Sixteen Bits has been creating pixel art of.. well, basically every character ever created. His style reminds me of the face-forward background characters (NPC's) in an old school RPG. Somehow he was able to capture each characters unique facial expressions using just a few varying pixels.
Watchmen
Party Down
Doctor Who - The Eleven Doctors
Click through the jump for many more. There are characters from Beetlejuice, Pulp Fiction, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Tim Burton / Joel Schumaker Batman villains, Star Wars, a ton of wrestlers from the early 1980's, and my favorite... 108 Lost characters (which I couldn't remember more than half of, so I guess it's time to start from the beginning again.)
While Tom makes a good case for Ric Flair's legend status in his post yesterday, I submit the above video as evidence that Ric Flair was, in fact, the worst. While we can look back at our childhoods and wonder why we were ever dumb enough to think that, say, the Undertaker was actually being controlled by a fat dude with an urn, I watch the video above of Ric Flair auditioning for World Cup-level soccer and wonder why I ever believed wrestling was truly real to begin with.
A bad flop here and there is fine - these guys perform at a high physical level on a regular basis. But Ric Flair actively made this part of his act. This is bad on so many levels, and really a poke in the eye of the guys who went out there and took their roles in the wrestling world seriously even though they were playing over-the-top characters in completely unrealistic situations.
It's stunning to me that the WWF/E and WCW never reined this in. Of course, Flair may have been too big a personality to be held back, but, really? This is the worst.
While looking for something thematic for this week, I ended up falling down the rabbit hole of the Deadspin feature Dead Wrestler of the Week. If you're unaware, it's a cornucopia of different critical biographies of (mostly) dead wrestlers, overwhelmingly from the late 1980s and early 1990s. You'll spend entirely too much time reading these, I promise.
It should be said as well that The Masked Man, David Shoemaker, does a semi-regular column about professional wrestling today over at Grantland. I don't watch pro wrestling at all anymore, but his articles still end up being a must-read for me.
Given that we're in Marchmania mode here, this image, posted on Thusday at one of my favorite Tumblrs, Special Bored, seemed appropriate to share. The Tumblr is by Sean Berthiume of Vinny's Pizza in Brooklyn, NY - a new board is posted daily with the specials of the day revolving around the subject of the artwork. So whether you want a Sausage Link to the Pasta or The Chipnotoad, you'll know you've come to the right place.
Wrestling has always been about the iconic characters for me. I grew up in the 1980's with such colorful, over-the-top WWF personalities as Brutus The Barber Beefcake, Jake The Snake Roberts and Captain Lou Albano. The weirder the character, the more I liked them.
In celebration of MarchMania, I've gathered some of my favorite classic wrestling inspired artwork.
Much more after the jump (including a semi-NSFW one all the way at the bottom).
I'm 30 years old today, so when I was growing up, my pro-wrestling "phase," as it were, was in the very late 1980s into the early 1990s. I remember being a big fan of the Bushwhackers and the Ultimate Steroid Warrior (more on him later this month), but, living outside of Worcester, Massachusetts, this meant that I could see the WWF pretty much every time it came through the area. I got to see a few tapings, any number of weird occurances, and the weirdest thing that I didn't realize was weird at the time - the return of Sgt. Slaughter to the WWF. I was at the old Boston Garden during the height of the bizarre Gulf War-era storyline of Slaughter when he feuded with Hulk Hogan. While there are some significantly bizarre stories to exist in the weird world of professional wrestling, this is one of the few cultural touchstones that bled over into the "real world," as it were, and continued to have repercussions.
