I’ve had my fun knocking the silly pseudo-philosophy of romance novelist Ayn Rand, and last night Stephen Colbert spent six minutes taking on the Rand Illusion.
Legendary comic book artist Steve Ditko, co-creator of Spider-Man and creator of Dr. Strange, has been a follower of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism for over forty years. This drawing is from a story he drew last year. The woman bears an unmistakable resemblance to Ayn Rand, which is ironic because the character is a villain.
On Wednesday, the Tournament of Champions will start on Jeopardy!, featuring the charming Larissa Kelly, the winning-est woman in the history of the game show. After my last items about Larissa, her hit count on this blog dropped. Apparently, everybody had been looking for the air dates for the Tournament of Champions.
Whatever happened in the tournament, however things went for Larissa, it happened two months ago at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Here’s hoping she did great. I will, of course, capture some video of her to post here.
It’s been two years already, since I mentioned Barbie’s 48th birthday. Which means she’s 50 now. Barbie has had many styles and fashions, but she’s always up-to-date.
Newspapers and magazines are laying off staff, and those that remain are writing articles on how to survive a layoff. Print media is in big trouble, and was long before the recession. As I highlighted over two years ago, the writing was on the virtual wall as far back as 1972.
One of the things that keeps me reading the printed page are the pictures that don’t make it to the online version of articles. One example is this photo by Jonatham Kantor for a recent Newsweek article, using a Peanuts Band-Aid to illustrate the claim that vaccinations have led to an increase in autism in children.
It’s a clever idea, but do you see the medical mistake?
Denro, #1 Monkees fan, says Peter Tork has announced he has a rare form of cancer. The story is in the Hartford (CT) Courant, and it was picked up by the BBC.
Rotoscoping is an animation technique that’s been around since 1914, when it was patented by Max Fleischer. It’s done differently today, of course, but the underlying idea — taking live action footage and making it look like a drawing — remains the same.
I can’t think of an instance where the Disney studio used it while Walt was alive (the integration of live action and animation doesn’t count), although film was often used as an animation guide by Disney artists. Disney was wise to stay away from rotoscoping, because, like anything, it can be overdone and/or misapplied as was the case with Ralph Bakshi’s mostly awful version of Lord of the Rings.
The distinctions between comics and cartoons and live action movies with digital effects are now so blurry as to be indistinguishable. In the future will still picture comics even exist as anything other than a niche, and for movie storyboards?
The Peanuts Motion Comics I talked about a couple of posts ago were done in Flash animation that obviously required no live action for reference. (They’re fun, by the way, and were based on 1964 comic strips that were some of the best material Sparky Schulz ever wrote.) Marvel Motion Comics are done in a similar way, but they’re much more detailed, of course, and they display the darker tone that everybody now associates with Marvel Comics.
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The first serious full-length movie to go all-out with Flash animation is Waltz with Bashir, which is brilliantly realized, but was obviously based upon live action source material, despite claims to the contrary that I’ve read. I’d also suggest taking a look at the clip from “Men in Black” (not the Will Smith movie) that I posted a couple of years ago.
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As I said, rotoscoping and its variants can be overdone. The ad agency that produced the new series of Charles Schwab commercials seems to have jumped on the Flash animation bandwagon, but it’s a misuse of the tool. This creepy image is supposed to make nervous investors feel more confident in a brokerage firm? Yuck!
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