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Brakawolf — NBN
#cascade #footrotflats #gsd #plush #plushie #plushies #footrot_flats #bordercollie #douglascuddletoys
Published: 2016-09-30 16:55:36 +0000 UTC; Views: 503; Favourites: 6; Downloads: 0
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For the second time the NBN (National Broadband Network) guys came to connect fibre optic to the premises stuff, and for the second time they went away. Meanwhile the plush which were in the corner of the room where the internal box would go had to be moved... look, you don't want to know about this. Just enjoy the photo.Fabulous Facts: there are five entirely different Footrot Flats Plush in this picture (I have twelve)
BTW I took this photo on a camera I picked up from Cash Converters last week for about a third what it's selling for on Ebay. Now and then they stuff up.
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Comments: 3
They're all so gorgeous! 
I hadn't heard of Footrot Flats before you posted the picture of your t-shirt. Is it a comic strip or a cartoon?
Also, congrats on the camera! I love when things work out like that.
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Her ears... well, if they're wired, it's extremely subtly done, because they're nice and soft. I'd have to guess 'no'.
Footrot Flats was a syndicated cartoon strip, like 'Peanuts' (actually Charles Schultz and Murray Ball were mutual admirers, and Schultz wrote the intro for the one FF book that was published in the USA). It started in NZ in about 76 and ran in Australia and NZ in papers til the mid 90's, though there was such a backlog of unpublished strips that the books kept coming out til at least 2000.
Unusually it's the later books, which sold in lesser numbers, which have become highly sought after, particularly since US fans largely discovered the strip after it had finished. Some of the last books still go for three-figure sums now and then.
There was an animated movie in about 1987.
Murray Ball retired the strip when it was still highly popular, citing different reasons at different times, though a consistent one was the death of his own dog Finn, who had come to be the inspiration for the main character.
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To anyone stumbling across this - I should have added, I think this idea about the death of Finn having something to do with the end of FF has grown up since then, as the last new strip appeared in 1994, and Finn lived til 1998. For that matter the idea that Finn was 'the inspiration' for Dog can only be partially true, as the strip was around six years old when Finn was born. He influenced Dog's character after that point, though.
Back in 1994, Murray definitely did cite the fact that his own dog was growing old as a reason for ending the strip - but he also mentioned his disappointment with the direction of New Zealand politics, and that he felt FF was becoming a sort of fantasy about a New Zealand that didn't exist any more. In a 2009 interview he revealed this was a major factor, and that his decision to stop the strip had begun with a lurch to the right in NZ politics as long ago as 1989.
"It meant if I carried on doing the strip as I'd been doing it for years and years, I was starting to tell fibs about the country.
``I had to make a decision: do I change the strip and follow the country; or do I stop the strip?
``And I decided to stop the strip, because I loved the characters and didn't really want them doing the sort of things they'd do in farming as farming had developed.''
- Sunday Star Times interview, Jan 2009
In a 2002 interview he stated that continuing the strip would be ""betraying a society that was gone and lying to the people".
Nevertheless I don't want to play down the fact that Murray was truly devastated when Finn did die in 1998. I just don't think Finn's ageing was the major reason for ending the strip in 1994. It was more of am explanation that didn't upset fans or the public - and there was considerable and genuine trauma over that 1994 announcement. It was a real bombshell; probably nobody outside of his family saw it coming.
Another, even less publicly palatable reason, which really was becoming obvious even in the later strips if you looked for it, was the fact that Murray was starting to feel stifled by FF, and presumably wanted to do something else, particularly something more political (which after all was what he had mostly done before FF). There is an interview out there somewhere - perhaps an audio one - where he talks about this (at least the feeling of growing to feel that FF was something of chore, if that's not too harsh). I don't want to paraphrase it too much from memory, so I'll leave it.
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