Actually, I have made fan-art in the past.
I was never a fan of making fan-art, though. See what I did there?
Despite being a studio art graduate, I still feel my work isn’t up to par. Instead of using only my personal work as a way to get better at this stuff, I turned to fan-art. I was so tempted the other day to take a favorite series and give it a classic spin.
Not too long ago, I purchased an NES Classic Edition. The NES Classic Edition is a miniature version of Nintendo’s iconic and game-changing console – the Nintendo Entertainment System – that first appeared in North America in the fall of 1985. The NES was our equivalent of the company’s highly successful Family Computer System (or the Famicom) in Japan, and it singlehandedly saved the North American video game industry from the lull it was in following the video game crash of 1983. This console was home of the iconic Super Mario Bros. trilogy.
Super Mario Bros. debuted in Japan in September 1985, in time for the US debut of the NES. While its American release date is surprisingly up in the air, it came out here sometime between late 1985 and early 1986, and all it took off from there. 2 1/2 sequels were actually made to this game, which is fascinating.
In Japan, Super Mario Bros. was followed up by Super Mario Bros. 2 in mid-1986, which was essentially a slightly updated version of the first game with much harder gameplay. Nintendo of America refused to release it here due to its difficulty and it being a near-carbon copy of the original, and thus pressed Nintendo to create a more suitable sequel. Born out of this was our Super Mario Bros. 2, which was actually a re-skin of a then-recent Nintendo game that had only been released in Japan: Yume Kojo: Doki Doki Panic.
Doki Doki Panic was a platforming game not dissimilar to the Mario adventures, and Shigeru Miyamoto was involved in its development. The characters were the mascots for the Dream Festival of 1987, which was Fuji TV’s doing. Nintendo teamed up with them to create this game featuring those characters in an Arabian Nights-esque setting. Nintendo later took that game and replaced the characters with the Mario cast, upped the graphics, upped the speed, and changed some gameplay mechanics. Otherwise, it was near-identical to the original. That was released here in October 1988, around the same time Super Mario Bros. 3 was released in Japan.
I chose to do fan-art for Super Mario Bros. 2.
This is a piece I had always wanted to do, a combination of Super Mario Bros. 2 and the Fleischer cartoons of the 1920s and 1930s. For the uninitiated, the Fleischer studio made the Betty Boop and Popeye cartoons. Max Fleischer made several innovations in animation, and sadly the studio went under during World War II. I think the Fleischer aesthetic has seen something a resurgence thanks to the success of Cuphead, and I’d like to think that the game inspired a lot of folks to seek out Golden Age cartoons, especially Fleischer’s out-there and innovative films. For whatever reason, I think the world of Super Mario Bros. would fit in nicely with the Fleischer works, and I felt Super Mario Bros. 2 fit the most out of the original NES trilogy. Maybe it’s the setting, the color scheme, the wavier design, the inherent cartooniness of the franchise itself. Fleischer cartoons were particularly surreal, in many ways their competitors’ offerings weren’t. Unlikely things were anthropomorphized in certain ways, things took on weird shapes and forms, unexpectedly weird and improbable things often happened that redefined cartoons. I think Mario is very similar in that department, and Super Mario Bros. 2 has that in spades: Plants and vegetables with faces, bird-things that shoot eggs at you, the weird enemies, the giant hawk head you walk through at the end of every level. The series would only get weirder from there!
It makes one thankful that we Americans got a much different Super Mario Bros. 2 in 1988. Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2 – now rightfully known as The Lost Levels – was the first game but ten times harder, this was not only something different, but also an improved version of Doki Doki Panic, a game that probably had no chance of seeing an American release had it not been for Nintendo of America insisting that we yanks get a different Mario 2.
So I made fan-art for something else, but this is a little more… Barebones?
Outside of a few people, has anyone here ever heard of the movie The Treasure Planet?
No I’m not talking about Disney Animation’s spacebound action-adventure film that came out over 15 years ago, I’m talking about a film that was made in Bulgaria and released in 1982.
Yes, the late cartoonist Rumen Petkov and a team came up with a “Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island in Outer Space” story years before Ron Clements and John Musker pitched their “Treasure Island in Outer Space” story to the brass at Walt Disney Feature Animation. It’s well-known among Disney enthusiasts that Ron and John had the idea as far back as 1985, and it was rejected during a pitch session that played out like the classic game show The Gong Show. That same day, they also pitched an adaptation of Hans Christian-Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, which got rejected as well. Days later they pitched that fairy tale adaptation again to then-head honcho Jeffrey Katzenberg, and the rest is history. The duo didn’t get to start work on their passion project until after completing Hercules in 1997, but by the time Treasure Planet was in production, Disney’s feature animation studio was collapsing. Treasure Planet, a good and admirable film, was a victim of the circumstances, and thus flopped at the box office. It is a well-liked movie among those who have actually seen it, and it remains something of a cult classic. Rightfully so.
Disney’s Treasure Planet combines space opera with 18th century aesthetics. Retrofuturistic in a strange way, often compared to steampunk, Treasure Planet is unlike many Disney animated features, and it’s very much unlike the Bulgarian Treasure Planet. Rumen Petkov’s film begins on a post-apocalyptic Earth, is very heavy on the sci-fi elements, and is also apparently a parody. From what I’ve heard, The Treasure Planet is supposed to be a riffing on the original Robert Louis Stevenson novel, but with a space setting. Watching various parts of the film seems to confirm that, both the English dub and the original Bulgarian-language version. There’s lots of cartoony stuff going on in the movie, everyone acts strange, all sorts of weird and trippy things happen throughout the adventure. At one point in the movie, the pirates all sing opera to defeat the gatekeepers of Captain Flint’s treasure… The gatekeepers are robot dragons that come out of lava-like substance that came out of a turd-shaped mound. I’m not making that up!
It’s strange, it’s bizarre, it’s a work of Eastern Bloc animation. What other explanations do you need? The animation itself is pretty low-budget, characters move in such… Messed up ways, I can’t even process how it even works. Just watch this clip from the movie that surfaced online a year ago…
Director Rumen Petkov later went on to work on shows like… Ahhh! Real Monsters, Duckman, Dexter’s Laboratory, Johnny Bravo, Cow and Chicken, I Am Weasel, and The Powerpuff Girls. He ended his career directing the animation for Hey Arnold: The Jungle Movie.
I for one happen to find The Treasure Planet to be a fascinating film despite its major shortcomings. Questionable animation and production values aside, I don’t think it works entirely as a parody, the story’s flat and the characters aren’t particularly interesting, and I think it just tends to go from scene-to-scene without leaving much other than the weirdness of everything. The film is like a psychedelic space movie that got made in the early 70s and languished for a little while. The real standout is Boris Karadimchev’s appropriately galactic-sounding, synthesizer-drenched score.
So why would I do fan-art for this movie? Well, halfway through the film, the characters encounter some magnetic storm that sends them to the 17th century. Instead of a spaceship, they’re on a ship on the high seas. During this odd detour, they are attacked by these creatures…
Something about their designs, I just really like them. Creatures with like multiple tentacles or claws like that tend to unnerve me for some reason, make them fly and it’s like… Oh boy! So I decided to draw one of these slithery looking aliens…
With this, I tried to understand their design and how they’re put together. They appear to be like a ball with suction cup-like bulges where the heads and appendages come out. I don’t think the film ever explains what they are, at least in the English dub. Why would they even be in the 17th century? Are they parasites? There’s mention of a 4th dimension and other space time-continuums, so it’s probably an alternate universe where seafaring people had to be afraid of literal flying parasites that were the size of a TV. I’d be terrified!
Doing both of these pieces was kind of liberating in a way. For the longest time, I put all my skills into my own works, but doing fan-art of pre-existing things challenges me in ways I would’ve never imagined. I plan to do more of this in the future, and post more work here, as I already post this kind of stuff on my art instagram – kyle_o_makes_stuff.
