Those of you who know the movie may find the images in this strip strangely unfamiliar. That's because half of them come from another movie.

I had a very difficult problem with the Oracle. Why? In Sinbad of the Seven Seas, there is a conspicuous lack of connecting footage. I'm fairly certain this was one of the parts of the movie that was unfinished when the film was shelved in 1986. The girl's mother tells us they all go to see the Oracle, and we hear what the Oracle says, but visually we only see two shots, neither of which has any of our characters in it. That's because both shots were stock footage from other movies.

We see the "I have four toes" frame from Episode 55, and we see the close-up of the Oracle. That's it. No shots of the ship docking wherever the Oracle lives. No shots of any of the characters talking to him. Nothing. How was I supposed to adapt this part of the film into comic strips? I could have skipped the scene entirely, but that wouldn't be any fun.

Part of my answer was to steal reaction shots of Sinbad and his crew from other parts of the movie. But I wanted to do more than that, so I scoured the movies that the stock footage came from for additional shots.

As I said last week, the shot of the Oracle allegedly comes from unused footage for "Hercules and the Moon Men" (a great MST3K episode, by the way). I skimmed through the movie looking for material but couldn't find any. The other shot comes from Lou Ferrigno's "The Adventures of Hercules" (aka: Hercules II), and there I found all kinds of different and interesting angles of that set.

The shot cribbed for Sinbad was just a distant establishing shot. You can't really make anything out -- until you see the what the closer shots look like, and then you can see what the various amorphous blobs in the long shot are, too. All I had to do was Photoshop the Oracle into the various shots (a fun but tricky task for, say, the "Now we rumble" frame), and presto -- I had a real space for me to play in. As a bonus, I was even able to get some shots of Lou Ferrigno in the scene, and wearing similar clothing, too. He had a beard, and shorter and blacker hair, but from behind he could pass for Sinbad.

And I got these wonderful images of the woman bent backward over the boulder, which is surely the most comically uncomfortable position ever. She was screaming in the movie, of course, as she was to be offered as a sacrifice to a blue sparkly monster. But I was extremely amused to discover just how many of the individual frames made it look like she was laughing. So it was easy to turn her character around and make her a voluntary captive.

You might think I had her in mind when I wrote Episode 54, which tells the backstory of the Lonesome Dude and Blondie McGee. I hadn't. I just wanted to write a funny backstory with some exaggerated mythical imagery. It wasn't until later that I had this new character on my hands, and I had to decide who she was going to be. Well, duh -- this was clearly Blondie McGee!

She wasn't blonde, but never mind.