Hellllllllllloooooooo

— The Thing Is, Ellen Bass

Way back in the early days, it was where black performers in Vaudeville were legendary for it in Jazz and Jive routines. At about 1:37, this is where the Nicholas brothers go off.

Tap is a distinctive American art form that comes from a blending of African dance traditions with Irish dance traditions. It was developed by Black and white dancers and came up alongside and deeply entwined with jazz.

Certainly the tap that ends up in musical theater often seems old-fashioned and white but that’s a musical theater issue, not a tap issue. That is only one small part of tap, which continues to have a strong African-American tradition.

The Nicholas Brothers, above, are in a clip from the film Stormy Weather, which has an almost entirely African-American cast. Some of the other scenes in the film include Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, one of the greatest tap artists of all time. He was very well-known generally and was in quite a few Shirley Temple movies in his day. (Shirley Temple, herself, was a tap dancer – which I’ll be real is probably contributing to people thinking it’s old-fashioned and white, because it’s easy to forget the Black man dancing alongside her, I guess.)

Here’s Bill Robinson with Cab Calloway in Stormy Weather – he’s performing a variation of his famous “stair dance” in parts of this clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY3fbvBRiaM

Here’s probably the most widely famous version of the “stair dance”, from The Little Colonel:

There’ve been a lot of white tap dancers through the years – see, for example, everyone’s favorite clip of two men torturing a speech therapist:

… but a lot of its most famous practitioners have been Black and it’s weird to me that people don’t know that.

Have a scene from Tap (1989).

A number of spirits we see have an animal form, specifically animals we recognize as "normal" for us. For example:

- Wan Shi Tong is an owl and his knowledge seekers are foxes

- Tui and La are koi fish

- Hei Bai is a panda

-The guardian of the mother of faces is a wolf (The Search)

Heck there's even the talking Baboon spirit and the monkey missing its face that we see in the Spirit World at the end of Season 1.

Basically every time we've seen a "normal" animal, they've been a spirit.

My point? I argue that Bosco is a spirit bear that's chilling and living the good life in the mortal world just because he can.

they: i dont understand

me: *explains in detail the difference between a fantasy setting w no misogyny n a fantasy setting where the creator just added women to the warrior class n put no further thought into it whatsoever*

they: *laugh* its a good fantasy setting, sir

whereas I think ilya as a captain is one of those people who seem to be running an extremely loose ship (it’s noisy it’s chaotic guys are roughhousing during practice people prank each other all the time everyone’s out a little later than they should be at the bar together etc etc) but actually the second something starts souring in the atmosphere it becomes obvious that ilya has his finger on the pulse of the room and absolutely nothing escapes his notice. and he has a knack for fixing things or smoothing things over without it actually seeming like he’s intervening at all, just by saying the right thing to the right guy at the right moment or giving someone a little nudge or taking some of the guys out drinking and by the end of the night it’s somehow all resolved even though no one can remember what happened or how he did it.

George Thomas Georgiadis - Young Man on the Sofa in a Moment of Relaxation