#professor fandango

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Encyclotrivia - APOCALYPSO

Back in October I updated my DeviantArt journal with a few of my most pressing priorities but mostly forgot about them and focussed on other things. Now it's 2020 and I've got a new list of priorities for this year but at the very least I was able to squeeze out a new Encyclotrivia entry. In the past I mentioned the battle vehicle Apocalypso: screwloosestudios.tumblr.com/s… but didn't have a design I was happy with (or which properly facilitated its function.) Then, some time last year I put together this design that I really liked and eventually got around to colouring it. Not completely sure I'm happy with the colour scheme - it is intended to be garish but it should still be balanced and I don't know if that's quite right yet. Another reason this one took so long to colour is that this specific image is made up of lots of individual parts so it can potentially be animated! Who knows when I'll ever get to that though.

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Should have uploaded this one first really, but it mentioned both Replay and Rereplay in its description so it had to come last. From a design history point of view, Play is reminiscent of the old character Contact but is really little more than a Replay precursor.

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Hey look! Contrary to popular opinion, I can draw characters actually doing things. I alluded to this one as far back as May: http://screwloosestudios.tumblr.com/post/173832675936/im-working-on-a-big-project-with-the-primes-this and it's sat in a state on half-finished-ness since then. I'm not sure it came out exactly as I expected but after a lot of last minute tweaking I got it to a point I think is decent.

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That is a final boss, not the final boss! The robot formerly known as Vengeance: www.deviantart.com/professorfa… gets an upgrade too.

He's a bit of a tough one to colour since his armour is supposed to be gold but hopefully you get the idea. One thing I always tried to do with this character was give him a 'manic' look on his face. It always seemed to be a struggle, but this eye design seems to work for it.

As an ungraded version of Replay, it would have been easy to give him some sort of super-powerful, high definition video gun, but I didn't want to dilute Replay's unique features if I could help it.*

His gun does take the rough idea of the Shuttershot one step further, but with a different execution. There is a reason why the gun is shaped like a dragon, but it's based in the character design history, rather than an in-universe reason.

Finally his emblem. In the past Vengeance had a sickle shaped emblem. It was meant to be reminiscent of a scythe, but the sickle shape worked better as an icon. When he became Rereplay: www.deviantart.com/professorfa… it became a moon (linking it to Replay's star) but now that the star is also gone, I had to come up with something else. This one here has two meanings. On one hand it's a pitchfork, making the sinister demon connection, on the other hand it's a crown, making the superiority connection.

*It's something that narks me in fiction - iterating on a character so many times that the original starts to look boring by comparison (ie: Mario, Metaknight)

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The first incarnation of the theatre had a scene based on a gangster shoot out, for some reason, but eventually became Murder Mystery, which is more a genre of fiction than a genre of theatre but that line remains blurred throughout.

A couple of notable details here:

The Killer puppet is not actually a separate character, but a representation of the murderer. Since this act is presented from the perspective of Sidney the detective, he has "flashback" thoughts where he considers how the murder took place and they include a non-dead Miss Teri and the Killer. To that end, technically any of the three suspects could be revealed as the murderer! The outcome is random, or more specifically dependant on which puppets get destroyed first.

In the olden days the boss was going to be the judge, but I thought on it and these plays rarely get as far as the courthouse, it's usually just the coppers showing up at the end, so that's where the DI came in.

His gimmick is that his head is a totem pole of expressions! The top part spins to show different eyes, the bottom has different mouth, and the middle one has different styles of moustache!

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Hey! Remember when I said I had something special coming up for the Encyclotrivia? Well this isn't it!

Since I'd decided the fifth "Type" category should be "Locale," I wondered how I would actually portray that, considering that I might actually have to draw a - shudder - interior.

But then I remembered that I haven't drawn the outside of Fandango Laboratories for a very long time.

In fact, there has never been a 'final' design of the place, just a few half-finished sketches.

The very first version of the lab: https://sta.sh/01k0xdifx5c8 was crude and directionless but even there you can see key features like the wonky tower and St. Basil's onion domes were already implemented. It wasn't until I went through the archives I realised I used this design in quite a few unfinished pieces!

I'm pretty sure I did a newer sketch where the lab had lots of 'solar panels' floating around it but I can't seem to find that one.

What I can find is a very fine sketch that became the basis of its modern design: https://sta.sh/02eowd7j7l3t placing it on a floating lump of rock and adding the planetoid to the top of the main tower.

However, this style of building, consisting of a large central tower and lots of other varied connected buildings predates Professor Fandango himself, in the form of "Replay's": https://sta.sh/01nie7kmpoze

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So this is the complete design for now. As always, colours were a challenge so there might be small tweaks going forward, but the important part was that, now I'm starting to structure the Fandango stuff more clearly, I was able to draw each zone separately and piece them together, which will be useful for their upcoming Encyclotrivia entries!

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I said that there were five "Battle Acts" in the Operating Theatre but you can't start the show before the overture, can you?

But these puppets don't descend from the flytower or come in from the wings. The brown base of the theatre is hollow and opens up like a drawer, from which the orchestra emerges. So these guys are more evocative of hand puppets that marionettes.

You'll notice that the conductor is listed as a "boss": each act has a boss puppet. They usually appear at the end of the act but in this case Gil Harmonic appears first, which also has the benefit of creating a barrier for the rest of the musicians so they can spit out damaging musical notes with impunity.

One of the sticking points that caused this project to take so long was that I kept changing my mind about the orchestra. At the very beginning they were supposed to be like this - all smartly dressed in matching evening wear. Then, when I struggled to come up with enough varied "normal" faces I decided I wanted them all to be extremely diverse and for each musician to represent a different genre of music (ie: beatnik lady on double bass is 'Blues,' mohawked rocker with electric guitar is 'Punk, etc.) and that theme stayed with me right up until this final version of the cast! I had even started colouring some of them until I changed my mind for the final time and reasoned that it wasn't really an orchestra anymore. I think it needed to be a bit more authentic so I went back to the old way, but this time I was better at putting together diverse faces!

You may also notice all sections of the orchestra are represented: three brass players, three woodwind, three strings (the harp is a bit unorthodox but it still counts) then two percussion and the piano. Names have always been a sticking point too so I'm not entirely sure about just naming them after the instruments but there are quite a lot of characters to consider. This is actually the biggest act by far regarding number of members so the layout is a bit wonky, but the later ones are neater!

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Is a Sphinx a cat or a dog?