The 1941 Baseball Mystery

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As mentioned in an earlier blog post, I've been exploring fun ways to imagine how Grean the Kac'hin might show up in the popular media of 1930s of a previous Reality. My original thought was that since some very early use of live television was for broadcasting baseball games, why not say that Grean was captured on  T.V. while she was hunting down Fengtol, a positronic robot? Those early television broadcasts were not seen by many people, so I want to help "spread the word" about Grean's "baseball intervention" with a pulp magazine cover image.

The image to the right is the only 1930s Baseball Stories cover art that I've been able to find. I was originally imagining that Grean might chase Fengtol into a baseball stadium, with the robot hoping that Grean would not continue pursuit in such a busy public place.

More recently, I've been exploring ways that Hierion Tubes might be used to shuttle people (and robots!) between the Hierion Domain and the world that we inhabit.

Rather than have Fengtol go running onto the playing field of a stadium, she might simply materialize in such a public place, stepping out from the Hierion Domain, with Grean following behind. Grean is indifferent to the prospect of being seen capturing Fengtol because it is part of Grean's plan to use time travel to initiate a Reality Change.

the Summer 1941 Baseball Stories cover

I like the scene depicted in the Summer 1941 Baseball Stories cover art (see the image to the right on this page). I guess this poor player who lost his cap is in a "rundown". Picture a player in the middle of a ball game who suddenly finds himself caught up in a struggle between Fengtol and Grean who "magically appear for a few seconds on the field. Grean zaps Fengtol with her ray gun then, as quickly as they came, the two "ladies" pop back into the Hierion Domain and disappear from our world.

Sadly, in 1941 there is no video tape. Several tens of thousands of baseball fans saw Fengtol and Grean on the playing field for a few seconds, but what did they actually see? A few months later an article was published in Future Science magazine suggesting that time travelers from the future briefly appeared.

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So far I have made a first draft of a an imaginary Future Science magazine cover showing what television viewers would have seen in 1941 when Fengtol was trying to evade capture by Grean.

I've been using model Tori Calderwood to represent Grean in some imaginary pulp magazine cover images. For this baseball scene I used the image of Tori shown to the left. This photograph was taken by Cathleen Tarawhiti.

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As a representation of Fengtol's face I used a photograph of Katrina Chadwick that was taken by Cathleen Tarawhiti. See the image to the right.

I was tempted to use DAZ Studio to render the body poses that I wanted to use for Grean and Fengtol, but then I spent some time searching through the stock photography at deviantART and found two images that are satisfactory for a first draft of the scene I'm trying to create.

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I used an image from Sakky at deviantART to depict Grean jumping into Reality from the Hierion Domain. See this pose, shown to the left on this page. This photograph was taken by Jade Macalla.

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In order to depict Fengtol running away from Grean, I used an image called Ember8 from Jessica's faestock gallery at deviantART (image to the right).

For the background of the baseball stadium I used an image from Wikimedia commons.

Version 1.0
I'd like to give both Grean and Fengtol slightly more alien facial appearances. Also, I want to do some more work on Grean's clothing and maybe alter the appearance of her "ray gun".

First draft of the November 1941 cover of Future Science

This image, above, is an animated GIF. See the SWF.

Future Science Animated
I recently made my first swf file. The image to the left is an animated gif. The gif format is fine for small and simple animations, but the 256 color depth leads to annoying pixilation with large color gradients. I've long wanted to try swf animations as an alternative to gif.

The animated gif shown to the left has only 7 images. My first swf was made from a Macintosh .mov video file, so it has much smoother transitions between the 7 different images that I started with. I still don't know how to instruct a web browser on how to control how large an swf is displayed on the screen.

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