When Rutentuten calls for aid, the undead spirits of comics long gone rise from the morgue file, and their parched carcasses hunger for the paper of the running strip.
So this is based on the other really impressive visual effect of Stephen Sommers’ 1999 ‘Mummy’, the scene were Imhotep blows some dust (from a canopic jar) on a wall with a mural, and CG- mummies start to break out of that wall and selected other spots of real estate. Of course, in the feature commentary, Sommers just remarked that this scene taught him a valuable lesson: never put CG- mummies before a dark backdrop, because it obscures the cool effect of being able to see through the holes in the mummies. Now that’s what I call a lesson with a pretty limited field of application. Well, I guess filming that movie just wasn’t a profound spiritual experience for him.
Stock footage is another important b-movie tradition, it means just taking snippets from older productions or other sources, and cleverly editing them into the movie to save on production costs.
Cleverly editing might work like this:
Closeup of two grim-looking pygmies, with generic African village backdrop.
Cut.
Tarzan yelling, with nighttime jungle backdrop.
Cut.
Stock footage: Herd of elephants running across the Savannah at daytime, accelerated. Sound-FX: car horns.
Cut.
Closeup of two terrified looking pygmies, with generic African village backdrop.
I spared no expense in the creation of the first panel, and searched through my files for bits of mummies from older, unpublished projects, to provide you with true stock footage authenticity. Turns out I had visited the issues of undead Egyptians at least twice before. The mummies on the left of the panel are, as far as I can remember, from a short comic dealing with the reawakening of Alexander the Great. The mummy on the right is from a single page I found, depicting that mummy entering a thatched hut on a tropical beach and kissing some guy sleeping there. That page is definitely by me, and can’t be older than a few years, but I have no recollection as to what it originally belonged to. Or what’s it supposed to mean. Heck, I have not the slightest idea in which context it should have even cast a shadow of a remote hunch of a vague allusion to making any sense to me at all.
A beach mummy in love? My mind is weird. O_o >_< O_o