#Creative Beast Studio

[tsaagan]

Anyone here like prehistoric elephants?

[bcstag]

Pentaceratops! With and without a guy. This was my submission for Creative Beast Studio’s art contest.

[dinofigureoftheday]

Dino figure of the day: Creative Beast Studio Glow in the Dark Zuniceratops (Orange)

[plushverine]

Creative Beast Studio Yutyrannus Huali 1:18 Scale, Brought from Minizoo September 2024

Had been a wishlist figure for ages, and I finally snagged myself one. Piine put them in a cool pose for me :3

[that-dinopunk-guy]

The BotM Dryptosaurus is pretty cool.

[thegeekiary]

Creative Beast Studio "Beasts of the Mesozoic" Figures Are Great Holiday Gifts For Dino Lovers - Holiday Gift Guide 2023

“Albertaceratops nesmoi” Collectible Action Figure from Creative Beast Studio Indie toymaker Creative Beast Studio has continued to expand the highly-detailed ‘Beast of the Mesozoic’ line of dinosaur action figures. From the deadly Tyrannosaurs to the nimble Velociraptors and the regal Ceratopsians, check out our 2023 holiday gift for the dinosaur lovers in your life. Continue reading Untitled

[stars-and-bites]

In a week of absolute shit and existential dread, this has been my one highlight.

You have no idea how excited I am for this.

[brutalgamer]

Cyberzoic crosses Dino Riders with Transformers, He-Man, and Zoids for wild new toy line

Fans of classic 80s properties… you’re gonna want to see what Creative Beast Studios has cooked up with Cyberzoic.

[dinophotography]

Feliz Año Nuevo 🎊

[thewaltcrew]

Director Kirk Wise, screenwriter Linda Woolverton, and actor Robby Benson on casting the Beast [x]

They gave me an incredible amount of freedom. I didn't want Beast to be a cartoon character. I played it as though I were doing a Broadway show. As if this was a living person. And I wanted him to be funny. By funny, I don't mean shtick or one-liners. I am talking about real comedy. When real comedy works, and is truthful, especially with the Beast, it comes out of the fact that he is so pathetic. For some reason, I really understood that. Ha! Because of that, they gave me a lot of leeway. [x]

My first audition was recorded on, of all things, a Sony Walkman. As a musician, I had branched out into recording engineer and loved to play with sound. When I saw the Sony Walkman I knew it had a little condenser microphone in it, and if I were to get too loud, the automatic compressor and built-in limiter would 'squash' the voice— and there would be very little dynamic range to the performance. I did a quick assessment and wondered how many people who had come in to audition for the part were making that error: playing the Beast with overwhelming decibels, compressing the vocal waveforms. I decided to give the Beast 'range.' Because of my microphone technique, and an understanding of who I wanted Beast to be, they kept asking me to come back and read different dialogue. After my fifth audition, Jeffrey Katzenberg the hands-on guardian of the film, said the part was mine…

Beauty and the Beast was so refreshingly fun and inventively creative to work on that I couldn't wait to try new approaches to every line of dialogue. Don Hahn is one of the best creative producers I have ever worked with. The two young directors, Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale, were fantastic and their enthusiasm was contagious. I not only was allowed to improvise, but they encouraged it. It never entered my mind that I was playing an animated creature. I understood the torment that Beast was going through: he felt ugly; had a horrible opinion of himself, and had a trigger-temper. Those are things that, if done right, are the perfect ingredients for comedy. Painful and pathetic comedy— but honest. The kind of comedy I understood...

In the feature world of Disney animation, the actors always recorded their dialogue alone in a big studio, with only a microphone and the faint images of the producers, writers, directors and engineer through a double-paned set of acoustic glass. Paige O'Hara and I became good friends; it was her idea that for certain very intimate scenes, such as when Beast is dying, we record together. We were able to play these scenes with an honest conviction that is often absent in the voice-over world...

The success of this film was the culmination of a team effort but I must say, the honors go to the animators— and for me (Beast), that's Glen Keane — and to Howard Ashman and Alan Menken. This was the perfect example of a crew who 'cared'. And the final results (every frame) of the film represent that sentiment. [x]

[wizzard890]

Warner Brothers would absolutely not be remaking Harry Potter as a prestige television series if it wasn't for the persistent popularity of the Marauders fandom.

Sure, companies dip back into IP all the time, but Harry Potter has had mixed success over the past ten years: popular video game, disastrous Fantastic Beasts movies, pandemic-successful stage show -- this isn't a sure bet, particularly if you're hoping to capture new fans, not just feed aging millennials.

Luckily for the bottom line, there is a thriving Harry Potter adjacent fandom, one that's only ballooned in popularity as the books proper have receded from popular culture. Studios often do algorithmic calculations to estimate popularity/risk/audience and oh boy, do young people fucking love Marauder shit. It's bled into BookTok, back into the related dark academia subculture (which Harry Potter arguably helped create in the first place); it pulls in fans who aren't familiar with the books, who instead consider specific fanworks canonical. They love the setting; anything to enrich the locale where Remus and James and Snape and Lily and Peter and Sirius have adventures. What better way to monetize that interest than stretching each book into a ten episode season of prestige television? If J.K. Rowling's creative control didn't expressly forbid anything beyond straight adaptation of the book, I'm sure WB would be developing a prequel as we speak.

J.K. Rowling is, of course, an executive producer, and WB's creative team has signaled that they will be working with her closely.

I truly think this is the most significant negative impact of a single fandom on the real world since The Last Jedi wars radicalized a generation of young men. We're looking at a potential total revitalization of Rowling in popular culture, unfathomable amounts of money in her pocket, complete creative control and publicity, associated bumps for the Harry Potter theme park, all of it.

Many people in the fandom understand that they're walking a line by engaging with Harry Potter at all, to such an extent that it's good form to make a point of not buying Harry Potter merch. That drives me a little bit crazy. Okay, you've repudiated the desire to own a Hufflepuff Scarf. In this age of studios watching fandoms, of total breakdown of the creator/audience divide, does that really matter? You've withheld your purchasing power, but kept the IP thriving.

And the thing that gets me is that Marauders fandom is so barely Harry Potter, so tangentially related, that they could have taken their flanderized headcanons and written their own books, or applied them to literally any other boarding school setting! There are maybe four chapters that cover the young lives of Harry Potter's Dad's Friends, and in all of them the characters are lightly sketched at best. No one would even accuse you of plagiarism for taking these characters and doing something else with them, they're essentially walk-on roles. Instead we have an active and growing fandom, where Sirus/Remus moved from being the eighth most popular ship on Ao3 to the SECOND, in the space of a single year. That's with no new books, new movies, no external bump of any kind from the IP.

And okay, sure, did this fandom sign a check to J.K. Rowling? No, that would be Casey Bloys and the rest of the clowns at HBO. But at this point, aren't we splitting hairs?

Like sorry, if I have to hear about the revolutionary queer power of pure, old-school fandom as something that exists without financial incentive, a community that can cause real and tangible changes in the media that gets produced, then you have to allow that those real and tangible changes can be for the worse.

[earthstellar]

Old Transformers Games You Can Still Play!

Following up on my Transformers Flash Games post here, I thought I'd go through the Internet Archive and pull up all the currently available Transformers games! :)

Some of these can be played in browser, while others may require DOSBox or other virtual machine to run-- I still don't know how to make old software work on modern shit, otherwise I would be messing around in Windows 3.1 right now LOL, but if you know how to do that, have fun!!! :)

In chronological order, and games in bold can be played in browser:

The Transformers (1985) - Commodore 64

Transformers: The Battle to Save the Earth (1986) - Commodore 64

Transformers: Generation 2 (1993) - Tiger Handheld

Beast Wars (1998) - Windows 95

Beast Wars Transmetals (2000) - PS2

Transformers The Game (2007) - Windows XP/Vista

Transformers Creative Studio (2007) - PC, Check Specs

War for Cybertron (2010) - Windows XP/Vista/7

Transformers Rise of the Dark Spark (2014) - PC, Check Specs

Transformers Devastation (2015) - PC, Check Specs

There are almost certainly a few I've missed, as sometimes searching the Internet Archive can be tricky depending on how things have been tagged etc., but when I have the chance to do a deeper dive I'll update this post! :)

Hopefully this is helpful for someone!

[vamprisms]

i love big budget film and tv projects where like almost every creative understands the assignment like. casting? born for the role. camerawork? out of the park bro. costume? fabric wizardry. make-up and hair? lush. locations, props and set design? it's literally like i am there babe. lighting? nice... why does the gaffer call you his best boy btw 😳? effects and creature design (if they have beasts)? out of this world. guy who gets the coffee? everyone seems extremely well caffeinated. sound design and score? goosebumps inducing.

and then the writers room will be fighting for its life to survive. oh god the studio is switching off life supprt.... very special and beloathed&beloved phenomenon to me

[dinofigureoftheday]

Dino figure of the day: Creative Beast Studio Beasts of the Mesozoic Guanlong wucaii

[wisteria-lodge]

I've seen a theory floating around that the Fantastic Beasts film was repurposed from a scrapped Doctor Who movie script and I was curious for your take.

In the early 2010s, there were plans for a Doctor Who film to expand the franchise, offering a fresh entry point new fans with focuse on courting an American audience. David Yates was in talks to direct or produce, and the Eleventh Doctor’s planned encounter with the Master was saved for the movie. However, the project fell apart due to Matt Smith’s early departure, Steven Moffat’s workload (Doctor Who, Sherlock, & Tintin), and declining interest from the BBC. Instead, Doctor Who marked its 50th anniversary with a feature-length special.

Enter Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Despite being credited as the sole writer, J.K. Rowling had no screenwriting experience. At the time, she was focused on her detective novels, while Yates played a major role in Fantastic Beasts’ unusually fast development. The film’s protagonist—a quirky, pacifist British traveler with a bigger-on-the-inside case, a love for strange creatures, and two companions—closely resembles Doctor Who. The villain even has a transformed face.

It seems likely that Yates repurposed the abandoned Doctor Who script, handing it to Rowling to rework as a Harry Potter spinoff. While the first Fantastic Beasts had some structure, the sequels—written solely by Rowling—were poorly received, probably due to her lack of screenwriting experience.

Obviously there is no way to know for sure, but this theory honestly holds up for me. The dates line up. The studio politics line up. David Yates is there both times. According to Karen Gillian, Johnny Depp was attached to the Doctor Who movie - and if he *stayed* attached as it was retooled into Fantastic Beasts, that would help explain what is easily the most baffling casting decision in the whole franchise. Even people who liked Fantastic Beasts thought Johnny Depp was a bizarre Grindelwald. It is so obviously a role that wants a Colin Farrell or a Mads Mikkelsen.

Jacob is also SUCH a Doctor Who companion - normal guy, dead end job, swept away into magical adventures. He's really not a very JKR-ish character because... well... she doesn't write sympathetic muggles. Her muggle characters are villains, ridiculous (or both.) Or else exist totally off-page. Her most sympathetic muggle character is probably Frank Bryce - who is bad tempered, crotchety, and not very interesting. This is honestly kind of a structural problem: if your villain's main point is "wizards are better than muggles," I think you'd want to prove him wrong by writing muggle characters who don't suck.

But Doctor Who loves a normie protagonist who teaches the Doctor an important lesson about community, or responsibility, or love. That is 100% Jacob. There are also elements of Fantastic Beasts 1 that feel... pretty tonally off for a Harry Potter movie? I'm thinking specifically of the Death Cell execution room. That whole scene - the way it's designed and shot - it's all extremely horror movie. That's fine for Doctor Who, which has always had horror DNA. But Harry Potter doesn't. It also doesn't really make sense as a sanctioned government execution room, it makes sense as the sort of creepy, uncanny trap the Master would put the Doctor in. If Universal developed cool/expensive assets for Doctor Who, I think it's totally possible that they would be motivated to recycle them into Fantastic Beasts.

It also explains why Fantastic Beasts 2 (which would have been JKR's original work) immediately un-does a lot of the plot elements from Fantastic Beasts 1. The bittersweet moment of Jacob losing the memories of his adventure, but keeping his unlocked creativity and hope, that's such a Doctor Who ending. So is that moral-quandary moment of 'is there a way to stop this monster, who is both an danger to others and an innocent, without destroying it.' But in Fantastic Beasts 2, within the first ten minutes Jacob has his memory back and we hear that Credence is fine. Also... Jacob gets a wand in Fantastic Beasts 3. And it's not a "real wand" or whatever... but like, if the series continued, it was going to do something. (Because JKR doesn't like writing muggle protagonists.)

I will also say that in Fantastic Beasts 1 - information is delivered visually, film language is better understood, it has a good sense of its own scope. It's a filmmaker's movie, while Fantastic Beasts 2 is a writer's movie. It's got a million characters, tons of scenes of characters in a room or hallway just *talking* to each other (which is less interesting to watch than it is to read.) Important plot beats are delivered through monologs or extended flashback sequences. The pacing is much, much worse. The action sequences are much more confusing.

Okay. Fantastic Beats 1 could have been made out of assets originally developed for Doctor Who, and by some of the same creative team. Yeah. I see it.

[that-dinopunk-guy]

So, the Beasts of the Mesozoic figures are cool as hell and easily my favorite line of dinosaur toys, but there's one detail I noticed about the tyrannosaur series that ever since I did has been bugging the hell out of me.

Now, if, like me, you've looked at a lot of theropod feet, you may know that the second toe would have had two pads, while the fourth toe would have three. And on the bigger tyrannosaur figures, this is correct:

(Toes are numbered from the inside out, so the hallux/dewclaw is the first toe, the one corresponding to the big claw on deinonychosaurs is the second, and so on.) As you can see here, this Tyrannosaurus has correct toes, as do the Tarbosaurus, Daspletosaurus, Albertosaurus, and presumably Gorgosaurus (I'm still waiting on the reissue for that one but I'm guessing it uses the same legs as the previous three).

But then look at the feet on their Lythronax:

The second and fourth toes are reversed! So this guy, Bistahieversor, and Dryptosaurus all have fucked up feet. (I can't say for their Yutyrannus, because I missed out on that one as well so I don't know just how much of its sculpt is unique.)

Of course this only affects the fixed "weight-bearing" feet, because the lower legs with the jointed ankles for posing can just swap their feet around. But it's still gonna bug me.