First, I shall begin with the explanation behind his appearance, a simple ghost with a bell (hat came later, from the RedSpy). Jumpropeman is called the Jingle Specter for a reason: It was his original name. A long while back my brother and I discovered the fun of Microsoft Word's thesaurus feature, allowing us to take innocuous and simple writings and turn them into humorous mishmashes full of synonyms.
One day, I decided to try the synonym-swapping silliness with the character profiles of F-Zero X characters. I don't know how many I did it with, but I know did it with at least Captain Falcon, Black Shadow, and The Skull. After doing the swapping of words, I saved it on my flash drive for some reason (might not have been on my computer, I don't know) and forgot about it.
Well, I was in a Science and Engineering Academy in high school, so we had lots of computer labs and we pretty much had to have our flash drives on hand. Which led to me dicking around on the internet in any classes we had computers, but thats not the point. The point is I had that flash drive with me and dicked around with it in Government (which was in a computer lab despite barely ever using them). I found the document again and came across the synonym profiles and found one particularly interesting thing.
In F-Zero X, the Skull's machine is called the Sonic Phantom. A pretty cool name, but Microsoft Word helped me to change it to Jingle Specter. Clinging to the name in memory, I was doodling in a journal and ended up drawing a few stupid things, but one thing I drew was a smiling ghost with a tiny bell he was ringing. AKA, the Jingle Specter.
Drawn in the top margin of notebook paper, he was small but not forgotten. I began drawing him on other papers, including ones I turned in and my SAT and AP tests. That ghost was essentially my graffiti tag. Well, now we get to the part where we get the picture into the computer! Interesting, huh?
Well, NASA was doing some thing where you could submit a picture and have it sent to space. I don't remember the specifics of why, but I put a picture of my real self but also wanted to include my tag, the smiling Jingle Specter. Using his initial drawing in the notebook but lacking a scanner that would treat the image well, I took a pic with my DSi, put it on the computer, and fiddled with its appearance in pixlr (online photoshop tool). The quality of the picture led to the odd blue tint he has, he was drawn on white paper and technically white, but photo quality made that ghost blue.
Touching up his eyes and mouth and cleaning up his outline created the initial Jingle Specter appearance he would have at the board. The picture (presumably) was then sent into space and occupied space on my desktop.
Now why is he called jumpropeman now, you probably didn't ask to a blog that will obviously explain it. Well, I don't remember where the name Jumpropeman comes from perfectly. It was my Youtube name first I think, and then became a go-to name for all my other online accounts. It stemmed, I know, from my attempts to remember a similarly named hero I had come up with. He had an equally odd concept, probably something like Librarian Man or something. Jumpropeman just popped out as a good replacement for the bad-concept hero name I needed.
Incidentally, check this out: I googled Jumpropeman once and found this image on a website. I've toyed with the idea of making it how JRM appeared in life, but I think I don't want to link him to an image I didn't create... and I think this guy is a bit too badass to have been him in life XD
The whole time schtick came about to make him organizing Fite Yer' Mates things easy. However, I did weave in a few other Original Characters from the past that all deserve a bit of explanation.
Next time on my blog, read the origin of Tut-Tut, the Snappers, and the broader aspects of JRM's Time Spirit position!
(Hope this was interesting)
