#the company was set up by John who only hires ex-army people

[on-a-lucky-tide]

I just got home from two days in the forest with a group of former soldiers. I made fire, chopped wood, caught and cooked my own dinner, and slept under the stars. I love camping, but this was a whole new level of experience.

And now I can't help but imagine Geralt setting up a "reconnect with nature" type bushcraft camp at Corvo.

[toomanystoriessolittletime]

Devil in disguise 2/3

Summary: You weren’t the girl who get attention from guys. You were the friend that always ended up alone at the bar, nursing her drink until you got home by yourself, while your friends took home someone. That’s how you suppossed this night would go to. Until an Apple Martini you didn’t order was set down in front of you. Looking around to make out who had ordered it for you, you saw him. John Wick.

Pairing: John Wick / F! Plus size Reader

Wordcount: 4.101

Warnings: smut

A/N: Thank you all so so much for the response to the first chapter. I hope you like the second one as much as the first.

Masterlist

Taglist:

@meetmeinthematinee​ / @hisdeadwife​​ / @fanficsrusz​​ / @mrrightismrreeves​​ / @ladyreapermc​ / @theolsdalova​ / @pinkzsugar​​ /   @ivymiiru​​ / @paanchu786​ / @penwieldingdreamer​ / @greenmanalishi​ / @itsmydreamlifethings​  / @blackeyedangel9805​  / @wiskey-chaser

It was a week later, you were definitely not sleeping in his sweater because you missed him, when there was a knock on your door. It was Saturday morning and you didn't really have plans for this weekend. You hadn't heard from him, or Nadia in fact and if it wasn't for the sweater you were wearing, you would think you dreamed last Friday night. You couldn't stop thinking about him.

His eyes lighting up as he talked about his hobby. Books. The pain as he told you about his ex-fiance, the woman he wanted to get out of this business for. The woman he wanted to marry only to find out that she had been hired by his employer to make him agree to the last thing he had done. Your heart broke for him.

Another knock on your door made you jump.

“Who's there?” You asked.

“It's John.” A voice called back making you almost choke, your eyes wide in surprise as you looked down at the clothes you were wearing.

“I brought breakfast,” he added. Looking around your apartment, you thanked God you had a nightly cleaning session. You looked at yourself in the mirror, as you walked towards the door, your eyes widening, pulling his sweater over your head, throwing it towards your bedroom, straightening the thin tank top you were wearing underneath. Undoing the messy bun you had on the top of your head, you shook your hair and put your glasses straight.

“I wasn't expecting company,” you said, the door still closed in front of you.

“Can you make an exception?” He asked, and you smiled. Slowly you opened the first then the second lock, opening the door.

“How did you find out this was my apartment?” You asked, looking up at him.

“It was the only one without a name on it.” He grinned, looking down at you. You still hid your body behind the door. John was wearing jeans and a gray shirt, a leather jacket over his shoulder and a full bag from a place called Continental on his arm. His hair looked soft, sunglasses on top of his head. It was the complete opposite of his look last week.

“Are you going to invite me in or do I have to eat all that by myself?” He asked sheepishly.

“First I need to change, but please come in.” You opened the door and waited for him to step through it, closing it after him.

“The kitchen is the last door on the left side.” You said quietly, admiring how his back stretched his shirt. He turned around, his eyes wandering over your whole body, making you bite your bottom lip before his eyes were on yours again.

“Hey.” He smiled, stepping closer to you.

“Hey,” you whispered as he leaned down, finding your lips in a soft kiss that made your breath hitch.

“I'm gonna...” you stuttered, gesturing towards your bedroom. Grinning he nodded before he turned around and walked to your kitchen.

You found him trying to work your coffee machine when you got back to the kitchen. You had put on your favorite sweater dress and some fluffy socks. You had no idea what the day would bring now that John was here, but you had intended to spend your whole day studying for one of your exams next week.

“Do you need any help?” You ask, making him jump.

“I wanted to make coffee...”

“The machine is broken.” You giggled, making him sigh as he chuckled and shook his head.

“How do you drink coffee then?”

“I don't. I stopped last year. I have a huge collection of tea though.”

“Tea it is then.” He smiled.

“So John... What have you been up to since last week?” You asked, suppressing a moan as you took a bite from the french toast he had brought. He had brought a very big collection of all the breakfast dishes you loved. French toasts, Pancakes, Sandwiches, Waffles and Eggs... 10 people could eat from that alone.

“Your friend Nadia...”

“Oh, she's not my friend anymore,” you interrupted him.

“Thank God.” He laughed.

“Well, I brought her home and picked up my last check from her father. And after that, I have tried to figure out what to do with my life now that I can choose what to do.” He said.

“And have you come to any conclusion?”

“Not really. I bought a house a little outside of New York I wanted to live in with... Anyway, now that that's not happening I'm thinking of maybe leaving the country... But to be honest I have no idea. I don't know how to live outside of this... world.” He sighed.

“John, how long have you been doing... what you're doing?” You asked.

“Since I was 15... which would be almost 35 years.” He said after a while. Looking at him you didn't know what shocked you more. That he had been... killing people for 35 years or that he was 50 years old.

“Wow... Okay, I need to process this. You are 50 years old? No way.” You said. Shyly he looked at you before he nodded. “Well not yet. My birthday is in 6 weeks.”

“Still. How do you do it?” You reached out stroking his cheek.

“I don't think about it very much?”

“You're 24 years older than me...” you said quietly.

“Is that a problem?” He asked.

“I don't know,” you said honestly. Because you didn't. The only relationship you ever had was with a man your age. And it didn't end well...

“I can understand that.”

“But maybe we can find out? I like you, John. Despite everything you have told me last week, I like you and I want to find out if this could be something.” You shrugged nervously. “I mean if you want to. I still don't know why me in the first place, but...” You were interrupted by his lips on yours.

“I like you too.” He smiled against your lips.

“Yeah?”

“Why else would I drive to see you on a Saturday morning with so much food I could feed an army because I didn't know what you liked most?” He asked.

“John?” It was the same day, dinner time and John had stayed the whole day. You would have loved to go out with him, but you really had to study. He was perfectly fine with it, sitting next to you for the most time, reading a book he had picked from one of your shelves, his arms around your shoulders, making it hard for you to concentrate on anything but him, but you did manage. He had announced an hour ago that he was to cook dinner and had left with your key to buy some groceries.

“I brought you some brain food,” he said as he walked in, his arms loaded with bags to the kitchen and came back with a muffin, kneeling down in front of you.

“Has anyone ever told you that you're pretty perfect, Mr. Wick?” You smiled.

“No one,” he said.

“Well then let me be the first,” you said, taking the muffin to set it down next to you on the couch before you wrapped your arms behind his neck.

“Give me another week and I'm pretty sure you'll be over me,” he said.

“I don't think so,” you whispered, leaning into him as you kissed him. Moaning against his lips, as you felt his tongue brushing over your lips, you parted your lips, letting him push you against the couch, both of his hands on the headrest as he deepened the kiss. Out of breath, you looked up at him, his lips flushed, his hair in front of his eyes.

“I'm going to make dinner now,” he whispered.

Nodding slowly you bit your lip as he slowly pushed himself up, walking out of the living room. Sighing you rolled your eyes. How were you supposed to think of anything but his lips now?

John coming over on Saturdays kinda became a weekly occasion. Your last exams were coming up and you were stressing out. So John made it his goal to take care of you.

He even quizzed you when you were on the verge of a nervous breakdown, rewarding you with kisses that stole your breath, making you crave for more. What made it all weirder for you was that he didn't expect anything in return. He seemed to want to take care of you, making sure to always be there for you.

You never had someone in your life who took care of you like John did. It still was a mystery to you what he was seeing in you. The chubby medical student. It wasn't that you were uncomfortable in your body. It was the way other people looked at you when you wore a dress that was a little shorter. When you were buying chocolate at the grocery store as if it would be a crime.

You loved your body, as long as you were by yourself. It was the outside world that made you think as if something was wrong with you. They didn't know you had danced ballet for most of your life. Even now when you had the time. Or that you hit the gym twice a week. All they saw was a few pounds where they weren't supposed to be, giving them the imaginative right to judge you.

But then there came John. Who saw you for what you were, not for how you looked. And you were falling for him. Hard. And there was nothing you could do against it.

It was the week before your final exam, you had been working 20 hours shifts at the hospital when John called you in the middle of the night, out of breath, his voice strained.

“Are you okay, John?” You asked sleepily, looking at the clock. 3:28 am.

“I'm sorry to wake you. I didn't know who else to call.”

“It's okay. Did something happen?” You sat yourself up, reaching for the lamp on your nightstand.

“I'm not sure. Dog hasn't been on his feet the whole day and she hasn't eaten and I'm getting a bit worried.”

“You have a dog?” You asked surprised, searching for your glasses.

“I do.”

“Has she been drinking?”

“I don't think she did.” He sounded worried.

“Hm... I don't know enough about dogs to tell you if you should be worried. There is a pet clinic down the street where I live that is opened around the clock if you want to be sure.”

“Okay. I'm going there now,” he said.

“Uh. Okay. Good. I'll meet you there,” you said right away.

“You don't have to.”

“I want to, John.”

There was a pause on the phone before he sighed.

“Okay. I'll need an hour.”

“Meet you there.” You said and ended the call.

An hour later you found yourself in front of the pet clinic, you had put on some sweatpants and a hoodie, your hair in a messy bun when you saw John's car approaching the building. He got out, quickly kissing you as you met him at his car, before he opened his passenger's door, carrying out a beautiful gray pit bull.

“Oh, she looks sleepy.” You said, carefully reaching to stroke her head.

“I know. That's what worries me.”

“Let them take a look.” You said, opening the door to the pet clinic for him.

“See? She's going to be okay.” You said, putting your arm around John's waist, your head on his shoulder, as you waited for Dog to be finished. She was getting an infusion of fluids and a shot of antibiotics.

“Thank God.” He whispered exhausted.

“Do you want to stay over? You don't have to drive back home. That way if something else is up with her we are right around the corner.” You proposed. He looked at you.

“You have your exam in two days, I don't want to get on your nerves.” He said.

“I wouldn't have offered, if you would, John. I would check in on your hourly anyway, so you're really doing me a favor here.” You winked at him and yawned in the next moment making him chuckle.

“Come on. I'll take you home.” He finally said, kissing your temple as he saw his dog slowly walking towards him on her own feet.

After you had put out some blanket for Dog to lie on, you made your way back to your bedroom getting your clothes off on your way. You had left your tank top and shorts on beneath, and all you wanted to do was go back to bed. Snuggling into your bed you sighed.

“John?” You called for him and heard him coming nearer.

“Yeah?”

“Are you coming? I'm dead tired.” You asked.

“I can take the couch.” He said. Propping yourself up on your elbows you looked at him confused.

“Why would you do that?”

“I didn't want to assume...”

“Come here, John.” You smiled. He turned the lights off behind him, took his jeans off and slipped under the covers next to you. You snuggled to his body immediately, sighing when you felt his arms around you, pulling your closer, your head resting on his chest.

“Do you have to get up early?” John asked.

“I have the next two weeks off...” You whispered, eyes already closed.

“Good.” He whispered, kissing your hair before both of you fell asleep.

You woke to someone kissing your neck, your back pressed against a warm body. Sighing you tilted your head, making him chuckle behind you.

“Good morning.” His raspy deep voice whispered against your ear.

“Hm...” You smiled pushing your body against his as you stretched, making him moan as your ass rubbed against his growing bulge, making you gasp.

“What time is it?” You ask.

“It's almost 11. I was already out with Dog.” He said, feeling his big hand ran down your side, resting on your upper thigh.

“And what do we do with this young day?” You ask, moaning as his other hand sneaked under your top.

“We could stay in bed...” He suggested his hand grabbing one of your boobs, making you groan.

“What has gotten into you?” You ask.

“Too fast?” He asked.

“God no.” You laughed and turned around to look at him.

“You have been nothing but a gentleman the last... 6 weeks. I can live with a bit faster.” You said, your hands resting on his naked chest. Your finger tracing one of his many tattoos. His hair was still damp, he must have been in the shower before he got back to bed.

“Careful what you ask for, Princess...” He whispered, turning your body, so you were on your back. He leaned above you, his weight resting on both of his arms next to your head as he leaned down and kissed you hard, pressing his body against yours.

“Princess?” You asked as he left your lips and kissed your neck.

“I still don't know your name.” He smiled against your skin, his beard lightly scratching, making you shudder. Slowly he pulled off your top, throwing it away as he knelt between your legs. As he looked at you you felt shy all of a sudden. There he was, a dream of a man, having eyes for no one else but you. Shaking your head you smiled shyly, looking away from him.

“If you don't want to...” John said.

“Kiss me.” You whispered, pushing yourself up to sit, your chest against his.

“Please.” You added looking up at him. You felt his arms coming around you, keeping you close to him as he carefully kissed you. Bringing your arms around him, holding onto him as he stole your breath you whimpered when you felt him bite your lip.

“Fuck me, John.” You whispered against his lips, making him moan.

“With pleasure, Princess.” He said lowly, his eyes dark.

“John...” You sighed, your nails gently scratching his back, as his hands wandered down your back, grabbing your ass, pushing your body against his.

“On your back, hands above your head.” He whispered demanding, making you swallow.

“Yes, Mr. Wick.” You smirked, letting yourself fall on your back, crossing your arms above your head.

“Keep them there.” He grinned, leaning down, kissing the valley between your breasts.

“Yes, Sir.” You sighed, feeling his warm hands on your hips his fingers slowly pulling your shorts down, leaving you completely naked in front of him.

“So beautiful.” He whispered, kneeling between your legs, his eyes roaming over your body. Slowly he leaned down, finding your lips in a kiss before he kissed down your body. You were grabbing the headrest of your bed by now, the urge to touch him becoming overwhelming as he kissed your hipbone. Looking up at you as he lay between your thighs you bit your lip as he put a soft kiss on your clit.

Spreading your legs for him he kissed your outer lips, making you whimper before he ran his tongue through your folds, humming like it was the best thing he tasted in forever as you moaned.

“Fuck John.”

“Not yet.” He grinned, wickedly looking up at you between your thighs before he really got to work. Kissing, nibbling, sucking on your clit while you felt his hand massaging your inner thigh, his hand stopping over your entrance, looking up at you, his mouth sucking hard on your clit as he entered you with one of his fingers. His arm, holding your hip down, pressing it to the mattress you groaned, panting, as he flicked his tongue over your clit, his finger finding that spot inside, you could never reach yourself, making you quiver. Adding a second finger he put pressure on the spot while he sloppily kissed your clit.

“Don't stop...” You moaned, your legs crossing him in.

“Are you close, Princess?” He asked, adding a third finger, replacing his mouth with his thump, rubbing your clit as he leaned up, kissing you. Moaning into his mouth as you tasted yourself on his lips.

“Please...” You moaned against his mouth.

“Please what?” He asked, breathing heavily as he looked at you, leaning over you.

“Please fuck me, John.” You whimpered, rolling your hips against his hand.

“Not yet.” He said again, sucking harshly at one of your nipples.

Throwing your head back you moaned out his name as you were surprised by your orgasm, riding it's waves until you felt your body relax. Out of breath as you looked at him, cleaning his fingers from your arousal, making you bite your lip.

“John?” You asked, making him raise an eyebrow.

“Let me ride you.” You let go of the headrest, pushing against his chest, making him fall on his back, as you straddled his hips. His hands coming down on your thighs with a smack. You moaned leaning down to press your body against his, kissing him hard.

Enjoying the feeling of his strong chest against your breasts you moved your body, your hands sneaking into his tight boxer shorts, gasping as you palmed his big cock.

He helped you as you pulled down his underwear, both laughing as it flew through the room.

Rubbing yourself over his cock both of you moaned, his hands coming to rest on your ass, his hands massaging your skin as he looked up at you, jaw clenched. Eyes dark.

Reaching for his cock you pumped him twice before you raised your hips, lining him up against your entrance and slowly sank down on him, never breaking eye contact, enjoying the feeling of him stretching your inner walls in the best way possible. Moaning when he filled you completely, you stilled, John pushing himself up, one of his arms on your back as his other hand came to rest on your ass, he slowly began to roll his hips, making you whimper.

“You feel so good... wrapped tight around my cock.” He groaned, his lips finding your collarbone, his tongue tracing its line before he kissed the top of your breast, while he kept rolling his hips against yours. Slowly you began to ride him, holding on to his body, as he guided you up and down, sucking on your nipple as you threw your head back.

Putting his face between your hands you guided him up to you, kissing him with a hunger, when he took both of your hands, pulling them behind your back, and holding them there with one hand, making you gasp.

“Let go, Princess.” He whispered as he thrust hard up into you, making you moan out loud as his hips slapped against yours. While he was more or less tying your hands behind your back he leaned his body on his other arm and began to fuck into you roughly, fastening his pace, grunting, while you kept repeating his name like a prayer. You could feel your orgasm building, your knees already shaking.

“Are you gonna come for me again?” He asked low. Not being able to form a single word you only nodded, your little finger brushing over his wrist of the hand that was holding yours behind your back. He let go of his grip, taking your hand into his and watched you with dark eyes as you tried to keep eye contact while your second orgasm made you almost pass out. Whimpering you let him fuck you through it, breathing hard as he slowed his pace, your head falling down on his shoulder. Laughing you looked at him.

“I think I can't feel my legs.” You said.

“I'll take that as a compliment.” He grinned smugly.

“You wanna come in my mouth, John?” You leaned close against his ear, feeling him twitch inside you.

“You'll be the death of me.” He moaned as you clenched your muscles around him, making him slap your ass as you laughed and climbed off of him on wobbly limbs.

Kneeling next to him, you took his cock in your hands pumping it a few times before you sucked the tip in, enjoying the taste he left on your tongue. Swallowing him until you almost gagged your bobbed your head, trying to keep a pace as you felt his hands on your head, gathering your hair so he could look at you.

“I'm wanna fuck your pretty mouth one day...” He groaned, watching down at you sucking his cock, his hair clinging to his sweaty forehead.

“What's stopping you now?” You asked releasing him with a plop, pumping him with your hand. You reached for his other hand, as you leaned down, looking at him the entire time as you wrapped your mouth around his cock, raising an eyebrow at him. Shaking his head you felt his hips move slowly at first, testing how far he could go, when his hand grabbed your hair harder, pulling it slightly as he continued to move his hips, thrusting into your mouth deeper and deeper, making you gag. Relaxing your throat you rested one of your hands on his hip, in case you had to stop him.

“I'm gonna cum, Princess.” He moaned. You hummed around him, watching him fall apart, tasting the salty bitterness he released, swallowing every single drop of him.

Biting your lip as you released him his arms pulled you up to lay on his chest, his lips finding yours.

“I think I'll keep you.” He said against your lips, pushing your hair out of your eyes, as you entwined your legs with his, enjoying his warm arms around you.

“That's convenient, I wasn't going to let you go.” You breathed back before you let your head rest on his chest.

[nazariolahela]

Something Domestic: Chapter 8

A/N: Hey y'all! This is a new TRR AU I’ve been working on. This story is told in first-person narrative, from Riley’s (MC) POV. There will likely be smidges of canon in this, but not too much. Thanks for reading, and please leave feedback, and/or if you would like to be tagged.

Catch up here

Series Tags: @burnsoslow​ @aworldoffandoms​ @dcbbw​ @ladyangel70​ @texaskitten30​ @sunandlemons​ @jlynn12273​ @indiacater​ @jared2612​ @rainbowsinthestorm​ @drakesensworld​ @badchoicesposts​ @msjr0119​ @katurrade​ @blackcoffee85​ @cynicalworlds-blog​ @hopefulmoonobject​ @beardedoafdonutwagon​ @cmestrella​ @sugarandspice-milkandhoney​

Synopsis: When Riley Brooks takes a new job as a nanny for the affluent Rhys family in New York’s Upper East Side, she assumes she’s just going to care for the children of the couple who hired her. But instead of just school pick-ups and afternoon snacks, she also finds herself spending time with Liam, the handsome divorced dad. Can Riley control her feelings for Liam while still performing the job she was hired for?

All characters are the property of Pixelberry Studios. Thanks for allowing me to borrow them.

Chapter Summary: Riley and Liam get to know each other and sparks fly.

I look at the clock on the microwave and sigh. It’s 7:02 p.m. and Madeleine still isn’t home. Good thing I didn’t have any Friday night plans. Not that I mind staying late, but a little heads up would have been nice. If she doesn’t show up soon, I’m going to have to get dinner started for the kids. They’re currently upstairs in the playroom, watching a movie, so I’m down here in the living room — sprawled out on the couch — waiting for someone to relieve me of my duties. Mara appears from the elevator a few minutes later, holding a plastic CVS bag.

“Here you are, Miss. The items you requested.”

I take the bag from her and pull out the contents: A bottle of Starbeans Frappuccino Vanilla Coffee, a bag of sour gummy worms, and the latest issue of Trend Magazine. If I'm going to be stuck here, I might as well have sustenance and entertainment. As I sit on the couch, chewing on a gummy worm, I scroll through my social media newsfeed. Looking at photos of my friends and acquaintances getting ready to start their weekend, I feel a tinge of jealousy. Okay, that’s enough of that. I close out the app and reach into the bag, grabbing the frap and the issue of Trend.

Time to catch up on my celebrity gossip. I flip through the pages, thankful there aren’t any more photos of Liam and Madeleine playing “fake family.” Just your daily celebrity feuds, who’s dating who, and your run-of-the-mill rumors. If I didn’t secretly love this stuff so much, I’d hate it.  Mara excuses herself to check in with Bastien, so I pull out my phone to text Hana. As I open my text app, the phone rings with an incoming call from her. “Hey, girl!”

“Riley, where are you? My date with Meghan is at 8 p.m. and I can’t decide on an outfit,” she says frantically.

I exhale. “I’m still here. Madeleine’s not home from work yet.”

“I hope everything is okay. Did you text her? Have you heard from Liam?”

“I did but got no answer. Liam should be home soon. If I’m not home before you leave for your date, I just wanted to wish good luck tonight. Whatever you decide to wear, it’s going to knock her socks off.”

She laughs. “You’re ridiculous. Call me if you need me to bring you anything.”

“Will do. Love you!”

“Love you more!”

We hang up and I set the phone back down on the coffee table. I pick up the magazine and resume reading. A few minutes later, I hear the ding of the elevator door and sit up to find Liam entering the penthouse. He looks up from his phone and spots me sitting in the middle of the living room. He shoots me a questioning glance. “Riley? What are you still doing here?”

“Madeleine never showed up. I couldn’t just leave the kids here alone.”

His jaw tightens. “Thank you for that. I’m sorry that she never called. Next time that happens, please don’t hesitate to call me. You shouldn’t have to give up your Friday night plans because my children’s mother can’t pick them up on time. I’ll make sure you get paid overtime for today as well.”

“It’s really no trouble at all. I didn’t have any plans. My roommate has a date tonight, so I was probably just going to sit on my couch and catch up on Real Housewives of Ducitora. Besides, I’m not that big into New York nightlife. Too loud, too many people, too expensive.”

He smirks. “Well, if you’re not busy, why don’t you hang out for a while? I have a bottle of wine chilling in the fridge, and Real Housewives OnDemand.”

I bite my lip, contemplating his offer. “I don’t want to impose.”

“Trust me. You’re not,” he replies, and my chest tightens. One drink won’t hurt. Right? He’s not asking me to have sex with him. Think of it as a chance to get to know him better. I nod and he smiles. He makes his way to the kitchen to retrieve the wine. While he’s gone, I grab my purse and make my way to the bathroom. I check my reflection, making sure I don’t look like a homeless bag lady. I pull the hair tie from my hair and finger-comb through it. I then grab my tinted lip balm and brush a couple of coats across my lips.

Satisfied with my appearance, I flick off the bathroom light and head back to the living room. He returns a moment later, setting the bottle and two glasses on the coffee table. He glances down at my half-empty bottle of frap and the gossip mag. He picks it up, thumbing through the pages and frowns. “I can’t believe you read this crap. Half the things they say in here are total bullshit.”

I shrug. “It’s my guilty pleasure. I like getting a look at how the other half lives. Until I started working here, I assumed all you rich and famous people live in McMansions with gold fixtures and an army of servants. I bet you don’t even cook for yourself.”

He chuckles, the sound warming me from within. “There’s a reason for that. Ask my kids what a terrible cook I am.”

I couldn’t hide my smile. “That explains the personal chef.”

He flashes me a boyish grin that shoots through my body, down to my core. My gods, save me from my lustful ways. He pops the cork of the wine bottle and pours two glasses, handing me one. I bring my wine to my lips and take a long sip. His eyes watch me as my tongue sweeps up a stray drop of wine dripping down the side. He visibly swallows. I think about what Charlotte told me and figure now is a good time to bring it up.

“So, I wanted to talk to you about something Charlotte mentioned to me today.” He sets his glass down and focuses his attention on me. I fiddle with my wine glass, doubting myself. He nods for me to continue. I exhale. “Okay. So, she mentioned that Madeleine has friends over from time to time.”

He rolls his eyes. “Penelope and Kiara. Yeah, those two are always around. Those three have been friends since college. I swear, when I married her, apparently they were a package deal.”

Ooh. This is awkward. “Actually, she mentioned a guy. She said that he’s over here frequently and that they spend a substantial amount of time in her room while you’re at work.”

Anger flashes in his eyes. Then almost immediately, he regains his composure. He exhales loudly. “I see. You know, I always suspected that she was bringing men into my home, but I never imagined she was doing it in front of my kids.” He gulps down his wine and pours himself another glass.

“I’m sorry I had to be the one to tell you.”

He shakes his head and sighs sadly. “Don’t be. It’s not your fault.”

We sit in silence for several minutes. He brings his wine glass to his mouth, staring into it with a blank expression. I watch him from the corner of my eye, making sure he’s not going to explode. Needing to break the tension, I set my glass on the table and lean back in my seat. “So, I hear you’ve been telling your friends all about me.”

His chokes on his wine and his cheeks immediately flush. “They told you about that?”

“Yeah, for a guy who doesn’t want his ex to find out, you sure talk a lot.”

He grimaces and sets his glass down. “In my defense, Drake, Max, and Liv are the only people I would ever tell something like that because I know they won’t tell her. From the moment I met you, I knew I was attracted to you. And in a moment of drunkenness, I may have confessed that to my friends. I didn’t mean for them to tell you though.”

He looks away. Is he embarrassed? Thinking back to what Drake told me at the bar that night, Liam hasn’t been with anyone since Madeleine. Assuming they were having sex regularly, he said it’s been a few months since he filed for divorce. Which means they probably weren’t having sex at all towards the end. Remembering my own drought, my mind wanders to that forbidden place. Is he lonely? Does he seek the company of certain women to fill the void his wife left? He doesn’t need those women when I’m more than willing to offer my “services” for free. I scold myself for thinking such stupid thoughts and take another sip of my wine.

Clearing his throat, he quickly changes the subject. “So, tell me. Other than gossip rags, trashy reality TV marathons, and hanging out at the Double Tappe, what do you like to do in your spare time?”

I drain the last of my wine and set the glass on the coffee table. “Not much. I do like to read in my spare time. And not just tabloid magazines. I just finished the new John Grisham novel. Talk about intense. Other than that, I spend most of my time hanging out with Hana. We used to spend a lot of time at The Foundry, but the drinks got way too expensive. Plus, the male clientele there really doesn’t really do it for me anymore. Too many tech-bros.”

He nods then picks up the bottle and both glasses and takes them into the kitchen. After depositing them in the sink, he returns to the couch. If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear he is sitting a little closer this time. I can feel the heat radiating from his thigh a mere inches from mine. My hands folded in my lap, I move them to the top of my thighs. His own hands rest at his sides, his fingers tapping the cushion. I stare down at his fingers as they inch closer. I look up and he’s staring at me, lust burning in his eyes.

“You said you weren’t into tech-bros. Are there any other eligible bachelors that have caught your eye lately?”

I blush. “Just one…”

“Anyone I know?”

My cheeks redden. Well, Riley. It’s now or never. He’s already told me how he feels about me. Why not let him know I reciprocate those feelings? He moves his hand to my knee and begins moving his thumb back and forth. My heart thunders. “Yeah. You.”

His smile fades as he moves even closer to me on the couch. “Riley. You should tell me goodnight.”

My breath hitches. “Why?”

“Because if you don’t, I’m going to kiss you.”

“What if I want you to kiss me?”

Before he can answer, he leans over and takes my head in his hands and presses his lips to mine. My shock turns to awe as I part my lips, inviting his tongue between them. I crawl forward into his lap, straddling his waist and wrap my arms around his neck. I press my chest to his, feeling his heart beating fast. My head tilts to the side, and he moves his mouth down my neck, sucking on my pulse. I tug his earlobe between my teeth and he growls, kissing and sucking harder. I’m probably going to have a hickey tomorrow, but who cares?

He moves his mouth back to my lips and his hands slip beneath the hem of my shirt, slowly moving up my back. I can feel his dick straining under his dress pants as I press my core against his crotch. He groans in my mouth, the sound shooting straight to my pussy.

Oh my god, this is so wrong. But why does it feel so right? His hands fumble with the clasps on my bra. I reach between us and begin tugging on his belt. The heat between us is blazing and I can’t stop myself. Finally, he breaks our kiss.

“We have to stop.”

“What? Why?”

He swallows. “You know why.”

“Is it because of the kids? If you’re worried about them interrupting us, we could go to your bedroom.”

He groans and ohmygod it does things to me. “It’s not that…”

“You don’t want to?” I ask.

“Of course I do. I’ve wanted to since the moment you walked in here that first day for your interview. I look at you and all I want to do is take you all over this apartment. You can obviously feel it,” he says. My eyes dart down between us to the evident bulge in his pants, and I bite my lip. His eyes follow mine; his expression amused. Then, his face goes serious again. “But my divorce isn’t final yet, and I can’t risk anything that would put your job or the kids’ livelihood in jeopardy. Besides, you don’t want to get involved with me. Divorced Dad lusting after the hot nanny. I’m like a walking cliche.”

I sigh, then nod. His words are the same ones that Hana has been preaching since Day One. And the same ones that Olivia spewed at me that night at the Double Tappe. Maybe I should start listening to these people. Not to mention, the kids are upstairs. And Madeleine could walk in at any moment. I slide off his lap and rise to my feet. “I should probably go.” I make my way to the kitchen and start gathering my things. He stands to adjust himself, then follows me.

“I’m sorry if I took advantage of you.”

I roll my eyes. “Liam. You didn’t take advantage of me.”

“You’re my kids’ nanny. I’m only trying to protect you.”

I open my mouth to respond when the ding of the elevator cuts through the silence in the room, and Madeleine emerges. She notices me standing in the kitchen, hastily packing up my tote. “You’re still here?”

“Yeah, no thanks to you,” Liam snaps. “You could have called her. Or me.”

Madeleine shoots daggers at him. “I got held up in a meeting. I didn’t have my phone on me. And besides, you’re here to relieve her, so what’s the problem?”

“The problem is that you shirked your responsibilities. You’re supposed to be here to relieve Riley in the evening so she doesn’t have to stay here all night. They’re your kids, not hers.”

She laughs, although there is no humor in her voice. “What does she care? She’s getting paid regardless.”

“She doesn’t get paid to raise our kids for us. That’s our job,” he growls.

Needing to get away from this situation ASAP, I grab my tote bag and scurry out of the kitchen. “Uhh...I’m gonna head out. I’ll see you guys Monday morning.”

As they argue, I make my way to the elevator and scramble inside. Once the doors close, I text Mara and tell her to meet me downstairs. I reach up and touch my lips, still feeling them tingle from his kiss. Did we really just do that? What would have happened if he hadn’t stopped it? I can’t stop thinking about that kiss as the elevator takes me to the ground floor. His hands up my shirt, the taste of his lips, the scent of his cologne. The way his dick rubbed against my center as I straddled him. My body is desperate for release, and all I can think about is how much he clearly wanted it too.

I should have known that hormones + alcohol = bad things. Although it was nice that he was a gentleman and restrained himself, part of me is angry with him for working me up like that, just to shut it down. Hello, lady blue balls. My name is Riley. The elevator reaches the lobby and I’m greeted by the sight of Mara waiting for me. She follows me out to the waiting cab and holds the door as I get in. Once I’m in, she taps the hood of the car and it pulls away from the curb. As the cab rolls down the street, I lean my head back on the seat and inhale, my emotions alternating between anger and humiliation.

Shit is going to be really awkward come Monday.

[londontantric-blog1]

Sex, Drugs, and Rock

The area that is now known as Turkey played a major role in the Mystery Religions. The use of drugs to create "religious" experiences was developed to a fine art by various occult fraternal mystery religion groups in the Turkey area. The Assassins from where we get the word hashish controlled parts of Turkey and Lebanon in Medieval times. They used drugs to gain the allegiance of their recruits. Some of the most powerful figures for the Illuminati have been Turks. The Grand Orient has had some powerful figures in Turkey. For instance, at the Masonic Congress of all the Grand Orients' (that's European Freemasonry- although several American presidents have been members of European Freemasonry) Grand Lodges, Bou Achmed came from Turkey. The Grand Lodge of Asia was represented by Sebeyck-Kadir from Asia. Bou Achmed took a big role in the Grand Orient's decisions.

As an aside, let me explain one example of the power of the Grand Orient in America. The Grand Orient was originally strong in Louisiana but spread itself to many other US. locations. Garfield, a very powerful man in the Grand Orient, managed to become US. President because the political process got deadlocked at the convention and the Masons suggested him as a compromise candidate. Although Garfield was an extremely powerful Mason, had been perhaps the youngest general in the US. Army during the Civil War, the Illuminati ordered him shot after he had served about a year in office as President. Garfield was reported by an eye-witness to Satanic rituals to have participated in the cannibalistic rites of Satanism done to gain the spiritual power of the eaten person. The Grand Orient Freemasonry has been linked to other orders of Freemasonry that are also called Rosicrucians. Pope John XXIII joined a Rosicrucian group that had links to European Freemasonry when he was in Turkey.

While the secret Grand Orient Freemasonry was very strong in Turkey in spite of its small numbers, the regular American Freemasonry granted a dispensation for a Masonic Lodge to operate in Smyrna, Turkey in May, 1863 but the charters were withdrawn on Aug. 27, 1880. However, it is interesting that of all the Turkish cities, Smyrna was definitely the best place for Freemasonry to gain recruits. Men like Achmed Pasha and many of the other Pasha family have been leaders within Freemasonry and the Illuminati. Achmed Pasha was a Satanist and had a large harem. Mehmet Talaat Pasha (1872-1921) was a Freemason and part of the Turkish revolution of 1908. He was the leader of the Young Turks, which was a joint project of the Sufis and the Frankist Satanists. (The type of Satanism led by the Frank family has had connections to Turkey for hundreds of years.) Mehmet Talaat Pasha was the Grand Master of the Grand Orient of Turkey. He was held the political position in Turkey of grand vizier of Turkey (1917-18). Another Turkish Pasha was part of the Turkish royalty running Egypt when Egypt was part of the Ottoman Empire. His name was Khedive Ismail Pasha and he was Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Egypt. It was this Turk, Khedive Ismail Pasha, who gave the famous Obelisk to the United States. This Obelisk was called Cleopatra's Needle and was originally erected in the city of the sun, Heliopolis, about 1500 B.C. The Obelisk is a representation of a human penis, because sun worship, worship of regeneration (sex) and worship of the sun god Satan were all tied together. Masons helped with the moving of the obelisk, and its dedication when it arrived in New York City. Large obelisks have been erected by Masons in New York, Washington D.C., Paris, the Vatican, and London. (If my memory serves me correct Berlin received one too at one time.)" (1)

Notice the importance of Smyrna as a source of Freemasonry here. That is where the Onassis family has operated potion-pushing or altered consciousness drugs for millennia.

Sometimes, when my tiny head is spinning with disinfotainment and other artifacts of the mediasphere, I try to think what archaeologists and social historians 2,000 years from now might make of our particular little epoch. How, for instance, would they parse the word "drug"?

Is a "drug dealer" a pharmacist or a petty criminal? When we talk about "reasonably priced drugs for seniors," are we discussing marijuana or Lipitor {or Levitra}? What would they make of the fact that the last four American administrations have declared a "war on drugs" while taking money from drug companies?

Why is it bad when residents of Colombia build mansions from profits on the sale of drugs, but it's good when residents of Newport, R.I., do the same thing? When one person cannot live without "lifesaving drugs," we express great sympathy, unless that person is a "drug addict," in which case we may even throw him in jail. When a mood-altering drug is sold in pill form in stores, it's called an antidepressant and hailed as a medical breakthrough. When a mood-altering drug is sold on the streets, it's called felony drug trafficking and subject to stiff criminal penalties. see here london tantric

Because we are native speakers of Americanadianese, we can wend our way through the contradictions. We know that the bad drugs are the ones the cause euphoria and impair judgment, unless the drug is alcohol, but that's not ever called a drug, so there's no confusion there. We know that the good drugs are the ones that cure diseases or relieve symptoms, except sometimes the good drugs are ineffective or even counterproductive in achieving those goals.

Street dealers do not finance experimental trials on the effectiveness of the drugs they sell. Drug companies do, but they fudge the results. Street dealers have a small feedback loop because customers can tell pretty quickly whether they're loaded or not. Drug companies have a long feedback loop because human beings can't instantly tell whether their cholesterol is being lowered or their blood thinned or their insulin production stimulated. A drug with a long feedback loop is clearly more profitable than one with a short feedback loop because the dealer can keep an ineffective drug on the shelves much longer.

Interestingly, the people who sell ineffective drugs are generally said to have made "honest mistakes." If a street dealer sold you an ineffective drug, you could take five of your friends and go back and have a brisk conversation with him. If a behind-the-counter dealer sold you an ineffective drug, you'd have to hire a lawyer and file a lawsuit and maybe, maybe, 10 years later you'd get some money, although probably you'd be dead by then.

Street dealers don't have patents on their drugs, which means that they'll always have plenty of competition. Drug companies do have patents, so they can set their prices without worrying about market economics. And when their patents run out, they can put out a drug with a slightly different formulation, promote it like mad and sell the new drug in a monopolistic setting {With government mandated market support in order to manage the 'money-trees' while building bureaucracy.}. You have to wonder when street dealers are going to come up with Cocaine XR or LSD Reditabs.

Since the street dealer works in a competitive atmosphere, he has to keep his prices relatively low. In order to increase his profitability, he can "step on" his product, that is, dilute it. It would be unwise for a drug company to adulterate its product, but since it owns a monopoly, it can set prices artificially high and achieve the same profitability levels. A street dealer who knowingly poisons his clientele is called "the scum of the earth." A drug corporation that knowingly poisons its clientele is called "a tobacco company." People who sell illegal drugs often rot in jail for 20 or 30 years. People who sell legal drugs are often forced to attend tedious daylong board meetings. People who take illegal drugs are called "losers." People who take legal drugs are called "everyone in America."

Glad I'm not an archaeologist in 4040; my brain would ache a whole lot.

One pill makes you larger, and one pill puts you in jail, and please do not operate heavy machinery with the ones that mother gives you. {My ex-roommate was being told to apply for his old job as a forklift truck operator while being given drugs for Schizophrenia which he did not have. He was no liar and could not expose a potential employer to the insurance risks or his fellow employees to the life threat this would entail. Many drugs people use are impairing their driving prowess, and there are laws to take away their license that go unenforced.}

Driving that train, high on ethyl 4-1-piperidinecarboxylate.

Homeopathy:

It is a wonderful thing to have the Joy of Learning and to make a career that you find is related to your studies. There are so many ways to get a Doctor label and thus claim expertise in the many fields and disciplines which we have broken knowledge into. Some of this is counter to real expertise and much of it just sets people apart from knowledge and each other. But people are also being segmented into classes within the hierarchy of government backed by and for elites in all so many ways. Medicine has been one of their more dastardly tools alongside religion. This next little factoid reminds me of how Edward Gibbon almost died because the British Medical system would not approve vaccinations through use of scabs as had been done by the likes of Paracelsus or others in antiquity and which was approved in the France of his era.

"When the Cholera epidemic reached England, it provided another opportunity to compare homeopathic treatment with the conventional methods of the day. Regular allopathic medicine yielded a mortality rate of 59 percent compared to only 16 percent for the Homeopaths. (2) When these statistics were collected, the information was so startling that a medical commission was sent to the London Homeopathic Hospital to check the records. Though the data were duly verified, it was decided not to make them public, and the facts were not released until a hundred years later." (3)

The formation of the American Medical Association is a major issue against alternative healing or real care for people. In the late 19th Century as these issues were becoming apparent there were many who knew that the allopaths or medical doctors selling laudanum and the like were actually the 'Killing-trade'. There are signs that stress management (don't fret - sweat or exercise) and the connectiveness to the 'all' around us are again making a play to be considered in health maintenance. Vitamins and supplements are able to prove to even the most duped person receiving medical care that they work and yet some doctor's groups and the governments that back them still disqualify doctors who advise their usage.

Academics are subject to a 'Knowledge Filter' (Berkeley Law Professor - Johnson) or Literary Theory (UBC English Professor Graham Good) and the outright suppression of creative or thoughtful and meaningful potentials. (4) The concept of Bucky Fuller called 'the observer of the observed' and his more detailed 'creative realization' is part of what operates as we 'project' upon reality. For example the things we see are actually a mixture of fields of energy from the dross and less excited to the highly excited or vibrational energy inside the atomic structures. One way of visualizing this includes an aura, which is the field of energy not usually visible but associated with the solar body and integrative centers called chakras. Perhaps we could contemplate a time when all people had the ability to see or sense auras. In our socially normed 'projections' that include telling our children certain things do not exist, we have lost the conscious integration or incorporation of these fields of reality.

Psychic surgeons in the Philippines and Brazil have had their energy measured during operations at the same vibration rate of 7.8 cycles. It started me thinking about how we can alter our state and how others might perceive us in these altered states. Clearly if anyone could see all the spaces between our electrons and the nuclei or between the different atoms and molecules we wouldn't seem solid by a long shot. Thus these surgeons who use no utensils would be able to energize the infected or diseased body part or tumor to remove it at an altered vibration level. There have been solid documentaries with such credible support as X-rays before a San Francisco businessman had such a tumor removed and X-rays a year later showing it hadn't returned. In the end you must decide who has the most to gain from the arguments and whether or not you want to actualize your own potential. Once you do a few things the debunkers say are impossible - then a smile will come to your face; and the intellectual conflict loses all import.

String Theory knows about the harmonic forces that are less than solid which somehow combine to make what we perceive as a solid. The astrophysicists now have told us that 95% of the universe is 'Dark Matter' or 'Dark Energy' - so get with it before you are invisible and don't know it! Just kidding! We fear that which we cannot fully comprehend and our experts or priests and doctors include many enablers of our fears. We even allow fear to pre-empt love; which is ironic because at the end of our lives it's not the fears or the differences that matter the most but whether we loved and allowed ourselves to be loved as much as possible.

"Every new perception of knowledge is always based either directly or indirectly on older knowledge. InteliTapping allows us to connect with the oldest, yet most complete source of knowledge." (5)

Nature produced a show on the origins of music and the biological and archetypal impact it has had on our evolution and emotional wherewithal. Along with reed instruments from as long ago as 60,000 years that obviously show sophisticated development of technology, they had the cave operas of those who rubbed and drummed on stalactites. They posited that the tree-swinging hominid that like the Sumatran Gibbon co-ordinates community for protection through territorial chants, is not so much less aware as most of our great Lockean influenced academics seem to be. These animals also learned what plants are dangerous and what plants alter your spiritual consciousness. You can see it when your puppy goes outside for the first time and chews on some grass to settle its tummy. Our genes contain a lot of information or the ability to tap-in to much knowledge. The buzz you get from 'weed' is the buzz coming from your Thalami and Third Eye or Pineal gland that has a crystal radio receiver and grains or crystalline structures. Crystalline structures like quartz were known to be useful in the Lost Chord of the Druids and more ancient shamans. There are magnificent quartz caves in Central America and other places that would have been used by early hominids for a certainty.

The Best Body Language - Sex:

Long before Tantra or Bhakti Yoga there were many things ancients probably learned from intercourse, even more than most people do today. Today we have drugs like Viagra to enhance the longevity of the sexual encounter. The Mayans have natural drug for this. There are so many things which keep us busy or deflect us from spiritual insight as is noted in many Eastern systems which refer to the 'busy-mind' or samsara and the illusion of Maya.

Second degree Wiccan students who have advanced through a rigorous training in esoteric knowledge begin a quest that many would regard as perverse pursuit of pleasure and self-gratification. The partners are often involved in other committed relationships. When a man and a woman who are interested in spiritual growth combine to experience the Tantric or Bhakti (Yoga) or ritualistic growth potential to free more than just their personal self or ego to reach the heights of spiritual or psychic possibilities; who can say what is real and what is imagined. This effort to commune with spirit is termed 'working partners' and the allies or guides is who they really seek to merge or work with. The imagination is undoubtedly a part of the dynamic. It isn't necessary for them to care for each other in the way lovers do. I have not done this 'work'.

Many people talk about 'soulmates' or 'dual flames' and the words become mere shadows of the real potential. At the same time sex is a dirty 'word', and act, in much of society.

What can a writer say to convey the essence of all these things?

If I absolve myself from the challenge of integrating these concepts, rituals and soulful realities I would simply say trust your soul and know that wherever you may go you will find something more than whatever you thought was real to begin with.

If I talk about 'la petite mort' or empathic attunements with the soul of the partner that allows the self to disintegrate and become part of something larger than one person; and almost dissolve in the vastness of spirit - it will only seem like prose and poetry. The phrase 'la petite mort' or 'the little death' can in fact lead to a Kundalini type experience which can cause death.

Of course, one can wax eloquent and carry on at length about any of their hopes and desires. The essence of a great working partner most probably has little to do with these aspirations and more to do with the way the soul interpenetrates all people. The glimpses of insight gained through empathy and love with those who shared my needs are special to me and will forever stay in the part of my soul (if there is such a part) that cherishes all we were and hungers for what we could have been.

To deprecate the witch who 'draws down the moon' into their partner on the path to worship of things no one can fully know is the stuff of fearful and insecure people. That kind of bigotry without actual experience is rampant in all areas of society. It is truly just the tip of the proverbial iceberg when one contemplates all the ways mankind has developed to separate himself from what we are collectively and what god truly wishes for us to realize. No amount of constant seeking or obsession with these pursuits will ever get a man any closer to his soul than what he was while in his mother's womb.

The joy and creativity of the challenge to know is as great a gift as our maker can give us - except perhaps the acquiescence to the soul within the loved one you are blessed to have the chance to know and share your life with. In the moment of creation each day as we grow and learn to be, we are forever drawn by some force that seeks greater harmony and purpose for all energy.

Many (if not most) people think the 24 hour orgasm is like alien abductions but the EEG and other ways of measuring physical responses would convince them otherwise. A similar number of people find the misuse of Tantric Yoga by the likes of Crowley and Hubbard is tantamount to whatever is evil in man. I say they are right, but that is not the fault of Tantric Yoga. These techniques are very seductive and in some ways the participants would choose to have the experience even if they knew a great deal about it because it is a sad truism that Masters and Johnson or Kinsey are right. They say a full third of women never have an orgasm through intercourse.

Many people seldom enjoy sex and some significant number of the rest of us are in varying stages of poor to decent ability and openness to what great learning sex can provide. It could be said that our sexual relations are a good barometer of the state of society. I favour sex education and all the opportunities and responsibilities that go with the natural and soulful functions of the act. It is easy to understand why some people are hesitant to have strangers teach their loved ones about sex. But Father Leo Booth is right when he notes that parents who repress their children or foist suppressive behavior upon them are just as guilty of abuse.

[lookbackmachine]

Disney Afternoon History Part 1

Disney Afternoon Part 1

Transcript of: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-look-back-machine/id1257301677?mt=2

[music]

0:00:06 Speaker 1: Arthur Herbert Fonzarelli, The Fonz, was the pinnacle of cool for a generation. The leather jacket, the jukebox and "Ayyy". And in 1981, he hit the cultural height of fame with his own Saturday morning cartoon show. Unlike, say, Mork & Mindy in which Robin Williams was limited by the constraints of reality, there's nothing inherently animated about Happy Days, but that wasn't a deterrent for the Academy Award winning studio Hanna-Barbera, when they created this.

[music]

[video playback]

[music]

0:01:19 S1: The animated Fonz didn't just jump the shark, he time traveled so he could ride a brontosaurus. Jumping the shark seemed baked into the premise of many of the cartoons from this period, because they started as a gimmick and only kept gimmicking. Besides a big hit with The Smurfs, this period, for Hanna-Barbera, was littered with Scooby-Doo knockoffs.

[video playback]

0:01:49 S1: The studio that once produced The Flintstones, Quick Draw McGraw, Huckleberry Hound, Yogi, Snagglepuss and The Jetsons was producing uninspired paint by numbers replicas. The parity was at its peak when the animated Fonz had a supporting role in Laverne & Shirley in the Army. The cartoons essentially amounted to barely animated fan fiction. For years, art and commerce clashed on Saturday mornings and commerce had a far better record. And yet, only four years later, a cartoon would raise the artistic bar for the medium, and strangely, it would be based on the currency of kid commerce, candy.

[music]

0:02:34 S1: Animated television started in 1949, as it should, a talking rabbit wearing a suit of armour, riding a horse toward camera. It was the spectacular opening of Crusader Rabbit, whose other animation wasn't nearly as good as the opening. It was designed, with little to no movement, by Alex Anderson, who was inspired by Baby Weems, from Disney's behind the curtain feature, The Reluctant Dragon. In the Baby Weems segment, there are story boards with a tiny bit of motion included to keep it from being entirely static. There are quick cuts, camera movements, and narration to carry the short all the way to the end. After seeing this, Anderson believed he could use this barebones style to have notoriously expensive animation make financial sense for television. He partnered with Jay Ward and the two created The Crusader Rabbit shorts for NBC. The shorts were successful and ran for several years, which sparked Anderson and Ward to create the cartoons that they were famous for, Rocky and Bullwinkle and Dudley Do-Right. Despite their massive success, their partnership didn't end well. In fact, it got worse, even though Ward was already dead. Alex Anderson, animator.

0:03:45 Speaker 2: I was surprised that... To discover that my 50% equity in the characters had disappeared and was not being honored. Yeah, I went to court, sued, got them to acknowledge that I was the creator. I learned about it at his funeral, when I was doing a eulogy and the names of several of us who were doing a eulogy were indicated, and it said Alex Anderson, creator of Bullwinkle and Rocky. And somebody had scratched it out and said, "An artist who worked for Jay Ward." And I thought, "Well, what's this? Why is this in?" Then I started checking and I found that, indeed, Jay had registered the characters in his name.

0:04:31 S1: The show's limited animation technique was taken by Hanna-Barbera and updated with better animation to produce several hits like Ruff and Reddy, Huckleberry Hound, and eventually the Flintstones, a primetime hit for ABC in 1960. Hanna-Barbera went on to an unprecedented run of hits and non-hits, but when it came to television animation, Hanna-Barbera was in a class of their own. However, things fell off in the 1980s. In those years, The Smurfs were their only big hit. This left a gaping hole in the market that was filled by cartoons based on toys, like GI Joe and He-Man. But their ratings were drooping as well. And then something happened that had never happened before. During the entire history of television animation, from 1949 to 1984, the most famous animation company in the world never produced a single animated television cartoon. That was about to change with a single brunch, but the events leading up to that brunch showed an American titan in peril.

0:05:36 S1: Walt Disney was dead, to begin with, he died in 1966. But he was still running the company from his grave. After all the company's internal motto was, "What would Walt do?" But hypothesizing about what a genius would do is not the same as having the genius actually there. Because when it came to the question of "What would Walt do?" the company wasn't guessing correctly. Even though it was 1984, its last motion picture hit had been The Love Bug, in 1968. And so, because the company no longer had Walt, it figured the next best thing was Ron Miller, an ex Ram quarterback and Walt's son-in-law, who became CEO in 1978.

0:06:16 S1: The best quote to describe Miller's tenure was his own, "Because of Walt, because of his influence, I second-guess myself all the time." Miller wasn't only contending with Walt's legacy, he was also dueling with E. Cardon Walker, who was the chairman of the board. Walker had been one of Walt's right-hand men. He was in charge of advertising and public relations. And in his tenure, Walker launched the Disney Channel, opened Epcot and Disneyland Tokyo, but he also had peccadilloes that were killing the company. Walker was not in favor of a $1 parking fee. "The parking lot is the first thing the guests see. We have to keep our prices low." And despite having been in charge of advertising, Walker did not believe in advertising or marketing. The Disney parks did not run ads or commercials. For some perspective, the first American newspaper advertisement was in 1704. In 1922, Queensboro Corp buys airtime from AT&T to create the first radio commercials in advertising history. The first TV ad was aired for Bulova watches in 1941, which cost $9. Advertising was not new, and yet, E. Cardon Walker wouldn't do it.

0:07:26 S1: In fact, Walker was even stingy on advertising when it came to the motion picture division. Budgets for advertising were growing since the big blockbuster Jaws. ET had cost $10 million in ads alone, but when Disney's TRON came out, they gave it such a minuscule advertising budget that no one knew the film was even out. The film took a $17 million write-down. While all this was going on, there was another heir to the Disney throne who was dubbed the idiot nephew by Uncle Walt himself, who once said, "My nephew will never amount to anything." Thanks to Walt-think inside the studio, Roy Disney was considered the village idiot. It didn't help that he wasn't the most charismatic individual. John Sanford, director, Home On The Range.

0:08:11 Speaker 3: He had this legacy kinda handed to him, and I think he really took it seriously. But on the other hand, he was just a normal guy who happened to have a ton of money. We were in La Verne, California, I think it was, at this movie theater. Doing a preview for Home On The Range, and there was a Bed Bath & Beyond, and Patty suddenly turns to Roy and says, "Oh, Roy, they've got glasses on sale. Do you mind if I go looking?" "Eh, go ahead, Patty." And Patty runs into the Bed Bath & Beyond and he says, "You know, we need to get new glasses. You know, you've got kids and they break all the glasses. And suddenly, it's 20 years later, and you don't have one glass that matches. So Patty wants new glasses." And he's just talking very frankly like that. And I said, "Yeah, I know that. I know how that goes." And then Patty comes running up. "Oh, Roy. They've got a wonderful set of glasses that are on sale. Let's go in and get them." And Roy goes, "Well, I don't wanna carry them all over the goddamn mall." And she goes, "Okay. I guess we'll get them later." [chuckle] It was just fun to watch them, 'cause it was like... Reminded me of watching my grandparents bicker.

0:09:12 S1: Roy didn't like his role at the company, nor constantly being at odds with Miller, so Roy left in 1977, but remained on the board. From afar, he watched the animation division go to hell, which was once the company's crown jewel. On Miller's watch, the Fox and the Hound was almost torpedoed, when soon-to-be-legendary animator Don Bluth left the studio after run-ins with Miller and the executives, and Bluth didn't leave alone, he took 15 animators with him. At the time, Ed Hansen, the head of the animation department, said this, "The whole animation department could have gone under at that time. As it was, we made it, but the release of the film has been delayed, and we lost half of our creative staff." Bluth had his own thoughts. "The thing that would help Disney the most is to have a living profit, not a committee. They need somebody who knows and cares about animation. They won't roll up their sleeves and plunge in like Walt did. They wanna hire somebody to do it. It just doesn't work that way. I think they've found that out now. It was a matter of constantly bumping up against Ron Miller and the older guys, people who wouldn't relinquish authority and who wouldn't make a decision except by committee. It just doesn't work that way. They had some of the best talent in the world there. But if a production head doesn't have talent or push, you won't make it."

0:10:29 S1: In spite of everything, the company did have some good news. Miller had gone against the Disney Brain Trust and was making adult fare with his newly-created Touchstone Pictures, and he had a huge hit on his hands with Ron Howard's Splash, on March 9th, 1984. It just also happened to be the same day that Roy Disney decided to resign from the board. Roy Disney's resignation set off a chain reaction. Corporate raiders tried to take over the company. Miller was forced out. Walker retired. Roy took a vice-chairman and chairman of animation role. Michael Eisner became CEO and Chairman of the Board. Frank Wells became President, and Jeffrey Katzenberg took the role of Walt Disney Studios chairman, and the corporate raiders were turned away. Eisner and Katzenberg had blazed a trail at Paramount and became the talk of the town for their track record and by throwing their names into the press as much as humanly possible. Meanwhile, Frank Wells had been vice chairman of Warner Brothers. They set about using their industry experience to transform a company that was run like a mom-and-pop shop.

0:11:33 S1: The fourth member of their team was assets, and there were assets galore that Disney simply wasn't utilizing to their full potential, or at all. The Walt Disney Company was like the drowning man in the flood who doesn't accept help from a rowboat, motorboat, or helicopter because he believes God will save him. The man dies, and he meets God and asks, "Why didn't you come to my rescue?" God says, "I sent you a rowboat, motorboat and a helicopter. What do you want from me?" Now, Eisner, Wells and Katzenberg would take the rowboat, motorboat and helicopter to the promised land. Under their leadership, the company began advertising its parks. Attendance rose 10%. They raised the price of admission, which led to hundreds of millions of dollars into the company's coffers. Eisner releases Disney classics on home video. It was initially sacrilegious in the company, but money talks. Cinderella alone made $180 million in revenue. Animation was losing money, so they thought about shutting it down. But Eisner didn't wanna piss off Roy, so they kept it around. It was a smart choice because Roy was a little bit more cunning than he seemed. He was no Richard III but he'd just usurped his own brother-in-law. And because Eisner would later fail to keep him happy, Roy would take out Eisner decades later. Roy might have been treated like Fredo, but he was secretly Michael Corleone.

0:12:57 S1: But that was a long way off, now Eisner was simply basking in his good fortune. "Such a bounty has fallen in my lap. Every day a new asset falls out of the sky. The real estate is just gravy, there are 40 unused acres next to Disneyland planted in strawberries." To re-emphasize his life on easy street, he was drinking a milkshake when he said that. And of course, there was another blue-ocean opportunity for Eisner to slurp up, animated television. On Eisner's first day at the studio, he announced he wanted to have a Disney TV cartoon on the air in 10 months.

[music]

0:13:35 S1: Willie Ito, animator.

0:13:41 Speaker 4: We knew internally at Disney that things are gonna start happening. And so, one day, they had all of the Burbank employees meet in the backstage set, we had a big open set area and everyone from the studio was there. And Michael Eisner was introduced and the whole bit. Then he gave us the overall picture as to what to expect in the future now that the new regime is here. And one of the things he commented on was we're going to alt Hanna-Barbera, Hanna-Barbera.

0:14:20 S1: According to the New York Times, he asked someone to find them the six most creative people at Disney to figure out how to make Disney TV animation work, which leads to the aforementioned brunch that started it all. One of the creatives brought to the table was Jymn Magon. Magon had produced story records for Disney music for eight years. Why bring a record producer, with no animation experience, to the table?

0:14:41 Speaker 5: I ask myself that every morning when I wake up, [chuckle] it's a bit amazing. Well, one of the things that Michael Eisner did before he was at Paramount was... I think he was head of ABC children's programming, I think he told me that he was the guy who actually bought the Scooby-Doo franchise from Hanna-Barbera, which of course, is still running after all these years. So, that was very successful, and I think he always had a soft spot for TV animation, and so when he took over the company in '84, one of the first things he wanted to do was to start a TV animation department. So, being new to the company, I think he just looked at different departments and said, 'I wanna meet some of the bright people that are doing things here at the company.' And we had just made a lot of money off of Mickey Mouse disco and a lot of projects that were new at the time in the record business. And so Gary Krisel, who was the president of Disneyland records, and myself, were invited over to Michael Eisner's house on a Sunday morning. Michael Eisner invited a bunch of people... Not a lot, I think there were about 12, in all, that were at this meeting in his living room on a Sunday morning in Bel-Air. And I had never been to Bel-Air, never been invited to someone's house up there, [chuckle] so, it was very fancy-shmancy for me.

0:16:01 S1: And there was also Tad Stones, who began his work at Disney in 1974. He was an uncredited animator on the Fox and the Hound as late as 1981. Now, he too was at the brunch.

0:16:13 Speaker 6: I was in Features, I eventually moved into Story, went to Imagineering and help design rides for Epcot Center, and back in charge of some Epcot Center documentaries that then never happened. Eventually ended up back in Features, I'm not sure they knew what to do with me. And that's about the time management changed, with Michael Eisner coming in and Jeffrey Katzenberg and those guys. And I was... Along my trials through the company, I had done some animation development for the guys over in the merchandising side of things 'cause they felt like the only way to really sell toys is to have some cartoons on TV. You can't wait for these features that come out every four years, or so, 'cause that's what it was at the time. Anyway, those same guys were pitching TV animation to Michael Eisner. I was actually on vacation, but I got a call that said, "We know you're on vacation, we know it's gonna be Sunday, but would you mind coming to Michael Eisner's house to talk about television animation?" So I was like "Yeah [chuckle], I think I can make time." Went there with like 10 people. These were the guys who basically I had worked with before and they were impressed with what I had done. And from the beginning, Michael Eisner felt like Disney is the top in animation, and it should be in every area that animation is in, it doesn't mean that television animation is going to look like feature animation, but it should be the best TV shows in animation on TV.

0:17:39 S1: Jymn Magon.

0:17:40 Speaker 7: Michael revealed that he wanted to start this new department, he wanted us to come up with some ideas and whatnot, and he actually came up with an idea himself, which was his kids who were in the other room eating cereal in the kitchen, in their pajamas [chuckle] on Sunday morning, had just come back from camp and I guess they had told him that they were eating these really cool candies called Gummi bears. And he said, "I just like the sound of that." And he looked at me, which was really weird, 'cause he didn't know me at all, and he said, "Make me a show called Gummi Bears." And I thought, "Why'd he pick me out?" [laughter] And I said, "Oh yeah, cool, great."

0:18:20 S6: So I pitched an old project, Mickey and the Space Pirates, they liked it a lot, but then they said, "No Mickey... We wanna make sure we can pull this off. Mickey is too precious." So there was a lot of respect there going in. No one was prepared to actually pitch shows. I had that artwork left over from stuff I had pitched to the merchandising guys, who were in the room, but it was kind of more feeling what Eisner wanted.

0:18:43 S7: But Tad was at that meeting, and he didn't come over for probably a full season to TV animation, but he eventually did, and thank God he did, because we worked on so many shows over there. But yeah, he was at that initial meeting, and he had a lot of great ideas. But he didn't come join us right away. And afterwards, we all met at a coffee shop, in Brentwood, and I remember us all kind of looking at each other, like, "This guy's crazy. Who wants to do a show about characters that get eaten every week?" [chuckle]

0:19:15 S6: And I remember saying, "Well, he seemed pretty sharp and respectful of animation, except for that idea about Gummi bears, that's like doing pepperoni people, or something. I don't know how to do that".

0:19:25 S7: So I think we all kind of felt like, "He's a busy man. This will all go away". It was about two weeks later I got a call, "So where's my show?" "Well, I'm writing it now", [chuckle] and I typed up something and it was horrendous, but it was the beginnings of development. And so I ended up, at one point, doing two jobs, I was still doing my record producing, but I was also developing two shows, both Wuzzles and Gummi Bears for Disney. And we didn't even have offices for the department back then. I remember we went over to a fellow named Lenny Ripps. Lenny Ripps was responsible for creating Full House and he was under contract at Disney for the time, and Lenny said, "Come on over, let's talk about this." And so there was Gary Krisel, who was going to be the president of the new division. So he was doing double duty at the same time, with records and TV animation. And Michael Webster turned out to be our office manager, and there was me. And that was the four of us sitting there around a card table in Lenny's office kicking ideas around. And that's how that department started, very bizarre and very humble.

0:20:47 S7: I remember having to take pitches from people and we were discouraged from doing that, because Disney became a big company and had deep pockets, and of course, people would come in and pitch, and then say, "You stole my ideas." And so pretty much kept to ourselves and almost all the development was from inside, from people on staff. So we didn't... It was in the time of [0:21:10] ____ and other people pitching their ideas from outside. There was a travel office for Disney across the street from the studio in Buena Vista and it was just a crummy old office building. And I think that's where we put Art Vitello when they brought him in to run Gummi Bears. And they were just sort of makeshift offices, they put some of the artists on the back lots, above the tea room. We were just spread all over. So we all became sort of bastard children.

0:21:41 Speaker 8: This is the great book of Gummi.

0:21:45 Speaker 9: What's in it?

0:21:46 S8: Well, we really don't know.

0:21:49 S6: Well, they actually developed Gummi bears kind of on a candy basis with a villain called Licorice Whip, I think. And they were actually gonna have the Gummi bears give dental hygiene messages at the end of every show. That went nowhere, and they threw it all out and came up with what was on the air.

0:22:06 S1: Instead of candy, the show got a complicated 500-year-old plus mythos. The Gummi bears were descendants of the great gummies, tasked with protecting all things Gummi from human greed and exploitation.

0:22:18 S7: I was very fortune that I got to work with two of my childhood heroes, which were Rocky and Bullwinkle. I found myself staring at Bill Scott a lot because besides doing all the voices of George of the Jungle and Tom Slick and Bullwinkle, he was a fantastic writer, and he had written all of these commercials for Quaker Oats, Quisp and Quake and Cap'n Crunch, and stuff like that. He once said to me, "You know the old story, Jymn, about how do you make a statue of an elephant? Well, you start with a block of granite and you chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant". He says, but writing a script is different. You start with nothing, and you chip away until you have a story. [chuckle] And I thought, "Oh, that's interesting. You don't even have the rock to work with." [laughter] And I just thought he was a delight. He died after the first season of Gummi Bears and that was just devastating for us.

0:23:16 Speaker 10: Welcome to the land of Wuz, where nobody is like anybody you've seen before. The people who live in Wuz are called Wuzzle, naturally. And as you've probably guessed, Wuzzles are a little bit, you know, different.

0:23:33 S7: I didn't stay on Wuzzles. Once we got the two shows sold, I stayed exclusively on Gummi Bears. But in the early days, we were trying to put together these shows to pitch to the networks. And we had a show called Jumble Isle, the idea was that there were these animals that were jumbled up, and there were two of each animal. And, lo and behold, it turns out Hasbro has... Already has a project called The Wuzzles, which they had plush animals at the time. And, again, I don't know the ins and outs of the business side, but it was decided, "Well, why create these things when they already exist and let's just do a deal with Hasbro to take our development and put it with their characters." which I'm not even sure they had much of a back story. But once the deal was made, then we'd develop them into talking, breathing, and living characters. [chuckle] And so what happened was that Wuzzles then went on to have its own production department, just like Gummi Bears had, but like I said, my involvement at that point, I had dropped out after it sold to CBS.

0:24:39 S1: Besides Wuzzles and Gummi Bears, Disney television animation had one more venture in its early years. Fluppy Dogs was the first animated Disney feature for television. The show revolved around the Fluppy Dogs going through an interdimensional portal to Earth. It got a 5.3 rating on November 27th, 1986. The numbers were so low that it killed off the idea for a television series based on the special, and with that, Fluppy Dogs was over before it even really got started.

0:25:08 S7: Fluppy Dogs was sort of the... I kinda call it the albatross around the neck. [chuckle] It was a cross to bear. And I think everybody in the department worked on it at one time or another. And so what happened was that we were gonna do this Fluppy special and it was going to be the kickoff for a series and it just never took off, it never... It just never happened, and I think we were all kind of glad it didn't go any further. I mean, they were cute, but I just remember it being like, "Oh crap, I don't wanna go on another meeting about Fluppy Dogs." [chuckle]

0:25:49 Speaker 11: We've been to so many worlds. I don't know how long it's been since I've seen my family.

0:25:55 Speaker 12: You can talk!

0:25:56 S1: I wish you wouldn't keep saying that, I've been talking since I was 3.

0:26:00 S1: I'm sorry, but I mean, talking dog? Fluppy, and doorways to other worlds? I just wanna find one world, my world.

0:26:12 S1: Disney was going in cheap in terms of the price for pristine Disney Animation. Disney knew they couldn't afford movie quality animation and expect to make a profit. But Disney still spent $285,000 on each episode of Wuzzles. That was double what Hanna-Barbera would spend. It was so much, in fact, that it was $35,000 more than it was being paid by CBS. Why spend so much? The reasoning was simple, if it looked better than everything else on TV, then the characters could become part of the parks, and because of the success rate of their recent films, Disney needed characters more than ever. Willie Ito, animator.

0:26:51 S4: When I was at Hanna-Barbera, Michael Eisner was the VP of Children Programming at ABC. So when we were doing presentations and they would fly out here to review what we were working on, Joe would ask us to come in on a Saturday, sit at our desk as if we're busy bees and then bring Michael Eisner and his people through, and says, "Hey, here, look, they're all working on the new show idea," and then see the presentation. So I knew of Michael Eisner. And so, when he says he's gonna hop Hanna-Barbera Hanna-Barbera, I'm thinking, "Oh my gosh, I came back to Disney to get away from this rat race, and I hope we're not gonna be all caught up in the middle of it." Well, to make a long story short, a few months later, a fellow named Michael Webster, who I worked with in animation, was hired on to be production coordinator for the newly forming Disney TV Animation. Michael got with me and says, "How would you like to come back to animation?" I said, "Michael. No, please don't, don't do this to me. I'm perfectly happy. I'm actually in my new career back at Disney." And he says, "Well, we're gonna have a little boutique operation. All we're gonna do is be responsible for the scripts and we'll do story boards and maybe character design, but otherwise, everything is going to be farmed off to a production house. So we're just gonna have a little boutique operation and let me dangle this carrot in front of their view."

0:28:29 S4: What it was is, he says, "I know you used to make a lot of trips to Japan and Asia, and you know a lot of the production houses over there. So I wanna send you there and meet with these different companies and talk business." And he says, "Well, we'll be sending you first class. You'd stay at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo." And then all that. How could I resist? Plus, the fact that there was a handsome increase because of my position, would be like an executive thing. "Michael, I'm gonna give you three months. That's what I could promise you." So, "Okay, that's a deal." I did the pilot storyboard for a two-minute pilot. The soundtrack was recorded. They cut the exposure sheets, and the whole bit, and with those two copies under my arm, I flew to Tokyo. As I was registering, this American gentleman approaches me, "So are you Mr Ito?" I say, "Yeah." And he says, "Oh, hey. I understand you're here to make pilot films for your fledging Disney TV animation." I said, "Yeah, I am. You could talk to me initially, but the decision will be Michael Webster, who will be arriving here in about half an hour."

0:29:50 S4: So we sat in the lobby, having a cocktail, and then Michael shows up and he's at the desk and I said, "Well, there's Michael now." So, well, we flag him over and he says... The fellow talking to us says, "What we wanna do is we wanna throw our hat in the ring. I understand you're gonna be talking to people at Toei Animation in Tokyo, then you're gonna be flying to Korea, and you're gonna be meeting with Steve Hahn at the Korean studio." I said, "Well, we only have two sets of soundtrack, exposure sheets and copies of the layouts and storyboards." He said, "No problem, they can make copies of all that." "So, okay, what do you think, Michael?" And Michael said, "Yeah, sure, why not?" So we awarded them to also do a pilot. Three months later, the three studios submitted their two-minute pilot. So the three pilots came in. We all go in the sweat box, all the executives are there, I think even Roy Disney Jr was sitting in on it, and all of the newly-appointed executives of the newly-formed Disney TV Animation.

0:31:02 S4: So we sit there and, number one, okay, number two, then number three, then the lights go on, and then now we have to say which one we liked, and it was unanimous. We liked this one, say, number two. Well, it turned out that that was produced by a company named Tokyo Movie Shinsha. It had nothing to do with the other two that we submitted, but this one had the rich, full animation and all that. So they got the contracts. So TMS is the producing company. TMS, they later did the Little Nemo in Slumberland feature also, and so they had access to a lot of young Disney animators with full animation training to work on their project. As a matter of fact, even that two-minute pilot, they sort of farmed out some of the animation to Disney animators, that's why it showed such quality and it beat out the Koreans and the Japanese studio.

0:32:08 S4: They cheated, but, in essence, they... Disney kept striving to get the utmost in animation quality, which is good, because that was one of my concerns. If Disney gets into TV animation, are they gonna lose their integrity by just schlocking it on, doing limited animation, and all that, but the quality is there.

0:32:34 S1: Jymn Magon.

0:32:35 S7: I remember we did a lot of tests with other studios. We ended up with... At least for Gummi Bears, we ended up with TMS, Tokyo Movie Shinsha, and I had to remember, when I was really used to looking at hamburger sort of animation, which is you move across the proscenium left to right, the background that keeps repeating, and that's sort of what we grew up with and were used to. And I remember the first episode of Gummi Bears, I saw Sir Tuxford ride his horse into camera. The horse came to camera, he did a full turn around, which you'd never saw in TV animation, it was like, "Holy cow! Look at what just happened!" And it was a real leap in the animation quality, and I remember talking to Karl Geurs, who was working over at, I think he was at FilmNation at the time, and he eventually came over to Disney to do the Winnie the Pooh show. And he said everyone in other studios was talking about, "Did you see what Disney did on Saturday morning? Oh, my God!"

0:33:38 S7: So the quality really raised the bar. Now, true, it wasn't feature animation, but it was a big jump in quality. Finally, they put us all together over at the Cahuenga Building, which was on Cahuenga, near Universal Studios, and it just got bigger and bigger as we added more and more people. So, on the one hand, we weren't on the lot anymore. The sort of good news was, nobody was looking over our shoulders, so that department started and grew and made its success sort of off by itself. Nobody was actually sitting down reading, our scripts, and saying, "Gee, I don't think this is very Disney, or I don't think... " There just wasn't any interference because they had other and bigger fish to fry. We went off and sold our first two shows, Wuzzles and Gummi Bears, to CBS and NBC respectively. And it just took off from there.

0:34:29 S1: Willie Ito.

0:34:30 S4: We had our own growing pains within the studio, getting people together, finding a crew, a good animator, story, bit people. And before that three months was up, I could see the frenetic pace. We were moving from office to office because it was like we move in and then they say, "You know, it's not enough room because we're expanding our staff." And I'm thinking, "What happened to the boutique operation? Now we're gonna have a whole staff. And then am I gonna have to do what I did at Sanrio, is manage this crew of people and all that." So I started feeling the pressure of that position, but in the meanwhile, I went back to Carson. And Carson van Osten, who was my boss in consumer products, and I said, "Oh, Jesus, it's the same old thing. Before I get too caught up into it, can I come back?" So he said, "Oh, yeah, there's always an opening for you to come back." So I came back to consumer products, but I stayed with the Disney TV, as far as merchandise and by-products and whatever else, but I was now out of the production rat race.

0:35:55 S1: Tad Stones.

0:35:56 S6: Anyway, I went back to Features, and pitched some stuff, and actually was considering leaving the company, and maybe just freelancing and then going into more, actually, science fiction short stories and novels. I met one of the guys who was then the head of the TV department that was just starting, and mentioned, "Hey, do you have any freelance opportunities?" And he said, "Oh, I don't know if you wanna do that, why don't you come and visit?" And I came to visit their very small building and he introduced me around, he said, "Yeah, Tad may be coming over here." Actually, he said, "Tad would be coming over here." And I just was quiet. I didn't know what he was talking about, but they ultimately brought me over to be the creative manager of the department, in which I was supposed to take pitches and come up with stories, and actually, I was supposed to take pitches more than come up with stuff, but I wasn't geared that way.

0:36:50 S6: And we had a gong show coming up with Michael and Jeffrey, which is you do like a two cents description of a show and they either like it or not. And I think we pitched 22 ideas. I think 18 of them were mine. And it's not like they were fully developed, it was like, "Hey, Trojan Birds and Legionnaire Cats, the city of Troy is up in trees, like Roadrunner and Coyote," and they gong. Anyway, Gummi Bears had been through two seasons, it was run by Art Vitello and created by Art Vitello and Jymn Magon. And Jymn had had no animation experience before that, Disney just said, "Hey, if you want the show, this is the guy who's gonna do it." So there was always a contentious relationship there. And by the third season, NBC said, "We want to change," and they tapped me and Jymn went on to, I think, DuckTales development at that point. Anyway, so that's how I got to Gummi Bears, it was just kind of like, "Hey, you, over here". And that started me story editing and producing.

0:37:51 S1: Willie Ito.

0:37:52 S4: But the question always was, "Well, how come Wuzzles and Gummi Bears, when Disney has such a stable of great characters that they could work from?" But I think initially, they says, "Well, we're gonna be making cartoons for Saturday morning, and that's a lesser market quality-wise, and we don't want to ruin Disney's image by turning out the limited animation with Mickey Mouse and all that, so let's go with new characters." But then the shows were a hit and it started to see that Disney TV was getting some recognition, and so Roy Disney said, "Well, come on, let's... Let's use some of our own characters, that way the market and the kids will gravitate to it knowing it's a known Disney character." So we did DuckTales.

0:38:52 S1: Jymn Magon.

0:38:53 S7: After two seasons of Gummi Bears, I moved over to work on DuckTales, which was a big deal at the time, we were doing this as a syndicated program as opposed to a network program, and it had already been developed, Tedd Anasti and Patsy Cameron were always creating episodes.

0:39:10 S1: Patsy Cameron-Anasti and Tedd Anasti, writers.

0:39:14 Speaker 13: My career in writing really started when I met my future husband, Tedd.

0:39:19 Speaker 14: That would be me.

0:39:20 S1: I was 18 and I auditioned for Walt Disney's new Mickey Mouse Club as a performer, and Tedd was a writer for Walt Disney and chose me at an audition, and I appeared on the new Mickey Mouse Club singing and performing sign language, and then I fell madly in love with him, Tedd, and started writing him love letters...

0:39:42 S1: Didn't spell my name right, though. So, during a union break, I'm sitting on a bench back when I did smoke cigarettes and the guy from the mail room comes by and goes, "Is your name Ashy?" I went, "No, no, it's Anasti." He goes, "Well, I think somebody's been writing you a bunch of letters, we've got in the mail room, didn't know where to deliver them." I discovered that she has an interest in me.

0:40:08 S1: Yeah, and he said... When he called me, he said, "You're really funny." He thought my love letters were funny, and he said, "I think you could be a writer." And Tedd showed me Micky Mouse Club scripts and taught me how to write scripts, and then I moved up here to Los Angeles and my first job was a freelance for Hanna-Barbera on a show called Casper and the Space Angels, and I freelanced for a couple of years and then became a staff writer on The Smurfs, and I was the first woman staff writer at Hanna-Barbera, as well as their youngest at the time at age 23. And then a little bit later, Tedd started writing for The Smurfs and we became story editors together. Margaret Lush, who approved my very first cartoon episode on Casper and the Space Angels, Margaret Lush, noticed that we had fun together when we wrote, not knowing we were dating or anything. And Margaret, she teamed us up as story editors on The Smurfs and then Tedd and I wrote on The Smurfs for three years, in which it won one Emmy. And then the next show that we did was DuckTales for Walt Disney.

0:41:16 S1: DuckTales was based on the Carl Barks comic book stories about the world adventurer ducks of Duckburg, Scrooge McDuck and his nephews. The comics were a hit back in the 1940s and '50s, and their comic adventure styling seemed a perfect fit for what Disney envisioned for its television programs. Barks was never really consulted, said Tom Ruzicka, associate producer on DuckTales. He continued, "Although the show was initially based on the concept of doing Scrooge McDuck and the nephews, we discovered that a lot of stuff that made wonderful comics wouldn't translate into the '80s, or into animation. So we started evolving new characters and other things to contemporize the show. As we did that, the stories got further and further away from the comics, although a few episodes are lifted right out of them."

0:42:03 S1: We had a meeting with Gary Krisel, where he showed us two projects, DuckTales and a special called Fluppy Dogs, and we chose DuckTales. That was a good choice.

0:42:16 S1: They hired us because they knew it would be a big show with lots of episodes. We got known as people who could do 65 half hours in a season and stuff like that.

0:42:25 S1: Or 90 minutes on The Smurfs. Our first year as story editors, we'd never story-edited before, it was 90 minutes, because it was such a hit, or on DuckTales, it was 65 half hours. People would say, "How come you're not freaking out?" Well, I just knew we would get it done, but Tedd, his energy and his dedication, I credit a lot of it to him.

[video playback]

0:43:18 S1: They were definitely based on the Carl Barks books, but the main thing we had to do was, again, bring the heart, bring heart out.

0:43:26 S1: Well, one day, certain executives said, "You're not following the books very closely." And we said, "We have 65 episodes to do and Carl Barks only wrote 16, and they're not that different from one another."

0:43:41 S1: Jymn Magon.

0:43:42 S7: The idea came up, "Why don't we do a mini-series that we can cut into a movie we can then show as a pilot, a kick off to the series?" So what was really fascinating, for me, anyway, was, even though the show was already in production, was to do the episodes that set the tone for the series. So the first thing that the public was gonna see was this five-parter, and we just had so much fun putting that together, because they had to work as five separate episodes, but it had to work as an overarching big story as well, so that it could be shown as a movie. And I have a picture of Mark Zaslove and Bruce Talkington and I standing in front of this chalkboard, we have this gigantic story outline in front of it of all five episodes. It was like, "Are we gonna be able to do that?" And it turned out spectacular, I was very happy with it.

0:44:32 S1: A lot of the episode went to Japan, the earlier ones, and the animation was just exquisite. It was so exciting to have the films come back, especially the earliest episodes. Wow, dazzling animation, like A-team animation. They had a party and they showed one of the fully realized episodes, it was called Duckman of Alcatraz, it was really, really sensational. But I remember even Tedd saying, "I didn't really realize how good this was." I think that no one really understood that, I don't think I did until the episodes started to come back with all the music, fully-animated, everything, and then when it debuted, it was a really, really big smash.

0:45:16 S1: Meanwhile, the LA Times' Charles Solomon was not impressed by DuckTales. In fact, he found it rather distasteful. "Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and other Disney cartoon stars owe their popularity and longevity to the fact that they were so well-animated, they ceased to exist as drawings on screen and emerged as clearly recognizable characters. By breaking with that tradition in DuckTales, the new management at Disney Studio is risking far more than the $20 million it has invested into the series. At stake is a name that has been synonymous with the best in animation for 60 years." But the risk of ruining their name in animation was well worth it, because the show was gigantic. DuckTales was big, really big. The series was in 56 countries and seen by 25 million kids each day. It went so far that it doubled the ratings of kids shows that it was in competition with. Even though each episode cost $275,000, Disney more than made its money back, and Disney television animation had finally truly arrived. Tad Stones.

0:46:20 S6: Well, DuckTales was a huge thing, because a Saturday morning show is just... Your first order is 13, and then maybe 10 the second season, and eight, and eight, and then you're lucky if you're still on. DuckTales, suddenly, it was like, "No, we're doing 65 episodes." George Lucas told us once that DuckTales was to syndication as Star Wars was to movies, I mean, it was huge.

0:46:43 S1: Patsy Cameron-Anasti and Tedd Anasti.

0:46:46 S1: We finished DuckTales and they didn't pick up our contract. The figured, find somebody cheaper, I guess, I don't know.

0:46:53 S1: Well, actually no, let me... I would like to differ with that. It was a smash and that was a wonderful thing for our career. They offered us Aladdin, actually, and we... I think we had always wanted to develop, like kind of be in developing new shows, and when Nelvana offered us vice president of development, we took that, and they were just starting out, kind of, they had done some things, but Beetlejuice really was their first big blockbuster. So I think they did offer us Aladdin after that, and then later, The Little Mermaid.

0:47:28 S1: I was sitting in a restaurant and here are the guys from Disney, the executives, end up sitting behind us, and we were with ABC at the time. When the girls from ABC went to the ladies room, the guys from Disney leaned over and said, "We need you back. We need you back on our show 'cause we can't get anybody that's doing a good job." So we went back and...

0:47:49 S1: Yeah, we spent three years on The Little Mermaid, which was, again, a very, very wonderful experience.

0:47:55 S1: They wanted us for five years, but we said, "Well, maybe just one year at a time." So we stayed there for 14 years, just one year at a time.

0:48:02 S1: Jymn Magon.

0:48:03 S7: I know that I was a big Carl Barks fan growing up, just as a kid, reading the comic book, and so we owed so much to Carl Barks, creating the Beagle Boys and Gyro Gearloose and Magica de Spell, and all these characters. And I felt bad that he never got any credit on the series. So one of the episodes I wrote was based on one of his comic book stories, I actually gave him credit as "Story by Carl Barks, script by Jymn Magon." Because I wanted his name in there somewhere on the series. There were two things that were key to DuckTales. One was Scrooge McDuck was torn between the cold, hard cash and the warmth of his heart for his family, his nephews, that's what was always driving the series, was this man caught between the cold and the heat. The second thing was, young children don't understand money, it's just like the coins, built different sizes, and paper, and they honestly don't have a concept of how money works. But Carl Barks was a genius when it came to, "Well, what do kids understand?" Well, they understand the tactile quality of coins. And so to have a money bin full of coins that you were able to dive into and just swim through like a porpoise, just that's what kids could understand and appreciate. And the fact that he gave Scrooge McDuck that childlike quality to be able to enjoy his money in a very tactile way, I think, was a real breakthrough for the character.

0:49:31 S1: Carl Barks, an except from The Duck Man, an interview with Carl Barks, 1975.

0:49:37 Speaker 15: The office, I think, wanted me to do a Christmas story and so I'm casting around for Christmas stories. I began to think of the great Dickens Christmas story, about Scrooge. It is the classic of all Christmas story. All I did was just peep enough to sort of steal some of the idea and have a rich uncle for Donald. Well, he had turned out to be kind of an interesting character in that first story, and so I began thinking of how to use him again. I guess the fact that he was rich was the thing that triggered all further developments, is just how rich, and the showing of his wealth. I found that that was quite a fascinating subject, just piles of money. It seemed to appeal to a lot of people.

0:50:33 S1: And I just gradually made him richer and richer and then I had to develop a place where he could store the money and all the time, there were the Beagle Boys trying to steal it from him. Those things just grew like building brick walls, you just lay one brick on top of another, and finally, you've got a whole thing built. You can't dive into a pile of money like you would into a snowdrift, so he had to have a trick by which he did. And I don't explain that trick because I don't understand it myself. And he can go out in the desert, and he can smell the presence of gold. Other prospectors would have to dig mountains of dirt before they could find any nuggets, but he can smell them. I think he represents something that nearly everybody wishes they could be, some time in their life, just a little bit too rich.

[music]

0:51:25 S1: Disney had another project that was budding at ABC. Disney had a long, strange history with this character, with lawsuit after lawsuit, but the character was about to become part of Saturday mornings in 1988, with an unlikely candidate to help lead it. Mark Zaslove, writer.

0:51:53 Speaker 16: What happened was I went to Cal Berkeley as a eventually theoretical astrophysics person, but I was also writing at the time, and I had a buddy, we were doing live action. So every summer, he was in UCLA, I was at Cal, we'd come back and we'd write a script or something. And then I wrote my first novel over there, and then it was like, "Well, what am I gonna do also for money?" I was doing magazine work, I worked for Larry Flynt for about seven months, meteoric rise and fall on Hustler and a couple of magazines like that, which was fun.

0:52:25 S1: I used to say, though, I was karmically balanced 'cause I did Pooh and Hustler. By the time anybody even asked about it, it was never a big deal, no one cared, I mean, it wasn't like I was posing or anything, or it was gonna come back and bite them. Not that I couldn't have. Oh, sorry. [chuckle] And I got my first gig in animation while I was there as well. But basically, I went, "I got to make some money." It's like, "Oh, yeah, animation. They need writers." My dad said, "Yeah, maybe try that." And it's like... So I went in, not thinking anything of it, really, and it was very easy to do, and so I was doing some freelance work and I had sent in something... Oh, GoBot, a GoBot script to Jymn Magon, and he went, "Oh, my God, it's the only funny GoBot script I ever read." So I went in, and he'd probably tell you better.

0:53:12 S1: I just had this sort of full of himself attitude, not in a bad way, according to him, but I just look back and it was just kind of funny, 'cause he saw it and he went, "This is really good writing." And I was kind of like, "Well, yeah, of course it is." It was like, "Well, it's animation." I never thought much about it. I learned to very much respect it. I always liked the product, but I was never like a fan of animation because I grew up around it, so it was always the discipline. But you have to understand, my dad was an animator/producer/director, so when I was growing up, animators were guys who were drunk on my living room floor. So I get to Disney and they're all teetotallers, except for a few people. I'm like, "You're not animators. I know what animators look like, and none of you are animators." I had gotten some bad raps there that I didn't do, I was always upset later when people say blah, blah, blah, and you were being blah, blah, blah, and I went, "I didn't do that. If I'd just known, I would have done that." I would have been much more obnoxious. I would have actually caused these problems.

0:54:10 S1: I think I could rub certain people the wrong way, although everybody could. But there was one day where, I don't know why, it was just one of those things where maybe we'd been working too hard, too long, and you're near the end of something, and I started taking tape and I started taping across the hallway. And then somebody threw something on it. It became like a giant spiderweb that stopped the hallway up. And then people started throwing items onto it, so it stuck. And so suddenly there's this whole blockade hallway, and people have thrown knickknacks and this and that. And suddenly, Michael Webster or Tom Ruzicka came by and they just look at me, like, "This is your doing, right?" It's like, "Ah, leave it." And then they walked off, 'cause they knew it was a way to blow off steam. But it was one of those almost MASH moments where you start off doing something silly, and the next thing, the entire place is sort of doing it. But I got nailed for things that other people did a lot. Where they were nicer, and I was more like, "Ah, whatever." I was certainly tolerant.

[music]

0:55:08 S1: And I think ABC wanted a Disney show. And then it became, "What do we give them?" And then Pooh, because they had mechanical rights, I guess, was a safe thing to do. So it was above my pay grade, but I remember that it was ABC wanting, but I think the machinations were, "What can we do that's very Disney that we have?" And then it became Pooh, and then it came down to us. It was funny. I knew it could be really good if we didn't screw it up, and they didn't think I should do it, 'cause I was young and I wore long leather jackets before Matrix. I was, theoretically, a dark character. And so they were questioning me. And I remember sitting at a table. I had to do the entire Bible premise pitch in a three-day weekend, and then go have lunch with Gary Krisel and some other people and explain why this show would be great.

0:55:53 S1: I remember going, "Look, I will bet you a year's salary," and fortunately, they didn't do it. "We will win our time slot, be number one, we'll win an Emmy, I guarantee it. I bet you my whole year's salary." And we did. We were the only show to do that at that time. But it was one of those where you just go, "If you don't screw it up, how can you miss?" The designs are good, great characters. Just don't be stupid. Write really well, and it'll be a good show. I never used anything from the books, because it wouldn't have worked for me. It was always, "How can I become Mill?" And then, "How do I expand that?" For whatever reason, they previewed it on the Disney Channel and then it went to ABC. And then ABC changed their order from 13 to 20-something for the first season. So we were all kinda cranking. That was actually a lot of fun. I loved that show.

0:56:41 Speaker 17: Why thank you, Piglet. It's perfect. What is it?

0:56:47 S1: That was the first time I was in charge of anything, and actually had to have responsibility, and scheduling everything. And Karl Geurs, he was very much pro-what I was bringing to the table. And that was a great learning experience. And it was about professionalism, and a way of looking at things that Karl had without being blighted or too jaded about it. Karl was Winnie The Pooh, just had that sort of attitude. As much as people used to say that he'd walk by and we'd be shouting at each other, I don't think we were ever ever ever angry. We were just loud. We'd circle, "What about this? No, this!" And then suddenly, I guess our voices went up. And people would go, "We walk by Karl's office," and it'd be like, "We hear you guys shouting. Is everything okay?" And I'm like, "Yeah, why? What's going on?" But you couldn't ask for a better person to take you in on your first day. We fell through the cracks at that time. They didn't know we were there, really, 'cause DuckTales was getting up to speed, and I remember, Karl telling me vividly, he goes, "You know, if we're a hit, they're gonna suddenly start caring about what we do, and give us all sorts of terrible notes".

0:57:49 S1: And he was right. Suddenly everybody wanted a finger in it the second season, and we got a ton more notes. "Well, we gotta do this. Is this good? Should we do that? We don't understand this." Anytime you try to do something, whether it's cutting edge, or just very truthful, and I thought the Pooh characters we handled extremely truthfully, they weren't just saying gag-lines. They were saying a line because that's what Pooh would say, or that's what Tigger would say, which is the essence of any kind of good writing, is, "Are you telling the truth?" And so we get people who wouldn't necessarily understand that, so we get notes, and then you'd have to explain it. And then that wouldn't necessarily work. And then it would be weird. I always had a really good relationship with standards and practices, but I remember I wanted Gopher to have a huge cask of black powder, 'cause he's a miner, and he digs, and I wanted to blow the side off of a mountain.

0:58:44 S1: And of course, ABC standards and practices says, "No, you can't do that." And I try to explain why, it's like this, and then kids'll do that. And I go, "I don't think they can get all the dynamite, or black powder." And they're like, "Well, you can do it in fire." And so I thought for a while, and just as a joke, I said, "Well, could you use a thermonuclear device?" And they thought for a while, and they go, "Yeah, that's okay." And so then I brought it to Karl, and Karl thought for a while. And he went, "You know we can't make the bomb look Pooh-ish, so we can't use it." But at least I feel like, "Okay, I got a thermonuclear device approved of for Winnie The Pooh."

0:59:15 S1: There's only one thing left to do.

0:59:18 Speaker 18: You mean?

0:59:20 S1: Yes, Rabbit. We must give Piglet a "staying inside" party. It's like a going away party, only different.

0:59:31 S1: While Pooh was doing well at ABC, DuckTales remained the number one kids show for two years. Luckily for Disney, when the show was finally toppled, it was by Disney's Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers.

0:59:44 S5: We didn't know this at the time, but I think in Eisner's mind, or whoever was in charge of that, felt like, "Let's see how the department goes first, before we start putting our flagship characters on the television." Because when you look at characters like Mickey, and Donald, and Pluto, and Chip and Dale, and whatnot, they were always on the big screen. So to suddenly take them and put them on the small screen, I think it's, you know, "Woah, we've got a big star. Let's not put them on TV, let's put them in movies," kind of thing. So yeah, we needed papal dispensation just to put Donald into DuckTales as a cameo to explain why he wasn't in the series, [chuckle] because he went off to join the Navy and left the nephews with his uncle. I remember we had to get permission to put him in to explain that.

1:00:29 S1: Tad Stones.

1:00:30 S6: I pitched Miami Mice 'cause Miami Vice was on the air. They liked that a lot because of the name. We called it Metro Mice and did a script for it, never went past that, although the villain of the script was a character called Fat Cat. We brought back and the idea of mice detectives came back as Chip and Dale's Rescue Rangers.

1:00:49 S5: We had two characters, two little mice called Kit Colby and Colt Chedderson. They were the original rescue rangers. And every time we would meet with Eisner and Katzenberg, they'd say, "That just is not a home run yet."

1:01:01 S6: And then later on, it was like, "Okay. DuckTales is a huge success. Are there any other Disney classic characters that we should be developing for?" And Mickey was still too precious. Donald made an appearance in DuckTales, he's very hard to animate. Goofy, yes, Goofy has always been the every man, definitely develop a bunch of things for Goofy." And then when they got to Chip 'n Dale, it was Michael Eisner who said, "Put those guys in that show," and Jeffrey said, "Home run." And that was Chip 'n Dale's Rescue Rangers.

1:01:29 S5: And that sort of broke the ice for, "Oh, now we can start to put other characters."

1:01:35 Speaker 19: I guess there's only one thing to say then. Rescue Rangers, away!

1:01:41 S6: I felt like, on Rescue Rangers, we lost a lot from script to screen because, one, we were working way too fast, throwing things together and not being able to follow up on stuff. The schedule was the same. The problem was, on the story side, there was just two of us editing. I literally was working 13, 14-hour days, except for Saturday, it was an eight-hour day, and then Sunday, my day off, was four hours. Those hours were at the studio. It wasn't like working at home.

1:02:10 S6: There was this particular point of contention that when it came time to do the multi-part pilot, we were told that we had slipped the schedule in some way, that we had less time to do the four episodes that were supposed to kick off the show than doing any given four episodes, which made no sense to me. It means we were rushing through the most important thing. So we took our shot at it, and we did what we could. And then they took me off the show and I said, "You know what? That's fine. There's only 15 episodes to go. I got to do the pilot, to set things up, so that's good." But then it turned out they were having people rework the pilot, rewrite it, and they were being given more time to rewrite the pilot than we were given to write it the first time, and that was too much for me, and I was out the door. [chuckle] Disney had certain landmarks in your career, give you a plaque or a ring or a statue. And the two statues I really wanted were Mickey as the Sorcerer's Apprentice and Tinkerbell. And Mickey was at... Hold on, I have it right here... I wanna say 15 years. Yes, I was about to get that. I was two months away from it, and it was like, that was somehow stupidly enough to make me calm down, and went back to work.

1:03:29 S1: Jymn Magon.

1:03:30 S7: It was a very strange time. I was busy trying to develop TaleSpin and we got this call that Buena Vista Television wanted someone to look at the pilot show that he had done. I think it was a four or five parter, just like what we'd done on DuckTales. I think they wanted someone to come in with fresh eyes and punch it up or do whatever, and it was like, "Well, I'm in the middle of doing TaleSpin and whatnot." Okay. So I said to Mark, "Look, I'm not gonna be here to help with TaleSpin. This'll go a lot faster if you help me." So he and I both jumped in and kinda reedited the pilot movie. And then I think we edited a couple of individual episodes that had been in the works during that time. And finally, just threw our hands up and said, "Look, we gotta get back on our project." And I think it went to Ken Koonce and David Wiemers next. So our time on Rescue Rangers was very brief. But, again, I never understood why Tad didn't follow through on that. I think it was some decision high above our heads, and I'm not sure why, so it was just like, shrug, "Okay."

1:04:32 S1: By the year 1990, Disney had invested $150 million in television animation, and by 1995, had plans to invest $400 million more. At this point, the output of television animation was prolific. Katzenberg was quoted as saying, "Each year, we are now producing as much animation as was done in the years 1920-1950 when all the classic Disney cartoons were made." These television animation shows had 22,000 full-painted cels per episode. Other shows at the time, of good quality, were averaging 15,000. Once Chip 'n Dale was another bona fide hit, Disney put plans in motion for television domination. And that plan was simple. It would have a two-hour block of cartoons when kids got home from school. Gummi Bears, DuckTales, Rescue Rangers, and their newest offering, TaleSpin. The shows were expensive, and yet, Disney wasn't even charging the networks for the shows. Instead, the deal was that Disney would retain the six minutes of advertisements to sell themselves. And this worked like Gang Busters. Despite the cost of production and advertising, the Disney Afternoon earned the company $40 million a year for a period of time. But this incredible run almost didn't happen because of one pitch. Jymn Magon.

1:05:46 S7: It didn't last long, but we had a process by which Tad would be developing a show and I'd be producing the show. And then I'd be done, so I'd go into development and he would go into production, and we would sort of flip flop as to what our duties were at TV animation. I was at a point of development, and we were creating this show called B players, and B players, I thought was kind of a clever idea. Came out at the time of Roger Rabbit. So the idea of all these cartoon characters mingling with live action people was popular at the time, so we said, "Well, who's the one character who is a star in motion pictures and then never worked again?" It was Baloo, so he said, "Oh, here's a guy who should be doing more movies, and he's not, he's stuck on the back lot. And along with him, is this kid who turns out to be a nephew, I think, of Mickey Mouse, his name was Ricky Rat, and Ricky had stars in his eyes, he wanted to be as big as his cousin or his uncle, whatever it was. And so the stories were all about Baloo and Ricky trying to convince the powers to be, specifically Michael Eisner, as a character in the show. "But it's too Western. Hey, let us do a space show. Hey, let us... " And then every week, they would be... Try in some way to get into the next gig, in that part of the cast, where all of these other people that weren't working anymore, like Horace Horsecollar, and Clarabelle Cow, and whatnot.

1:07:07 S7: Everytime we pitched it, it just never seemed to stick. And, at one point, Kaztenberg said to me, "If you say B players one more time, I'm gonna throw you out the window."

[chuckle]

1:07:18 S7: Well, it's like, "Well, I guess that project's dead." Everything I'd pitched there had pretty much gone. And so we were thinking, "This is gonna go", but it didn't, we'd stopped dead, and we were stuck, as we had to pitch the next series to all the department heads in Florida, and we had no show. And we had to get into production for the next 65 episodes. And on top of which, it was going to be the linchpin of the Disney Afternoon. And I remember Michael Webster, who was not a fan of mine, poked his head in my room and he said, "You better come up with a new show real quick or it's gonna be Tumbleweed City around here," meaning, we're gonna fire everyone."

[music]

1:08:01 S7: And I thought, "How did this fall on my shoulders, that everyone's future depends on me? Am I that important? And if so, let's see a bigger paycheck, [chuckle] if I'm that important." So it was like, "Oh, scratch head, scratch head, what am I gonna do?" And one of the guys that I had hired at TV animation was Mark Zaslove, and Mark had gone onto fame and fortune by story-editing the Winnie The Pooh Show. And so Mark and I did a lot of talking, a lot of collaboration on ideas and whatnot, and I said "Mark, come in here, I have an idea that I wanna chat with you, I wanna use you as a sounding board. "So what had happened was during DuckTales, one of the early ideas about Launchpad McQuack was that he had a courier service, and that he would fly anything anywhere overnight, or something like that, was his slogan, and so, Scrooge McDuck would use him to send things to crazy places like, 'I need a whale sent to Sea World', [chuckle] in Dubai, or something.

1:09:01 S7: And that never went anywhere, because, eventually, Launchpad became Scrooge's private pilot. So I said, "What if we took Baloo from B players, who's a really good character, I believe in him, and we took this air cargo service of Launchpad McQuack's and kind of glued them together so that Baloo is the pilot and he's got this company, and it's failing because he's a jungle bum bear, and he's got this kid, the typical Disney orphan, like Mowgli, who he's gotta look out for." I said "Now, we're starting to get the dynamic of what drove Jungle Book so well, which was here's a guy who is torn between being a big kid himself, and being a father figure." And I said, "I think there's something there." And so Mark and I kicked it around and we had some drawings made up. And in three days, we had TaleSpin. And we went and pitched it, and it was like home run. [chuckle] So whereas we could pull our hair out over B players for weeks and months, TaleSpin came together really very quickly. And so Mark and I ended up as the producers on that show.

[music]

1:10:12 S1: Mark Zaslove.

1:10:13 S1: He had pitched B players and that got shot down and they didn't have that fourth show to put on, which became The Disney Afternoon. I gather it was a $2 billion pitch, eventually, that's what they made off of it, off of TaleSpin. I remember walking in sort of in the middle of something, on Pooh, or on a break or something, and it was like, "Yeah, try this. What can we do with these characters?" And then, three days later, we had TaleSpin.

1:10:35 S1: Tad Stones.

1:10:36 S6: Gummi Bears, it was just... I mean, it was cool. We were a very small team, we were still trying to figure out things. It was just a lot of camaraderie in the studio, there was only... I wanna say like, two shows going, or on a special like, Fluppy Dogs and gummies and Wuzzles had just one season, and development was going on, so it was a very small group and a lot of energy. It was a lot of fun. And then when we got into the Disney Afternoon, it was even better because we didn't have to have network approval for anything, it was basically, if we could sell Michael and Jeffrey on an idea, we then did it. [chuckle] Buena Vista Distribution had to take it, they didn't have any input, and we got a lot of close scrutiny for the first three scripts from our president, who was Gary Krisel, of TV animation, and then he had stuff to do. So you were on your own. You'd come up with anything and then when first footage came back, there was kind of like a little more scrutiny, 'cause is it going the way we expected? How is it looking? What adjustments do we have to do? You went back to doing whatever you wanted, until it's about time to go on the air.

1:11:41 S6: At which time, it'd either be good times or panic, depending on what they thought of your show. I couldn't have done Darkwing Duck and had the show we ended up with under any other situation, because I was just trying all sorts of crazy, goofy things.

1:11:57 Speaker 20: I've just gone crazy!

1:11:58 Speaker 21: Come on, dad! It's not that complicated. Cabbages from outer space are duplicating everybody in the world, so they can take over the planet. And this cow, who's really an alien, has come here to recapture them. Just deal with it.

1:12:13 S6: It started as Jeffrey saying, "Hey, you did this episode of DuckTales called Double-O-Ducks. I want a show called Double-O-Duck." Again, I thought it's just a spy parody, there's no Disney heart to it, but boss said I gotta do it, and that's all I presented to him, and he said the same thing, he says, "There's no Disney heart to this. Do it over. Thank goodness. [chuckle] He should have said, "Get me somebody else, " but instead, I went into, "Okay, what about the Shadow and Doc Savage had a team of guys who worked in secret?" And ideas like that bubbled around Silver Age of comics and he really turned into more of a superhero, a non-super superhero than a spy, but you could look at that pitch and really do a normal show, [chuckle] I guess. And then, as we got into it, it was like, "No, I'm pitching, what if you take Warner Brother shorts and gave them heart in 22 minutes instead of seven minutes of just gags?" And that's what I was chasing, and some hit it better than others.

1:13:10 S6: When I was doing development, they wanted a new character, so I came up with Double-O-Duck, who, at the time, wasn't much more than... Visually, was Donald Duck, white tuxedo mask and a little hat. But, anyway, when we were developing him, Launchpad was not in it. In my head, was Doc Savage, who had a team of guys who worked with him, who were specialists, and then that shrunk 'cause it was like too many people. And for a while, he had a sidekick who was a little guy who wore derby, so it wasn't until Gosalyn entered the picture that we really had a show based on the idea that what if Batman had a little girl who refused to stay at home? Although I don't think we said it that concisely at the time. And we still felt like we needed a guy for Darkwing to talk to. And Launchpad, because he had been there in the beginning, and we knew him, just seemed like that personality is great. So we brought him on to Darkwing, but really changed his design and subtracted many an IQ point from him. [chuckle] So he's a lot dumber in our show.

1:14:10 Speaker 22: I got a whole scrapbook, a few newspaper clippings. Of course, it's not a very big scrapbook.

1:14:16 Speaker 23: Wouldn't it be easier to fly if we were facing the other way?

1:14:20 S2: Oh, yeah, sorry. [chuckle] I sometimes have trouble with that.

1:14:25 S6: The real pilot for Darkwing Duck is an episode I wrote called, "That Sinking Feeling", with Moliarty as the villain, this guy who is based on the mole man, basically, except he really was a mole, stealing objects from the surface, bringing him down to the center of the Earth where he'd reconstruct them into this giant ray that was going to pull the moon out of orbit to block the sun so it would be darker on the surface, and Moliarty and his minions could all live on the surface. That was the first one written, and the first one boarded that we went into and act three of that, for no reason at all, they're in a baseball stadium, and suddenly, everybody's in... Except for the villain, is in baseball outfits. It was that thing where Bugs Bunny would go off screen, come back with a whole new costume.

1:15:07 S6: We actually didn't get that level of breaking reality in the show a lot, although we went crazy in different ways, but that was the one that was testing out everything, it really set up Gosalyn's relationship with Darkwing Duck and how close they were and her relationship to Honker. So that was our pilot. That's the first thing through. Then what everybody considers the pilot, which is the four part, Darkly Dawns the Duck, that story, again, became a little straighter. But the main thing is, everybody always asked about the origin of Darkwing Duck, and I said, "You know, he's basically a Batman, what am I gonna do? Have him sitting in his mansion and a duck breaks through a window and he goes, 'That's it, an omen, I shall become a duck'"? Wait. There was nothing to tell there. I certainly wasn't gonna kill his parents, and have him have this life of seeking revenge. So, I said, "No. Let's address the heart, let's bring Gosalyn." This is the story of how he adopted Gosalyn, and then that story got a little darker, dealing with what happened to her parents. But that's what made you really care about her, so... And care about her predicament.

1:16:17 S2: Yeah, once again, saved by my buzzsaw cufflinks.

1:16:21 S6: Some of the things with Darkwing were very not formulaic, but I had orders for my editors, and I said, "Every show, he has to say, 'Let's get dangerous'". The secondary thing was, "Suck gas, evildoers" when he used his gas gun, and too many people didn't hear the G, and it just didn't come up as much, that one kinda fell away. Originally, he just had one thing that he said, he said, "I'm the terror that flaps in the night." And I, frankly, forget the second line, it was like the third script in, it was an episode where Launchpad had to play the part of Darkwing, and he could never get the line right. He said, "I am the road salt that rusts the underside of your car." He continually screwed up throughout the episode, and we all thought it was hilarious. And I said, "You know what? Rewrite the scripts we've already got done. Let's give that to Darkwing. That's too good to just leave on this one episode," and that became his ongoing thing.

1:17:15 S2: I am the terror that flaps in the night. I am the jailer who throws away the key. I am feeling really stupid. Boy, I hate it when I'm early. You'd think criminal masterminds would be more punctual.

1:17:35 S1: Dean Stefan, writer.

1:17:37 Speaker 24: So, throughout the entire office, everyone from secretaries to producers and everything, they ran a contest. "Name this character", "Name this star" "Name this guy", and out of all the names, out of all... You know, we each put in dozens. They picked Darkwing Duck, and of course, it was Alan Burnett, who came up with the name and he got the 500 bucks. I would never conceive the name "Darkwing Duck", it just doesn't make sense. But now, how could it be anything else. Actually, Wiemers and Koonce, who were my story editors, who by now, had left Disney to seek their fortune in sitcoms, they sued Disney because they said they had written that Double-O-Duck episode of DuckTales and they thought they should be recompensed or whatever the word is.

1:18:19 S2: Of course, anything to do with Disney, they own anyway, but they did see some kind of settlement, I believe. I don't think it was huge. Then they later came back to Disney, so I guess there's no huge bad blood, or maybe that was part of the deal. Tad really had the whole thing down first, he was really into Twin Peaks at the time. I remember our first meeting, where we all go in to pitch stories and stuff, he had two bagels or donuts in front of everyone, which was like a thing from Twin Peaks. I wasn't a fan, so I didn't really know, but I knew it was sort of an iconic thing and he was very into the whole Twin Peaks thing, and very artsy stuff. And I would later make fun of him, because he would... I guess, it became such a big deal, the show, that he would start giving notes.

1:19:05 S2: Everybody would write out notes and give it to the story editors and stuff, like, he would start cassette-taping his notes like from some undisclosed location, like Howard Hughes, or something, and then the cassette would arrive at the story editors, and then they would play the cassette for you, and I would put this cover under... A lot of that may have been because of his hours, he liked to get there like five in the morning and leave at two or three in the afternoon, 'cause he had kids, and he was an early guy. Most people like me, I'm probably the worst case, but before 10:00 AM, forget it. So I never worked directly under him, where I had to report to him directly as a story editor, but he liked to run a tight ship, I think. But the cassette notes were a bit much.

1:19:49 S2: I am the thing that goes bump in the night. I'm the neuroses that requires a $500 an hour shrink!

1:19:55 S6: I know, when we started Darkwing, they wanted to do a Darkwing Duck movie, and the studio in Paris, that later went on to work on features, they did a bunch of development that was totally ignoring what the show was. I took one stab at it. Again, this is the opposite of being left to do whatever you want. I had to pitch this, and it didn't go, and I just said, "You know, I can't do both. I can't do a movie and get this show up and running. So I'm just gonna do the show". I only found this out recently, they thought that maybe that should be a musical. Jymn Magon was actually gonna have meetings with Barry Manilow, ended up having meeting with another big music guy, not a name you would know as a star, but that was just crazy. And that really showed that, man, they don't understand what Darkwing Duck is, so thank goodness that didn't happen.

1:20:41 S2: I am the terror that flaps in the night. I am the weirdo who sits next to you on the bus. I am the swan prince?

1:20:52 S1: With the Disney Afternoon well on its way, it was time for the first of the fab five to get his own vehicle.

[music]

1:21:02 S5: I think they were going to originally do it as a scout troop to the show, and that's why it's called Goof Troop. I was not there for that development, but when it finally came around who... Goofy's gotta live in Spoonerville, and have a next door neighbor, Pete, that's when we developed the show in earnest. We looked at those old cartoons of Mr. Geef or Goof, or whatever his last thing was supposed to be, and he was always... Lived in the suburbs and would wave bye-bye to his wife, as she would get in a car and drive off, and he was in charge of the kid for the day. Goofy would make mistakes, and the son would just go along with it, and I remember thinking, "Well, we've gotta kinda make it more interesting than that." And you look for the key to the series. And the key to Goof Troop, for me, was, "I don't wanna grow up to be my dad," and I think we felt like, "Yeah, that's what we want. We want this guy who's a single dad trying to raise his kid right, and was next door to this bad influence, Pete and his family." That, to us, was where all the comedy gold was to mine, skateboards and school and working in town, and commuting, and stuff like that.

1:22:11 S5: My forte was always in the comedy [1:22:15] ____ is in Rescue Rangers and TaleSpin kinda thing. Goof Troop was more of a sitcom, [chuckle] more Laverne & Shirley, that kind of thing. Feels like adventure to me because Goofy found a way to mess everything up.

1:22:30 S1: Michael Spooner, artist.

1:22:32 Speaker 25: I was a principal layout designer on the project. We decided to go with the style of 101 Dalmatians, where it was line art, the painter would actually do a watercolor under a cell line, so my line art would be transferred to Xerox to cel, like traditional animation was, and then they would do a watercolor. I had done so much design on the town in which he lived. The studio decided to name it Spooner though.

1:23:00 S1: Jymn Magon, original pitch for syndicators to buy Goof Troop.

1:23:05 S7: So, I wanna introduce you to Goof Troop. And, in it, Goofy is now a man of the 90s. He's a single dad living in suburbia, with his three phones, two TVs, one cat, and a very contrary 11-year old son. Let me take you through a day in the life. An alarm fire goes off. It belongs to good old Goofy, that good-natured klutz whose motto is, "A day without sunshine is like night!" Goofy embraces the dawn like every other obstacle in his life, with boundless and fondling enthusiasm. Now I wanna show you the difference, here is his son Goofy Jr, or Max, as he likes to be called, because he hates being silent with an adjective, like his father. Anyway, as you can tell from Max's enthusiasm, this is a school day. Now, Max loves Bo Jackson, Goofy thinks he's one of the Jackson Five.

[laughter]

1:23:50 S7: Max loves Mario Brothers, Goofy's pretty sure they'd beat him off in the third grade. Max loves his VCR. Goofy can't spell VCR.

[laughter]

1:23:58 S7: Anyway, Goofy heads downstairs to make a nutritious breakfast, or more to the point, a nutritious mess. "Junior, food's on!" Well, Max heads downstairs, shaking his head, wondering, "How does such a radical kid like me end up with such a goof for a father?" And so it would appear that the fruit seldom falls far from the tree. However, this is a curse that Max is determined to break. He desperately wants to swim out of the deep end of his father's gene pool. But you know, through all these crazy escapades, the one thing that Max learns is, "Just when you're convinced your folks are totally useless, they're there for you when you're totally useless." So relax, Max, your father ain't so bad. He's just Goofy. Hell, let's face it, kid, you're a little goofy. Welcome to the Goof Troop, kid.

1:24:47 S7: Yeah, I had done an episode called 'Have Yourself A Goofy Little Christmas', which the idea of the father-son going off and father wants to do one thing that's traditional and the son wants to do something different. That, to me, felt the most like a booby, and kind of set the tone. And, at one point, we were gonna do, I think, a two-parter, that was Goofy and his son on vacation, and somehow, that two-parter turned into the idea to do another... Well, it was called "Movie Tunes" at the time, when we did the DuckTales movie, and that was driven pretty much by Mr. Katzenberg, who told us a really interesting story about how he was losing touch with his daughter, and he decided "We're just gonna take time off and she and I are gonna get the car and just go somewhere." And he says, "I don't know where it happened or how it happened, but we connected on that trip, being trapped in a car together. That became the gist of The Goofy movie, which was father wants it the one way, the son wants it another way, then they finally find each other along the way. That was very rewarding for me, to be able to move from the TV show into a feature film.

1:25:57 S7: Well, I sat by myself for a long time, and then they finally brought in Kevin Lima. Kevin just had a whole plethora of people he trusted, and they were great. The film took off from there, and I think, of all my experiences in animation, that was the most... I want to make sure I say this right, kind of the most disconcerning, because it was so different from writing for episodic television, 'cause in episodic television, the writer becomes king. I'm not sure that that's the correct position for the writer, but just because of the time limitations, you had to have something written and, basically, directed on paper, and then everybody followed it. That's whether you could get it done in time. But when it came to a movie, it was a very flexible thing, and lots of people are involved, and they're changing their sequence, and that sequence is so powerful that it changes that sequence. And suddenly, the writer's, "Huh? I think I recognize one of my lines in here." [chuckle] I think Moss Hart said that. I would come into work and I had written a sequence and then it would be storyboarded, and I look at this and say, "This is genius! I wish I had written this!" [chuckle]

1:27:05 S7: It was terrific. It was such a new way of working for me. So it was disconcerning from the standpoint that, gee, I don't have the kind of control over the project that I used to have on TV, but that's not to say that they weren't doing spectacular work and that I was such a lucky guy to be a part of it. While I feel like I brought the essence of 'I don't wanna grow up to be my dad', I really feel like so much of all the clever little things and the sort of Kelly moments, that was Kevin and his team coming in there with their stuff, and it was just such a delight to work with them, and that's why I think I was upset, because I didn't get to follow through on the movie. I was told in... Go over here and work on DuckTales. We went to lunch as I was leaving the series, we went to Sizzler, of all places, and I just said, "I feel so bad, Kevin, because I wanted to be so helpful and such an important part of this and I feel like so much of what I did didn't end up on the screen." And he said, "But Jymn, we wouldn't be doing what we're doing, if we weren't standing on your shoulders", and it was like, "Oh yeah, I guess so" [chuckle] Made me feel better. That's just a part of the creative process. The first link in the chain sometimes doesn't look like the last link in the chain [chuckle], it's painted a different color along the way.

1:28:33 S1: After the company had dabbled in its most famous IPs, the next show would be a wholly original character, well, sort of. Bonkers was loosely based on the idea of Roger Rabbit, he was a former cartoon star who had fallen on tough times after his show had been cancelled, and became a cop, teamed with a human partner. But its production was mired in reboots and dissatisfaction. Greg Weisman, creator, Gargoyles.

1:29:00 Speaker 26: Well, I mean, Bonkers is complicated. Bonkers was a show that I developed, and got Duane Capizzi, the producer, story editor, Bob Hathcock was chosen to be the director, producer on it. We had real high hopes for it, but, unlike Gargoyles, that was a show where I got it up and running and then I walked away from it, and other people were supposed to be paying attention to it, and the very first two or three episodes that came back didn't look very good, from an animation standpoint, not sure that, initially, the show's art directed very well. We had humans and quote unquote "toons", even though the whole thing was animated.

1:29:37 S2: And I think there should have been a distinct, more kind of realistic art style, not Gargoyles, necessarily, but something, even from a color palette standpoint, that felt a little less cartoony, so that the quote unquote "toons" on the show, like Roger Rabbit, and Jitters Dog really pop, because they were toons in a human world, and I don't think that art direction ever quite came off, but I think we had a really smart show which featured Bonkers partnered with Miranda Wright as a cop. Bonkers drove her crazy but he was her partner, so she'd back him no matter what, and ultimately, they were friends, and we did a lot of smart sort of clever things about what it would be like in a Roger Rabbit vein to live in a world with toons and humans.

1:30:25 S2: And then I think, honestly, that some of the executives, when the first stuff came back and didn't look very good, overreacted. There were certainly problems, maybe even some problems with the writing, but I don't think the problems were quite as problematic as some people thought, and I think, frankly, most of it could have been fixed by fine-tuning the art direction. But I wasn't in charge and I was also in the process of trying to move over to Gargoyles and all this stuff is sort of happening simultaneously. I did get dragged back into it, and at some point, it became clear that... To Gary, that he wanted some real wholesale changes here and neither Duane nor Bob were giving him that, so both of them wound up getting booted off the show, and a guy named Bob Taylor, who had done Goof Troop, was brought in, and Bob made some very drastic and, I think, unnecessary changes to the show.

1:31:19 S2: He did get the art direction better, but Bob didn't think girls were funny, so he ditched Miranda and put in a character who, in essence, was Pete from Goof Troop, and was voiced with Pete's voice by Jim Cummings, and Jim is great. Jim voiced Bonkers. I love Jim. But it was just a dynamic that we had seen before. The story lines were, I thought, way less interesting, and I was really not happy with the change in direction on the show. And then, of course, they wanted this stuff first, so it all got very rushed and they couldn't throw away the dozen or so episodes that featured Miranda, so even though that stuff was made first, it aired last, and they actually created an episode where Piquel joins the FBI and moves away, and Bonkers is partnered with Miranda for the last dozen episodes, which again, were the dozen or so that were made first. But they created a new pilot and basically played it as if the Piquel stuff was first, and the Miranda stuff was second, when it was really the other way around. And so, it became a show of...

1:32:31 S2: It makes me sad, [chuckle] but... 'Cause I think a lot of potential was squandered there, and I think a lot of the changes were unnecessary, and, to be fair, Taylor and I didn't really see eye to eye on anything, and I finally just begged off, and asked Gary to take me off the project, 'cause I didn't think I was helping Bob, 'cause we agreed on almost nothing. And so I was just in his way, and Gary had gone with Taylor, and it was his show now, so I had to let it go, and so Gary said, "Okay." And I sort of stepped away from the project, and had very little involvement with all but the first couple Piquel episodes, which I didn't care for, which doesn't mean they're bad, it just wasn't the show I had developed, and wasn't the show that I wanted to make.

1:33:30 S1: Bonkers hit the air in 1993. It had almost been a decade since the brunch that started it all. In that time, Disney television had gone from nonexistent to the standard that everyone else had to chase. The problem was, by the time Bonkers hit the air, other networks had already caught up and would even take the lead, and now Disney television animation would have to decide if they were going to chase by rebranding, or stick with the girl who brought them to the days.

1:34:00 S2: Here were all these people from different studios, there were people like me that had never worked for any studio, in animation. I was a record producer. So I think it was [1:34:09] ____ and I, we're talking, and we said, "Are we doing this right? Are we doing a Disney TV show correctly?" And then we realize, there's never been a Disney TV show, at least a Saturday morning style TV show. And therefore, because we work for Disney, and we're making these shows, we are Disney [chuckle], what we're doing is Disney. And that, whatever we were doing, whether it was right or wrong, would be a Disney show.

[music]

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[aporeticelenchus]

Gilbert and Sullivan three-sentence plot summaries

I’ve been promising @oceannocturne a brief Gilbert and Sullivan guide for a while, but it turns out that the “brief” part is tricky. I wanted to make a post with short summaries – no more that three sentences each – and a few song recs for each opera, but that quickly grew way too long for one post. So, here’s a post that’s just three sentence summaries for all the extant operas, for anyone who wants a quick idea of what’s going on in each of them. I’ll try to do a series of follow-ups with some specific songs linked and put in context.

The Sorcerer (aka The Love Potion AU) Alexis is marrying his beloved Aline, and he only wishes everyone else could be as happy and as in love as he. In fact, he wishes it so much that he hires the sorcerer John W. Wells to drug the entire town with a love potion! Chaos, predictably, ensues.

HMS Pinafore (aka Class Hierarchy and Boats) Captain Corcoran is the well-bred and well-mannered captain of the Pinafore, and he’s delighted when Lord Admiral Sir Joseph offers to marry his daughter Josephine and elevate the family station. But Josephine loves a member of her father’s crew, the simple sailor Ralph. Fortunately, love can level all rank (but not that much), and a British tar is any man’s equal – or so Sir Joseph always says!

The Pirates of Penzance (aka Look You All Probably Know This One Already) Frederic is the slave of duty, and in duty’s name he has served out an apprenticeship with a band of pirates, despite passionately longing to lead an honest life. When his term is up, he seeks out new love and plots to destroy his old piratical associates (in the name of duty). But the pirates still have a claim on Frederic, and he’s torn between his duty as pirate apprentice and his loyalty to his fiancée Mabel and her family.

Patience (aka ~*~Aesthetic~*~) The ladies of town all love the tragical aesthetic poet Bunthorne, who has in turn sworn his love to the milkmaid Patience, the only maiden in town who dislikes him. When Patience’s childhood friend (also turned poet) Archibald returns and confesses his love for her, Patience falls in love for the first time – but as she’s been told that love is completely selfless, she believes that she must love the odious Bunthorne rather than the too-wonderful Archibald. Meanwhile, a regiment of dragoons, who were all betrothed to the local ladies a year ago, are stationed in town and can’t figure out why the ladies are chasing a pair of poets instead of them.

Iolanthe (aka Parliament Fairies) The Arcadian shepherd Strephon has a secret – he’s half-fairy (from the waist up), and his mother Iolanthe was banished from the fairy court for daring to marry a human. Strephon loves Phyllis, but her guardian the Lord Chancellor is determined that she marry a peer (and secretly wishes to marry her himself!). A misunderstanding between Strephon and Phyllis leads to clash between the fairy court and the House of Peers, and the angry fairies makes Strephon a member of parliament and head of both parties, able to pass whatever legislation he chooses!

Princess Ida (aka #misandry) Twenty years ago, the infants Princess Ida and Prince Hilarion were betrothed, and Hilarion’s father Hildebrand is threatening war if Hilarion’s bride doesn’t appear. But when Ida’s father Gama arrives, he brings word that Ida has foresworn the company of men and converted Castle Adamant into a women’s college where no man is allowed. Hildebrand plans to march on Ida’s castle college with an army, but Hilarion hopes to infiltrate Castle Adamant himself and win Ida’s love first.

The Mikado (aka William S. Gilbert Discovers That Japan Is a Country That Exists) Runaway prince Nanki-Poo disguises himself as a wandering minstrel to escape an unwanted fiancée and search for his true beloved, Yum-Yum, only to find that she’s engaged to marry the village executioner Ko-Ko. Ko-Ko’s never performed an actual execution, and he’s been given notice that he’d better find a victim soon – and Nanki-Poo’s considering volunteering if it means he can marry Yum-Yum before he dies. And that’s all before his father, the Mikado, shows up in town with his “daughter-in-law-elect” in tow!

Ruddigore (aka SpooooOOOOOoooooky) The Baronet of Ruddigore suffers a terrible witch’s curse; the bearer of the title must commit a crime every day or else die in horrible agony. Lord Ruthven Murgatroyd should have inherited the title, but he faked his own death and lives as simple Robin, a timid and conscientious young man who (timidly) loves the beautiful Rose Maybud. But when Robin’s foster brother Richard becomes his rival for Rose, Robin’s true identity is revealed and he must live as the Bad Baronet he was born to be – or die a terrible death!

Yeomen of the Guard (aka The One That’s Almost a Grand Opera) Lord Fairfax, consigned to the Tower of London thanks to scheming relatives after his fortune, contrives to marry a random woman in the hour before his execution so that his wealth will pass to her instead. Poor Elise Maynard, fiancée of the wandering jester Jack Point, accepts the offe and marries Fairfax sight unseen, with a blindfold on. But Phoebe, who loves Fairfax, schemes with her father to free Fairfax and disguise him as her brother and a yeoman of the guard, leaving Elise torn between her old fiancé, her unknown husband, and the handsome new yeoman who’s started courting her…

The Gondoliers (aka Problems With Monarchy) Marco and Giuseppe are brothers and gondoliers, who have just chosen two beautiful ladies to marry. Right after their weddings, they’re informed that one of them (though no one knows which) is in fact the lost heir to the Kingdom of Barateria – and unbeknownst to them, that one was married at birth to Casilda, daughter of the Duke of Plaza Toro. The two agree to rule Barateria together until they can discover which of them is the true king, and as lifelong republicans they struggle to reconcile their ideals and their positions as monarchs.

Utopia, Limited (aka Corporations Are People) King Paramount of the island nation of Utopia is a king of autocratic power and absolute rule – aside from the minor fact that his two Wise Men have the authority to blow him up with a keg of dynamite if he steps a toe out of line. Paramount has decided to reform the entire nation of Utopia to be exactly like England, the country he admires most, and when his daughter Zara returns from her studies in England she brings back several Englishmen known as the Flowers of Progress. The Flowers devise a set of schemes to make Utopia more English than England itself, including turning the entire island and everyone one of its inhabitants into limited liability corporations!

The Grand Duke (aka A Not Very Good Revolution) The actor Ludwig is, along with his entire theatrical company, engaged in a revolutionary plot to assassinate the penny-pinching, hypochondriacal Grand Duke Rudolph and put their manager in his place. When Ludwig misinterprets their secret sign and spills the whole plot to the Grand duke’s detective, he pretends to inform on his fellow conspirators and convinces Rudolph to become legally dead for a day while Ludwig takes his place. But once Ludwig is in power, he changes the law to keep Rudolph “dead” and himself in charge forever, and has to deal with the ensuing tangle of obligations and commitments.

Bonus: Trial By Jury (aka The Short One) Edwin is being sued by his ex-fiancée Angelina for breach of promise of marriage after he threw her over for another woman. A completely impartial jury and wise and learned judge solve the ensuing legal tangle. This one is too short to even merit three sentences!

[originalhybridloverfics]

Bodyguard AU

Felicity paced the length of her office, a hand running agitatedly over her hair that was pulled back into a ponytail, her other hand held her phone to her ear. “No, I understand. I just wish I had more notice.”

John Diggle who stood at the open doorway, arm crossed watched her agitated movements and listened to her side of the conversation and though he was only hearing her side of the conversation he was pretty sure she was talking to Victor and he was explaining that he was being shipped out in just two days.

John could see where her agitation came from, watching the tense set of her shoulders. She would have to find another man to take up Victor’s position. Which wouldn’t seem that big of deal accept for the fact that the spot she needed filled was kind of secretive since not many knew of the secret woman’s shelter that Felicity ran. It made looking for someone to fill Victor’s spot rather difficult to say the least.

Though he did know a guy who was more than capable of replacing Victor. Oliver Queen. He had served with Oliver for a few years before he joined private security up until the point when he met Felicity. While he was state side Oliver had continued with several more tours. But Oliver had gotten state side 6 months ago and they got together for drinks every few weeks. He knew Oliver was working private security like he used to but he could see his friend hated it.

He knew Oliver was struggling and maybe doing something more than private security, something truly important would do his friend some good. He contemplated bringing him up as a suggestion to Felicity as she finished up her call.

“No, thank you, Victor. It was a honor to have you for the time that we did. Stay safe.” Felicity bid Victor goodbye ending the call, she rounded her desk setting the phone receiver back in its cradle before sinking into her desk chair, hufffing out a breath, and rubbing at the creased that formed between her brows when she was stressed.

“I know a guy that could fill in for Victor.”

Felicity dropped her hand from her forehead. “I can’t just hire anyone, Dig. You know that.”

“I do. And I wouldn’t suggest just anyone. I know how important it is what we do here.”

Felicity reached for her red pen and twirled it between her fingers in a thinking gesture. It wasn’t often Diggle vouch for people. He was a hard man to impress. So when he did Felicity tended to take it to heart. There wasn’t a person on earth who she trusted more with her life than John Diggle and with good reason. When they first met he had saved her life, she had been living on the run from her psycho ex-boyfriend Cooper Seldon, if it hadn’t been for him, she’d probably be dead. It was a chance meeting, wrong place, wrong time kind of deal or right place, right time, depending on how you looked at it. “Is he a good man?”

“One of the best men I’ve ever had the honor to call my brother. We served a couple tours together.” Diggle assured her. “I would take a bullet for him.”

“High praise.” Felicity mused, leaning back in her chair.

“Well earned.” Digg said. “Trust me, he’s worth at least considering. Just give him a chance, meet with him and if you’re still not convinced no harm done. I’ll put my feelers out for someone else.”

Felicity tilted her head in his direction. “I always trust you Digg. Set a meeting up and we’ll go from there. If I think he’s a good fit. I’ll hire him. Until then I might need you and Roy to take extra shifts.”

“I’m fine with the extra shifts and I’ll give him a call now.” He stepped out of her office closing the door behind him.

Felicity let out a sigh. Her life was completely from what she thought it would be. She thought she’d be working at a huge tech company or maybe start up one of her own. Instead she ran a secret woman’s shelter out of an conveince store. The owner of the store was more than willing to help out and Felicity had a working arrnagement with her and paid good money for the hidden shelter and its discreetness. She got the money from free lance computer software jobs.

Felicity spent most her time trying to protect and fight for these women who were in horrible situations to fight for themselves.

But sometimes it was dangerous, the women that they housed were in the worst situations and the ones they were running from were usually psychotic and took things too far which was why Felicity had took to hiring men to protect the shelter and the women children that took refuge here.

Diggle was in charge of everything security wise after she hired them. She kept a total of six bodyguards and they worked in separate shifts. There was Sara Lance, Nysaa Al Ghul, Roy Harper, Slade Wilson. Victor had been one of them but not any longer and of course John. She trusted every single one of them.

She didn’t know Diggle’s old army buddy but she trusted Digg’s judgment. If he said the guy was worth giving him a shot than she was willing to at least interview him.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

A week later Felicity had plans to interview Oliver. Shortly after Digg had talked to Oliver and he had showed an interest in the job, Felicity received a call from Oliver Queen they spoke briefly over the phone and set up an appointment but as soon as Felicity was off the phone with him, she immediately began looking into Oliver Queen. She did a full background check on him. He had graduated from high school but drifted through several colleges never truly able to make one stick and seemed to have trouble finding a place he truly fit until he joined the army after dropping out of his fourth college. Where he seemed to falter in school acedemics he excelled at everything in the army and was one of the youngest most decorated soldiers.

Felicity had went as far as to hack into the government database and take a look at his missions, the lives he took and the lives he saved. He took a huge risk and he often threw himself into the line of fire but it usually always paid off even if he had been in the army hospital more than a few times. She had tooken a look at his medical records and 65 percent of his body was covered in scar tissue and he had more than a few broken bones and fractures over his time of service that never healed properly.

Felicity admitted that on paper he seemed to be exactly what she was looking for out of someone to fill in Victor’s place but what was on paper didn’t always turned out to be what she thought. She wanted to meet with him and get a feel of him herself to determined whether or not if she would hire him. Dig’s recommendation may have gotten him through the door but it didn’t get him the job.

There was a knock at her office door and she called out for them to come in, Dig appeared in the doorway. “Mr. Queen is here for his interview, Felicity.” He stepped further into the room and when he did Felicity caught sight of the man in the doorway.

She had seen pictures of him in her background check but the photos that she had seen hadn’t done him any justice. He was a gorgeous man and he had a large build not nearly as large as Dig’s but still he swamped her and was twice the size Victor had been.

Felicity stood from her desk and motioned for him to come in as she rounded her desk coming to stand in front of it as he walked further into the room.

“Ms. Smoak?” Oliver moved forwarded extending his hand. “I’m Oliver Queen.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Queen.” Felicity shook his hand, noting how it covered hers completely and how warm his skin was.

“No, Mr. Queen is my father. You can just call me, Oliver.” Oliver smiled, releasing her hand.

Felicity allowed her hand to return to her side as she leaned against her desk. “Yes but he’s not here and neither does he have the qualifications for this interview. Not that your father isn’t good enough. Or you for that matter. I mean not that your not good enough clearly you are if your four army tours is anything to consider. I mean sure your more than qualified to meet my needs.” Oh God, why couldn’t she just stopped why she was ahead. Damn her mouth always getting away from her. She really needed a filter. “Not my needs as in my physical needs.” she was quick to correct. “I meant the needs for the interview.” she pursed her lips and counted down backwards. “3..2..1.” She blew out a breath. “Why don’t we get started.“ she motioned with her hand to the chair opposite her desk.

Oliver was quiet a moment and she waited to see if he would mention her babble, she noted the small upward turn of his mouth and she could see amusement in his eyes, she didn’t know if he was laughing at her silently or if he just found her babbling amusing. Finally he said. “Of course, Ms. Smoak.”

Felicity nodded, rounding her desk once again and taking her chair, noting how Oliver waited till she was seated before sitting in the chair across from her as Dig took station at the door.

“John tells me that you served two tours together and that you’re more than qualified to take up this job and I’ve taken a look at your public record and I would have to agree but if I’m going to trust you to do this job, I need to know what kind of man you are.”

“If you seen my record I think it more than speaks for what kind of man I am.” said Oliver with a raised brow.

“It speaks of your accomplishments as a soldier but I’m not asking about the soldier. I’m asking about the man.”

“What’s the difference. I’m the same person.”

“The difference is a man and a soldier think differently. Sometimes that’s a bad thing but sometimes its a good thing. I just woud like to know which one it is with you.” she locked eyes with him. “So tell me Mr. Queen why did you join the army.”

“I was lost. I didn’t want to live up to the expectations around me so I did the exact opposite of what they thought me capable of.”

Felicity hummed. “And how did that work out for you?”

“Better than I thought it would.” Oliver found himself admiting. “I always sort of drifted since highschool but when I joined I found a purpose something worth fighting for.”

“So you would say you found something to believe in. Something bigger than yourself.”

“Yeah, I did.” Oliver didn’t know why he was being so forthcoming. There was just something about Felicity, the way she seemed to look through him with her saphire gaze, seeing down to everything that made him who he was at his score.

“And just what do you believe in?” Felicity questioned, she liked what she was hearing so far but she didn’t want to be hasty in her decision.

“I believe in justice. I believe in doing the right thing. I believe in fighting for those who can’t fight for themselves.” Oliver spoke strongly. Fighting for others. Protecting innocents had become such a huge part of him it was pratically ingrained in his DNA at this point.

Felicity heard every word he spoke and she believed herself to be a good judge of character with an excellent bullshit meter and right now everything in her was telling her if she hired Oliver she wouldn’t regret it. She could hear the conviction in his voice that he believed every word he said. She stared at him and what she saw was a good man.

Felicity hummed. “How much did Digg tell you about the job?”

“Not much.” Diggle had only told him he worked in security but never went into details. “But if it’s a cause Dig is willing to fight than I know it’s one worth fighting for.”

Felicity looked over to Digg, sharing a wordless conversation and after a moment she nodded at him, her sign of approval with his recommendation and his loyalty to what they were doing here. She turned back to Oliver. “Once I tell you what exactly you’re interviewing for and you for some reason decide this job isn’t for you all I ask is that you never speak of it to anyone it’s imperative that it remains secret for everyone involved.”

Oliver felt the weight of her words and the way she was looking to him with trust settled in his bones and he knew instinctively that he would never betray her trust. “You can trust me.”

Felicity felt like she could somehow she knew instinctively that Oliver was someone she could trust. “I run, I mean, John and I run a secret woman’s shelter. It’s annoymous because the women who come here are in far worst situations than others and their desperate. We’ve had more than a few crazy ex’s literally try to kill their way to these women. And I take their safety and the safety of their children very seriously.”

Oliver had heard of a few secret women’s shelters, where everything was mostly annyomous. it was these shelters that were mostly targeted by spycho boyfriends, husbands and stalkers. He hadn’t known there was one in Starling or one on just the edge of the Glades for the matter. He never would have guessed but fighting for a cause to protect women and children from abusive bastards was a whole more appealing than protecting rich spoiled silver spoon brats like himself once upon a time.

“I can promise you this job is something I would take very seriously. I would do everything I can to make sure nothing will hapen to the women and children seeking a safe place.” Oliver vowed.

Felicity felt every word he spoke like an sworn oath of protection. She stood up. “Then welcome, Mr. Queen-I mean, Oliver.” She quickly amended. “We’re glad to have you.” Oliver followed suit, standing from his seat. “How soon can you start.”

“As soon as you want me to.” Oliver answered easily.

“How about tomorrow.” Felicity moved around her desk, coming to stand in front of him. “We can go for a tour of the place and you can meet some of the others who you’ll be working with and Digg can discuss everything with you that you need to know.” While Felicity hired the manpower here, she mostly connected with the women and gave them a safe place to live, a place where they didn’t have to worry about looking over their shoulder every two minutes but it was Digg who handled the security who made the shelter as safe as it possibly could be so she tended to leave all the security measures and details to him.

Oliver nodded with a firm nod. “Sounds good.”

Felicity nodded. “Then follow me.”

Oliver followed behind her out of her office with Digg following into step behind her.

He listened as she rattled off things he needed to know as she led him through the shelter, giving him a tour introducing him to some of the other hired guards.

All of who seemed to highly respect Felicity and why wouldn’t they. It didn’t take more than two minutes to take notice of the way she carried herself. For someone so small she commanded a room with just one pointed look, a raised brow, a tilt of her head.

And there was just something about her that made you want to fight for her cause, her beliefs. That made you want to offer up your absolute loyalty without question. There was just something about Felicity Smoak that drew you in like a moth to a flame.

And years from now he would thank Diggle on his wedding day to the strongest woman he knew for introducing him to the most, beautiful, kind and selfless woman he had ever had the pleasure of knowing and falling irreversibly in love with who would one day become his wife.

[mattkennard]

Guns for hire in Hereford: inside England's unlikely global security hub

Published: Guardian (10 January 2017)

There is a mysterious feel to Hereford, the picture-book English cathedral city on the border with Wales. When I stop people in the street to ask if they know the city houses a massive private security industry that operates in conflict situations all over the world, some say they don’t even know what private security is.

But many other residents have military or intelligence connections themselves. One man tells me: “I am local but I don’t want to say what I do.” He continues: “A lot of stuff goes on in Hereford; it’s a right little hub. There’s a lot of very deep stuff here, but it’s kept very hush hush.”

The world’s private military-security industry is always controversial, with critics arguing that it operates in a lawless regulatory climate and undermines the very fundamentals of democracy: the idea that only an accountable state has the right to the legitimate use of force.

Many Hereford locals remain unaware that this burgeoning industry is being developed on their doorstep. There is very little in the local newspaper, The Hereford Times, on the subject, and even less in the national media. But with new groups emerging to represent the security and defence industries in the city, that could be about to change.

A recent report from War on Want called the UK the globe’s “mercenary kingpin”, and found that no fewer than 14 private military and security companies are based in Hereford. That number is growing, and has made this 60,000-strong city a major hub for an industry which has boomed during the “war on terror”.

The business model involves providing “soldiers for hire” to companies and governments around the world, to protect assets and important people from criminals and terrorists (and sometimes dissidents). It is a multibillion dollar industry operating in virtually every country in the world. Few outsiders, however, would expect quaint old Hereford to be a key player.

As the rain comes down and evening descends, it starts to feel like we’re in a Kafka novel, and there’s a conspiracy going on: everyone is part of this strange ex-military, ex-intelligence milieu, but no one can speak about it.

One man who won’t give his name says he “used to work for the Ministry of Defence in the security business … Hereford has become a private military centre because of the SAS,” he explains. “There’s other units too, and a lot of them tend to settle here after they’ve finished their time, so they go into that sort of field.”

Another woman I speak to doesn’t know what a private military company is, but agrees: “There’s a lot of people involved in the SAS or military here, so yes, people will know what is happening. On the private military industry, lots of people here are probably profiting from it – so they wouldn’t be complaining about it, and it wouldn’t be in the newspaper.

“You don’t see soldiers around in uniform here,” she adds, “but they are all over the place in their civilian clothing. And if there’s a pub fight, it’s always shut down pretty quickly by the SAS guys ...”

Walking around central Hereford, with its thatched-roof houses and grand Edwardian offices, it’s hard to believe there are companies here that are intimately involved in many of the most dangerous regions in the world, from Somalia to Iraq.

On St Owen’s Street, in the heart of the city opposite its grand registry office, two private security companies, Octaga and GardaWorld, have offices in a twee redbrick set of houses. The latter has work in places as diverse as Haiti, Libya and Yemen – yet on a frosty winter evening standing outside their headquarters, it’s hard to feel further away from those places.

The main reason for Hereford’s position at the centre of global conflict is its location right next to the village of Credenhill, where Britain’s Special Air Service – the SAS – is based. There is, of course, no official acknowledgment of this fact, but when you drive into Credenhill and pass the RAF base, you see the layers of armed police and military manning the entrance.

Signs invoking the Official Secrets Act and banning photos are tacked to the walls of buildings here. In 2010, the undercover nature of the base became controversial when Google Maps refused to take off images of it on the maps of the area.

The War on Want report noted that “at least 46 companies [throughout the UK] employ former members of the UK Special Forces”. Since George W Bush launched the war on terror in 2001, it has become the UK’s – maybe even Europe’s – principal location for private security and military companies, or PMSCs, as they are known in the business. Now, there is a move to formalise and consolidate this community of security services in the city, under the banner of the Herefordshire Security & Defence Group (HSDG).

“If someone had said to me that British private security companies have ex-intelligence or special forces in their membership, obviously I wouldn’t have been surprised by that,” says Sam Raphael, a senior lecturer in International Relations at Westminster University and author of the War on Want report. “But what is surprising is the extent to which that’s the case; the sheer number of operations and outfits [in the UK] that are employing ex-special forces, who have operated in a shadowy world working for the state, and now continue to operate in a shadowy world.”

Hereford’s military history

The military imbues Hereford. In the local Waterstones, SAS books get pride of place in the main display; there are shops selling military gear, and leaflets everywhere advertising the Military Wives Choirs’ “Home for Christmas” concert at the cathedral.

The city has a long military history and always adapted to the changing nature of war. The SAS base at Credenhill was previously RAF Hereford. In the first world war, the Herefordshire Regiment was a Territorial Force – but it was one of the first to volunteer for overseas service, and went on to serve in Egypt, Palestine and France.

On 27 July 1942, the Luftwaffe bombed the Rotherwas Munitions Factory on the outskirts of Hereford: a site which is now an industrial estate housing a private security company.

The SAS was formed in North Africa in 1941 by David Stirling, who had grown weary of the failures of large operations and wanted to switch to faster-moving, four-man patrols. Since 1960, 22 SAS, the regular army unit, has been based in Hereford. In 2000, the regiment moved to the RAF base at Credenhill. It is thought to have four operational squadrons, each comprising around 60 men.

Most of the private security companies in Hereford have been started by ex-special forces soldiers. The PMSCs offices are located all around Hereford, from quaint old houses to industrial estates on the edge of the city.

The walk from the centre of Hereford to the offices of Ambrey Risk – a private security company focused on maritime protection against modern-day pirates, for example – is a full-on country affair. About five minutes of walking outside the city brings you to a bridge jutting across the River Wye, with greenery as far as the eye can see. This continues until you reach the Thorn Business Park.

Inside Ambrey’s nondescript office, 40 people are manning the phones, working on securing the assets of some of the biggest companies in the world in some of the most dangerous places in the world, from Somalia to Nigeria. When they look outside their window, however, all they can see is freight lorries standing on a rainy, windswept industrial estate on the outskirts of Hereford. It’s a bizarre juxtaposition of worlds.

John Thompson was in the parachute regiment from 2003 to 2009, working within the special forces support group for most of that time. He then worked for a big international security company in Africa, before setting up Ambrey Risk in 2010. Thompson says he set up shop in Hereford because it’s where he is from (he’s a local boy), but also because “there is a small pool of security companies here that are born out of people being in the regiment, and there is a small mini-hub of security and defence companies in Hereford. It’s a good place to be if you want to be in this line of work; one of the few areas in the country where there is a small cluster of companies that do what we do.”

Thompson is now pushing to bring the private security companies in Hereford tighter together. He recently helped set up the HSDG, which will meet regularly to create coordination and synergies between the industry in the city. The group calls itself “an association of security and defence companies”, formed by local Herefordshire companies with the aim of “raising significantly the commercial and industrial capacity of this niche and specialist sector in Herefordshire, for the benefit of group members and the wider community”.

“There are 15 companies locally,” Thompson says. “We are probably the biggest in terms of these companies – but we know pretty much all the others, and the HSDG is our first attempt to get everyone talking, and working together both to win work and to share our ideas and information.”

Guns for hire

Hereford is a particularly attractive location because office space is cheap and readily available, and because the city sits in the middle of huge expanses of countryside, where residential training courses can be easily organised. One of these training centres lies on the outskirts of Hereford in the sleepy village of Madley: population 1,200. It’s the closest thing to the Postman Pat bucolic idyll one can imagine, with the Red Lion pub, parish church and post office the only signs of life outside of the grazing cows in the surrounding fields.

But nearby stands an unremarkable, converted barn which, every six weeks, is filled with prospective recruits for the global private security industry from places as diverse as Eastern Europe, the US and Latin America. Here’s where some of the next generation of “guns for hire” start their journey – from those guarding VIPs in war zones to corporate assets in the developing world. Madley and Baghdad couldn’t seem further away, but they are intimately linked by conflict.

John Geddes is the founder and owner of Ronin Concepts, a private security company set up in 2004. Geddes spent his long military career in the parachute regiment and SAS, before quitting and going to Iraq as a private soldier with British company Olive Group. He became disillusioned with the quality of those applying for jobs, and saw an opportunity to move into training.

“In 2004 I jacked in Iraq and came back to the UK, and threw all my money into creating Ronin Concepts,” he tells me as we stand inside the converted barn.

Geddes says Hereford is the kind of place where, if he goes out, he will see other people from PMSCs and say hello. It’s a community.

“For instance, we just did a venue in Glasgow, an executive protection job,” Geddes says. “I raised a team of six in Hereford and took them up to Glasgow; five days’ work, and we flew back yesterday – it was fantastic.” He then admits: “We’re all friends, but it’s a quiet competition.”

Inside the barn, dummies lie on the floor with plastic heads strewn around. The main wall has a big screen on which Geddes puts his training videos, showing live-fire training in Poland and the US (he has training properties in both countries as well).

Geddes explains the unlikely success of the UK in dominating this multibillion-dollar industry. “The answer goes back a couple of hundred years to the rise of the East India Company, which was a private military army. They occupied huge tracts of the globe, and mostly were ex-services patched throughout the empire.”

Now Hereford finds itself at the centre of this industry, whose continued growth carries deep significance for the future of global conflict. “Private security and military companies mean that being able to constrain the use of force and making sure it complies with morality and the law becomes increasingly hard,” says Sam Raphael, the academic who has highlighted the UK’s – and Hereford’s – leading role. “Holding states to account, and ensuring regular armies use force in proportionate and legal ways, is hard enough – never mind the number of different actors we see proliferating now.”

A number of these private-sector actors are using Hereford as the stepping stone into a world of hyper-violence and big money – to the discomfort of some locals, at least. As one exclaimed when told about the industry in the city’s midst: “How is that legal? That’s not legal, surely!”

While the legality of these industries is not at issue, there is no specific regulatory framework – and a visit to this sleepy cathedral city raises many questions in these turbulent times. 

[tabloidtoc]

National Examiner, April 26

You can buy a copy of this issue for your very own at my eBay store: https://www.ebay.com/str/bradentonbooks

Cover: Queen Elizabeth's royal rage

Page 2: Playing House -- famous best buds who shared the rent -- Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman, Ryan Reynolds and Michelle Williams, Robert Downey Jr. and Kiefer Sutherland, Danny DeVito and Michael Douglas

Page 3: Justin Long and Jonah Hill, Ving Rhames and Stanley Tucci, Eddie Redmayne and Jamie Dornan, Jason Priestley and Brad Pitt, Holly Hunter and Frances McDormand, Rob Lowe and Tom Cruise

Page 4: Matt Damon's roles and costumes

Page 6: A Delaware state trooper went above and beyond the call of duty when he surprised a little boy with a brand-new pair of Steph Curry sneakers -- Trooper Joshua Morris and nine-year-old Ra'kir Allen got to be pals when they played basketball together, along with other youths in the area and when the good-hearted cop learned that Ra'kir thought NBA star Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors was his idol, he got an idea, and after running the idea past Ra'kir's mother, the cop presented the aspiring sports star with his own pair of shoes -- Morris says cops should never be strangers to the people they protect, and he lives his belief every day

Page 7: Screen legend Bette Davis believed she had psychic abilities, says her assistant Kathryn Sermak, who met the legend in 1979 and was hired within five minutes of meeting her -- as her personal assistant, she was at Bette's service 24 hours a day, but the star was also very generous like if they were going to a film set, the job was seven days a week, but when it was over, she'd give Kathryn a paid vacation anywhere she wanted for as much as six weeks -- few people know that the screen idol loved to pull practical jokes on people; for instance, at cocktail hour, Bette would serve drinks in gag glasses that dribbled, and then when the liquid would pour onto her guests' expensive dresses or suits, she would innocently ask if they were okay -- the assistant also knew Bette's only child, Barbara Davis Hyman, known as B.D., whose father was Bette's third husband, Grant Sherry. Bette and her next husband, Garry Merrill, her co-star in All About Eve, also adopted two more children, Michael and Margot Merrill, but diagnosed with brain damage at age three, Margot has spent her life in institutions

Page 8: Saving Face -- take years off with simple makeup and skincare tips

Page 9: Vax Reax -- prepare for possible COVID jab side effects

Page 10: Billy Adams really knows how to get his daily steps in as the software exec walks 12 miles around Washington D.C. every day, picking up trash by hand -- during the lockdown, Billy took advantage of working from home to find a daily routine that was good for his physical and mental wellbeing, and helps beautify the city he loves -- starting in June, he began to choose a different 12-mile route every day, no matter the weather, Billy crossed from his Maryland home over into D.C. for a three-hour loop, starting at 8:30 a.m., and he picks up trash along the way and dumps bags of it into garbage cans on his route

Page 11: Tips for getting a restful night -- some tried-and-true tips for getting some rejuvenating rest

Page 12: Olivia Newton-John knows a thing or two about survival: she's had breast cancer three times over the past 28 years and has worked tirelessly to save her own life and the lives of others with her extensive research into natural remedies -- the 72-year-old Grease star says she and her husband John Easterling, who founded the Amazon Herb Company to help the world recognize the benefits of the Amazon Rainforest plants, have developed an approach called integrative medicine. It's a mix of doctor-recommended treatments and those from their own research

Page 14: Dear Tony, America's top psychic healer Tony Leggett -- never too late for romance, it will take work

Page 15: Tom Cornish is 96 years old, but age hasn't slowed him down from knitting up a storm of kindness -- over the past year, the Minnesota World War II veteran has donated nearly 500 winter hats in eye-catching colors to the Salvation Army, where he does volunteer work, and he hand-made each and every one of them

Page 16: Keeping the Peace -- TV has its share of great cops, but here are the ten best TV cops of all time -- T.J. Hooker, "Pepper" Anderson, Joe Friday, Andy Sipowicz, Richard "Hutch" Hutchinson, Kate Beckett, Lennie Briscoe, Olivia Benson, Frank Reagan, Sheriff Andy Taylor

Page 18: When a North Carolina school entered custodian Raymond Brown in the state's School Hero Award, he lost to someone else, so they made their own ceremony and gave him $35,000

Page 19: A group of ATV riders got the scare of their lives when one of their dogs stepped off the edge of a steep cliff and kept going, according to Steven Hawkins, president of the Utah ATV Association, who call themselves The Wild Bunch -- they immediately swung into action action to rescue stranded pooch Summer and got together and each took a hold of a rope with Steven at the end, climbing slowly down the face of the rocks as the others held on while looking on in horror, but in the end, the group found the strength to pull man and dog from the cliff face to safety

Page 20: Cover Story -- Queen Elizabeth is on the warpath -- palace aides are walking on eggshells around Her Majesty ever since Prince Harry and wife Meghan Markle dropped the bombshell on American TV that the royal family is a racist mess who completely ignored Meghan's mental health problems, among other horrifying accusations, and the queen will never get over the fact that Harry, without warning, turned his back on his own country and the people Elizabeth has served every day of her 95 years and she's also terrified the royal family's circus-like antics will bring on the end of the monarchy

Page 22: A California couple who were just about to retire drastically changed their plans when they adopted seven children -- Pam and Gary Willis have five children of their own and have been foster parents to many others and just as their last child was about to leave home, Pam spotted a Facebook advertisement searching for a forever home for seven kids from ages 15 to 4 whose parents had been killed in a tragic car crash -- Pam says she couldn't stop staring at their faces, saying she can't explain it, but she just knew she was supposed to be their mom and when she told Gary, she thought he'd call her a wacko because they were just about to retire, but surprisingly he agreed and they both felt it was what God wanted them to do

Page 24: High school senior Dasia Taylor is only 17, but she's going down in medical history for inventing sutures that detect if a wound is infected -- the brilliant student was named as one of 40 finalists in the Regeneron Science Talent Search, the nation's most prestigious science and math competition for high school seniors -- Dasia's sutures, which took a year to perfect, work by changing colors if the patient's PH level alters and the level changes quickly when a wound is healing and goes bad, so she began experimenting with beets, and she found that beets changed color at the perfect PH point and that's perfect for an infected wound -- the color changes from bright red to a dark purple when a wound becomes infected so it's easy to see with the naked eye and Dasia envisions the stitches being used in developing countries, so that infection can be detected with no advanced equipment -- Dasia's goal is to attend Howard University and become a lawyer

Page 25: 4 signs you may have weak bones

Page 26: Sentimental baseball fantasy Field of Dreams hit a home run with its poignant story of second chances, and as the one-of-a-kind movie celebrates its 32nd anniversary, here are some of the secrets behind the classic motion picture

Page 28: Wisdom of the stars -- inspirational quotes to light your way -- Javier Bardem, Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio, Michelle Obama, Brad Pitt, Diana Ross, Justin Timberlake, Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway

Page 29: Beyonce, Barack Obama, George Clooney, Sidney Poitier, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Rihanna, Will Smith, Matt Damon, Ariana Grande

Page 32: Get Insects to Bug Off -- save your picnic and your sanity with DIY tricks

Page 40: Chakras -- Your powers begin within -- what chakras are and what they do

Page 42: 10 facts about Law & Order: SVU

Page 44: Eyes on the Stars -- Blake Shelton says he's hoping for a summer wedding with fiance Gwen Stefani, Sylvester Stallone is writing a potential TV prequel to his Rocky film franchise, Tara Reid recently wiped out on the red carpet in six-inch platform heels, Evelyn Sakash who worked on art direction on Mermaids was recently found dead in her NYC home months after she was reported missing in September 2020, Dancing with the Stars pro Sharna Burgess recently made her red carpet debut in Malibu with beau Brian Austin Green, Jeffrey Dean Morgan admits he's still shocked about The Walking Dead coming to a close later this year, Martha Stewart made waves last summer when she posted a sultry selfie on social media and admits she got so many proposals and so many propositions

Page 45: Rita Moreno attends the SAG Awards via video (picture), Selena Gomez and Martin Short shares some giggles on a NYC set (picture), Mary Steenburgen playfully serenades husband Ted Danson (picture), Helen Mirren (picture), Joe Giudice recently met Luis "Louie" Ruelas who is the current boyfriend of his former wife Teresa Giudice, Salma Hayek has joined the cast of House of Gucci playing clairvoyant Pina Auriemma, Ben Affleck gushed over ex Jennifer Lopez in a recent interview

Page 46: Two best friends are even closer after one rescued the other using CPR, a single day after she completed a course on how to administer the life-saving technique -- Torri'ell Norwood, age 16, was at the wheel when a speeding driver rammed her car, sending it hurtling smack into a tree and the St. Petersburg, Florida teen climbed through the window to safety when her door wouldn't open, and two of her three passengers also managed to get out, but her BFF A'zarria Simmons was still inside the wreck unconscious -- Torri'ell had just completed her CPR training the day before and knew what to do so she pulled her pal from the vehicle and, when she couldn't find a pulse, administered 30 compressions and two rescue breaths until A'zarria regained consciousness and paramedics soon arrived and rushed the girl to a hospital

Page 47: Get out of the wind and rain, or just find some shade, while you wait for the next bus in these quirky, fruit-shaped sculpture bus stops -- the idea began in Japan and is now spreading to other countries, so don't be surprised to see a super-sized piece of fruit at the end of your block in the near future