Tom's Mad Blog
August 12th, 2007 | Posted in Freelancing
Q: Have you ever turned down an assignment for MAD, and if so, why? A: Only once. Several years ago I was driving to Massachusetts to open my theme park operation at Six Flags New England for the first time. I received a call from MAD to do a parody of a movie called “Panic Room” starring Jodie Foster and Forrest Whitaker. Much as I would have loved to do it, I was about to spend almost two weeks setting up and working at the theme park, plus the drive home to Minnesota from Massachusetts. The deadline was too tight, so I had to turn… READ MORE
August 11th, 2007 | Posted in It's All Geek to Me!
After the endless hype and press coverage, I promised it would be some time before I wrote again about the Apple iPhone. The frenzy has died down now so I thought I’d relate my final assessment of the gadget now that I’ve used one for going on two months in the “real world”. When people see me with the phone I invariably get asked one question… does it live up to the hype? The answer is not cut and dried. In certain ways the phone exceeds the hype, in some it is good but not exceptional, and in some it is woefully inadequate. A lot… READ MORE
August 10th, 2007 | Posted in General
I’m a pretty big baseball fan. While the sport has taken it’s lumps the last decade or so, it’s still the best sport in the U.S. Pro football is full of monstrous egos and grossly overpaid showoffs that play for a whopping 60 minutes every week. Every time I see a player crawling around on the ground and barking like a dog after making a routine tackle I get sick to my stomach. The ridiculous hype and endless rehashing of that 60 minutes of play time is even worse. Pro basketball is full of thugs and criminals, and players who whine and quit playing hard… READ MORE
August 9th, 2007 | Posted in General
I’m on my way today for a very brief visit to my park operation at Six Flags New England, so little time to blog. However, here’s something I’ve been meaning to mention: The newly released Popeye DVD. I’m not a big animation afficinado, but I regcognize good stuff when I see it. The early Popeye animated shorts from Max Fleischer studios are good stuff. Warner Brothers just released the first of several volumes of Popeye cartoons on DVD: “Popeye the Sailor: 1933-1938 Vol.1“. This is something special for Popeye fans… the first 60 Fleischer shorts all remastered from the original negatives, uncut, shown in chronological… READ MORE
August 8th, 2007 | Posted in Sketch O'The Week
Sketchbook doodle of Robin Williams with a very unlikely expression. I did a quick ink job and added some values with some old gray design markers. READ MORE
August 7th, 2007 | Posted in General
Since I’m on the subject of audiobooks and iPods… One of my pet peeves with the iPod and iTunes was the way it handled imported audiobook files. I’m talking about the ones you import from your own audiobook CDs, not the downloaded ones. Audiobooks downloaded from iTunes or from Audible are recognized and treated differently than regular music files. The are automatically placed in their own section entitled “Audiobooks” in both iTunes and the iPod, and the files are “bookmarkable”. With regular songs if you pause while listening to one song and go to another, when you go back to that first song you start… READ MORE
August 6th, 2007 | Posted in General
As an avid reader who has almost no time to read, I was overjoyed to discover audiobooks were something I could listen to at certain times when working on projects in the studio. I’ve said before that I can’t listen to an audiobook I have not already read, because the necessity of concentrating on what I am working on means I have to tune in and out of what I am listening to… and with books I have already read I can do that without having to rewind because I missed something. Actually I enjoy revisiting old favorites every few years anyway, so audiobooks let… READ MORE
August 5th, 2007 | Posted in Mailbag
Q: What kind of pencil does your company use, I got a picture drawn in St. Louis, and I like the clean strokes on my caricatures? A: I get asked about not only the pencil but all our materials a lot, so here is the breakdown of everything we use to draw and paint live, airbrush caricatures at the theme parks: I use two different kinds of pencils. Both are “clutch” type leadholders, meaning that they have a claw-like end that grasps the lead. The main one is the Caran D’Ache Fixpencil 3, which is a 3mm leadholder. Most leadholders are 2mm, and the thicker… READ MORE
