Here's some cheap (and I do mean cheap) Halloween costume (well more like makeup) ideas from Dynamite #20 from 1976. If you were a elementary school kid in the 70's or 80's I'm sure you remember this magazine.
If I was the kid who had to wear the macaroni and Honeycomb cereal glued to my face I'd be pissed (actually he doesn't look too happy). Maybe these ideas would work as a rainy day fun activity, but it would be very embarrassing to try one as a serious Halloween costume.
Also if you read the article they call for "surgical glue" to glue all the stuff onto the kids faces. First I don't know where you would buy surgical glue (the article says the drugstore, but really?), and secondly that sounds like a horrible idea. From what I know surgical glue is very similar to super glue, and super glue isn't an acceptable makeup adhesive. Spirit gum has been used for decades in theater and film to glue things like fake mustaches and beards on actors, and this seems like a much safer adhesive to use for your space alien makeup.
Ultimately let's face the cold hard truth people. These makeups are simply not very good. Now some might say, "Oh but it's fun for kids!" and "This was good for the 1970's." I say no. No it's not. I've seen much better makeups for kids in books from the 70's (maybe I'll do a post on them). Kids would much prefer to learn makeup techniques that look like they come from film or TV. Even if it's something extremely challenging for children to accomplish it would have been better to try something more advanced than this lame "face odyssey."
Here's the cool cover art for the Alfred Hitchcock's Ghost Stories for Young People vinyl LP...
OK I know, that's an easy one to find online, but how about the back...
That's not so easy to find. Now future internet generations (or as long as this blog exists) can see the B&W illustration of a child terrified by a huge ethereal letter from Alfred Hitchcock.
If you would like to listen to this recording you can thank YouTuber, VintageHorrorSounds, for uploading the entire album...
Also the album is available on CD or download at Amazon.
It's October, and that means it's time for a month long celebration of Halloween stuff.
If you know this blog, you know not to expect a new post every day or anything extreme like that. I'll certainly be more active this month than in the past, and I'm hoping to have a few posts each week.
The finale for the this month will be a new Halloween animation. I don't want to state explicitly what I'm doing, but if you remember those Disney Haunted Mansion concept art animations I did in 2009, I made a little comment in a post that might give you an idea of what I'm doing. You can hunt for that post if you like a challenge, or simply look at the picture above.
So when finished will this animation be a trick or a treat? Heck I don't even know yet, but for now you get a tease...
I wanted to do some sort of back to school themed posts for September. So I looked at a few elementary school text books from the 1940's thru 1970's, but couldn't find anything very interesting or original.
I did think this 1955 cover for a Random House "Allabout" book was kinda fun...
It's about famous scientific expeditions, and the mysterious illustrations make it look like it could be about dinosaurs, mummy's curses, and monstrous creatures of the deep.
Next is a 1970's brochure for the American Museum of Atomic Energy (now called the American Museum of Science and Energy. I blame the name change on Homer Simpson.) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
Hmm, I wonder if this means Dick Tracy's 2-way wrist TV was nuclear powered.
Lastly I found this book...
I'll try to get around to reading it sometime. God knows the writing on this blog can use improvement.
I have one last western themed brochure to share, it's Tombstone Junction in Cumberland Falls, Kentucky. This park was notable for having a full-size operating steam train that ran on a 2½ mile track.
I was a little skeptical of the "See the World's Top Country & Western Stars Perform" claim (see the yellow circle above), but after checking out the Wikipedia entry it seems this was totally true.
When other small parks fold up they usually just quietly go bankrupt, but it sounds like Tombstone Junction went out in a blaze of glory. The place caught fire twice - once in 1989 which caused serious damage, and again sometime around 1991 which was the final coup de grâce for the park. Then according to the wiki entry even the wooden train cars were intentionally burnt to salvage the scrap metal in 1992. Although it's reported the burning cars rolled away uncontrolled and crashed in a flaming heap. I think I might have bought tickets to see that.
Continuing with the western theme for this month here's a brochure from 1979 for Ghost Town in the Sky in Maggie Valley, North Carolina. This park has been in bankruptcy for the last few years, and if you care about such matters you can read about the whole mess here.
If you want to see what Ghost Town in the Sky looked like in 2007 (which I think was the last year the park was open) here's a link to a pictorial "TPS Report."
Here we go folks with the last of the Western River Expedition concept art animations. I took last week off because I needed to attend to other things which took priority, but it also gave me extra time to think about how to present this final animation.
What we have this time is a collection of Marc Davis's art arranged in a sequence that's basically in order of how they could have been presented if they were in the actual attraction. Let me make it clear, they would not have appeared back-to-back like this. This is simply a progression of selected show scenes.
Since I always like to present Marc's unadulterated art, here's what I've animated...
The "singing" cactus would have appeared early on in the ride...
... and so would the singing cowboy and longhorns.
The drunken Indian and jail escape above would appear somewhere in the middle of the ride in the town of Dry Gulch.
And lastly the masked "banditos" are the final show scene before attraction drops you down a waterfall.
Now let's watch the animation...
The D23 Expo 2011 (a convention hosted by Disney for fans) was last week (August 19 to 21 ), and coincidentally featured a short presentation on Western River Expedition by long time Disney ImagineerTony Baxter. Tony had just started working at Imagineering when the WRE was being designed, and he is the man responsible for the Big Thunder Mountain Railway. So who better than Tony to give a kind of virtual ride- thru...
Final Comments
Until I saw the Tony Baxter video a couple of days ago I was planing to use this for the primary music...
Do singing cactus sound like chipmunks? I thought it's possible. Although now I don't know if the cactus would have been animated. In the model which Tony showed there's an awful lot of cactus, and that makes me wonder if the cactus were planed to be static figures. There were cactus that looked like humans on Disneyland's Rainbow Caverns Mine Train (later called Mine Train Through Nature's Wonderland), and they didn't move. Then again, WRE was supposed to have a animatronic cartoon talking owl named Hoot Gibson (which Tony didn't mention) who was going to be a sorta host/guide - so maybe moving singing cactus would be a part of the ride. Does anyone out there have a solid answer on this?
The big thing that sunk Western River Expedition was it's huge cost, but some un-PC elements didn't help things either. The dunk Indian "talking" to the wooden Indian is a funny gag, but I don't think it would ever had made the cut into the final ride. Although one could make the argument that most of the pirates in POTC are drunk, and certainly many of the cowboys in WRE are drunk too - so the Indian isn't being singled out. Also it looks like some of the art in the D23 had been changed to remove the sombreros from the "banditos" and thus making them simply "bandits" which avoids any more potential un-PC elements.
While Marc Davis is a master of staging, I don't know how the jail escape would work. It's a funny gag on paper or for an animated cartoon, but I don't know if it would "read" in the actual attraction. From the drawing it looks like dirt is flying into the air, and I don't think that would be possible to do. Never the less, I still animated it as I thought it was intended - although the burrowing looks like the way Bugs Bunny sometimes travels. If I was working on WRE I'd suggest the way to stage this gag is to have the mound of dirt already created, and just have the escaping criminal pop his head out of the ground at the end of the burrow. He'd quickly look around, and then go back down.
I got a little artsy/cheesy at the end to illustrate the intended waterfall finale of WRE. I hope you liked it, and I didn't embarrass myself too much.
