Star Trek vs Star Wars
The animated segment from the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special, The Story of the Faithful Wookiee, opens with an alien alphabet that looks as if it’s an untranslated anime, although to the best of my knowledge it was produced by Nelvana in Canada. I supposed they were doing their best, in the spirit of Star Wars, to be as authentically alien and distant as possible. This coming from a film series that has sound effects in space! Combined with the opening monologue ripped straight out of Star Trek we indulged by taking it one step further.
–EDIT
Thanks to the help of Geoffrey Padilla, our new resident 3D modeler, for the new version Corellian Corvette you see in panels 2 and 3. This has replaced the far more detailed texture that gave the previous models (snagged from X-Wings games) a very realistic look that didn’t fit well with Blue Milk Special’s cartoon style. We hope you agree, it looks fantastic. More revisions to past strips still to come. 🙂
Watch the opening of the animated short below, courtesy of YouTube.
To start reading Blue Milk Special from the beginning click here.
Ha! That’s great …
😆
It almost looks like they flipped and inverted the letters of the alphabet somewhat, although I’m not sure who they are calling a “HOE”.
Great returns to form lately, I love this.
Capt. James T. Elia Kazan. The thing that really made me laugh was ‘The Indefensible’ – excellent!
My borther-in-law used to say during the opening bit of Star Trek “Who is this ‘Captain Slog’ guy anyway?”
Good thing I wasn’t drinking anything when I saw Spock’s line. X D
Oh, great strip! Just what I needed this morning! 😀
At first glance I thought the text was Cyrillic, but for the most part it’s actually just Latin characters turned upside down.
Still gibberish, though.
I’m with John, that Indefensible bit was a nice touch. Very funny. I finally watched the cartoon last night (it may have been the strangest 9 minutes of my week so far), so now I’m ready to see where you take it.
LOL i freaking love this.
Hey, wait…is that ship scanned in or did you draw that?
That is really freaking me out, it looks awesome either way…but how did you do it?
It’s from a 3D rendering with some simple photoshop filter effects to cut out a lot of the colors. It’s still not cartoony enough to gel with the original artwork in each strip so we are currently working with Geoffrey Padilla, a BMS reader with experience in 3D software. Hopefully, we will get together a library of 3D space ship models simplified down to cell shading (cartoon look) that we can then drop into our 2D strip. This will mean some George Lucas style going back and revising older strips where the space craft appear and substituting superior graphics for the often rushed and shoddy panels currently on display.
I thought you disliked the way Lucas remade the original trilogy into a more “3D-ish” look? Or did I get it entirely wrong there? =)
You’re correct. And I can understand his thinking a little better because of the desire that I have to ‘fix’ old strips that were rushed at the time. HOWEVER, and this is a big however, substituting 3D ships in place of the mish mash of photoshop filtered movie stills that we currently use is different.
Today’s strip is not what we’re ultimately going for with the space ships. That was something I threw together before I even put the call out for assistance with 3D. That 3D render of a Corellian Corvette was from a video game. What we’re working on doing is introducing 3D ships rendered to look cartoony. So right now, there is nothing for our readers to look at and say whether it will look good or not. Imagine Family Guy’s animated look for the ships for example. I’m not talking about realistic textures like you see in today’s strip. I’m talking simple cartoon style cell-shading.
The purpose is actually to fit better with the existing ORIGINAL art by Leanne and myself. Right now some of the slapped together space scenes don’t gel well because they don’t look like they were hand drawn… and they weren’t! They look like stills that have been put through a number of crappy photoshop filters to produce something quite weird. So, the goal is to actually do the space scenes in a style that suits BMS original art.
I’m sure that sounds like something George Lucas might say, but perhaps the difference is that we’re not going back adding new material and gratuitous effects, we’re just going to fix those panels that don’t actually do a good job of communicating the intent of the scene. We want to be consistent about it. Just like, if anyone has noticed, I’ve replaced Han’s head in about 70% of his appearances in the strip so far. I still have to get through all of Han’s scenes on the Death Star, but the problem was that we had a likeness that was much closer to Harrison, which Leanne came up with much later. Okay, I am starting to feel like George Lucas, but hopefully our changes are justified in the end and for the better. *sigh* 🙂
Is it me or does the animation look Heavy Metal-ish?
It’s quite likely that they do share similar influences as they were both produced in Canada. Heavy Metal’s animation team may have had previous experience with Nelvana producing the animated segment for the 1978 Holiday Special. Both would have probably been in production back-to-back.
While it’s now painful to watch, I can remember as a kid being enthralled with anything that was new Star Wars.
Ah, strips like this are the reason I picked the handle I did 🙂
Have to mention that there is a viable explanation around for the sound effects in space, it might even be official canon. The sounds were simulated in the cockpits of the fighters to provide 3d information to the pilots, so they could tell the direction any fire was coming from. And it certainly helps in computer games that do the same thing on my surround speakers…