Rubber Hose Santa Claus

 

I was fiddling with new filters on NightCafe and I found one called "1920s Rubber Hose Ink Wash" Rubber hose is the style of animation used in cartoons produced in the 1920s and 1930s. I love those cartoons, with the bold lines, film grain, sepia tone due to film aging, but mostly I love the characters. What's not to love? Those big cheery toothless smiles, the huge eyes with a pie slice cut out, the round shining puppy noses, those big, round shoes that look like over-inflated pool toys, those huge, white three finger Mickey Mouse gloves, it's all so perfect. But also, those noodle arms and legs. 

That's where Rubber Hose style of illustration gets its name from. There's no elbows or knee joints, the arms and legs are rubber hoses that bend almost like a human arm. 

When I first created the wizard above, I really wasn't quite sure what I was going to get. A good AI will take a while to put together an image and this was worth the wait. I was creating a satire of shoveling snow in Buffalo and the point was that even a wizard has to get out and clear the driveway on occasion. But when Mister Wizard popped up I gasped, it was perfection! It was completely different from what I was expecting, but it came out beautifully. 

Then I thought: he looks like Santa Claus from a 1930 cartoon. I had to try to make a Santa, but I had to do it my way. The Santa Claus that we perceive as the real Santa was invented by the Coca Cola in 1931, and some of my fondest childhood memories of Christmas were centered on a four-foot tall, illuminated Coca Cola Santa that my dad had absconded from his family's grocery store. It was big and beautiful, and to me, it wasn't Christmas season until dad put Santa up on the front porch. But in 1964, Coca Cola moved away from the image they created and eventually switched to the only creature in North America that will hunt and kill a human being for sport - the polar bear. Nothing says Christmas to Coke like being stalked across an icepack by a fifteen-hundred-pound man eating bear. 

So, MY Santa drinks Pepsi. If it's good enough for Joan Crawford, it's good enough for my Santa. Besides, I prefer it to coke. I've done a couple of images of Santa slamming back an ice-cold Pepsi on his infrequent breaks, so my rubber hose 1920 Santa looks right at home in the Pepsi Generation. However when I went to animate the image, AI showed its stupidity. I wanted one deer to peek out and the only bit of color would be the deer's NOSE. Those simple instructions were too much for AI.

Never let AI run the train!