Sunday, February 07, 2010

The 80's: Popcorn N' Kandy

Remember, tuck and rolling-up your pants? Taping songs off the radio with your cassette recorder? Richard Blade on K-ROQ? Patrick Nagel artwork? Staying up late to watch the premiere of Michael Jackson's 'Thriller' on Friday Night Videos? 'The Cosby Show' and 'Family Ties' on Thursday Night. "Be There!", "Where's The Beef?", "I'll Be Back."...big hair, turned up collars, 'Members Only' jackets...

...gotta love the 80's....

Well, my friends Bert Klein and John Iskander wrote a script for a musical comedy about teen angst set in the 80's. They were looking for someone to do some artwork to go with their pitch packet so a did a few designs.

(So I don't compromise their script idea) The basic story is a love triangle between these three characters. Our protagonist "Popcorn" (which is a nickname given to him because he works the refreshment stand at the mini-golf/arcade) is in love with this girl named Kandy (probably short for Candice). Together, they're "Popcorn n' Kandy" (cute, eh?). Well, there's one person who stands in their way and that's Darwin Lee, the preppy cool kid at school. Granted, it resembles the movie 'Valley Girl" but trust me, the story has an originality and charm of its own!

I like the story because being a teenager that grew up in the 80's, I can relate to the main character.



These are alternate designs for the character Kandy:



Popcorn had a sidekick which was like his "Jiminy Cricket". It was a little boy who idolized "Mr. T" (from the 80's t.v series 'The A-Team').

[NOT PICTURED]


One thing I do is I listen to music of the era or genre that I'm designing for. In this case I was listening to a song called 'Cool Places' by Sparks. When I would listen to see song, I saw a title sequence. At the time, I was just starting to use Flash to do animatic storyboards for Renegade Animation Studio on the 'Hi-Hi-Puffy-Ami-Yumi' show for Cartoon Network. This would have been about the year 2005.

With the title sequence, I wanted to do a "flashback" theme for the audience who experienced the 80's to get thrown right back into it and for the younger audience who hadn't experienced the 80's a "crash-course" in what was popular. I threw in some names as place holders and basically came up with this:





MORE TO COME....


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2 comments:

Mr. Macabre said...

You've captured the 'essence' of the '80's perfectly! This would be a movie that I would DEFINITELY see!

Eric Scales said...

Nicely done!