Walt Disney's Holiday Parade was a special comic book released by Disney Comics featuring stories spanning the decades. The content included a Carl Barks Donald Duck story, plus classic comics starring Li'l Bad Wolf, Pluto, Uncle Scrooge, Super Goof, Chip 'n' Dale, and Mickey Mouse. This great cover was drawn by Rick Hoover and colored by Gail Bailey.
New for this comic book was a TaleSpin story called "Shine a Little Light." There's no date anywhere on this comic book, but since TaleSpin was new for 1990, I'm guessing that's the year this comic was released.
In the TaleSpin story (written by Cherie Wilkerson, drawn by Cosme Quartieri), Baloo the Bear must make a delivery to Thembria, a cold and oppressive nation inhabited by an army of boars. Unfortunately, the diminutive Colonel Spigot decides to ban all private holiday celebrations.Luckily, with the help of Spigot's gentle-giant assistant, Sgt. Dunder, Baloo is able to help the citizens of Thembria.
In the animated series, Colonel Spigot was voiced by Michael Gough (he played Gopher in the Winnie the Pooh series) and Sgt. Dunder was voiced by Lorenzo Music (Garfield the cat and Tummi Gummi on the Gummi Bears).The TaleSpin coloring book offers a glimpse of a different spin on the Thembrians.
I'm guessing the Coloring Book was created when the show still had some development going on. It appears that Colonel Spigot was originally going to be a small lion.
Meanwhile, Sgt. Dunder was a big bobcat!
I think these designs are appealing, but I'm glad the characters were changed to boars.
I'm very curious about the original versions of these characters and how they changed during the development of TaleSpin.
Here's an article on exactly that:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.animationsource.org/talespin/en/articles/TaleSpin_characters_old_design/103802.html&id_film=9
Very cool! :) I'm the webmaster of the site TaleSpin Source.
ReplyDeleteDo you have the full comic? I believe this is the first TS comic to ever be published (at least that's what I.N.D.U.C.K.S is saying) and I think it's rather rare.
If you do, I'd be very interested in reading it and make it available on my site :)
Also, where did you get these early-development sketches? I think I saw them somewhere, but can't remember...
gregory-weagle: Thanks for the link! I had seen this page before, but had not seen the link to the concept sketches of Spigot, Dunder, the Air Pirate and Wildcat.
ReplyDeleteHey steet--I enjoy TaleSpin Source! I did not know this was the first TS comic! The early designs of Spigot and Dunder here are from the TaleSpin Coloring Book, so maybe you saw them there. And yes, I have more TaleSpin stuff to share...
I wish they'd worked more characters from "The Jungle Book" into "TaleSpin". Surely they could've found a place for Bagheera, at least.
ReplyDelete