking of crazy ways of drawing familiar characters, Something Awful's Flashtub has done a pair of dead-on parodies of Dingo Pictures/Phoenix Games. They make a lot more sense (???) if you watch this first. See the parodies here and here. (Naughty language warning.)
Maybe this isn't new to southern Californians, but Disneyland commercials air only very rarely here on the east coast, and this new one advertising the long-awaited reopening of Star Tours is the Best Thing.
The Onion AV Club shared a wonderful interview with Norton Juster. And one of their local branches questioned the logic of the NKOTBSB tour, and of misaimed nostalgia in general.
Over at Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs, Dave alerted us to some new "Terra Nova" teaser images, which can be seen here. The most important thing to note is that we get a better look at the theropod critter from the teaser trailer which I had assumed was a Carnotaurus. Turns out it's one of Branon Braga's invented species and... sigh... Brannon Braga.
I mentioned in the last post that I am foaming at the mouth with anticipation over "Brave". And now even more so, as Cartoon Brew has revealed that the characters have a wonderfully eerie Brian Froud a la "Labyrinth"/Miyazaki a la "Spirited Away" look.
Speaking of, "Labyrinth" is 25 years old yesterday.
CHUD.com reposted the list of winners from this year's Saturn Awards. Yipes.
"X Number Best of Whatever" lists on the Internet are usually a load of poo-poo, but here's Time Magazine's 25 Best Animated Features. You know what I just said about the Saturn Awards? Yeah... same thing here.
GeekMom shared an awesome way to get kids into art on her blog. I should raid my overstuffed, OCD-affected art supply box and make a few of these to give out to my little cousins when they visit.
The good news is, there is a sequel to Lev Grossman's The Magicians on the way. The bad news is, we have to wait until August. The... neutral news is, we have a teaser image as well as a discussion between author and illustrator to tide us over.
A couple of fun Tumblers about animation art have come to my attention: Smears, Multiples, and Other Animation Gimmicks celebrates the (often very strange) art of the motion blur, while Out Of Context Animation takes stills out of context with... odd results.
Apparently, someone wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal that, according to GeekMom and i09 (and many, many others), might as well have been entitled "Badly Informed, Sensationalistic, and Deeply Patronizing Thoughts on a Genre I Lost Touch With Decades Ago and Now Only Notice the Very Worst Popular Recent Examples Of". As usual. This time it's young adult literature.
In happier news, I can't wait, I can not freaking WAIT, to go see this.
Speaking of dinosaurs and glee, Albertonychus has done a fabulous series on feathers which you all need to read starting here.
And Darren Naish has been sharing chapters from his bird biology book that, sadly, never happened.
Everything is Terrible gave us a brief reminder of why I kinda miss the "eff it, let's just slap some trash together and there's your costume" aesthetic of low budget 80's sci-fi movies. They also reminded us that there is nothing on God's green Earth that is more utterly confusing than Christian Furries.
Last week, I wrote about how "Jurassic Park 4" just refuses to die. Turns out the same thing can be said for the "Fraggle Rock" movie (and good lord, the comments on that article are depressing). I maintain that the Fraggles are Jim Henson's crowning moment of awesome, but my interest in a film gradually eroded when it went from "the original puppeteers will play the characters!" to "it's going to be CGI" to "and it's basically got the same plot as 'the Smurfs'". And then the report came in that the studio wanted a "darker and edgier" script and that's the point where I was just, f**** it.
io9 has a list of Things That We Will Never See Happen in a Green Lantern Movie. They've also shared a timely list of uncomfortable issues raised by the presence of the Popemobile in "Cars 2".
Legendary Bronze Age Disney animator Andreas Deja launched a blog called -what else?- Deja View. Definitely worth following.
Speaking of neat artist blogs, Jody Bergsma gives us a refresher on the color wheel. I should really practice my watercolor skills this summer. Her crab painting gave me some nifty ideas for the upcoming Carboniferous Gallery.
Cartoon Brew shared this charming teaser for an upcoming stop-motion film based off The Boy With the Cuckoo Clock Heart. Just try not to get the chorus in your head.
This theater disclaimer is both the most hilarious and the saddest thing.
Via "Hark! A Vagrant!", Strong Female Characters! Also simultaneously the most hilarious and saddest thing.
And Project Dryptosaurus hosted the Boneyard Blog Carnival!
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Sketch of the Day!
Squirrels!
You know, it's hard to be an animation fan sometimes. Sometimes enough comments of "it's better than it looks" and/or sheer curiosity can backfire on you. And you wind up with something like "Gnomeo and Juliet" in your Netflix queue. And since you hate to send movies back without watching them, you watch it.
Well here's the thing, dear reader. This isn't just a bad movie. It'd be one thing if it were a bad movie, I could just dismiss it in one throw-away line in a post about something completely different if it were just a bad movie.
But despite what anyone in their right mind would expect from the trailer and (let's admit it) the title, this isn't in the same family of forgettable and easily dismissed bad movies as "Meet the Fockers" or "Valentine's Day" or what have you. No, "Gnomeo and Juliet" has turned out to be more along the lines of "The Star Wars Holiday Special" or "The Room". It is a fascinatingly bad movie.
You may remember a little less than a year ago, I wrote a post about this movie that was almost entirely prompted by my disbelief that somebody actually sat down and made it. Long story short, this was a project that was pitched at Disney sometime after "Dinosaur" and "Home on the Range" and other Disney movies that probably never even got to go in the Vault. The studio was pretty desperate for another hit. So they almost made a movie where nonhumans sing Elton John songs in a very loose adaptation of a Shakespeare story. Again.
The project was scrapped years and years ago. However, last autumn, it mysteriously actually got made somehow by (according to what little I can learn from IMDB) the studio that gave the world "Space Chimps". It turns out, according to the making-of featurette on the DVD, Elton John loved this movie too much to let it die.
And so, in 2010, we got ourselves an animated film full of gags that only could have been pitched during the exceedingly specific time in history where a movie in which gnomes sing Elton John songs would have actually not been a wholly terrible idea. Thus the "American Beauty" reference pictured above. And a scene where a character does an impression of Borat. And a good old-fashioned scene where the Internet behaves like it has never ever done in anything resembling our reality.
But maybe the strangest part of this movie is the fact that the animators went all out with it. My gosh, the gnomes are adorable and the little details are stunning (if only because it's a shock to see such things in a movie like this). They've got little grass stains and moss and chips and dings and hand-painted flaws. The ivy and rhubarb plants have little veins and discolorations. Hell, this is one of the best-looking bad animated films I've ever seen.
(And as God as my witness, I wish I could say this was the only fascinatingly bad kiddie-oriented "Romeo and Juliet" adaptation I saw this year. Alas...)
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This article showed up in my feed via a toy collecting blog I like and...
Fellow Art Evolved-kateers, this is what we are fighting. I was ready to cry. (And the comments... Dear God, the comments...)
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Sketch Photograph of the Day! Just to show I have lost no love for gnomes.
This also reminds me: it's been a while since we had a gardening post hasn't it?
This was easily the best Boston Comicon I've ever attended. Mad props to the show-runners and event organizers and the convention center and to and all the artists and vendors and costumed characters and like such as who participated and/or attended. Major major thanks to everyone I met who bought a print or a card or who just took the time to visit my sites or who picked up a Comicbook Artists Guild application. And thanks to the Guild itself for letting me take up a few cubic feet of their table for the better part of the show.
As usual, I'm overwhelmed with free stuff along with photographs and drawings to sort through. And that's going to take... a while. Like, I'll probably save my Comicon stories for next week. Until then, here are some new
Links of Interest!
So... you may have heard that some serious *EEsht* went down Sunday night. The Hollywood Reporter compiled some of the best/sweetest/strangest reactions from popular Twitter feeds. I am the person John Legend is talking about. If you were wondering, it's more weird than hilarious.
On a (much) lighter note, I love "Scott Pilgrim vs the World", I love "Friendship is Magic", and thus I wish I had come up with this trailer mash-up first.
Speaking of Ponies, congratulations are in order to Lauren Faust, for raising over $15,000 for Japan relief efforts via her recent character design auction.
O.T.I.S. visited the New England Aquarium and came back with lots of great photographs.
I read this weird story about Mike Tyson's tattoo artist and immediately wondered if he was suffering from the same ego-inflating disease that recently infected Greg Paul.
Here's a little song they both might need to listen to; and that should be turned into a cute animated PSA to run during Saturday morning cartoons.
The blog "Good Show, Sir!" is a repository of really weird trade paperback cover art. I think their newest find is my favorite so far.
We didn't talk much about current happenings in mainstream comics at the CAG table, but I did overhear some people wagering that once our old friends the Mainstream News (click the "Epic Fail" tab below) heard about a certain plot twist that happens in Action Comics #900, they'd blow it way the hell out of proportion. Guess what? They did. (Guys, he's an alien. Chill out.)
Lastly, and best of all, ArtEvolved's Hadrosaur Gallery is up! Hooray!
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Sketch of the Day! Have a random dragon!
I'm going to impulsively discuss the world of discount dinosaur books for children, just in time for *next* month's Boneyard. (Edit: YAAAAY!!! Yes, people discovering me through S.O.S., I'm a bit of a dweeb. But hopefully a funny and informative one.)
Now, dinosaur books at least aren't as bad as cheap toy makers (if only the situation in this book was real). But they likewise tend to be a mine field of too little fact-checking, too much "aw, we'll just base everything on the most famous depiction of the animal in question." It takes a very long time for the new dinosaur finds that change out perspectives and shatter our very expectations of what these wonderful animals were like to filter into the public consciousness (if you don't believe me, ask your friends what a Tianyulong is and why everyone sh*t themselves when it was published).
As a shocking demonstration, I have for you two cheap dinosaur books I found in a surplus and salvage store. The first is creatively entitled Dinosaurs and if you must, it may be purchased at Amazon here. Or not, because the thing is mercifully out of print, but at least we know who to blame now.
Now, I should really let images like this one speak for themselves, but the print may get hard to read once I resize them (you should hopefully be able to click for big). For it's first trick, the book confuses Mei Long and Psittacosaurus (if you don't know from dinosaurs, I'm in no position to help you in understanding the rest of this post, but in this case the mammalian equivalent would be identifying a small, fluffy cat as a big, bristly boar). As an added bonus, the text refers to dinosaur eggs. Yeah.
The text in this one's a little fuzzy, but it's the most epic failure in the book. Here we have all of our favorite Ornithischians or "bird hipped" dinosaurs! You know, like Torosaurus and Psittacosaurus and Microraptor and Caudipteryx and Ara and...
...
...
Wut?
To be fair, I can see why that'd be confusing. But it's also the kind of thing that makes it clear you have no business writing a book about dinosaurs.
I can't tell if these are sad or hilarious in hindsight. (And yes, the top one does say "Torsaurus".)
Our next book is this thing, which I am very sad to see is published by Walter Foster, the famous art instruction book publishers. I was going to go ballistic over that title, but it turn out they're all like that (All About Drawing Sea Creatures and Animals! All About Drawing Horses and Pets! All About Drawing Vehicles and Trees!) It starts out with this handy scale guide for typical animals in the book:
Oh... wow...
Then gives us some handy -er- "Dinosaur Extremes". Again the text is fuzzy, but we get the good old "Troodon is the smartest dinosaur" trope again:
And finally, a selection of the dinosaur drawings themselves, with some text. LOOK AT THAT TRICERATOPS!!! Also, the fun fact about Baryonx is just strange and that cute Bearded Dragon has no idea why he's here:
(And guys... hey guys... guys...
Oshawatt or Snivy?
EDIT: Oshawott. Oshawoot always.)
First off, Astrology is a load of bologna. Let's just make that clear. Yeah, people born around the same time of year *maybe* have similar personality traits, and it's useful for extreme shortcuts in literary symbolism, but that's about as much credence I give this stuff. Also, if the PG-13 rated title didn't warn you enough, this post will have vitriol in it. Hide the kiddies until Wednesday, when I will either talk about Batman or Pokemon.
So last Thursday, your Facebook page probably exploded in an orgy of "OMG why am I a Gemini now?" or "What the hell is an Ophiuchus?" This is all thanks to the mainstream media catching wind of Parke Kunkle, board member of the Minnesota Planetarium Society. Earth's relation to the sun has changed slightly since the Babylonians created the first western zodiac, but according to Kunkle, the zodiac dates were never updated to reflect this. Since zodiac constellations are so helpful to astronomers in determining the position of the sun, he came up with a more accurate timeline for them. It includes thirteen constellations, simply because astronomers have counted Ophiuchus as a zodiac constellation for years, and anyway the Babylonians had entirely different zodiac signs. (You would think that the astrologers would have caught this earlier, but never mind that now.)
Got all that? Good. Because here is an example of how this has all been reported (and the comments, holy sh*t). Note that OK! hasn't changed it's horoscope page. How rebellious of them.
So basically, an astronomer did something cool to help his fellow astronomers, and unless you study space yourself, this really doesn't affect you at all. But the internet, in a fine demonstration of why I love and hate it, misunderstood what actually happened and lost it's sh*t over it. I find the ways people have been reacting to this story *fascinating*. It's a little more fun than Tricera-Fail because the subject matter is, as has already been stated, baloney. That said, I never knew, until this week, how many people I know took astrology this seriously. It's... unsettling.
No, your birthdate has not changed. Ophiuchus isn't something scientists just made up, it's just usually left out of the zodiac constellations probably because there's twelve months and so it's just easier to have twelve signs (trust me, I'm just learning about this constellation myself). The night sky has not changed either, and frankly it doesn't care what we humans think about it. And finally (this is the one that astonishes me), just because your new astrological sign doesn't match up to your old astronomical sign, doesn't mean that your personality has changed in any way.
Unless...
Unless you read up on your "new" sign and what it represents. And you vehemently disagreed with it. And yet, somewhere deep down inside, the personality traits of your astronomical sign... stuck.
BWAAAAAAAAAAAHHHM!!!
For the record, I... remain... myself... Dr. Mung-Mung... I mean, a Pisces. Woot. I rather like these proposed new signs suggested by Geek Mom, if only because I get to trade in my fishies for a dragon (wut up, Ness).
Other reassuring things for people affected by the mainstream media misunderstanding and losing their sh*t over a mildly interesting science story. In fact, please copy and paste this into your status if you know someone, or have yourself been affected by the mainstream media misunderstanding and losing their sh*t over a mildly interesting science story. The mainstream media misunderstanding and losing their sh*t over a mildly interesting science story affects the lives of many. There is still no known cure for mainstream media misunderstanding and losing their sh*t over a mildly interesting science story, except for the media getting off their collective fat asses and doing some damn fact-checking. 93% of people won't repost this... Why? Because they probably think reposting this will cause autism or something, which it won't, as determined by science.
1) Pluto is a Trans-Neptunian Object and there are a LOT of them. So rather than have a "My Very Excellent Mother..." mimetic that goes on for twenty minutes, it was time to reevaluate how to define the word "planet". If you're not talking to an astronomer, you can call Pluto whatever you want. Call it a gerbil for all the cold unfeeling objects in space care.
2) Paleontologist Jack Horner started kicking around the idea that maybe the dinosaur we call Torosaurus was really a very old and cranky Triceratops. I have never seen the mainstream press blow a science story so out of proportion as I did when this one got out. Almost no Very few other paleontologists take this theory seriously, and most are just like, "well, that's... interesting, but let's see if we can find more evidence of that first". Point is, Triceratops isn't going anywhere.
I need a hot drink.
Addendum: Oh, I love you, The Onion.
Further Addendum-ing: I love you too, Clever Girl.
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Sketch of the Day!
I think you could make an excellent argument that the rise in scientific misunderstanding directly correlates to the lack of a good current "Star Trek" TV series...
Further, further Addendum-ing: I love you too, VG Cats!
WARNING: Uncharacteristic vitriol and some naughty language ahead.
Consider this another episode of Things I Need to Catch Up On Because They Happened During Don Bluth Month.
So around the middle of July, my wonderful regular reader/commenter Zach Miller posted this article on his blog: Toroceratops. I suggest you read it and his other two posts on the subject before we go on.
My reaction was, essentially, "Huh. So John "T. rex was an obligate scavenger" Horner proposed that Torosaurus is actually just a really, really old Triceratops and therefore all Torosaur fossils should be renamed Triceratops? That's... interesting, I guess. I, like most of the commenters, will buy it if we ever find an unmistakable transitional 'Toroceratops' skull."
And then I pretty much forgot about it.
Until I was well into the Don Bluth reviews and learned, via FARK.com, that the mainstream press had got a hold on this story. Ladies and gentlemen, the poor former (maybe) Torosaurus is unwittingly at the center of a fine demonstration of every single thing I cannot f***ing stand about the way the mainstream press reports on science, animals, nature, and... f*** it, everything.
Choice headlines:
"The Triceratops Never Existed!" - Yes it did. It's Torosaurus who would be getting the name change. Please learn how scientific nomenclature works. Also, changing an animal's name doesn't magically make it disappear. Seriously, WTF?
"Triceratops 'never really existed but was just a young version of another dinosaur'" - Same points as above, and just who the hell are they quoting? Honestly, this might be my favorite of the reports because you've got that headline and then, buried deep within the body text of the report itself: "All torosaurus specimens will now be reclassified as triceratops, the scientists said."
"Morph-osaurs: How shape-shifting dinosaurs deceived us" -
1) Christ in a hot rod, I didn't pass five MTELs to see an affix used as a verb in a newspaper.
2) I don't know if this offends me more as an armchair paleontologist or as a sci-fi fantasy fan (by those "physically changing as you age" standards, aren't we all shapeshifting?) But at least it prompted this stupid thing which is hopefully funny:
Rest assured, dear readers, that the "nonexistence" and "shapeshifting" (I seriously couldn't type that without cringing) of dear old Triceratops has been highly exaggerated. But you wouldn't know from these articles. They have utterly failed to understand how scientific nomenclature works, have happily reported this theory -which many have called into question- as a universally accepted fact, and seem to be of the opinion that Triceratops (who doesn't give a sh*t what name us puny humans call it by anyway) has somehow vanished from the fossil record altogether.
I need a cold drink.
Edit: See also this.
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Art of the Day: On a much, much happier note, joy and rapture! The Art Evolved Pop Culture Gallery is up!
Other Person's Art of the Day: Also, Gregory S. Paul's Dinosaur Coffee Table Book on Blurb Want... so... much... (Cries at lack of money.)
