#but these were some favorites from my cyclops photo shoot

[larcenywrites]

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alrighty, let’s recap this bitch!

LAUNCHPAD! I’VE MISSED YOU SO MUCH! PLEASE COME BACK!

I looked up when National S’mores Day is (because I’m a nerd) and it is August 10. So either the photo later was mislabeled or, more likely, Launchpad got the wrong info

Huey with the little baby scouts is TOO CUTE!!

I wonder if Violet’s there. Probably not because she would have been hanging out with Huey if she was. Or this episode was meant to come before Challenge

It’s a baby beagle boy! I wonder if he’s there of his own will or if it is part of some plan

He scared away most of the kids! Now they won’t get to enjoy s’more-y goodness

His s’more sounds DOPE AF, though it probably would give you INSTANT DIABETES

“Aw, not even a modern robot.” MY SWEET SON!

I know it was the bully saying it, but Huey should chill a bit when it comes to doing things EXACTLY and PERFECTLY. It’s just gonna cause stress

 BOYD IS BABY AND I LOVE HIM

“Would you like to be friends?” “Sure. Wow, that was easy.” If only it was always that easy

I don’t know if Huey has the JWG as memorized as he thinks, going by Challenge and Quack Pack

“We’re just kids.” “Definitely!” *uses laser eyes to light fire*

This episode does a good job showing what a trigger word/phrase is like, though I’m not sure if that was the intention

I like that a squirrel with a burnt tail scurries out of one of the trees. It’s the attention to detail that helps elevate this show

Instead of jumping out of the way or hiding Huey jumps straight onto Boyd to try and help him. Huey already sees Boyd as someone worth protecting

The kid that just runs across the screen while his hat is on fire is great

Not sure why they took the time to change before going to Gyro but whatever

BOYD IS ADORABLE AND I LOVE HIM

“I’m more than an intern, I’m a scientist.” I feel like this might be hinting at Fenton’s arc for the season, possibly wanting to be seen more as a scientist than a superhero

I’m gonna pretend that using sunglasses on someone who is shooting lasers out of their eyes is a Cyclops reference. And they look pretty dope too

At least Fenton knows when he is in over his head...this time

Gyro trying to climb up on the table to avoid Boyd was kind of funny. And then him protecting himself with Lil Bulb

“Which one?” Manny is DONE with this shit

“Boyd? What idiot called it that?” Even when he’s not there, Gyro can still burn Mark lol

I figured 2-BO was a reference to something but wasn’t sure what. Apparently it’s a bit of a play on the name of Astro Boy’s in-universe creator’s son. Neat

 Huey stays in between Gyro and Boyd to protect Boyd

Fenton’s face cracks me up. There are NO THOUGHTS in this man’s head lol

“You were an intern like me?” “Nothing like you.” Damn Gyro, why so salty?

I don’t know why Fenton is so surprised that Gyro was an intern. I feel like that’s a pretty standard thing

LOVE IS STORED IN THE BOYD

It make me sad when Gyro mentions how many times Boyd’s core programing was altered. Poor baby doesn’t really get a say in what happens to him

“ROAD TRIP!” Huey, you do these kinds of things ALL THE TIME. I feel like he should be used to this by now

“YOU’RE not going. GIZMODUCK is.” Does Gyro see Fenton and Gizmoduck as separate entities or is this just a no, but yes type of joke?

Huey standing up for Boyd is so sweet. They barely know each other but Huey trusts him

When the episode doesn’t have the theme song you KNOW shit’s ‘bout to go down

I wonder who’s flying the plane. My guess is Launchpad because Della would have been cooing over Huey making a new friend and go into embarrassing mom mode. He probably went of on his own adventure or did tourist things like buying collectables. Or maybe Gyro flew them there. Who knows

As many people have said, the art direction and animation for this episode are BEAUTIFUL. I love the pink tint the lighting has in most of the episode

SAILOR MOON CONFIRMED CANON

I bet Mark Beaks is a Sailor Moon fan

I like that the in-universe Sailor Moon is a bunny because Usagi is Japanese for rabbit

I love that going incognito nowadays means you wear a hat, a hoodie, and sunglasses. Boyd looks good in red (though red is my favorite color so I might be biased)

Gyro-takes one step and the fuzz shows up. NOICE

I like detective lady. She has a cool design

Huey and Fenton are awful at acting casual

“Crimes?” Oh my sweet Hubert. I’m pretty sure most if not all of Scrooge’s employees have had run ins w/ The Law

Gyro is like, move I’m gay

“I’m here on a very important...field trip.” ALL THE KIDS NEED A GYRO FIELD TRIP LIKE HOW THE GAANG GOT ZUKO FIELD TRIPS

Lil Bulb said FUCK THE POLICE

I wonder what it actually says

Fenton just watches as the inspector chases Lil Bulb

Seriously though, Fenton does a bunch of silly stuff in the background and this episode warrants a rewatch SOLELY for him

How did Lil Bulb know where to find them? And how did he shake off the inspector? I want to see his little adventure

FOR SCIENCE!

“Blah!” *arm armor attaches* I want this joke to come back

Fenton and Huey INSTANTLY nerd out. I love them

Fenton being a Gyro fanboy is ADORABLE

“AH, DUST IN MY EYE! The dust of GENIUS!” What a dweeb lol

I like that Fenton keeps the arm on for the whole scene

Poor Boyd, he looks so scared

Huey going into protective big brother mode

Doofus continues to be equal parts hilarious and disturbing

Where are their parents? Like, someone should be looking after these kids! ESPECIALLY DOOFUS!

“Do you need a hug?” I SURE FUCKING DO

Mark is such a prick lol

“NO WAY, A ROBOT BOY! DREAMS DO COME TRUE!” YOU DON’T DESERVE THAT DREAM YOU COCKWAFFLE

SOMEONE HUG THIS CHILD! BECAUSE I CANNOT!

“Seems like the little guy’s had it tough.” MY POOR BABY

Lil Bulb gets SO PISSED he blew a fuse

You really shouldn’t have left them alone, Gyro

Why does Fenton automatically jump to superhero for Boyd? I mean the theme of the episode is letting Boyd choose who he wants to be so of course Fenton would have his own idea of what Boyd should be, but why go straight to superhero? Do you want superbros, Fenton?

Huey already realises this might be a bad idea, because he’s more concerned about Boyd as a person rather than Boyd as a machine

“IN RETROSPECT WE PROBABLY SHOULD HAVE USED THE FIRST HOLE” Fenton, you dumbass genius

Dr. Akita’s setup made me laugh. I DIED when he “enhanced” the image

I recognized the character on the chips though I don’t know their name. I’m more of a western animation fan, so many of the references probably flew pass me

BOOP

I also have a key on my laptop that flies off (it’s the u key)

I LOVE BABY GYRO! It’s so cool they went with his og look (minus the red hair) to show him younger

I LOVE THE OUTLAW COUPLE! SO COOL! SO HOT!

Huey is so DONE with Fenton

I love the stupid G pose he does. PLEASE HAVE HIM DO IT AGAIN. PREFERABLY WHEN DW IS NEARBY

Such a polite boy

“My bones are metal!” This line and Boyd’s catchphrase of “Hi, I’m Boyd/2-BO, a definitely real boy!” reminded me of Olaf. The end of the episode gives Boyd even MORE Olaf parallels

Gizmoduck sliding by those boxes was cool

How did Gizmoduck get himself unstuck from that alley?

I loved the double take the female outlaw does

Huey is TRAUMATIZED

I legit thought Boyd was gonna light the oil on fire the first time I watched and I was like that won’t help

“So, what do we do now?” “I...don’t know.” This is why you don’t leave babies alone to fight criminals

Boyd reminded me of Calculester from Monster Prom when he asked the lady to return the money

STOP LEAVING THE CHILDREN ALONE! THEY ARE BABIES! THEY AREN’T EVEN TEENS!

“Why do we always fight when we’re on vacation?” Because this is Ducktales and there is no such thing as a normal vacation

Lil Bulb just kicking his lil feet

The “lab” safety poster made me chuckle. Then I remembered Akita is also a dog and I laughed more

LITTLE BABY GYRO GRADUATING! My guess is his professor/dean/principal influenced him on a personal level and is partially the reason Boyd is a parrot

Lil Helper blueprints. Nice reference to the og series

Has anyone talked about the poster with the cogs and the dogman in old-timey clothes that says GIZMOS on it? I think it’s a Dr. Who reference

IDEALISTIC GYRO AND BOYD IS TOO CUTE!

How did he NOT notice the second hole in the wall?

That is a surplus of handcuffs. Do you think she uses them for...fun times?

“I’m just a guy! With very bruisable skin!”

Poor misunderstood Gyro inventions

Boyd just politely waves at everyone

Huey is WAY calmer than I would be if I got lost in an unfamiliar city

Boyd says FUCK WORK

 I love Huey stimming. Really hope Disney will let them confirm in words that Huey is autistic

Is it more common for two kids to wonder around by themselves in Tokyo? Because as an American I find it super stressful and would want to find their parents so they could be safer

THE BUNNY! AND THEN THE KITTIES!

Do cats just take buses on their own in Tokyo?

CHERRY BLOSSOM TIME BITCHES

“And I know what you’re thinking, what about ninjas?” I am ALWAYS wondering about ninjas

I like that Huey finally has a friend who shares the same interests and doesn’t mind info dumps

“Boyd, I don’t think you’re a killer robot. You’re just a kid.” “Aw, that’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.” T_T

I CAN SHOW YOU THE WORLD

I like Boyd’s motief

Akita is us after the quarantine

When he complained about being stiff I was like mood

I like his Green Goblin disc thingy

The other people don’t give a shit about Boyd just FLYING DOWN WITH HIS ROCKET FEET!

Gyro shows up *dramatic wind*

His tablet has a duckie on it. I wounder if they have a Mac/PC thing going on with Waddle and what brand the duckie represents

When the adults argue and Boyd gets all sad and scared I FELT THAT

Huey doing his best to keep Boyd calm and defend him SO PURE

OH GOD HELP THIS POOR CHILD!

HUEY IS A GOOD BOY AND A GOOD FRIEND

“Because of you I’ve become an outcast.” I feel like you did that to yourself

ANIME HAIR POOF

ngl, that shit was TERRIFYING

“You don’t have to do what Akita tells you. Do what I tell you.” So close

“INTERN! FIGHT BETTER!”

Huey must weigh NOTHING if Gyro can pick him up

Akita’s tail looks like a cinnamon roll

Huey always finding that hidden info

The gibberish Gyro says is great

BOYD SAYS IT BECAUSE GYRO TOLD HIM THAT!

THAT HUG!!!

HOW DARE AKITA HURT BABY GYRO AND SWEET BABY BOYD?!

PROTECTIVE PAPA GYRO

NEEEEERRRRRRRD FIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT

“You’ll never invent anything worthwhile.” LIL BULB HAS ENTERED THE FIGHT

Are doggos recyclable?

HUUUUUUUUUUUUUGS

Blue eyes=good robot

ANOTHER HUG

Be Only Yourself, Dude

I like that basically Gyro admitted that he was like Fenton if Fenton hadn’t had support

“That’s not technically how doctorites work, BUT I DON’T CARE!” Do you think Gyro doesn’t have his doctorate or do you think he assumed Fenton already had one?

“The hugging is a ‘just for today’ thing.” YOU CANNOT STOP THE HUG TRAIN!

“Leave. Now.”

Are they gonna go to the plane?

This season has been consistently knocking it out of the park! I’m a SLUT for backstory episodes, so I enjoyed this one a lot. I loved seeing Gyro when he had hope and faith in the world. It SUCKS that Akita took that away from him. Hopefully Gyro will see things slightly less cynical now. Fenton was a dweeb the whole episode and I love him for it. Boyd is SO SWEET AND PRECIOUS and in NO WAY deserved the treatment he got. I have a feeling there is more to Boyd’s creation/Dr.Akita that we’ll get later on. Huey was ADORABLE this episode. It’s really sweet to see him hangout with someone who gets him. Everyone deserves to have at least one friend like that. The fight scene was GORGEOUS! SO FLUID! I really loved this one and I hope we get more Team Science episodes because these characters play really well off each other. 

[rptv-starwars]

'The Empire Strikes Back' at 40: What the 'Star Wars' sequel's iconic special effects owe to Ray Harryhausen

By Ethan Altered-States (Ethan Alter)

Yahoo Entertainment, Yahoo Movies  •  May 27, 2020

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/the-empire-strikes-back-star-wars-special-effects-ray-harryhausen-212159259.html

[article was edited for brevity, clarity, and to omit dumb commentary by the original author]

Dennis Muren poses with an AT-AT walker behind the scenes of The Empire Strikes Back. (Photo: Lucasfilm)

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Both Ray Harryhausen [special effects creator prominent in the 1960s for stop-motion animation] and The Empire Strikes Back (ESB) are celebrating milestone anniversaries this year. 2020 marks the 100th birthday of Harryhausen, the special-effects pioneer behind vintage Hollywood spectacles like The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts, as well as the 40th anniversary of the second movie in the Star Wars original trilogy.

But they have more in common than the calendar year: The AT-ATs and Tauntauns that walk through ESB are inspired by Harryhausen’s menagerie of stop-motion creatures, from cyclopses to krakens. “They had character, they had performance and they had purpose,” says Dennis Muren, who parlayed a childhood spent watching Harryhausen’s films into a groundbreaking career as a Star Wars F/X legend. “They were wondrous to look at, and the designs of the shots were dynamic. Ray’s work grabbed you emotionally, because it began with him. I’m the same way: being emotionally connected to the performance and design of a character who, simply put, looks really neat.”

Currently the Senior Visual Effects Supervisor and Creative Director at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), Muren first joined George Lucas’s pioneering visual effects studio in 1976, when it was still making and photographing spaceships in a Van Nuys warehouse. After the success of Star Wars (A New Hope), Muren followed ILM to the Bay Area as Lucas planned for a sequel. “It was the hardest film by far,” Muren says of how ESB came together behind the camera. “Everything just got bigger. The spirit of the film was still fun and adventure, but it had more romance, it had more action, the Empire was bigger and the universe was bigger than we thought on the first movie.”

Muren’s role also expanded with ESB as he took point on directing the fleet of miniatures in the film’s iconic opening on the ice planet, Hoth. With the advent of digital technology still many years away, Muren and his team brought the Rebel’s herd of tauntauns and the Empire’s squad of AT-AT walkers to life by hand. And through it all, he followed the example established by Harryhausen.

“I always think of the Cyclops from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, who comes out of his cave roaring and angry, and his hands are up because he’s ready to grab one of the sailors,” explains Muren, who later won his first Oscar for his work on the film. (He currently has nine statues, the most of any living person.) “That’s what I always strive to put in my work: that there’s a reason for that creature to be there. You’re not just giving the audience an effect: You want them to feel something from it, whether that’s ‘Oh my God, that’s amazing,’ or ‘Oh, that’s really creepy,’ or ‘Wait, that’s impossible!’”

In honor of ESB's 40th anniversary, Muren walked us through the seemingly-impossible task of making the Hoth sequence, and his own close encounter with his F/X hero.

Yahoo "Entertainment": You said that The Empire Strikes Back was the hardest Star Wars film to make. What was the reason for the degree of difficulty?

Dennis Muren: Well, The Phantom Menace may have been equally difficult, because there was a lot of real groundbreaking work on that in terms of getting all the digital stuff to work. But we had two supervisors on that. For Empire, we had just moved up from Los Angeles, and only brought about 12 people up from the 50 in L.A. and had to hire locally just to get the thing done. All of us working on it wanted to top ourselves, and George had already done that with the designs. The number of lands and battles you saw in Empire was at least five times more than you saw in Star Wars. You had an ice planet and a city in the clouds — how are you going to get that to look right?

Doing any kind of compositing over a light-color background is very, very hard. And the whole movie was full of that in addition to your normal space battles. The vision was so big, and we had a couple of years to do it, but it took us so much time to get the fire to do it and the people to do it. We all wanted what George wanted, which was also what the audience wanted: to show you that this universe is so much bigger than what we saw in Star Wars.

Yahoo "Entertainment": What was the most challenging part of the Hoth sequence specifically?

Dennis Muren: The opening tauntaun shot was one of the most difficult things, and the most interesting. The story behind that was that George had brought back this helicopter shot from Norway [where the Hoth exteriors were filmed], and it was about 200 or 300-feet off the ground with the cameras looking straight down. He didn’t know whether if that shot was going to be necessary to the movie, but at the very end, he said, “Yes, it’s necessary to have this shot. Do you think there’s a way you can add a Tauntaun to this?”

There wasn’t! There were no tracking markers on the ground that would have helped us make the stop motion camera map exactly with the moves the helicopter made, and then we could have combined that with an optical printer. But none of that stuff was there. I thought about building a big model, but I didn’t think it would work with the background. George said, “Well, just think about it.” I spent 15 minutes thinking about it, and figured it out in 15 minutes! I learned an amazing lesson from that: There’s usually an answer, there’s always some way that you can fiddle around with what you know to attempt. If I had stopped thinking at 14 minutes and 59 seconds, we wouldn’t have had that shot in the movie.

Yahoo "Entertainment": The tauntauns definitely feel very Harryhausen in their design and behavior. Did their form match what you could accomplish then with stop-motion or did the stop-motion dictate their form?

Dennis Muren: George had the idea for a galloping horse kind of thing, and I think Ralph [McQuarrie] and Joe [Johnston] worked on the design. I was involved in how we were going to create a setting that looked like it was going to be real, and wouldn’t be encumbered by any of the cameras. I don't know how many shots we had of it — maybe 12 or 15 or something like that, and they were some of the last ones we did. There were a couple that George added right at the very end of that. It was like, “We can finally take a breather after two years, but no, there’s one more shot!”

Dennis Muren (behind the camera) filming Suzanne Pasteur (a friend of Lorne Peterson's) on her horse for tauntaun movement reference. (Photo: Lucasfilm)

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Yahoo "Entertainment": I remember connecting to them very strongly as a kid — I always through they’d be fun to ride.

Dennis Muren: That comes from the design and purpose of it. It doesn’t act like an evil creature: It’s a fairly big, bulky thing and it actually looks kind of cute with a horn and steam coming out of its nose. It’s not a creature that could kidnap you or anything — it’s just a beast of burden. That’s true of all the Star Wars movies: The behavior is familiar, so the audience can relate. Even with the designs of the spaceships; I tried to show how they would bank off to fly to another planet or something, like an airplane would do in the air even though there’s not gravity in space and that would never happen. It looks really neat and you can relate to it.

Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) on a tauntaun on the planet Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back. (Photo: Lucasfilm)

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Yahoo "Entertainment": In terms of the AT-AT walkers, that’s a case where you’re bringing character to a non-living thing. There’s behind-the-scenes footage of the ILM team studying elephants for movement reference.

Dennis Muren: When we saw the designs, we thought they were kind of like big animals. We went to an animal park in Dunn, California, and put a bunch of chalk marks on the elephant and had it walk by left to right and right to left with the camera on. That gave us the weight; those things would have weighed thousands of tons, and we had to make it look like they had gravity or else they were just going to look silly — not as powerful and as evil as they're supposed to look. We also shot the elephants in slow motion to make them look even bigger, and observed traits like how far up the knee goes up and how far forward the body travels. Does the foot just lift up? Does it drop back down again? All that stuff was used as a basis so that when we went to animate, we had a body part to do that.

We also had some really good equipment to look at the frames as we were shooting them and make sure the animation was working well. Like now, there's all sorts of stop-motion photographers, and ours wasn’t done like Ray would have done it where you couldn’t tell if you made a mistake and could go back and say, “Did I move this too far?” We were able to compare and say, “Oh yeah, we did move it too far,” and then change it to move to a better place. So it's probably more of a fluid motion than you might have seen before and that was important. Any sort of chatter in the stop-motion looks like the mechanics of the walkers. They're all mechanical anyway, so there's got to be little bumps and grinds in the motors. So that adds to the feeling, you know?

Yahoo "Entertainment": Besides Hoth, what was your favorite sequence to work on?

Dennis Muren: I don’t know — they’re all so different! [Laughs] I really like the asteroid sequence; that might top Hoth a little bit. It was also really difficult, but a lot of fun to do. George wasn’t interested in the beats of the action, but the attitude. It had to have a certain clarity to see what was going on, which was difficult because the asteroids were coming in from any direction. I did a mock-up of that sequence and realized that everything had to be based on the Millennium Falcon blasting through the asteroids. We came up with the idea of having all the asteroids going in one direction, from one side of the screen to the other, and then you could show how the Falcon makes evasive maneuvers.

Yahoo "Entertainment": Did you get a chance to meet Ray Harryhausen before his death in 2013?

Dennis Muren: Oh, yes. I was probably about 14 at the time, and he used to be in the phone book as was almost everybody else in those days in L.A. I called him up, and he was living up in Malibu, so my mom drove me two hours up to his house, and I met him and his wife. They were just the nicest couple in the world. They invited me in for an hour or two, and we kept in touch. As I got older, I went back to his garage and showed him my home movies, and he showed me some of his early home movies. He was a kindred soul. He later moved to England, so I didn’t see him very often after that.

Special effects legend Ray Harryhausen working on a model for a Clash of the Titans character. (Photo: Courtesy Everett Collection)

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Yahoo "Entertainment": Did he ever visit you while you were making Star Wars or Empire?

Dennis Muren: No, but I did see him while I was working on Dragonslayer. We were at the same studio in England, and he was making Clash of the Titans. I think I brought him by to show him the dragon, and the rear-projection work. We were working on the next step beyond stop-motion, which was the combination of animation with a motion-controlled motorized camera. He didn’t entirely relate to that, and I can understand why: It could take five days if you’re lucky to get a full shot. At the end of the day, [his method] didn’t have quite the realism that ours ended up having, but he also had the energy to just get in there and grab the figure with his hand and spend the next eight hour animating it.

After Empire and things like the Tauntaun sequence especially, I realized that we needed to get away from stop motion and try and look for something else. I would say that we didn't get the tauntaun to move quite as much as we wanted to, and there were some shots that we didn’t quite finish. But George was utterly accommodating about everything, and there was a feeling of real accomplishment when it was all over. Empire just opened everything up: You can see there’s a lot more stories you can tell, and they’re still going on.