Last Of The Rhodesians: April 2010

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Peter Rabbit - Tank Killer

Now, believe it or not, this has to do with my next exam. It is all about adaptation of children’s literature (which includes all forms of input), these last two decades. It is a bit complicated, but as this is part of the answer, please look and hopefully give comments.

This is from "The Book of Revelations" by Mark Leigh and Mike Lepine.

In 1988 a humour book called The Book of Revelations (Mark Leigh and Mike Lepine) printed a parody of both Beatrix Potter and Sven Hassel entitled "Peter Rabbit - Tank Killer" - lampooning the fashion of the period for unscrupulous publishers and literary estates to draft in famous authors to pen "continuations" of their most successful characters and series. (Taken from Wikipedia.)

I found the story and pics on the net and created the YouTube.

Sunday, April 04, 2010

Tintin In The Congo – An Essay With Attitude

Here is the reason why I haven’t posted for a while. What started off as a good idea -soon became a nightmare, as I realised my thoughts and expectations far surpassed my IT competence.

This ‘essay’ has been changed a bit to cover my ass with the Open University, but not only that, it is impossible to plagiarise.

This particular part of the course on Children’s Literature, which covered illustrated children’s books, was a true eye opener, and I will never look at a kid’s book again without looking for all the minute details some of the creators of this genre invest in their prodigies. I am still astounded at the brilliant quality of the OU course materials and tutorship. I am not authorised to show my tutors comments, nor my result…but let’s just say I had a drink with Captain Haddock when they came in.

Two of the set books I have used in nuances of acknowledgement within the grand total of this essay – in particular Beatrice Potter and the post-modern Voices in the Park by Anthony Browne.

The work involved in this presentation nearly killed me! I simply could not fathom how to inbed images etc, so landed up doing it in a most painful way.

In the end, it is a MS Word document that is as functional as Captain Haddock after six bottles of whisky. Naturally, I couldn’t post it. Not only that, the file was so huge, at 11.5 mb, the OU refused to accept it!

Cut a long story short…dig this…after blowing up my computer with the nonsense (I tell no lie, I now have a brand new one with Windows 7), I printed the lot out and scanned it. Completely insane - as I ran out of ink on the second page! Ebay to the rescue…el-cheepo ink. It worked.

Some of the detail is amazing. The envelope has the address of the Tintin publisher and the stamp does really exist. I even found the Tintin fonts! The parodies are real. It was amazing what I all found and ‘stole’ to create this. I found out that copyrighting images on the internet is next to impossible, and should any one pursue this, you can shut down 99% of Google images overnight.

I thank all and sundry for the images I used, and the amazing links and information regarding not just Tintin, but the furore around his adventure in the

Congo

Finally – I thought of putting this up in bits, but the few people who have seen this already, insist it should go up as one.

HOW IT WORKS –

Place curser on image > left click once.

Use Ctrl and the + or – at the same time to get the size perfect for reading.

Hit the 'Go Back Page' to go to the next image.