Dan Harkless' "Incinerate" Icon

Date:  

February 13, 1997

Tool:  

Thaumaturge Icon Editor 1.0 on an Apple Macintosh Centris 610 running Mac OS 7.1

Info:  

On my Mac desktop I had a program called "Incinerate", which was basically an accelerated trash can. That is, files were deleted as soon as you dropped them onto its icon. I didn't like the original icon, so I drew this one.

It depicts one of my favorite scenes from "Super Dimension Fortress Macross", the classic early-'80s animated television show from Japan, brought to the U.S. as the first "Robotech" series. In this scene, Maximillian Sterling sneaks aboard a space cruiser belonging to the giant Zentraedi race in order to rescue his captive friends. His Veritech fighter plane can transform into a humanoid configuration about the size of a Zentraedi, and he manages to fit his mecha into a guard's uniform. The deception doesn't last long, however, and the Veritech is hit badly during a firefight before he can mange to maneuver it into an elevator. The Veritech starts to go critical, but Max and his friends escape before it blows. A Zentraedi soldier waiting to ride the elevator isn't so lucky. The elevator arrives on his floor, the door opens, and he barely has time to be confused by the sight of the Veritech in its half-humanoid, half-plane Guardian mode, dressed in a Zentraedi uniform, before the mecha explodes and he is incinerated.

The animated depiction of the incineration was a burst of red flame filling the hallway and the soldier's body reduced to several dark parallel horizontal lines that drift backwards. Speaking of backwards, the body you see here is facing away from the explosion instead of towards it, so I guess this icon was just inspired by the Macross scene rather than being an exact depiction of it.

Note that on modern devices, the icon will look darker than it's supposed to, due to the use of an sRGB-compliant 2.2 gamma correction factor, rather than Macs' pre-2010 gamma of 1.8.