The RAU Gallery Switched at Birth? Part 2

PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3


Nucleo McRaven

Goemon

Submitted by Crawl and 1000.

FO's Comment: Crawl tells me that a lot of my characters look like Goemon. Unless the theory I gave before is correct, I have no idea why. Especially since Nucleo, unlike Tomi, wasn't even influenced by anime. On a side note, Prof. McRaven has so many look-a-likes, I'm beginning to think he should have his own dedicated page.




Samantha

Flying Omelette

FO's Comment: I don't think I look as much like Samantha as Crawl says I do (no, she wasn't based on me), but I have to admit that we seem to be in a similar predicament here...




Seth

Bele & Lokai (Star Trek)

FO's Comment: Geez, I'm surprised I didn't notice this earlier. Those Star Trek guys were actually submitted for another SAB entry, but I took it down because I didn't really agree with it. However, this one is MUCH closer! So close, it's frightening.




Seth (face only)

Phanto (SMB2)

FO's Comment: Either the Yin-Yang look was all the rage in the 80's, or Seth's attempting to compete with Professor McRaven and Harken in the Great SAB Race.




Beorthe

Meatwad (ATHF)

Submitted by Junus Crowe, "I was just browsing through your scrapbook and noticed that your character Beorthe (the big round rock guy with the hands) reminds me a lot of Meatwad from Aqua Teen Hunger Force. I can't quite explain it but it works better when Meatwad's arms are visible."

FO's Comment: I couldn't find a picture of Meatwad with his arms visible so this will have to do. Actually, I think the Eyerock boss of Super Mario 64 reminds me a lot more of Beorthe than Meatwad does, but I don't have a picture of him available.




Seth

Richard Lewis

FO's Comment: Maybe I'm just going insane, but when I found this old sketch of Seth, I couldn't help but think he looked like someone...someone I'd seen before...and, then, yes, I remembered who it was. He looks like actor/comedian Richard Lewis! Okay, just like with the Nucleo/John Kerry one, his chin's not as big (which probably has more to do with the fact that I almost never draw large chins on my characters), but the rest of him is surprisingly similar!




Ghestov Sal-Yun

Ian McKellen

FO's Comment: This is just...bizarre. I originally didn't want to post any of my old pictures of Ghestov because I felt the design was too ridiculous. But having recently seen X-Men 3: The Last Stand, I was taken aback by how much he looks like Ian McKellen as Magneto, especially when Sir Ian wears the helmet. (But thank goodness it doesn't have those dumb horns.)




Ghestov Sal-Yun

The Gremlin (Looney Tunes)

Submitted by Deathamster, "Not that FO needed to feel any more self-conscious about the way he looks, but I can't help it...Ghestov reminds me of that Gremlin from the Looney Tunes."

FO's Comment: Ha ha ha! That's great!




Crelo Kobold
(Image Arcane)

Trooper
(Magic of Scheherazade)

Moblin
(Legend of Zelda)

Trooper & Crelo Kobold part submitted by Codie Martin.

FO's Comment: I've known for some time that Crelo, Bartholomew, and the other Kobolds resemble Moblins, on account of them all being armored bulldog-like monsters, but I had never even thought about the Troopers from MOS before. I'm not sure if the Troopers were inspired by the Moblins or not, but it certainly seems like it.




Honen Calzoun

Jinx (Super Mario RPG)

FO's Comment: Maybe a bit of a stretch, but when I found this image of Jinx from Super Mario RPG, he reminded me of certain pictures of Honen Calzoun. It's something about the expression of the eyes, the "horn" on his head, the pale white skin color and spherical body parts.




Nucleo McRaven

Tomba

Submitted by Codie Martin.

FO's Comment: Further proof for the good professor's theory that mountain devils evolved from humans...or at the very least, pink-haired prehistoric cave-dwelling humans. (For some reason, the Nucleo McRaven ones are always hilarious.)




Nucleo McRaven

Bobcat Goldthwait

Submitted by CataTonic9

FO's Comment: I'm still trying to decide if this is the greatest Prof. McRaven SAB ever or just the most disturbing. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that a character whose design was somewhat based on a mountain lion would resemble a guy whose name is "Bobcat". I just hope I don't start picturing the good professor talking with Goldthwait's voice.




Nucleo McRaven

The Barbarian Brothers

Submitted by Lefty, "Many moons ago I sent a picture of Image Arcane's mountain devils (Cleo?) to one of my friends, because they looked ALMOST like The Barbarian Brothers (stars of 4 amazingly goofy movies in the 80s). He agreed there was a definite resemblance."

FO's Comment: It seems like I just keep getting sent things that look like Nucleo McRaven, and they just keep getting funnier and/or weirder.




Hermes

Scooter (The Muppets)

FO's Comment: Hermes was a hermit crab from the RAU who usually had a peanut shell instead of a snail shell, but occasionally wore other objects on his back, too. I don't think his resemblance to Scooter is at all a coincidence, considering how much The Muppet Show had an influence on that comic. Everything from the shape of his noseless face, to his floppy red hair, and orangey color.




Emmel

Niddler (The Pirates of Dark Water)

FO's Comment: Despite the eerily-similar color scheme, this one is coincidence. My oldest drawings of Emmel (who is a creature similar to an archaeopteryx, not a monkey) were done long before this cartoon existed. (Boy, I'm really dating myself, aren't I?) Although Emmel, like Hermes, was very, very much Muppets-influenced. I seem to be picking up a hint of Animal in her design.




FOX News Chief Roger Ailes

Crelo Kobold

FO's Comment: Whenever I see that guy, I expect him to start wildly shaking his face back and forth like Boss Nass in The Phantom Menace, and then doggy-slobber goes flying everywhere like in the movie, Beethoven.




Garfield

Nucleo McRaven

FO's Comment: I admitted somewhere in the Scrapbook that I learned to draw cat-like feet from Garfield (Garfield was one of the few cartoon cats that had paws so gigantic, you could theoretically stick them on a humanoid character and they'd be proportioned just about right). Well, now I also confess that this particular panel of Nucleo falling flat on his face was inspired by a Garfield panel where he fell face-down into his food. Garfield has appeared that way so many times in the comics, that I don't know if it was this particular one here that I saw, but you get the idea.




Princess Hordkha (Drakkhen)

Princess Cygnus

FO's Comment: This is a weird one. Both dragon princesses with blonde hair and one of those bellydancer-type dresses that hangs down in front. And if I hadn't gotten lazy with the sprite, Cygnus would've had wings and looked even more like Hordhkha, because she was supposed to have them.




Image Arcane

Jaxon Cat O'Ninetails

Submitted by Codie Martin

FO's Comment: Funny how I never noticed that...




Wanderer (Children of Mana)

Harken

Submitted by Magical Yard Gnome

FO's Comment: If I didn't know better, I'd think I just got ripped off...




Nago & White Cat (Kirby 3)

Kiini

FO's Comment: What on earth is it with the RAU Gallery's cats?? Harken has a million-and-one lookalikes, Leon was Switched at Birth with Pero and Doraemon, and now this! I kind of, sort of knew that Kiini looked a little like Nago, but I had completely forgotten about the white cat until I just recently replayed the game. If she had Nago's eyes and you removed her arms and gave her a longer tail, she'd pretty much BE Kiini. Kiini, btw, was inspired by a cat-shaped doorstop that I got from some mail-order catalog a long time ago (here's a scan of it). I also had never really picked up on just how much Nago looks like Kiini in the game's ending:

Maybe they had that same doorstop...




Tatjana (Arc the Lad 4)

Samantha

FO's Comment: I don't know how it's possible that I sat on this one for so long without ever noticing it before, but when I updated the RAU SAB and the Arc 4 SAB together in one night, I put 2-and-2 together. Tatjana always struck me as seeming somewhat familiar, but I could never place it. Now I realized that she sort of looks like Samantha. I even have some (really old) pictures of Samantha wearing a similar headset:



That drawing of Samantha is so old, it's from an untitled preliminary episode. (These were later retconned and not considered canon to the series.) She is one of the few characters that appeared in the prelims whose design I did not radically change over the years. Aside from the visual aspects, Sam and Tatjana have similar personalities and roles, too. They both start out on the villain's side, but are convinced through a main character's kindness to join the side of good (and in both cases after having been abandoned by their superiors). They're both really smart, scientific/techie types, they both seem to lack a sense of humor, and they're both wearing a lab coat (yeah, technically Sam's jacket is a lab coat, even though it's red.) Sam lacks Tatjana's hatred of all non-human beings, and Tatjana doesn't turn out to be an android anywhere in the story, but the similarities are striking, nonetheless.




Torque

Yorgie, Grundle & Rhindle
(Adventure)

FO's Comment: Time to let this cat out of the bag. The design of Torque and Flune, Honen Calzoun's righthand robotic henchmen, AKA the "Rope Demons", was inspired by the duck-like dragons of the Atari 2600 game, Adventure. I always thought the bodies of the dragons looked like ropes, so I drew what a dragon made out of rope would look like. Then I envisoned the head as being mechanical (since the body was rope, I figured it would have to be). And then I designed it so that it would balance itself on its tail (just like the Adventure dragons appear to).

This was not unusual for me. When I was really young, a lot of times I would take Atari 2600 sprites and draw what I thought they might possibly represent. Sometimes, my creations got pretty weird and far from the original mark. Unfortunately, I didn't save most of that artwork, and I wish I did so I could put it on the site. Anyway, when it came time to choose a couple of sidekicks for Dr. Calzoun, I went through my archives looking for inspiration and found these robotic rope-dragons. Considering that Honen invents robots, they seemed perfect for the role. I added body armor, rope-like arms, and did a general design clean-up for the resulting Torque & Flune models. Finally, I decided to make Torque red like Rhindle and Flune green like Grundle. I thought about making a yellow one to pay homage to Yorgie, too, but ultimately decided that two of these types of characters were enough.


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