Indie Squid Kid

As Dr. M at Deep-Sea News deftly points out…

The Giant Squid (Architeuthis dux) and the Humboldt Squid (Dosidicus gigas) are two very different animals. So, no matter what many in the media are reporting, thousands of Giant Squids did not wash ashore after an earthquake, and Giant Squid are not invading the waters off Southern California.

Squid Fail indeed.

leviathans 9, originally uploaded by Ryan Rubino.

Behold the glory that is Lego Sperm Whale vs Lego Giant Squid! I thought about saving this for Flickr Friday, but I just couldn’t wait!

For more photos of these beautiful brick behemoths, visit Ryan’s Flickr set.

Hot on the heels of Movie Week, I find out that Disney is working on a prequel to their classic 1954 adaptation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (covered previously here and here). Due to be released in 2011, and titled Captain Nemo: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, McG (Terminator: Salvation, Charlie’s Angels) is attached to direct. And I am afraid.

Supposedly, the prequel will tell the story of how Captain Nemo goes from being an Indian prince to the brooding science pirate we all know and love. Or, in McG’s words “Where you look at the original picture [Nemo] just enters and he’s already pissed off and underwater and what we want to do is show how he got there.” McG has also stated that he wants Will Smith to play Captain Nemo.

Wait…Seriously?!

Don’t get me wrong, I like Will Smith just fine, but why go through all the trouble of adhering to the character’s original backstory (in The Mysterious Island, Jules Verne reveals that Nemo was Prince Dakkar, son of the Raja of Bundelkhand) but not cast an Indian actor? I’m having troubling visions of a mutant mashup of the abysmal League of Extraordinary Gentleman movie and Wild Wild West.

The Hollywood Reporter reported (duh!) yesterday that the script for Captain Nemo is undergoing a major rewrite, but only time will tell if this is a good thing or not. (For the record, I’m getting all this second-hand from Meredith Woerner over at io9, THE blog for science fiction news.) I guess the odds are pretty good that there will be some kind of cephalopodian element to this movie, and, if so, I fear the odds are even better that it will end up in the Indie Squid Kid Movie Hall of Shame.

So, to cheer myself up, I’ll end with some production images from Disney’s original 20,000 Leagues movie. All of these and more can be found at Pat Regan’s wonderful www.volcaniasubmarine.com.

James Mason as Captain Nemo

Production sketch of the squid fight.

Nemo vs the giant squid!

Still from the discarded "sunset" squid fight sequence.

We live in awesome times—particularly if you are a T-shirt enthusiast. T-shirt design has long been an art form, but the Internet has revolutionized the craft. There are currently dozens of websites where one can get amazing/hip/ironic/hilarious shirts, and so, logically, T-shirts that feature cephalopods abound. I’m sure it will come as no surprise that I own quite a few of them, but, due to my sedentary lifestyle and a job that requires I be parked in front of computer all day, they stopped being flattering on me right about the time that I started this blog. Until now! I think it must have something to do with having a kid—both because taking care of a baby is a form of exercise, and because we have started being more cognizant of our weekly food budget.

Anyway, starting today, I am going to feature a different cephalopod-themed T-shirt every Tuesday until both my personal collection and the vast inventory of the Internet have been fully cataloged.

Kicking things off, we have “The squid and the whale” by graphic designer Dan McCarthy. In addition to this and other cool shirts, Dan also makes some kick-ass prints and posters!

The U-Haul Venture Across America and Canada SuperGrpahics® campaign uses vibrantly colored images to celebrate mysterious places, bizarre facts, and interesting creatures from all over North America. There is a SuperGraphic for each American state and Canadian province, and, as you can see, the one for Newfoundland features our old friend Architeuthis dux. I’ve spotted this on the highway several times, but I never got a good look at it. In fact, my only issue with U-Haul’s cool truck graphics is that, for me at least, they constitute a bit of a driving hazard. I just want to stare at them!

I know it’s too small to read in the above image, so here is the the accompanying text:

Did you know…

The first recorded encounter with the world’s largest invertebrate took place off the coast of Newfoundland. What secrets of the deep were revealed with the discovery of the giant squid? Learn more about the giant squid at…www.uhaul.com

The U-Haul website actually has quite a bit of information about the giant squid, and this graphic is available for download both as desktop wallpaper and, best of all, as a coloring book PDF!

I didn’t originally anticipate needing to spend two posts discussing Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, but it turns out I have more to say! In fact, without the two things covered here, Indie Squid Kid probably wouldn’t exist!

Walt Disney Presents the Story of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Disneyland Records, 1963)

I wouldn’t say that this record is single-handedly responsible for my life-long squid obsession, but it definitely made quite an impression on my young mind. Here we see the giant squid, hate radiating from its enormous (and oddly human) red eye, as it is about to try to crush the oncoming Nautilus in it’s mighty tentacles. The fact that things didn’t happen quite this way in the movie is completely besides the point—this cover is AWESOME.

The record is an abridged version of the movie, and it uses a different (and uncredited) voice cast. Ned Land is the narrator (instead of Arronax), and his signature sea shanty, “Whale of a Tale,” has at least one different verse than the original film. Wikipedia tells me that this record was produced in 1963 to coincide with the first theatrical re-release of the movie. Herein lies a bit of a mystery. My copy of the record is also dated 1963, but I know I got it sometime in the early 80s. Were these LPs kept in print with the original copyright date, or did my parents pick it up second-hand? (It’s in pretty good shape for a 46 year old record.)

Story records like this were the DVDs of their day. I probably only saw 20,000 Leagues a few times on TV over the years (I doubt I ever saw it in the movie theater, and my family didn’t own a VCR until the late 80s), but I knew the story backwards and forwards because of this record.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: Submarine Voyage

I also wanted to mention the long gone (and sorely missed) 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea submarine ride from Disney World Magic Kingdom. The ride was open from 1971 to 1994 as part of Fantasyland. It was a near-exact copy of Disneyland’s Submarine Voyage ride, except the passenger vehicles were modeled to look like the Nautilus. The ride narration was rerecorded with a Captain Nemo sound-alike, and the script was tweaked to reference events from the film. Both rides culminate with a simulated giant squid attack.

I grew up in California, and visited Disneyland a few times in the late 70s and early 80s. It should be no surprise that the Submarine Voyage was my favorite ride (the Jungle Cruise was a close second). Sadly, I never got a chance to ride the Magic Kingdom’s 20,000 Leagues ride.

Incidentally, the original Submarine Voyage ride (which was open from 1959-1998), was reborn in 2007 as the Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage. There is no longer a squid attack sequence, and that is a damn shame.

Welcome to Movie Week! Every day this week, I will profile various cephalopods that have appeared in film—both famous and obscure.

I can’t think of a better place to start than with the greatest movie cephalopod of all time—the giant squid from Disney’s landmark 1954 adaptation of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

The squid appears during a climactic sequence about three-quarters of the way through the movie (1:35:42–about 95 minutes in). The Nautilus has just been ambushed by an American warship, and the damaged submarine has sunk to a depth of 5,000 feet, which, according to Captain Nemo (played by James Mason), is “deeper now than Man has ever been before.” Naturally, this seems to royally piss off a passing Architeuthis. Nemo tries to repel the squid using the Nautilus’s electrified hull (a technique which he had just successfully used to defend the sub from a tribe of vicious cannibals), but to no avail. Bringing his vessel to the surface, Nemo leads his crew into armed combat with the squid that now has the Nautilus firmly in its embrace, warning them that the giant squid is “the most tenacious of all sea beasts.” Nemo soon finds himself in the grip of a massive tentacle, his doom assured. Fortunately, Ned Land (played by Kirk Douglas) breaks out of the brig just in time to save Nemo with an expertly thrown harpoon—hitting the squid directly between the eyes (which Nemo mentioned earlier was the beast’s “only vital spot”).

The special effects in this sequence hold up surprisingly well after 55 years. The model used in the underwater scenes is quite realistic (the strange edits in the above video notwithstanding), even if some of the details are off. It even releases a cloud of ink when Nemo tries to electrocute it, which is a nice touch. Sure, the battle with the squid on the surface ratchets up the cheese factor a bit, with big, rubbery arms flailing all over the place, but in this blogger’s humble opinion, the Disney Architeuthis is more convincing overall than some recent attempts I could mention.

Disney’s version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea remains the definitive interpretation of the Jules Verne classic. While steampunk traces its modern literary genesis back to the late 1980s/early 1990s, I think it could be easily argued that the popular sub-genre owes much of it’s visual aesthetic to the riveted opulence of Harper Goff’s Nautilus.

Let’s face it, this IS what the Nautilus looks like. Period.

©Brandon Bird

For the final post of Art Week, here is the Most Awesome Thing Ever.

Sadly, I don’t own this, but DAMN I wish I did! Two different sizes of this print are for sale over at www.brandonbird.com.

And it just so happens my birthday is coming up this month.

I’m just saying…

From the Santa Cruz Sentinel via BoingBoing

Remains of a rare giant squid turned up off the coast of Santa Cruz, California yesterday. According to researchers from the Pelagic Shark Research Foundation, this specimen was probably 25 feet long and weighed hundreds of pounds when alive. Only one giant squid has ever been caught on video alive.

From the Santa Cruz Sentinel:

A flock of gulls feeding on the carcass alerted the crew to the remains. Their first thought, said crew members, was that the animal was a seal but after motoring closer to it they recognized the chewed-up squid…

(Giant squid expert and Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History curator Eric) Hochberg said there’s likely several squid along the California coast, but because the animal swims at depths of thousands of feet, it’s almost never seen and difficult to study…

“The animal is just so big and so rare … it’s very easy for people to get a little nervous about what it is, and the stories go from there,” Hochberg said.