WINTER: Happy Tree - Kickle Cubicle Mon Amour

I will always love you, Kickle Cubicle...
And you will alway haunt my dreams, Giant Pirate Chicken.
Floating dead in icy waters. Face down.




Next to the Happy Tree






Kickle Cubicle for the Nintendo Entertainment System (1990) was one of the first games I rented from a video rental store. I did not finish it but it gave me a great deal of satisfaction. The game's mechanics were easy enough for me to handle and it provided me with small doses of success.Not like the ghastly Faxanadu where I failed at beating the first monster hopping around in front of the town's gate.
Somehow I never forgot about Kickle Cubicle. It is stored deep inside my head, like that moment when I first saw Mortal Kombat for the Super NES being played by some older kids in the mall.

There has to be a connection of some sort.
I was one these kids who tend to imitate shooting sounds and the piercing shrieks of the fallen while playing videogames and I always liked a hint of violence in my popular culture.
With Kickle Cubicle I could act out these urges:
Kickle Cubicle takes place in a hibernal realm of snowmen and pirate-chicken trying to mangle you. As a player you have the ability to freeze enemies with your breath, take the icy cubicle to kill other targets or kick them into water to form walkways.
You kick animals into the water to run across their frozen carcasses.
How much fun I had.
It was a mortal combat.

Strangely enough I have decided what I wanted to draw long before I even thought about all of this.
While doing some research I found this (right picture):



The American add for Kickle Cubicle not only shows traits of the time-honored MegaMan-tradition of pictoral fraud but also emphasizes the essentially gory nature of Kickle Cubicle.

I salute you, unkown advertising graphic designer!





..also: it is snowing right now.
Pretty.