A Little Lost Along The Way

"...I'm only findin' my way back from where I've been...don't know where I've been."

I had to create some new Randall fanart, with all the buzz surrounding his role in the upcoming prequel to "Monsters, Inc.", "Monsters University.
Now, if you've been underneath a rock for the past two weeks or so, here's the deal: Disney-Pixar finally released some official pics of young Randall "Randy" Boggs(as he will be known in MU), as well as a trailer and a promo video on YouTube, both of which give us brief, but oh-so-tantalizing, glimpses of Randall in his college days. From what we can tell so far, Randall used to wear glasses, big, round, Coke-bottle lens glasses. He apparently was Mike Wazowski's roommate early in their college stay, and quite likely his friend. His official profile/description states that he started college with high hopes of "fun, making friends and fraternity parties", in spite of an "embarrassing disappearing habit" that threatens to derail his Scaring potential if he can't get it under control. There is NOTHING, absolutely ZIP, that so much as insinuates that Randall is evil, sneaky, underhanded or in any way a negative individual. Everything so far has shown him to be a nerdy little guy, friendly, perhaps quite shy, and insecure about his own Scaring ability due to suddenly changing colors to "disappear" into any background, perhaps when nervous or put on the spot. This of course supports what I've maintained all along: Randall is NOT inherently evil, as many of his haters have claimed. He started out as an ordinary, albeit nerdy/geeky sort of guy.
So...what the heck happened? A lot of people are figuring that something bad is going to happen to him him MU, to sour him and especially to turn him against Mike and Sulley, something tragic. Perhaps. OR, he might simply fall into "bad company", and will be negatively influenced gradually, maybe while trying to shake his nerdy image to become a seriously scary monster. From the looks of his fraternity brothers in Roar Omega Roar, I'd wager that they will have a hand at least in a change of attitude for impressionable young Randy. Even in the original movie, Randall struck me as someone who is desperate to fit in and be accepted by his peers and gain their respect; he just doesn't know how to do it, and he also came across as someone who is trying to overcome something-whether it was his previous nerd image, or worse, I don't know, but Randall is trying to prove himself for more reasons that just to make more money or get more points than someone else. I always felt that there was a much deeper reason there, or, as someone wrote on Tumblr, an "undercurrent of hurt" that the sharper viewers could catch. I can easily understand how Randall could have simply "snapped" in MI, because I can understand what would have been involved in designing and building the Scream Extractor for Waternoose, and I know the effects of that sort of stress first-hand. I live it, in fact, every day. Still, there must have been something in that rather fragile psyche to set the stage for that eventual meltdown, some event or events that took that innocent, wide-eyed kid with that sweet, friendly, but shy smile to that angry, frustrated, bitter and reactive adult we saw in MI. I just hope, with so much of my own deeply personal reasons, that director Dan Scanlon and Pixar will not yank the proverbial rug out from under me and the other Randall fans, and have some "see, he really WAS evil all along" plot twist, but from the photos to the merchandise, I really don't see that happening. For the first time, I'm actually looking forward to this movie, that it will vindicate what so many of Randall's fans have believed.
Randall is no saint. I've never tried to portray him as such. He did some bad things, really bad, but just how much was of his own free will and how much was due to outside influences or deeper emotional issues that perhaps will have their origins in MU, is debatable. The older I get, the more crap I go through(like the absolute Hell I'm going through right now), the less I believe in true "free will". We're more influenced by our environment and our "animal instincts" than many of us like to believe. My biggest issue has always been that of all the characters in "Monsters, Inc." who did some bad things, RANDALL is the only one who actually gets severely punished. He's the whipping boy, the scapegoat, whom Disney-Pixar has been holding up for the last 12 years, saying, "see how EVIIIL and BAAAD he is? Don't you just HATE HIM?"
Therefore, my biggest question for Randall's part in MU is not going to be what happens to him in college that perhaps changes his outlook, but whether or not Pixar will leave us fans hanging, wondering of Randall's ultimate fate. We were left with an image of him being savagely beaten with a shovel in a tiny trailer-camper on a Louisiana bayou...mistaken for an alligator, in a part of the Human World where people EAT alligators. Randall was basically lynched by two of his fellow monsters, thrown into a trailer with a bloody butcher knife and a meat cleaver on the wall, and I've no doubt that it was the intent of Mike and Sulley that Randall wold be brutally tortured, slaughtered, butchered and eaten. They just didn't want the literal blood on THEIR hands. Not MY idea of heroes, folks! So, that's what we were left with...and where is the point in showing that Randall was really a nice guy, a sweet kid with hopes and dreams, just to have him apparently meet such a horrible fate without even the due process that the worst criminals in our world would receive? It would seem to be a horrible travesty not to resolve what happened to him in MI.

Well, this pic...I drew it on copier paper on a clipboard while teaching, using a cheap mechanical pencil and some equally cheap colored pencils. I'm not even sure why I just colored parts of it, other than his eyes, because they are such a lovely shade of green that it seems shameful not to show that. I wanted to basically show him coming "full circle", able to finally put his past behind him, and come to terms with it at least, to be able to acknowledge that he *&^%ed up, big-time, that he could have hurt a lot of people, that HE was hurt by a lot of people, and be able to find enough closure with the whole incident to be able to move on as much as possible, emotionally and physically. The scars-seen and unseen-will always be there as a reminder, but now he sees them more as signs of what he has overcome, including what what he'd become, rather than reminders of his failures and tragedies. Since he wore glasses in college, and thick-lensed glasses at that, I have to assume that Randall's eyesight is far from 20/20, so I gave him glasses here as an adult; I just upgraded them to a more grown-up, contemporary style indicative of his chronological and emotional maturity, and yes, they are bi-focals, if you look closely! And that coffee mug(Randall has always been a coffee junkie in my head-canon and in that of the much of his fandom)-it's purple with a gold fleur-de-lis. In the MU trailer, Randall has bed sheets and luggage that are purple, with what appears to be a pattern made up at least in part of gold Fleur-de-lis. Foreshadowing, perhaps, given that the official symbol of New Orleans and pretty much all of southern Louisiana is a gold Fleur-de-lis on a purple background?
I might do a full-color digital version of this later, if I can find time in between my own life being a virtual train wreck at the time. This movie, seriously, due to Randall's apparent role, is the brightest little ray of light in what is a seriously bleak situation. I know it seems stupid to pin such hopes to a movie, to a fictional character, but now more than ever I feel such a strong connection to this guy.
And I have to throw in a shout-out to Gary Allan, whose songs are helping me to survive right now. I hope you're right, Gary, and this storm will eventually run out of rain.

pitbulllady