Konk action figure sculpture guide

Posted to eBay in late 2014. This illustration contains details and specifications for the Konk (or Conck*) action figure by Hasbro (along with the accompanying close-up images).

*Conck was the originally proposed spelling for Konk. Originally his name was Conch, then Conck, then ultimately Konk. 🙂

Old eBay auction: scripts from existing and unproduced episodes

Tim Lawrence, who had written for the show previously, posted these incredible documents to eBay in 2015:

  • King Niddler: script – written by Glenn Leopold
  • King Niddler: outline – written by Glenn Leopold
  • Series Bible
  • Script for an unproduced episode, titled “The Chamaeleon Stone” or “The Shrine of the Northern Rim”

IF YOU WON THIS AUCTION, PLEASE CONTACT ME.

Note the scribbled notes (some of which I can’t make out) and the unique Pirates of Darkwater (one word!) wordmark/logotype.

A smattering of this and that

Quick lunch-break post…

Happy 100th(!) birthday to esteemed animator Don Lusk! He worked on PoDW during his tenure at Hanna-Barbera (as well as Captain Planet and others in the late 80s/early 90s), and has an amazing history, having also worked for Disney for nearly 30 years and animated some very memorable scenes for them. (More info at Cartoon Brew, which called PoDW out by name (woo!).)

Also, the PoDW opening made an appearance at the Alamo Drafthouse as part of a pirate-animation-themed montage that aired before viewings of Captain Phillips. (The opening of Peter Pan and the Pirates also aired.) Cheers, William/@whatevercove!

And to answer the questions that some people have left in the comments, I SWEAR that I want to get back to scanning the RPG module’s character pages, as well as my copies of storyboards from The Quest. Maybe I’ll commit to doing 10 pages a day or something…I give you all permission to nag me about this! (I’m also pretty behind on e-mails due to the move–will catch up soon.)

As usual, there’s probably a ton more that I’m forgetting. More soon, I hope! (Life is great. Leaving Boston and moving back to Pittsburgh was absolutely the right choice for me–I am so much happier here already. Currently starting week 4 of my new job–so far so good! Any local/regional PoDW fans, do drop me a line and let me know if you ever want to meet up if you’re in the area!)

Hope you all are doing wonderfully, and I do mean that truly. 🙂

A (tongue-in-cheek) creative challenge, and going behind-the-scenes

I recently learned that the following domains are available. I challenge (dare, really!) any of you creative people who see this to create something inspired by the following names…

PiratesOfDarkWaterHeater.*
PiratesOfDarkWaterSports.*
PiratesOfDarkWaterDamage.*
PiratesOfDarkWaterFilter.*

.* = .com, .net, .org, and so on.

😉

No prize or anything–but if you do actually create something, email it to me and I’ll happily post it here!

(It turns out piratesofdarkwater.com is available and going up for auction, but the minimum bidding price is close to $200! Sheesh…let’s just save that for whoever creates a kickass reboot of the show, shall we?)

– – – – –

Also, I may as well note here…I recently heard from Lane Raichert, one of the writers on PoDW episodes 1-5 (not much besides just letting me know that he was redoing his website and the PoDW section was coming down for a while). And that got me thinking…something I have never thought much about doing was to reach out to the people who worked on the show. I’ve always been far more interested in the creativity of this universe, the worldbuilding aspects, and so forth, but it never even occurred to me to actively reach out and contact the behind-the-scenes crew. (Other fans have, though! Mr. Raichert said that he’s frequently contacted about PoDW, which is awesome. Also, conceptual artist Floro Dery is probably the one exception, as far as my contact with the PoDW production team–he has reached out several times with gorgeous examples of his brilliant work from the show.)

This is something I want to do more of, going forward. The show’s over 20 years old now, and some of the creative team were at least halfway into their careers when they worked on it–and some have, sadly enough, already passed away. It’s time to really get moving, to get stories about how it all came to be!

Unreleased PoDW action figures, and Victory storyboards

Hi! Long time, apologies, keeping really busy…the usual spiel. 🙁 I promise I haven’t given up on the site, even though an actual update is unfortunately nowhere in sight. Maybe one of these days…

But anyway, at last, I’ve got a couple of cool things to share.

FIRST: Floro Dery, conceptual and storyboard artist for the Dark Water miniseries, posted a gorgeous set of storyboards for the final scenes of episode 5, Victory (arguably one of my favorite parts of the entire series–how dark and intense it is!). They’re all on Facebook, so you do need to have a Facebook profile to view them.

SECOND: There have been rumors of unreleased PoDW action figures that Hasbro was planning, and there’s finally a photo of a few of them online, courtesy of an eBay auction:

Hasbro 1992 Toy Fair - PoDW action figures

This is one of two pages devoted to PoDW from the 1992 Hasbro Toy Fair catalog. (I’ve e-mailed the seller to ask for a photo of the other page.) Listed are:

  • Ioz: with Push-out Arm-Sword and Removable Battle Armor!
  • Swar: with Color Changing Tattoo!
  • Ren: with Sea Sled with Working Squid Shooter!
  • Grimrot: with Glow in the Dark Features!
  • Strand: with Twin Spinning Arms Feature!
  • Bloth: with Removable Battle Armor!
  • Nimbo: with Real Working Bow-and-Arrows Weapon!
  • Kiroptus: with Multiple Rotating Wings!
  • Scorian: with Rotating Head-mask Feature!
  • Octoquid: with Spin-around Tentacles Action!

Interesting. 🙂

So there are the three obvious ones: Ren, Ioz, and Bloth are all major characters.

There are some interesting minor/one-off character inclusions in here: Scorian and Swar (from episode 11, The Collection–Ioz’s old pirate rivals), Kiroptus (from episode 8, The Beast and the Bell), and Strand (had a brief cameo in Zoolie’s gaming house in episode 4, Betrayal, and a bigger role in episode 13, The Darkdweller).

And there are a number of unknowns. “Grimrot” bears an odd resemblance to Joat, but we’ve never seen him/it. I feel like “Nimbo,” or some variant on his character design, was in the background in a couple of episodes, but with no real importance. And “Octoquid”…yeah, definitely not, haha. It makes me wonder if these are characters that would have had more prominent roles in future episodes, or if they were created from early concept artwork, or if they really only existed as merchandise.

There are already 3 bids on the catalog or I’d have tried to win it myself–I’ll bet there are other collectors who want it more than I do, since I’m really only interested in seeing the PoDW content in there.

In other news…the Warner Archive may indeed be interested in releasing the Dark Water miniseries to DVD, if they can find high-quality versions of the episodes. I’ve only got 1-4 (in English, anyway)…do any of you out there happen to have the episodes on some old but untouched VHS tape somewhere?

Hope you all are doing well, and enjoying the spring/fall (for northern/southern hemisphere visitors, respectively)!

Storyboards and concept art online

It took a few hours of work, but it’s just good to have it out of the way. 🙂 I’ve just uploaded over 150 photos of storyboards from The Quest and some concept art, like of Bloth’s pirates and the like, to a collection on my Flickr account, and included some commentary/analysis, some of it serious and some of it joking. 🙂

The storyboards are mostly of cut/deleted/edited material. The concept art is mostly of Bloth’s pirates, but also includes a couple of pages with alternate spellings. The crazy thing: some of Bloth’s pirates actually had names! But ironically, those were the pirates that showed up maybe twice and had no lines–the ones that did make regular appearances were just named “Pirate #3”. Oh, well.

And I apologize that these photos are unedited and not the greatest–I took these all the night before I left Atlanta to return to Pittsburgh, and since there are over 500 pages in this packet, scanning them would be an immense undertaking. (As if I’m not behind on keeping the rest of the site updated already…)

Anyway, enjoy!

Happy new year!

Hope you’re all doing well! I’ve made it through one semester of graduate school unscathed and am posting this just a couple of days before beginning my second term (which will be a lot crazier).

Just a few random notes, to reassure the small but steadfast group of you who do check in that I’m still around. 🙂

False DVD information: Recently I’ve seen more people posting comments about false DVD releases about the show. Like always, there are NO official releases of the show on DVD. I’m keeping an eye out, and a lot of my friends and acquaintances (some of whom are very vigilant in terms of keeping up with DVD/entertainment information ) know to let me know if they come across any information about the show, so there’s a network of us keeping an eye out for any news.

David Kirschner: Some people are either claiming or have come to assume that David Kirschner’s been blind to the demand for the show to be revisited: this is not true. Those of you who’ve been keeping up with the site for years should hopefully remember that Mr. Kirschner e-mailed me directly a few years ago. (Though I’m trying to find the blog post and am coming up blank…I did post about that here, right?) He’s been aware of this site and of the fan base for quite a while, and he’s grateful for both, and has not forgotten about the show. However, we have yet to see if this will actually lead to him revisiting the show. There are rumors, but nothing substantial.

Seriously, I have no idea where people are getting this false information from. I don’t expect that all people interested in learning about the show would visit my site–I suspect that the Wikipedia entry gets more hits than this site does–but there’s nothing there that would lead them astray, either.

Anyway, on to lighter things…

Dark Water: I found my VHS copy of Dark Water episodes 1-4 (with Roddy McDowall voicing Niddler–unfortunately I can’t find the VHS with episode 5 on it) and will be making a DVD copy and hopefully ripping video clips soon. For some reason, there are some people who are adamant that McDowall never voiced Niddler, and that it was Frank Welker all along: hopefully this will put those rumors to rest.

Storyboard photos: Also, while I was back at my parents’ house for the winter holidays, I finally went through the copies of the storyboards for episode 1 that I obtained this summer, and snapped photos of the scenes that are cut or altered. Interestingly, some of these extra/edited scenes were in the comics! Hopefully those will be up soon (possibly on my Flickr account, just to get them up somewhere, as there are over 100 photos).

That’s about it for now. Happy 2010! Hopefully this year brings good things for you.

Call for help: episode credits, RPG transcription

Hello! I’m still alive…just busy, as always. (I am still behind on my e-mail–sorry!) I come to you with two requests, one from a fan and one from me (also a fan, but…you know what I mean).

 
 

The first request…

Jeffrey is wondering…do any of you have the original end credits for episodes 1 and 3? How about the original end credits for the Fox run of the show?

This is a trickier question than it seems. Many of you know of those seals that appear in the background of episodes 1-5 (the same seals that run down the sides of this website layout):

1. The Quest: an octopus (the seal of Octopon)
2. Dishonor: the island with the moon overhead (the Island of the Pale Warriors/Atani?)
3. Break-Up: a crown, wings, and shackles (symbolizing Pandawa)
4. Betrayal: a woman’s face, half revealing the skull (symbolizing Tula’s betrayal)
5. Victory: three human hands and one monkeybird hand forming a peace symbol

However, on the Boomerang airings of the show, and some (all?) of Cartoon Network’s airings as well, the credits that appear with The Quest are actually the credits for Dishonor–the island crest is visible in the background. And the credits that appear with Break-Up are those of Betrayal, with the woman seal in the background. (I never realized this mistake till he kindly pointed this out. I am astonished to have not seen this mistake(?) before.)

Do any of you have any video clips, DVDs, VHS tapes, etc. that have the proper credits for The Quest and Break-Up? How about the credits from the original Fox run? Jeffrey is eager to access the original credits for each episode (and now I am, too!). Please do let me know if you can help out.

 
 

Next, my request…

After long last, I have finally started to complete work on the digital copies of the PoDW RPG module and World Book. Many people have asked me about these over the years, and I just couldn’t start working on them for one reason or another. I am truly sorry about that. But now that I’ve gotten into grad school for the fall, I feel more of a sense of urgency to update this site before I most likely drop off the face of the earth for 2 years. As it is, the next 3 months before I move and start school are going to be extremely busy.

It turns out the World Book has a lot of gaping holes in it that I (in my RPG-ignorant state when I typed it up years ago) figured people could just make up as they went along, but I finally see how helpful it would have been to have all those stats and additional info I’d cut out. I will be posting the full version in PDF format some time soon…it’s not a huge undertaking but it is time-consuming.

As for the character sheets, there are 105 of them, and this is where my request comes in. Would you be willing to help type them? I have a scanner, and I can scan the pages in, but they will be image files and very large (way too large to generate a PDF from), and the thought of transcribing over 100 images fills me with dread. That’s precisely why I haven’t attempted this before–it’s a ton of work for one person to do and I just haven’t had the time to start on it.

What I propose is this: I will start scanning the images and put them in a directory and post the link here. If you would be so kind as to volunteer to type up one or a few pages, comment on the thread in question with the pages you are doing, and e-mail me your transcriptions, with the page name/number in the e-mail title. I will compile them into a PDF (and eventually create a standard HTML version, too), and in the meantime, the images are also accessible to everyone.

It’s rare that I put out a call for help like this, but this is something dozens of people have asked for, and I feel horrible for holding out on you guys. I have always prided myself on putting every bit of media and information I receive on the site, but over the last couple of years it’s all been piling up. It would mean a lot to me and to many other interested fans if you could take a few minutes and help out. 🙂

 
 

As always, thank you for sticking with me and supporting the site. This show is now officially 18 years old, and you guys are just as awesome and supportive as ever, and I can’t thank you enough for that.

tv.com trivia

I haven’t checked the tv.com PoDW section in a while, and there have been some definite updates–namely, the trivia section.

My first reaction: WHOA. Who wrote this? (I have a few theories, based on the main contributors listed there, a number of whom have contacted me through this site over the years.) Whoever it was is incredibly perceptive because s/he’s noticed a lot of stuff I have never seen or realized in the many times I have rewatched these episodes.

My second reaction: On the whole, it’s more of a bloopers/errors/continuity-questions page, but still fun. 🙂

And a question: The second point under “The Beast and the Bell” references an interview “four years ago” with a writer who worked on this episode. Which writer? Where is this interview from and who conducted it, and was this really done as recently as 2004-05? (I’ll eventually start asking around on tv.com, but if anyone reads this who knows the answer, I would really appreciate if you could tell me!)

And I’m still looking for any suggestions or input from all of you, as per the previous post. Thanks again!

Some more Japanese info

(Thank goodness WordPress saves drafts–my browser crashed when I was writing this this weekend.)

Here’s something else: the actual Japanese title isn’t merely Dark Water, but “Michi no Umi he Dark Water,” or “To the undiscovered/mysterious sea: Dark Water”. Neat, eh? It had a limited airing, on NHK-BS2 on satellite TV. I don’t think they aired all 21 episodes, based on the air dates I found, but I don’t know that for sure.

And it had unique opening and closing theme music, sung by Hironobu Kageyama, who might or might not have been Ren’s voice actor (there’s also a guy named Takeshi Kusao cited as voicing Ren).
– The opening theme is “Aisubeki no Senshitachi”, or Beloved Soldiers.
– The closing theme is “Senshitachi no Kyuusoku”, or Soldiers’ Rest.
They’re just as cheesy and generic as they seem from the titles–I found clips of both songs (scroll down to the beige box with two sets of links; in the second list, 5 is the opening theme and 6 is the closing–each will spawn a pop-up window). For those who can read Japanese, here are the lyrics for the opening and closing. Set your browser’s character encoding to Shift-JIS for these.) Look for them if you ever go to a karaoke parlor in Japan–you just might find them!

That’s all for now, but that’s plenty!