Far Side reenactments

Far Side Reenactments is a Flickr pool devoted to photographic stagings of Far Side strips. (Example a left by entitee.)
Far Side Reenactments (via Laughing Squid)

David Pescovitz is Boing Boing's co-editor/managing partner. He's also a research director at Institute for the Future. On Instagram, he's @pesco.

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rekoil

Didn’t fark.com do a photoshop contest on this theme a while back?
Ari B.

Little bullseye yarmulkes! I want one!
pilcrow

Can’t they be more seasonal and recreate some of the sublime snowmen from Calvin & Hobbes?
xerxy

Some of these are done really beautifully. Really should watch it as a slideshow.
Tom Hale

Those were hilarious – I like the trick spoon best. My kids are getting really tired of me holding a book upside down and saying, “Hey, this book was printed upside down!” Now I can add the trick spoon gag to my dumb dad act.
Santa’s Knee

“If we pull this off – We’ll eat like KINGS!!!”
alisong76

Bugger of a birthmark, Hal.
Anonymous

I don’t know why, but they don’t work in real life. My mother collected Far Side comics so I’ve seen most of them, but for the life of me I didn’t know what most of them were and they made no sense.
Anonymous

#8 Most of the problem seemed to be that Gary Larson often put the punchline in the title. So without the title, the images are just kind of… off.
Anonymous

@ #8,b.

Scratch that. It makes a LOT more sense if you don’t view it as a slideshow.

:)
Frank_in_Virginia

This is great, thanks for the call out!
Cpt. Tim

awesome. this will make me dig out my far side books and find more to do.

here’s one of the first ones i remember from when i was a kid, done from memory;
http://www.flickr.com/photos/captaintim/3156793647/
Kabur Naj

I love that these exist.

Gary Larson was a huge grump (or perhaps it was Andrews & McMeel) about the digital dissemination of his cartoons back in the early days of the intarwebs, and cracked down really hard on it. As far as I can tell, the main result was that the previously ubiquitous awareness of “The Far Side” in popular culture seems to have shrunken to almost nothing, and certainly so for anyone born after the mid-eighties. I’ve always thought this a great shame, because many of the gags in Far Side cartoons (at least before the strip became a contemptible self-parody) are absolutely classic.

If this Flickr stream results in just one young person seeking out a Far Side book and enjoying it enough to start sharing it with their friends, then Gary Larson should take note: You don’t have to participate in the digital age to benefit from it, but you could’ve benefitted far more if only you had embraced it for what it was rather than to stubbornly stick to your old world-view. (Easy to say in hindsight, I realize, but it really peeved me at the time. Scott Adams figured the web thing out right away, so in a sense it *was* a deliberate choice on Larson’s/A&M’s part to shun the internet. I think the world is the worse for it, and I’m certain that Larson’s lot is too.)