Saturday, June 14, 2014

Tools for Tomorrow




INSIDE:

To the Dad who was always on the cutting edge of technology 
and prepared us with the tools we’d need for tomorrow.


Recently I began thinking about how essential my parents were in helping me to recognize quality storytelling.

During the Nineties there were a great many spectacle driven movies that I felt I needed to and threw a fit when my parents would deny them to me. Looking back at how lackluster many of these titles were, I’ve come to realize how my parents were really protecting my taste palette from being desensitized by these flash-in-the-pan flops.

As alternatives, my Dad introduced me to cerebral science fiction features like “Planet of the Apes” and “2001: A Space Odyssey”. These were things I certainly wouldn’t have willingly watched on my own and were partially responsible for forming much of my current sensibilities.

Given how my career has been molded by such moments, I wanted to celebrate my Dad’s choice in sci-fi cinema on Father’s Day and honor the heritage of my Geek patriarch with a card that made reference to something other than Star Wars.


Originally I was going to have multiple mini-illustrations from many sci-fi movies but decided to narrow my focus on just one film that played to Dad’s love of cutting edge technology.




2 comments:

  1. The card you made really captured the whole Space Odyssey feel to it. I love it! And that is so cool that your dad introduced you to that movie. I think it wasn't until high school that I saw 2001, but my parents did remember it and thought it was so funny that I was watching movies that they grew up with. Of course my dad was not really interested in sci-fi movies, he has always been more into the old westerns and other older romance movies or anything mob related. lol My uncle though was big into some sci-fi, so I was able to pick up on some of it. But this was a nice post. I saw the link on FB, but I just now got to read it and it was so good! As usual your talent is wonderful and the card is just great. I hope you are doing well!

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    Replies
    1. I may be overselling his forward thinking nature for introducing me to the film as he brought it home to show us on December 31, 2000. (How he was able to secure a rental copy that late I'll never know.) I was pretty dismissive of it then, but warmed up to it after seeing its influence and unique narrative style, though I don't think I'd rank it among my favorites just yet.

      Sci-Fi the dominant genre when I was growing what with Jurassic Park and the rerelease of Star Wars. Dad was into all kinds of things. Some of my stronger memories of titles he brought home include mystery comedies like the "Pink Panther" or "Charlie Chan" series. I didn't really get bit by the Western or Romance genre bug until college when I saw movies like "The Searchers" or "Roman Holiday".

      By the time I was in my teens, Alfred Hitchcock and the Universal Monsters were my personal brand of bread and butter. However when I was 17, I had just finished my first college course that I took for a summer, so I was feeling very grown up, and my parents were out of town for a week. First thing on the agenda of teen rebellion was to rent all the movies that I could never get the rest of the family to sign off on. I really made a time of it with titles like "The Princess Bride", the original "King Kong", Woody Allen's "The Purple Rose of Cairo" and George Pal's adaptation of "The Time Machine". Oh yeah, I lived on the edge!

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