Fire in the Hole!

I just finished this piece for an art show coming up in December. The show is based around plastic toy grenades. The main portion of the critter's body is the grenade with all kind of parts added and a new paint job.

I call this piece Warsaur:








I'll post some more information about the show when I know more about it.

All good things...

Oh well... I guess everything has to end sometime. My growing T-Rex grew all he would grow-- well... he grew as much as the jar would let him grow.



Look at that guy! He's taking up most of the jar. Because he grew as much as the jar allowed, his tail quit growing, but the base of it got really thick. My T-Rex has a big ol' butt-- OH YEAH!



When I opened the jar his head shot out of the water like some bad B-movie.



Look at this sucker!



You can see just how massive the little thing got to be when Pheyden is next to him.

It's hard to believe this sucker started out like this:





The tiny company information blurb has grown... I figured it would fade away, but it's still there. This company wants you to know who they are!



Oh well... now we get to see what this thing looks like when it dries out. I hope it goes all deformed and shriveled like that Spider-Man my friend had!

Dino Update 3

I took this picture yesterday afternoon. You can see he's growing steadily:



This one is from this morning:



And these are from tonight:



He kinda jumped up there. He started out about 5 inches long and now he's about 10 inches long. The weird thing is that he's still stiff as a board... I thought he'd be all squishy and floppy, but he's like one of those plastic dinosaurs you played with when you were a kid.

The growth continues...

Dino Update 2

Here he is over 24 hours after his growth began:



If this keeps up, I'm going to need a bigger jar...

My prediction? By this time next week I'll be riding this dinosaur into battle.

Dino Update

Last night I put the growing T-Rex in his very own glass pickle jar to grow like a champeen! As soon as he went into the crystal clear water this yellow, foggy residue spread throughout the jar. Ugh.



He sat overnight and now he looks like this:




The water cleared up some, and he's all bumpy and lumpy. He grew a little bit, but he's supposed to double in size every 24 hours. YESSSSSS....

Oh no, there goes Tokyo!

On the way back from DragonCon I stopped at Toys R Us to see if there were any good things on clearance. There weren't. >:(

I did, however, snag this extremely cool guy for 16.99:



MechaGodzilla (or Kiryu, as he's known to our Japanese friends) stands about 12 inches tall and is made of rotocast vinyl. He has 5 points of articulation (head, arms, waist, and tail), but makes up for lack of articulation with a neverending supply of solid awesome.



You really can't beat that price, as most 12 inch vinyl kaiju figures (that's what they call giant monsters in Japan) from Japan will set you back easily twice that price. Heck, some 4 inchers can run you 40 bucks. Import fees are a mohfoh!



He looks great on a shelf, and looks even better menacing tiny figures.



As you can see here, he has already made fast friends with Reverse Pheyden from Onell Design.



At any rate, I love my Mechagodzilla, and I now want the Godzilla to go along with him. Too bad I live pretty far from the nearest Toys R Us, because that's about the only place you can find these guys!

A Tale of Two Zillas

So today I did the flea market thing. It was much hotter than it needed to be. I'm totally serious. It could have easily been about 30 degrees colder.

I grabbed an old vhs copy of two Pete and Pete episodes. Gosh, but I miss that show. I was amazed at how quickly it sucked me right back into the fun and weirdness. Nickelodeon was really pumping out some good stuff in the early 90's. The only thing worth watching on there nowadays is Spongebob, and that's hardly ever new (which is OK for me seeing as I only recently started watching it and needed to catch up). My P&P tape came with a tattoo of Petunia.



If you don't know what I'm talking about, you really need to go hunt down a P&P tape or dvd... trust me.

I bought some DVD's as well... there's a guy who sells DVD's for 3 bucks or 4 for 10 bucks. They're used, but they are always in fabulous condition. I check anyways, because if anyone ever has a problem with you checking the quality of their used merch, DON'T BUY IT FROM THEM.

I grabbed Stand By Me, American Psycho, Sin City, and Godzilla. Yes... that Godzilla. The Dean Devlin, Roland Emerich version. Why would I buy that? Until today I honestly couldn't tell you why. I have been wanting to own it for some time now, but did not want to pay for it. I guess $2.50 is a reasonable compromise.

vs

After watching it again I have to say that it does wonders for anyone who loves the traditional "man-in-rubber-suit" style of Godzilla movies. Devlin and Emerich threw millions of dollars of Hollywood cash at this colossal crap pile of a movie and it still can't compete with the old-school Godzilla flicks. Were the old ones cheesy? Heck yes they were! Were they fun? You bet your butt they were! Did they spawn sequels? How 'bout over 25?!?!? That's something America's Crapzilla can't say. Well... actually it can't say any of the above.

Crapzilla is a long, sappy, preachy, and just really... bad. The special effects were kinda neat. The monster looks pretty cool, but he's no Godzilla. If this movie had been called IGUANDOR or REPTILLIDOR or something else, I'd be all over it... but it's just two jerks with a lot of money and no taste making a rip-off of a franchise that's done pretty well over the years. In the "making of" featurette Dean Devlin says his first step in approaching Godzilla was to completely change everything about the character.

Yeah... smooth move, Ex-Lax.

Here's what Japan had to say about the American Godzilla:

Live-Action Grimlock... sort of...

Well... it seems the rocket scientists who wrote the two Transformers movies are unwilling to actually put the Dinobots in their movies because one of them-- get this-- "doesn't like dinosaurs."

I have this hard, fast rule. If you're a guy and you don't like dinosaurs, I don't trust you automatically. Something is seriously wrong with you, and we need to get you to Jurassic Park STAT! Wait... that movie might just make you hate dinosaurs... nevermind. At any rate, these brainiacs can't even see that every darn kid in the world just loves dinosaurs at the very core of their collective being. Growing up as a boy (I'm really not actively trying to exclude the ladies, I just don't know any who really like to expound upon the wonders of Pachycephalasaurus' fantastic noggin... and I know even fewer who happen to also dig Transformers) you're just hard-wired to like dinosaurs. That Orci guy needs to just rethink his role as a writer of popcorn cinema if he has a hard time getting his head around the concept of children going monkey-crap-crazy over gigantic robot dinosaurs.

I say all this to frame up my post tonight. I just found this INSANE commercial from Germany's Saturn consumer electronics company. It features the possible only live-action dinosaur robot we'll see for quite some time. It's only in the commercial for a short moment, but it's quite possibly the best moment of the whole darn thing.



Is it just me, or is that chick at the end about the creepiest thing you've ever seen? She just kinda killed the whole "sexy-robot-girl" thing for me when she started talking.