Dear Octonauts, I noticed what you did in the “Artifical Reef” episode, giving the sharks all James Mason voices. Thanks for keeping it interesting for the parents, and the older ones at that.
James Mason Shark
Tag: octonauts
Octonauts FTW
Punkin has really taken to The Octonauts cartoon. These things come and go in waves (no pun intended) but this one seems to be sticking. We had Octonauts stuff at her birthday party and she spent her birthday money mostly on various Gup vehicles.
What I really like about the show is that every single episode is doing stealth teaching. There is always at least one animal fact or aquatic bit in each cartoon. The other day she used the words “kelp” and “krill.” When I asked her, she was able to correctly define what each was. I would put this as the best cartoon she watches for that reason. Add on that I enjoy it as an homage to all forms of stiff-upper-lip British military fiction (for me, that includes Pertwee era Dr. Who). This show is educational to kids, enjoyable by parents. That’s a win on multiple fronts for me. Now we need to hunt up some of the original books that the show was based on.
Pretending To Be An Artist
A few weeks ago, we made the last minute decision to make Punkin a birthday card with some of her current favorite characters. I’m not an artist, but I know enough about comic books to understand the process and try to emulate it.
I tried to go through the standard cycle as a layman understands it. First I did a quick thumbnail on printer paper to make sure I understood the basic composition of the thing, and more importantly how I understood the sizes of the figures relative to each other.
After that, I took a folded piece of card stock and pencilled in the figures. When I felt good about that, I inked them. After that, I erased a little of my lines and passed it off to the colorist and letterer (which was mommy.) The final product looked pretty decent, if we do say so ourselves. It was a lot of work and made for a later night than anticipated but it was probably easier than trying find a card with the right set of characters. Considering the front is a Paw Patrol character and the inside is a mix of Octonauts and Mickey Mouse, that was probably impossible.
The Things I Know
There is so much pop culture knowledge from the last 5-15 years that just eludes me now. I have officially hit that age where I respond to most issues of recent pop culture with the middle-aged guy “Whaaa?”
One exception is that I am – if not against my will without really trying – learning a lot about which resident of Pixie Hollow is which, what color uniform each member of the Paw Patrol wears, which Octonaut is which, Doc McStuffins and Sofia the First and Chuggington. The list goes on. And on.
A second exception occurred today in the gym. Although I have never in my life watched an episode of General Hospital, I glanced up at one of the televisions and thought “Is that Wally Kurth in bed with Nancy Lee Grahn? When did that sort of thing start happening?”
I know the dumbest shit.
PS – I got a weird and inexplicable thrill from adding the WordPress tag for “wally kurth” to this post. Is there a lot of kurth in the metadata of the blogosphere?