misc

Here's the very first time Fred (as a dog) ever materialized. For whatever that's worth.
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Here's a sketch for a gag that Nickelodeon turned down because it's similar to another gag they already have.
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Here's a tree in Prague. Can anybody explain to me and Brigham how that tree assumed that shape?

5 comments:

dogboy443 said...

My take is that it might have some kind of wrapping barrier around it that restricted it's growth and when it matured the wrap was removed. Possibly a traffic protection barrier preventing autos to jump the curb and strike the tree. They have them all over in Boston except not so restrictive.

My 2 cents.

The Other Mark M.

Jed Alexander said...

I'm thinking, fire? Then the thing started sproating out of the fire damaged stump.

Anyway, the Moebius strip idea rocks! And I hope you don't still hold it against me for accusing you of being a traitor to the illustrator's cause. I took it back.

I think I really pissed off Eeteed though. I say basically the same things I already said to Eeteed, but nicer. but I don't take it back.

eeTeeD said...

the more i think about it, the more i would like to see a teeny weeny zoetrope. you could make one without the benefit of a turntable, but you will end up using more paper to compensate for this, and that means less paper for the actual animation.
anyway, here’s how you could do it:
there needs to be a circle, with a dot dead center. on the outer rim of the circle is where you put your separate animation images. everything has to be outlined. the kiddies cut out the disk, and cut out the spaces between the images (the space grows wider as is closer to the edge of the circle). now the kiddies push down the “tabs” that have the animation on them. the drawings face the INSIDE of the zoetrope. the kiddies poke a pencil point through the dot in the center of the circle and balance the zoetrope on the pencil. now the kiddies spin the zoetrope and look between the tabs, and they will see teeny weeny animated.
it would work much better with a turntable, but this should still do the trick. i THINK/HOPE.

James Robert Smith said...

Tree: It was part of a communist plot.

SRBissette said...

In my ol' Duxbury VT home area, there was a tree that BECAME like that. When I was a kid (around ages 6-9, 1961-64), someone had stuck a bottle over the tree. It grew through the upside-down bottle, breaking the 'top' (base) doing so, and continued to grow. We always checked out this oddity and wondered what would become of it.

Driving that stretch of back road much, much later, in the late '80s, I found the same tree -- it was weird, looking much like the tree you have in the photo! At some point the bottle broke or was broken, leaving splintered glass shards partially absorbed in the tree trunk, but the area BELOW the bottle site was thinner than the width of the growth ABOVE where the bottle had been.

So, maybe --