Madblood Battle Anthems
June 28, 2009 ~ 5 Comments
I really wanted a robot battle anthem in this storyline, but I’m not very good at writing amusing lyrics, so I decided to hold a contest and have the readers do it for me. This had the added benefit of allowing me to fill the Sundays with weeks and weeks and WEEKS of runner-up lyrics. Bite me, I was always running out of stuff to run on Sundays.
The borders and illustrations are all from an online archive of 19th-century songsheets.
Rob McCarthy is a friend and Viz coworker. Much later in Narbonic, he costars with my husband in the Sunday feature “Continuity Repairs with Rob and Andy.”
Willow didn’t specify a tune for this song, but I have a suspicion it should be “Where There’s a Whip (There’s a Way)” from Ralph Bakshi’s amusingly shoddy animated Lord of the Rings movie. Oh, Mr. Frodo!
Dana is one of my college friends and senior-year housemates, not to mention the namesake of the strip’s second most prominent superintelligent gerbil. It was so like him to pick “Teddy Bears’ Picnic.”
Buddha Buck gets major points in my mind for combining the Battle Anthem Contest with the annual Narbonic Haiku-Off. This way, he only has to write one entry! I should be so smart.
On second thought, this is even better.
….er.
“Hey, now, while I concede the “anthem” part, you gotta admit mine had theright flavor for “battle”. Repeating “Crush, Kill, Destroy” again and againwill destabilize any enemy’s morale. Especially if you accompany it with theLost In Space theme (written by John Williams, did you know that?) on abattery of bagpipes.“
–Dave III, 19 Jan 2003
I dunno… “We will fly and burn and slice” (the Toclafane, Doctor Who, new series, series 3, episode 12: The Sound of Drums, scene quite possibly only included in full version and not aired on your favorite TV channel) has always been my favorite morale-destroying thing to repeat in a creepy voice in (preparation for) battle.
…
That’s right, I know enough of them to have a favorite. Anyone who’s thinking about battling me better not let me have a megaphone.
I’m actually imagining this to the tune of some of the background music for Command and Conquer. It works quite well.
Where there’s a Whip (There’s a way) is from the Return of the King, which was the unofficial kind of not sequel to Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings. Bakshi wasn’t really involved in it, much like the Hobbit before that, but Warner Brothers released all three movies as a trilogy.
There’s some differences in the techniques used. Lord of the Rings was basically filmed, then animated using rotoscoping. I’m unsure whether this was a clever idea or an insane one.