Remember Crazy Foam for your bath in the 60s/70s? You’d empty the can with one bath and then get smacked for “wasting” soap. Man…
The 70s were chock full of “educational” TV shows so the networks could get away with playing 6 hours of cartoons on a Saturday morning crammed full of commercials for toys, cereals and even more toys. The good old days. But these shows were often filled with clumsy old geezers who were trying to show you how to build a nuclear reactor from two straws and some white glue. Every project required white glue. Most of the time these TV scientists had “youthful” assistants who would take the blows of the exploding test-tubes and stuff. “Wasn’t that fun, Timmy?” … “I can’t see!” And so why not have Bud do the same to his lovely and unsuspecting assistant?
I saw a video on YouTube quite by accident that inspired this comic. A geeky scientist gets his “lovely” assistant to drop some watered down yeast into soapy hydrogen peroxide in this HUGE beaker and it just explodes with green foam. Cool stuff. My Mom used hydrogen peroxide for everything around the house. If I’d known how to use it like I do now, I would not have survived the 60s.
I interned briefly at the recording studio in Pekin, Illinois just after Styx recorded “Man of Miracles” down there. It was a blast to be in a working studio for about 10 minutes then it got really boring. Interns were there to get donuts and coffee and clean toilets (with hydrogen peroxide!) so I quickly dumped that internship for one at the local cable TV news station, where I would end up directing the nightly news just one year later. I’m a quick study.
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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4N0m95PExHY
Discussion (50) ¬
man, its a sad, sad thing that saturday morning cartoons are pretty much gone now. i was really bummed to see that (almost 40 year) tradition die out. eff’d up.
man, i don’t think its the cost of production at all. i think the reason saturday morning cartoons were killed was mainly due to lobbyist groups and the stupid “educational programming” mandate that pretty much ruled the changes to the saturday morning cartoon lineup for decades and the changes were more drastic every single time it happened. when fox was still airing a saturday morning lineup a year or two ago (one of the last gasps of smc lineups), half of it was filled with crappy live-action edu-tainment tripe that was absolutely gormless. they had a couple of ALMOST decent cartoons but for the most part it was all complete shit.
they shoulda just kept schoolhouse rock around… 🙂
don’t they still sell quisp? i coulda swore it was still available as recently as 5 years ago…
i dunno man, i don’t really think that SMC died in the 80’s, i think it truly started its long and slow death in the mid-to-late 90’s…
hell, almost all smc’s were produced on a pretty tight budget and all of them skimped somewhere…and most of the 80’s cartoons that were produced were pretty low quality as well…but that all started in the 70’s i believe…and recycling scenes or actions was a pretty common practice from the 60’s thru to now. everyone from jay ward to hanna barberra to even warner brothers did that. i believe even the brothers fleischer did that back in the 20’s, but at least their recycled backgrounds were pretty long. 😉
then again, some actually had relatively decent and wild animation too … take bakshi’s version of “mighty mouse”, for example. wow. now there was an amazing little piece of werk. and of course, it didn’t hurt that john k. was behind a lot of it.
the whole “toy line as cartoon” thing fueled so many cartoons in the 80’s that it wasn’t even funny. some were total garbage; others were quite good for what they were, and at least they were a very entertaining 22 minute advertisement. 😀
by the by …
excellent use of the “FOOM!” sfx. that’s one of my favourite comic sfx and is rarely used. yay! 10 points. 😀
Saturday morning cartoons? Cartoons at *any* hour, apart from DangerMouse (preceded by a couple of stiff joints)? Dearie me, you Earthlings really *are* descended from chimpanzees 😛
Seriously, more than ever I’m glad I grew up without a telly. We had a power outage a couple of nights ago and for a few hours the only sound around the neighbourhood was the anguished wails and withdrawal-twitchings of all the people who’d suddenly been cut off from their plasma-screened soma feed. We OTOH had a romantic candlelit supper and then chatted in the garden whilst watching the fruitbats dance overhead 😀
we had a power outage here last summer for about 8 hours due to a massive lightning storm. knocked out a 4 square mile area…. it was AMAZING how quiet my neighborhood got. and me, being the night owl, i just sat and listened to how quiet it was all night long. its amazing how loud everything truly is. its like the buildings themselves just hum with all the electricity runnin’ thru ’em. it was so quiet i could practically hear people farting 3 blocks away.
at 4am, i went out and listened to the sounds of the neighborhood. it was amazing how many people i could hear snoring in the neighboring apartment complex (which is a HUGE complex btw). felt like a ninja sneaking around the neighborhood, just listening. spectacular. probably what it was like to hear a similar neighborhood 70 years ago.
it was a full moon that night too so everything was very nicely illuminated, and with no nearby light pollution you could actually bask in honest-to-pete moonlight.
i love my electricity (especially for amplification purposes) but sometimes the quiet is just what’cha need.
With you on the loving-electricity part, but yes, sometimes the quiet of Just Like Ago is soul-soothing. Except it *isn’t* ‘quiet as such – there’s the sound of the wind stirring the trees, the sound of small animals in the night, and if you live on a farm right beside the ocean (as I did for years until I went mad and emigrated to live in a city with a population equal to *all of* Ireland’s), the constant sound of the sea caressing the rocky beach at the bottom of the fields.
I like my music very loud and my quiet very quiet 😀
Man, you are my hero!!! I spent my high school years hooked on Styx…until I saw the VH1 special Behind The Music. (I’ve always wondered, wasn’t one of the recording studios that Styx recorded at near Chicago Ridge Mall? Pumpkin Studios or something? I grew up in Evergreen Park and would drive 95th Street alot, and saw this building next door to a carpet store west of the mall…of course I could be totally, completely wrong about that…just wondering…)
Wow.. my parents are sure glad I didn’t know this trick when I was a kid…. I can picture it now “but mooooOOOOOooooM! it’s SCIEEEEENCE!”
*laughter*
Around 1976, my family was visiting some friends. One of their kids had a chemistry set. You can probably see where this is going…
Billy told me about the vinegar-and-baking soda method of making tiny volcanoes. We set up two test tubes, with plastic tubing between them. Just as the concoction neared its explosive climax, my mom walked in. “What are you two doing?” she demanded. Just then, the fizzing compression of baking soda and vinegar reached maximum volume. The force of it blew the plastic tubing from the soda-holding test tube.
And, of course, my mom was standing right in the path of an impressive arc of chemical “lava.”
There ought to be something in the Parental Handbook for moments when two 11-year-old boys collapse in laughter as their chemistry experiment showers you with baking soda foam.
Lacking such instruction, Mom simply yelled at us for five minutes or so, then sent us both to bed… in separate rooms, of course.
Ah, yes – the classic Styx Behind the Music episode. Until that point, I had assumed that Tommy Shaw had been responsible for the utter pussification of a band I had enjoyed until the travesty of Cornerstone (not to mention the abominations that followed). Watching that installment of Rock’s Greatest Train-wrecks, the truth was revealed. Tommy came off as a real trouper whose sense of humor must have been essential to the survival of Dennis deYoung. Watching the scene where a mortified Shaw tries to “act” amidst a shower of “BOO”s from the audience (climaxed by his wry observation, “I was self-medicating a lot at the time”), and seeing the utter contempt with which a clueless deYoung was regarded by his former bandmates (who refused to tour with him again), I saw where the true blame for Styx’s collapse belongs.
Bring back Dr. Julius Sumner!!!!!! Those were the best.
Great stuff Byron! I’ll definitely be trying the foam thing at home with my son! Where can I get 30% hydrogen peroxide? Haha!!
Blowing shit up is the only science I’m good at. 🙂 Well…that and biology. LOL.
Hmm. I’ve nothing much to contribute to this one – see my reply to Dee about cartoons; also, I have less than nothing to offer about ~shudders~ Styx – so I’ll take the opportunity now to say that I LOVE Lorraine’s Polaroids. Keep ’em coming!
I also know nada about the comparative merits of your tectonic-sounding breakfast cereals, but during my time out in Ahh Murka I discovered two awesome (non-tectonic) ones: Cream of Wheat and Grape Nuts. Grape Nuts were fabulous because one could douse them with milk, eat a few bites, go off and do odds and sods, come back an hour later and they were *still* crunchy. Cream of Wheat is my second favourite breakfast food (next to porridge); I used to buy it from a little USA imports shop in Muswell Hill, and then from USA Foods down here (scary place – never seen so many additives in my life!), but about five years ago someone changed the Cream of Wheat recipe – probably to make it ‘healthier’ – and now it has far too many wheat-germ flecks in it and just doesn’t taste right, sigh…
truth be told, i’m not that big on styx either…one of the chicago bands i’m not very fond of … cheap trick on the other hand… early cheap trick was great stuff.
yer right, cream of wheat is “different” now somehow … i always liked malt-o-meal a lot better than cream o’ wheat … then again, i always preferred grits to cream of wheat … that flavour never changes. 😉
grape rocks…man, i only liked that cereal when heated. otherwise, i always thought it was like eating wheat-flavoured granite.
gotta love american cereal names though. designed to sound ‘peppy’ or ‘zippy’ or like they’ll give you so much energy you’ll fire off yer chair and into the cosmos after eating a bowl…chocolate-frosted sugar bombs… they’ll blow ya mind! 😀
Ah yes, Cheap Trick were a seriously fun band (and that’s a fave oxymoron of mine, ‘seriously fun’). I won’t spend time dissing Styx here, as Byron loves them, but they played support to my band way back when and I thought they sucked major arse, both musically and attitude-wise.
IMTAO most of the USA’s great kickin’ rock bands came from much further south and east. Like, Georgia. And Florida 🙂
Mmm, wheat-flavoured granite…
I like sugar *on* cereals (though I normally eat my porridge plain – just oats and water, not even milk). Sugar *in* cereals, not so much. I also find sugar rush as much as a mystery as dope munchies: neither has ever happened to me. Too much sugar makes my gums feel like they’re shrivelling, and too much dope just made me feel like I was approaching the event horizon of a black hole, but that’s as far as it goes. Caffeine, though – I am truly scary on caffeine. And all it takes is one mug of espresso, or of rocket-fuel ‘ordinary’ coffee, to do it to me o_O
i’m not sure i follow, or perhaps its just that i don’t agree that yer analogy applies to the KLF…especially not the KLF *as* the KLF…and possibly not the JAMS either…
i don’t think that sampling very small bits of a song, especially when used in a collage where there are MANY samples of songs, is akin to stealing a riff of a song w-i-p overheard in a studio. especially now in this day and age when the people who sample enough of a body of werk to view it as outright theft, since nowadays if that method is employed then they have to actually get clearance by paying a usually exorbitant (but rightfully so since potentially millions could be made) clearance fee and paying royalties for anything that isn’t obviously fair use (and many, MANY hip hop and rap-based pop songs spring to mind).
i think if it’s a short enough sample, and its not the main focus of a body of werk (ie bruce hornsby’s “the way it is” as the “musical” portion of the track, etc), then its a form of flattery since someone thought enough of it to use that snippet in their piece, which is probably, in the end, a huge collage made from a dozen sources or more. nowadays tho the border between fair use and “we want a piece of that” purely depends on how popular the record becomes or how much money the artist has to fight back in the name of ‘fair use’.
unless you were specifically referring to bill drummond and jimmy cauty and know something about them that i don’t, which is quite possible, i don’t think that the idea you present (ie the stealing of a riff overheard from a neighbouring studio) really applies to them, and especially not when they were going by the JAMS moniker, unless again, you know something i don’t and one of their ‘hits’ was a direct ripoff of something that they overheard whilst werking in the studio (again, entirely possible). their werk as the JAMS was very low-rent. they had literally no budget to do what they did when they sampled abba (and all the rest), and from what i know of their history (again, nothing inside their camp, just from what i’ve read), those records as the JAMS made virtually no money other than to put right back into the project to fund more pressings, etc. pretty far from millions, and probably also pretty far from 10’s of thousands. as the timelords, i’d bet that they still made virtually no money from it — probably the “we want a piece of that” bit set in by the two obvious copyright holders; no information has really been available there and i’ve always wanted to know if they “got away with it”, if they were the first to pay clearance royalties or if they simply just got away with obtaining a mechanical license for each song (which technically, for the day, was legit if they generated both pieces themselves, which partially sounds like they did)… i have no idea of the PRS allows that or not. i think the reason why the tried to distance themselves from that single was purely because no one was willing to promote it the way they wanted (ie car as pop star). i think they figured that with that single, the bird had left the nest and it was time to move on. those guys were always really big on shifting gears in the name of new ideas anyway, and i think by the time they deleted their catalog they figured that they could contribute nothing new to the house music set and the jig was up. either that or they figured that the machine gun stunt drummond pulled at the BRIT Awards was going to screw them or something.
as the KLF, i never heard anything they did that resounded of huge plagiarism, and it seems to me that they explored and broke ground in the very new territory of house music at that time. nothing earth-shattering, but i hear echoes and ghosts of “what time is love?” and “3am eternal” all over the spectrum of house music (and electronic music in general) even today.
one other thing that i really appreciated about them was that they took the outlaw thing to whole new heights and were pioneering something totally new and unexplored at the time. i really think that they were the punk rockers of their genre to be truthful, because they pushed the boundaries as far as they could both in their art, in their promotion, and the glaringly obvious but totally ambiguous boundary of good taste. the whole vandalization of billboards, for example. brilliant. “hey, that looks like our logo, if we just change one or two letters…” … ballsy. the stunts that they pulled in the name of promotion was nothing short of brilliant in most cases, since it often involved both of them actively promoting instead of just putting ads in the NME or MM or plastering flyers everywhere. they tried to push their promotion right to the edge (often too far) and in many instances, it werked. they believed that positive or negative press was all good and they were masterminds and werking the media imho.
i agree with the burning of a million pounds stunt. i think that was wasteful and of course am of the opinion that they should’ve kept being the thorn in the side of the music industry by funding projects and being active still. however, i think it was largely just another art project, and meant to be shocking, since most of their art stemmed from that simple ideal — be as shocking as possible. open peoples’ eyes. the burning of that large a sum of money is shocking and appalling, and i reckon that was the entire point of it. they wanted to stir the shit, like they always did. i would really love to hear why eactly that they did it, if only just to have an answer to that question. supposedly they will openly talk about it in 2017, so maybe then we’ll finally get an answer, if either one of them make it that far.
outright ripping off someone by way of purposely stealing the exact riff or chord progression that you heard them play to you or overheard in a studio situation as a new idea and beating them to the copyright punch (which yer example points the finger at) is bad and i agree with you there in the example that you cite. having known people that have had their shit stolen in that exact same manner, i understand that whole scenario and how sucky it is to be on the shitty end of that stick.
there is a grey area though, and it is simply one of artistic exploration and blind ignorance of the other songs’ existence, a’la the example you cite of the “men at work” case, where i think the persecution of that band is total bullshit. i know nothing of the situation, but i seriously doubt that men at work stole the song in question (maybe they did, but crikey, the song is almost 30 years old now!).
being that writing music is often as much blind exploration of chords and notes (ie stabbing in the dark) as it is hearing a chord progression in yer head and focusing on translating it from neurological firings to actual waveforms floating out from an instrument and into the air, i think that it is not impossible for two people to stumble on the same chord progression or riff on opposite ends of the world, given that the musical scale is definitely finite in nature. finite number of notes in the scale, finite (though VERY expansive) amount of chords available, finite possibilities. thankfully, synthesizers, odd instruments, effects, strange types of scales, modes, etc, make the possibilities seem infinite, and they are in a sense. but i don’t think its impossible for two (or more) people to stumble upon the same chord progressions or note structures. and given the larger general public’s lack of desire for extremely complicated pieces of music, it narrows the scope so much that composers of pop music HAVE to stick to simple music structures that get recycled over and over again. listen to any piece of top 40 gold and the golden rule of pop music has proven this. history is bound to repeat itself and has done so quite a bit over the last 70 years, especially in rock’n’roll.
take the case of satriani vs coldplay, for example. i do not think this was a case of coldplay ripping off satriani, i think it was a case of satriani needing money and saying “hey, look, these three chords are the same!”. again, it is not impossible for two people to stumble upon the same musical progression.
i personally think that external artistic influence when writing new material is quite ok, and happens all the time. the whole process of learning an instrument *always* involves emulation. if you like the way robert fripp plays guitar, you study how he plays, and attempt to make music in a similar vein, yer stuff is going to sound very similar to robert fripp. aping the style isn’t a bad thing, and every guitarist/keyboardist tends to ape a style that they glomm onto while learning how to play. but then taking that skill and, say, recording an entire version of “RED”, selling it and not paying licensing fees or royalties, is a bad thing. 😉
i think i hear dinner calling my name. 🙂
the “ie” in the “i think if it’s a short enough sample, and its not the main focus of a body of werk (ie bruce hornsby’s “the way it is” as the “musical” portion of the track, etc)” part of that paragraph was meant to essentially point the finger at that Tupac Shakur song, “changes”, which basically used that (imho insipid) bruce hornsby riff as the musical basis for the entire track, and meant to cite this as the polar opposite of the “employing a short fair use sample” type thing.
hunger, and having one of yer toes accidentally broken by some woman wearing a pair of 4″ stilettos at a club (which happened earlier tonight) really does a number on yer ability to focus. 😉
–dee!
a couple of thoughts occurred to me while i was (painfully) cooking my dinner, which is now cooling and awaiting me to devour it and i just thought i’d tag them down while i still had them fresh in my mind.
first off, i am NOT against people getting paid for their werk, especially in creative endeavours like making music, creating art, etc. the above may read like i am, or one could draw that conclusion and i’d just like to say that i am not against it. not in the slightest.
secondly …
i am largely against seeing creative werks (especially derivative ones) removed from public access just because a corporation has piles of money to throw at its removal / destruction. there have been many pieces of werk i’ve seen over the years get pulled/banned/removed simply because it was a derivative werk that sampled the original in some way.
that said … there’s one thing i’ve noticed over the years that, amazingly enough, the major label system in particular has absolutely FAILED to notice. and that is this:
litigation with intent to destroy a derivative werk usually only results in the derivative werk becoming immensely popular and sought after, and in spite, the original werk and the copyright holder of said original werk suffers greatly as far as attention being paid to it due to negative pr and, most importantly, lost sales. ie people seek out and buy the derivative werk in droves because of the attention it is getting by the negative press of the litigator. thus, attempting to sue a werk out of existence only causes people to seek it out and spread it in droves, having the unintentional effect of making it even more popular than the original werk.
if left alone, the derivative werk usually brings positive attention to the original by way of curiosity, thus selling as much of the original as the derivative. thus, people who are curious as to where the source material came from go out and obtain the original just to hear (or see, in some cases where the art is visual more than it is aural) how the derivative got from point a to point b. not EVERYONE who discovers the new derivative seeks out the old version, but …
so by leaving it alone, or putting a positive spin on the derivative werk, the derivative werk causes income to happen for the original in many cases…
as an example: i can’t imagine that “the grey album” didn’t cause people to go out and buy a copy of “The White Album” in droves just to see how Dangermouse sliced up the original to create the derivative.
i also think that in the future, people will use sampling as a form of discovery, just as they have since the widespread use of it. for example, i think that many hip hop fans have been turned onto james brown solely because of the amazing proliferation of the chunk taken and used ad nauseum in hip hop from “funky drummer”. or the beatles “tomorrow never knows” through the chemical brothers song “setting sun”. tho the chemical brothers did not sample the original, its blatantly obvious that that’s where the inspiration came from.
i think i’ll shut up now. 😉
also tafkan, i’d like to note that this isn’t an attack at you or on you, because i dig conversing with ya here. just my thoughts on the issue. and maybe, just a little, i’m trying to sway you a bit on yer opinion. 😉
mmmm…dinner…
Dee-Dee-Dee-DEE…
Dee-Dee-Dee-DEE…
Dee-Dee-Dee-Dee, Dee-Dee-Dee-Dee, Dee-Dee-Dee-DEE… Dee-Dee-Dee-Dee, Dee-Dee-Dee-Dee, Dee-Dee-Dee-DEE…
Dee-Dee-Dee-Dee Dee-Dee-Dee-Dee, Dee-Dee-Dee-Dee Dee-Dee-Dee-Dee, Dee-Dee-Dee-DEE! DEE! D-
Sorry, I was just taking the fifth 😛
First off, my sympathies to your toe! Just be thankful it was only a four-inch stiletto and not a six-inch one – the physics of stiletto heel damage potential are scary in any event, but they go up exponentially with the extra two inches…
Secondly, you’ve presented a fascinating and well-considered set of mini-essays here. I still don’t necessarily agree with you on most of it, but you’ve earned your QC’s wig and robes – or your Clarence Darrow bowtie – should you ever decide to change career paths 😉
I’ve copy-pasted this thread out for my own keepers, and will get back to you on the latest with reactions/counter-arguments/whatever (after all, this page ain’t going anywhere), but for now, I have go commit some journalism – ah, the tyranny of deadlines – and then drag me semiretired semi-crippled arse off to do some onsite work, so I’ll be back tomorrow. Even though we’ll probably have to yatter in the comments of the next 1977 strip by then 😀
~exits, playing her 1970s Sly Stone/Sam and Dave live mashup on her mePod~
I remember “Dinosaurs,” a Jim Henson produced sit com about a family of dinosaurs. The father, and the baby would bond over a television show similar to “Mr. Wizard,” where the scientist would devise some experiment for “Timmy” to do which would cause him to explode. The scientist would then look off stage and call out; “We’re going to need another Timmy!” It reached the point where the father and baby would start saying; “Say it!”