The whole idea of this strange and funny departure from both canons arose simply from the fact that I discovered the Phantom of the Opera (and this was an event for me). Before that, I had only heard the main theme of this musical piece on the radio as a child and I liked it, but I didn’t know English at the time. It wasn’t until years later that I began to understand English by ear, but by that time I was already up to my ears in the lore of Crash and planning the “Crash Revolution” (which meant a complete redesign of everything-Crash to a more “kawaii” anime style). When I learned that the musical was based on a book, I went off to read the book about the “opera ghost”, and it was the longest read of my life. Not because the book is boring or too long. It’s because I read it with an English dictionary on hand.
The book turned out to be quite interesting, and much more complete in terms of content than the musical. Given my burnout at the time, and as a result a corresponding type of inspiration, one evening (I’m pretty sure it was evening), I drew this cute sketch:
Yes, Cortex and N.Gin are the best villains in the Crash Universe (according to my personal view). Because there is no one to take care of them, they sometimes take care of each other – for example, in this picture N.Gin is being read a bedtime story. The fairytale about the “Phantom of the Opera”, which inspired his thematic dreams where he was the main villain – the notorious Phantom 😁 Much like it was in the story of the “Phantom” called Erik, there was a girl in N.Gin’s life he would love to conquer, but was completely unable to do so. In N.Gin’s dream, Coco Bandicoot became Christine Daae and Crash became her childhood friend, Raoul.
Since N.Gin doesn’t have too many associations in his head, especially after the rocket incident, there are some quirky occurrences like Tiny as Madame Giry:
Sure enough, Tiny is terrifying N.Gin even in his dreams. A couple of other mutants turned into the opera managers:
Lab assistants became stokers, Nina – little Meg. At first I wanted to cast Leo Koto as Buquet, but he’s an unofficial character and it isn’t witty to put him in this role.
To correct this situation, I gave the role of Buquet to Polar. In particular because he is absolutely impossible to hang 😆
All in all, it was terribly amusing and funny. In addition, I’ve got an absolutely official reason to draw Victorian clothes (it is blatantly obvious that I have a weakness for this kind of fashion). I don’t know if anyone else will find this project funny, because it will be amusing mainly for people who know the game series about Crash well… But I had to write it down anyway, because at that moment I realized that the creative world is much larger and there are many more subjects for drawing than I thought before, having fixated on a narrow range of games…
