Aardwolf

The porch gourds are so happy with all the rain we’ve had recently.

Ida Pulis Lathorp (1859-1937) "Still Life with Pumpkins and Onions"

Autumn in Colorado

Halloween's over, but I can still reblog fall stuff.

Rattober #15: Trainee Rat

Another pleasant surprise from the garden today. Don't know how I didn't notice this fella.

The unnamed creature from the unnamed dimension was and still is my favorite monster of the week in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.  These 10 screen captures (honed down from the 27 I took) don’t do it justice.  It possesses an unnerving alien quality that’s missing from the other great monsters in the Ninja Turtles cartoons, comics, and action figures of the twentieth century.  This was the show that brought bizarre creatures, creative concepts, and deliberate absurdity to the button-down world of children’s programming.  The Real Ghostbusters was the only cartoon that even came close (more on that later).  But even against this backdrop of unabashed weirdness, the beast from the climax of “Splinter No More” stands out.  We never learn where it came from, what its motives were, or what exactly it even was.  That makes it all the more interesting.  An alien dictator reduced to a brain inside a robot is strange, but comprehensible.  A totally unknown monster is more frightening and compelling.

The rest of the episode is quite normal, and not exactly stellar.  The main plot about Splinter demutating and resuming his human life goes by quickly and without feeling (even by Eighties cartoon standards).  Predictably, the antimutagen wears off in the end.  The subplot about Krang’s invention spurring the leaderless Turtles to fight each other fares better, and gives April a more active role than usual, but it’s still nothing to write home about.  The episode’s sweet spot comes about from a third plot, where Shredder is trying to open a portal to Dimension X using magic instead of technology.  With a stolen arcane book and an underground sanctum built by a cult in the Twenties (a possible nod to Lovecraft), he performs the ritual to open the portal.  Krang’s warning not to deviate from the occult procedure in the slightest way is the only hint we’re given of what will transpire.  Splinter sneaks up and attacks Shredder during the ritual, cutting off the incantation one word early.  A standard good guys versus bad guys scene ensues.  In the absence of a dimension name, the supernatural voice recognition software apparently dialed up a random dimension.  But this goes unremarked upon, because everyone seems to forget about the portal during the fight.  A viewer could easily believe that the writers had forgotten too, and that it wouldn’t figure into the plot anymore.  But they would have been wonderfully led astray.

A few shots in, while Shredder is ranting, we see a tentacle descending in the background.  In the next shot, the most otherworldly guest star to ever grace Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is revealed in all its glory.  Eerie electric organ music starts up to set the tone.  The Turtles, famous for showing mercy to sentient humanoids, just plain try to hack the thing apart.  You would too; I don’t care how honorable or Eastern you are.  The attacks are no good, because it regenerates immediately.  The intrepid ninjas do manage to get everybody free from its tentacles, but the portal has expired, and with it the plan to herd the eldritch monstrosity back through into its home dimension.  Our heroes have no choice but to collapse the entire chamber and bury the abomination in rubble.

The clear implication that the creature died in the cave-in failed to register with me as a child.  I assumed it was slowly digging its way out even as Splinter and the Turtles shared a warm moment in the lair.  As much as I longed for a second appearance by the nameless horror, any sequel would surely have been an anticlimax.  You just can’t top a scene where a tentacle monster comes out of a misdialed interdimensional portal and is gone before the audience knows its story.

As a footnote, I’ll record that I was struck recently by the similarity between this scene and one in “Loathe Thy Neighbor,” an episode of the Ghostbusters cartoon that I don’t think I ever saw as a kid.  Like in “Splinter No More,” an extradimensional tentacle monster appears out of left field to provide an unexpectedly awesome climax to an otherwise run-of-the-mill episode.  As it turns out, both episodes were by the same writer.  Nice work, Michael Reaves.  Your tentacle monster incursion was a tale worth telling twice.

I was definitely subliminally influenced by that thing when I made this pumpkin

Nice gourd!

And wow, I used to make some long-winded posts. I guess I thought Tumblr was supposed to be like Blogspot or Wordpress.

Photography by Annie Spratt

Scene from a walk.

Little ghosts.

Had to share this @WeHeartIt

1385: Inktober Day 2

#hartmanmonstroween 25 Hallows Eve #dailyweirdo #dailymonster #creaturedesign #sentai #supersentai #halloween #uotesmonstober https://www.instagram.com/p/CVoCSAclYrx/?utm_medium=tumblr

More pumpkin cheesecake on my dash.

29 - patch

A return to tradition.

I guess pumpkin cheesecake is a tradition.