Tag: movie frame border

Doc-whodunnit?

Hello, I’m billytheskink and you’re not. Be thankful for that, too, as I’m doing two weeks time writing blog posts about Funky Winkerbean and the endless Butter Brinkel Battle (and you’re not).

Back to the… are we watching the documentary in today’s strip? Is that what these filmstrip borders mean?

The very late Valerie Pond was about to leave the studio that employed Brinkel when she met her untimely death. Is this factoid a red herring or a critical bit of evidence in this pointlessly re-opening case?

All good questions… with answers that I do not actually care about one bit. What I do want answered, though, is how you check guests against an invite list at a masquerade ball.

The Unbearable Heaviness of Brinkel

So we began and ended the week with a fat joke. Yep, this is how Emmy winning content gets made, folks….

Along with the flagrant retconning, jaw-dropping anachronisms, and slapdash draughtsmanship, the very sequencing of this week’s strips annoyed me so effin’ much that I’ve gone and rearranged them in logical order on their own page: sonofstuckfunky.com/the-butter-brinkel-story-corrected-for-continuity.

As Monday is the first of a new month (jeeze, it’s already July?) , your genial hosts here at SoSF don’t have the so-called luxury of being able to peep next week’s strips in advance. And Sunday’s strips are never available ahead of time, so don’t bother checking in around here until midnight Eastern (hopefully you’ve got better things to do on a Saturday night…I haven’t…) And heads up: stepping to the plate on Monday is none other than billytheskink! Billy has perhaps the broadest knowledge of Act I and Act II, and the ability to resurrect vintage strips, and shows a better grasp of continuity in the Funkivers than Thomas Martin Batiuk himself, and is handy with haiku. I salute him, along with @epicusdoomus, who manages the bullpen, and every guest author, past and present, over nine years of this blog, and most of all, you, the reader.

Carousel of Dull

Other than the fact I was able to enjoy a small side-line cottage industry in collecting option checks, Funky and my other work have always managed to avoid being exploited or stained by Hollywood as if the strips had been Scotchgarded against the very possibility.

Tom Batiuk, from The Complete Funky Winkerbean Volume Six

“Butter” Brinkel had his own carousel and a pet chimpanzee?  He’s coming off less like Fatty Arbuckle and more like Michael Jackson. Brinkel’s also got the world’s largest gun collection.  Could this be foreshadowing? Does that collection include Chekhov’s gun? Does “the starlet Valerie Pond” meet her demise by gunfire?

The Brink of Stardom

timbuys
June 25, 2019 at 1:03 pm
Are we watching them make the documentary now? That is, is he depicting Cindy doing the voiceovers narration of the scenes from What’s-his-nuts career?

Well, that might explain why today’s strip seems like it should have appeared on Monday. Maybe instead of Cindy blathering away as she and Jessica sit in front of their editing station, we’re actually “seeing” some of Cindy’s documentary. Which would make this the first time we’ve been allowed to see actual footage from any of the Funkiverse’s myriad movie projects. However, nothing can explain how a silent film star “rose to stardom in the early 40’s“.

What a Troup-er

We all recall that “brighter the picture the darker the negative thingy,” don’t we? It’s what Cindy absently muttered into her drink after Cliff confirmed that he’d once worked with “‘Butter’ Brickle” (and yes, I will continue to use quotation marks around that name for as long as I feel like it). Mason immediately predicted another Emmy for his wife, the documentarienne.  Maybe he thinks it’d look great alongside his Oscar for Starbuck Jones.

So we learn a little more about Brinkel’s backstory, namely, his beginnings as part of a vaudeville “troup” [sic]. It’s a real testament to Cindy’s ability to acquire rare footage, as it’s not clear how many “troups” back in those days were capturing their stage performances on film.