Damfino -- would that be a Buster Keaton reference?

"Where are we?"

"Damfino!"

I like the snow-bound atmosphere in this drawing....


Mark

correct! you should see my deviantart account (http://willows-storm.deviantart.com), it's filled with chaplin, keaton, the marx brothers.. i love all of that old stuff. and from what your user page says, you like old stuff too, though it doesnt mention anything in particular.

By the way, I've just visited your User Page... and my question has been answered. :)

XD haha you will find alot of Buster references in my artwork, especially when my character Harp is concerned. The train in this pic was modeled and colored to look like The General. I didn't want to give it the same name on its plaque, so I put in a different Buster reference. It works for the train cuz half the time the engineers dont know where they are anyway, especially in a snowstorm or fog.

LOL btw, I didn't think anybody would notice the Buster stuff, it surprised me to find someone on FA who knew of him!

Which is rather sad, when you think about it. After all, I've wondered for years if, without Keaton, there would have been a Wile E. Coyote; in fact, many of the Chuck Jones cartoons seem to owe quite a bit to Keaton, in the gestures of their characters and in the often elaborate "set ups" of their gags.

So true.. and even today everyone knows each gag down to the point of it being overly boring and cliche, that stereotypical "cartoon humor". They'd believe that nothing in the Looney Tunes world could really happen because they are cartoon characters and can do things people can't do, like survive a long fall or bend like rubber. Little do they know that they were based off of one superhuman of a fella who could do literally ANYTHING.

He paid for it heavily, though. I once read somewhere -- in the Rudi Blesh biography? -- that Keaton was so badly and thorougly bruised from all of his stunt work, that he never went to swimming parties because he worried that people would think his wife was beating him.

And at one point (after SHERLOCK JR, I think), he went to a doctor because of headaches and discovered that one of his stunts had actually broken his neck...!

Yet so much of the fascination of Keaton's films is that the actual star is actually doing what you see on the screen, without stuntmen and without modern stunt protection. It adds an exhiliration and magic that modern films never quite provide, because we *know* that the stunts are not quite real.

Dunno how much I can trust Blesh.. he may have lived with the Keatons for awhile, but he also has spread many rumors that are untrue too (This site said that Blesh wrote as if Buster had no life after MGM and harped on his misfortune to bring tears to his readers, http://www.busterkeaton.com/bookshelf.htm). I think two things are playing a factor with your swimming party statement, first of all he was deathly afraid of groups of people, and second of all, that sounds like one of his jokes which could have been taken as him being serious if you don't know him enough. Around what year was that statement said?

Yeh, he did get a fracture there, he broke it when he fell from the watertower (he didn't anticipate the water would come out as fast as it did and it literally threw him down to the ground) and when he landed, the back of his neck slammed into the railroad track. But like usual he just got up and ran away and everything was fine. Many years later he went to the docs to check it out and thats when they scanned him and found he fractured his neck awhile ago, and the only thing Buster could trace it back to was the time he fell in "Sherlock Jr".

That's what I truely love about him It was so heartbreaking when he went to MGM and had to conform to other stuntmen doing his stunts for him and that he couldnt do anything that he was known for. In his own silent films, the only people that usually got tied into his stunts were his leading ladies, and they either were replaced with a dummy ("Our Hospitality") and his own sister Louise as a stunt-double ("Steamboat Bill Jr.")

If you should ever find a video called "A Hard Act To Follow", get it immediaely. They are rare and hard to get. It tells you everything i've just told you, plus it has tons of stories from Eleanor (last wife), Donald O Connor, and other people telling anecdotes of what they remembered. Fun stuff!