Harry-Go-Round

One thing about the costumed characters at American theme parks: They almost never sit down on rocks and need to be helped to their feet by passing guests… (Photo by Elizabeth McCracken.)

Here’s Falbala (aka Panacea), an Asterix character, in an $18 figure I bought at Parc Asterix–home, I suspect, of the best theme-park gift shops on the planet.

I’m still playing catchup from my Paris visit, so I’ll blog highlights of the trip in bits and pieces. Starting right now.

Here are figurines I bought–at a neighborhood video store–of the characters that the French call La Girl and Le Loupe. These aren’t those 100-euro limited-edition collectors’ items, though I saw plenty of those. No, these ones cost me about four bucks apiece.

How can you dislike a town where stuff like this is readily available for prices like that?

You know it’s been a crummy weekend when CNN.com’s home page carries separate news stories about the deaths of Tigger and Piglet. (Although both Winchell and Fiedler deserve to be remembered for far more than Pooh, of course.)

Both gents will be missed. And as far as I’m concerned, they’re irreplacable–even though Disney obviously doesn’t agree.

I’m about to come home from Paris and am shamefully behind on my blogging. Stay tuned for a full report, and here’s a picture from my visit to Parc Asterix to tide you over. (Photo by Elizabeth McCracken.)

…visiting my sister, but on the lookout, of course, for animation and comics-related stuff. We spent some time in the comic-book store district today (yes, Paris has a comic-book store district–it’s near Notre Dame). The stores were rife with products such as statuettes of Tex Avery characters and of Hot Stuff (many, many statuettes of Hot Stuff), but they seemed for the most part to be the same items I saw when I was here in 2003.

On the other hand, I happened across a DVD box set of Betty Boop cartoons (in English, with French subtitles). It seems to be based on the VHS box of the late 1990s, but it’ll be good to have it on disc, and it comes with an audio DVD of Boop music. What a good idea.

More news to come, I’m sure…

If bloggging is light for the nonce, I have an excuse–I’m on the road, doing very important things. (Photo by Mike Luce.)

Here’s a depressing-but-interesting article from Wired on Jeff Katzenberg and Dreamworks Animation’s strategy for success–which is basically to beat Pixar in terms of quantity, not quality.

The late cartoonist Al Kilgore is perhaps best remembered for being a founding member and guiding spirit of The Sons of the Desert, the Laurel and Hardy appreciation society. (He named the group and designed its delightful escutcheon.) But from 1962 to 1965 or thereabouts, he did something at least as interesting–he drew the unsuccessful, little-remembered Bullwinkle newspaper strip.

From what I’ve seen of the strip–which isn’t all that much–it deserves to have been successful and well-remembered. Kilgore’s work was simultaneously very true to the Ward sensibility and had its own distinctive personality; Mark Kausler has said that his drawings of the Bullwinkle characters were the best ones ever done, and I tend to agree.

Kilgore didn’t live to a ripe old age, and most of the non-Bullwinkle work he did that I know of is even more obscure, and less worthy of his skills. Which is a shame, since he was clearly a very talented guy.

Anyhow, I’m tickled to report that I recently bought something I’d never seen for sale before–a Kilgore Bullwinkle original. And one that shows Bullwinkle lounging about with Liz Taylor, no less. Here it is for your enjoyment–in both small, horizontal form and an oversized vertical one that shows off Kilgore’s penwork to better advantage. Amazingly enough, I haven’t located a single other example of Kilgore Bullwinkle on the Web.

He’s a cat (six to nine weeks old) named after yours truly by my friend and former colleague Richard Baguley.