More Pix For A Laugh

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[Pete Dero]

[Barthheart]

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hahahahaha

[Centurion40]

O0

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"This is the captain speaking.  Las Vegas air traffic control has asked us to circle the runway for a few minutes while the apocalypse rains destruction on the city.  We'll try to land again in an hour or so."

[Centurion40]

First time that I visited Vegas, we were hit by a downpour like that one afternoon.  The Mrs. and I ducked into the Miracle Mile Mall at Planet Hollywood.  I've never seen heavy rain like that before.  Only lasted about 15 minutes but it was impressive.

[JasonPratt]

That photo reminds me of the time in college when UTK came from a very solid loss at halftime to beat (visiting) Florida (one of the last times we ever beat Florida that it meant anything. ;) )

I don't do well in crowds anyway, and we were so far behind at the half that when I saw thunderclouds coming in I decided to call it a day and hike back to the dorm. No sooner had I gotten there than the bottom fell out, so I was glad I had come home!

But then it kept going. And going. And going.

Watching what was happening on TV was numinously awe-inspiring. Most everyone, being more prepared than me ;), pulled out their orange rain suits, and suddenly Neyland Stadium was at least three times more Volunteer Orange than it already was. More importantly, the crowd Went Utterly Insane.

Because they understood that a rain this hard was going to shut down the Florida passing game. Which it did. For a whole half.

It rained so hard, the networks lost their satellite transmission -- which I'd never seen happen before at the time -- and had to shift over to another game from another region for a few minutes. When they came back, explaining what had happened, the announcers were talking about how they had never seen a stadium so primed to beat Florida before. Not only was it still raining hard enough to shut down the air game, they had given the cute ground-level interviewer girl a sound meter from somewhere and even with a microphone they couldn't hear her because the noise level was at 140 decibels. A closeup of the water running off the field showed the water jumping. (I don't do well with loud noises either, so I was especially glad not to be there now. ;) )

Between the rain and the 12th Man effect (where the crowd strategically interferes with play calling on defense and bolsters morale on both offense and defense), TN did come back despite heroic efforts by Florida to keep the lead, and won the game. The goalposts came down for one of the last times despite having been recently declared illegal to do that.

The next week, one of my teachers told me he had been driving on I-40 toward Knoxville, and as the interstate rounded a hill he felt confused and didn't know why; and then realized he should have been able to see the city but couldn't. "It was like it had been swallowed by the pit of hell."

[JasonPratt]

The photoshopper may not know there's a story behind that connection. ;)

Back when that indie film-maker Charles Pierce scored an amazing coup writing and filming recreations of stories from Fouke, AR as The Legend of Boggy Creek, the guy he hired to draw the iconic poster was Ralph McQuarrie. Who, thanks to evocative work on this and some subsequent posters, who was hired by George Lucas to be one of the chief artistic designers for Star Wars. It is no exaggeration to say that most of what we think of visually when we think of that property was invented by McQuarrie, including various storyboards that were eventually filmed much as he drew them, and the design for Darth Vader (and later for Yoda and Boba Fett), is thanks to McQuarrie. We might not even have Star Wars as a property if not for him, because his production design helped convince 20th Century Fox to fund the project!

He's also who totally redesigned Lucas' idea for Chewbacca from a far more alienish alien, who would have been difficult to realize for film, into... well... bigfoot, sort of. 


Updated to add: after checking McQuarrie's interview with author Lyle Blackburn, McQ himself says the similarity was a coincidence and that he was working from a very specific description provided by George Lucas. Considering Lucas hired McQ largely on the basis of his success in marketing Boggy Creek with that poster, and considering that we know Lucas' original design for Chewbacca was radically different, I'm still inclined to think the coincidence isn't actually coincidental, even if it was Lucas' idea to make the change.

[JasonPratt]

Just to clarify what I meant by the iconic Boggy Creek poster. (That's from Lyle Blackburn's personal collection. His book on the history of the Boggy Creek movie and the lore surrounding it is excellent, and I highly recommend it.)

McQuarrie also went on to do posters and/or conceptual art for Battlestar Galactica, Close Encounters, Star Trek (the Motion Picture), ET, Cocoon, Back to the Future among many others. (He won an Academy Award for Visual Design for Cocoon.)

All that, thanks to Boggy Creek.  O0


(I read in a book back in the 80s that Kenneth Johnson the TV producer/writer also had something to do with the Boggy Creek film, but I haven't been able to verify that today. He's co-creator of a lot of Six Million Dollar Man material, including the Bionic Bigfoot (and Bionic Woman, btw), and the main creative force behind the TV adaptation of The Incredible Hulk -- which featured several nods to Bigfoot lore early in its run. He's also the main writer for the Alien Nation film, series, and TV films.)

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