#sam & max: this time it's virtual

[sapphymayeyeplease]

Sam & Max VR Corn Dog stimboard

"Max isn't good with similes."

🌽🌭🌽 🌭🌽🌭 🌽🌭🌽

@itsalltooloud

[jaxxypoo]

Max is arrested by non freelance police :3

[your-fav-is-divorced]

sam and max but only in this time its virtual

Sam And Max from This Time It’s Virtual! Are Divorced!

[swevenish]

BEEN OBSESSED WITH SAM AND MAX AS OF LATE 🧡

[crow-man72]

here's all of the sam and max media ever.... I'm normal promise :3

[aesthetictree]

oh you just got a concussion from a dumpster falling on you? go make me a corndog or something and also heres a gun go shoot bugs in our immediate vicinity

[dogboyklug]

silly sketches right before bed

max is so ridiculously gentle w lumpy when hes giant its kinda funny

[theloveforart]

Made this while watching a gameplay of This Time It’s Virtual

Hope you like it :)

[whimsyfelt]

Lumpy's still getting used to their new job.

[noir-ish-bee]

this was fun but. it was also abslotue HELL to draw....

[h-worksrambles]

One thing I’m always pleasantly surprised by with Sam & Max is how consistently good the voice acting is, especially for the two leads. Even if I can pick a favourite voice for both Sam & Max, it’s a very close thing, and there’s not one performance I can call bad.

Take Max for instance. Nick Jameson voices him in Hit the Road, and his take is a fair bit quieter than later performances. Aside from the sheer perfection of his Brooklyn twang, I enjoy how his Max is a little subtler. He’s upbeat sure, but he’s not a loudmouth either, often saying cryptic or sinister comments in a very relaxed tone. “We’re the Freelance Police and we’re in a race against time”. (calmy) “And we’re barefoot.” I feel like this more subdued Max is actually the most comic accurate one to date. Max’s voices tend to be rather loudmouthed and hyper-expressive later on but Comic!Max...not so much.

In the comics, Max tends to maintain his huge grin as a neutral expression, in such a way that you never know what’s going on behind that smile. And not knowing what he’s thinking is kind of the key to Max’s character if you ask me. And Jameson keys into that excellently. He’s upbeat, but he’s not especially loud. Cheerful, deadpan and subtly threatening. Jameson takes my award for the most comic accurate Max. The only time where he really loses his temper is when he gets sick of Doug the moleman’s long-winded story. Otherwise, he’s very dry or inscrutable. Not even Sam can entirely puzzle him out sometimes. “I wish I knew what Max was thinking... ...Well THAT was a waste of money.”

Rob Tinkler’s take in the cartoon is quite different in some ways. He’s much louder, much more hyperactive, much less quiet, and perhaps less subtle in some ways. And yet, this is probably my favourite Max voice, despite how different it is. What I think makes Tinkler’s performance work so well, is that despite being larger than life and more...well...cartoonish, he still captures that inscrutable quality of Max, but in a very different way. Tinkler’s Max, above all, is an impressionist. He’s constantly putting on different voices, mimicking different personas. This is naturally a great way for Rob Tinkler to flex his range as a voice actor, but it means that you still have that hard-to-read quality. Except this time, it’s because Max’s showmanship is constantly hiding what he’s actually thinking and feeling.

  Hyperactive characters typically wear their hearts on their sleeves in a way that means they let all their emotions hang out. But Max...doesn’t. He’s actually extremely cagey with his emotions, deceptively smart, and no one can ever tell what’s going on behind that disconcertingly large smile. Tinkler and Jameson both capture that in very different ways, one through a quiter deadpan, one through extroverted showmanship. And I’d certainly say Tinkler’s charisma makes him my favourite to watch. His energy is absolutely unmatched and it’s an achievement to pull off a performance this cartoonishly over-the-top without getting annoying. A character who switches moods this much this fast only works if the actor has the range to switch on a dime, and I’d say Tinkler does.

“We return VICTORIOUS! Crowned with the scars of BATTLE!” (then with a childlike giggle) It looks like I’m wearin’ polka dot jammies!” I think that impressionistic showman vibe helps, as he can pull back the energy with a more muted voice for a comedic contrast to avoid overplaying the shouty parts. It’s a great performance all round. Still miss the Broooklyn accent, though...

William Kasten’s take on the Telltale games is also very interesting, and probably my second favourite behind Rob Tinkler. Much like Tinkler, his Max is much louder, more extroverted you might say, compared to Hit the Road or the comics. However, he’s not so much of a showman, and is generally a little more upfront with his emotions. He’s more prone to be visibly angry, shocked, frustrated or scared. That’s not to say Cartoon!Max never lost his cool, (Glitch in Time, anyone?) but its definitely more frequent here, though that may simply be down to Telltale having three whole games, so this gets to happen more often. “Ho ho ho-oohhh MY GOD I’M ON FIRE!!!!”

More than any other though, I think Kasten is the voice actor who makes Max genuinely cute. He’s high pitched without being grating, and he gives Max a lot of traits that are unironically adorable, especially his little giggles, or his ‘wheeeee!’s when he’s launched into the air. He’s also able to switch that energy on a dime from endearing to completely cutting and malevolent. That cutesy excitement quickly switches into malicious glee. And I don’t think his moments of cruelty or violence would be nearly as funny if he wasnt also so legitimately cute. He’s a little monster who’s so adorable that you can’t stay mad at him, and it works really well. It’s another case of strong comedic contrast.  Plus, I just think his comedic timing is just generally on point. “And the pope says, ‘thanks! Last time that happened McKinley wanted to [CENSORED] ...no waitwaitwait, I think I told it wrong.” (I would like to talk more about Andrew Chaikin as I do like his take, but there just wasn’t enough time to form any meaningful analysis based solely on Culture Shock. So just know I like him and wish we got to hear him a liitle longer).

  Then you have Dave Boat in Poker Night and This Time It’s Virtual, and I’d say his Max is probably the most sarcastic. His register is quite close to Kasten’s but he trades out the cutesy facade for raw snark. Most of his lines in Poker Night 2 are giving a sassy comeback to whatever straight line Sam just unwittingly fed him. “...And that’s why I don’t wear shoes.” “And also because shoes make him look like a big brown clown!” This happens even more so in TTIV, plus he spends most of the game taking spiteful potshots at the player, since he resents their presence to begin with. This is easily the most cantankerous Max has ever been, and when you remember the writers of TTIV once remarked that, because they were coming back to this series with an older perspective, then that tone of ‘I’m gettin’ too old for this’ trickles down into the characters too.   “...Why don’t you throw me like that anymore, Sam?”

Though much like Max in Glitch in Time, or Max’s more genuine moments in Telltale, he also gets a chance to show that oft-hidden vulnerable side when Sam goes missing, and he sells it very well. For as much as these voices differ, they all manage to hit a lot of the core beats of the character. Even from someone like me who is kinda...eh...on This Time it’s Virtual compared to the rest of the series, I have no complaints with either of the leads’ performance. Boat frankly nails it.    I think it says a lot about the consistent quality of the series’ casting that I have so much positive to say about all these different voice actors. And even if they all bring their own qualities and quirks to the role...they all still sound like Max. They all capture the core essentials well enough that every version of Max, from the comics, to the games, to the show, all feel like the same character. And when I think of other fandoms I’m in where different voices and performances can lead to hugely base breaking divides over character interpretations (cough, Sonic the Hedgehog, cough), it makes Sam & Max’s ability to avoid this all the more impressive. Especially for a series otherwise so unconcerned with canon.

Edit: My brainworms are clearly worse than I thought because I did in fact make that Sam voice comparison and you can read it here.

[carpet---burn]

I knew the models looked weird.

They changed our favorite freelance police's bodies.

:[

Especially Sam.

Look at his face.

He's so derpy looking. ToT

Still love them though.

That's the website where I found the models for any curious folk.

[creature-feature-creature]

Rate tardigrade?

:)

omg someone read that I could do real animals too thankyouthankyouaa

TARDIGRADE FROM REAL LIFE

from @nyyxqueen

By the way, categories are gonna change a little due to it being REAL

Looks; 5/10 - Everything about this guy is REALLY cute, except for the extra skin folds. These unsettle me. They're called water bears though, and they do look like them.

It does have stub legs though. Added bonus. I can't really make this as long as I normally would because nobody spent a while drawing/modeling what this guy would look like.

Abilities; 10/10 - ok. They've literally been in space. They can go 10 YEARS without water. They can survive extreme pressure and extreme temperatures. Literally would survive the apocalypse.

There's a common myth that these guys live on you, but they actually live in moss! Even though they're almost immortal.

(They were also in sam and max so I'm a little biased)

They're just COOL. Go look at some cool tardigrade facts because I can't list them all here >:)

Edit; @plural-void in the notes told me that they could actually survive anything except for their natural predators. So yeah they found the almost immortality glitch

Overall - 7.5/10; its tardiGRADE is A+

*comedy drumset noise*

[way-too-cool-raybot]

With the remaster of season 3 coming out soon I feel the need to tell any new fans or people interested in the series that there are a lot of Really Terrible Jokes (read as: Offensive) in the sam and max series. Like especially in the telltale games. I feel like if someone wanted a feel for the characters before getting tossed in to All Of That the best introduction would be This Time It's Virtual or *maybe* Hit the Road (I can't recall any too bad Jokes in that one but it was made in the 1990s so). I'd suggest the cartoon but at least with the games there's none of the stuff that happens in the Literal First Episode of the show. But season 3 goes hard and unfortunately has a lot of callbacks to prev seasons so I can't entirely discount them.

[crow-man72]

I JUST THOUGHT OF THIS AND I HAD TO POST ABOUT IT SOMEWHERE SO HERE WE GO SAM AND MAX RANT TIME

Ok so Sam and Max have canonically been alive since the 80s, so that would make them in their late 40s-50s right? BUT in an interview (can't find the exact interview sadly 💔💔) Steve Purcell said that Max is canonically 35, and based on some dialogue from the comics Sam is probably younger than Max, which contradicts the time they were born. Time has also been shown to move the same in the real world (e.g, the time cards in 204 they show the years that each area takes place, in TTIV Sam says "it's 2021 Max, nobody calls them yuppies anymore" ect.).

SO WHAT IF the Telltale games come first in the Sam and Max timeline, which would explain how Max made stag films in the 60s even though his parents were probably teens/preteens then, and also explains how Sam and Max are in their mid 30s in 2021. This would have to mean that the Crime Fighting ending is canon (which imo is pretty sad because I think the Crime Fighting ending is pretty mid compared to the Adventure ending, and the fandom has basically all used the Adventure ending when making continuations from TDP) because in the Adventure ending Sam swipes away the time machine Max used to get to Sam's dimension. The Crime Fighting ending has way more evidence that it's canon too, such as Max using the elevator in Poker Night 2.

thank you for coming to my Ted talk

[pppuffin]