Tuesday, August 22, 2006
I miss The Three Stooges
When I was middle and high school age, one of my morning rituals was The Three Stooges and The Beverly Hillbillies on TBS. Every weekday I would wake up, eat breakfast, get ready and leave the house with one of those two shows dancing on the light beams from the TV in our living room. There was something special about The Stooges’ simplistic stupidity that appeals to nearly every male I know. My dad loved them and would watch the various marathons, specials, etc that permeated superstation cable TV during the late 80s and on through the 90s. He watched, so I watched and the watching became a part of our mornings for four or five years.
Something about watching grown men getting jabbed, poked, stabbed, smashed, whacked and pulverized repeatedly without any obvious harm or injury never gets old. I, like every self-respecting human being on the planet, was a big fan of the Moe, Larry and Curly years. Shemp had his moments and he was way ahead of Curly Joe and Joe, but Curly was The Man. From “Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk” to the single-handed eye poke defense, Curly was an entertainment icon and his genius transcended generations. As far as I know, Curly is everyone’s favorite Stooge and his act is still legendary amongst males 25-75. The man was a comedy god on the level of Chaplin, as far as I’m concerned. Combined with Moe and Larry; the Curly’s Stooges crew was beyond The Marx Brothers in every way.
When you step back and look at our modern world, the viral video phenomenon would seem to be a direct descendant of The Stooges’ legacy. Moe, Larry and Curly taught us that watching people smash each other in the face with hammers, pipe wrenches and bricks was funny. YouTube and viral video only reaffirmed this conclusion, while adding the gritty authenticity that is created by the presence of real blood and legitimate pain. Once again, the only difference between now and then is the technology involved.
In other news, expect the beginning of my comic strip in the near future. While working on my little brother’s character image, I came to realize that I have a basic idea of how I want my three core characters to look, so there’s no need to get all of the faces in my head done until the time comes to include them in the strip somewhere. The general idea about where and when to start things has started to solidify as well. Some of the ideas of how to present and how literal to be are also floating around in my head, but are as yet undecided.
My buddies and I come up with some ridiculous hypotheticals, so I have quite a bit of material to draw on. We’ll see what makes it out and onto the web.
In school news, my books are ordered and should be here tomorrow. All that is left for me to do is acquire a laptop and get my study on. Classes start tomorrow night at 5:30…Jebus help me. :)
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I can't wait to see this comic strip. For future use, just in case you don't know of these, you can probably get most of your textbooks used from half.com and amazon.com for less than the bookstore price. But you have to give them at least a week to come in.
I'll have to check half.com out. My books came from Amazon this time, but I bought them all new. The prices weren't bad, so it wasn't a big hardship. The strip will have to wait a bit...too much reading and writing to do right now, but it's coming. :)