The Triumphant Return of Walter Fozbek!

Few things make me happier than getting to finally tie up a long-dangling loose end. 

You may recall that way WAY back in the summer of 2011, I wrote two long, weird posts about The Double Disappearance of Walter Fozbek by Steve Senn, a short, weird book that I mostly remembered for it's very short, very weird animated adaptation that aired as part of the anthology series "CBS Storybreak".  I strongly recommend reading those posts because there's a lot of information in them.  Like I said, this is a very weird book.  (You'll also get to enjoy some early-installment weirdness.  Who the hell is this person who actually enjoyed the taste of an IPA?  Certainly not I?)

As happy as I was to finally find the book, I still longed to watch the cartoon again.  I figured by now that it was lost to the ages, Lost Media if you will.  But it turns out that there's a small but dedicated contingent of YouTubers finding and uploading as many "CBS Storybreak" episodes as they can find.

And, miraculously, "The Double Disappearance of Walter Fozbek" is among them!  What a great way to kick off the new decade!  Here it is:



Goodness.

I remember practically every minute of this strange little cartoon. It's really close to the book, aside from a somewhat streamlined ending, "Flintstones"-ish prehistoric gags and all.  There's also a touch more existential angst.  Like, certainly "The Last Unicorn" this ain't.  But that scene where Walter (remember he's the only human in a world of anthropomorphic animals) is face-to-face with the fossil remains of another human (remember humans are extinct in this world); that kind of thing messes you up as a kid. 

Between the New Kids on the Block Christmas Special and "Walter Fozbek", this has been a very good time for “Yay I KNEW it was real!  And, now that I can finally watch it after 20-30 years, I completely understand why everyone looked so confused and slightly concerned when I tried to describe it to them.”

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Art! A cute pudgy Unicorn and her tiny Fairy friends to bless our 2020's.

Far-Out Sci-Fi, Tricerafail, and Furries (of a sort) - _The Double Disappearance of Walter Fozbek_

Previously on "Tricia's Obligatory Art Blog"...



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.

(Trish gets a case of Pamola Xtra Pale Ale...)

Right. This book is weird.



(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.

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Sketch of the Day!

I should not have done this.

Fuzzy Memories, Captain Kangaroo, and Walter Fozbek - "CBS Storybreak!"

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 such posts before, and I really hope this is another case where kind folks write in with more information and helpful links, like so.

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...)



~*~ On to Part Two! ~*~

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Sketch of the Day!

Things I Must Post About!

This is partially for my benefit, partially for you readers to laugh at. I just finished an archive binge on my own blog and here are all the subjects I said I would write more about "someday":

* - WACOM Tablets and why they own so hard.

* - Jeff Smith's Bone. Actually, let's just get this one done: It's very good. Great art, terrific story. Just be aware that this is the kind of graphic novel that starts out like "Pogo" and ends like Dragonlance, and we all know what those are like, right?

* - Executive Meddling. Though I think between Don Bluth Month and the "Alien 3" review, I think that's been adequately covered. If you just can't get enough sad stories about an artist's vision being screwed by the higher-ups, you may read the namesake Trope, or listen to the whole spectacular debacle that the director of the film "Fanboys" suffered in this episode of the /Filmcast.

* - Speaking of: Podcasts! I got another shout-out by the very nice guys at "Science... Sort Of" in a recent episode. I think it's time to return the favor.

* - Obscure and or strange cartoons and shows like the previously and very briefly mentioned 1990's "Land of the Lost" reboot, "Kidd Video," and"Glow Friends".

* - The 1980's "Dinosaur" documentary with Phil Tippet animation and the PBS "Dinosaur" documentary with cel animation.

* - Reviews of illustrated books that somehow influenced me. William Stout's Dinosaurs, Rien Poortvliet's Gnomes, and Wayne D. Barlowe's Expedition.

* - Hazel Hedgehog and the Smurfette Principal. Maybe. Once again, the namesake trope pretty much covers it. Hazel herself is mentioned in the "Comics" section.

* - Classic Ranger Rick, though this is seeming less and less likely, and that makes me sad.

* - "Inception" and how much it melted my face off. Actually, yeah, there's my review. "Inception" = Awesomesauce.

"Trish, this is a movie that is essentially a victory lap for one of your favorite directors, stars an actor you've been a fan of since forever, the rest of the cast is incredible, it has amazing music, a brilliant fight scene unlike anything ever attempted before, and many shout-outs to M.C. Escher and Jungian symbolism and other stuff that you find awesome. And all you have to say about it is, 'It's Awesomesauce'? You know you wrote an entire blog post about a Tinkerbell book..."

Yeah. Yeah I know. It's just that I'm very late to the party and better writers have beaten me to everything interesting I could say about "Inception". I'm pretty sure I don't need to sell the movie to anyone at this point either. And I consider the Tinkerbell review an Old Shame.

By the way, Christopher Nolan was totally robbed. Bad Academy! Bad!

* - Other good 2010 movies I haven't got a chance to review yet and deserve long write-ups because they are underrated/obscure/whatever.

* - MOER OLD PALEOART!!! Especially the tale of Syntarsus (got that ready for Thursday!) and the Simon and Schuster Encyclopedia.

* - "Fraggle Rock" for cryin' out loud! Jim Henson's stuff in general.

* - "Invader Zim" and "Super Mario Brothers"

* - Movies That Are Good But Have a Ton to Answer For.

* - Expensive bird seed failure.

* - Dinosauroids and maybe other weird pop culture paleo-stuff.

* - And maybe this will be the year I write about the classic Christmas specials, yah?

OK, I'm promising nothing, but there's a good long list of subjects. Hopefully "someday" will be "over the next few weeks".

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Art of the Day!

I have updated my DeviantArt ID finally! I don't know, I think Spewey is a good mascot don't you?


DA ID 2011 by ~babbletrish on deviantART

"Whale Magic" is going to break your mind.

I... I... I have no words for this (discovered by Cartoon Brew):

ZOMG Whale Magic!!!

I'm usually pretty good at sensing whether something is an elaborate satire or not and this is just too amazingly insane not to be real. Honestly, though, I'd rather see them elaborate on the story of Richter Duck.