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Childhood Frights!

It’s Halloween, and in honour of this holiday of horrors I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on the movie and tv moments of my childhood that scared the living crap out of me.

10. The Wicked Witch of the West
My earliest memory of ever being afraid of something on TV or in a movie is definitely The Wizard of Oz.  I was obviously very young and I don’t know if it was the witch herself, or the flying monkeys, but I just distinctly remember getting very nervous and frightened when watching the scene at the witch’s castle as the guards marched by.  “Yo-ee-oh! Yo-oh!”

9. Thriller
I wasn’t so much afraid of the Thriller video when it came out so much as I was fascinated and curious because it was one of those things that my parents told me not to watch (but did anyway).  My dad pretty much forbid us kids to watch ANY music videos.  Best Thriller memory: the zombie that blows a big blood bubble!

8. The Cave on Dagobah
A kid watching The Empire Strikes Back for the first time doesn’t really expect the sequel to something as delightful as Star Wars to be as dark as it is.  Never mind Han Solo’s carbonite freezing or even Luke getting his hand sliced off—the real scary moment of this movie is Luke confronting his inner demons in the cave on Dagobah. It’s dark… it’s creepy… it’s in sorta-slow-motion… when all of a sudden he draws his light sabre!  He knows something I don’t know!  What’s this?  Holy crap it’s Darth Vader and he followed Luke here!!  OH MY GOD!  Luke just cut off Vader’s head!  But wait, it’s not Vader, it’s....  LUKE!  As a kid I was never quite sure if this was a nightmare, or a ghost, or some kind of Jedi mind trick.  Them Jedi can be sneaky like that, y’know.

7. Evil Superman
There are several scenes from Superman III that scared me as a kid, one is at the end of the movie when Robert Vaughn’s henchwoman Vera gets pulled into the supercomputer and somehow turns into a robot!  But for a kid what’s really frightening is when the hero goes bad.  Like Willy Wonka going mad on the chocolate river, I didn’t quite know how to cope with Kal-El going Koo-koo.  It was very unsettling for me to see the Last Son of Krypton getting drunk in a bar, harrasssing children, and making sexual advances towards Annette O’Toole!  (and then somehow pounding the crap out of Good Clark)

6. Willy Wonka’s Boat Ride
I think every kid watches this scene with a horrified look on their faces.  I think it’s scary not because of the violent imagery of bugs and chicken decapitations, or even the manic crescendo of noise and music—this scene is scary because it actually makes kids think that something’s not quite right in Willy Wonka’s head.  Is he evil?  Insane?  He’s going to kill the kids, isn’t he?  This scene is matched for intensity with the final scene in which Willy Wonka yells at Charlie.  “You disobeyed my orders!!!  You STOLE fizzy lifting drink and DIRTIED my ceiling you DIRTY THIEVING BASTARD!”

5. The Government Steals E.T.
There is only one scene in E.T. that scared me as a kid, and it’s after E.T. is found half-dead in a ravine being eaten by raccoons.  Mom’s just found out about the alien the kids have been keeping, Elliot’s gone loco, and Drew Barrymore is at her snot-nosed crying best.  Tensions in the house are high and suddenly the home is TAKEN OVER!  BY ASTRONAUTS!  And not just any astronauts --- astronauts who walk slow and methodic with their arms outstretched like zombies.  Astronauts who don’t even bother to open windows and doors properly and just walk right through the blinds and curtains as the family screams in terror (an explanation would be nice, thank-you!) and somehow the family’s model train set feels it’s an opportune time to set itself off.

4. Pulsating Tree Root Monster
Space Quest 2 was my favourite computer game growing up and it was filled with some very tense moments for a cheap blocky comedy game.  There was the lovesick Alien queen that would escape from its cell in a fastpaced frenzy ripped off from Alien.  There was also the underwater swamp alien ripped off from The Empire Strikes Back.  Oh, and let’s not forget the gorilla-like security guards ripped off from Planet of the Apes.  But the moment that had me on the edge of my seat was the mazelike pulsating tree root monster that, as Roger Wilco, I had to navigate through without touching… it was very stressful, let me tell you!

3. Princess Mombi from Return to Oz
This “sequel” to The Wizard of Oz starring a young Fairuza Balk as Dorothy was filled with some very frightening scenes such as the crazed Wheelies, the mad Nome King, oh, and let’s see… the mental hospital with screaming children in the basement where Dorothy is taken to get electric shock therapy in order to cure her of her delusions of Oz.  Right.  But the ultimate scary moment in the movie is when Dorothy needs to sneak through a hall of sleeping disembodied heads belonging to Princess Mombi who, of course, wakes up and starts the dozens of heads a-screaming.  And it’s a Disney movie if you can believe it.

2. The Doctor Who Theme Song
Every kid I grew up with feels the same way about the theme song to Doctor Who.  And this is why: we all grew up watching Polka-Dot Door and Today’s Special on TVO.  But for some reason, a programming genius at TVO decided that the show that should be aired immediately following this block of preschool programming is the show with the themesong that made all the kids wet their pants in fear.

1. Jan Svankmajer’s Alice
Flipping through the TV at night on several occasions as a child I managed to come across Jan Svankmajer’s version of Alice in Wonderland.  Part live action, part stop-motion animation, it was hypnotic.  But it scared the hell out of me.  If you haven’t seen it, imagine Alice in Wonderland if it was made by Tim Burton.  But Tim Burton was Czechoslovakian.  And a zombie.  All the characters apart from Alice are animated puppets made from skeletons and dead animals and of course they all have that jerky motion inherent in stop motion.  This was definitely not Disney’s version of Alice, and it has stayed with me to this day (I would kill for a copy on video).  I’m pretty sure I can blame TVO for this as well.

UPDATE:
Okay, I just remembered ANOTHER scary moment from my childhood.  Do you remember that Bert and Ernie sketch from Sesame Street in which we find them exploring an Egyptian tomb and when Bert disappears Ernie is taunted by a statue that looks just like him?  Bert, not believing Ernie, just tells Ernie to sing a song if he’s scared and eventually Ernie and the statue break into a duet of “Rubber Duckie"… I couldn’t find a picture, but this now replaces my number one choice.  THIS was true absolute horror (until the part about the rubber duckie of course).

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Far Sided

Promoting the release of the mammoth The Complete Far Side, Gary Larson is interviewed on NPR.  You can listen to the interview (and some web-only soundbytes) on their website.

It almost seems jokelike to hear Larson explain, when asked how he spends his time now that the comic strip is behind him, that he’s concentrating on his music.  I’m sure he’s a talented guitarist, but it seems like such a cliche answer…

Listening to Bob Edwards, however, describing his favourite Far Side panels directly to Gary Larson himself (punchline and all) is like listening to your father retell a joke he heard, but doesn’t quite get the delivery right.

That being said, what’s your favourite Far Side?  Mine’s the one in which an old lady sits in her house and one of her dogs says to the other: “Want to see something funny?  I’m going to stare at the closet and just growl.”

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Hey, laughing boy!  No more buwwets!

Yesterday I splurged and purchased not only the 4-disc Looney Tunes Golden Collection DVD set, but also the 3-disc Spongebob Squarepants Season 1 set.  It should be enough irreverrant animated goodness to last me well into… well, next week at least.

I can count the number of times I’ve seen Spongebob on TV on one hand, so the DVDs are turning out to be a real treat since I haven’t seen most of what’s on them.

But what really needs to be mentioned is the Looney Tunes set.  I knew which shorts were included in this batch, but I wasn’t fully aware of what extras were included.  I’m pleased to say that the site has far more extras than I was anticipating…

First off, many of the shorts include audio commentaries by animation historians Michael Barrier and Jerry Beck, animation director Greg Ford and voice artist Stan Freberg, all of whom really know their stuff.  In addition to the commentaries, several of the shorts have a music-only track to showcase the manic orchestrations of Carl Stalling.

There are also a couple of featurettes and a documentary called Irreverent Imagination on the chracters and themes of the shorts which feature interviews from the creators, their offspring, and contemporary filmmakers such as Joe Dante, the director of the I-can’t-believe-this-was-made Looney Tunes Back in Action and the Looneytunesian Gremlins movies.

But the real gem in the collection is The Boys from Termite Terrace, a documentary from 1975 hosted by John Canemaker and features interview clips with Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, and Bob Clampett.  Termite Terrace, is the affectionate nickname of the rundown building in which the Warner Brothers animation department was situated, and while the information isn’t new to people who’ve studied the history of Warner animation, it’s a thrill to see these masters talk about their craft.

Topping it all off is another documentary from the Cartoon Network about the “lost cartoons” of Warner Brothers, a posthumous introduction by Chuck Jones, still galleries, pencil tests, trailers, Mel Blanc recording session outtakes, and even more (seriously, these DVDs are oozing with added material).  It will take a while for me to get through everything, but it’s going to be fun.... Even just browsing the discs last night made me giddy.

Now, I just have to wait for Warner to release more sets, because there are clearly some important shorts missing from this batch.

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So Many Faces!

It’s been a while since I’ve posted some faces from my daily sketchbook journal.  Here are some of the characters I’ve seen around the city lately:

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Overheard on the Subway

“Chris Kattan is a genius.”

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Indiana Jones and the Bad Photoshop Work

Like most self-respecting geeks I purchased the Indiana Jones trilogy on DVD this week.  At first look, the packaging is great.  The box and the DVD cases appropriately reflect an old weathered globe-trotting Indiana Jones look to them (complete with Drew Struzan artwork).  The colours are deep, rich, warm colours.

But upon opening the cases, the magic disappears.  The actual discs themselves have photos of Harrison Ford that have clearly been put through a quick Photoshop filter to give them an artificial sketchy-painterly look as if to mirror the look of the Struzan paintings.  And they’re bright, soft, pastel colours that lose all the warmth and richness of the outer packaging.

The animated menus of the DVDs are even worse—film clips given the same cheap-looking filter are patched together along with some poor-looking 3D animation (For Raiders, an airplane, for Doom, a minecart, and for Crusade… the circus train?).  Apart from looking pretty cheap and fluffy and ruining the whole Indy feel that the outer packaging provided with its artwork and rich colours, these menus give away great scenes that someone new to the series wouldn’t otherwise be savvy to (Granted, if you’ve never seen an Indiana Jones movie before then you must’ve been living under a rock).

The official website tries to pan this filtered look off as a special feature, claiming that the ”digitally filtered classic Indy moments” harken back to nostalgic Pan-Am posters.  Well, I never once made that connection—they just end up looking like a cheap digital hodge podge of scenes from a movie franchise that should’ve been given a less frivolous-looking menu design.  (Why does Lucas’s other franchise have great DVD menus for his lesser films?)

Luckily though, the movies themselves are undeniably great and transcend all my pettiness and scrutiny. 

“You call him Dr. Jones, doll!”

Oh, and speaking of Drew Struzan, why don’t the bonus features of the DVDs include any promotional/concept artwork at all, such as these great pieces?

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The Ultimate Wordsearch

Okay, rank this up at the top of the list of “things that make the Internet cool”.  Amazon.com has now implemented a new search feature—no longer limited by title and author name, you can now search the full text of thousands of books word for word.

Giving it a go, I picked up the current book I’m reading, The Complete Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and looked for a unique passage.  Searching for the character name Miss Honoria Westphail, Amazon knows I’m looking for Mr. Holmes!

Then I thought, heck, if I can Google myself, does this mean I can Amazon myself, too?  Turns out I can!  A quick search for John Martz Font informs me that Musings on Human Metamorphoses by Timothy Leary credits me for one of my fonts.  Ha!

No psychadelic LSD trip is complete without proper typography, let me tell you!

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Tokyo Doll

I just got back from the Tokyo Doll exhibit at the Design Exchange.  It’s an exhibit showcasing Japanese toys and dolls as art.  All I can say is that I’m living in the wrong country.  These are definitely some of the coolest-looking dolls (hard to call most of them toys, and they’re far too playful to be just sculptures) I’ve ever seen, and if I didn’t know any better I’d swear that Japan was actually on another planet.

My favourites included the work of Jin Arakawa, Masakazu Inoue, and the wooden robots designed by Take-G Toys. (Sorry I couldn’t find any links, but you can see their work within the Tokyo Doll site).

I found myself swooning over the small plastic “capsule toys” that are sold in vending machines in Japan.  A search for them brought me to Magic Pony, a site devoted to selling such bizarre figures!  If I wasn’t so broke I’d probably waste a lot of money there�

The exhibit runs until sunday, so if you’re in Toronto, check it out.

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Mister Misery

Elliott Smith committed suicide yesterday.  He was 34.  I didn’t know much about Elliott other than I knew he wasn’t happy.  Every time I saw him in concert I could tell that not only did he not want to be there, but I was pretty sure he didn’t want to be anywhere.

With song titles like “Everything Means Nothing to Me” and “Bottle Up and Explode” and lyrics so sad they’d put Morrissey to shame, he was definitely one of my favourite songwriters.  Whenever I was having a bad day I could always put in one of his CDs and know that at least I didn’t have it as bad as this guy.

i waited for a bus
to separate the both of us
and take me off far away from you
‘cos my feelings never change a bit
i always feel like shit
i don’t know why i guess that i “just do”

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Whacked Waxworks

I once visited a wax museum in Niagara Falls, and it was creepy, but none of sculptures were lifelike enough to truly gives me the willies.  Granted at the time, I didn’t really know who Ronald Reagan, the Pope, and Cher really were.

But there’s something about this Britney Spears statue at Madam Tussaud’s that’s undeniably frightening.  Is it how realistic it looks?  The way it actually breathes in time with the music?

No, I think it’s knowing that some lonely sculptor actually made this by hand, dressed it in clothes, and posed it like this.  That ain’t right, is it?

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Drool!

Brian Taylor’s Rustboy is now a gorgeous self-published coffee-table book.  Drool!  I must have it!

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Strong Enough for a Man

For what is supposed to be “the first network for men”, am I the only one who finds the logo for the recently-branded SpikeTV a little feminine?

It looks like a logo for a brand of tampon (and not a particularly comfortable one at that).

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Creativity the Key to Success

According to Richard Florida, the success of a city’s economic development is not technology and industry—it’s creativity.

The article doesn’t explain exactly how the gay and bohemian indexes prove to be indicators of economic health, but I know that I myself choose to live in Toronto not just for the employment opportunities, but for the culture of a big diverse, happenin’, energetic city.  So in that sense, I can see how creativity at least keeps me pumping dollars into the economy.

But as much as I want to believe that creativity is the key to a successful city, without knowing more I have to think it’s pretty idealistic.  After all, should we really trust a society of hippies?

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Mummy’s Boy

An animated version of my friend Jay Stephens‘s character Tutenstein has been in the works for a while now, and is finally premiering in November, saturday mornings on NBC.

According to Jay, early November was the traditional ancient Egyptian celebration of Ka-Her-Ka,the autumn festival celebrating the death and resurrection of the mummy god Osiris.  How perfect!

Check out Jay’s site for some concept artwork.

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Cinema del Artie

In a New York Times article, Art Spiegelman points out what it is about comics as a visual storytelling medium that appeals to me:

“I get narcissistically centered in my work. Film, theater and certainly television require large groups of people working together. At their purest, comics can be made by one, even if multiphrenic person.”

Apart from his uneducated take on mental illness (Artie, schizophrenia is not multiple personality disorder, nor is ‘schizo’ a prefix meaning ‘two’), I can’t help but share the same feeling on comics.

Comics are incredibly cinematic, yet more personal than any film can ever be because one single person does the writing, the costuming, the set decoration, the special effects, the directing, the acting… It’s what appeals to me most about cartooning as an artform—the control.

I also like how he compares cartoon speech balloons to haikus, in their economy of words.  However, he fails to mention that unlike a haiku, speech bubbles have accompanying illustrations that, as the saying goes, are worth 1000 words (that no doubt exceed any syllabic limitations).

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