Pilot's Log

A little while ago I heard about the coming of Equestria Girls, an offshoot of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic that reimagines the cast as human teenagers.

All I wonder about this is if the rest of the "funny animal" cartoon franchises will follow suit...and what it means if/when they do.

What happens when Felix de-Cats and Mickey de-Mouses? Will the Tunes stay Looney with Bugs, Porky, Daffy, Wiley E., and Speedy as shaved apes? Does Darkwing need to be a Duck to Get Dangerous?

What are your thoughts?

* It becomes a fad to get mini refrigerators, mini freezers and mini microwave ovens (all roughly the size of toaster ovens--originally designed for the Asian market) and have them in rooms other than the kitchen. One set for the living room, one for the den, one for the hallway between the bedrooms, one for the office. Of course, this doesn't do the problem of rampant obesity any good.

* Disney adds a new area to Walt Disney World devoted entirely to the studio's horror properties. The Haunted Mansion is moved out of Adventureland and updated to become the centerpiece of this park-let.

* A viral advertising campaign for a synthetic "incense" product gets a lot of notoriety when the people behind the campaign hack local TV stations to air commercials which are banned by the FCC. They ALMOST get away with it. But the phrase "Stoner Taxicab" enters the slang lexicon permanently.

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The pilot storyline for Gargoyles. I know the world has completely changed in the time since it was on TV, but gosh darn it!--Revive it somehow! A Pixar CGI feature version would be billions of tons of cool.

A sort of postscript to my entry about Moonliner/Mission To Mars at the Disney theme parks...

I was kind of curious about the dimensions on the scaled drawing of the Moonliner mockup and whether the theater/simulator would have fit inside. Granted, this was spurred on when I attempted to find something else on GoogleImage and found an interior picture of the theater. I'm not going to link to it here tonight, but I did notice something helpful beyond the obvious matter of the room being a cylinder (as it was on the mockup)--there were THREE rings of seats around the central visual projection screen disks.

I don't own a theater seat. But I do own a seat that is roughly the same size and so I posited that each row is probably 30~36". Since it counts TWICE when you add them for DIAMETER--the three rows would comprise at least 180" of the overall diameter of the space--and therefore the fuselage of the Moonliner. As the given measure of the fuselage on the measured drawing is only 108", then the mockup isn't "actual size"--it's a scaled model, if the theater/simulator was meant to "fit inside."

And then I look elsewhere on-line and see that in fact the mockup is 1/3rd scale.

Told you this was "useless".

BTW, my wall calendar this year was given us by a family buddy who's into big rig trucks. It's from Shell Oil and features custom trucks. One of the trucks for the summer months--was posed next to a restored TWA Lockheed Constellation airliner--and the Moonliner was visible in the background! It's still around somewhere!

I really could have stayed another week in Florida, but I got enough of the things on my list done and all the people who matter most to me. Darn it, if America had actual passenger trains running I'd shuttle between here and there all the time.

* "And I'm Never Going Back To My Old School..." As said earlier, on St. Patrick's Day a high school classmate had invited me and my brother to a party at an Irish/Sports bar. Going was a necessary mistake. The music was way too loud to carry on conversations. We found our "party" but beyond two or three people we didn't "mingle" and while I thought I recognized one woman--I didn't want to talk to her. The truth came to me that if I really wanted to socialize with my classmates in school, I would have. These days there is no meaning attaching me to this crowd. All of a sudden I feel okay with having been shunned and flunked. I just didn't fit in.

* Too many of the people I know are now attached to oxygen apparati. If you smoke, quit. If you don't smoke, don't start.

* I will never again go in a Disney store. Mike dragged me in one so he could look at Princess figures. They'd never hire me, but I bet working there would drive a lot of people insane.

* I will probably swear off eating more than one meal a day at a restaurant. Not so much the expense, or necessarily the food...just the stress is enough.

* Q-105 is back. The Tampa station is now Sixties/Seventies/Eighties oldies rather than baseline Top 40, but they haven't lost the style that made us fans for so long.

* I decided to not be the Lipinski Proxy this time. Dana's fantasy baseball league is down to five participants so their draft today will probably run a lot quicker even without my assistance.

* Atlanta's highways are bedlam. Both ways we had trouble with crowds and volume slowdowns. Dunno what route I'll take next time tho'.

(I think theidolhands might want to hear about this little "space oddity".)

Today, my buddy Paul gave me an audio CD copy of content he acquired though his Disney contacts...

...Soundtracks from the Moonliner and Mission To Mars attractions at the Disney theme parks.

Listening to them threw me back thirty-one years to the first time I visited Florida and Walt Disney World. Mission To Mars was my favorite of the attractions then. The concept was a flight-simulation theater that took the crowd on a semi-realistic journey to the Red Planet, with rudimentary motion seating and panoramic projection screens of the spacecraft's external views. Before entering the theater itself, the crowd would go through a "Mission Control Brief" led by an audio-anamatronic character, who stood in front of banks of NASA-variety high-tech consoles "manned" by other robotic mannekins. The far wall of the room had large screen video and movie projectors. Going through that was, to a twelve-year-old kid, like living the future.

This disk had all fifteen minutes of audio from that attraction, and now my imagination can flit back there and remember it all. Three other tracks were from the earlier Moonliner incarnation of the ride, with public address chatter of a ("transistor-punk"?) aerospace passenger terminal, engine noise from a George Pal-era spaceship, and overture music from when it was 100% acoustic orchestral hardware. No better evidence of how much the world has changed...and also, how much the world's future avoided what we thought we wanted, back in those decades after WW2.

I'll go back to Florida, but I'm not sure I'll go back to Walt Disney World. Mission To Mars was replaced before I finished my flight training around 1990, and space tourism is either alive and well, or about to be swept aside by history, depending on who you ask. In the meantime, I'm the Dork Who Fell To Earth, looking for the next hyperspace portal and saving up for a ticket to Anthea. Hope you'll be on the flight with me. I could always use a travelling companion.

PS: Thanks to www.lunar.org...some visuals of what space tourism looked like to Disney from the outside: ( Read more... )

And from www.davelandweb.com...Mission Control: ( Read more... )

Full of Eastwick Witches and West End Girls...West End Girls!



Who does own the old Harvey Comics "stable" these days, anyway?

( The Mechwarrior 5 Demo Trailer At The Center Of The Dispute )

Meanwhile:
( Fallout From The Big Comics Merger--Backward Compatible-Style! )