Gif moodboard of me during my research process cycle. You haven't known the triumphs and defeats, the epic highs and lows of researching while manic.

JBB: An Artblog!
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Not today Justin
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
styofa doing anything
dirt enthusiast
AnasAbdin

shark vs the universe
h
Today's Document
noise dept.
cherry valley forever
YOU ARE THE REASON
🪼

Janaina Medeiros

Kaledo Art
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda

if i look back, i am lost

seen from Australia

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@budcortfancam
Gif moodboard of me during my research process cycle. You haven't known the triumphs and defeats, the epic highs and lows of researching while manic.
Hey guys. Baby here. Just born, new to everything. Is william burroughs problematic
Dean Martin - You Made Me Love You.
where does the mustache-twirling silent film villain comes from? And who was the first ?
Well, here’s the thing about that specific archetype of villain so near and dear to our hearts: They don’t actually come from silent films. They are pretty specifically a product of stage and vaudeville shows playing up parodies of classic villains, and then these parodies made their way to film and cartoons through characters like Professor Fate and Snidely Whiplash.
But if you want the history lesson as well as the reasons why these characters are such an effective visual shorthand for villainy, you can trace this pretty directly back to Edward Hyde.
Right from the start, the common image of Mr Hyde was that of a twisted ogre dressed in gentlemen’s clothing, the kind that people actually wore at the time of Victorian England. And there’s been much said over the years in regards to how Hyde taps, intentionally or not, into social prejudice, into a fear of the lower classes and their integration with people from higher social standing, of Hyde as a stand-in for poverty and crime and vice and etc. There’s been a lot of reinterpretations of the book that took a specific angle with Hyde, mainly a sexual one, others that focus heavily on the battle between good vs evil (which really misses the fact that Jekyll wasn’t much of a good person in the book to begin with), and so on, there’s of course much room for reinterpretation.
But these usually miss what else was happening in England, after Mr Hyde became a household name. You might have heard of it.
Through a stroke of fate, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde debuted just two years before the Jack the Ripper murders took England by storm. In fact, newspapers regularly referred to the murderer as Mr Hyde because of the story, and there’s a particularly famous story of actor Richard Mansfield being publicly accused of being the Ripper because of his scarily-convincing performance as the character.
And from that point onwards, the image of Mr Hyde, of the sinister criminal dressing up as a gentleman, became not just the public image attached to depictions of Jack the Ripper, but the image of villainy itself.
Go ahead, picture the most basic silhouette for a villain in your head. Here, let me make it easier for you:
I googled this on incognito mode just now, and as you see, even before Star Wars and Disney, there you see the sinister figure in top hat and cloak, knife or cane optional. The universal shorthand for villain, partially because of Mr Hyde.
I mentioned earlier when talking about Count Fosco that the reason he was made an Italian is because at the time (1860s), Wilkie Collins assumed his crime to be “too heinous” for an English villain. Which is funny now, considering that English fashion AND accents have become the go-to signifiers of ultimate evil since forever now.
Before Mr Hyde and the changing paradigms of fiction that followed him, the most common idea most people had of “evil”, of an evil person, mainly took the form of either a poorly dressed street criminal, or a foreigner. In fact, the term “villain” in the first place has the following origin:
“base or low-born rustic,” from Anglo-French and Old French vilain “peasant, farmer, commoner, churl, yokel” (12c.), from Medieval Latin villanus “farmhand,” from Latin villa “country house, farm”
The most important phases of the sense development of this word may be summed up as follows: ‘inhabitant of a farm; peasant; churl, boor; clown; miser; knave, scoundrel.’ Today both Fr. vilain and Eng. villain are used only in a pejorative sense.
Which is maybe the most obvious fact to consider anytime the discussion of “why are villains so popular” takes place.
Hyde was obviously not the first villain to dress up in respectable clothing, even in popular Victorian icons Sweeney Todd predates him by a few decades. And obviously this didn’t change overnight, mind you, but you can see the pattern: Mr Hyde debuts and his arrival crashes the cultural paradigm in waves. Not just in the idea of man as a creature of duality with the extraordinary beast lurking inside, which as I’ve argued before in writing about Tarzan, is in the bedrock of the very concept of the superhero and also the ultimate connection between hero and monster in fiction, but also in the terror of knowing that the most hideous crimes against humanity can, and are, being committed by those who sit at the highest points of respectability, the doctor and scholar and gentleman, who wears the same clothes he uses to heal and lecture and help, to trample children and assault and murder people (which is obviously not even remotely as unthinkable now as it might have been to Victorian audiences at the time)
Two years later, a string of savage murders committed by someone with medical expertise shakes up Britain to it’s very core, and suddenly the story doesn’t seem quite so much like fantasy, and suddenly, villains all over the place in fiction are showing up dressed in gentleman’s clothing, because now writers and artists are tapping into the fear felt by Dr Jekyll’s high society friends: the realization that the monster is one of them, that gentleman and villain are one and the same.
It wouldn’t be long afterwards that the likes of Dracula and Dorian Grey would further popularize evil aristocrats and gentlemen and murderers in evening wear as not only enduring, but omnipresent villainous archetypes, particularly on stage, which is where we are gonna find the other major figure responsible for popularizing the specific villainous archetype you mentioned: Tod Slaughter
If Mr Hyde’s omnipresent popularity was instrumental in defining the look of the stage villain, then it would be Tod Slaughter who would be responsible for popularizing the comically over-the-top gentleman villain in the stage, to be cemented as a vaudeville staple and later a staple of pop culture itself. And he’s never gotten even 1/10th of the credit he deserved for it, certainly not after his death.
Born with the name Norman Carter Slaughter and performing initially under the name N. Carter Slaughter (I wonder where we’ve heard a name like that before), he initially performed conventional leading men roles, until after his service in the war, when he was reviving “blood and thunder” melodramas, including Sweeney Todd, and bringing barnstorming to the stage.
And it’s those kinds of melodramas that also led to the creation of “grinning villain in evening wear” as a staple of the stage, even before Slaugher made a career out of those, and it was bringing barnstorm acting to the stage that cemented his particular brand of villainy. The earliest cartoon example of such a villain I can find, Oil-Can Harry from Mighty Mouse, debuted in 1933 in a show specifically called “mellerdrama”, as a parody of the kind of show Tod Slaughter had helped revive and play.
He renamed himself Tod Slaughter in the mid-1920s, and in the 1931, he rebranded himself “Mr Murder” and started really going full in on villains from the 1930s all the way to his death. He’s played Sweeney Tood 2.000 times on stage, he’s played Mr Hyde, Jack the Ripper, Spring-Heeled Jack, Long John Silver, and many other roles in stage and film. He was never popular among critics, but he was a household name, one of Britain’s biggest stars in the early 20th century, and really I think those of you who follow me are already quite familiar with household names extremely popular in their times still fading into complete obscurity.
Slaughter’s body of work – no matter how poor it may seem by today’s standards – was a bridge between the Victorian blood and thunder melodramas and the gore and flash of Hammer Studios in the early fifties.
The film work was censored as often there would be cutaway edits or fade to black during the more harrowing moments. The ‘X certificate’ for audience restriction had not yet been created.
Tod Slaughter pointed the way to gore, and this in turn became taboo subjects in horror.
He was the first to use gimmicks, such as having doctors and nurses in the theatre during performances in case someone fainted. They were called upon, too.
Tod would often go to the theatre bar during the interval in full make up with bloody apron (as in the case of Sweeney Todd) and sit muttering and ordering drinks. Not a soul would go near him and a showman’s mystique was created.
Tod Slaughter passed away of a coronary thrombosis in Derby in 1956, which was also the year Bela Lugosi died. His work slipped in to obscurity. - Article by spookyisles
Seriously, just look at him, look at him acting. Don’t get me wrong, he took his work incredibly seriously and it showed, he wasn’t intentionally out to create a parody archetype, but this guy had such an energy to him that really made his characters stand out in a way unmatched, and it was his specific style of performance that was ultimately carried over from stage to film and then, to pop culture long past his lifespan. It’s an utter shame that somehow we didn’t immortalize this guy in pop culture along with the other horror greats.
Oil Can Harry, Professor Fate, Snidely Whiplash, Dick Dastardly, Dan Backslide, Hedley Lamarr, Robbie Rotten, Seymour Ghastly, Waluigi, Dr Robotnik, all of these and others owe at least some tribute to the original. He is the Grandad of Mustache Twirling and in October we should all grow one and twirl it mischievously to honor his contributions to the finer arts of villainy.
Like Hammer Films, or Carry On, or practically any other low brow populist entertainment of yesteryear, Slaughter was not popular even with the genre critics – if you saw anything about his work in the horror books and magazines of the 1970s or early 1980s, it was invariably dismissive. The official word was that Slaughter was a bad actor who could not leave behind his theatrical performances in his films, and the movies themselves were creaky rubbish.
Yet even as we read this, we were starting to see Slaughter’s films on TV – late night or mid-afternoon broadcasts on the fledgeling Channel 4, for instance – and the films were magnificent. Glorious, unrestrained melodrama, fast-paced and deliciously gothic, all anchored by the central performance of Slaughter, who was less theatrical, more gleeful as he tore up the screen with a level of cheerful villainy that has never been seen before or since.
Slaughter was of his time, perhaps, but that somehow made these films all the more enthralling – you just didn’t see acting like this, or faces like this, anymore. Perhaps he was rare, even in the 1930s, and that’s why he was so popular with audiences back then.
Slaughter’s films had an authenticity about them, a lack of pretension that I imagine also marked his stage shows. He was never going to appeal to the chin-strokers and the academics. Slaughter was too real for that.
He was the people’s villain - Article by reprobatepress
@starklore
I would argue there’s another character that had more to do that specific villain archetype: Simon LeGree, the villain of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (1852), a brutal rich slave-owner with a big hat and mustache, needlessly cruel and fond of kidnapping attractive women.
While initially a serious anti-slavery novel, the book was freely adapted into vaudeville routines, including a lot of parodies, which then carried over repeatedly into early cartoons–”Uncle Tom’s Bungalow” from Warner Bros, “Mickey’s Mellerdrammer” from Disney, Felix the Cat in “Uncle Tom’s Crabbin’”, a standalone parody from Novascope (be forewarned most of these have been banned from TV and disowned by the rights holders)–the basic costume design with the handlebar mustache, formal clothes, and big hat (minus the all-black clothes, since that would be hard to animate), as well as the constant mugging and grinning at the camera/audience. Since Tom Shows were so common in the era directly before vaudeville, I would say there had to be some influence there
(That distinct Mustache Villain accent/voice might also be a corrupted parody of the non-rhotic upper-class Bostonian accent originally used by actors playing Legree, also heard from Daniel Day Lewis in “Gangs of New York”, although these days these guys tend to sound more Mid-Atlantic.)
…And then it seems pretty likely to me that there’s probably some influence from il Dottore and/or Pantalone the Merchant, the Vecchi of the Commedia dell’Arte, the stock villains of comedies known for their mustaches, black clothes, and wacky-yet-evil antics keeping young lovers apart.
Thanks for the response! And yeah, Simon LeGree is definitely a character to be accounted for, if only due to the sheer popularity of Uncle Tom’s Cabin at it’s time and the 1930s cartoon depictions of LeGree that were also among the earliest examples of, let’s call em Dastardly Whiplashes for now to borrow a term from TVTropes (although, again, those are still predated by Mr Murder, Oil-Can Harry and other characters I’ll name below).
I opted against LeGree because LeGree with a handlebar mustache, formal wear and excessive cartooning is specifically a product of takes on LeGree being influenced by said melodrama parodies. LeGree as a Dastardly Whiplash is largely a product of LeGree being influenced by parodies of melodrama villains, many of whom were inspired by LeGree or making fun of LeGree, and whom LeGree started imitating later.
There’s a pretty clear difference between pre-WW1 takes on LeGree, like the one you posted above, which were not as uniform in how they presented the character visually or character-wise (in the sense of how much his terribleness is played for drama or comedy)
to post-WW1/1930s takes on LeGree, all of which seem to largely run with the black-garbed handlebar-stached version and make LeGree into a gag character, if a particularly nasty one.
It is obviously inarguable that LeGree was influential in the development of American villains as a whole, but I would be less sure about setting him up as the definitive first of the “Dastardly Whiplash”, because he plainly wasn’t one at his conception, and only became one when he was influenced by pre-existing stock melodrama villains, which even date back even farther than Simon LeGree himself.
It goes back to that debate that occurs everytime one tries to pin down the origins of an archetype, of what’s an influence in an archetype (ex: Tarzan, Hugo Danner, Flash Gordon, Doc Savage to the superhero) vs what’s the, or at least a, formative example of it (Superman to the superhero), which is a debate that gets even more complicated when you factor how ideas can and do develop separately and simultaneously, which ideas had a more pervasive influence than others and so forth.
I certainly cannot claim that Mr Hyde or Tod Slaughter created the Dastardly Whiplash archetype wholesale, I even said as much in the original post that the grinning villain in evening wear was common in melodrama stage shows and penny dreadfuls long before Mr Murder and Mr Hyde. What I’m arguing is that Mr Hyde, though not the first to do so, would define “top hat and black cape” as the number one definitive look of evil to eventually supplant the poorly-dressed street crook or exotic foreigner, and what Tod Slaughter did was revive the popularity of said shows as well as popularize the concept in film through his style of performing, and film is where Snidely Whiplash and Dick Dastardly would get their whole material from and become the go-to modern examples of the archetype.
Now, the earliest example I can find of a character who is, indisputably of the Dastardly Whiplash type and with zero room for debate, is Relentess Rudolph from Hairbreath Harry in 1906
Rudolph seems to be a parody of the roguish con-man protagonist Rudolf Rassendyll from The Prisoner of Zenda, which was MASSIVELY popular for decades and pretty much created a stock cartoon plot still used today. Hairbreath Harry is a parody of 18th and 19th century music hall melodramas and considered to be the first comic strip to use the motif of the “triad of square jawed hero - beautiful but helpless heroine - gloating mustachioed villain, played for laughs”, and the “played for laughs” part is important, because by design, the Dastardly Whiplash has to be a parody or comedic character, or at least influenced by said parody characters, otherwise you could claim literally any villain with any of said features as the first example.
Rudolph also influenced Desperate Desmond, possibly the first true example of a Dastardly Whiplash who was also the protagonist.
Except I still can’t be sure if Rudolph can be said to be the first, because both him and Desmond are still fundamentally parodying a style of villain that predates both them and Simon LeGree as well. The absolute earliest take on the stock plot these characters are attached to is Royall Tyler’s The Contrast from 1787, which is about the rivalry between American hero Col. Manly and European fop villain Billy Dimple for the hand of Maria Van Rough (Billy Dimple doesn’t look the part though), which definitely makes it the earliest American example we can find of the type of story Hairbreath Harry was satirizing. It was also said to be the first true American play, although written in the tradition of English Restoration comedies of the earlier 17th century. And yes it is true that the stock villains of Commedia dell’Arte also were an influence and/or an early example of it.
And if this research has shown me anything is that the “Dastardly Whiplash” is an archetype that pretty much seems to have always been played mainly for comedy and parody, except they are all just kind of parodying each other time and time again. It’s like trying to determine who The First Supervillain is, which is a topic I’ve been grappling with for months now, at some point you’re just gonna have to draw a line in just how far can you go back in time to find these connections and how much they do, or do not, matter.
I think, maybe like the superhero and supervillain, we can argue that the Dastardly Whiplash has more than one trajectory that led to it’s creation and more than one specific character that created or popularized or codified and whatnot to point to. Although it is perplexing how alike these characters are and how they all seem to be parodying each other to an extent, like a running gag that started at some point in the late 1700s or early 1800s and then it just never stopped, like these clowns are all created as spoofs or caricatures of real life people or other characters, and they all just kinda end up stealing material from each other by happenstance or intention, AND NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW
Which is all too fitting.
happy Mother’s Day to these two queens
Art by Walt Scott, from “Walt Scott’s Christmas Stories,” “Four Color” #1062 (1959).
girl help i'm turning 30 in a few days and i've done fuck all with my life
fuck all is a classic 30 year old thing to do. youre right on track
I love jaywalking with another pedestrian lol we’re unionized
Rugrats Passover Special promo [1998]
Source [YT: GrowinupinSincity81]
I know you wanted me away But I am called to be the first Pope from the USA I heard that there's a special place where God talks directly to me every time I pray
I'm having holy dreams, of ruling the Holy See Hear Santa Monica, her son is calling me Won't make the bishops proud, the USCCB Will see their bro in Christ, I know they're gonna scream
"God, what will you do? You once were our boy, then you went to Peru," oh Fathers I'm on the balcony In my vestments, they elected me as the
I'm pontificating as the
I'll be treading closer to the
✨ OLD STATUS QUO ✨
But bigots will keep calling me the
I rise, as Leo, 10 and 4 Saying that the Church should help the migrants and the poor They ask, my feelings on baseball And wonder if I like the gays "a bit" or "not at all"
I live my holy dreams, in Vatican City 'Bye Santa Monica degli Agostin'ani I preach the basic core of Christianity It makes hypocrites mad, I know they're gonna scream
"God, what have you done? He's left of center, an' he's your new Number One," oh brothers The Father and Son Told me they think your views, are hopelessly wrong. You call me
Go ahead keep tweeting I'm a
Maybe I'll slide down a righteous
✨Slippery Slope✨
And someday maybe there will be a
honestly the original USDA food pyramid was funny as fuck for recommending 6-11 servings of bread a day. like honestly don't mind if I do
this and the vogue wine diet I'm catholicmaxxing
good question
NEVER KILL YOURSELF
TODAY IS A GOOD DAY.
(Sources: Wall Street Journal and Hollywood Reporter)
I'm obsessed with the Bath & Body Works subreddit because there's only three types of posts and it's:
1.) Women in their fifties having the epiphany that capitalism and/or marketing is evil, but like. They don't realize that that's how capitalism and marketing as a whole are designed to work; they think that this is a unique type of evil that Bath & Body Works has invented. They'll be like, "It's sick and twisted that they just keep releasing new products that are inferior quality versions of their old products with a different label and then making them seasonal items so that people feel pressured to buy them before they can really think about it because they're worried they'll miss out!!! This should be illegal!!!" You're telling me, girl. You're gonna be soooooo mad when you find out about. The whole world.
2.) Level 1-2 Hoarders in denial showing off their collections of hundreds of candles and body sprays and lotions and then frothing at the mouth in the comments section when people offer support resources for hoarding and shopping addictions.
3.) The world's most iconic autistic women with a vintage Bath & Body Works special interest who don't realize they're autistic women with a vintage Bath & Body Works special interest trying to convince themselves that the lotion they thrifted from Goodwill that expired in 2002 isn't rancid, it's "macerated".
Actually, making this rebloggable only to add that there's a fourth type of post which is people posting pictures of horrifying fires that their candles caused and being like, "This is the sixth time my candle has almost cost me my home. What should I do? I am NOT going to get rid of it. It's a discontinued scent," and everybody being like, "Oh my god??? I LOVE that one, do NOT throw it away. Just get a candle warmer."
Les Marques internationales : supplément de la “Propriété industrielle” organe du Bureau international de l'Union pour la protection de la propriété industrielle - 1909 - via Gallica
This Twilight Zone episode (The Trunk) starring Bud Cort is so lovely and worth 22 minutes of your time. He appeared on a couple of anthology series (Tales from The Dark Side, Tales of the Unexpected, The Hitchhiker) and short films in the 80s, and they’re definitely worth watching. Rest in peace, Bud.