DarenDoc’s Slightly Nifty Musings Inc.

This is why Microsoft doesn’t “get it”…  are they trying to be “cool”?  Are they just happy to have jobs?  Why do those tables look like they belong in a high school science room?  This is like the parents hanging out at a kid’s birthday party and trying to be “with it”…    ah well…

I know, I know… I haven’t posted anything in ages… been horrifically busy… just wish it was actually producing income… ah, well.  So, now, In the tradition of the great “MAD” Magazine… I offer this small little mashup that I’ve always wanted to do… enjoy.

I do enjoy dressing up for Halloween…  over the years, some times I haven’t been able to participate in it due to being busy, or just not coming up with an appropriate get-up… but I always enjoy the process of putting together a costume.  Halloween of 2007 was one of the years where I got to do something fun, and my sweetie Heather was right along with me… supporting, and doing a bang up job of seamstressing… (is that a word?)

I’m not one of those people who choose inappropriate costumes.  I’m well aware of my body type, and that spandex is a privilege… not a right…. so you won’t see me in a superman outfit, or stormtrooper suit.  I have, however, over the years, chosen some outfits that not many people attempt… such as readers of this blog have seen in past posts… I went one year as Sir Bedevere from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”, (with Heather as an awesome “not a witch” girl), I have a pretty darn good Darth Vader outfit that is wearable… an Obi-wan type Jedi outfit, and one year, I put together a rather outstanding (if I say so myself) rendition of Toht from “Raiders of the Lost Ark” complete with glowing poker and headpiece scarred hand.

When Halloween 2007 was approaching, I had the idea that Heather and I would make a good Jor-El and Lara from the Donner “Superman” movie… With my greying hair and round face, I’m constantly looking brando-esque in the mirror, so I thought I would work it out pretty nicely.  Heather’s red hair and generally cheery disposition would be perfect for Kal-el’s mom… (we toyed with the idea of Jared being a little superman, but he was dead set on optimus prime… so we gave in…)

I knew that the original outfits in the film were covered in strips of that Scotchlite material used on streetsigns and front projection screens… but knew that without a half silvered mirror and a stage light following us around, it wouldn’t do much good…  as you can see in this image of the original costume…

Not as Glowy as we would have thought...

Pretty grey and dismal… but when a light is split and bounced off of it back into the camera:

The Real thing... Front-lit as it should be.

Now, the trick would be to find material that would mimic this kind of look, but in real life… Heather suggested crushed velvet velour… we found a place online that sold exactly the kind we needed… and got enough for both our costumes…

Heather did an awesome job of reverse engineering from photos… and sewed up a tunic, pants, and sleeveless jacket for me, and a tunic and pants for her… turned out great… even had shoulder pads… which left the “S” for the “El” family crest… I devised a way to glue tiny plastic jewels around a screen-grab trace of the S in a dark satin material, with carefully cut velour swatches to fill in the areas that needed to be filled… then all this was fabric glued onto the tunic…

The real "S"... now that's a lot of bedazzle.

And here is what Heather and I looked like… complete with my newly custom styled Andy Warhol wig.

Awfully giddy...

And full figure… in the face of certain doom for Krypton…

they look awfully composed when facing the ultimate destruction of Krypton...

Was a lot of fun…  and the costume now stands in a place of honor…

Kryptonian Fashion

You might notice the Hot Toys “Jor-El” figure at the base of the costume… it is awesome as well…

My son...

I admit, ComicCon was always one of the high points of the year for me… the opportunity to hang out with old friends and meet new ones… all while  experiencing the true pinnacle of geek nirvana…  I started attending regularly in 1995  after going for a day in 1990… but after that I never missed a year.  Until now.

My friends know that we have all said, after a particularly grueling con, that this is the last year we’re gonna do this… but we never really meant it.  Well, last year, I meant it.  After surviving the “giant room of funk” that I call the dealers room and seeing the corporatization of the whole thing… the con has turned into a trade show.  A trade show that increasingly tries to foist on us stuff that we don’t wanna see.  (or at least _I_ don’t wanna see.)  Horrifically crowded panels meant that I was having to wait in line for hours to see a popular one… even for those panels I was IN…

Just wasn’t a good experience for me last year… and it became increasingly apparent that the cost of attending was skyrocketing beyond that which I could justify going again.  I prefer not to be gouged 550.00 a night at an aging and declining hotel.  So, I am not going this year.  My friends thought I would gradually change my mind after I said it last year… but I’ve found that my will is strong… and my resolve un-sullied.  So I’ll just have to reminisce about past glories.

One of the most fun things that happened at comiccon over the past few years is that I got to do a lot of goofy fun panels with my friends.  What started out as a lark for a bunch of geeks has turned into a respectable panel of industry veterans… as all of us have advanced in our careers.  One of the goofy panels that we started about 8 or so years ago was the “Starship Smackdown”… where we take famous starships from scifi and pit them against each other in heated debate over which is more powerful than the next.  Using ludicrous and geeky reasoning… the panel is hilarious, if I do say so myself… and we constantly got more and more people attending there, and at ComicCon’s sister convention, WonderCon in San Francisco.

After we started doing the panel, following years found us doing other variations… “Alien Armageddon”, “Starship Smackdown All Stars”, and, of course, the notorious “Robot Rumble” in 2004.  We were so psyched at the reaction to the audiences to this goofy panel, that we went out of our way to actually promote it… we played a trailer for it at one of our yearly “Is Star Trek Dead” panels, and, thanks to CFQ Publisher and Geek Panel moderator Mark Altman, showed a teaser to the thousands in the arena waiting for the Masquerade… it was priceless.

It started with just having the idea that what could be more ludicrous than a comiccon panel needing a trailer… so we worked on two tracks… I did a small teaser for it, with basically camera movements on toys… and tried to treat it as a serious subject by quoting Asimov’s Laws of Robotics. Soon after, Rob Burnett, with Steve Melching and I giving moral support and “creative input”, cut together a great montage of clips of famous robot celebrities… then molded it into a cohesive narrative with yours truly doing a particularly hammy voice-over.

I present to you now, for the first time, both of these teaser trailers, to help you re-live the glory that was comic con… or to glimpse what geeks do with too much free time.

Last week I saw a clip up at the lovely but odd “Emerald and Hobbit” blog…and just had to share it…  The Kenner Alien toy was always something that creeped me out as a kid… and it always seemed a bit odd that they would be making toys targeted at kids who weren’t old enough to see the movie.

ALIEN Commercial… sorta.