Furry Halloween treats, McGruff Goes To Jail – NEWSDUMP (11/4/15)
by Patch O'Furr
Headlines, links and little stories to make your tail wag. Guest posts welcome. Tips: patch.ofurr@gmail.com.
Halloween treats: Popularity for Rocket Raccoon, and some looks at the culture of costuming.
Mom’s costume creation goes viral, ‘wins’ Halloween 2015. A very lucky kid in Michigan got to be an accurately-diminutive Rocket Raccoon, complete with moving jaw. It got shared on Facebook by the director of Guardians of The Galaxy. This isn’t claimed to be overtly “furry”, but when Mom makes cosplay outfits for Comic Con… it makes you wonder what research helped to build it from scratch.
UPDATE: The maker confirmed to me that Furry tutorials helped build it. I asked her opinion of furries, and she says:
It’s some tough work everyone does and all of you should be proud. I made so many mistakes because there aren’t a lot of tutorials for doing stuff like this. I honestly didn’t know too much about furries until I was trying to research how to make a movable mouth for my son.
In Huntsville Alabama, inside the business of Fig Leaf Costumes: “it looks like a dressing room for furries in here.” Read between the lines, and the article might involve us, maybe indirectly. There’s this thoughtful tidbit:
So why does he still enjoy playing dress up at age 35? “I love how people react. If you dressed up as a character they love they come over and give you a hug. It’s just a good feeling,” says Harrison, who along with his girlfriend plans to dress up in a couples costume for Halloween this year: “Lady and The Tramp.” Burkholder thinks the trend of adults continuing to dress in costumes, for Halloween and otherwise, is due to “Gen X feels a little bit lost so what we’re doing is claiming a little bit of a community for ourselves, especially with cosplay. And also with modernity people move away from so they want to form a sense of community, so whether it’s videogames or cosplay it’s people coming together. And I like that.
“Milford Schools Criticized Nationally Over ‘Halloween Ban’.” A smaller city in Connecticut planned to stop costuming at some public schools. That quickly changed after everyone growled about political correctness. It reminds me of a similar-sized city in Vermont banning fursuiters. Are they just too uptight in New England? Are some people afraid of self-expression?
16 year sentence for McGruff the Crime Dog.
“The actor who played the crime-fighting cartoon character McGruff the Crime Dog, was sentenced to 16 years in prison stemming from a 2011 arrest in which police seized 1,000 marijuana plants, 27 weapons – including a grenade launcher – and 9,000 rounds of ammunition from his home…”
