Unequally Yoked
I’m on tenterhooks waiting to get my copy of Andre the Giant: Life and Legend, which I preordered immediately after reading this review of the graphic novel.
CA: The way you draw him, the thing that I really notice is that you’re always doing these close-ups of his hands, either contrasting with other people or just with the tiny little neck of a beer bottle poking out from his fist.
BB: That was the thing. I watched a lot of footage of Andre, and that’s one of the things that, once you start looking at how big his hands are and comparing them to the things in the shot with them, is amazing. He’d shake hands with people and their hands would just get completely buried in his giant hand. I know there’s a handprint in stone somewhere, where you can compare your hand to his.
There’s a video that I believe the AWA made back in the day, and Andre’s in it. You just see a Jeep Wrangler, and you see his hand coming out and opening the door, and his hand takes up almost the whole door. It’s a good example of how much larger he is than the average person.
CA: Even the Andre shirts that WWE sells just have the handprint on them.
BB: I was thinking about that. You’d have to take the measurements of the mold and find what the actual size was, because that would be a cool tattoo.
CA: I love the way it’s used as this recurring motif in the book. There’s a shot of it at the beginning, then you see it again in the fight with Chuck Wepner, where it’s even bigger than Wepner’s boxing glove. You have him putting his hand on Robin Wright’s head to warm her up.
I love The Princess Bride, and, when I read the book, I really believed that William Goldman has adapted it from S. Morgenstern’s classic tale of True Love and High Adventure. In college, I got to play Miracle Max in a heavily adapted version of the story for five and six year olds.
It’s the only part I successfully auditioned for at Yale, and I remain confident I won it solely on the basis of my very Miracle Max-y hair.
So you can imagine my delight when I was reading The Toast’s list of Flaws Only A Protagonist Could Have and ran across this:
“I just don’t know what to do with this,” her hairdresser moaned, comically letting his arms fall to his side. “Your hair is just so wild and unmanageable, a lot like you. It can’t be tamed.”
“Neither can I,” she said, and she roundhouse kicked him in the face, and then she ran outside to find a real man who could handle someone who played as hard as she worked.
Though I think my favorite was:
“You’re so noble,” the villain sneered, because he’d totally expected him to do that noble thing he’d just done but he was totally secretly impressed. “Not like me. I do whatever I want. So why do I secretly admire and maybe even love you a little bit?”
“Whoa,” he said.
“Wait,” the villain said. “I didn’t mean to say that last part. What I meant was why does your goodness shine through the light of my evil deeds and make me wish I was worth of you somehow?”
“Wait,” the villain said again. “You’re noble in a bad way, not a good way,” but it was too late. He was secretly good now, and they were going to become heroic friends.
Given the number of friends I make by arguing with them, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to stop hearing “Maybe we’ll be heroic friends” in my head after a debate any more.
One of the best parts of having formerly villainous friends is that, presumably, you get to use their doomsday machines for non-doom-y purposes. And that might look a little like this series of videos General Electric put together using their stress test machines to break other stuff. The skateboard wheel below is my favorite, but the baseball is really fun, too.
Now, if you want to know more about things not being dramatically destroyed, you’ll want to check out this piece from The New York Times on how the Museum of Natural History attached the giant blue whale to the ceiling. I loved this part:
According to Stephen Christopher Quinn’s book, “Windows on Nature” about the museum’s dioramas, Lyle Barton, the museum manager in charge of installing the whale in 1968, was so anxious that something would go wrong that he got a rod the exact distance from the whale’s chin to the floor. While the rest of the hall was being completed, he would make certain every day that the whale was holding its own.
The crew building the exhibit so resented Mr. Barton’s lack of confidence, Mr. Quinn writes, that they dribbled an imperceptible bit of glue on the rod each morning until enough layers had accumulated so that when Mr. Barton checked one day, the rod no longer fit underneath the whale’s chin. He had a moment of panic, thinking the whale was finally sinking.
And if you want someone dedicated to putting things back together when they break, you want this glorious character “Captain Patch” from a cosplay event.
Sometimes I have clever transitions from take to take, and sometimes I have a hilarious reenactment of a bizarre deposition that I can’t withhold from you for the simple lack of a segue. Enjoy.
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