Yesterday's Sketchbook

[tealin]

Page One - On Sunday I listened to 'Fat Man on a Bicycle' (a segment I'd recorded off Saturday Night Fry when it was on BBC7) and felt a lot better. What follows are bits and pieces for a Statement.
Page Two - More bits.

Seeing V again tonight, this time with a friend from school. How many times will I need to refresh my memory, I wonder, before enough of it sticks?

Comments

Brill

[noodledaddy.livejournal.com]

The one of you kicking looks EXACTLY like you kicking something. Because people disagree with you does not necessarily mean you are wrong.

BTW, eating dinner last night, we watched a sparrow hawk join us for dinner out in the garden. His supper was a mouse.

A²

Re: Brill

[thefordmustang.livejournal.com]

"Fat Man on a Bicycle"?

I wonder if that is the same series from the 1980s and that it is still going on? This British fellow did bike trips through Scandinavia around 1988 which became a very funny travelogue TV series on our PBS system. It is very responsible for making me fall in love with Scandinavia and wind up in the work I am in.

I can relate to the picture you drew. I have lots of days like that.

Re: Brill

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

No, this is just a skit on a radio show... heehee, it'd be funny if there was a Fat Man on a Bicycle show.

Re: Brill

[(Anonymous)]

It would be easy to spoke fun at such a show. But who would pedal such entertainemnt to the public? I'm not sure I could handle it, I would not stand for it! You would have to chain me up or I'll brake something! Ohhhh. I have to have a seat, I tire quickly.

A²

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

I don't enjoy arguing for sport. I'm not getting sucked into it again.

Then we all lose.

[noodledaddy.livejournal.com]

It is not sport. We all gained by your free expression of ideas.

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

Too bad for you, then.

Re: Brill

[thefordmustang.livejournal.com]

There was, actually. It was wonderful as a TV show though it was not a regular installment- more miniseries based on the different places the Fat Man comic went! Great fun. Here is what I found about it when I browsed for it on the web.
---
Fat Man - The celebrity nickname of British radio/TV personality Tom Vernon who starred in a series of travelogues sponsored by PBS and Britain's Channel 4 Television wherein he biked about the world in search of Epicurean delights (Food y'all). In 1987's "Fat Man Goes Norse" he visited towns in Norway and ate smoked reindeer. In 1990s "Fat Man Goes Gaucho," the blimpy Brit bicycled a thousand miles and feasted on the Argentinean cowboy delicacy, fried bull's testicles...Gulp! And in a 1991 installment, "The Fat Man Goes Cajun," Mr. Vernon experienced the Cajun culture and chowed down on Louisiana sausage, crayfish and alligator. With all of his bicycling bravado, he still weighed in at 250-295 pounds.

Re: Brill

[thefordmustang.livejournal.com]

Ah, PUNishments I see. I had to change gears and saddle down I was laughing so hard at these comments.

[infiniteviking]

Lovely picture. *also hates arguing*

Re: Worth 1,000 Words

[tannhaeuser.livejournal.com]

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

Writers started taking over cartoons in the 50s and 60s with limited animation (Hanna-Barbera type stuff) because it was faster and cheaper to do minmal animation to illustrate what was essentially a radio play (to pay the actors for one afternoon rather than the animators for several weeks). While excessive wordiness is never a good thing (unless done for effect, in moderation, like Mojojojo's rambling redundancies in Powerpuff Girls), what's really making cartoons hard to watch now isn't their reliance on writing so much as the writing being really, really bad. You could never have as much and as varied animation on TV as you do now if it weren't for the 'illustrated radio play' way of doing things, but the dependence on writers means that unless you find good ones, no amount of artistic genius will make up for their weakness. Add to that the seeming alien abduction of all talented writers and you get boring, hackneyed cartoons, or animated sitcoms – what's the point of them being animated? It's cheaper and faster to do them live-action.

I only know the TV side of things... DisneyBoy? Any thoughts on Features?

[thefordmustang.livejournal.com]

THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! for that explanation! I think you summed up very well what I think has been the big problem with animation (both TV and feature). There are a lot of very, very talented artists out there but they have to work with difficult writing. Granted, I am not an animator so maybe I see things the wrong way... but so much focus seems to be on animation styles being better than other animated styles when one of the biggest factors really is having a good fit between the animation and a well-written script.

[tannhaeuser.livejournal.com]

What’s really making cartoons hard to watch now isn’t their reliance on writing so much as the writing being really, really bad.

[disneyboy.livejournal.com]

There's a LOT I could say about this, but given that I'm a slow thinker and a much, much slower typist, would you forgive me if I attend to other things (the movers are coming tomorrow morning with a new desk - I still have to clean out the old one!) until I can give this the time it deserves? (And you know I will!) Is there something brief but significant I can say in the meantime, without opening the floodgates? Basically:
-Because a lot of movies were performimg poorly under the old system (boarding without a script), and/or being drastically re-written or cancelled well into production, and a lot of live-action people were taking over Disney animation, it was decided that every movie should start with an approved script, and be assigned at least one full-time writer
-This generally didn't help much, because:
--The best writers were either busy, too expensive for Disney, or not interested in animation (there have been a few exceptions)
--The writers who came our way generally had little or no experience writing for animation - were live-action wanna-be's - and as such were poor collaborators, possesive of their material, tired of the endless revisions, didn't think as visually, or were primarily "polishers" - reworking dialogue, coming up with funny one-liners rather than generating new content - and we've gone through them like toilet paper, after spending a LOT of money on unusable material
--the people in charge who approved the scripts that would move into production were morons

--even the better-written scripts still needed extensive reworking because what read well on the page often did not translate when storyboarded visually(apparently Pixar has gone through this, and now relies strongly on the director {and his/her story crew} to generate the content from beginning to end)

Luckily, it appears, at least at Disney, that this is all about to change. More later...

Re: Brill

[veronikamg.livejournal.com]

What kind of work do you have FordMustang? I'm Scandinavian (Norwegian) so now you got me curious.






()

Re: Brill

[thefordmustang.livejournal.com]

Hello there, lady from Norway!

I work for Icelandair creating travel packages and tours to Iceland, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Greenland, the Faroe Islands and some other places.

Scandinavia is such a great, great part of the world. You are lucky to live there. I have tried to and found it hard to get work... I still hope somehow with this job I can get transferred back to Iceland or Norway.

Where do you live in Norway?

Re: Brill

[veronikamg.livejournal.com]

I live in Arendal (http://images.google.no/images?q=Arendal&hl=no&btnG=S%C3%B8k+etter+bilder)
, which is a town on the south-eastern coast. It's small but loud, thus making it a good representative of Norway in general. :D

I go to college in Kristiansand (http://images.google.no/images?svnum=10&hl=no&lr=&q=Kristiansand&btnG=S%C3%B8k) (the "Great City of the South" - all of 80 000 people!!).

(You are welcome to read my LJ if you want to. And don't be surprised if you find my comments in yours.)

Re: Brill

[thefordmustang.livejournal.com]

God dag og takk for svaret! Takk også for bilderne! (My Norwegian is not the best, sorry about that! I can read it, just not speak or write it well)

Those images of Arendal were nice! That small but loud comment was hilarious, too! :-) Yes, I have heard of the Great City of the South. How far are you from Drobakken? Actually, we did have a Norwegian here at work (she was from from Lillehamar)She moved back to Norway and now works as an Icelandair Sales Executive in Oslo. She lives in Drøbak and commutes to Oslo. I hope to be visiting her soon for some hiking.

Thanks for the invitation to read your journal. I will certainly do that and leave some comments from time to time.

Nice to meet you!

Re: Brill

[veronikamg.livejournal.com]

Nice meeting you too.

If my knowledge of geography is right, Drøbakk is about five hours from here. On that Google pic site there should be a map showing southern Norway with Arendal, Kristiansand and Oslo. Drøbakk is pretty close to Oslo.

How cool that you understand some Norwegian, as it must be one of the most obscure languages out there. Ha en fin dag!

Re: Brill

[thefordmustang.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the answer and the geography lesson.

Norwegian is actually a very, very cool and cool sounding language to me! I wish more people could learn it since it would not be hard for native English speakers to learn. I speak Icelandic so that helps me with knowing Norwegian (plus trying to learn it to impress a Norwegian guy I had a crush on - it does not work unless you also look like a supermodel :-))

Takk og bless!

Re: Brill

[veronikamg.livejournal.com]

Norwegian guys: Blech! (Not all of them, but those who are blech are very much so.)

Re: Brill

[thefordmustang.livejournal.com]

Yes, I would be inclined to agree with you there on the Nordic guys who are blech (though we have lots of blechers in the USA, too). I did find, overall, that Norwegian guys have been the nicest and most genuine of all the Scandinavian guys that I have met. (Though maybe since I work in special interest tourism I have a different experience and the men who work in this industry tend to be more open minded, down to earth and kind hearted than most guys would be).

The guy I knew was one studying in part of America where there were not a lot of Scandinavian guys so he got spoiled pretty quickly by flirty U.S. women to the point where he could pick and choose and, logically, chose the best of the best. In his favor, I would say that he did actually become very down to earth and even a bit of a social activitst (yea!), though he still always had drop dead gorgeous girlfriends. Ironically, I wound up doing tourism business with one of his relatives many years later at a conference in Oslo, so I heard about what happened to him. It was nice to hear that once he moved back to Norway he became even more down to earth and actually became a pretty interesting guy and a nice family man. Just being in America he got to be a bit of a superstar.

I do work with a lot of Norwegian guys in the tourism industry these days (and also a lot of Norwegian ladies, too) and most of them are really nice people who are very much down to earth family guys very proud of their wives and kids- I always like hearing about their families, too and often have met them when they come to the USA or I wind up in Norway. Perhaps, though, as I wrote before, a certain type of person is attracted work in Scandinavian tourism and so we tend to be more down to earth and nature oriented and family oriented overall. So you know, for Americans, Scandinavia (and Norway and Iceland especially) are considered ecotourism destinations- places that are very special for the nature and culture and people. It is expensive to go there but the idea is you also get a very nice experience so it is worth the high price and you want to help support the nature and culture. It also means that those of us who work in tourism want to show a more authentic and local side of places like Norway and Iceland.

Icelandic guys are really blech! The problem there is that so many women have moved to places like Reykjavík for the mostly service profession jobs there that there are literally 3 girls for every guy. That has made so many Icelandic men very, very arrogant toward women beacuse so many very beautiful women are competing for guys who have developed now a very cavalier attitude toward women. Ironically, in the countryside there are more men than women because the guys stay to work on the farms so there are a lot of nice bachelors who have no chance to meet a girl because all the women are in Reykjavík fighting each other to be with an arrogant, not so nice guy. Go figure.