Spinning My Wheels (Patreon)

My semi-monthly report is that there's little to report...

However long my friend's recovery was expected to take, it's taking a little longer. And just yesterday there was a development that one would think might require immediate attention, but the soonest the doctor can look at it is next week. With any luck...  actually I'm tired of saying "with any luck", with how things have gone, so far.

Between worrying about my friend's health & recovery, and being unable to do anything for the pain he's experienced at certain points, I haven't been able to do much more than think about what I might work on whenever I get back home. One of those things being the Daisy game I've thought about on and off for who knows how many years...

Actually, calling it a game might be generous. It's more accurate to say I have ideas for animations, with the game engine as a means of viewing them. Getting a functioning platformer out of it would just be a bonus. And with all of the game industry layoffs, lately, I'm expecting that the rest of the year might be light on work. Plenty of time to learn some new tricks, in that case!

Something else I've been spending time on, lately, is a bit of reconstruction of Disney Afternoon pilots. Shows like DuckTales and TaleSpin originally premiered as prime-time movies, that were then split up into multiple episodes for syndication. Often, bits would be removed in the process, whether for time or to meet the stricter content standards for after-school programming.

The first (and probably easiest) of these Disney edits is the Darkwing Duck pilot, Darkly Dawns the Duck. This one of the few shows whose original movie was released on home video. I'd been hoping for a while that the laserdisc would appear on Ebay, so I'd have the next best quality level to mix with the DVD episodes. A copy of the laserdisc WAS offered a few weeks back, but someone else snapped it up before I'd even seen the listing. Lucky for me, though, someone - perhaps the same person? - digitized the disc and uploaded the full, raw recording to Archive.org! After downloading it and combining it with the DVD footage, my version is now also on the Archive!

The next pilot on my list is TaleSpin: Plunder and Lightning. This one is a bit more... interesting. There are shots that were trimmed by only a few frames, while others have several seconds cut out. Entire scenes were also removed. The framing is different in some shots, while in others, the backgrounds are wildly different... And this was just one episode out of four.

At the very least, these reconstructions are distractions that don't take an absurd amount of time to finish...