Dogpatch Press

Fluff Pieces Every Week

Tag: parody

July 21, 2015

Furry Force 3 is out, and I can’t stop larfing! Interview with the animators.

by Patch O'Furr

Furry Force part 3: “Furry Superheroes Are the Grossest” is the new animated comedy short from CollegeHumor.  It did confusing things to my body.  I didn’t know whether to laugh or barf.  Let’s call it larfing.  If you’ve ever been hangry, you get what I’m trying to say.  Or if you’ve ever sharted… never mind, because that’s gross.  If you don’t like gross, don’t watch this.  Run away.  Furry Force 3 pushes the silly, teasing grossness of the first two shorts way past sick and twisted.  It might go too far for most of us.  But for some asstronauts at the outer limits of taste, that’s exactly where they wanted to go.

They went this far because the Furry Force series won unexpected demand.  The response surprised even the creators, who had no idea they would get appreciation by satirizing furries.  (Read my interview with writer Adam Conover and what he says about it.) They even won the highest Furry award, the Ursa Major!  CollegeHumor laughed with furries while laughing at them, by campaigning to win the Ursa Major.  This new episode comes fresh after being voted Best Anthropomorphic Dramatic Short of 2014.

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April 15, 2015

Interview in Splitsider, and CollegeHumor’s message. Last day to vote for the Ursa Majors!

by Patch O'Furr

splitsider-logoLast week I interviewed Furry Force writer Adam Conover.  The story was covered by Sydney Parker, writing for comedy industry magazine Splitsider. They interviewed me – but I didn’t tell them to call me a “popular furry blogger!”  (Is that like being a cool trekkie gardener – an amazing ren-fair knitter – or a fabulous metalhead stamp-collector?)

How the Furry Community Embraced CollegeHumor’s Furry-Lampooning ‘Furry Force’.

 

CollegeHumor followed up with a message:  “Thanks so much for your support and for the great post/interview with Adam!”  They shared a video to encourage you to vote for Furry Force to get an Ursa Major:

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April 10, 2015

Exclusive: CollegeHumor is doing Furry Force 3! Writer Adam Conover talks about it.

by Patch O'Furr

FurryForce_7-logoPart of the interview series:  artists, animators, and more.

How Adam felt about the Ursa nomination.

How Adam felt about the Ursa nomination.

When he was younger, Adam Conover went to anime conventions dressed like a bad guy from Sailor Moon.

Adam writes jokes about internet culture for CollegeHumor.  The comedy website earned high praise this week with 9 Webby award nominations.  He told me that winning those would be way less cool than getting an Ursa Major award.

What more could comedians want, than the highest accolades of Furry fandom next to their Webbys?

Furry Force is up for the award now.  The CollegeHumor animated short series was written by Adam and Brian Murphy.  I think it’s a good-natured laugh riot. If you agree, help them win.  Let them know that we like comedy, and funny people who like us too.

The Ursa Majors deadline is April 15 – Vote Furry Force.

 

CollegeHumor gave me 30 minutes on the phone with him, to help me exclusively reveal some cool news.  Back when the original single short video got millions of views, it led to a Part 2.  Thanks to continuing response, there’s a third on the way.

Furry Force 3 is expected around June.  I can’t wait to see how Adam’s new baby comes out!

oPkWNuv

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February 26, 2015

The Great Catsby, by Linda Stewart – book review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.download

The Great Catsby, by Linda Stewart
NYC, Cheshire House Books, September 2013, trade paperback $10.95 (143 [+ 1] pages).

This is the fourth novel in Stewart’s Sam the Cat series, officially children’s fantasies but often Edgar and Agatha Award mystery-fiction nominees. Stewart’s first, Sam the Cat: Detective (February 1993), was a generic hard-boiled mystery fantasy-parody, with Sam, one of a mystery-bookshop’s cats (the other is Sue, Sam’s sassy secretary), hired by an apartment building’s housecat to find their real human burglar and keep the apartment’s custodian from being framed. The next two novels, The Big Catnap (August 2000) and The Maltese Kitten (December 2002), were specific pastiches of The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1939) and The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (1929), with Sam standing in for Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade, who practically defined the crime-noir private eye genre. Not exactly kids’ stuff. The Maltese Kitten also won the Cat Writers’ Association’s 2003 Muse Award in the Best Juvenile Fiction category.

Stewart seemed to run out of famous crime-noir mysteries to parody after 2002. But, eleven years later, here is The Great Catsby. Presumably you know what this is a pastiche of, even if you haven’t read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age classic. Not exactly a hard-boiled mystery, and still not exactly kids’ stuff; but it does get the series moving again.

“The first time I saw Catsby he was sitting atop a diving board and staring across a swimming pool at a lantern hung from a tree. It was one of those green paper Japanese lanterns and it flashed, in the local distance, like the light of an alien star. Of course I didn’t know he was Catsby then, or anything else about him. By his looks, he was nothing special – just a pleasantly yellow fellow with a curve at the tip of his tail. What impressed me had been his gaze – an almost laser-like concentration – and the stillness that seemed to surround him the way a halo surrounds a saint.” (p. 1)

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January 6, 2015

Paved with good intentions – Furry Newsdump (1/5/15)

by Patch O'Furr

Headlines, links and little stories to make your tail wag.  Story tips are always welcome.

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In the Media

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You Can’t Get Inside – a profile of the furry community from within. furries

Michael Arthur writes at The Hooded Utilitarian.  “Profiles written in good faith by outsiders are thin on the ground.  Accurate ones do not exist.  Do not feel discouraged.  If you really “got it” like we get it, you’d be one of us.”

The article doesn’t just verbalize getting it, it IS that.  Great essay!  (When I read it, I was glad it supports criticism I’d already written about the Buzzfeed article, below.)

Arthur writes about being “Zapped with that funny feeling” that is Furry… it reminds me of something from a while back, in the same post where I mentioned that President Obama hung out with a furry.  “The furriest thing ever”. Here’s being zapped:

Photos, Furries, and Photos of Furries.

Flavorwire makes a small notice that positively shares the below article.

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December 18, 2014

“Alpha Chow:” Adult Swim’s furry parody infomercial, and comments from the fursuit actor.

by Patch O'Furr

Arrow is the furry star of this!  I got in touch with him for some casual questions:

“How did the video come about? Did you answer a casting call or did they contact you? Didn’t the suit already exist… do you think they specifically wrote it to fit you? Did you talk about the story to the writer? What was the production like, and where? How many takes did you do for the demonic voice?”

He answered with a blog post about the video:

Arrow Discusses: The Adult Swim Experience.

…a writer from a company that films shorts for Adult Swim contacted me because he wrote a script involving a buff mascot costume. He apparently found me from a fursuit parade video. After reading the script, I agreed, and flew down for a day-shoot. It was an amazing experience – I was treated as “talent” as much as any of the other actors in the short, and everyone was friendly and fun.

Then Arrow added answers to my questions that weren’t already on the blog:

  • “The script he wrote called for a muscular dog costume. They figured instead of making their own they’d hire someone who already had one. He told me they emailed a few other furries too.
  • The production space they rented, hilariously, is Lance Ikegawa’s studio in LA.
  • When it was time to shoot the scene they didn’t know if I was going to voice it, so I jumped in and said I could do a pseudo-demonic voice and showed it to them. They did two takes. Obviously it was further edited in post. I did more takes of the head reveal, which was the most “acting” I did – I had to hold my own fursuit head in front of my face to cover my head entirely, then act like I was trying to pull the head off. That took about 5-10 takes.
  • The eyes are digital because I refused to wear contacts cause I can’t get them in my eyes – if I could wear contacts, I wouldn’t have gotten LASIK!”

Find Arrow on Twitter: @arrowt.

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November 18, 2014

Fangcon’s Draconis in hospital, Claw & Quill, Watership Down – furry Newsdump (11/18/14)

by Patch O'Furr

Here’s links, headlines and little bites of news to make your tail wag.  Story tips are always welcome.

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Around Furry Fandom

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Fangcon’s Draconis / Calamity Cougar recovering from heart attack suffered shortly after the con.

Shortly before Fangcon, Draconis submitted a tip for my article about it.  It was a shock to hear bad news in short order.  I’m happy to see his positive video response about recovering, performing like a pro and furry all the way.

Claw and Quill: regrouping.

Watts (Chipotle’s) online publication attracted much anticipation from readers seeking smart furry magazine content, but it hasn’t put much material out.  The “long-overdue” second magazine issue has been conspicuously absent.  Now comes good news – a recent update from Watts explains a change from webzine format to WordPress, allowing multiple contributors to add content.  (I’d sure love to see more than the handful of blogs like this.)

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April 21, 2014

Talking with the directors of College Humor’s “Furry Force”

by Patch O'Furr

Interview series:  Artists, animation directors, DJ’s and event organizers, superfans, and more…

Furry Force just released it’s second episode. It stars super gross furry heroes, who bring sexy justice to villains like Victor Vivisector. Here’s Rich, the talented animation director at it’s Toronto studio. (It’s written by Brian Murphy and Adam Conover, who says “This video shouldn’t even be legal”.)
victor
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