The Blog for Tooth Walking Sea-Horse Enthusiasts
This one’s cool on a couple of levels. First off, the video begins with Cab Calloway dancing to “Minnie the Moocher” in front of his band, busting some serious moves. The 1931 precursor to the moonwalk, the Crip walk, and James Brown’s dance moves all in one. This must have blown people’s minds back in the 30’s.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaZOXF83zBg
The ghost walrus appears at 4:21. Kids today, they have no idea how surreal old cartoons were.
Love this graphic. It’s from Deviantart, by stixman.
Here’s the link:Â http://stixman.deviantart.com/art/I-Support-Walruses-61619437
Many of you will recognize this image immediately. Yes, it’s Walrein, an ice and water-type Pokemon from the Pokemon Blue/Red series. For players, Walrein evolves from Seleo at level 44. If you’ve ever played Pokemon and used this guy – you’ll know that the Ice Ball attack is a powerful advantage in play.
I’m too old to have played Pokemon the first time around, but my now 11 year old son is a Pokemon master – he even made it to the finals in the regional video game tournament one year. Since he plays pretty much all available versions of Pokemon so much, I have played through Pokemon Blue and “Wally” the Walrein was part of my finishing team!
I enjoy the behavioral and habitat information that Walrein has in his bio:
Walrein live in large groups near the shore with their pre-evolved forms. These groups are always led by the largest male Walrein who acts as the beachmaster. Fighting for dominance among males can get pretty fierce, and many are the male Walrein who bear scars from challenging the beachmaster and losing.
Here’s more information about Walrein on the Bulbapedia, a community-driven Pokemon encyclopedia wiki.
http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Walrein_(Pok%C3%A9mon)
Cartoonist Bob Canada turns us on the Vampire Walrus, horrific scourge of the arctic. His posting is as amusing as this drawing. Beware the vampire walrus!
The Vampire Walrus’ wings are mostly for show, as they are far too small to lift its impressive bulk off the ground.
Here’s the link to the full post on Bob’s Blogger site:
http://bobcanada92.blogspot.com/2009/10/rare-and-deadly-vampire-walrus.html
Bob’s a designer and cartoonist from Indiana. Not Canada. I like his drawing style. I like the fact that he posts sketches along with the final art – I always like the energy contained in an artists sketches, sometimes more than the final.
Marlene is getting a new roommate. Before her roommate arrives, she dances with Skipper with excitement, but Skipper is paranoid that Marlene’s roommate may be a spy, possibly with the intent of stealing Kowalski’s newest invention, a device whose function is not yet known, even by Kowalski. The penguins point out to Marlene that the new arrival weighs at least 1,500 pounds, enormously heavier than she is, and suggest that multitudes of otters might be on the way. The new roommate turns out to be a walrus named Rhonda, who is sloppy, has bad manners, bullies Marlene, and uses her as a live tissue. She also farts in the water constantly as well as in Marlene’s home. After faking her approval to the penguins several times, Marlene finally asks them to ship Rhonda somewhere else. But when she learns that a labeling error resulted in Rhonda being headed for a polar bear reserve in Alaska, her guilty conscience causes her to save the annoying roommate. At the docks, Marlene grabs onto a rope and uses Kowalski’s invention, which turns out to be a plasma cutter, to free the crate at the dock where Rhonda is being shipped out of. Once the crate returns to the zoo, Marlene and the penguins arrange for Rhonda to be transferred to the Hoboken Aquarium. Rhonda ends up being a spy after all, and she steals Kowalski’s plasma cutter and discusses it with Dr. Blowhole, Skipper’s unseen dolphin arch-enemy, en route to a new aquarium.
I had to link to it sooner or later. No search for the word Walrus on any web search engine, Twitter or anything else will fail to turn up a link to this song. So for you Beatles fans, here’s the psychedelic cartoon video:
As part of my ongoing quest to make you readers aware of walruses in popular culture, I give you Rotor the Walrus, a character in the Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon series. I became aware of Rotor by accident, I’m too old to have watched the Sonic cartoons and never played the games, but my young son has been very into Sonic for some time. One night when I had half an eye on the TV, I noticed Rotor! So here he is. Not as well known as other popular cartoon walruses (like Chumley, which is the most popular search term that brings viewers to this site). Rotor is the mechanical genius of Sonic’s team of “freedom fighters”. He is self-described as a nerd, and this quote appears on his fanclub site (linked below). “If I spend my time working on this, I don’t have to face other people”, which I suppose is a very walrusy sentiment.
Here’s a link to an info page about Rotor:
http://info.sonicretro.org/Rotor_Walrus
Here’s his wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_the_Walrus#Rotor
Rotor even has a fanclub site:
http://sonicsatam.com/thewalrusfanclub/
Made from fresh-squeezed walrus! Once again, graphic evidence that somewhere in the writing crew associated with Matt Groening’s various production companies – there is a fan of the walrus. This one’s from Futurama. A semi-interesting aside: When my son was younger and we were swimming, he’d yell out “Ride the Walrus!” and climb on my back to be pulled around the pool. I’ve only seen like 3 episodes of Futurama, but this must have been one of them. As far as my claim that someone associated with Futurama/The Simpsons is a fan of the walrus, allow me to link to my earlier post “Grand Theft Walrus!“…
Buy a T-Shirt with the Extreme Walrus Juice design from Zazzle:
http://www.zazzle.com/extreme_walrus_juice_tshirt-235269074600073354
So my first commenter, my friend Kristen, who co-runs the very nice boston-area foodblog North Shore Dish left the following comment:
Wow. Now all I can think of is Chumley the Walrus from the Tennessee Tuxedo cartoons. Love the site – nice and clean. Also, cracked up when one of the Google sidebar ads was for “need a carpenter?â€
Well, Kristen’s only a year or so older than I am, but I had never heard of Chumley the Walrus, and had only a passing understanding of “Tennessee Tuxedo“, although now that I have the benefit of some Googling behind me, this Tennessee Tuxedo show sounds remarkably similar to my favorite cartoon of all time, “Help! It’s the Hair Bear Bunch”
Chumley is portrayed as the dim-witted sidekick, in some ways the equivalent of “Botch” on Hair Bear, and looking at the voice talent from the two shows, the back and forth between the Don Adams-voiced Tennessee Tuxedo and Chumley must have sounded an awful lot like the verbal banter between Botch and Mr. Peevley, the zookeeper on Hair Bear. Although it should be noted that TT had a zookeeper and inept sidekick character as well.
Notable Chumley facts: Apparently Chumley is a South Pole Walrus, the only one of his kind if thats’ the case. Hence the friendship between Chumley and Tennessee Tuxedo I suppose.
What other cartoon Walruses am I missing out on – I’ve discovered two more since drafting this post, and I’ll get posts up about them very soon.