parappa project conceptual breakdown

okay so if you're seeing this, the video is out in the world!!!! and I am excited to say yes... it was Parappa inspired. There are other fun easter eggs in there too so I wanted to make this post about the design influences and then another post in the next few days about how tf I did it lmao

TURNS OUT making a paper flat 2D character move around in 3D space is actually difficult... 

1-2. All the junkyard/spinning piles of stuff were a nod to an anime dom and I watched last year called Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! It's a story about these 3 high school girls who start an anime club that PRODUCES anime. It's a short 12 episode series but each character has her strengths and the OP song/visuals are forever engraved in my brain (easy breezy~!) so I was heavily influenced to draw like 100 random doodlebobs to put this together :)

3-5. Parappa toaster lmao. Dom actually was able to finesse one of these iconic grailed kitchen appliances for less than $100 (they go for like 300 I think) but yeah! It makes real toast with 3 different templates for toast designs. Naturally if we were going to make a Parappa aesthetically inspired video I HAD to make a reference to it. 

6-8. Okay the chess part was super spontaneous, we had to put together more scenes to make this look like a video game movie trailer and I had purchased this Karim Rashid chess set (same designer as our iconic couch) for Dom. He originally showed me in about 6 months ago? saying he wanted it but the prices were always over $100. Luckily my ebay notifications are fire and an auction popped up for a STEAL... 

so the chess game is an actual game that I replicated (yes I am a crazy person) from the 1997 match #6 between chess grandmaster Gary Karparov and IBM's computer Deep Blue. This game is iconic because it was the first time in history that a computer beat a grandmaster chess player. If anyone is crazy enough to slow it down and knows a lot about chess games... they should actually recognize it. As a bonus, I had Clio's online chess username show up as "deepblu99" :) ... because he's a robot dog and all that

9-10. Other easter eggs include the sonic I made for Julian's strayrats x sonic collab and the High Fructose design is actually a logo flip of the Fujiya logo.  as usual, all music is by the one and only domsolo & I pray I see an EP bc I don't think there's anything as tortuous as constantly hearing these fire beats and... not having anyway to play them ever. Yes, not even I have access to the beats lmao

OKAY so that was the breakdown... conceptually. I'm going to make a video doing a technical breakdown for you nerds that want to see what's going on under the hood~