#porky’s hero agency | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

brookston · 10 months

Text

Holidays 12.4

Holidays

Alpha Phi Alpha Day

Andisop begins (Isle of Man) [3-Weeks before Xmas fiddlers go door-to-door playing the song and announcing the weather in exchange for a tip; thru Xmas]

Barbórka (Miners' Day; Poland)

Berkeley Hundred Thanksgiving

Carbon Literacy Action Day

Day of Publicists (Colombia)

Day of the Artisans (Mexico)

Dragon Age Day

Extraordinary Work Team Recognition Day

Fir Day (French Republic)

Fred Hampton Day (Illinois)

Grange Day

Hov Day

International Cheetah Day

International Day of Banks (UN)

International Free Hugs Day (a.k.a. Int'l Hug Day)

International Revolutionary Day

National Cyber Signing Day

National Day (Laos; UAE)

National Dice Day

National Dystychiphobia Awareness Day

National Francis Day

National Kitten Day

National Rototelehandler Day

National Sock Day

National Tunneling Day (UK)

National Write a Letter to Santa Day

Navy Day (India)

Pallister-Killian Syndrome (PKS) Awareness Day

Rake Leaves Into the World's Largest Pile Day

Ribbons and Wrap Day

Santa's List Day

Sarsodaw Pwe (a.k.a. Sarsodaw-nei or Writers’ Day/Literati Day; Myanmar) [varies during month of Natdaw, 9th month pf Burmese calendar]

Thai Environment Day (Thailand)

Tupou Day (Tonga)

Wear a Beard of Bees Today Day

Wear Brown Shoes Day

Women in Agriculture Day

World Water Loss Day

Worldwide Handsome Day (South Korea)

World Wildlife Conservation Day

Food & Drink Celebrations

Cabernet Franc Day

National Cookie Day (a.k.a. Cookie Baking Day)

1st Monday in December

Tree Dressing Day (UK) [1st Monday]

Walt Disney Day [1st Monday]

Independence Days

Commonwealth of Fundy (Declared; 2009) [unrecognized]

Westland Province Day (New Zealand)

Feast Days

Ada (Christian; Saint)

Anno II (Christian; Saint)

Barbera (Christian; Saint) [brewers] *

Bernardo degli Uberti (Christian; Saint)

Bona Dea ("The Good Goddess" Secret Ceremony; Ancient Rome)

Chocolate Anything Day (Pastafarian)

Clement of Alexandria (Anglicanism, Eastern Catholicism)

Day of Shango (a.k.a. Sango, Chango or Zango; God of Fire, Thunder & Lightning in Santería, Yorùbá)

Day of the Frost King (Pagan)

Eid il-Burbara (Honoring St. Barbara, but like Halloween; Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Russia, Syria, Turkey)

Festival for Minerva (Ancient Rome)

Giovanni Calabria (Christian; Saint)

John of Damascus (Christian; Saint)

Kepler (Positivist; Saint)

Maruthas (Christian; Saint)

Mechagodzilla Day (Church of the SubGenius; Saint)

The Merrill Lunch Hungerdunger McCormack All Accountant Marching Society (Muppetism)

Nicholas Ferrar (Anglicanism)

Osmund (Christian; Saint)

Pallas Athena Celebration (Goddess of Wisdom)

Peter Chrysologus (Christian; Saint)

Sigiramnus (a.k.a. Siran; Christian; Saint)

Wassily Kandinsky (Artology)

Lucky & Unlucky Days

Sensho (先勝 Japan) [Good luck in the morning, bad luck in the afternoon.]

Premieres

Basin Street Blues, recorded by Louis Armstrong (Song; 1928)

Beatles for Sale, by The Beatles (Album; 1964)

Black Mirror (Anthology TV Series 2011)

December’s Children (And Everybody’s), by The Rolling Stones (Album; 1965)

The Dreadful Doll (Animated TV Show;Jonny Quest #12; 1964)

Father’s Lion (Disney Cartoon; 1952)

I Fought the Law, by The Crickets (Song; 1960)

I Get a Kick Out of You, recorded by Ethel Merman (Song; 1934)

Jet Jockey Rocky or The One Point Landing (Rocky & Bullwinkle Cartoon, S2, Ep. 77; 1960)

Krampus (Film; 2015)

Landslide on the Rails or Bullwinkle Covers His Tracks (Rocky & Bullwinkle Cartoon, S4, Ep. 184; 1962)

Mickey’s Polo Team (Disney Cartoon; 1936)

MI-5 (Film; 2015)

Missouri Mish Mash, Part 1 (Rocky & Bullwinkle Cartoon, S4, Ep. 183; 1962)

On Golden Pond (Film; 1981)

Out of Our Idiot, by Elvis Costello (Album; 1987)

Plots and Plans or Two Many Crooks (Rocky & Bullwinkle Cartoon, S2, Ep. 78; 1960)

Porky’s Hero Agency (WB LT Cartoon; 1937)

Reds (Film; 1981)

The Simpsons Sings the Blues (Album; 1990)

The Story of Ferdinand, by Munro Leaf (Children’s Book; 1936)

The Ten Commandments (Film; 1923)

Tobacco Road, by Jack Kirkland (Play; 1933)

Too Late to Cry, by Alison Krauss (Album; 1987)

Up in the Air (Film; 2009)

The Woods Are Full of Cuckoos (WB MM Cartoon; 1937)

Today’s Name Days

Adolf, Barbara, Johannes (Austria)

Varvara (Bulgaria)

Barbara, Ivan, Sunčica (Croatia)

Barbora (Czech Republic)

Barbara (Denmark)

Barba, Barbara, Parba, Varje, Varju, Varve (Estonia)

Aira, Airi (Finland)

Barbara (France)

Barbara, Johannes (Germany)

Barbara, Seraphim, Varvara (Greece)

Barbara, Borbála (Hungary)

Barbara (Italy)

Baiba, Barba, Barbara (Latvia)

Barbora, Liugailė, Vainotas (Lithuania)

Barbara, Barbro (Norway)

Barbara, Berno, Biernat, Chrystian, Hieronim, Krystian, Piotr (Poland)

Varava (Romania)

Barbora (Slovakia)

Bárbara, Juan (Spain)

Barbara, Barbro (Sweden)

Barbara (Ukraine)

Ada, Adah, Adina, Aida, Babette, Barbara, Barbie, Barbra, Osman, Osmond (USA)

Today is Also…

Day of Year: Day 338 of 2024; 27 days remaining in the year

ISO: Day 1 of week 49 of 2023

Celtic Tree Calendar: Ruis (Elder) [Day 7 of 28]

Chinese: Month 10 (Gui-Hai), Day 22 (Bing-Shen)

Chinese Year of the: Rabbit 4721 (until February 10, 2024)

Hebrew: 21 Kislev 5784

Islamic: 21 Jumada I 1445

J Cal: 8 Zima; Oneday [8 of 30]

Julian: 21 November 2023

Moon: 50%: 3rd Quarter

Positivist: 2 Bichat (13th Month) [Kepler]

Runic Half Month: Is (Stasis) [Day 9 of 15]

Season: Autumn (Day 72 of 89)

Zodiac: Sagittarius (Day 13 of 30)

#calendar #Holidays

1 note · View note

brookstonalmanac · 10 months

Text

Holidays 12.4

Holidays

Alpha Phi Alpha Day

Andisop begins (Isle of Man) [3-Weeks before Xmas fiddlers go door-to-door playing the song and announcing the weather in exchange for a tip; thru Xmas]

Barbórka (Miners' Day; Poland)

Berkeley Hundred Thanksgiving

Carbon Literacy Action Day

Day of Publicists (Colombia)

Day of the Artisans (Mexico)

Dragon Age Day

Extraordinary Work Team Recognition Day

Fir Day (French Republic)

Fred Hampton Day (Illinois)

Grange Day

Hov Day

International Cheetah Day

International Day of Banks (UN)

International Free Hugs Day (a.k.a. Int'l Hug Day)

International Revolutionary Day

National Cyber Signing Day

National Day (Laos; UAE)

National Dice Day

National Dystychiphobia Awareness Day

National Francis Day

National Kitten Day

National Rototelehandler Day

National Sock Day

National Tunneling Day (UK)

National Write a Letter to Santa Day

Navy Day (India)

Pallister-Killian Syndrome (PKS) Awareness Day

Rake Leaves Into the World's Largest Pile Day

Ribbons and Wrap Day

Santa's List Day

Sarsodaw Pwe (a.k.a. Sarsodaw-nei or Writers’ Day/Literati Day; Myanmar) [varies during month of Natdaw, 9th month pf Burmese calendar]

Thai Environment Day (Thailand)

Tupou Day (Tonga)

Wear a Beard of Bees Today Day

Wear Brown Shoes Day

Women in Agriculture Day

World Water Loss Day

Worldwide Handsome Day (South Korea)

World Wildlife Conservation Day

Food & Drink Celebrations

Cabernet Franc Day

National Cookie Day (a.k.a. Cookie Baking Day)

1st Monday in December

Tree Dressing Day (UK) [1st Monday]

Walt Disney Day [1st Monday]

Independence Days

Commonwealth of Fundy (Declared; 2009) [unrecognized]

Westland Province Day (New Zealand)

Feast Days

Ada (Christian; Saint)

Anno II (Christian; Saint)

Barbera (Christian; Saint) [brewers] *

Bernardo degli Uberti (Christian; Saint)

Bona Dea ("The Good Goddess" Secret Ceremony; Ancient Rome)

Chocolate Anything Day (Pastafarian)

Clement of Alexandria (Anglicanism, Eastern Catholicism)

Day of Shango (a.k.a. Sango, Chango or Zango; God of Fire, Thunder & Lightning in Santería, Yorùbá)

Day of the Frost King (Pagan)

Eid il-Burbara (Honoring St. Barbara, but like Halloween; Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Russia, Syria, Turkey)

Festival for Minerva (Ancient Rome)

Giovanni Calabria (Christian; Saint)

John of Damascus (Christian; Saint)

Kepler (Positivist; Saint)

Maruthas (Christian; Saint)

Mechagodzilla Day (Church of the SubGenius; Saint)

The Merrill Lunch Hungerdunger McCormack All Accountant Marching Society (Muppetism)

Nicholas Ferrar (Anglicanism)

Osmund (Christian; Saint)

Pallas Athena Celebration (Goddess of Wisdom)

Peter Chrysologus (Christian; Saint)

Sigiramnus (a.k.a. Siran; Christian; Saint)

Wassily Kandinsky (Artology)

Lucky & Unlucky Days

Sensho (先勝 Japan) [Good luck in the morning, bad luck in the afternoon.]

Premieres

Basin Street Blues, recorded by Louis Armstrong (Song; 1928)

Beatles for Sale, by The Beatles (Album; 1964)

Black Mirror (Anthology TV Series 2011)

December’s Children (And Everybody’s), by The Rolling Stones (Album; 1965)

The Dreadful Doll (Animated TV Show;Jonny Quest #12; 1964)

Father’s Lion (Disney Cartoon; 1952)

I Fought the Law, by The Crickets (Song; 1960)

I Get a Kick Out of You, recorded by Ethel Merman (Song; 1934)

Jet Jockey Rocky or The One Point Landing (Rocky & Bullwinkle Cartoon, S2, Ep. 77; 1960)

Krampus (Film; 2015)

Landslide on the Rails or Bullwinkle Covers His Tracks (Rocky & Bullwinkle Cartoon, S4, Ep. 184; 1962)

Mickey’s Polo Team (Disney Cartoon; 1936)

MI-5 (Film; 2015)

Missouri Mish Mash, Part 1 (Rocky & Bullwinkle Cartoon, S4, Ep. 183; 1962)

On Golden Pond (Film; 1981)

Out of Our Idiot, by Elvis Costello (Album; 1987)

Plots and Plans or Two Many Crooks (Rocky & Bullwinkle Cartoon, S2, Ep. 78; 1960)

Porky’s Hero Agency (WB LT Cartoon; 1937)

Reds (Film; 1981)

The Simpsons Sings the Blues (Album; 1990)

The Story of Ferdinand, by Munro Leaf (Children’s Book; 1936)

The Ten Commandments (Film; 1923)

Tobacco Road, by Jack Kirkland (Play; 1933)

Too Late to Cry, by Alison Krauss (Album; 1987)

Up in the Air (Film; 2009)

The Woods Are Full of Cuckoos (WB MM Cartoon; 1937)

Today’s Name Days

Adolf, Barbara, Johannes (Austria)

Varvara (Bulgaria)

Barbara, Ivan, Sunčica (Croatia)

Barbora (Czech Republic)

Barbara (Denmark)

Barba, Barbara, Parba, Varje, Varju, Varve (Estonia)

Aira, Airi (Finland)

Barbara (France)

Barbara, Johannes (Germany)

Barbara, Seraphim, Varvara (Greece)

Barbara, Borbála (Hungary)

Barbara (Italy)

Baiba, Barba, Barbara (Latvia)

Barbora, Liugailė, Vainotas (Lithuania)

Barbara, Barbro (Norway)

Barbara, Berno, Biernat, Chrystian, Hieronim, Krystian, Piotr (Poland)

Varava (Romania)

Barbora (Slovakia)

Bárbara, Juan (Spain)

Barbara, Barbro (Sweden)

Barbara (Ukraine)

Ada, Adah, Adina, Aida, Babette, Barbara, Barbie, Barbra, Osman, Osmond (USA)

Today is Also…

Day of Year: Day 338 of 2024; 27 days remaining in the year

ISO: Day 1 of week 49 of 2023

Celtic Tree Calendar: Ruis (Elder) [Day 7 of 28]

Chinese: Month 10 (Gui-Hai), Day 22 (Bing-Shen)

Chinese Year of the: Rabbit 4721 (until February 10, 2024)

Hebrew: 21 Kislev 5784

Islamic: 21 Jumada I 1445

J Cal: 8 Zima; Oneday [8 of 30]

Julian: 21 November 2023

Moon: 50%: 3rd Quarter

Positivist: 2 Bichat (13th Month) [Kepler]

Runic Half Month: Is (Stasis) [Day 9 of 15]

Season: Autumn (Day 72 of 89)

Zodiac: Sagittarius (Day 13 of 30)

#Holidays

0 notes

ducktracy · 4 years

Text

185. porky’s hero agency (1937)

release date: december 4th, 1937

series: looney tunes

director: bob clampett

starring: mel blanc (porky, emperor jones), tedd pierce (gorgon, assistant), sara berner (porky’s mom)

the final porky cartoon for 1937, and what a busy year it’s been for him! hard to believe he had an entirely different voice, look, and demeanor just 8 months prior. even then, his character still had much to explore, as we see here—in this cartoon, he’s cast as a child again. curiously, bob clampett is often credited as the one who refined his personality into the one we know today (he did give him his iconic suit and tie), but, like everything else, it was more of a collaborative exploration by all of the directors.

the title card is one of the more interesting title cards in the warner bros. repertoire—it’s a photo of a porky statuette! bob clampett would make several statues during his time at WB and distribute them to his top animators. while the statue in the credits is painted over, you can view an unpainted model here!

here, porky dreams of the wonders of ancient greece, prancing around as the mythological messenger parkykarkus. however, a gorgon has her sights set on turning him into stone, and it requires some quick thinking from porky to weasel his way out of this mess.

bobe cannon animates the expositional sequence, with porky propped up in bed, sucked into a giant book full of greek myths. his mother (offscreen) tells him it’s time to go to sleep, but porky objects, protesting that he was just at the exciting part. cannon’s animation is easy to spot with his trademark buck teeth, yet the gestures he gives porky--finger points, turning the page, etc.--give him a nice dose of youthful energy as he recaps the story, telling tales of gorgons and “great great great” greek heroes.

nevertheless, a disembodied hand turns out the light, dismissing porky’s protests. he heaves a resigned sigh, lamenting how he wishes he could be a great greek hero.

the cartoon doesn’t make any attempts to keep the dream sequence a surprise--instead, the face of the book’s cover takes up the entire screen, the pillars emblazoned on the front melting to life as we fade into ancient greece. and, as to be expected, our favorite porcine hero proudly stands in front of the building, proudly advertising “HERO FOR HIRE AGENCY -- PORKYKARKUS PROP.”

porkykarkus is a play on parkykarkus (”park your carcass”), a character on eddie cantor’s radio show “the chase & sanborn hour”. truck into porky’s services as he narrates over the specials:

“has anybody any eh-deh-deah-deah-dragons you want seh-seh-sleh-slay-slaye--rubbed out? or maybe ya have some, uh, fair meh-mai-meh-maide--honeys ya want rescued! it’s a peh-pleasure. is your daughter safe? phone eh-peh-porkykarkus at olympia 2222!”

porky’s narration, as always, is fun to listen to, and the physical advertisement has its own charm and appeal, with discounts and deals on certain rescues. not only that, but it’s a damn smart way to save money, having just the narration over the still frame. smart thinking!

conveniently, porky gets a phone call, sparking the tried and true “gear up for a big sprint but merely tinker on over to your destination” gag. as porky answers the phone, filling us in by repeating the hidden dialogue from the other line, we find out it’s the emperor--he wants one hero to go.

chuck jones’ layouts stick out quite strongly throughout this cartoon, especially in the human designs. porky’s statue of mercury is no exception--the bulbous nose and rounded body construction are all surefire trademarks of his work. porky grabs the messenger’s hat and winged shoes from the statue, never once taking a beat to stop as he hobbles along, dressing as he prepares to head out. woodblock sounds simulate the sound of his hooves clopping, but also add an extra jaunty jive to the merry score of “have you got any castles?” in the background, the cartoon’s motif. it would also be a merry melody courtesy of frank tashlin not even a year later.

with that, porky takes off, soaring in the skies like a pro with his winged shoes. if the scene wasn’t appealing enough with the overhead layouts, the animation of porky steadying himself is wonderfully smooth and fun--the cherry on top. he circles the palace where the emperor is located, swooping down to his destination. complete with airplane sound effects, of course.

“howdy, empy!” another bulbous-nosed jones character silences porky from behind his armchair. emperor jones (boy, who could that name reference, i wonder?) speaks in a ridiculously hilarious dialect, completed with a thick accent: “shh! i’m making a fireside chat with my sheeps!” his voice then slips into a rooseveltian draw as he coos “my friends, grecians and customers, this is emperor jones speaking...”

pan to the audience, which consists of a sea of smiling statues. this entire speech sequence is wonderful--not only is his terrible grammar terribly amusing, (”statistics show... what last season at this time was population in greece from 6,000 with 500 with 54 people, with 17 statues.”) but little touches such as one of the audience statues roasting marshmallows and later a hotdog over the fireplace, the emperor making his audience clap by pulling on ropes tied to their arms, and so forth make the entire charade highly amusing with lots of details to look out for. porky standing idly in the background, awkwardly fidgeting as he tries not to intrude is a great little piece of character animation as well.

the emperor gives the skinny, all while chowing down on a hotdog: a gorgon has been turning more and more people into statues, and they need a hero to steal her life-restoring needle in order to turn all of the statues back into humans again. the hero he has in mind is, of course, porky, who bashfully accepts the offer. when the emperor asks those in favor to raise their right hand, he pulls on a lever that causes all of the statues to raise their hands in unison, including a hand on a nearby clock. with a handshake, empy concludes “it’s a deal!”

one of the most impressive pieces of animation in the cartoon (i actually dedicated an entire drawing to it!) is when the emperor sends porky on his way, who waves goodbye as he flies through the air with his winged shoes. just as he tips his hat, he knocks into a pillar, which sends him tumbling upside down, but still airborne. the wings on his shoes form hands as they shake their fists in the glory of the good landing, with porky flashing a cheeky grin to the audience before spiraling lower in the air, regaining his balance, and barreling onward towards a smoldering volcano. the animation is full of life and character--though porky is consistently jolly in the B&W clampett cartoons, the grin towards the camera as he prides himself in his save is a great little touch of personality. slowly but surely, bits of character are now becoming more defined.

a gag that took me just now to recognize it--porky swoops into the heart of the volcano, where we spot the source of the black fumes pouring out the top: the gorgon statue factory. a merry score of “you’ve got something there” serves as some easy listening as we’re treated to a sign gag:

outside of the factory is a human picket fence, comprised of familiar faces: statues of bobe cannon, norm mccabe, john carey, bob clampett himself and chuck jones surround the area. directly outside of the factory is the frozen statue of a salesman with his foot in the door--the joke is not only amusing, but the pose is quite strong and readable, too. though nowhere near the dynamism of frank tashlin’s poses in the mid ‘40s, clampett’s poses in this cartoon are quite defined and exaggerated for the time period. this is especially sharp in the scenes with the emperor.

porky knocks on the door held ajar by the ceramic statue’s foot, holding out an envelope. “telegram for the guh-geh-gee-geh-gee-gor-geh--” a hand snags the envelope out of porky’s grip, causing him to mutter “aww, nuh-neh-nee-nuh-neh-neh-nut--shucks,” a phrase he echoed in clampett’s previous entry, rover’s rival.

we transition to the inside of the factory, where we see the gorgon herself, positioned in front of a camera, awaiting to take “pictures” of her models. tedd pierce voices the gorgon, whose vocal stylings are a parody of tizzie lish, bill comstock’s character on al pearce and his gang. interestingly, the cartoon before this, the woods are full of cuckoos, featured a caricature of lish as well, also voiced by pierce.

clampett and pierce’s comedic timing is sharp--not nearly as sharp as tashlin’s timing in the woods are full of cuckoos, but abundantly amusing nonetheless. the gorgon asks for a boy--”a sorta young-ish one”--and in comes a decrepit old man who can hardly hold himself up. the gorgon waits for the man to assume his position on the podium where his picture will be taken, singing a pitchy rendition of “am i in love?“, another homage to the characteristics displayed by lish’s character on the radio.

the gorgon snaps her photo, which turns the shaky old man into a stone statue at once, cheekily labeled “ANTIQUE -- $60,000 (P.S.: 000,000)” before he’s yanked off of the podium with a cane.

“now let’s try a group picture.” you know it’s a ‘30s cartoon if the three stooges come waddling in--they made their caricatured, cartoon debut in the 1934 film the miller’s daughter, notorious for being chuck jones’ first animation credit. as expected, they all beat the tar out of each other while on the podium, rendered immobile only through the power of medusa’s camera. they turn into the three wise monkeys, labeled “3 MONKEYS OF JAPAN -- MADE IN GREECE”.

norm mccabe’s animation is easy to spot in the next scene with porky, characterized by his signature double eyebrows. porky knocks on a door, parroting a favorite catchphrase from the al pearce show that frequented many a clampett cartoon: “i hope she’s eh-eh-at home, i hope, i hope, i hope, i hope, i hope...”

porky shakes the hand of the assistant, unfortunately a blackface caricature (save for the voice, who is just tedd pierce speaking in a deep, suave voice) as he greets “welcome, stranger. won’t you come in?” before porky has time to answer, he’s yanked through the iron bars of the door and placed neatly in line for the photoshoot, where he peeks through the door to see the action inside.

a pile of men form a pyramid, where the camera turns them into a literal statue of a pyramid, with some slight imperfections. “aw, shucks!” laments the gorgon. “you moved!” she approaches them with her life restoring needle, allowing the men to form into the proper position, maintaining good balance. she gets her “genuine egyptian statue”, quipping “ought to make a handy paperweight!”

the assistant informs porky that he’s next. porky backs up anxiously, echoing a short-lived catchphrase of his from the joe dougherty era: “nuh-neh-no! eh-nn-nee-no! a-a thousand times no!” the decision to make his thoughts visible (his head is slapped onto that of a piggy bank’s) is playful, and also reflects just how big of an influence comics had on bob clampett’s work: comic artists such as milt gross and george lichty have been cited by clampett as inspirations. the george lichty influence is definitely noticeable in rod scribner’s animation under bob clampett, as we’ll discover in the coming years.

in the midst of his panic, porky backs into a statue of "dick a. powello” (dick powell and apollo), causing it to break. but, rather than fuss over the mess, porky uses the opportunity to hatch an idea instead.

in comes strolling porky, concealed by powello’s upper body and a blankett hiding his hooves. the triumphant score of “he was her man” and the gorgon’s smitten woos makes the scene hilarious as is, but the blanket falling off and revealing porky’s pudgy little hooves is the icing on the comedic cake.

porky perches himself on a conveniently placed couch, where the gorgon approaches him. “pardon me, is this seat taken?” she doesn’t wait a wink before snuggling right up to him, a heart symbolizing her affections popping in the air. though clampett would play with typography at times and maintain an overarchingly jovial mood to his cartoons, it’s an odd thing to see him play with comic-like visuals in this manner, such as porky physically envisioning himself as a piggy bank or the heart from the gorgon. i wish he had done it more in this nature!

with the gorgon too close for comfort, porky uses this as an opportunity to grab the gorgon’s life-restoring needle, dangling from her neck and lying against her body. it wouldn’t be a clampett cartoon without sexual innuendos--porky reaches aimlessly around for the needle, prompting the gorgon to let out a shriek, cooing “why, mr. a POWELLo!”

she smothers the ceramic head in kisses, giving him a nice lipstick finish to boot as she pretends the statue has given her a ring. her ecstasy is hilarious and WONDERFULLY conveyed through strong, rubbery poses worth freeze-framing. picturing porky’s befuddlement is another humor within itself.

finally, porky’s disguise is revealed when the gorgon literally crushes the statue in an embrace, stone crumbling around him as he desperately slips out of her grip. as the gorgon makes threats to call the cops, reciting the WB favorite catchphrase of “calling all cars! calling all cars!”, porky makes with the needle and jabs it in various statues, warning them “uh-geh-uh-get goin’! i-i-eh-it’s the guh-geh-geh-eh-geh-gorgon!”

as the gorgon chases porky with her camera, he continues to revive a barrage of statues: the antique, the famed discus thrower (who throws himself out of the scene rather than the discus), the man from the end of the trail statue, who exits riding his horse like a merry go round (a nod to friz freleng’s sweet sioux), a woman who marches off with popeye’s forearms--note the bobe cannon statue in the back here--and a mermaid who unzips her fin and makes a run for it. the highlight of the entire montage is when porky approaches two temples (the two of them together labeled “shirley temple”) and injects the needle into them, prompting the temples to use their pillars as legs and run for the hills.

the chase reaches its climax as the gorgon pursues porky with a movie camera, turning the crank ferociously as she runs. her plan works--porky slows down, freezing in mid-air as the gorgon cries “hold it!” thus, the gorgon pins porky to the ground, who tries his hardest to fight back, but ultimately flailing around as she commands him to open his eyes.

we melt into the present, where we find porky’s mother in place of the gorgon, telling him softly to wake up. he does so, after she pries one of his eyes opens. relieved that it was all a dream, he embraces his mother, prompting a happy end and an iris out.

this cartoon has a soft spot in my heart--it was one of the first LT cartoons i saw on this whole venture. i thought i was the smartest person alive, understanding the three stooges, popeye, and shirley temple references. who knew just how much i had (and still have!) to learn! though even without my sentimental biases, this still stands as a very good cartoon.

as i mentioned previously, the poses in this are full of elasticity and energy, especially in the emperor and the gorgon. porky does a very nice job as well--little pieces of animation such as him fidgeting awkwardly while the emperor rambles on, swinging from side to side as he’s offered the job to be a hero, etc. etc. are full of charm and character. while his personality isn’t the most electric in comparison to characters like bugs and daffy, it’s the little things like these that really make porky stand out. with him, a little subtlety goes a long way, and that’s why he’s one of my favorites. he’s so reserved in comparison to such a wild cast of characters that his timidness actually shines through and sets him apart! (though, on the other hand, he can still have quite the personality, as we’ll discover!)

personally, the only gripes i have with this cartoon is the blackface caricatured assistant (which, in comparison to some cartoons we’ve seen and still have yet to see, is relatively mild, but uncomfortable nonetheless). the jokes, while corny at times, still hit, the animation is full of life and vigor, and the short as a whole has a lot of charm, whimsy, and personality. it has my seal of approval! go check it out!

link!

#lt #porky’s hero agency #clampett #looney tunes #reviews #long post #A REVIEW!!! of one of my favorite cartoons! it's a christmas miracle!#well favorite for this era anyway

25 notes · View notes

looneysmackdown · 2 years

Photo

porky family tree i think info in undercut

ok so we have porky and im just gonna assume every1 where knows who petunia is now- peta pig- porky’s daughter, only appears in the 2004 My Generation G...G... Gap

priscilla pig- only appears in 2006 direct-to-video film Bah, Humduck! A Looney Tunes Christmas also shes voiced by tara strong lol

note: i cant find anything that would confirm petunia to be peta and priscillas mom but i put her as the mom on the family tree anyways. patrick pig, percy pig, portis pig, and peter pig- porky’s brothers, appear in 1937 short The Case of the Stuttering Pig

now the nephews and niece- cicero/pinky pig- porky’s nephew appears in the shorts Porky's Naughty Nephew (1938) and Porky's Picnic (1939).

although in the shorts mentioned above he is called “pinky” he appears in the comics where he is called “cicero”. most of the sources say hes the same character just called a different name i think??? (i havent read the comics yet sory) he also appears in a few looney tunes cartoons shorts

note: i canr find anything on who his parents are but it could b 1 of porky’s brothers porko, puerco and sow- porky’s niece and nephews, appears in the duck dodgers episode “pig planet”

note: once again no idea who these kids belong too. could be 1 of porky’s brothers porky’s mother: despite never been given a name shes made a few appearances in porky pig cartoons. she appears in the shorts Porky's Hero Agency (1937) and Wholly Smoke (1938) she is mention every once in a while in porky pig cartoons. she also makes a cameo in the looney tunes show merrie melody song “table for one”

phineas pig- porky’s father appears in shorts Porky the Rain-Maker (1936) Milk and Money (1936) Porky's Poppa (1938) and Porky and Teabiscuit (1939)

and thats it i think lemme kno ifi missed any1

#looney tunes #porky pig #petunia pig #cicero pig

16 notes · View notes

watching-pictures-move · 2 years

Text

Movie Review | Porky's (Clark, 1981)

If there's one thing I took away from Porky's, it's the importance of casting. This falls roughly into the wave of fratboy/horndog comedies from the late '70s to the early '80s, and compares unfavourably to some of the better known movies of that wave. You can look at the arguable progenitor of that movement, Animal House, and see how that movie's anarchic qualities were lent a certain charge by the animal impact of John Belushi and the low rent charms of Tim Matheson. You can also look at a movie much closer to this one's mold, Revenge of the Nerds, and note not just the dorky likability of Anthony Edwards and Robert Carradine as the lead nerds, but also the warmth brought by supporting players like Larry B. Scott and Brian Tochi even when they're saddled with blatant stereotypes. The main cast here is a bunch of nondescript young white dudes with only the most superficial characteristics to distinguish them (one is tall, one is Jewish, etc).

If you want distinct presences, you'll have to look to the periphery. As a Canadian production, this earns its Canuck credentials by casting Art Hindle as a cop who happens to be the older brother of one of the boys and is perhaps a bit too sympathetic to their exploits, and Doug McGrath as a gym coach. I remember McGrath as the cop who got gently pranked on by Margot Kidder in Black Christmas, and here he sort of pays it forward by not sufficiently cluing in younger coach Boyd Gaines into the unusual behaviour of female coach Kim Cattrall. (Yes, there are a lot of coaches in this movie. I mostly tuned out gym class but I'll concede that this school had a better staffed phys. ed. department than the one I went to.) Cattrall does her best to add some personality to her limited role, but like many of the female characters, she's essentially a throwaway gag, presented to us for a laugh and then scuttled off to the side before she develops any agency. Only Kaki Hunter, as one of the boys' girlfriends, seems to behave like a real person.

In this sense, the movie is probably true to the worldviews of the hormonally-overcharged sex obsessed protagonists, who are concerned almost entirely with getting laid and see women as a means to an end. And this isn't out of line with the genre, but this is another area where the movie compares unfavourably with Animal House. In that movie, there's something completely base about the protagonists, with the ugliness of their actions and thoughts operating almost entirely as transgression. Here, you're supposed to root for the heroes in their reliably foiled efforts to get laid. Porky's wants you to like its characters. Animal House doesn't care if you do.

There is also a fair bit of racist language thrown around in the movie, largely but not entirely tied to a subplot about a Jewish character standing up to his bigoted bully, and the bully standing up to his ex-con father. On one hand, this subplot ties up a bit too neatly, with the Jewish character becoming friends with his bully after the confrontation with the father without any real reconciliation between them. It's perhaps a transparent excuse for the movie to indulge in this language for easy shock without really confronting its ugliness. But as a brown kid who went to a primarily white school, I got a fair amount of racist "humour" thrown my way, and I became friends with some of the people who did the throwing. These were not people who had hate in their heart, but stupid kids who didn't know better, so perhaps it was easier to look past some of the things they said, but I do think there's something to the movie's handling of this relationship and the way friendship can develop in such situations without an overt reckoning. If anything, what frustrated me about my experiences was the tacit approval of the faculty, who laughed these things off a bit too easily when they should have known better. So if anything, the way Hindle seems as comfortable as he does with the heroes' mischief bothered me the most about this movie. Apologies if I'm getting too personal here.

Maybe the most intriguing read of the movie is the way it might mirror Bob Clark's own life. Despite being an honorary Canadian, he grew up in Florida, where this movie is set. (His first movie, She-Man: A Story of Fixation was shot there, and gains a little something from the sweltering atmosphere. I'll give that movie a recommendation, as it's more sympathetic to its queer and queer-adjacent characters than I expected given the exploitation angle.) And judging by the results, he must have really hated it there, given the way movie almost suffocates us with the toxic good ol' boy atmosphere of the titular bar, or suspends us in the frustrations of its heroes as they repeatedly fail to get any action. This has a certain brownish look I associate with Canadian productions, but there's little of the coziness that sometimes comes with it. Everything here feels dingy, miserable. The movie is sporadically amusing, as Clark is a capable comedy director and knows how to structure a gag, but by the end of the movie, I felt a little depressed. As for how intentional that is, the jury's still out.

#film #movie review #porky's #bob clark

6 notes · View notes

dailybestiary · 6 years

Text

Patch Has Issues: Dungeon #2

Issue: Dungeon #2

Date: November/December 1986 (Pretty sure my Christmas haul that year was full of dope toys from The Transformers movie/show.)

The Cover:

(Use of cover for review purposes only and should not be taken as a challenge to status. Credit and copyright remain with their respective holders.)

Ah, Clyde Caldwell. He, Larry Elmore, Jeff Easley, and last issue’s Keith Parkinson were the mainstays of TSR’s amazing stable of artists. I have a soft spot for Caldwell. He did the covers for the D&D Gazetteer series, which means his work emblazoned some of my absolute favorite books from my middle school years. (At the time I had the whole series except the two island books, GAZ 4 & GAZ 9 (which I’ve since collected), plus the Dawn of the Emperors box set. My favorites, for the record, were GAZ 3, 5, 10, and 13. I...may like elves...a little too much.) And even as I sit here, other covers demand to be named. The very first Dragonlance adventure, the iconic Dragons of Despair? The Finder’s Stone trilogy? The first Ravenloft box? Dragon #147? Yep, he did those covers too. He was amazing.

But hoo-boy, we also have to talk about the not-amazing parts. Once Caldwell settled on a way of doing things, that’s how he did them. Points for consistency, but man, he had tropes. Even his tropes had tropes. He had a way of painting dragon’s wings. He had a way of painting swords and boots. He had a way of painting jewelry, and belts and coins—ovals upon ovals upon ovals.

And his way of painting women was with as few clothes as possible. Everything I said about Parkinson last entry? Yeah, that goes double for Caldwell. He never paints pants when a thong will do. His take on the reserved and regal Goldmoon—thighs as long as a dwarf and bronzed buttcheeks exposed—reportedly left Margaret Weis in tears. Magic-users (God, I hate that term) famously couldn’t use armor in D&D and AD&D, but Caldwell’s sorceresses pretty much stick to gauze just to be safe. And the Finder’s Stone trilogy I mentioned above? Yeah, the authors of Azure Bonds took one look at Caldwell’s cover art and literally had to come up with in-text reasons why the heroine Alias—one of the most surly woman sellswords in existence—would wear armor with a Caldwell boob hole.

Don’t get me wrong, I love cheesecake as much as the next dude. (Actually that’s not true; I came up in the grunge ’90s—our version of cheesecake was an Olympia brunette in three layers of thrift store sweaters reading Sandman while eating a cheesecake. Hell, that’s still my jam.) But context matters. The sorceress from “White Magic,” Dragon #147’s cover, may barely be wearing a negligee, but she’s also in the seat of her power and probably magically warded to the hilt—she can wear whatever she damn wants; it’s her tower. So no complaints there. But this cover’s pirate queen Porky Piggin’ it seems like an unwise choice. (The friction burns alone from clambering around the rigging…)

It’s clear from reading The Art of the Dragonlance Saga that TSR was trying to turn the ship around when it came to portrayals of women in fantasy, however slowly. And in Caldwell’s defense and to his credit, he definitely delivered women with agency—in nearly every image, they are nearly always doing something active and essential. They just tend to be doing it half-dressed.

Which is all a way of saying I dig this cover—the explosion, the churning sea (even if it does more look like snow drifts than waves), the sailors all running to the rail to look—but yeah, that pirate captain needs to put on some damn pants.

The Adventures: Before we get started, I have to note that though we’re only an issue in, already the magazine feels more noticeably like the work of editor Roger Moore. This is 100% a guess, but it really feels to me like Dungeon #1 was made of adventures that the Dragon office already had laying around, whereas Dungeon #2 was composed of adventures that Roger Moore and the new Dungeon team had more of a hand in sifting through. (He also has an assistant editor this time in Robin Jenkins, which had to have helped.) Even the cartography looks better. Again, I have zero confirmation of this, but the feeling is strong.

“The Titan’s Dream” by W. Todo Todorsky, AD&D, Levels 5–9

PCs visiting an oracle accidentally walk right into a titan’s dream and must solve some conundrums to escape. What an awesome concept this is! (Spoilers for “Best Concept” section below.) It’s a shame I don’t like this more.

First of all, dreamworld adventures are really hard to do well. And for them to work, there usually need to be real stakes—and not just “If you die in the dream, you die in real life!”—and/or a real connection to the PCs in your campaign. The latter, especially, is really hard to pull off in a published adventure; typically it’s only achieved through tactics that critics deride as railroading. (For instance, @wesschneider’s excellent In Search of Sanity does a great job of connecting the characters to their dream adventures...but it does that by a) forging the connection at 1st level, and b) pretty strongly dictating how the adventure begins and how the characters are affiliated. It works, but that’s high-wire-act adventure writing.)

Being a magazine adventure, “The Titan’s Dream” doesn’t have that luxury—it’s got to be for a general audience and work for most campaigns. That unfortunately means the default “Why” of the adventure—a lord with a child, a wedding, and an alliance at stake hires the PCs to chat with a wise titan—is little more than that: a default.

On top of that...I cannot get excited about anything Greek mythology-related. To me, just the fact I’m seeing it is a red flag.

Look, Greek mythology is why I got into this hobby. Hell, it’s why I got into fiction, period. (For some reason I somehow decided I had no use for fiction books targeted to my age, with the exception of Beverly Cleary. Then in 4th(?) grade, I got a copy of Alice Low’s Greek Gods and Heroes, and the rest is history.) But Greek mythology is often the only mythology anyone knows. When people think polytheism, that’s where most people’s minds go. Which is why, if you ever played D&D in the ’80s, I pretty much guarantee your first deity was from that pantheon. (In my first game, my first-level cleric pretty much met Ares and got bitch-slapped by him, because that’s what 4th-grade DMs do.)

So to me, putting Greek deities or titans in your adventure is the equivalent of putting dudes riding sandworms into your desert adventures—you can do it, but you better blow me away, because that is ground so well trod it’s mud. And this one doesn’t do the job.

The format is three dreams, each with five scenes. Parties will move randomly—a mechanic meant to represent dream logic (or lack thereof)—through these scenes, until all the scenes from one dream have been resolved. This is actually kind of fascinating, and I wonder how it would play at the table—I have a feeling observant players will dig it, but others may find the mechanism’s charm wears off quickly, especially if they have difficulty solving the scenes or get frustrated with the achronicity of events. I also like that every scene has a number of possible resolutions, so the PCs aren’t locked into achieving a single specific objective like they were stuck in a computer game.

But...I can’t shake the feeling of weak planning and execution (or even laziness?) that stayed with me throughout the adventure. Like, okay, the first adventure is a cyclops encounter out of the Odyssey. Cool! But then...why does the Titan follow it up with pseudo-Norse/Arthurian encounter? Did the Odyssey not hold the author’s attention? (Nor the Iliad, the Aeneid, or Metamorphosis? Really?) And then why is the third dream “drawn from the realm of pure fairy tale”? Like, were you out of pantheons? Horus didn’t return your calls? Or be more specific—why not German fairy tales, or Danish, or French Court, or Elizabethan? It feels like a class project where one group was on point, one group got the assignment a little wrong, and one didn’t even try.

Again, it’s not even that this adventure is bad—I honestly can’t tell if it is or not; I’m sure a lot of its success is determined at the table. And I could totally see throwing this at a party if I was out of inspiration that week or we needed a low-stakes breather before our next big arc. But the instant I think about it for more than a second, it all falls apart for me.

Have any of you tried this one? Let me know what you thought. And for a similar exploration into dream logic/fairy tale scenarios, I recommend Crystal Frasier’s The Harrowing for Pathfinder.

“In The Dwarven King’s Court” by Willie Walsh, AD&D, Levels 3–5

Willie Walsh is a name we’re going to see a lot more in issues to come—he’s a legendarily prolific Dungeon contributor, delivering quality, typically low-level, and often light-hearted or humorous adventurers issue after issue after issue. His first entry is a mystery with a time limit: A dwarf king is supposed to make a gift of a ceremonial sword to seal a treaty, but the sword has vanished. Brought to the king’s court courtesy of a dream, adventurers must find the sword and the surprising identity of the culprit before the rival power’s delegation arrives.

At first I was going to ding this adventure for its “What, even more dreams this issue?” hook...but here’s the thing with Walsh—never judge his modules until you reach the final page. Nearly every time I’m tempted to dismiss one of his sillier or more random adventure elements, it turns out that it makes sense and works just fine. In this case, the cause of the dream is haunt connected to the mystery, and I feel dumb for being all judgy.

So anyway, the PCs are given leave to search for the stolen object and the thief, but of course it turns out there is a whole lot of light-fingeredness going around. As Bryce (see below) puts it, “It’s like a Poirot mystery: everyone has something to hide.” This castle has as much upstairs-downstairs drama as any British farce, with nearly every NPC having either a fun personality and/or a fun secret (and with the major players illustrated by some equally fun portraits) that should make them memorable friends and foils for PCs to interact with. Not to mention the actual culprit is definitely a twist that will be hard explaining to the king...

GMs should be ready to adjust on the fly, though—a) it’s a lot of characters to juggle, and b) since the PCs are 3rd–5th level, the right spells or some lucky secret door searches could prematurely end the adventure as written. You may want to have some last-minute showdowns, betrayals, or other political intrigue outlined and in your back pocket if what’s on the page resolves too quickly.

Overall though, I’m a big fan of this adventure, and look forward to the rest of Walsh’s output. Also, given the dwarven focus and the geography of the land, this adventure could be a very nice sequel to last issue’s “Assault on Eddistone Point.”

“Caermor” by Nigel D. Findley, AD&D, Levels 2–4

Look at this author’s list of writing credits! Findley was amazingly prolific, and his work was pretty high-quality across the board, as far as I know. I particularly loved the original Draconomicon, one of the first and only 2e AD&D books I ever bought as a kid. I also loved his “Ecology of the Gibbering Mouther” from the excellent Dragon #160, and some of his Spelljammer supplements are currently sitting upstairs in my to-read pile, recently purchased but as yet shamefully untouched.

Now look at his age at the time of his death. Life is not always fair or kind.

(Speaking of unkind, man is the bio in this issue unfortunate in retrospect: “[H]e write for DRAGON® Magazine, enjoys windsurfing, plays in a jazz band, and manages a computer software company in the little time he has left.” As Archer would say, “Phrasing!”)

Anyway, this adventure is simple: An otherworldly force has been murdering the locals. The locals have pinned the blame on a handsome bard from out of town, and their own prejudices and general obstinacy are sure to get in the way of the investigation—that is, if the true culprits, some devil-worshipping culprits and and an abishai devil, don’t get in the way first.

All in all, this is a tight, well-written adventure, so I don’t have much to say about it, other than that if you like the idea of sending your party to help out some young lovers and save some faux-Scots/Yorkshiremen too stubborn to save themselves (and maybe slip in a valuable lesson about prejudice and xenophobia as well), this is the adventure for you.

One thing that does jump out to a contemporary reader, though, is the comically overpowered nature of the baddie pulling the strings in this adventure: Baalphegor, Princess of Hell (emphasis mine). Overpowered, you-won’t-really-fight-this-NPC happens with a lot of low-level adventures, when the writers want a story more epic than characters at the table can handle or are trying to plot the seeds for future evils. But still, any princess of Hell would already be a bit much...but an 18-Hit Dice, “supra-genius”, the Princess of Hell? Like, what the f—er, I mean, Hell?

If you use the adventure as written, the only way to have Baalphegor’s presence make sense is to eventually reveal that the area is an epicenter of some major badness. (Maybe that explains the lost nation of evil dwarves in the adventure background.) For a good model on how to seed early adventures in this matter, Dungeon’s Age of Worms Adventure Path and Pathfinder Adventure Path’s Rise of the Runelords AP, both from Paizo, are exemplars of small-town disturbances that eventually have world-shaking implications.

It’s also fascinating in retrospect to note Ed Greenwood’s massive impact in the hobby. Any article that appears in Dragon has the sheen of being at least semi-official, but it’s clear that Greenwood’s content was a cut above even that. In this case, an NPC from a three-year-old article of his is not just treated as canon, but also supplies the mastermind behind the adventure! It’s no surprise that in the following year his home campaign, the Forgotten Realms, would soon become AD&D’s newest and then its default setting.

Two final thoughts: 1) There’s some fascinating anti-dwarf prejudice in this article. Nearly every mention of dwarves paints them as exceptionally greedy and/or villains. And 2) how did one even begin to balance adventures in those days? This adventure is for “4–8 characters of 2nd–4th level.” There are a lot of difference at the extreme ends of those power scales…

“The Keep at Koralgesh,” by Robert Giacomozzi & Jonathan Simmons, D&D, Levels 1–3

One of the problems of BECMI D&D being known as “basic D&D” is that writers often assumed the players to be basic (that is, younger/new) as well. Which probably accounts for some of the early suggestions to the DM we get at the beginning of this adventure—like some pretty patronizing advice along the lines of not immediately announcing to PCs what the pluses are on their magical swords.

Fortunately, after that the article settles down and gives us Dungeon’s first real D&D adventure. In fact, not just real, but massive: 20 full pages of content—nearly half the issue! It’s a fully fledged dungeon crawl that has the PCs taking advantage of the summer solstice to open a shrine door that will lead them inside a long-ruined keep said to hold great treasure.

Now, I imagine in the coming installments it’s going to seem to many of you like I’m grading D&D adventures on a curve, because of my love for the system and the Known World/Mystara. That’s a fair accusation, but a better way to consider it is that I’m reviewing D&D adventures for what they are—adventures from a separate system, with a more limited rules system and palette of options than AD&D. You don’t go to a performance of Balinese shadow puppetry and compare it against Andrew Lloyd Webber; you look at it for what it achieves in its own medium. Since they appear side-by-side in the same magazine, comparison is going to be inevitable, but that’s with the understanding that AD&D was the kid coloring with the 64-crayon box of Crayola, while D&D was getting by with just eight.

On its own terms then, “The Keep of Korgalesh” is a decent, if not superlative, success. I love that it’s practically module-length and that we get three complete levels—a far cry from the previous issue’s side-trek-at-best, “The Elven Home.” We also get two new monsters, which absolutely fills my inner BECMI D&D player with glee. And I like that what starts as a dungeon crawl/fetch quest evolves into a “kill the big bad thing” and “find out what really happened to this city.”

There are issues, though. If the whole city was destroyed, getting to see some of it besides the keep would have been nice. Some of the ecology for the dungeon inhabitants is questionable. There pretty much wasn’t a single pool or fountain in this era of D&D adventure design that wasn’t magical, and this adventure was no exception. One of the new monster’s names makes no sense except that “tyranna” and “abyss” are cool words (I mean, I guess you could read that as “tyrant of the depths,” but still…) And there are painfully obvious borrowings from other works, especially Tolkien—a door that only opens at solstice, a lake monster, an orc with a split personality that is clearly a Gollum homage, etc.

What this adventure really needs is stakes—just something to give it a bit more oomph beyond the dungeon crawl. (Finding a blacksmith’s lost hammer is the hook offered in the adventure but it’s pretty flimsy.) Perhaps the PCs are some of Kor’s last worshippers, and clearing out the dangers here and resanctifying his temple is one of their first steps toward returning him to prominence. Maybe the PCs’ grandparents were involved in the city’s demise and restoring Koralgesh will restore the families’ honor. Or you could keep it simple and have a band of pirates or a rival adventuring group also trying to clean out the keep, turning it into a race (with the tyrannabyss causing the scales of fate to wobble at appropriately cinematic moments).

So the final analysis is this is a decent dungeon crawl upon which you can build a good adventure. The real reward of this module isn’t treasure; it’s finding out just what happened to Koralgesh. But for that to matter, it needs to tie into the PCs’ pasts, futures, or both.

BONUS CONTENT FOR KNOWN WORLD/MYSTARA NERDS: Kor is almost certainly a local name for the sun god Ixion. The chaotic deity Tram is probably a local version of Alphaks, though Atzanteotl is another strong candidate, especially since deceit was key to the pirates’ success. Koralgesh could be located somewhere on the Isle of Dawn, the northern coast of Davania, or an Ierendi/Minrothad Isle that those nations haven’t made it a priority to rebuild.

Best Read: “Caermor.” Nigel D. Findley was a pro.

Best Adventure I Could Actually Run with Minimal Prep: “The Keep at Koralgesh,” as a well-written, straight-ahead dungeon crawl. Every other adventure here relies on a pretty strong handle of very mobile NPCs and their motivations, or a Titan’s dream mechanics.

Best Concept: “The Titan’s Dream,” as noted above. It’s a great idea very worth exploring, even if I wasn’t about the execution we got in this case.

Best Monster: This was actually a monster-light issue. Despite some awesome art for the tyrannabyss, I have to go with the epadrazzil, a scaly ape from a two-dimensional plane of existence that has to be summoned via a painting. All of those details are just so wonderfully and weirdly specific it has to win. (Extra points for anyone who noticed the thoul—a classic D&D monster (though it did make its way into AD&D’s Mystara setting) born from a typo.)

Best NPC: Since this is a role-playing-heavy issue, there are a bunch of contenders, and the final verdict will go to whoever your party sparks to at the table. Obviously King Baradon the Wise should get the nod for [spoiler-y reasons], but I also really like the opportunity the executioner Tarfa offers, thanks to his incriminating goblet and how it might bring the PCs to the attention of a far-off assassin’s guild at just the right level.

Best Map: All together the maps from “The Keep at Koralgesh” form an extremely appealing whole. But for best single map I have to go for the palace of Mount Diadem—that is a bangin’ dwarven demesne.

Best Thing Worth Stealing: Jim Holloway’s illustrations of dwarves. Good dwarf, gnome, and halfling art is hard to find, and even the good stuff often leans stereotypical. While Holloway’s art is often humorous—I have a feeling he and Roger Moore jibed really well, though that’s totally a guess based purely on what assignments he got handed—his dwarves, especially in this issue, are fresh, specific, and unique. You could identify them by their silhouettes alone—always the sign of good character art. If you need an image of a dwarf NPC to show the players, “In the Dwarven King’s Court” is a great first stop.

Worst Aged: Female thong pirates on magazine covers. Also using the actual names of actual mental illnesses in game materials.

What Bryce Thinks: “This seems to be a stronger issue than #1, although half of the adventures are … unusual.”

Bryce actually almost likes “The Titan’s Dream,” confirming my loathing of it. He in turn loathes “In the Court of the Dwarven King.” Like me, though, he is pro-”Caermor” and sees potential in “The Keep at Koralgesh.” (Also credit where it’s due: I might have missed the condescension at the start if he hadn’t called it out.)

So, Is It Worth It?: If you’re a Clyde Caldwell fan, this issue might be worth searching out in print. So much of Caldwell’s work from this era was dictated by product needs, cropped and boxed up in ads, or shrunk down to fit on a paperback cover. So to get this cover in full magazine size, with only the masthead tucked up top to get in the way—that could be well worth a few bucks to you.

Also, if you’re BECMI/Rules Cyclopedia-era D&D fan (or know someone who is), again, this one might be worth having in print. “The Keep at Koralgesh” is a legit, proper BECMI D&D adventure, spanning 20 whole pages and with two new monsters to boot. I would have practically have cried if someone had given 7th-grade me this.

Beyond that you can probably just rely on the PDF. But both “Caermor” and “In the Dwarven King’s Court” have strong bones worth putting some modern muscle and skin on.

Random Thoughts:

The Caldwell cover painting was also used for the Blackmoor module DA4 The Duchy of Ten. PS: I’m not trying to tell you what to do or anything, but if you do happen to run across a physical copy of The Duchy of Ten or and of the DA modules, holla at ya boy over here.

Since this is our second issue, we now have a “Letters” column. Turns out Dungeon had been announced in Dragon #111 with a really detailed set of writer’s guidelines; most of the correspondence is questions re: those. In the process of answering, we get some surprisingly frank talk about payment. The $900 for a cover seemed low until I converted it to 2018 dollars, and ~$2,000 does seem right to my ignorant eye. I then made the mistake of converting my current salary to 1986 dollars and felt a lot worse about myself and what I’ve achieved.

Apologies this took so long to post. I had the issue read by early October and most of this review written with the next week or two after...but then I got involved in dealing with a 4.5 week hospitalization and aftermath...and then a second still-ongoing hospitalization...and even though I only had about four paragraphs left I just couldn’t find time to put a bow on it.

Notable Ads: The gold Immortals Rules box for D&D. (I also still don’t have that one yet, and Christmas is coming. Just saying, guys, if you happen to find one in your attic.) ;-) Also an ad for subscribing to Dungeon itself, starring “my war dinosaur, Boo-Boo.” No, really.

Over in Dragon: Beneath a glorious cover, Roger Moore is the new editor of Dragon #115, three authors (including Vince Garcia, who I like a lot) share credit on a massive six articles about fantasy thieves, a famous article proposing that clerics get the weapons of their deity (people were still talking about it in the “Forum” column when I was buying my first issues two years later), and a look at harps from the Forgotten Realms (notable because behind the scenes Ed Greenwood’s home setting was being developed for the AD&D game for launch in 1987.) A photographic cover and a 3-D sailing ship are served up in Dragon #116, along with maritime adventures, more Ed Greenwood (rogue stones), and articles for ELFQUEST, Marvel Super Heroes (Crossfire’s gang), and FASA’s Dr. Who game (looking at all six(!) doctors). (Incidentally, I had an Irish babysitter around this time who first mentioned Dr. Who to me—I wish I’d explored more but I was too young to understand what I’d been offered.)

PS: Yes, I’ve heard about the upcoming Tumblr ban. It is a terrible idea that will affect way too many of my readers. It shouldn’t affect me much (and I have all my monster entries backed up at the original site), but I will keep you posted as I learn more, particularly if I find you, my readers, packing up and going elsewhere.

#daily bestiary #patch has issues #pathfinder #paizo #3.5 #dungeons & dragons #dungeons and dragons #d&d #dnd #ad&d #becmi #dungeon #dungeon magazine

95 notes · View notes

clubofinfo · 7 years

Text

Expert: One of the people who did 9/11 once yelled at me, quite angrily. I wish I could remember why. I can’t. Nothing remains of his chastisement but Trombone Shorty’s plunger mute, waa wwa, mwaa waa mwa. The occasion was some briefing or other. Searching my soul with Augustinian scrupulosity, I cannot rule out that something in my bearing or demeanor might have inadvertently signaled that I didn’t take him seriously. I didn’t have to take him seriously, in the scheme of things, he had the military cookie-cutter stamp, OCD and not too bright, all at sea when hierarchy fails him. He wasn’t my client so I didn’t need to kiss his butt. Perhaps some inappropriate joke failed to go over his head. Somehow, at any rate, I annoyed one of the most infamous criminals in history, and lived! That’s like short-sheeting Hitler, or giving Pinochet an impish purple nurple. Because in retrospect, he took thousands of American lives as a pretext for wars of aggression that killed a million more. Myers knew about the white jet, the one they saw in Shanksville, the jet CIA sent to do his job for him, the job he trained his whole career to do but fucked up in the most important hour of his life. He didn’t call the other one off, Cheney did, but Myers didn’t seem to mind some doughy draft dodger taking over his job and doing it wrong. Myers took all that failure and disgrace in stride. No seppuku for him, he’s a warrior – he sees to things in his department. It’s too much to expect that he might look into why he bobbled the hijack alerts from FAA, nose around and ask Mitre what they were doing squiring dastardly Saudi terrorists around critical government agencies, showing them how to blind the Air Force while CIA watched their every move. But then, failing to mind my own business is my besetting sin. I made a Mitre functionary quite irate with a different impertinent question. They had installed her on the 9/11 Commission, to give us closure. And I was only asking about those ludicrous dogfights with big fat civilian planes. Imagine if I’d ribbed her about Ptech! Now in his dotage General Myers sits slack-lipped on corporate boards, and at some school, Faber College, I think, maundering at other people and they don’t take him seriously either. They give him cookies, cookies with, one imagines, jelly centers, like in other old soldiers’ homes. He’s harmless again. General Myers, a synecdoche of the USA: an infamous criminal lightly disguised as a bumbling idiot acclaimed as a hero. He failed his way to success. Now he’s a spent force. Just because they exterminated millions, that’s no reason to take them seriously. They’re clowns. We simply don’t see it, downtrodden and brainwashed as we are, not until they come up against someone minimally competent. The СБРФ, Russia’s Security Council, is cheerfully grinding CIA to powder in Syria. They interdict and expose US sneak attacks in strict accord with law, enforcing long-neglected UN Charter Article 47(3) at gunpoint. They leapfrogged the Pentagon with stand-off weapons to continuously counter escalation. They’re now the world’s most influential advocate for rule of law. Russia complies with the Paris Principles, the world standard for institutionalized human rights under expert international oversight; the USA does not. China’s Politburo Standing Committee outwits CIA at every turn, effortlessly appropriating US state secrets and winning over US allies with better deals. Just look at their essential principles of unrestricted warfare – necessary, minimal, restricted, limited, particularly non-military – it looks suspiciously like peace. Imagine poor Myers trying to cope with that. In its peculiarly non-military fashion, in treaty bodies and charter bodies China fights to get you the economic and social rights your government says you can’t have. China’s Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence are a straightforward précis of the UN Charter. Just one of the five principles mentions China’s national interest. It’s downright alien to those of us accustomed to the USA’s neurotic fixation on vague threats from every nook and cranny of the earth. What does China want? China wants equality and mutual benefit. Iran’s Sepāh, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, won the war in Iraq by watching us lose. While mediating for regional states and popular mobilization forces, Sepāh has held the US to feckless bluster with a canny grappling strategy, sprawling and grapevining to impede US moves until lawfare can be brought to bear. Iran’s world-class jurists compile a lengthening catalog of grave US crimes and wrongs for the World Court to judge. Iran, founding member of the G-77 comprising 80 per cent of the world, past president in the crisis years of unchecked US aggression, diplomats primus inter pares who shepherded the Tehran Consensus into being; Iran, nuclear/chemical disarmament envoy of the Non-Aligned Movement for peaceful coexistence, half the world’s people and two-thirds of its countries. Step into court and full-spectrum-dominate that. Worse yet, long-time US puppets now say no. Germany and Austria joined the free world in repudiating US economic coercion that breaches UN Charter Articles 41 and 421. The European Union and the IMF refuse to join the US in reneging on its nonproliferation agreement with Iran. Iraq ejected its US occupiers by the simple expedient of denying them impunity. The head of state of the Philippines burnishes his overwhelming popularity and public trust by mocking US officials’ sanity, paternity, character, and sexual practices. That shocks the US government, which has been warring on or waterboarding its Malay colony into submission for more than a century. That’s your USA: Monty Python’s Black Knight, dismembered but undaunted. By some masterstroke of KUBARK mind-control, Americans don’t get the joke. Everyone is laughing at their laughingstock regime but them. We Americans are indoctrinated with pompous monkey see, monkey do. The state puts models before us: tweedy Ivy-League mediocrities solemnly blithering about The Presidential Character or the stultifying ceremony of installing public figureheads. We retain a few of their slogans, but more importantly, we learn to make the faces. The judicious face. The face of regret. The grave resolute face you make when they tell you it’s time to blow up more wogs. Want to be a leftist? Then you make the lugubrious hangdog face Chris Hedges taught you. Back when he worked for the New York Times, Hedges taught us the pop-eyed “Oh no, Saddam’s sending terrorists to get us!”2 face. But what about the face for Russia ripping Turkey out of NATO? That’s the 4chan Lenny smirk face. Where’s the face for Russia lawfully snatching away the best parts of Ukraine, leaving scheming NATO stooges with the Chernobyl exclusion zone and a mob of flat-broke Nazis? (You know, this one, :-D) And what about the face for Iran hijacking the US RQ-170 stealth drone, reverse-engineering and improving it? Or for catching CIA at illegal warfare, deftly taking all their cyber-weapons and giving free samples and countermeasures to the world in paralyzing water-torture dribs and drabs, spouting obscene broken-English gibes and insults all the while? Surely you must recognize that one. Go ahead, think about it, you’ll make the face. They call it lol. It’s not as though you’re being disrespectful. Your ruling junta had a good run. Now it’s over. America’s indifferent ‘rivals’ casually make fools of CIA. If you didn’t notice, that’s because you read the news, or did your high school homework too intently. Here is what actually happened. The Dulles administration extended from 1949 to roughly 1966 (like popes, CIA potentates subside gradually into incontinent senility.) Dulles established clandestine crime as US policy. He took control of government with secret moles and gave CIA impunity with sub rosa legal pretexts. He purged elements supporting rights or rule of law, and recruited vanquished Nazis to set up a US Gestapo. He consolidated the wartime press into state-controlled organs of public information termed “the mighty wurlitzer.” He crippled and corrupted the UN Secretariat and killed the one stray Secretary-General who wasn’t a tool. After he got deposed, Dulles’ CIA killed an insubordinate head of state, JFK, and put FBI to work covering up CIA crime, the prime directive it retains today. The next administration was the Safari Club. The CIA regime diffused its leadership to the point that some acting directors were foreign nationals. The Safari Club was not an interregnum but an organizational expedient dictated by international resistance to crimes of the CIA regime. The UN member nations denounced US torture and aggression under explicit warning of general nuclear war. This emboldened the old constitutional institutions to mount challenges of their own. The Senate and the House probed CIA. In five months at CIA James Schlesinger extracted the family jewels, a bill of indictment of ultra vires crimes, and purged a thousand agents, dwarfing the subsequent Friday Night Massacres of Stansfield Turner and R. James Woolsey. Jim Schlesinger. Now there was a man to take seriously. He got the point of a briefing, a point I was prevented from making out loud, by reading the mathematical entrails of a massive Soviet-style central planning simulation at a glance. Schlesinger got himself fired in 1975 for declining to wage war on Cambodia. Under siege by the world’s best and brightest, CIA retreated and regrouped. Adnan Kashoggi and his CIA factotums3 ran a hunting lodge and tasteful whorehouse in Nanyuki Town in Kenya. There CIA plotted with spooks from its satellite states and handed off the worst of their clandestine crime. CIA also colluded with foreign counterparts in other clubby venues like the Pinay Circle. This enabled a ruse: we’re not concealing crimes, we’re keeping the confidences of our allies. The blatant porky worked, when everybody went along, and gave CIA room for maneuver. CIA sacrificed Nixon as a scapegoat and wrote the Pentagon Papers to frame the Pentagon for CIA’s Vietnam War. They led the Church Committee in harmless circles. CIA defanged the more threatening Pike Committee: they inserted a ritual incantation (CIA works for the president!) and stuffed everything else down the memory hole. Then CIA put Congress in its place with the melodramatic bribery-cum-treason snares of the ABSCAM investigation. They deployed the mighty wurlitzer to neutralize avowed human-rights president Jimmy Carter and his straight-arrow DCI Turner. CIA directed their secret agents in Congress, State, and Justice to vitiate binding US commitments to demobilize, disarm, and stop its torture, murder, armed attack, racial discrimination, weapons proliferation, and coercive foreign interference. The Bush administration took power in 19804 and continued until circa 2001. Bush shifted the focus of foreign interference from Latin America to the Middle East. He fought the world consensus on economic and social rights, wrecking countries that governed in accordance with those rights. Bush squelched a feeble Congressional investigation with multiple preemptive pardons. To dispel “the Vietnam syndrome,” Americans’ revulsion against war, Bush entrapped his Iraqi client state with petty resource disputes as a pretext for US invasion. Capitalizing on the unforeseen collapse of the USSR, Bush militarized the UN Security Council, dispatching armed peacekeepers everywhere on any excuse. He manipulated regional rivalries and the UN Secretariat to thwart reform of the P-5 nations’ veto impunity. Bush père skydives to prove his mettle, plummeting to earth in the arms of a SEAL much as Mao would drift inertly down the Yangtze River in his dotage. But the Gates administration is in power. Bush protégé Gates rose to power in a process recalling late-Roman dynastic succession of adoptive sons, with Bush’s bloodline heir as presidential figurehead. While maintaining his predecessors’ rackets, Gates used 9/11 as a pretext to implement longstanding plans for counterinsurgency warfare at home and aggression abroad. He boosted Afghan opium production by a factor of 40, culling Americans by shortening their lifespan, and made the subject population pay for the greatest financial crime in history. Gates obstructed international efforts to end impunity and regulate the arms trade. He adapted to the debility and corruption of the commercial arms industry by relying on foreign armed irregulars for covert aggression. Gates’ critical test lies before him: after a quarter century of CIA cadres installed to front for the regime (Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama) a president under insecure control has taken office at a juncture when CIA again faces multiple threats to its impunity: – Legally mandated release of all unshredded NARA records bearing on CIA’s 1963 coup d’état; – International legal pursuit (in inter alia Italy, Spain, Poland, and Canada, with international civil society including CCR and CJR) of systematic and widespread CIA torture and disappearance amounting to crimes against humanity; – Concerted civil-society legal challenges to CIA’s gravest crimes including Saleh v. Bush, Abdul Wahed Shannan Al Rabbat v. Blair, and prospective JASTA suits. When quashed in CIA-controlled national courts, these cases support ICC admissibility of crimes the state is unwilling or unable to prosecute; – Nonproliferation treaty bodies openly denouncing US proliferation effected by CIA assets such as Marc Grossman, Will Cathcart, and Robert Garry, in the 2015 NWC Review Conference and in ministerial-level Russian statements exposing US efforts to thwart the object and purpose of the BWC.5 – Dawning public awareness of CIA attacks on the domestic civilian population as pretexts for intensified repression. That’s what all this “fake news” censorship is for: CIA wants its exposure and denunciation to go unnoticed here at home. The related saber-rattling and war hysteria also takes people’s minds off CIA crime. The synthetic desperation of it promotes the CIA line that rule of law is fighting with one hand tied behind your back. See? Postwar US history is simple. Just keep your eye on CIA. Though the government fixes your attention on the danger of the suicidal nuke war it continually threatens, the real threat to the regime has always been international consensus. Throughout each new CIA junta the international community methodically constructs a binding legal regime. You can read a hundred US histories and never see a word about it. The world codified America’s Nuremberg Principles to curb criminal commanders and, with the Rome Statute, set up a court free from national interests to try them. The world codified the UN Charter’s mandate of pacific dispute resolution with state responsibility principles. The world set out your rights in law, consolidating them under the two overarching aims of the UN member nations: your right to peace and your right to development. The old second world, renewed and esteemed, enforces law that issued largely from the Non-Aligned Movement and the G-77.6 Contemporary history is largely the story of CIA’s pitched, doomed struggle against rights and rule of law. Held to these standards, the US government is exposed as a shabby throwback. Uncle Sam is dead – in the likes of Gates and Myers we’ve reverted to an old familiar mascot of another washed-up empire, Don Quixote, scrawny, skint, and delusional. Let Thomas Harrington describe the poor thing’s dream world: The cheesiest and most hackneyed evocations of national grandeur. Page 1: a quote from the Star-Spangled Banner in a lithograph-like image of The War of 1812. Page 2: Lincoln’s famous quote about ‘government of the people, by the people and for the people.’ Pages 3-4: a multicolor image of an eagle and a flag… And on and on for 24 more pages with graphic backdrops such as Mt. Rushmore, the Liberty Bell, and yes, buffaloes roaming across the open plains. That’s the passport they make you carry. The kindly border guards of the outside world try hard not to roll their eyes at it. Remember, Don Quixote has a happy ending: in innumerable slapstick melees strapping peasants beat some sense into the old scarecrow before he dies. That’s what’s happening to CIA right now. Join the fun, world, get your licks in while you can. He’s on his last legs. * As articulated for the world by the Special Rapporteur on Coercive Measures. * “Defectors Cite Iraqi Training for Terrorism,” The New York Times, November 8, 2001. * Miles Copeland and Ed Moss of Booz, Allen and the mob, respectively. * CIA’s formal instauration was scheduled for March 31, 1981, in OPERATION NINE LIVES, but it was bungled and had to be deferred. * Illegal US biowarfare is under investigation by civil society and by treaty parties. * Russian FM Lavrov is speaking to a global audience. http://clubof.info/

0 notes