Thank you SOOOOOO much for all of the follows, likes, and feedback, gang! That’s always the biggest part of what keeps me cranking out so much rampant silliness! And, for those of you who fairly recently began following our adventures here on our website, we reintroduce the stars of the strip, beginning, natch, with THE star, one Zekinald T. Rhino. Without Zeke, of course, there’s no FLEA FLICKERS…and WITH Zeke, there’re no leftovers!
We at FLEA FLICKERS figured we wouldn’t slow the roll we were on lampooning the world of pro football broadcasting, this time parodying one of the more popular pre-game studio shows! And, while this might not just yet be a page right out of history, it IS a page right out of our second book, “‘It Could Have Happened To Anybody’,” which you can make your very own by shopping online at Amazon, Wal-Mart, Books-A-Million, Barnes & Noble, and other fine retailers!
Our last post about broadcast booth hijinks got us to thinking, gang: there’s always a ton of speculation, prognostication, anticipation, and other “ations” when big-name pro football players become free agents, and even when top-tier coaches are up for grabs, too, but very recently even on-air broadcasters have emerged as ripe for the picking for networks and new streaming service games. To call this latter event a frenzy would be an insult to large schools of carnivorous fish, but nonetheless we used our FLEA FLICKERS universe parodies to illustrate just how insane the changing of announcer guard has been of late…and, if some of the changes aren’t to your liking, peeps, just look upon it the way you would the weather: before too long, it’ll be something entirely different.
Ah, the prototypical three-man announcer booth: the seasoned broadcast veteran, the former player that may or may not ever get the hang of the whole color commentary thing, and the former coach who, for an announcer, makes a great former coach. Combine ingredients, vigorously blend, chill at room temperature, and voila! The three of them mesh much like M. Howard, L. Fine, and C. Howard almost did. Coitanly!
Another one of our “Sunday-sized” strips, gang, this one answering the question “What if we took a famous movie and FLEA FLICKERS-ma-tized it?” We used to love MAD magazine TV show and movie parodies in our impressionable childhood years, and some of that influence can be seen in strips like this one. Truth to tell, we can drop nearly anything into the zany, obtuse world of Zekinald T. Rhino; pretty much any shaped peg fits into our rhino-shaped hole. And the coolest thing about it is that I don’t even really have to do much of anything! It’s all already out there, having pretty much written itself (though don’t read into that the wrong way: our gags and plots are NEVER A.I.-created), fruits of silliness ripening on branches in Goofytown Orchard. All I have to do is reach up and pluck ’em off the trees! Bon Appetit!
Since we’ve got another silent strip here, gang, we’ll let the picture tell the story, though we can’t resist the moral: “Those who are as dumb as oxen get to be as strong as them, too.”
SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT! (For some reason, I’ve always wanted to say that!) If you haven’t gotten the chance to try your hand at our Zeke maze, then you may not want to see the one unique solution as shown above. And, thanks to a suggestion by an old classmate, I’ve updated the time limits to reflect differing degrees of maze-solving prowess. Puzzles and brainteasers of many types are awfully fun to create; this may just give me an idea… 😉
2023 has been a pretty wild year o’ dabbling for us here at FLEA FLICKERS BY DAN BROWN. I’ve loved mazes all my life, and learned to draw my own (ahemcoughahem) decades ago…and so I thought, “Da heck, why not try to incorporate some Flea Flickersness into maze art?” And who knows? Maybe this would be an interesting venture for us to explore. But, in the meantime, this here’s a real legit Zeke maze with just one real legit solution (which you won’t see til our next post), so feel free to try it out and see if you can make it from Zeke’s right ear to his right pinky toe in under the time goal!
The influence of television situation comedies is inescapable in much of the FLEA FLICKERS BY DAN BROWN silliness. Exhibit A: we took an adult-character-only strip and added kids for extra family-oriented-ness. Example 2: Cassie, who’s as smart as a whip, and Zeke, who’s as intellectual as an empty bag of doorknobs, produce the aforementioned children who follow the same gender-oriented I.Q. pattern. Proof Part D: the panels before the payoff panel have silly little lead-up gags of their own. Hey, if we can combine football and animals, we can also have a comic strip-TV sitcom hybrid going on!
Inspired by our last post, which in turn was inspired by the cover of our second book, we present to you an entirely brand-new strip, polished off just moments ago, featuring three of Our Big Four being addled by Zeke’s attempts at intellectuality….again. Sure, Our Main Rhino demonstrates no discernable capacity to learn…but if Jay, Cassie, and Robert continue to engage him, it doesn’t speak well of THEIR ability to connect the dots either…
