Archive for the 'Amusements' Category
Imagineers and Crocodile Tears
March 6th, 2008I’m fascinated with former long-time Disney artist Kevin Kidney’s flickr photos — in particular this “before and after” gallery art of a boy at Disneyland. Notice that the corporate p.c. police deleted the boy’s pop gun and replaced his spear with a souvenir flag.
On a similar note, read this Re-Imagineering post on Disneyland’s troubling refurbishments […]
Two Bunnies and a Duck
February 8th, 2008The s.o. has been hounding me for the last few weeks to get a comic strip going. Voilà: Two Bunnies and a Duck will be updated every two weeks. Doing a comic strip is harder than it looks. How the #@%≈$ do comic strip artists keep the characters looking the same in every panel? I […]
Hamster Love
November 6th, 2007Is it any wonder that one of my childhood rituals was listening to Dr. Demento every Sunday night on Phoenix’s long-running rock station, KUPD? Among my favorite tunes from back then was “Hamster Love”, a parody of the Captain & Tennille’s mushy hit “Muskrat Love” extolling the deliciousness of rodents. You can listen to it […]
Industrial Light and Magic
October 28th, 2007Trying to find a place to share some illustrations scanned from a 1966 issue of Fortune magazine, I started a new flickr group called Vintage Industry. I’m hoping the group members will make this into a virtual storehouse of great vintage industrial imagery — like the two below, which have that gross/cool “messy” painting technique […]
Carthay Circle Land, Here We Come
October 18th, 2007Al Lutz of MiceAge.com provides the skinny on the five year, $1.1 billion expansion for Disney’s California Adventure. A very much needed improvement, I’d say. We went to DCA a couple of years ago, and the experience was underwhelming to say the least. We saw everything we wanted to in a half-day, as opposed to […]
Peel a Wheelie
October 18th, 2007Wicked-cool artwork: Branded In The ’80s takes a look at Weird Wheels stickers, a kustom kar series that owes a big visual debt to Ed “Big Daddy” Roth. I would’ve loved to have pasted these on my Trapper Keeper!
Name That Film on Flickr
October 11th, 2007Lately I’ve been delving into the Name That Film flickr group. It’s not just the fun of trying to guess the film stills captured off DVDs, but a lot of the images have a strange, surreal beauty (like the one above by frequent contributor Poletti). One can especially get a lot of interesting frames from […]
Ernö Rubik’s Breakfast Nook
September 18th, 2007I kind of like this multicolored floor — real kicky! And you can’t go wrong with Eero Saarinen furnishings. This is actually one of the more subtle interiors from the Your Swingin’ Pad set, assembled by flickr user Miss Retro Modern (via Eye of the Goof).
It Made Me Chuckle
September 10th, 2007The Onion: Pitchfork Gives Music 6.8.
Extinct Attractions Club
August 27th, 2007MSN catches a contributor in a nostalgic mood: 10 Things I Miss About Disneyland. A good article, although I think a lot of this second-hand nostalgia tends to gloss over the fact that some of those old rides may have not been all that. Sure, the Monsanto House of the Future looks way cool in […]
Housing Developments
August 24th, 2007Funny stuff: the Phoenix New Times‘ Robrt L. Pela begins a new column, Surreal Estate, with a piece on the new faux-Italian apartment complex bordering the busy I-17 freeway. This reminds me of when I went apartment hunting back in 1994. Looking for places in the East Valley (Tempe/Chandler/Mesa), I used the Arizona Republic listings […]
Mickey Mouse Operation
July 30th, 2007I’m digging on the latest Kiddie Records Weekly find, a vintage ’50s or so set of five flexible 78RPM discs called Your Trip to Disneyland. Granted, Mickey, Tinkerbelle, Donald and Goofy make for rather obnoxious tour guides — but it’s a priceless set and the artwork on the picture discs is gorgeous. With the kind […]
Fun with a Porpoise
July 16th, 2007The excellent Fanboy.com points to a beautiful mosaic Totoro rendered in dishes of paint from Japan. My mosaic is coming along well. The beads have all been painted/stained and now I’m nailing each one in the board. Though the completed bottom six rows look slightly uneven, that and the silver nailheads give it a nice, […]
Who Needs the Kwik-E-Mart
July 8th, 2007X-Entertainment visits one of the 7-11 outlets restyled as The Simpsons‘ Kwik-E-Mart. The makeover looks like a fun idea, and an insanely popular one at that, but they did it to only eleven outlets across the country. What kind of Mr. Burns-style exec approved that one? D’Oh! Via Gael at PCJM, who also got to […]
Gross, He’s Picking His Nose!
July 4th, 2007Remember the early Simpsons episode where Bart and his fellow classmates have to sit through an ancient film about the wonders of zinc? I kind of got that feeling while viewing a DVD gifted from Christopher — Atomic Age Classics Vol. 2: Hygiene, Dating & Delinquency. This collection of vintage educational films (one of five […]
