Guardians of the Galaxy's Groot Offers Broccoli For Lunch

Groot  the bipedal tree offers some of the sweetest moments of the Guardians movie.  (Some might even describe these moments as insipid, but we are going to go with sweet)  Groot is a perfect all purpose sidekick: he doesn't monopolize the dialogue, is full of hidden talents and is good hearted and selfless.  He 's  Chewbacca and R2D2 rolled into one very vaguely Vin Dieselish package.

Midway through the movie, he offers a young girl a flower that he has grown on his palm.  I thought if he can grow flowers and emit sparkly motes of light, why not healthy lunch foods?

While they are fans of Groot, my sons were not so impressed by this concept.  Like all self-respecting cool children, they prefer to pretend that they hate broccoli,.

Grumpy Cat and Rocket Raccoon

Sarcastic, merchandisable talking animals share a disapproving moment.

"Guardians of the Galaxy" opened last Friday, and seeing it over this weekend was not optional. It certainly lived up to its press as far as our sons were concerned.

That is to say: there was a snarky talking raccoon, and he did have a big gun. As a bonus: there were a lot of explosions and a dancing plant.  There was also a bunch of other stuff that prompted my younger son to plaintively ask several times, "when is this going to be over?" Nevertheless, by the dancing plant at the end, both kids were both ready for the sequel.

And Grumpy Cat? While the kids do find him amusing, I have to admit that he is more my fixation than theirs.  Why are sarcastic animals so appealing? And so lucrative?

Attack on Teen Titans

 

An obvious mash-up that we could not resist.

We are now on the 12th volume of  "Attack on Titan." Our older son would happily read another 12 volumes if they were available.

The Teen Titans are not so high on the list of popular shows at the moment, but Robin never completely loses his appeal.

I suppose that if this were a genuine mash-up of the two shows, Robin and company should be naked, but I just could not even try to imagine that.

Kid Portraits for 2014

As usual, they suffered mightily while this picture was being taken.  I asked them to be still, and requested some adjustments of hand positions and such.  Torture.

Because their faces are covered, you cannot tell how much they are suffering.

I try to do a couple of portraits every summer during the downtime between summer camp and school.  You can see the previous portraits at the links below to discover whether my drawing is improving... or getting worse.  My camera phone has definitely improved since 2012, so at least the resolution and white balance are better.

Summer 2013

Summer 2012

March 2012

Below are the two individual napkins, photographed in the usual manner.
And a photo of the kids on the floor without napkins, so you can see how much pain they experienced during this project:

 

Colossatron

Colossatron from Halfbrick is subtitled "Massive World Threat" which appeals very much to Archer's video game sensibilities.

Drawing rectilinear, robot-like things is not something that I do well, and I must admit to shirking most of the details of this city-destroying alien robot snake thing.  I am afraid that I may get another chance.

Demo Man from Team Fortress 2

I haven't drawn an age inappropriate, violent video game character holding a piece of wholesome lunch food in place of a weapon in a while.

Archer tolerated my substitution of flaming broccoli for Demo Man's giant gun with relatively good humor this morning.  The guy still has explosives attached to his vest, after all.

Godzilla and the Colossal Titan

Monster size matters:

Godzilla and the Colossal Titan from "Attack on Titan" seemed too obvious a pair to pass up.

Of course, it had to be "classic' Godzilla and not the star of the 2014 movie, as the new kaiju has grown to something  in the neighborhood of 100 meters. The Colossal Titan is a mere (and much more plausible) 60 meters.

For those who are sticklers about super-monster size, I know that the classic Godzilla should be a bit shorter, at around 55 meters, but perhaps he is standing on his tippy toes. 

Cybil from Mark Tatulli's Lio Comic

LOL Axe Cat:

Our kids reread the several collections of Lio comics that we have once every few weeks.  They particularly enjoy Cybil, Lio's cute and fluffy, yet well armed and potentially homicidal, cat.

In a one three panel comic, Lio pokes Cybil and she responds by suddenly threatening him with a large axe.  He takes her picture and sends it to "Cat Fancy Magazine"... much to the editor's horror.

This one is definitely not appropriate for Quaker school lunch.  The summer arts camp is much more tolerant, but perhaps we are still pushing the envelope. 

Eren in Fire Titan Form from "Attack on Titan"

The obsession with "Attack on Titan" continues to blossom at our house.
We only have 5 of the 13 (and counting) manga volumes, but it is clear that I am going to have to come up with the others sometime soon.

As images of saucer-eyed children being devoured alive by giants passes for relaxing bedtime fare around here, I've been reading the books out loud in the evenings.

Doing so has made it clear why our sons love the series.  It is a fine distillation of the youthful fantasies of being able to rocket through the air to successfully battle giant monsters.

The fact that the heroic young protagonists are rendered in generic anime style as big-eyed waifs and most of the titans are more realistically drawn to look like schlubby, clueless adults is also an appealing facet, no doubt

The main large-eyed young protagonist Eren, can morph into a titan himself, but his titan is muscular, pointy-eared and can burst into flames, so he is definitely no schlub.

Corvo, Agent 47 and Connor Kenway

Cool killers from Dishonored, Hitman and Assassin's Creed III

Archer, a person of the ripe old age of 11, asked me yesterday which of these three games would I be most likely to allow him to play.  A thorough enumeration of the relative amounts of sadism and bloodletting in each of the three games followed. (For instance:  "Really! You don't HAVE to kill anyone in Hitman!")

I replied that this seemed like a trick question as I was pretty sure that all three were rated M.  Archer responded that 11 is almost a teenager and it was high time for his first M rated game.

Skylanders Legendary Chop Chop

Interest in Skylanders waxes and wanes around here, but never goes away.

Archer always has a list of Skylanders characters that he feels that he really needs to have.
Legendary Chop Chop is at the top of this list right now.

Minions and Alien and Strange Facebook Popularity

Erich Grey Litoff was kind enough to share this napkin on the Stan Winston School of Character Arts Facebook page where it accrued over 5,000 likes and 890 shares.

This is approximately 5,055 more likes and 890 more shares than our napkins usually receive on Facebook.  

Oh well.

Toothless

Archer asked for a drawing of himself with Toothless.  My rendering of both of them, unfortunately, was not particularly successful.

Fortunately, Archer is more easy going than his brother when it comes to mediocre portraits by mom.  Ansel has recoiled in horror and refused to take nearly every napkin drawing I've done of him to school.  Archer kindly reassured me this morning that he would take the napkin even though the drawing of him wasn't very good.

Eren's Titan from "Attack on Titan"

 

Archer is still thinking a lot about "Attack on Titan"... the game, the television series and the manga books.

I have managed to remain mostly ignorant of what is apparently a big cultural phenomenon in Japan, but this probably cannot last. With particular delight, Archer showed me a Subaru commercial featuring attacking titans, arguing that this was evidence of the broad popularity of the franchise. I said, well, yes, it must indeed be popular in Japan. "How do you know this commercial is only running in Japan?" he asked. Well... it is in Japanese. I think the American equivalent would probably feature a General Motors vehicle being used to escape a horde of zombies.

Archer asked for the main character Eren's titan for today's napkin. In the "Attack on Titan" story, not only is the world endangered by giant naked (but genitaless) humanoids, but some regular humans can morph into these creatures in order to battle the others. (Still no genitals, though.) Perhaps this is an essential difference between Japanese and American culture? America's favorite monsters- zombies and vampires- are rarely naked.

Bearbarian

Sometimes, I can take a simplified cartoony character from one of Archer's favorite video games and draw it in a more realistic way and achieve a vaguely amusing result.

Sometimes, the result is awkward and disturbingly weird...and not in an interesting way.

This is Archer's avatar of the moment on the browser game Bearbarians, available on the likes of miniclip.com and addictinggames.com.  

Unsurprisingly, Archer was not impressed this morning.  And I left the weapon out of the picture:

So...double fail for that.

The source material: