Roger Rabbit Picture

One of the better images from that time is a Roger Rabbit picture I painted sometime in 1989.

I was (and still am) a very big fan of the movie “Who framed Roger Rabbit” with Bob Hoskins and Christopher Lloyd. I liked the idea of a toonworld and of toons walking among humans a lot. Also I think “Roger Rabbit” is still the best movie ever when it comes to having people act together with animated characters. No other movie was ever able to integrate cartoon characters this well into a real live environment (Ralph Bakshis “Cool World” really sucked and the latest try, “Rocky and Bullwinkle”, is also very badly done!).

Roger Rabbit was the first movie ever that I went to see twice in the movie theater and I have seen it countless times on video afterwards!

After seeing it on the big screen I bought a poster of the movie to hang it in my room. And somewhere on this poster was a small image of the introduction of the “Herman and Roger Rabbit” cartoon that was being produced in the movie.

I copied the rather small image from this poster to the CPC by using a very bad self programmed drawing program. You cannot imagine how simple this program was: there was no fill function, no shading or distortion effect, no circle drawing ... nothing, just dots and lines!

So I painted the outlines of the light in the background and of the two heads, saved the picture and used a BASIC fill command to at least fill the heads with and the background with color. And then I painted the rest of the picture just with dots! I think I’ve worked on this image for several days, but I was so besotted with this movie that I was willing to sacrifice this much time on painting this picture!

Actually I thought about writing a Roger Rabbit game and I started painting the title screen while thinking about different levels. But after a Roger Rabbit game was released for the Amiga and later (correct me if I’m wrong) for the CPC I discontinued my effort to write a Roger Rabbit game, even though I’ve had thought up a number of levels and ideas for playing sequences.

But I thought that I, a 17 year old computer freak with no previous successes, wouldn’t ever get the license to produce a game for a movie. Especially since I surely couldn’t afford to pay for it in advance.

Well, that makes is just one more game that didn’t get produced due to fiancial limitations...

But the title screen still exists and though undiscovered, finally found its way to publication as cheat part in the Castle Party Demo.

To see it insert the original Castly Party Demo Disc and type RUN”castle.8” and press the RETURN key.