THE LASTEST STATE OF THE ONION ADDRESS
Well, guys. This is gonna be my mostlastest STATE OF THE ONION that I get to share with you. Yup.
Great googilymoogily is my HappyHeart all full-up with ouchies even thinkingthoughts ‘bout it!! IKNOW!!
Basically, tomorrowtimes is when me plus Mirabelly get to say everythings we are feeling ‘bout going into retire-ational leisuretimes, so … for THIS here post, I am gonna let MUM plus POP say mostly everythings goings on in their brainmelons, K? K.
Luvluvlove you guys. Forever plus everever.
H❤️H❤️H❤️
The whole, entire Brindlebunch
A FINAL MESSAGE FROM MUM AND POP ❤️
Good grief! We’ve done this once already! How can this be so HARD!?
This actually took several days to write - off and on - as we repeatedly crumbled and had to stop, cry a bit and then come back and attempt to finish. We’ve been quite a mess, but we want to start by making clear that these emotions are even mix of HAPPINESS and SADNESS and that we have absolutely NOTHING to complain about because ….
These last 7 years that we’ve shared with you all have been a profound GIFT.
And it’s a gift that will continue to give us joy for as long as we live. …
Mum and Archie watching the sun set
Thank you for reading this final public message.
It’s a doozy only because we’ve got SO MANY FEELINGS TO PROCESS!
And because for those interested, we would like to give you a glimpse at our future too. It’s amazing how difficult it is to let go - even for a second time - but the fact is that the time has come for us to close Archie’s public life and to let him and Mirabelle enjoy retirement out of the public eye.
Make no mistake, we’ll still be visiting parks and their routines will not change all that much, but we’ve made the tough choice to keep any new adventures private from now on. Please know that this is not about wanting to sever our ties with YOU. Not at all. If we do lose touch with you, it’ll be a terrible side-effect, not the goal. We hope that doesn’t happen. The real goal is to move into the next chapter of our lives and to let Archie and Mirabelle relax and enjoy themselves. They’ve done so much and been through a lot and we both feel that we need to close this door to make room for a new door to open.
2020 has really sucked, hasn’t it? I mean, ”Great Googilymoogily” as Archie would say! We are not wealthy people and had to get really “creative” to pay the bills through most of this year. After it became obvious that the pandemic was going to be in our lives for a while, and we really started to become depressed by the whole thing, we made the choice to bring Archie out of retirement and try to spread a little love and light humour around. We pretended like Archie’s comeback was to help OTHER people get through the dark times, but the truth is, it was to help US get through too. And it really did. …..
Archie posing for the camera and Pop in his “Birthday Feets”
Things are slowly starting to come around again (we’re not anywhere near NORMAL yet, but things are moving for us again) and new opportunities are finally emerging. Now more than ever we need to focus on the future and just how we’re going to rebound from this mess as quickly as possible (We’ve got a couple of dogs with expensive tastes to take care of after all! 😊). It’s just going to take a lot of hard work and long hours. That’s not a complaint. That’s just the way it is. We’ll be ok and despite the stress, we know we’re much better off than many other people out there.
TOMORROW, Archie and Mirabelle are going to sign off, and then on FRIDAY, we are going to create a massive post that will showcase just a few of the THOUSANDS of amazing moments we’ve been lucky enough to enjoy and share with you. And then that will be it. We won’t be posting another Archie story. …
Mum posing with her furbabies
Archie’s page will remain up and open for the foreseeable future. So will his blog, but there won’t be any more activity past tomorrow. The blog may get rebuilt and look different in the coming weeks as we prepare to submit a world record attempt* to the Guinness people and we need for them to have easy access to all 600 of Archie’s park reviews. (* It’s an absolute LONG SHOT, but if it happens, we promise we’ll share the news)
Although we really will miss you terribly, we will not miss Facebook, so we’ll be visiting Facebook only very rarely, and if you would like to reach us for any reason - which we would love - please email us at:
mrbrindleton@gmail.com
or send snailmail to:
The Brindlebunch
Unit #3, 473 Baker Street,
London, Ontario, Canada.
N6C 1X9
If you send us something, we’ll send something back. We love being penpals and it would bring us great joy to stay connected. Including for CHRISTMAS this year and every year after for that matter! If you send us a card, you’ll get one back! We’d love to exchange messages with you for as long as you’d like. You’re our friends and we’re going to miss you like crazy!
We’re deleting Mirabelle’s Facebook page immediately, but only because it never really worked the way we had hoped it would. When we first gave Mirabelle her own page, the plan was never to post two completely separate series’ of stories. That would have been impossible! All we wanted was for Mirabelle to have the chance to post her own comments on Archie’s page and to have fun interacting directly with Archie’s friends. But Facebook had other plans. Archie, of course, responds to every comment made on his page, but when Mirabelle tries to interact with his page by leaving a saucy comment on all of YOUR comments, especially for her “MIRABELLE TAKES OVER!” posts, Facebook would flag her page and shut it down for “spamming”. We tried several times to plead our case (We own both pages! How can we be spamming our ourselves!?), but they just weren’t having it. And due to that, there’s not much on her page anyway, so to clean things up a bit, we’re going to delete it. ……..…
Baby Mirabelle using Pop’s brainmelon as a pillow
We’re not going to tease you with the idea that Archie will ever come back and post publicly like this again, because that’s not going to happen. That chapter has now come to a close. It’s been seven, nearly eight years. He’s done a lot and it’s time to pass the baton on to the next person (or puppy).
In preparing for these last few posts, we scrolled back through literally every Facebook post he ever made (all the way back to JULY 25, 2013 !!)
There approximately
SEVEN THOUSAND POSTS.
We can’t accomplish much more than that. It’s incredible just how much has happened and how many different events both Archie and Mirabelle have created and/or contributed to. It just feels like we did what we set out to do and that it’s the right time to move on.
But we do want to share this brief look at a possible future with you:
Our dream from very early on was to create an actual ongoing show - like a TV series - from Archie’s blog posts. We love shows like Mister Rogers and Canada’s Mr. Drsssup, the Friendly Giant, Sesame Street, and often used them for inspiration. And we think Archie’s “world” is big enough and rich enough to build a show around. We had hoped that it could become the family business at some point and that it would generate an income for our family so that we could do this full-time. But that happens for less than 1% of those who try and after seven years of solid experimentation and exploration of ideas, we now understand much more about just how tough that dream is going to be to make a reality. …
Mum and the kids making cozypile snugglesnorts
For starters, whenever we attempted to transition any part of Archie’s presence into a profit maker like introducing a piece of merchandise or a new idea that would cost money to use, it immediately felt weird. We didn’t start this with the goal of making money, we just hoped it might go that way - which was naive. That’s not something that happens all by itself. And forcing a shift from free to pay-to-play rarely works - especially for a tiny little “franchise” like ours. It never felt right or worked particularly well. So for that reason alone, we need to stop here, reset, and, PERHAPS … MAYBE … AT SOME POINT … start over with a very new and different direction that could generate an income that would not have to come directly from you.
You may now be thinking …
“Wait a minute. Does that mean Archie
will be coming back in some other form?”
The only answer we have right now is … MAYBE ? …
Archie and Pop cyclebiking
It’s still very much a dream of ours to make an Archie Show, but it’s a dream that’s going to take a lot of time and money (AND LUCK) to make happen. A LOT. We do have a bit of a plan, however, so here’s everything we know and feel about the subject right NOW:
Mum and Pop both work in film production and have enough skills, knowledge and contacts to make a series of TV-like episodes. In fact, we got so far as to take meetings with a few significant production companies here in Canada that were all about exploring the possibility of making an Archie Show. But they all fell apart, and for a LOT of different reasons that would be hard to explain here, so we’ll talk about just the biggest problem we encountered - ARCHIE HIMSELF.
The production would be a ton of hard work, but that’s not the issue. That’s normal. It is extremely risky and extremely difficult to build an entire show around one, single, living animal. (* there is Mirabelle too, of course, but for this example, just pretend we were just dealing with Archie by himself). The very idea that your lead character is a single dog with no stand-in or “double” who could never get tired, or sick, or injured or stop performing for any reason once cameras started rolling freaks out anyone interested in the show. In most cases, when there is a dog on screen, it is in a smaller, supporting role, or there are often several dogs all playing the same part so that there isn’t all of the pressure on just one dog to get everything done, all day, every day. It’s a lot to ask from a little guy. …
Archie and Mum teaching baby Mirabelle how to Doop Dee Doop
When thinking about the kind of schedule and demands that Archie would have to fulfil to create a professional show, we get VERY uncomfortable. We just don’t want to put Archie through that. There are exceptions of course, but a lot of performing animals don’t have a very fun life and we’re not going to force Archie (and Mirabelle) into a life like that for any amount of money. Archie, being incredibly handsome actually had the opportunity to appear in TV commercial and shows, but once we listened to what would be expected of him (and us), we closed that door. Not interested.
It’s stressful and risky to place all of that pressure on a little dog. And Archie is getting older. And greyer and yes, ageism is sadly a thing with animal performers too.
So … we, of course, have long talked about books and other ways to keep Archie’s public voice alive, but what we really WANT is to make a show and to create something more interactive like his online stories have been. So although we MAY go the books and merch route at some point, we are going to keep focused on the concept of a series until that’s been proven impossible.
The Brindlebunch in their first ‘roundthebackyard
How might we make a show about Archie if we don’t want Archie to be in it, you ask? Do we hire another dog or DOGS? No. The situation would be the same for those other dogs and we wouldn’t be comfortable with that, either. And besides, what are the chances of finding another well-trained, incredibly patient and well-behaved Frenchie that is as handsome as Archie Brindleton!? Talk about a hunting UNICORNS! So …
Pop has been lucky enough to recently work on a feature-length documentary that is focused on the Mr. Dressup show, which - for those of you who do not know - was a massively popular Canadian children’s show that ran for 29 years and was very much our Mister Rogers. More importantly, it featured characters that were portrayed by puppets. Pop has also been a huge fan of Jim Henson his entire life and in interviewing the cast and creators of the Mr. Dressup show for this documentary, he got a chance to speak directly with a number of high-profile puppet designers, fabricators and performers. This is how we will do it, given a chance. We will translate our wonderful dogs into performable puppet characters that will never get tired or injured or sick or too old to perform. And we’ve agreed that we either get those characterizations exactly right, or we don’t bother.
Pop gets to interview Casey, Finnegan and the legendary Judith Lawrence of the Mr. Dressup Show
There’s already been some work done on the design and functionality of an “Archie Too” character (That’s what we call Archie’s puppet), but the pandemic and its impact have stopped that effort cold for the foreseeable future. A Mirabelle character would follow once we’ve got the “Archie Too” character sorted and prototyped. And then we’d work on the settings and supporting characters such as Uncle Danny, The Naturemama, Mrs. Waterbottom, Bjorn the Tennis Yeti, Steve the Deer and so on and so on.
(*Can you picture these wonderful characters in your mind!? We certainly can - and DO - ALL THE TIME!) 😊 …
A pre-Mirabelle family portrait
Of course, we make no assumptions that just because you’ve followed the real Archie and Mirabelle on their many adventures that you’d have any interest in a show like we’re describing, and we completely understand.
It may be similar, but it will also be very, very different. We are taking the position that we’ll be starting from scratch, and if anyone reading this comes on board and supports the show - if and when we ever make it happen - we will be very lucky indeed.
Mum and Archie at his first PAWLOOZA Dog Festival in London, Ontario
So that’s where we are at. And the dream is still very much alive at this point. We’re just not sure what may come next or when. For now, we just need to take a break, cleanse our palate and then, at some point in the future, come back full of creative inspiration and furnace-like ambition to make our best attempt at creating an Archie Brindleton Show. Oh. And Archie himself will, of course, be a producer and creative consultant, so we’ll be in good hands. 😊
Thank you very much for everything, everyone. Each and every one of you means the world to us and we owe you a great deal for all of your love and support. You’ll forever be our friends, so know that if you’d like to reach out or even visit (after the pandemic of course) you will ALWAYS be welcome. We love meeting you, getting to know you and love listening to your stories and hearing about how Archie earned your friendship. We learn from you and your experiences and your supportive feedback is priceless. Please never hesitate to reach out if you would like to reconnect. We promise we mean this. ………
A more recent family portrait by Studio Keufner
But now… It’s time to move on.
Thank you again. Please take good care of yourselves and those around you. You all deserve health and happiness and we will continue to send HappyHeartHugs to each of you every single day.
Everlasting love,
