Strider,

Nice to hear there are more Dr. Julius Sumner Miller fans around. I got hooked on him on late night tv years ago. All science classes should be as fun as his.

What's funny is that I bought that same desk for my dad around the same time. $250 at Service Merchandise, if I remember correctly. And we used it for our Atari 800 (and later, for our PCjr).

According to Valve, The Incredibles didn't have any influence on their design for TF2. It was mainly early 20th Century commercial illustration.

Valve presented a paper on their rendering and artistic style of TF2 at a conference recently. Here's a link to the movie they showed:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2yb54_team-fortress-2-rendering_videogames

Here's the paper for anyone interested:
http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2007/NPAR07_IllustrativeRenderingInTeamFortress2.pdf