Monday 6 December 2010

A Guide To The Unicorns of the Internet

A Round-Up of Evil, Robotic, Rainbow, Sparkly, Geeky and Dismembered Unicorns

Unicorns are classic mythological horned horses/deer/kirin/dainty cloven hooved things, beloved by two audiences. Little girls are enthralled with the pretty, dainty, magical horses - as a quick search for Unicorns on Zazzle and Amazon will show in a scary way.

The other unicorn-loving audience does have its "Pretty horse" lovers, true, but the major part of it has recognised the most important bit of the unicorn. It has a bloody great horn and can stab things. Who is this enlightened audience? Why - the internet, of course!




The internet loves unicorns. They're everywhere. From happy sparkly unicorns being ridden by sparkly, doe eyed, beautiful yaoi boys, to beefed-up, psychotic, robotic killers, unicorns appear everywhere! We love them so much, we want to play with them, eat them, draw them, wear them!


sparkly fake joke unicorn spam meat thinkgeek tinI got an email from ArchMage today about ThinkGeek's tinned unicorn meat - apparently if you want to import it into Germany, you better not write Unicorn on the package. Or meat. Or else label it 'JOKE. Not Real!" ... or include a Deutsch-English dictionary with 'Unicorn: fictional" bookmarked and highlighted!
"Canned Unicorn Meat" Gift Delayed at German Border as Rare Meat

And then this evening, someone on Squidoo posted in the forums about the joke 'prize' (of the same unicorn meat) that you get awarded at a certain level.

This reminded me of how many unicorns I've been encountering and writing about lately (mostly amusing), so I figured I'd make a Unicornic Blog!

There's the ThinkGeek unicorn meat, of course - which started as an April Fool's Joke, but is now sold as 'real' canned meat with mixed-up sparkles. Actually, it's a dismembered toy unicorn in a can - reminiscient of the dismemberable Black Knight plushie!

The Sisters at Radiant Farms have dedicated their lives to nursing these elegant creatures through their final days. Taking a cue from the Kobe beef industry, they massage each unicorn’s coat with Guinness daily and fatten them on a diet comprised entirely of candy corn.


If you like the look of the tasty meat and want to serve up your own, well, there's a spin-off ThinkGeek Prime Cuts of Unicorn t-shirt that you can buy - ideal as a guide for serving up a nice serving of prime love-filled unicorn steak and avoiding the slightly tasteless, chewier cuts of superglue meat. There's a (rip off?) version on Zazzle, too.

Next up is the flash game, Robot Unicorn Attack. Robot Unicorn Attack is as addictive, annoying and happy and harmonious and harmony, harmony oh looove...

Your dreams did not come true... score/credits screen after dying


...

Wait, where was I? Oh yes, it's as always want to be with yo-aargh!. Addictive. Yes. Happy rainbow flash game of doom. You can basically sum it up with this graph.




I wrote a lens on it, and that's doing very well, I'm happy to say. Which is how I know that there's now a heavy metal AND a Christmas version coming out/available for iPhones. Basically the same game, just with different endless songs and appearances. There's a Chase Your Dreams t-shirt and a 'loading screen' Robot Unicorn Attack T-Shirt from ThinkGeek out finally/already. There are also a couple of AdultSwim designs available.

The Robot Unicorn was probably based off Starlite - the happy, sparkly, rainbow maned flying horse from the Rainbow Brite cartoon. The pretty horsey with the colourful mane has also been lovingly recreated by artists across the internet.

Rainbow Brite's Horse Starlite
Yeah... join with me in a resounding collective "Stereotypicaooooh pretty...."

The designs of Starlite and the rest of the characters were revamped recently, from the pudgy cute little round 1980 cartoon characters, to sleeker, older, prettier, more manga-influenced characters.

OLD

NEW



On the topic of 'pretty horsies', The Last Unicorn has been loved for years, as a beautiful, classic animated film in a time when there weren't so many, and fan art and references to Almathea abound across the net. I've done my part by adding Almathea/Disney femslash to the Disney femslash collection *cackles*

Sadly, I haven't actually seen this famous film, apart from YouTube excerpts and for years thought it was the book The Little White Horse, by Elizabeth Goudge (because I could not fathom a famous book that I hadn't read, much les not even heard of!)

The AVENGING UNICORN PLAY SET is well up there in awesomeness - the Avenging Narwhal is even more awesome, as it impales endanged species (the unicorn less imaginately is impaling people), but sadly no longer available.
avenging unicorn playset


There's this awesome animated screensaver from The Truth about the death rate of smokers, which I downloaded many years ago and spent hours looking for recently. All I found were a couple of screenshots, and the original download site... which doesn't always actually work for me! I did finally get it to download (weird browser issues? The site itself? Dunno. But I finally have it again!)

It features badly drawn but apparently content unicorns, that jump back and forth between two clouds, floating in a pale pink sky with a giant rainbow arcing down across it...

The Awesome Unicorn Screensaver of RAINBOWS

... and 30% (or some similar smoking death statistic) miss, and either fall to their deaths, get struck by lightning or crash into the cloud. The corpse then falls to the ground and burns or decays into a skeleton. The longer it runs, the larger the pile of skeletons below...


And on this topic of horrible medical conditions, let us segue into the internet classic, Charlie the Unicorn.




And then there's this mysterious cutie
HELLO my name is the Unicorn of your dreams



And to round off, have some general unicorn art and linkage

  • Two of my favourite rainbow/ robot unicorns, for originality and execution.
Rainbow Stallion print
Rainbow Stallion by Unicorn_Dream
View more Rainbow Posters

Steampunk Unicorn Damask Poster print
Steampunk Unicorn Damask Poster by redrevvy
Shop the other art at zazzle


The steampunk unicorn actually reminds me of the young adult series by Tanith Lee , which features giant mechanical unicorns.





And I've been writing this for about three hours (admittedly, while being distracted by Eufloria) so I'm going to suddenly stop, with no real conclusion now.

edit: And now, of course, there are the unicorns of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.

Twilight Sparkle and Rarity.
My Little Pony Basic Rarity the UnicornMy Little Pony Basic Twilight Sparkle

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