Here's a range of character cards based on the format of the Weetabix Asterix: His Friends and Foes promotion from 1975. The characters are from an idea I developed for an animated sitcom in the early 2000s and I was curious to see how they would lend themselves to this format.
Retrograde 5 was to be a kind of British Futurama, pitched as This Life set aboard Deep Space 9, focusing on the lives and loves of a team of time-raiders rather than lawyers and a homage to camp sci-fi of yesteryear - particularly Barbarella, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and the 1980 Flash Gordon. There was some interest from a couple of production companies but, perhaps unsurprisingly, it was never green lit.
The character visuals were generated in 2006 using an online tool called Hero Machine (the first version, later referred to as Hero Machine Classic) which, being Flash-based, no longer functions. Unless you have access to something like an ancient Apple Mac G4, which I do, managed to boot up and ran the program offline to make some tweaks.
Getting the files to a modern computer was another challenge as Hero Machine Classic had no image export function. You design your character and then take a screen shot when happy with it. On a 1999 Power Mac screenshots were saved as now obsolete PICT files, which bizarrely do open in some modern vector based applications even though the PICT files are bitmap rather than vector images.
As the G4's cd-drive no longer works, burning the files to disc to bounce over to my PC wasn't an option. It wouldn't recognise phones or usb sticks when attached either. This obstacle was overcome by compressing the collected PICT files into an exe file using that trusty relic DropStuff and copying them to floppy discs (max capacity 1.4MB!) using an external drive which, oddly, it would recognise.
The joys of old tech. Kind of fitting considering Retrograde 5 was envisioned to be set in a nostalgia-obsessed future!
