Upside-Down and Downside-Up, Mirror Magic Means Much Mixing
While Gregory Gráinneog and his wretched companions eke out a miserable existence above ground (on a scorched and ruined earth), below the surface – in caverns dark, dank & deep – a weird cabaret repeats itself. Endlessly.
A curtain prepares to raise itself…
A hideous (fur-covered) twosome – atop a grimly lit stage – are revealed…
They gaze into each other's sad & boggled eyes – communicating a weary resignation and a deep, nameless pain…
They begin to chant arcane words. "She" – garishly made up and clumsily bewigged (a demonic Norma Desmond). "He" – A proto-Shrek (brain skewered with gaily coloured pins). Hellraiser pales in comparison.
Their necks begin to extend – grotesquely. The pace and fury of their delivery begins to increase. All this before an infernal backdrop where the muddy hues of Joseph Turner meet the terrible vision-scapes of William Blake.
On and on they go. Faster and faster. Disturbinger and Disturbinger. Elastic necks at maximum extension. Screeching wails at lunatic pitch…
And then – as the audience (if there even is one) begins to lose its fragile reason and scream for them to stop – they violently withdraw their ghastly heads. Letting loose (as they do so) a long and loud sigh. An almost orgasmic sigh. A sigh that mixes brief relief with the knowledge that they – like doomed Sisyphus – must soon repeat this manic ritual.
For all time.
P.S: Animation nerds might like to learn (if they don't know it already) that the creative hand behind this (and, indeed, Gregory Gráinneog) was one Jimmy Quin.
August 4, 2009
14 responses to Upside-Down and Downside-Up, Mirror Magic Means Much Mixing
Me and my big mouth. I should not have mentioned these things.
(I think their bodies are made of attic insulation?)
Har! You get what you ask for. Even if you don’t ask for it.
Definitely attic insulation. If they rubbed against you (which they definitely want to do) a nasty rash would be the result. One that would gradually consume your entire epidermis.
Worse still, after three days of agony you would become one of them. “Join us! Join us!” they cry, faster and faster…
Jesus yeah the colour scheme is pure Blake. And I remember as a kid being pissed off that the rate of increase in speed of speech was not consistent with how high their necks stretched.
I also used to get peeved that Knight Rider and A-Team toys had Knight Rider and A-Team printed on the side of them. Even then I understood the fourth wall. For, um, toys.
YOU’RE RUINING MY CHILDHOOD!
or my rose-tinted memories of it, at least.
Allan, You wouldn’t want The Tongue-Twisters breaking through 4th or 5th walls. Not because it’d be mildly annoying. More cos they’d invade your living-room and eat your soul.
Rosie, Glad to oblige.
*grabs rose-tinted spectacles and crushes them underfoot*
I once played a Tongue Twister in a German language play based on Bosco.
I imagine that watching this is not unlike the effect gained by perusing a book of William Blake prints, watching John Carpenter’s THE THING, and then ingesting an extra large dose of LSD.
Embarr, You can’t just leave it at that. Details please. The tongue-twisters are unnerving enough in English. Gott only knows how freaksome they’d be in German (the language of eeeevilll).
Shadow, DVD of The Thing? Check. Book of Blake prints? Check. An extra large dose of LSD? Fresh out. Damn.
Experiment (to compare and contrast) fails.
When I was at school a friend of mine swore blind that if you swallowed a glass of coke in one gulp, followed by two aspirins and a bag of that ‘SpaceDust’ sherbert dip stuff, it would induce hallucinations.
I believe that he may have been lying.
Thanks for a happy memory – it’s been so long since I thought about these aliens. As soon as I saw your screenshots I heard the accompanying music in my head. Bosco himself (itself?) was a bit shrill for me, but the show was full of wonderful creatures.
Shadow, He was. It actually makes you explode.
Stan, You’re welcome. It’s been a long time since the “aliens” thought about you too. But now they’re thinking about little else.
Expect a visit. In your dreams…
Where normal folk go to the Gaeltacht, I went to German college in Mullingar. Each class had to put on a German play and the end of the course. We chose to do a full episode of Bosco and I was a Tongue Twister. I sadly can’t remember the actual tongue twister now but it was all very well received. Bosco sounds very creepy in German. We even had a man in tight, purple jeans a la Philip!
We would have won too except at the end, where we had the German and Irish flags descend on the stage, some gobdaw decided it would be a good idea to rip up the German flag. In front of an all German jury. They don’t take kindly to that kind of thing, strangely enough. We were disqualified. It still rankles.
German college? Christ almighty, your parents must have hated you. A lot.
And how could any people fail to see the mirth in a bootlegged, foreign-language production of Bosco where their national flag is desecrated? Humorless bastards…