As a fellow admirer of crows once sang in a song that has been drilled in the tooth of my memory since high school, maybe this year will be better than the last. God I hope so. I at least intend to blog more, when I can; anything that strikes my fancy and is also too weird and/or wonderful NOT to post about.
Case in point: "Along the Moonbeam Trail". This is a short silent film recently restored to the best of the editors' abilities (here's hoping they find the ending). I'd like to thank Tyler Greenfield for posting a clip on Twitter because it's honestly astounding that I've never seen it or heard of it. It has everything! It is not my Entire Aesthetic (for one thing, I'd have more than one [1] major female character and she'd do more than being a Deus ex Machina), but it's about as close as a movie from this time period could hope to be:
Everything about this is great but I'm torn between the random witch, the "pterosaur" who's really one of the first movie dragons, and the stegosaurus and his cute skink-tongue.
-----
Art of the Day!
I painted this back in 2018 and I'm reposting it here to bring this wonderful magical energy into 2021. Happy New Year!
Great day in the morning, the Illo is a fantastic Sketchbook! I've gone through a rash of Moleskine-alikes and this one is my favorite so far. Perfect size, takes all the media I like joyfully, and scans like a dream. You know a Sketchbook is quality when you've moved on to the next one (which isn't even bad, just very very different) and you already miss it and want to get more of them.
Now, I'm a little burnt out so maybe I won't be doing the daily JuneFae Challenge, but a periodic piece of Fairy fun isn't unreasonable. Here's a little rainy day Fae:
I'm starting to warm up to month-long daily/weekly art challenges. Not sure if I'm going to do weekly wrap-up posts or do a long one at the end of the month; we'll see. Anyway, I love Mermaids, you love Mermaids, let's spend this whole month making art of lovely ladies of the water.
😍😍😍 HEY WOW WOWIE WOW AWESOME COOL FUN PARTY BARBIE BIRTHDAY AWESOME WOW YIPPEE YAY WIZARD WOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!! 😍😍😍💩🍹🍰
😨
Okay, this one is going to take some explaining.
If you spend any significant amount of time in the Disney fan portion of this vast sea we call the Internet, you'll find that one thing Disney Park fans like to complain about is the inclusion of popular established characters in Epcot attractions. This hasn't been bothering me nearly as much as it does others, but after watching "BARBIE BIRTHDAY PARTY AT WALT DISNEY WORLD EPCOT '94!!!" (henceforth, "BARBIE IN EPCOT" because I just... can't) I can see where the dissent is coming from.
The whole "BARBIE IN EPCOT" thing was actually a contractual obligation between Disney and Mattel and ye gods, does it ever look like it. I feel like this must have been the Faustian bargain for all the Mattel characters they got to include in "Toy Story". The stage show lasted a little over a year and a half, and just about the only real evidence that it wasn't some kind of group hallucination is this video. The video was available for purchase with special Barbie dolls for a penny, which seems about right.
On the one hand, it's always neat to get a behind-the-scenes look at Disney stage shows, and the segments about how birthdays are celebrated around the world are very nice. On the other hand, you have the screaming 90's child actors. Do anything you can to prepare yourself, because the screaming 90's child actor hosts of this special are like entire seasons of "Full House" made flesh. I hate them, I hate them so much, and it's as much about the screaming and their being genuinely horrible (get your damn fingers off that beautiful cake you monsters!) as it is that I wish I could get as excited about anything as these screaming 90's child actors get about literally everything.
-----
Because it's my Birthday and I love you (and also because Faebruary's still in my rear-view mirror and St. Patrick's Day is this weekend) have a Bonus Especially Weird Disney Thing! Let me show you the traditional dances of my people:
This isn't what I saw a few nights ago in Raglan Road after downing two Kilkennys (though it's close). This is "Light Magic". It's from 1997 and was meant to be the replacement, in Disneyland, for the Main Street Electrical Parade. Once again, home videos like this are about the only real evidence this wasn't a mass hallucination.
It's also from that very weird, very specific, and thankfully very over period where Disney Parks defined "parade" as "Three or four floats that ride down the street, then stop and stay still for several minutes at a time to do a long elaborate show, then start moving again to suddenly stop and do another show and so on". It went over even less well than "BARBIE IN EPCOT", not even surviving one whole year.
May the good Fairies draw near to you,
And spread love and luck with their weird little dances every day.
And may a good strong drink
Make the memories of horrible screaming 90's child actors go away.
I'll be honest, part of why I turned this into a Moment is to see how one looks like here. Storify is going down in May and I need a new home for my Tweetmentaries after all...
I did it. I painted a Fairy for every single day in the month of June. I'm really proud of myself if I may say. The entire Flickr album is embedded below:
So what's the next art challenge? I've heard KaijuLy suggested and my current Sketchbook is more than qualified for that:
But there's also a part of me that wants to save my energy for SmaugUst...
