Welcome to the Arizona State Fair! This time taking place in Lillytown/Fleur de Lys, Manitoba, Canada, for reasons. One of the reasons being that I couldn’t well have sent the main cast onto such a long road trip…that would inevitably have lead to severe psychological damage, possibly murder, and potentially a full-blown road movie in the middle of my fantasy movie. As for a in-universe reason…well, perhaps they just felt the climate was too hot in Arizona, so they moved the State Fair up North to limit the perspiration to manageable levels. That reason works for me, so it shall be canon. XD
Whatever the reason for its presence, our heroes avail themselves of the opportunity to visit the fair, and start out by getting aboard the Stockades & Skeletons Ride. For which I really can’t think of any plausible in-universe reason, really-really, but also can’t allow that to stop myself. I think it’s blatantly obvious why they have to get onto that particular ride, even for readers who have never seen the old 80ies “Dungeon & Dragons” cartoon, and so can’t recognize this strip as a loving recreation of that show’s opening sequence. In short, it’s starting to look since the entirety of Act 1 might not have been totally unrelated to the rest of the plot, after all, even if it just had started to look like it were.
On the way to you-can-imagine-where, the Professor and Biff take the opportunity to outline their personal positions vis-a-vis pen-and-paper roleplaying, and they’re pretty much what you’d imagine them to be. Mopey, meanwhile, has her baser instincts wrestle with her basest ones…the result will have no bearing on the plot or any other sort of practical relevance, but, for the record: if it had become relevant, Mopey would ultimately have decided to sent Snuka to rat out Biff to his teammates, so she would get to see Biff trying to stuff himself into his own locker without having to talk to his fellow jocks in person. Elegant, ain’t it?
The Stockades & Skeletons ride, as such, is nothing special – just like its inspiration in that old cartoon. But it does have the same fake dragon shooting a real flamethrower at the riders – a feature that I found a bit odd in the original, to be honest. I mean, I can see how that would be all kinds of cool, but it’s hard to overlook certain liability issues potentially arising from that. >_> I mean, in the US a fair ride operator can get into moderate legal trouble if a ride as much as just decapitates a rider, so grilling them does look like all but inviting a lawsuit.
More on Mon…uh, Thursday.
Well, in the 80s I was on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain (and 1983 is also the year of my birth, but I digress), but don’t fret, that intro is on youtube, so everyone can enjoy just how finely crafted this homage is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YacKar7y3mc
Yeah, I tried to stick to it pretty closely. Not that the cartoon was terribly popular, even on this side of the iron curtain and in my generation, but still. And the original intro did actually do a pretty good job of introducing the whole set-up of the show quickly and efficiently.