#enjoy the big lion boye

[lexiord-art]

First up is the main man and leader of the gang, Marcus! :]

24 years old and standing at 6'2" (188 cm), Marcus is the star player of his rugby team, a part time tutor, at the top of most of his classes, and hella charismatic to boot. He's the type of guy that if you know him, you wanna be him or, at least, try be friends with him. With the gang, he's the outgoing and driven leader type, doing his best to make sure everyone has a good time. If there's ever any danger, he's the first to jump ahead and protect everyone else alongside Grizz.

[yikesola]

Compare and Contrast: Dan and Phil Bedrooms Over the Years

i’ve been thinking for a while how to tackle this meta, trying to find a gimmick or an angle— like “baking through the ages” where i looked at dan’s posture compared to his growth spurts in baking videos bc it’s one of the few consistent examples of them standing together in frame but it all boiled down to “dan slouch😩”, or just picking pieces to compare their size difference (shoulders, hands, ass) but that felt uniquely dehumanizing if i actually committed to it. so i widened my horizons. size difference need not mean bodies alone— so let’s take a look at a decade of bedroom discourse (ummm ,, minus the discourse) 

we’re gonna start with childhood bedrooms: 

tiny, teensy, might not look so small if these weren’t tol boyes but they need space for their big ol limbs to spread out! horrible colors, the both of them. and worst yet, they know it now, but at the time? kings of interior design, they thought themselves. anyways, this is an excellent starting point for them; when comparing sizes might as well start with the smallest right? except these aren’t the smallest....... things were about to get much, much smaller.......

college dorms:

look ,, they had the least amount of say in these than in any of the other bedrooms (i guess the childhood bedrooms had little of their input but we cannot forgive or forget those paint jobs!) that being said, despite their best efforts to tack stuff onto the walls, these are dismal rooms. the smallness, the lack of light, their posture— far from their best rooms. 

of course, while dan was mostly chilling (supposedly👀) in his dorm rooms, phil was enjoying the freedom of his first manchester flat: 

it’s (again) quite small. we can see the lamp on the floor bc of no room for a bedside table, lion surveying all this domain, and the sheets in the color scheme we know and love. bare walls still :/ he’ll get there. 

here’s the thing about a first flat ,, it’s supposed to be a shoebox. phil’s working with no budget, he’s trying to tame the wild west of the internet into an actual career, he’s happy just to have a flat, never mind the size! and anyways, less to clean, right? he’s doing just fine. there’s room to grow, and he’s ready for it. he’s ready for a place with, well .... for example..... two bedrooms. he’s ready for 

the manchester apartment: 

TABINOF provided us with handy dandy floorplans for this one 🙌 thanks boys! we also learned in TABINOF that the reason phil got the larger room / en suite was because he had the larger number of subscribers at the time. that’s certainly a judicial way to decide something like that ,, and since we decided earlier this is a discourse free post i’m not gonna say anything about the en suite room usually designating master bedroom while the smaller room usually designates that it’s the guest room. not gonna say that at all. why ,, who are you?? 

now we’re working with some Space! 👏👏 more furniture in the bedroom than just the bed?? TWO bedside tables each???? who are these young professionals! i’m so impressed with them :’’) sure..... you might have to sidestep between the foot of dan’s bed and the wall. sure .....  phil’s en suite might roughly be the size of his bed. but this is what we call Progress ✌ their hamster cages might feel slightly cramped as is, but all that’s about to change babey, as the boys take on the big city in 

the london apartment:

bless TABINOF, she’s providing a crude foorplan again! they’re good-sized rooms, the entire reason this apartment won out for them, lazy introverts that they are. no en suite this time, but dan’s room is juuuust a bit bigger what with his desk/piano zone and we can see that’s because he’d surpassed phil in youtube subscribers by then (again, very judicious, fellas! what a way to make that choice that clearly matters so so much considering these are Separate Bedrooms and all) 

these rooms had all the space they needed to lean into their respective aesthetics and then some. i always think about (and wrote one of my very first phanfics about *cough* cheeky spon *cough*) dan’s disillusionment with the space, how he refered to it all as ugly and just wanted to gut it. i think despite the big big bedrooms, it’s clear the boys were feeling trapped. in the london apartment, in the branding they’d really honed in during the five years they spent there, in the inarguably of two distinct spaces— Dan’s Room and Phil’s Room, can’t possibly mix them up, they’ve got color-coded duvets after all. 

that’s why from here on out we see a shift in how the size is changing. before, there had always been an upward trajectory. both dan and phil were looking for bigger spaces with every new bedroom. and then the growth became inverted, most notable right away in 

the second london apartment:

dan doesn’t actually use his bedroom for a filming location anymore, something that seemed important to him regarding a work/life balance. we can absolutely respect that, but thankfully there were occasional liveshows from the bedroom lovingly dubbed the moon room, because of the very spacey-themed decor (something dan and dan alone enjoys, we all know. phil’s space merch? idk her.... this is a 👏discourse👏 free👏post!👏👏👏👏) the moon room is a very good size, and has an en suite. it’s such a good size in fact that we can see dan was a good enough fellow gay to offer to store some of phil’s things in there, as phil’s room in this flat is muuuuch smaller than the last few he’d had. maybe he missed the special sort of embrace that claustrophobia can bring. 

we know all too well however that dan and phil do well with change— when that change is on their terms! which leads us to.......

final forms (for now!) :

dan abandoned the moon room to embrace the actual moon, to embrace the black void of space, to ascend and live by the light of his smile and sparkly jacket :) phil found a patch of white wall which is a very convenient thing considering how many flats and offices and forever homes might have just the very same thing. the space is pretty set, and he seems to enjoy it. just enough room for trinkets (god remembered when he just tacked papers onto his uni walls?) a lava lamp and a houseplant! 

they’ve both come so far 💞

****

Meta for @phandomficfests​ Bingo Fest, prompt: Size Difference

[seeksstaronmewni]

12 WAYS THAT WALT DISNEY AND HIS EMPIRE COMPANY BECAME A PART OF MY WORLD

Happy 117th Birthday, Walt Disney! (Tweet about this here)

I grew up mostly on @cartoonnetwork, but a lot of CN Studios’ creatives became a part of Disney Television Animation (including @crackmccraigen and Paul Rudish), and Lucasfilm Ltd., including Skywalker Sound and @starwars were absorbed.

First, I began with Winnie the Pooh: The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (Masterpiece Collection VHS), The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (ABC Saturday Mornings in the 2000s, Tigger-ific Tales VHS), Pooh whistles, giant stuffed Pooh head, Pooh toys (like Tigger’s treehouse), and so on.

@disneypixar‘s Toy Story is a film whose dialogue is almost perfectly integrated into my mind. Definitely the finest of Tom Hanks, and the sound design by Gary Rydstrom (and his assistant, Tom Myers) of Skywalker Sound is equally memorable.

When a relative gave me the 1997 Masterpiece Collection of Bambi, I was introduced to one of Lucasfilm’s finest divisions, THX Ltd. (now owned by Razer). Just a blue outline, geeky jargon text reading “Digitally mastered for optimal video and audio performance”, a loud (and creepy, but eventually I found to be awesome) whirring sound, and some shiny bars reading “THX” *shine* ... I loved it but went through “THXPhobia” until Disney Channel’s final airing of their 4x3 print of Monsters, Inc. on the morning of October 13th, 2008, A.D. I somewhat recall playing the THX logo repetitively, however, listening to the Deep Note played 2 pitches higher than the original, on my VHS of Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace. Now THX Ltd. is over 35 years old!

Relative to Lucasfilm’s quality control division is Star Wars, and I grew up a lot on that... mostly merchandise, VHS tapes and DVDs in THX. I have little memory of when Genndy Tartakovsky’s Star Wars: Clone Wars came out, but I did watch Dave Filoni’s Star Wars: The Clone Wars on CN. The sound design of Return of the Jedi is some of the coolest ever done, including that of Ben Burtt and Skywalker Sound, but The Force Awakens is the ultimate Star Wars movie (my favorite, and with like 6 or 7 sound designers), and The Phantom Menace & Attack of the Clones are the ultimate in quality, featuring THX Digital Mastering, Dolby Digital Surround EX, TAP Quality Assurance Services, and THX in select theatres. Star Wars: Clone Wars, which I got on DVD in late Spring 2010 from a local Movie Gallery closing, features amazing talent by Cartoon Network Studios and Skywalker Sound... in THX!

I also grew up on Disney’s Sing-Along Songs VHS tapes, at least of The Lion King and Mulan. Very memorable Disney moments. It was foolish of me to tape over one of them in Summer 2009, but I think that I lacked record VHS tapes in the moment.

Also part of ABC’s Saturday Mornings was House of Mouse, namely the Mickey Mouse Works segments within. Warner Bros. Sound’s division, Audio Circus, did very good sound design for it.

For Christmas of 2002, we got Monsters Inc. on DVD and were opened to the amazing world of “bonus features” (that is supplemental material)... including outtakes and a sound effects only track!

For Christmas of 2009, I decided to get the platinum edition DVD of Bambi, of course in THX, and it was then that I began to understand the emotional value of the film, of life and death and of romance. It became a very big inspiration (as was revisiting All Dogs Go to Heaven on Atlanta’s CW69 in 2011, created by a former Disney creative, Don Bluth), and it felt more new to me as I remembered little of the film from the 1997 VHS... which I eventually destroyed due to THXphobia (but replaced in Summer 2013). For my sake, though, the dramatic parts, like the “Bambi eyes” scene and Bambi’s fight, were blanked out; I doubt that those would bother me then, and put the blame on the 2+ pitched Deep Note.

I was familiar with the works of Ben Burtt on Star Wars and Indiana Jones, and I enjoyed the sounds of Toy Story, Monsters Inc. and Terminator 2: Judgement Day, but January 2010 brought my revelation of appreciating sound design... of not cartoon sound but the action-y stuff (explosions, electricity, gunfire, crashes... that stuff) -- and that was specifically with another fine division of Lucasfilm Ltd., Skywalker Sound. The sound of Volcano, Titan A.E., Mars Attacks!, Forrest Gump and The Terminator (which I found was remixed from mono to 5.1 Dolby EX with sound effects by Skywalker Sound) were some titles that featured amazing sounds, by Christopher Boyes, Matthew Wood, Chris Scarabosio, Randy Thom, Gary Rydstrom, Steve Boeddeker and more. In 2011, I researched a lot more about Skywalker Sound and made lists of their lesser projects and their staff (In 2017 I began my extensive IMDb list of their 500+ staff). I recognized so many individual sounds and sound effects clusters (or combos) that I could pinpoint, and some guys on the Sound Effects Wiki are pointing some out (along with myself). Eventually, this led me to appreciate lots of sound designers, mostly those of cartoons, like Joel Valentine and Jeffrey Hutchins, who also worked on Disney shows.

Paul Rudish’s envision of Mickey Mouse is amazing and hilarious, and it brought a lot of Cartoon Network Studios creatives into Disney Television Animation. I know not why Advantage Audio (whose creatives usually seem to have a sound design style that sounds... “limiting”) worked on it as compared to Audio Circus or Hacienda Post, but Robert Poole II did expand his sound design palate for this series.

Of course, @crackmccraigen‘s finest cartoon yet, Wander Over Yonder, introduced us to a cartoon that excelled at not only humor--both slapstack and, well, “modern”--but also heart, including some very important life lessons.

A creative on Craig’s team for the aforementioned show, @daronnefcy, created one of the cutest dolls ever, Star Butterfly of Star vs. the Forces of Evil! From excelling at cartoon physics on the visual medium (that is catchlights, heart-shaped pupils, etc.) to such a great act of love at the risk--if not cost--of life, Star is in heart the perfect woman for me. The amazing talents of @cheyennecurtisart and Mercury Filmworks (of Wander Over Yonder, The Powerpuff Girls Movie and Mickey Mouse), plus Mercury’s @littledigits, @brettvaron and @brianwithanh made amazing contributions to Disney’s finest franchise yet! I wish that Joel Valentine and other sound creatives (among visual creatives) would contribute to SvTFOE, though.

These shows, cartoons, companies, studios, and assembled creatives are a part of what is arguably the empire of studios and cartoons, the studios of Walt Disney. For your inspiration and contributions, may God bless all of you for all of your days!