Rokko's Dad

I've sinned a bit by creating a bigger back story and family for Rokko then I would've ever intended to. I figure that when you over complicate characters you loose some of the charm of them. When you create more family and more relationships you open it up for people to ask more questions. What works for Spongebob, as an easy hypothetical, is that it generically the same thing every episode, and doesn't really need the complexity to make it a good show. What works about Older cartoons like Betty Boop, Mickey, and Bugs is that at any moment the storyline and fit around the character, rather then having a storyline for the character to fallow. Over complexety really brings down the characters flexability.

So anyway here are Rokko's father and brother. Havn't really given them names yet, in tradition of all my other background characters. If I'm lucky I won't need to use them but for the geeks who must know, this would be the story. Rokko's family history is all about basturd children. Rokko never knew his father, and his father didn't know his and a good chance all the grandfathers before then didn't know who they belonged to. Rokko's dad met his mother when coming to shore one year, and from there I don't know how or why but she was so ashamed to have Rokko that moments after giving birth she dumped the poor boy over a bridge into a river and Rokko was discovered by Lon and Rokko never learns the truth of his parents until the 2000s.

Rokko's dad never knew about the girl he had a one night stand with had a child of his, he was several miles off shore down in Mexico by the time Rokko was around. Seven years later, and many countless girls along with it, he finally got tracked down by a Brazillian woman who had birthed his newest son. He could've easily dumped the child over board and the stress would be over, but with anger from not knowing his own parents (and this woman thinking she could just abondon her duties as a mother onto him) desided that he could raise this child to his likeing, and end the family line of basturds. Stranegly enough though, while Rokko grew up with spite for men/fathers, his brother grew up with a spite for women/mothers. Rokko was dumped into an orphanage and confused the whole experiance as to being apart of one large family where mother and father were so horrible they never had time for thier kids. He felt bad for his non-exsistant mother because she kept having child after child and leaving it for the older children to babysit them. He left the orphanage because he knew he'd end up like the older boys there, drugies, crooks, and in jail.

Rok's brother on the other hand, was upset that his mother never loved him. His father didn't suger coat anything for him, so alot of the harsh realities of life was tossed in his life, but in a more spoiledand sheltered method then what Rokko had to experiance on his own. Rokko lived the harsh realities of life, while his brother was safe on a boat listening to the ramblings of an old seaman who really didn't need a child anymore then the boys mother. I do have a good feeling that the boy never really had a possitive experiance with women to like them or treat them with respect. I did not intend him to be gay though, but it just seems like a possibility once he finds a girl he gets pregnant and forced to marry her, that he'd be looking for men to fool around with on the side.

The three of them meet up when Rokko finaly finds out the truth, which is hard to explain at the moment, because Lon is supposed to be dead in 2001. Rokko never gets a chance to reunite with him and understand why Lon gave his kids to Warner Brothers, or why Rokko was torrtured so horribly most of his life. With Lon's death Rokko finds himself in a halfway re-run state where nothing really important in his life happens that seem much different anymore then, but he's consious enough to see that his past demands some serious answering to. I'm not sure how or when he finds Lon's old sketch books and notes from the asylum but he discovers his real father and his birth story.

From there Rokko finds his dad's boat, and desides to join his fishing team rather then dropping the "you're my father" bomb right away. They stay in a LA harbor for a while until one day Rokko wakes up in a huge fog, and finds out they're in the middle of the Pasific Ocean and been traveling for Japan for some time now. Stuck with these two enimes for lord knows how many months Rokko comes to terms with his father's family side and finds the experiance releaving but sibling rivery raises up before Rok's brother figures out that they're related. While in Japan Rokko and his Bro have a night on the town, and his bro dares Rokko to a drinking match. 10 shots on Rokko and 3 for the bro, Rokko is still sober enough to keep his cool but soon after his brother stats explaining what women are good for (pussy and cleaning house) Rokko breaks his face in and takes him back to the boat to sail back home.

On the way home, Rokko's father explains to him the story about his brother and why he never knew about Rokko being born. Giving him some hard love he tells him that it's not hard to spot thier gentics, and if Rokko wanted to continue working for him now would be a good time to make up for lost time. Rokko only wanted to tell his father that he exsisted and had no need for his love and care anymore. Rokko needed to take care of his own family and after 3 more months traveling through the fog, ended back home to find out that his father and brother had died back in 1930 when they got lost in a fog and never returned. Even if Rokko wanted to see his father again, he couldn't but some stories need to be told just once. Closure is more important then just knowing the truth.

More new characters

Here is another Young and Old comparison set drawings of some more consistant characters. Ginger of corse is in here. Not much changes with her except having children brought her body down to a confortable sag. What woman doesn't loose her pep through life, even the happiest of ones?

Now the two other characters are best excamples of background characters that I've given a little more depth. Sadly these two don't have names yet either. I have quite a few characters that I havn't felt like giving names yet but usually most people know who I'm talking about (it's sad when I have a name of a character and people don't know who I'm talking about). For now I'll called them Joe and FiFi

Joe is like a two tone Fry (furturama), just a normal guy hanging around a bunch of freaks. He would see Rokko and his friends running around town causing trouble and just wanted to be apart of it. When his friends and family ask why he hangs around such crazy people he just says "They make me laugh!" Occassionally he get involved with Rokko schemes but ends up getting in trouble in the end. When WW1 started, Joe was the only one of the boys to get drafted into the war. Tooki and Gilbur were 4F'd because of deformities, unlike Rokko they wanted to go off to fight. Rokko and Crikkit did everything they could to get out of being drafted and to a point of fakeing thier deaths. When Rokko heard that Joe was drafted he gathered all the guys together to go out to Europe to save Joe from the germans. They hired a captain to take them to Europe but they were attacked by a Krakken along the way. With great luck Rokko servived but got separated from his friends but desided to go look for Joe on his own. With Crazy luck Rokko stubbled into a battlefeild were Joe was stationed at...Right in the middle of a air raid. So here comes Rokko stumbbling into the trenches and dragging Joe to "Safety". After many arugements about patriotic duty and "saving ones own ass", Joe left with Rokko over the French contry side to find Rokko's missing friends. It wasn't long before the army found Joe and Rokko and court marshell'd them both. They were tacken to an army base where they ran into all of Rokko's lost friends, who had been picked up by the French Navy and tacken to the same base. There, they were all put up as entertainment, and met up with FiFi.

FiFi doesn't talk much, she laughs and yells but mostly she doesn't talk (probally because she doesn't speak english well). Originally I was going to have Rokko met Ginger while in Europe but I desised that this would be a better chance to introduce FiFi. While Joe is 18 FiFi is about 16-17 when they 1st met her. She did like Rokko alot at the time and when Ginger came into the picture she was jelious but she got along better with Joe. Even when Rokko was womanizing he never once tried to go after FiFi, she would hit him and drop heavey things on him while giggling. He didn't get the idea that she liked him at all. After a while her desire for him died and she fell in love with Joe. The two of them are the oldest looking of all of Rokko's friends. Not Sure why they aged more then the others over the years but it's always nice to have old looking characters.

More Back up Characters.

Sigh, been a while with a new post, but everytime I've wanted to post something new I've been at someone elses computer, where I wasn't able to upload new images. I'm gonna talk about as many cahracters as I see important on these pages.

ON this page you can see the 1st drawings of my Batman and his boy XD. I just noticed I gave him a pocket protector which I didn't draw on any of the other drawings. The big robot is one failed attempt to create a body design for Rokko's Mob boss that I've been talking about. I turned it into a robot because I wanted a robot detecitve, or something. The idea of having a robot as a friend/ally for Rokko was a neat idea but I didn't want one as tall as him, so I made the little one at top. I'm still not sure if I like that design.
I love Joe's Apartment, so I started just doodling some roach designs, that would be equils to Crikkit's friends and random background roaches. The human on this page was another attempt at drawing the mob boss (I swear I tried to draw this villan many times before I came up with something I like and I still don't think it's the best design...you'll see it later). I was looking for a the scaryness of Micheal Corleone, seeing how he started wanting to be out of the 'family business' but soon became scary and dangerous. Now I'm thinking that guy would make an interesting human Crikkit.

Here's some characters that we've mostly seen already. Here is the pencil version of that group drinking picture that I finished a couple of days ago. You can see how the lineart gets cleaned up. The top picture of Rokko and the Rabbit is an intersting one but I love the expressions and senerio. Rokko is aware that he is an old cartoon and his creator has died. Old cartoons tend to get in a rut and forget why they do the things they do because they don't have anybody reinventing thierpersonalities and meaning. Normally Rokko and Rabbit would be at each other throats Kill Bill style, but that's not always the caise. One night Rokko explains this phenomion to Ginger and says that the other night while picking up tampons and a pregnacy tester at 1 AM he ran into him picking up some condoms himself (coming from a party with girls in his car). While the hatred was still there, the effort was not. It was out of context, like if they broke out into fists of furry then, what was the point, nobody was watching. It's an odd feeling to be a cartoon, because you never know what's being filmed and what's just a normal, butt scratching type of day.

Rokko is also swipping Gilbur's penis hat. I still havn't drawn the expression he has when Rokko calls it that but I just don't draw the character enough.

Now Rokko's life during the 50's-90s (while he was away from Ginger) was another one of those just living moments. It was the most depressing time of his life but to him he was equally sharing the pain that his creator was having while he was locked away in a mental asylem (Lon Borax was his creator, for those of you who didn't know). Rokko learned during that time that he couldn't die. Every method used to try to kill himself just failed and he soon just wanted to go away. He did remarry a couple of times but non of those women were right for him. The dog lady (not the flapper girl) was one of those women, but he didn't want to marry her, she just said you're my husban now and that was it. FaFa was a minor background character in a MGM cartoon, just as a young puppy back then, but then her design was moved to advertise Dog Food for a small chain and her work consisted of quick commercial shots and packaging labels. Because of that small money though she was able to become a rich lady who bought husbans for her amusement. Rokko was her husban in californina, who he shared a house with another one of her husbands who couldn't speak english. Rokko himself didn't care enough to object to her paligamist fantasies, but he never got sexual with her because of his feelings for Ginger. FaFa didn't care weather he really liked her or not, but the idea of having a sexy arm candy like him was enough, and she felt sorry for his story. She only divroced him because her official husban was starting to find out about these other men she collected. She gave tearful kisses good bye and said he could come back to her when ever he needed.

Other characters on this page include the flapper girl, who is one of Rokko's 1910 friends who I drew an older version for. I'm still working on her personality but she never really had a big thing for Rokko, just a friend. She does fall in love with the human character I have as one of Rokko's friends. The guy in the white suit at the bottom is another character Rokko met during the 70's. He's like a chipmunk reject, because he's kinda like Alvin and the Chipmunks semi human character designs, but not human or animal enough. He's codeanmed QueBall because he's got an 8 ball for an eye and his eye was pushed to the back of his head. The other eye he went blind in but he can see perfectly out the eye in the back of his head. He's got massive kung-fu skills a great underground resorce for Rokko. A couple of the characters on this page are jsut background characters. The cops are still work in progress but they are old versions of two cops that were constanly after Rokko.

That's it for now. Any other questions?

Transcreation

This is quite an interesting concept that I've been working on for quite a while but I didn't think there was a perfect term to discribe it.

This article from the Wall Street Journal brings up a great point in character designing. Cartoon CharactersGet Big MakeoverFor Overseas Fans Read this before you read the rest of my article please. (Note; If this article get deleted by Wall Street without my knowing, I really can't fix it for you, so hopefully it'll last a long while.)


Now some of these "Transcreations" we've known about for a while (I have anyway), Sesame Street has been using different characters in thier forien shows for many years, Brazilian SS having more sexual untertones (as paroded by Simpsons) and an African version introducing an HIV positive character (I don't know if he's a puppet or a real kid though.) Minnie's Hello Kitty make over is something I'm surprised Disney hasn't done already, being ones of little creativity. In an anime store in my mall, the Mickey and Minnie stuff they sell is the Two Toned versions of them. Not saying that they don't make the 1950s Mickey in japan but you can't hardly find any Mickey and Minnie stuff at the Disney store on the opposite side of the mall, let alone the 1930s versions. And well all know asians love to rape little girls (sarcasim), so the PPG makeover is not surprising, but one thing that confused me was that didn't they show the original PPG in japan? Otherwise they wouldn't have gotten the idea to make an anime version at all.
I'd say the Indians seem to fuck up our characters the most. With Ballywood being able to produce movies faster then the porn industry, there is a lack of quality control in thier market. One of the reasons the US edits forien cartoons is because their subject matter is to far fetched and doesn't make since if not either stated in an exposistion or remade with a theme americans are familiar with. The Ring is a good excample of the US remaking an Asian movie. Must've been that american's wouldn't understand that being scared to death is a logical and scarier method of dieing, so they rewrote the scene so the girl looks more digital then an acaul person coming out of the screen, and then having it so the guys face has been melted off. The Indians must rewrite origin stories or change the characters so that it matches the relgious and social trends of teh culture and not seem to bizzare (Why would a spider bite cause Peter Parker to turn into a spider, all animales are sacred in hinduism right?)Well reglardless of what the US does here's some Indian mackoffs.


India needs quality control.

Just in time for Halloween

Here's a great Mickey Mouse transcreation. Not Indian but still really messed up.

This is not something that's new to our own culture. If there is anybody guilty of distroying cartoons from a different country, it's the US. Back in the 90s (and to this day) anime's are torn apart limb from limb and all traces of it's origin's were stripped away. I remember watching Sailor Moon and being currious as to why they called those white triangle things (riceballs) Dohnuts. Those arn't dohnuts, and is this cartoon supposed to be in Japan or the US? All the words are in english and the characters clearly look american, but they talk about Tokyo and other sorts of weird japaness culture traits added in there.
Pokemon was a huge butcher by having all the japaness pokemon names stripped and given english versions. This was an improovement because there are some really awkward pokemon that would tack forever to pronouce right for a little 6 year old. I still don't know how to say Lugia right, but some names they should've kept (Like Stunky was Skunkapu, that sounds cuter). The anime was butchered as well, having the japaness characters stripped from the backgrounds, the japaness theme songs rewriten, and japaness culture showdowed and unexplained. There were a couple of episodes deleted because of cencorship issues (One with James having double D size boobs, and a Trigger happy warden), but episodes that were about japaness holidays like Kid's Day and Women's Day were at risk of being deleted because they were not US holidays. IMO they should be US holiday's, we have secritary's day, why not Kid's day?
Sonic the Hedghog might be the most fucked up and saddest story out there (that I can express here). A japaness character, baised off of Mikey Mouse, comes to the US and given two separate and completely different cartoons that don't relate to the games original storyline. The Game's storyline had been edited to fit an american audiance as well, making Sonic from another planet and forgetting details like where he was born and making up that his powers come from his shoes. Well we know how messed up the fandom has gotten because of this, I don't think I need t go into it.

Next time I write a blog I'll go into into this a little more, and talk about how americans 'Transcreate' their own shows with time.