And now a Vital Message – At a loss with what to do during the Pandemic shutdown? No Prob! Check out Bunz & Katz” handy How/To Tutorial on Anti-Social Distancing…
Here’s an interesting story– Maybe– sort of… It goes like this: Once upon a time, waaay back in the 1980s, a friend– well sort of a friend, talked me into writing a TV pilot script for him (on Spec), Which he then put his own name on an’ took all the credit for… Okay, so he really wasn’t that much of a “friend”… In any case, the idea never sold and of course I was never paid a penny… Big surprise huh? But that’s Not the Interesting part – Y’see, as a running gag in the story, there was this inane cartoon show which the main character watched on TV (the character watched it, the real audience would have never seen anything but the back or side of the the TV set – and only heard the dialog) … An’ that inane, irritating cartoon show was – You guessed it – the SMELTZ… Now decades later, they finally get their debut (and Exit)…
Truth to tell, I wasn’t initially planning on using the Smeltz for this strip, (or at all – ever)… But Bunz an’ Katz did need to be watching something tedious, boring or just dumb on the TV, and while patching together the page layouts, somewhat to my own surprise, the Smeltz turned out that very show! Sometimes the characters will do that– You’re skribbling out an idea an’ suddenly the character(s) do something totally unexpected, as if they really have lives of their own… This doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it’s usually more entertaining than what I had planned… Y’know, sometimes I feel like maybe there’s a much better writer than myself out there in some unknown dimension, who I can occasionally channel an’ borrow ideas from… Perhaps there really is– though I’ll probably never know…
Dunno… I think maybe Harlan was too brilliant to have needed any mystical help with his stories… I talked and/or corresponded with Harlan Ellison now an’ then and he’d read or at least thumbed through a few of my own comix… Though the only piece of writing that I can recall he ever actually complimented me on, was a warped little tale called, “How I found Jesus on Xmas…” http://www.cuteybunny.com/XtraPix/Xmas/XmaStry.html
When you think about it, I must’ve been mad to have mailed him this as a sort of Xmas card!
Whoo… obviously, too much “self-isolation” can lead to Terminal Boredom and Sensory Hallucinations… Or maybe Bunz & Katz just got hold of a really, really Unusual old junked TV…
Incidentally, speaking of the great if irascible Harlan Ellison, (sort of) though I don’t think there’s any actual connection between him and the hotel, from Dec 2017 to March 2018 – (Pages 147–154), Bunz and Katz’ confrontation with the beat Cop and the Thugs seems to have taken place in the alley just west of the Ellison Hotel, (these days known as, “The Ellison Suites”) in beautiful (if moderately dangerous after dark) Venice California… or anyway that brick wall used as the backdrop in several panels is the west/alley wall of the hotel… I’d snapped a few photos of it back in 2000 while looking for likely local for a Moulin Rouge calendar… (later that day I stumbled across a better suited brick wall & doorway that I could adapt) – but odd photos have a way of finding their uses, even if you have to wait a decade or more to discover it…
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And now a Vital Message – At a loss with what to do during the Pandemic shutdown? No Prob! Check out Bunz & Katz” handy How/To Tutorial on Anti-Social Distancing…
Here’s an interesting story– Maybe– sort of… It goes like this: Once upon a time, waaay back in the 1980s, a friend– well sort of a friend, talked me into writing a TV pilot script for him (on Spec), Which he then put his own name on an’ took all the credit for… Okay, so he really wasn’t that much of a “friend”… In any case, the idea never sold and of course I was never paid a penny… Big surprise huh? But that’s Not the Interesting part – Y’see, as a running gag in the story, there was this inane cartoon show which the main character watched on TV (the character watched it, the real audience would have never seen anything but the back or side of the the TV set – and only heard the dialog) … An’ that inane, irritating cartoon show was – You guessed it – the SMELTZ… Now decades later, they finally get their debut (and Exit)…
Truth to tell, I wasn’t initially planning on using the Smeltz for this strip, (or at all – ever)… But Bunz an’ Katz did need to be watching something tedious, boring or just dumb on the TV, and while patching together the page layouts, somewhat to my own surprise, the Smeltz turned out that very show! Sometimes the characters will do that– You’re skribbling out an idea an’ suddenly the character(s) do something totally unexpected, as if they really have lives of their own… This doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it’s usually more entertaining than what I had planned… Y’know, sometimes I feel like maybe there’s a much better writer than myself out there in some unknown dimension, who I can occasionally channel an’ borrow ideas from… Perhaps there really is– though I’ll probably never know…
I think that happened to Harlan Ellison once.
Dunno… I think maybe Harlan was too brilliant to have needed any mystical help with his stories… I talked and/or corresponded with Harlan Ellison now an’ then and he’d read or at least thumbed through a few of my own comix… Though the only piece of writing that I can recall he ever actually complimented me on, was a warped little tale called, “How I found Jesus on Xmas…”
http://www.cuteybunny.com/XtraPix/Xmas/XmaStry.html
When you think about it, I must’ve been mad to have mailed him this as a sort of Xmas card!
Whoo… obviously, too much “self-isolation” can lead to Terminal Boredom and Sensory Hallucinations… Or maybe Bunz & Katz just got hold of a really, really Unusual old junked TV…
Is this part of the continuity? Does it matter? Love the Smeltz! Didn’t Gallagher start this way?
That’s pretty Smurfed up, dude. 🙂
Incidentally, speaking of the great if irascible Harlan Ellison, (sort of) though I don’t think there’s any actual connection between him and the hotel, from Dec 2017 to March 2018 – (Pages 147–154), Bunz and Katz’ confrontation with the beat Cop and the Thugs seems to have taken place in the alley just west of the Ellison Hotel, (these days known as, “The Ellison Suites”) in beautiful (if moderately dangerous after dark) Venice California… or anyway that brick wall used as the backdrop in several panels is the west/alley wall of the hotel… I’d snapped a few photos of it back in 2000 while looking for likely local for a Moulin Rouge calendar… (later that day I stumbled across a better suited brick wall & doorway that I could adapt) – but odd photos have a way of finding their uses, even if you have to wait a decade or more to discover it…