Making of "History Times"
Added 2019-09-05 16:18:20 +0000 UTCThe kernel for this joke came about when we were raking our brains for ideas for the potato collab on Instagram. The idea was that Vincent would pick up the potato and ask Fran if that was what she played with in "history times" before computer games. She'd then show him the Super Blockman game and he'd decide that the potato was the better option.
I was up against the clock a bit with the potato collab though, so I decided to save this idea for later and do something simpler for it.
When it came to reworking it "sans potato" we initially thought he could be rooting through an old box and find something like a cassette tape, or rotatory phone. I didn't like all the extra setup of him having to find something and talk about it -it needed to be punchier. J came up with the kids loving "retro" things which really streamlined the gag.
We wanted the game to be as crap as possible, so I tried to take the worst parts of Super Mario Bros, Pitfall and Frogger. We also gave the controller a single button and old fashioned curly cord.
At the end we realized we hadn't managed to get over the frustrations of early games, so we packed some of that into the bonus panel. I usually do a single image for bonus panels and would have had them sitting on the sofa staring forward at the TV with all the speech bubbles around them, but I realized they'd have to be in slightly different positions to what I'd drawn already, so I opted for the MUCH easier job of drawing 3 close up reaction shots -which ended up telling the story better anyway!
