Cartoons: Our Window On Reality

Not All Of Them, Obviously

A gang of bears that speak fluently in English, who wear clothes and whom possess an invisible motorcycle is clearly the product of either a fever-dream or powerful hallucinatory drugs.  Yes, that's "Help! It's The Hair Bear Bunch" in a nutshell*.  Whoever decided a rampaging grizzly would be a sympathetic children's cartoon character had probably run out of medication.

     ANYWAY I wanted to point your sclerotic eyes in the direction of another cartoon from my long-distant you, "Wacky Races".  Art!

     Dammit, more cuddly bears!  Teddy Roosevelt, do you see what you started?  Okay, check out upper port, second in and what do you see?  The "Buzz Wagon".  If I give Art a tender reminder with the cattle-prod -

     That there is Rufus the lumberjack, who has more muscles than a shellfish seller, and Sawtooth the beaver <winces at bad pun>.  Of course he wears a hard hat!  Felling trees is potentially dangerous!  The relevant bit of this Intro are the Buzz Wagon's wheels, which are made of circular saw blades.

     We now jump from cartoons to the "Beyond The Press" team of Lauri and Anni, who live in Finland.  Which is a real country and not a conspiracy theory dreamed up by Ruffia and Japan.  Art!

     Yes, that is a car with circular saw blades for wheels, and yes, it is fully capable of moving over terrain.

     The wheels in motion.  One presumes that all is needed are saw blades with the approximate circumference of this car's original wheels.  Incidentally, the team had left their Saw Subaru parked up on soft ground at the side of the road, so the blades had dug into the ground sufficiently that the car could not be moved; Finland, you see - ground freezes hard in winter.  Lauri had to free it with a jackhammer.

     As you can see, those 'wheels' cause considerable damage to the road.  That's not an issue here, on their own property, but it would be on the main roads and the police would not like it.

     Because neither Lauri nor Anni can resist mucking about with their inventions, OF COURSE they had to drive over an assortment of full pop bottles,with the rather pretty result visible above.  Next it was a set of pork ribs.

     Not sure why it was pork ribs.  Pork ribs are evil incarnate and must be destroyed at every opportunity?

     So there you have it, a modern-day Buzz Wagon.  I must tell you in the future about how Mythbusters took a pick-up truck and replaced the wheels with square, cast-iron manhole covers ...

    Motley!  We're going to drop you in the centre of that field.  Yes, that one with all the cows.  You have to evade them and get to the gate.  No, they're not antennae nor aerials, they're cattle-prods, firmly glued to their horns.

Retrospective Revisit

If you keep up with the tsunami of scrivel here on BOOJUM! then you may recall that I use pictures from the covers of pulp magazines from the Thirties to the Fifties, to add a little spice to the blog.  Usually science fiction covers, because with those the artist had no limit to their creations, except that you couldn't have your attractive young woman wearing less than a bikini.  In the spirit of which -

How to scare cats the pulp fiction way!

     Or "I'm a doctor!  I was only prepping her for surgery!"

     Or "Future immortality made funeral businesses take stupid risks"

Contemporary Chronicles Of - Er - Chaos?

Ah yes, that Swedish graphic artist with the strange imagination, Simon Stalenhag, and the even stranger artwork he produced in a series.  Art!

     This one is called "Local Servers" which is a tad ambiguous (probably intentionally, mind).  You can see these alien invaders love love love them some cabling, which would come to considerable grief if Rufus and Sawtooth passed by here.  I agree, this isn't lumberjack country, so the risk is small yet it's not zero.

"The Gathering"

     Again with the ambiguity!  What are those peculiar headsets people are wearing?  Why is that one kid not wearing one, instead carrying it?  Is this a voluntary thing?  Is that an "O" or a "0"? And if so, why so?   And, above all else, don't these aliens have Wifi?

Colour Conrad Confused

As mentioned previously, Your Humble Scribe is once again watching "Guardians Of The Galaxy", and has to admit that the green-skinned alien Gamora gets his pulse going faster than normal.  Art!

Somewhere, Captain Kirk is salivating

     The thing is, Conrad also has a background in Japanese kaiju, and was certain he'd heard that name "Gamora" before, in a completely different context, which naturally set him doing a dab of detecting.

     Well!  I discovered that there is indeed a Gamora, with an earlier pedigree than that of GOTG, and Conrad is not ashamed to say that this version does not remotely float his boat (and would instead probably sink it).  Art!

     It appears to be one of the villains from a Japanese show called "Ultraman" and let me cattle-prod Art into finding another image -

Dare one say <ahem> horny?

     I prefer the green-skinned alien version, thanks.  Not sure what "Ultraman" is, although the name sounds familiar - shall I risk a quick Google? O go on then -

An all-encompassing job description

     A yes, a Japanese superhero whose face is covered, so they can have cheap unknowns playing the part <nods wisely> we've seen this before with the "Mighty Morphing Power Rangers".  There seems to be a ton of tat about Ultraman, so I'm going to leave it right here.

Finally -

A Darwin Contender!  This lady was attending a huge Harley-Davidson rally in the Black Hills of Dakota, where bikers ride around the landscape annoying everyone with their EXCEEDINGLY LOUD MOTORBIKES.  There are bison in the Dakotas.  Bison have calves.  You can see  where this is going, can't you?

Calf with mum. Do. Not. Mess. With. Calf.

     The lady saw a bison calf, thought it was cute and went to pet it.  Cue the arrival of Mum on the scene, half a ton of bison travelling at speed towards that interfering Hom. Sap. putting her infant in peril.  The lady suddenly found herself being thrown around as the bison's horns got entangled with her belt, until her pants gave up the uneven struggle and she fell to the ground.  Mother Bison, deeming that the lesson had been learned, left.

     Nobody injured, but the lady, who had become unconscious after being thrown, woke to the presence of many, many law enforcement and emergency workers, whilst wearing only her knickers.  Lesson learned!

*  Sometimes they wear trousers.