Friday, January 27, 2006

Who says we're original?



Here are some black and white villian portraits that were eventually painted (in color) for the "Legion of Evil" episode. We've always found it fun (and a little bit of extra work) to break the show's usual visual style to make a special story-point, or to create a dramatic effect. Some of these are homages to artists, comics, or animation of which we are fond. These still images were inspired by a scene in the classic Bob Clampett/Daffy Duck cartoon "The Great Piggy Bank Robbery" pictured below. What tributes have you recognized?

7 comments:

crashfourit said...

Interesting... :/

Brian Growe said...

haha that's great, I love that Daffy cartoon. And I'm a huge Teenage Robot fan! I'm so sad to see it going soon, do you think there's a chance Nick will ever do a DVD of MLAATR season by season?

Anonymous said...

hmm... pickle puss, hammerhead, snakeeyes, but I forget the pumpkin one. Where's neon noodle?

Jeremiah Alcorn said...

Love, love, love the stuff up here. My buddy Steve Lambe showed me you blog and I've been hooked ever since. Thanks for the inspiration.

Anonymous said...

Funny how the larger hammer brother holds the weeny little hammer.

You'd think the villains would learn their lessons from their first encounter, but it's still good they get to re-appear.

The Great One said...

Actaully, The resemblence I see is the bottom lighting of the face, the dark background, use of shadows, the appearance of the characters as looking down on the audience as a "glowering" presence, and the mean demanor of the facial expression. The eyes, where seen are lighter than the rest of the face, for emphasis.

You have added more motion to the character to convey evil intent as modern cartoons are more action derived and to give a sort of "life-like" quality to what is a 2-dimenstional work. You also choose to use shades of gray rather than color, like an old 30's film-noir movie.

BTW, the chacters, as I recall from the Daffy duck movie were: Hammer Head, Pumpkin Puss, Mr Big, and Big Bad Wolf.

My regards to Rob Renzetti and Yourself, Alex.

The Great One said...

Correction, That was Snakes eyes and Picklepuss! Didn't get a good look before