The Gasbags are by fart my favorite series by Rodney Matthews! I bought all 8 of these Christmas cards and they have more rich detail and vibrant color in person than you'd guess by looking at the online photos, really astonishingly beautiful art! I never knew that characters could be so simultaneously seriously cool and hysterically funny at the same time!
The designs of these characters are beautiful and very cool, kind of menacing in a fun rascally way. However the fart jokes make me laugh intensely and actually add a great quality to these characters' personalities and don't reduce the menacing cool factor at all in their case, it all feels like it is balanced just so, so that it all fits beautifully together! I did giggle a bit at some of the poetry, but the real strong point of this series is in the absolutely amazing artwork, these characters are perfect for me, just the right balance of everything I like in cartoony characters!
I am a little bit distressed by the seemingly limited availability of products from this series, I don't like the idea of when they sell out that that will be the permanent end of being able to get these products. I feel like for as rare it is for people who love prankster humor to get decent things with characters like dragons, rats, dinosaurs, crocodiles, boars, birds, and stuff like that if that is really their favorite kind of humor and character mix, like it is mine, it should really be more permanently available like print on demand. I am still upset that I can't find a way to buy all of the animated ring tones that were on Mobibase and Hands-On Mobile, I don't think Hands-On Mobile even exists anymore and Mobibase said they deleted them years ago because they no longer have the rights to them.
I hope that that means that Rodney Matthews still has all of those video files and is the new rights owner, since he is who created the characters, so I hope he will release them all to be publicly bought because it is DEFINITELY way too rare to get actual animations from this series. The screen-saver GIFs, profile, and background pictures would be nice to be able to buy again for phones too, but I mostly want the animated videos with sound, even just to watch for laughter's sake on PC, so please, PLEASE, Rodney Matthews, please restore those. If you do, I will be exceedingly grateful to you for your help!
I hope the John Cleese and Happy Farter's Day cards and merch will be available again. I hope anything copyright related can be resolved so that Rodney Matthews can make the great content of this series able to be publicly purchased or viewed again. Rodney Matthews' old website even had a section for Gasbags characters being added to a gallery monthly, I still think there should be more books of this series too, and actual physical copies of them.
I would love to know the names of all of these characters, I know Rotrat, The Aimless Scruttock, Fartridge, and Combustadile are some of my favorite ones, but there really should be a chart of all of these characters and their names. I think The Gasbags deserve an animated TV show and plushies with mechanisms like self inflating whoopee cushions in them to make them realistically fart by blowing air out their bottoms' openings instead of an electric noise maker. Those are much less funny or good because of repeated limited noises and battery concerns, the way I described, they could have infinite new, more realistic sounds that could be controlled because they would realistically fart!
If that plushie idea is used, please base it on how the official farting Puft plush worked from the game Oxygen Not Included. That was the funniest farting plush I ever saw because it was one of the only ones that got the mechanism exactly right for that kind of product. If you want a TV show produced of The Gasbags, please ask me if I'd like to work on it as I am an animator who would love to animate these kinds of characters and jokes!
Please make an effort to make as much previously existing Gasbags content across all official old sites available again. I really love all of Rodney Matthews' art, but am very disappointed that this series is so underrepresented when it is my favorite series of his. I will buy whatever I can from The Gasbags series and will always support it!
I hope Rodney Matthews understands how much he improved the lives of his fans with his amazing artwork like this, the Traveler's Tales logo, and all of his other great work, especially the dragons and dinosaurs! As far as I'm concerned, all of Rodney Matthews' art is worthy of a five star rating! Rodney Matthews is a star!
Keep being AWESOME!
Best regards,
Adam E. Wyeth
P.S. Even though I bought these individually, I'm positively reviewing these too assuming they are the exact same products, just bundled.
