Friday 26 November 2010

monsters and transformations

 While i truly believe that monsters really do exist there is nothing wrong with that at all,    this sort of thing has interested mankind for centuries,     and writing about them makes me feel happy and i'm not going to give up something that makes me happy.     As for the believing that i am a monster thing well my friends and family are perfectly fine with that,   in fact i love being a monster especially a weregrinch,  vampire or any other creature i like.  

I have always been a monster fan ever since i was a kid and i love scary stuff too,   in fact i'm probably the only one in my family who doesn't get frightened by horror movies -   in fact me and my bro are the only ones who don't throw up after watching a David Cronenberg film.     I've always been heavily interested in transformations and of shapeshifting in general -   American Werewolf In London was what did it for me because of it's famous transformation sequence which won Rick Baker his first academy award for best makeup (also it was the first movie to introduce that category at the oscars the year it came out).

For me transformations and shapeshifting are extremely interesting as long as said transformation sequences are cleverly done and don't overuse CGI too much.    A friend of mine recommended that I look up the Carlos Castaneda books which feature shamans and shapeshifter characters in them including a man who turned himself into a serpent.    And that is what i am doing right now.     And who knows -  they might give me inspiration for my next story.


Another movie which fueled my interest in transformations was the movie Willow,   there was the scene where the sorceress turns an army of soldiers into pigs.      Also the series Manimal is one of my favourites next to Buffy,   Xena,   Angel,   Hercules,   X-Files,  Burn Notice,  Lost,  House, and Heroes.    The transformation sequences in those two were superb -   it's a pitty the only ones we got to see on screen were the panther and the eagle,   the snake and the others were all done off screen (except in that one episode where he turns into a snake to save someone from falling in quicksand)


I also remember this one episode of the Brtish children's show The Rottentroils which was centered around a family of troll-like creatures with magical abilities,  in one episodes one of the family members accidentally starts a fight between his father and a really powerful ancient wizard -   the wizard gets ticked off and uses his magic to transform that little troll's brother into a rat  and it's up to the youngest member of the family to try and fix things.     The series aired on CITV in the afternoon -   around 3 or 4:15 pm,   and  in each episode the group of trolls would get up to crazy shenanigans including some of their magic backfiring -  like in the episode where the wife takes part in a gardening contest -  she uses a spell to try and make her garden more alive than the others -   but the spell backfires and accidentally transforms the hapless human neighbours into plants.    

There are quite a few tv series on CITV that featured transformations in them,   two that I remember very well were Wolves,   Witches and Giants and Grizzly Tales For Gruesome Kids -   they were made by the same animation company -    Wolves,   Witches,   Giants was sort of twisted takes on classic fairy tales while Grizzly Tales For Gruesome Kids was based on a book series centered around kids who were either bratty, digusting or mean in some way and the kid would usually end up getting their comeuppance in one way or another (e.g a kid who watches too much tv gets sucked into the tv and can't get out,   a kid who never eats fruit gets turned into a bat,  a kid who eats too much chocolate gets transformed into a  literal chocolate boy) and some of these had transformations in them like the Buggalo Bear episode in which a girl gets turned into a stuffed toy,   the aforementioned fruit bat episode,  and the one where a boy gets turned into a ventriliquist dummy,  there's also one where a girl eats something with a fly egg on it and turns into a fly herself.

Don't you worry i will be returning to DA soon,   just as soon as i get my new email account set up.

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