Enter Abdominal, Stage Left

Cheemaneester?!? What the heck is that? It stumped Google. I can't find any reference on the web to such a word.

Well, as predicted the real snow monster has finally appeared. Though why at this particular juncture in the story I can't say. It would seem that he is a little late to the party at this point. I thought it would have been better for him to show up before Tunk was unmasked and defeated. Nevertheless, here he is as if on cue.
It would seem that he is unhappy about something, though I'm not sure what. Is he upset that somebody has been impersonating him?

I also find it odd that Tunk was able to exactly replicate the look of the monster using mammoth fur when he apparently didn't even believe that it was real in the first place.

And speaking of staging, what happened to Mountain and Puny in the final frame here? Did the Roar! of the real snow monster cause them to suddenly vault backwards 20 feet?

You do the hokey-pokey and you turn yourself around ...

This is a Mike Thomas-style post, and it goes back to my common mantra lately - "It's all about staging!"

Granted, we've got at least a split second between panel one and panel two, but in that time, Mountain has released Tunk and shifted from his side to the front. In the meantime, Oop has also released Tunk, also shifted to the front, has grabbed his mask with his right hand, has shifted the mask magically to his left hand, and is drawing back to wallop Tunk again. Tunk, who has had has head caved in with an ax, has been jumped from the back by Mountain, has had his butt set on fire, and has received an upper cut by Puny, is suddenly no longer on fire and isn't even trying to escape, though everyone concerned has let go of him.

In the meantime (lovely meantime), Oop's outfit has turned back to a dark colour, while the boys are suddenly dressed in white in panel two. Odd, that.

Not that it's perfect, but I've sketched out a possible alternative layout that keeps our chess pieces moving in a logical direction. You could move the "camera" in tighter for a more dramatic presentation, but I think this would work. Also, while in my doodle it looks as if Oop is wiping himself, he's supposed to be holding the mask - in the correct hand. I imagine he could also be positioned shaking the mask over Tunk's head in rage and it would work too.

Space-time anamolies ...

I know that Jeff has suggested that we are probably being so critical of the Oopster that we can't just sit back and enjoy it anymore. Maybe so, but I'm just MST3K'ing this stuff anyway, because it seems so darn odd. I'm really enjoying this strip on several levels. Comparing this strip with the previous ones, it's as if Oop has drifted into the Bermuda Triangle ...

1) Torches magically appear in a darkened pen.
2) Either Oop has just stepped out of the shower and wrapped a beach towel around himself, or he's on his way to a toga party.
3) Mountain has magically disappeared from the fray.
4) Being on fire is unacceptable. Having your head caved in with a stone mallet (see previous strip) is no biggie.
5) Speaking of which, Oop's mallet/ax/flute has vanished. It's not even visible on the ground.
6) Not only is Tunk screaming because he's on fire, but I'd also expect him to mention that he has a flaming ice cream cone crammed up where the primordial sun don't shine. Flame + severe abrasions = sad monkey.

World's worst come-on line

Judging from the first panel, it appears that something truly inappropriate is about to happen here.

Never fear, though, soon it's back to the rock 'em sock 'em action we love, with Mountain apparently focusing on one of Tunk's upper vertabrae.

Calling Alice the Goon ...

Am I the only one who expected Alice the Goon to come a-runnin' when Puny sounded out his pterodactyl call? Alice, that bizarro creature from the Popeye strip whose bloated, hairy, naked body kept children awake at night once upon a time, also tended to speak in this odd oscilloscope kind of lingo. Now we know what a pterodactyl sounds like - a resident of Goon Island. What does a Goon sound like? Umm ... err ... uh ... I dunno. I think I would have just opted for a cool sound effect like "EEERAAKKHHH!" or something here. You tell me. What is a pterry s'posed to sound like? On a side note, doncha just love the fact that Mountain is about to take on a smaller, unarmed man in a monkey suit with a club the size of a horse's leg? Is that class or what?

Mammal? What's a mammal???

Jeff touched on this strip in a previous post, but it's interesting that in the Sunday Christmas continuity, Oop has, seemingly for the first time, run into a deer-like creature. Actually, he and his posse seem a lot more surprised by this reindeer than they ever were by the Abdominal Snowman in the daily storyline. Pretty odd. Now granted, the Oop strip plays fast and loose with prehysterical time, but you'd think that he would have run into a deer or ancient variety of antelope at some time in his life. Neanderthals had a sweet tooth for deer, as a matter of fact, as well as each other. My favorite part of this strip is when the Wizer refers to Guz, Foozy and himself as the "three wise men," deliberately leaving Oop out. He's our hero, but he ain't the sharpest knife in the drawer.

You're in the Army now

I'm having a really hard time following Tunk's logic through this ordeal. He wants to invade Moo, but rather than gearing up for that battle he chooses to leave his Army who knows where and climb up into the mountains wearing a monkey suit. There he proceeds to terrorize a bunch of defenseless, cowardly people who subserviently file themselves into a makeshift concentration camp without a struggle.
And now Tunk wants to recruit these folks for his Army???
You've got to be kidding! If they won't defend their own homes, what makes him think they will do any better fighting for him?

Announcement

I want to take just a moment to welcome Michael Fraley as the new co-author of this blog.
Michael has graciously agreed to pitch in and help me as we continue to follow the travails of our favorite time-traveling caveman. Michael, as most of you know, has been a frequent commenter on this site. He is also a cartoonist and a long-time fan of Alley Oop with an extensive knowledge of the strip's history. So please welcome Michael and wish him all the best.
And don't worry about me. I plan to continue my usual feverish pace of posting comments on this blog as always.

Cowards of the county

When Mountain first appeared on the scene we were supposed to be impressed by his immense size and strength. Then we met his little brother Puny who turned out to be even bigger. So we were left believing that the people living up in the mountains were supposed to be a race of hardy giants. One would not want to go up against an army of these folks.

As it turns out however, Mountain and Puny seem to be the exception to the rule. Most of the mountain people are average sized folks who are apparently too docile to put up a fight when confronted with someone or something threatening their villages. Now we see today that after being freed from the prison/fortress that sprung up in their midst seemingly overnight, they are all going to cower inside a cave and let Mountain and Puny face whatever dangers are out there alone. How pathetic is that?

Haven’t we seen this before?

Today’s strip is a complete and utter retread that does nothing to advance the story. It is so redundant that they were able to recycle art from a strip that ran just a few days ago. Compare the strip for today (dated 11/10/05) with the one in the post immediately below this one (dated 11/4/05). Notice how the second panel in today’s strip simply combines the image of Oop from panel two of the earlier strip with the image of Mountain from panel one of that strip. All they did was change Alley’s hands slightly. Both characters have the exact same expressions and positioning. Even the little puff of frosty air above Oop’s right shoulder is the same.
That said, I still can’t understand why Oop is so insistent on keeping those poor folk locked up in their prison. Why doesn’t he just use his stone ax to chop away the poisonous vines and break them out of there? Does he think he needs to leave them there as bait to lure monkey-suit guy back?
I guess we will find out eventually whenever the authors tire of recycling all their old artwork.

Alley Oop: Expert Horticulturist

This prison/fortress is some engineering feat for one stone-aged guy in a monkey suit to have pulled off. When you get that high up in the mountains the tree line shrinks back considerably. That is why mountain peaks are bald. And the trees that you do find are short and scraggly. So to build such an enormous fortress out of wood would have required hauling tons of lumber up from somewhere else. Quite remarkable that the mountain people didn’t even notice while this construction extravaganza was under way.
How did King Tunk build the prison anyway? Hammer and nails? Now that we are getting a closer look from outside it seems that all the timbers are strapped together with vines. That would be more consistent with stone age construction knowledge, but it would also make it much easier to tear down, poison vines or not.
And that brings us to the revelation today that the vines are chock full of poisonous thorns, according to our resident expert horticulturist Alley Oop. But why would Oop know this when Mountain and Puny did not? Imagine how many vines you would have to gather to build a fortress like this? You would assume the vines are growing all over the place in that case, so why would Oop, a non-native, know they are poisonous while Mountain and Puny are clueless? Did Tunk import all the hundreds of yards of poisonous vines along with the tons of lumber?

Oop Takes Charge

Nevermind the fact that he is in unfamiliar territory (he didn't even know to dress warmly) with two guys who grew up in that area, Alley Oop is clearly in charge here.
Here he is instructing the natives on how to track people in their own backyard while they look on as if they had no clue what to do next.
But that is our Alley Oop - the globe-trotting, time traveling, superhero! He has already figured out that the snowmonster is just some guy in a monkeysuit without even a glimpse of the critter at this point. Now all he has to do is lay they guy out with one swing of his stone ax and that will be it. Mission accomplished.
So what are the authors going to do to complicate things further? I still think the real snowman will make an appearance in this series at some point.

An introduction and an explanation

I think it is long overdue that I wrote a general comment providing an explanation about Alley Oop Watch and why I started it.
First, let me say that I am overwhelmed by the response this blog has generated. I believe I may have more regular readers here than I do at my main blog. I know it is not because of anything I write in particular, but more because it has developed into a gathering place for people who share a common interest - either positive or negative - in Alley Oop. I think that is terrific.

I will confess that I started this blog two years ago as a lark. I never thought anyone would be reading it other than myself. But thanks to the miracle of Google searches it has brought together a small, but devoted group of Alley Oop fans and critics. Here is the backstory on how it all started. I was visiting my mother one weekend and was telling her about my blog. She seemed interested so I decided to show her how easy it was to set up a blog on Blogger.com. The Alley Oop strip I had read that morning was still fresh in my mind when I took the two minutes or so to set up the new blog. I had been reading Alley Oop since the mid-’90s and often would be frustrated by some stupid inconsistency in the storyline, but since I didn’t know anyone else who read the strip there was no one I could talk to about it. On the spur of the moment I decided a blog would be a good place for me to vent my frustrations about the strip.

I know that at the top of this blog I refer to Alley Oop as “The world's stupidest comic strip...”, but that is clearly an exaggeration. There are many other comic strips that are far worse than Alley Oop. I just choose not to read them. There is obviously something about the Alley Oop strip that has kept me reading it all these years in spite of my frustrations. I see the criticisms leveled at the strip here as mostly a tough love operation. I don’t want to see the Alley Oop strip ended. That said, however, I welcome comments from Alley Oop fans and critics alike (and most probably wear both hats).

As for the comments, it has been pointed out that the older comments have been disappearing from the site. That is a problem that I hope to rectify soon since I think the comments have added a tremendous amount to this site. Unfortunately, I have tried to do this on the cheap for the past two years. I’ve never invested a penny into the site which is hosted on the free Blogger service and uses the free Haloscan comments. But now it looks like I will need to upgrade my Haloscan account in order to access comments that are more than a few months old. I will try to do this sometime in the next few weeks.

I want to thank everyone for dropping by and leaving your comments.

Scooby Doo, Where are you?

So the snowmonster turns out to be Moo's arch nemesis King Tunk wearing a costume made of mammoth fur. That's original. All we need now is for the Scooby gang to show up and pull off his mask at an inopportune moment.

Of course, as in most of these stories, there are still a lot of things that don't add up. For instance, how is taking over these mountain villages going to give Lem any advantage over Moo? Alley Oop didn't even know they existed before Mountain showed up so they can't be in a strategic position for launching an invasion. Is Tunk planning to conscript all the Mountain people into his army? That's about the only way I can see how it could benefit him. They don't have a lot of wealth and Mountain said they were starting to run short on food.

Another problem is that Tunk isn't all that big compared to Oop and Guz and all the other cave people. Yet when we first glimpsed the snow monster he was towering over the frightened villagers, at least a foot taller than the biggest man, and snapping huge boards over his head using his bare hands.

Now today we have Tunk laughing about the primitive mountain people because they still believe the snowman exists - as if that was some kind of stretch for people living side by side with dinosaurs. But when the story began Mountain and Puny talked about a snowmonster who they got along with fairly well. So my prediction is that the real snow monster will show up at some point and possibly confront Tunk.

Abominable gulag

This is getting silly again.
Mountain’s homeland has apparently been ravaged by the mis-named Abdominal Snowman and now we see that all the people are being rounded up and herded into some kind of wooden fortress where they are to be held captive for some unknown reason.
Maybe if there was an army of snow monsters I could see this happening. But one snow monster who is at best maybe six inches taller than any of the men from Mountain’s village? What’s wrong with these people?
As Michael Fraley pointed out in comments, these people are used to dealing with T-Rex’s and other fearsome creatures on a daily basis. How is it that they allow themselves to be cowed by one measly snow monster? Why don’t a group of the men get together, grab a few clubs and go and subdue the creature? Is Alley Oop the only one capable of such feats?
And if they were truly terrified of this creature you wouldn’t have people glumly being herded along like cattle into a cage. You would have everyone running off in five different directions.
I’ll tell you one thing, the snow monster from the Rankin and Bass Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Christmas special was a heck of a lot scarier (and bigger) than this creature.

Abdominal Snowman?

What the heck is the Abdominal Snowman? Is he a fitness freak who works out all the time trying to build up his abs? Maybe he has been terrorizing the Mountain people by trying to get them to do excercises to build up their abdomens too.
You don’t suppose the Benders meant the Abominable Snowman, do you?

The Mountain saga continues...

The writers came up with a better way to conclude the strength competition in the daily strips than they did for the Sunday section. Oop managed to salvage his reputation as a hero after initially falling into a self-pitying rage fueled by his jealousy of Mountain.
Now it looks like they are planning to use Mountain’s character for another adventure they are setting up, this one having to do with the impending Ice Age that may be threatening Mountain’s village. That could prove to be interesting. Maybe Moo will soon find itself overrun with evacuees in a story that parallels the travails of the displaced residents of New Orleans.
The brief merging of storylines with the Sunday strip seems to have been a temporary experiment that the authors decided to cut short. That’s good because it was a serious drawback to the daily strip to have each week’s storyline outlined in advance.
I’m wondering how long Mountain’s character will stick around. Do the strip’s writers see him as a new major character with a recurring role?
Perhaps he will become so popular that he will muscle Oop out of the strip altogether. They could rename the strip Alley Oop and Mountain. It’s not unprecedented. Just look at how Barney Google became Snuffy Smith, or more recently the way the strip Ernie became Piranha Club or Robotman became Monty.
Naaaahhhh! They would never do that.

Right arm, left arm... whatever

This is so unbelievably stupid I just can't believe that the cartoonists in charge of Alley Oop these days actually did it.
We are currently suffering through one of the most boring storylines I have ever seen at Alley Oop and to top it off they make one of the most incredilby stupid blunders I have ever seen in a daily comic strip this Sunday.
Here we have Alley Oop and Mountain engaged in an arm-wrestling competition to see who is stronger. Notice in the first frame they are wrestling with their right arms, but then just a couple of frames later Mountain defeats Alley Oop and suddenly they are wrestling with their left arms.
This is just appalling. Do the Benders even care about this strip anymore or are they just churning this stuff out to collect a paycheck and could care less how badly they insult the intelligence of their readers?

And to make matters worse, the strip's current authors harve recently decided to merge their storylines for the daily and Sunday papers. That means that we get to see a week ahead of time what is going to happen so that reading the daily strip becomes a mind-numbingly boring experience. I'm just wondering if they are going to have the same right arm/left arm screw up in the daily comics like it was for the Sunday version.

Jealous Again

Haven’t we been down this road just recently? It was just about a year ago that Oop returned from one of his time traveling adventures to find the residents of Moo smitten by a newcomer - Dolph - who turned out to be a bad guy intent on taking over the kingdom. In that case, as with this one, Oop’s immediate reaction to the newcomer is intense jealousy.
This time the newcomer is a walking giant named Mountain. I don’t think he will turn out to be a bad guy because he seems to be based on some real-life figure (possibly a football player) who I’m unfamiliar with.
Mountain saves a family trapped by a boulder in front of their cave entrance. Oop is embarrassed because he could not budget the boulder before Mountain walked up and pulverized it with some kind of football blocking manuever. Instead of congratulating Mountain and celebrating the rescue of the family, Oop storms off in a huff. Why do they insist on making Alley Oop so petty these days? Was he always this way?
Next Oop finds Oola taking a big plate of food to the “dreamy” Mountain, further enflaming his jealousy. Once again I have a hard time understanding Oola’s character. She has been Oop’s steady girlfriend since the dawn of time but when Oop finally asked her to marry him several months ago she blew him off and said she needed more time to think about it. Apparently that also meant more time to have flings with other characters whom she seems to fall for at every opportunity. Has she forgotten about Oop’s proposal or does she even care? Is it time for Oop to take that long ride to nowhere with Dinny that he almost took when she was head-over-heels for Dolph?

We interrupt this blog...

I want to take a quick break from Alley Oop for a moment to note a new comic strip by Michael Fraley, a frequent commenter on this site.
Michael’s new strip - Burnie and Clyde - can be found on the Comics Sherpa site where new comic artists are provided a chance to show their stuff and perhaps build up enough support and momentum to get into syndication. Here is Michael describing his new venture:

It's about time I put my money where my mouth is. I've got a new strip on Universal Press Syndicate's "Comics Sherpa" site for undiscovered talent. I've done various other “serious" things, including a series of "Arthur: King of Britain" comics that Caliber published back in the 1990's - but folks always seem to like the scribbly, goofy stuff I do best. OK, here it is, a strip about a conservative little turtle and his duck friend who only has one toe dipped in the reality basin.

Best of luck to Michael and his new endeavor. Be sure and check it out regularly.

Now back to our regular scheduled programming...