Today’s sketch, The Wolf and The Seven Young Kids, is one of the stories that is somewhere in the middle of the of obscurity list. It’s usually in most of the collections, I know I read it while growing up, but it’s usually supplanted by the similar story of the three little pigs.
For day fourteen of this challenge, we’re back to Hans Christian Andersen with one of my personal favorites, The Tinderbox!
I really didn’t go for any particular scene from the story… Just did something that caught the main point of the story which is the soldier using his magic tinderbox to summon his three magical big-eyed dogs. (I kind of think I sort of ended up channeling Gahan Wilson when doing the dogs.)
While I was doing the drawing it occurred to me that The Tinderbox is the original Pokemon story.
Well after nearly a week of drawing obscure, to completely unknown, stories the magic Tupperware finally gave me a live one with Little Red Riding hood.
I have to confess this is one I have mixed feelings about this one. As an unrepentant treehugger I can be pretty knee jerk about it being one of the stories indirectly responsible for the near extinction of the gray wolf. On another note while I’ll be happily part of the chorus saying there are no reported attacks by wolves in history, I’ll also wonder why the wolf would go into all of the trouble of the Grandmother disguise when he was alone in the woods with a little girl where there could be another unreported attack. On top of this there’s so many takes on this that have already been done from all the jokes about the wolf having a crossdressing fetish to all of the hypersexualzation of the story with Red Riding Hood in bed with the wolf.
All in all I’m not sure if I’m happy with this one… sure it looks fine but I don’t think this is an original choice and I could probably point out about four separate illustrations I’m cribbing… Also I think I screwed up Red’s feet.
I just recently enjoyed DC comics’ Wacky Raceland a humorous apocalyptic revision to Hanna-Barbara’s sixties cartoon The Wacky Races. This got me waxing nostalgically about Hanna-Barbara’s best villains, Dick Dastardly! Dick is a wonderful parody of every mustache twirling villain from silent films. The kind you find yourself liking far more than the cardboard heroes he would inevitably fail to defeat. This got me thinking about all of the movies that inspired the Wacky Racers as well as Dastardly’s second starring role: Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines.
I started my viewing with Blake Edwards, The Great Race. Loosely based on an actual 1908 auto race from New York to Paris. The Great Race embraces a silent film sensibility featuring Tony Curtis as the dashing hero all in white, The Great Leslie, and his rival, the villainous Professor Fate, played by Jack Lemmon dressed all in black top hat and everything. From there we follow our two rivals as they go from one one spot to another on the map as they jockey their way to be first to the finish line.
While this film was fun I had mixed feelings about it. Due to sabotage all the other racers are eliminated in the first mile so it never has the ensemble quality that I expected. The other problem I had was it was extremely episodic with a lot of the stops they make in the map are stories unto themselves distracting from the film. So nice as western musical number and giant pie fight were, they all seemed like big lipped alligator moments to me.
Fortunately the good parts of the movie trump these completely and that is Jack Lemmon chewing the scenery as he ineptly cheats his way across the globe
For the longest time all I knew about Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines , or How I flew from London in Paris in 25 hours 11 Minutes was the song. I was actually surprised that it was a movie too and I wasted a little bit of time wondering whether one was based on the other.
What we get is story of the early days of aviation with an international ensemble cast competing in an airplane race across the Channel in an endeavor to promote (British) Aviation.
This film was fun. For all practical purposes the the plot itself is optional. What we are here for is the wonderful over top stereotypes ham it up, my favorite is Gert Fröbe of Goldfinger fame hamming it up as a straight laced Prussian officer who’s learned to fly from following the Prussian Army’s Big Book of Instructions (step one sit down) Even funnier is when their on going rivalry culminates in a duel with blunderbusses in hot air balloons )apparently something like this actually happened.
For day twelve of the challenge the magic tupperware told me to draw the Twelve Brothers. Brothers turning into birds (type number 451 in the Arne-Thompson index) is a fairly common trope, Grimm alone has three examples. When picking which to put in the hat I chose the one with the brothers turning into ravens rather than swans) Ravens are cool.
I’m mostly happy with this one, though I probably rushed the crowd a bit and the two brothers in the foreground miay look a little bit like a stop motion effect of the transformation.
The Duration of Life will probably be the most obscure fairy tale I get this month (this is what we call wishfull thinking) On top of that there really much going on. With nothing much more than a couple of animals standing in line, to petition god.
In hindsight I regret not thinking of doing this as a celestial DMV with all of the animals taking a number. (It probably wouldn’t have fit in the constraints of the format.)
