This is Tyler, my best friend from high school, and me.
We've both always loved art, especially when it involves inventing our own characters to draw.
Though Tyler was two grades ahead of me in school, at one point we had the same study hall, so we would draw pictures for each other, make each other laugh, and inevitably get yelled at by a nearby teacher.
I don't know when this started, but eventually we ended up collecting the drawings in a folder. Once we were both in college, we began a part-time ownership system of the folder, so we'd each get to spend quality time with it.
But the years passed, I graduated from college, and I completely lost track of the dang folder and pretty much forgot about it!
Fast-forward to about a week ago: I was at my parents' house looking through boxes of my college stuff when I FOUND THE FOLDER. I knew right away I needed to share this treasure with as many people as possible. I mean, it's basically a time capsule from the mid-2000s!
So here we go. I might as well start by letting you know that we were both OBSESSED with The Little Mermaid in school. We created a harmonization of "Part of Your World" and sang it all the time. Years later, we would see The Little Mermaid on Broadway. This is Lil' Merm, like, if Ariel was a punk singer.
Aaand...the same concept, but slightly more complex, and also terrifying.
Here, Ariel and Ursula are depicted under some alarming circumstances in an ad for Frank's Fishy Grotto.
This depiction is the truest to the film: It's the "Poor Unfortunate Souls" scene, but as a diagram?
But because we were both into ~theater~ (Tyler more than me — he's now an actor!) a lot of these drawings ended up resembling elaborate posters for plays and musicals.
Take, for example, Miller's Gazebo: On Ice. This is by Tyler. "The gazebo nobody wanted..." But why? Really makes me want to see an ice skater playing a sad gazebo.
And then there's my masterpiece, The Phoney Poodles of Paris. "By night, they're poodles, by day they're people..." Wow. Count me in!
This is maybe the only one I've remembered over the past ~13~ years. Oh, Confessions of a Cockney Flower Girl, you are my favorite fake play.
Veruka's Revenge: The Visit to the Factory is clearly a very compelling sequel. I don't know why I always wrote so much text on every one of these, but I assure you, it's not even worth trying to read.
Flo's Umbrella is definitely the most beautiful of all these. Tyler was way better at this than me.
In stark contrast to that, let's examine a movie (I think) about an unidentified killer neck. Yeah, a neck.
This miniseries clearly takes inspiration from Sweeney Todd.
Sixpence is "a story of love, robbery, and early night clubs in 1800s London!"
You may have noticed that a lot of Tyler's posters have "The Alamo Casting Company" on them. Well, that was the fake casting company associated with many of these productions. I even have some letters between Alamo and another casting company I made up. We were meticulous.
But there weren't just drawings in that folder. There were also some letters — long, nonsensical letters. I've cropped a couple.
And then there was some downright random stuff, like this:
And this library card pocket (left) and all the stuff found inside of it (right), all of which I 100% do not remember creating or receiving.
But what happened after that, you say? Well, we tried making videos, and I tried wearing hats. Neither really worked out.
So there you have it! Here's to friendship! Here's to being weird with your friends! And here's to Lil' Merm!
