Awesome people I know...

I usually write only cartoony stuff on this blog, but I thought I'd share this from another big part of my life -- ragtime music!

A couple guys I know brought down the house with this performance of Russian Rag a few weeks ago.



Left is Tom Brier. Right is Carl Sonny Leyland.

Wakko's Two-Note Song in ragtime

Suddenly, on a whim, I thought, "By gosh, I should do a video of Wakko's Two-Note Song in ragtime!" even though I hadn't played it in 10 years or so...



Didn't have time to rehearse it much 'cause Linda had a TV show she wanted to watch in just a few minutes.

But there it is. So there.

"You remind me of a very young Randy Rogel."

...as Slappy would say.

Back in the late 1980s, I got copies of some rather famous fan-made Doctor Who films. They were famous for their use of a woman in the leading role, and their relatively high production values for fan films.

Then in 1996 as I was showing the films to a friend, I was startled by the name Randy Rogel in the credits. Turns out, yes, it was that Randy Rogel who played the companion, Carl Evans. Randy even choreographed his own song'n'dance number in the second episode.

Yet I never had seen online copies of these films, until now. Apparently, producer Ryan K. Johnson has allowed them to be included in a fan-film archive.

So enjoy some young Randy Rogel...

The Wrath of Eukor
Visions of Utomu
Broken Doors

And an additional film which was not a Doctor Who story per se, but does have the Doctor and Carl in it: Pentagon West

Then when you're done with that, check out this video I shot as I presented my transcription of the Animaniacs theme to a friend who's a phenomenal sight-reader: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcZroW6fGcA

Sorry I'm wearing pants, but...

Phew. I'm not as young as I used be.
Anyway, enjoy me doing Wakko's America on a giant map!

At last, I can show you the NARF

It's been a long time that I've wanted to show this to folks. I finally got round to doing so, in my own "special" way. Naaaaarf.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNFZXF6qDRk



I picked up the NARF way back when I worked at CompUSA. The bottom of the form says "rev 0792" which may mean July 1992, in which case it's purely a coincidence and not evidence of Pinky & The Brain fans working for CompUSA corporate.

CompUSA failed and went bankrupt rather quickly in 2006, so one might think it was just one of Brain's plans that failed horribly.

Zany to the max!

I finally sat down and wrote out a transcription of the Animaniacs theme. I had done it way back in 1994 or 1995, by ear. For this new arrangement, still by ear, I added some harmony notes to the melody, and noticed a couple of transitional chords that had been wrong in my initial transcription.

It can be downloaded here:
http://members.cruzio.com/~keeper/temp/animsolo.pdf

And I threw together a quick video of what the arrangement sounds like (I really did throw it together; if I had had time, I would have cut out a few systems at a time so the music was more readable on the screen):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo73yhg66Ds

I've always wanted to transcribe the Freakazoid theme, but only ever got round to doing the melody. Maybe someday. Now I've got someone begging me for transcriptions of the Looney Tunes title themes.

Charismatic Cackle?

Someone called my evil laugh in the Angelina title sequence a "charismatic cackle."

I thought that was amusing.

Anyway, huzzah to Valerie for managing to get that animation featured as a "Daily Deviation" on DeviantArt. The first couple times that animation was uploaded, the folks at DeviantArt removed it, thinking it was a violation of the Terms of Use. In other words, they thought it was too good to be the work of the poster, my old friend Federica Giulietti. They thought it was a real TV show's title sequence. Well, Federica certainly dreams that one day it would be...

No digital animation or effects there. Even the backlit-shading effects were all drawn by her hand. The music is original too. I should know, because I wrote it.

Just a-postin' for postin's sake

Had a bit of difficulty getting video from my new JVC Everio camera to work on YouTube. Unfortunately, YT destroys audio when it tries to convert AC3 into its native AAC format. But if I convert to MP3 first, it's all right. Slowly but surely am beginning to post video shot at the 2009 West Coast Ragtime Festival.

We did the Red-Rose-Rag-as-Elmer-Fudd routine in the finale concert. A few people in the audience really laughed at the "ever since the merger" line. All in all, everyone thought it went over even better than it did in Sutter Creek. I saw a couple people in the audience holding their video cameras, and I know one person who posts to YouTube was one of them, so hopefully there will be video of it online before long.

I also joined the featured musicians on stage in the mass final performance, playing my kazoo. Woo!

Got some snow on Friday night. It's melted here now but the hills are still white. It was already low-30s by 6 p.m. tonight. Gonna be a cold one. I'm really hating having to work in the garage in sub-freezing temperatures these days.

We saw Planet 51 and The Fantastic Mr Fox this weekend (well, the former on Thanksgiving Day). The latter film was much more amusing, but the whole 1950s feel of the planet in the former was kind of cute. I just felt like the concept was nice but it didn't really have many laughs. I was surprised by the amount of Spanish names in the credits. Discovered at the end that the CGI was all done in Spain. Interesting. Of course, Mr Fox was stop-motion animation. Funny visual gags and lines. Amusing character movements for action scenes. Just all-around nice movie.

I was going to write something else, which I thought of as I typed the title, but it has since slipped my mind. Sigh. Memory is the second thing to go... I don't remember what the first is.

Mad Scientist Rag

My profile photo here was one that I took after waking up one morning and seeing my hair. I grabbed my camera and made a face as I took the picture. I thought that I looked somewhat like a mad professor or something.

A couple years later, or maybe just one, I realized that Mad Scientist Rag was a great title for a ragtime composition, so I wrote one. I used that photo for the cover of the tune, pasting my head into a jar of a "mad scientist's laboratory" stock artwork.

Anyway, a classically trained pianist just posted a video on YouTube of himself playing my Mad Scientist Rag.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HucjsXrWtSo

Click the link above to view it!

20 years ago

I discuss my experiences from 20 years ago. October 17, 1989.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vxuAx-eGJI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8KUza2PQvg

It is one of those milestone days for all of us who survived.