It is Pisces Season my friends, and I can think of no better place to spend it than deep under the sea. First, lets travel on a virtual ride on the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea attraction from the early, weird days of Disney World. This comes from our friends at Defunctland, and is intended to be experienced on a VR headset. I played it on my phone held right up to my face, which worked... okay. It is a phenomenal recreation of a ride I got to experience one time ever and I look forward to other attraction recreations.
Next, an episode of the wonderful "Eyewitness Video" series about the ocean. I really like this series and want to binge it at some point - after "The Muppet Show" of course.
And finally, Blank Check Podcast is doing a series on John Musker and Ron Clements and the Disney Renaissance. So far, it's fantastic and their recent "Little Mermaid" episode is wonderful.
Thanksgiving! I wish you all a wonderful one this year even though, of course, this Thanksgiving is going to be different. But the important parts of Thanksgiving should survive 2020. And as we learned about five years ago, Thanksgiving is about family! And food. And eating a turkey!
Turkeys are birds! Prehistoric-ish birds, even! Therefore, they are dinosaurs! So we should celebrate Thanksgiving with dinosaurs! I have definitely made this joke before!
Everyone of a certain generation remembers the Eyewitness books, which I covered a long time ago. The documentary series is a little more obscure, but the couple of episodes I've watched are quite nice. They manage to feel like thumbing through one of the books, and I love the opening credits sequence! That imaginary museum is basically what my "Mind Palace" feels like. I really like how they use film clips where the books would use still pictures and art; a Good Book-To-TV Adaptation.
"Eyewitness: Dinosaur" even goes so far as to animate stop-motion versions of the signature dinosaur models from it's book equivalent. We also get a cute Aardman-ish mascot character who looks like an ancestor of Henry from "Amazing Animals", which was kind of a spinoff series. And we get a little bit of Phil Tippett's "Prehistoric Beast" to boot!
We also get the strangest variation of the 90's "little theropods are in one clade, big theropods are in a different one" Great Theropod Classification Mess-Up I've ever seen, and it's right there in the preview of the video. So basically, for a long time, little theropods like Compsognathus and Coelophysis and the smaller Maniraptors were all thought to be related and placed in the Coelurosaur clade. Meanwhile Allosaurus, Dilophosaurus, Spinosaurus and good old T. rex, since they were all large, were "Carnosaurs". In hindsight, this is obviously wrong as hell and kind of like saying "Foxes, housecats, otters, and terriers are all in one family group; wolves, lions, wolverines, and Great Danes are in another, different family group."
Well according to "Eyewitness: Dinosaur", little theropods/Coelurosaurs are in the same family group as birds and large theropods/Carnosaurs are in the same group as... crocodiles. Which is like saying, "Foxes, housecats, otters, and terriers are all in one family group which also includes pinnipeds (I guess? Look, we have a distinct lack of an entire clade of diverse flying carnivores, so stay with me.) Meanwhile, wolves, lions, wolverines, and Great Danes are in another, different
family group which also includes... Dimetrodon." That is, at least, a new one.
Have a lovely Thanksgiving, everyone! I am, as always, truly thankful for all of you. 💖
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Art of the Day! A nice little landscape for your holiday weekend.
Ah, Eyewitness Books. The science, nature, and history library that saved many a kid my age while writing reports for school. Their format has been much-imitated, even to the point that part of me could argue that, in many ways, Eyewitness ruined the world of nonfiction children's books. For ages and ages afterwards, the default "style" for such books was, "stark white background, photographs of objects related to the subject, and labels. Labels everywhere." You can see the roots of the "Whatever"-Ology books and their various and sundry rip-offs there.
Eyewitness' Dinosaur editions are perhaps the best-loved out of the whole series. They took the then-unusual approach of using models to depict the dinosaurs. All the models were made by John Holmes, Roby Braun, Graham High, and Jeremy Hunt. The photography was by Andy Crawford, and the drawings by John Temperton and Graham Rosewarne. The book was published in 1993 by Dorling Kindersley, Inc.
The dinosaur models were very up-to-date for their time, but maybe have not aged well. And, sadly, they are each attended by a swarm of labels.
And a few of them depict the dinosaurs from the inside-out. Lord knows why, especially since the form and function of internal anatomy isn't really the focus of the book and is never elaborated upon. And mind you, this was all done before we found Leonardo so a lot of what you see inside this Gallimimus is based on educated guessing.
Now, the Eyewitness approach is nifty but I do recall having a book by them specifically about hadrosaurs, and most of the "illustrations" were just this model photographed from different angles. Yeah.
I am willing to admit that I may be a little obsessed with Deinocheirus' crazy-long arms...
And here's the hand of Baryonyx. You know, if it were out of context and I didn't know much about theropod anatomy, I might assume this was a maniraptor foot and large talon too. This explains some things.
Speaking of maniraptors, here's a familiar face. 80's kids, how sick are you of this guy. (It's Dale Russel's rather infamous model of Troodon, for those who don't recognize it.)
And here is a very strange bust of an oviraptor. I'm gonna say it. I'm gonna say it and you can't stop me. Here we go.
Scaly raptors look stupid.
They do. Look at this thing and the Russel!Troodon and try to argue it. And keep this in mind for one of next week's books...
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Additionally, CHUD.com reviewed "The Land Before Time" as part of it's Childhood's End series (revisiting movies the writers watched as children but hadn't seen in over a decade). If nothing else, it finally explains the title.
Additionally additionally additionally, I just got some more retro dinosaur books from the library, so Retro Paleoart "Month" may go on for a week or so into May. Which is good, as that will give me time to recover from Comicon. (Which is in just a week OMG!!!)
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Art of the Day!
I should probably save this for my review of "Pokemon: White", since it's one of the best things in the game (though this looked an awful lot better in my head):
