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.

What I’ve been working on…

(Thank goodness for Illustrator’s pencil tool, to let me “sketch” these straight into vectors…so much easier than carving out every little detail with the pen tool!)

screenshot-dwcoins-wip

It feels like these images have held a lot of sway for a number of fans. I’ve seen people reference them in various ways over the years and marvel at the meanings behind the symbols. (These are the background “sigils”/”seals”/”coins” in the end credits of episodes 1-5.) So it seems only right to make vector files of these, so people can use and remix them as they see fit.

I’m definitely working away at a bare-bones redesign of the site (content/layout/interactions first, styles and graphics later), to use as a portfolio piece. My intention is to post the vector files of the logo and these 5 “coin” images there under a Creative Commons license. (SVG should do it, right? Would you all need any other file formats?)

Do you have any other images or symbols you’d like to see vectorized? (The Compass and the Treasures of Rule come to mind, but beyond that I don’t know.) Let me know!

World Book character sheets ARE ALL ONLINE. (plus other goodies.)

It’s only taken me…what, 10 years now? But–it’s true–after major fan demand, ALL THE WORLD BOOK CHARACTER SHEETS HAVE BEEN SCANNED AND ARE ONLINE.

They’re up as individual images for the moment. I need to transcribe the last ~45 and will start to…okay, eventually…put the images and text into a document/PDF. (I was going to say that I had done this with the World Book, but the PDF version actually does not have any images in it. Something else to add to the to-do list!)

For those who have been asking me (for YEARS now), I am truly sorry for the delay. Just…you know…life and stuff. I hope that these have been worth the wait!

Well, in other news…hello! Stuff is definitely in the works. It’ll be quite a while yet but a redesign/update of the site is in progress, to finally dust it off, clean it up, and bring it into this decade of web design.

A few things of note, sent in by some awesome people over the months:

Alexandre has captured the Sega Genesis PoDW soundtrack and converted it to mp3s for our listening pleasure. ** will host these files on this site once I update **

Neike has edited and uploaded an incredible collection of screenshots of locations and creatures, the Treasures of Rule, and more.
** will host these files on this site once I update **

Brittany contacted me about a doll she spotted on eBay a while ago. It’s a doll of Ren that I’ve never seen before, and even the original listing has no real information on it beyond “Made in Korea.” Do any of you know know anything about this? See below…

ren-doll-ebay-unknown

Jakub, and possibly some others, have been working on building out a wikia.com wiki for PoDW.

Sony/”Konway” has uploaded a few choice videos: the end credits of Dark Water, the Dishonor cut scene* with Roddy McDowall vs. Frank Welker

Want a hi-res scan of the background image behind episodes 1-13? Doug pointed out that the original painting was up for auction at Heritage Auctions a while back but the image is still there.

And deviantART user DanFelix has been maintaining Dark-Water-Pirates, a collection of fanart from across the website. People have created some really interesting, clever, and fun pieces lately.

*I refer to this as “cut,” though some people were fortunate enough to see the show on TV with this clip included. Different stations made subtly different cuts to the show.

That’s it for all, but hopefully not for long. Cheers! Thank you so much for your support and kind words–I never say it enough, but I deeply appreciate your encouragement and enthusiasm over all these years.

Music and merchandise finds

Happy spring, Northern Hemisphere citizens! Time to share a couple of recent PoDW Twitter finds:

For those of you familiar with the Sega Genesis PoDW game, somebody put together a great clip of himself performing the Sega game’s Janda Town theme music. The layering of the different sounds and lines is really great and spot-on. Check it out!

Also, Ian has set up a RedBubble site with apparel with the PoDW logo on it! The only thing: he’s using a version of the video game logo that may be a little blurry/artifacted when it’s enlarged. But it still looks great, and RedBubble provides some pretty cool options: varieties of shirt types, colors, and sizes, to fit your taste. At SF conventions I attended in the past, I always made it a point to wear a PoDW shirt and/or bring the up in panel discussions, to get it back on people’s radar one way or another. The more people who do stuff like that, the better the odds are that eventually enough people interested in a reboot of the show will get noticed. So…you never know. 🙂

And if I haven’t linked to this yet, Nate has done in a few months what I haven’t gotten around to in many years, and ripped a few video clips of the Dark Water miniseries–specifically, 2 clips with Roddy McDowall voicing Niddler (something I know a lot of you have been really curious about), as well as the miniseries opening.

Oh! OH. I DID make an update…to the contact page. (Better than nothing, right…?) It was horribly outdated–I’ve removed my Facebook link (I deleted–not disabled, but fully deleted–my profile last summer), and added links to Twitter and my (pretty outdated) personal website. I’ve also cleaned up the language somewhat, and apologize sincerely if anything on there was a little too blunt or offputting.

That’s it for now. I’m quite busy…preparing to move this summer for the 3rd time since November (I’ve had surprisingly horrible luck with living situations during my 1.5 years in Boston), playing in a lot of orchestra/opera concerts, presenting at a conference in a few weeks, and looking forward to finding some free time in the summer for personal and/or portfolio-padding projects. (Like this site, perhaps?) Now that the sun no longer sets by 4:30pm, life is pretty wonderful again. 🙂

I hope you’re doing well, too!

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)!

CONTEST: Win an unopened copy of the PoDW RPG!

Firstly: a representative from Warner Bros. has asked me to remove links to videos/torrents of full episodes of the show. This unfortunately includes foreign-language editions. If you have any questions on this, please feel free to contact me.

– – – – –

Anyway, on to (fun) business!

A very kind collector of RPG materials has donated an unopened, mint-condition copy of the Pirates of Dark Water RPG module by Lee Agosta, with the intent of passing it on to a fan who would really cherish owning his or her own copy. The RPG includes the World Book, a fold-out full-color map of Mer, and over 100 pages of creature/species information. (If you’d like a preview, much of this material is in the Buried Treasure section, minus the creature sheets, which I have been notoriously slow about scanning/uploading…again, sorry about that.)

Entering is really easy: just leave a comment here or e-mail me (subject line: PoDW RPG contest) with the following:

1. Your name (or a unique alias)
2. Your e-mail address
3. Your location (not address)
4. (just to humor me, really…) Why you want to win the RPG set – are you a collector of merchandise related to PoDW, animation, or RPGs? Have you run PoDW RPG campaigns before or would you like to? Or “just because?” 🙂

Like the DVD contest, this will be a random drawing, and this is open to fans anywhere in the world. The last question really is just out of curiosity, because I’m really interested in seeing what all you are interested in.

DEADLINE: TBD, but probably the end of the year? I only want to wait till after the winter holidays to mail this: I have run Secret Santa campaigns online in years past, and sometimes up to half the participants’ gifts were lost in transit. Not to mention, there are a ton of gamers and roleplayers out there, and I’d like to allow more time for word to get out.

Good luck!

World Book character sheets 1-50 are up!

As the title says. 🙂 I scanned in another ~25 tonight, and they’re now online (including a replacement scan for #2, which somehow was tilted really badly before). Enjoy!

I’m now committed to finishing these ASAP. Seriously, please do e-mail me and nag me if I don’t get the rest up in the next couple of weeks. And as always, my sincerest apologies for taking SO MANY YEARS to scan these.

EDIT (12 August 2010, 12:45AM): Pages 51-60 are up (out of 105 total).

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.

Video clip of the Dishonor cut scene!

Hey, everyone! I’m excited to offer you something the web has never seen before (as far as I know). 🙂

So I mentioned that I left my English-language Dark Water DVD rips at home. However, I discovered the Japanese Dark Water DVD rip on my hard drive! Which happens to include that one very insightful cut scene from episode 2!

The original file and one with English subtitles are now available for download (and the English subtitled one is on YouTube). They’re Quicktime .mov files.

The subtitles are actually the original English dialogue, as opposed to translations of the Japanese. (Why translate a translation, right?) It’s probably useful to know, though, that while the Japanese dialogue is a solid translation of the English, there are differences. I will edit this with a faithful translation of the Japanese, once I clarify some points. The translation follows after the jump.

(In hindsight, perhaps I should have made a standalone subtitle text file. If you’d really like one, to subtitle this file in other languages, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.)

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