Baking the Baker

Shoe

2012-01-22T21:07:00.003-05:00

I really love looking at early installments of long-running comics.

Here's an early "Shoe" strip by Jeff MacNelly. Published in June 3, 1979.

Reminder

2012-01-22T10:24:00.001-05:00

Auction ends tonight. Also, I have other stuff for sale.

Original Comic Art for sale

2012-01-19T17:56:00.003-05:00

I normally don't do this, but I'm in a need of some cash. So I'm selling some originals for American Paradise, a newspaper comic that I drew back in 2010. These strips were published in Tennessee papers.

They end in 3 days, so hurry if you want any. Listing's here.

"Two Guys on the Border" by Shunji Sonoyama

2012-01-16T21:30:00.005-05:00

Shunji Sonoyama (1935-1993) was a Japanese cartoonist best known for First Human Gyatoruzu (Hajime Ningen Gyatoruzu), a comic published Manga Sunday and other magazines from 1965 to 1975. It was turned into anime twice (one from the '70s by Tokyo Movie Shinsha and another from the '90s by Studio Pierrot). The 1970s anime is still being rerun in Japan to this day and was released on DVD.

Sonoyama also did other strips, including Ganbare Gonbe (1958-1992), Hana no Kakaricho (1969-1982), and Gatapishi (1979-1992). But one of the most unusual is probably this one, and I happened to have a copy of it.

It's called Kokkyo no Futari (Two Guys on the Border). It's a 32-page booklet that Sonoyama published himself in 1962. It's a series of one-panel cartoons featuring two guards on the opposing sides and their friendship. I took the liberty of scanning some of the pages below, along with the letter Sonoyama himself wrote (in English), signed and attached to the booklet.

Preview

2012-01-14T15:03:00.002-05:00

A little something I'm working on.

2012-01-12T21:20:00.000-05:00

Tintin continued

2012-01-09T17:43:00.002-05:00

I thought I'd post more on the 1960s Tintin animation.

They were originally shown in cliffhanger format, where 5-minute segment would air every weekday, forming a complete storyline. Some later video releases edit them together into one large film.

The English version plays it off like a radio serial, complete with the narrator (Paul Frees) saying "Herge's Adventures of Tintin!" in booming voice at the start of every episode. I thought I share this, The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure, which was adapted into a mocap film recently by Steven Spielberg.

Dal McKennon, who frequently did voices for Walter Lantz, does Tintin and Professor Calculus. Paul Frees is Captain Haddock, Thomson and Thompson, as well as the narrator. The two men took turns voicing the villains and other side characters.

Interestingly they took liberties with the original storyline. For one, in the comics, Tintin didn't meet Calculus until Red Rackham's Treasure, but here they already knew each-other.

How anime is made

2012-01-06T23:27:00.013-05:00

I know not everyone enjoys anime, but this should interest animation fans.

Ever wondered how anime is made? Well, this post gives a detailed explanation of the production pipeline and how the jobs are divided. Obviously it can vary depending on the studio (or even shows within the same studio), but for the most part it's the same.

As I pointed out before, in Japan the animation is inked and painted before voices are recorded. They must save alot of time and money not breaking down dialogues onto exposure sheets (trust me, it's a huge pain in the butt).

I wonder how many of us actually care about accurate lip sync in animation.

What would the state of western studios be like if they used a similar method domestically? Japanese cartoons are produced much quicker; supposedly it only takes one to three months to complete an episode (from script to final dubbing), as opposed to six-to-nine months on western shows.

Of course, cultural differences can be a big factor here. But still, it makes me think...

2012

2012-01-01T19:56:00.001-05:00

I thought I'd welcome 2012 with this thing that I doodled, using Sharpie and orange highlighter.

That's Cow and Chicken's dad in the bottom left corner.

Tintin

2011-12-28T00:00:00.001-05:00

With the release of the Spielberg Tintin film, I've been thinking of the 1960s series produced in Brussels by Belvision studio.

7 of the storylines were adapted to animation, which was presented in cliff-hanger format for a total of 50 five-minute shorts. They were subsequently imported to USA, where the voices were dubbed over by veteran actors Dal McKennon and Paul Frees.

But as it turns out, one of the storylines was animated in USA. A Cartoon Brew post on various adaptations of Tintin over the years led to a comment from Philippe Capart, who made a documentary about Belvision. The first story to be adapted to animation was "Objective Moon", produced in 1959. Belvision contracted with America's Larry Harmon Studio to produce the storyline. Harmon's studio has experience in mass-producing TV cartoons, making Bozo the Clown cartoons for syndication and also on the King Features Popeye series.

The Belvision series has poor reputation amongst Tintin fans. While I don't think the series in general is that bad, the case can be made for this one. Harmon's studio has made some really bad cartoons. The drawings are pretty poor and the writing could've been better. Subsequent storylines were animated in-house at Belvision with their own artists, although Charles Shows stuck around doing all the voices.

Voices are Larry Harmon (Tintin, Professor Calculus) and Paul Frees (Captain Haddock, Thomson/Thompson twins). Paul Fennell directs. Lou Scheimer, who went on to start Filmation, did the backgrounds.

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-24T16:53:00.000-05:00

Goku's Big Adventure - Episode 4

2011-12-19T02:20:00.002-05:00

Ah, glad to see this again.

One of the lesser known Osamu Tezuka series was "Goku's Big Adventure", which took over Astroboy's timeslot after that show got cancelled. It only lasted 39 episodes, but the show has charm. It was unusual from Tezuka in that it was very gag-driven, where nothing was taken seriously.

Possibly the most craziest was episode 4, which was directed by the late Osamu Dezaki. It was up on YouTube with English subs few years ago, but it got removed. However someone recently uploaded the entire series dubbed in Italy. It'll do for now, I guess.

Here you go.

The Gutsy Frog part 3

2011-12-06T21:38:00.007-05:00

I think what stands out to me about Japan's Dokonjo Gaeru (The Gutsy Frog) is the character layouts/poses. The level of energy in the layouts can vary depending on who was doing what, but when they're energetic, they're VERY energetic. I'd like to think that the animators at A Production (TMS's satellite studio that did their animation) had fun working on this show.

Japanese cartoons are produced on much lower budget and tighter schedule than American cartoons, even back in the '70s, but there's still an element of fun in this show that's lacking in Hanna-Barbera and Filmation cartoons made at the same time.

There's alot to like about it. One thing I love is how visible the teeth are whenever the characters are talking, complete with gums sticking out. I find that funny, for some reason.

Here are couple more episodes:

Chief Director: Tadao Nagahama
Scenario: Yutaka Kaneko
Storyboards: Minami Asa
Animation Directors: Osamu Kobayashi, Tsutomu Shibayama
Key Animation: Daizo Takeuchi, Shingo Matsuo
Animation/Inbetweens: Mieko Takagi, Kazue Tanaka, Masako Konno

Chief Director: Tadao Nagahama
Scenario: Tomoshi Inoue
Animation Directors: Osamu Kobayashi, Tsutomu Shibayama
Storyboard Artist/Animators unknown

Chief Director: Tadao Nagahama
Scenario: Tomoshi Inoue
Animation Directors: Osamu Kobayashi, Tsutomu Shibayama
Storyboard Artist/Animators unknown

Exposure Sheet

2011-12-05T15:51:00.006-05:00

I ended up creating my own exposure sheet for use, which I then printed on 11x17"

It's rare to see them printed in two columns, but I did with mine, just for the sake of conserving paper.

If anyone wants to print their own, here's the pdf file.

The Gutsy Frog continued

2011-12-03T18:40:00.008-05:00

Thought I'd share more "Dokonjo Gaeru"

Here's all you need to know: Hiroshi agrees to potty train his friend Kyoko's baby sister. I just love how everything escalates in the end. Not bad for a cartoon about peeing.

This episode was broadcast in Japan on November 17, 1973.

Series Director: Tadao Nagahama
Scenario: Yutaka Kaneko
Storyboards: Takeshi Sakamoto
Animation Directors: Osamu Kobayashi, Tsutomu Shibayama
Key Animation: Okuda Seiji, Kazuo Iimura
Animation/Inbetweens: Shouzen Ozaki, Osamu Takebe, Setsuko Shibuichi

The Gutsy Frog

2011-11-30T09:13:00.005-05:00

Dokonjo Gaeru (official English name: The Gutsy Frog) was a comic by Yasumi Yoshizawa and ran in Weekly Shonen Jump from 1970 to 1976. It was later adapted into two TV series, both from Tokyo Movie Shinsha (TMS). The first one ran for 103 episodes in 1972-74 and second series lasted 1981-82 for 30 episodes.

I was a fan of the first show when I was a kid (it was being constantly rerun on various cable networks). The animation is limited, as typical for anime, but it was still fun to look at. Fun facial expressions and really dynamic pose. It's cartoony, but very Japanese as well. The characters are also well-developed, from the rambunctious Hiroshi, courageous Pyonkichi (the frog on the shirt). Even the bully, Gorilla-Imo has nice, emotionally-charged development.

Recently someone uploaded various episodes on YouTube. Unfortunately for me they're in Spanish, although this won't mean much to anyone reading this unless you can speak Japanese and/or Spanish. But I thought I highlight some episodes.

Series Director: Tadao Nagahama
Scenario: Yu Yamamoto
Storyboards: Shigeru Takahashi
Animation Directors: Osamu Kobayashi, Tsutomu Shibayama
Key Animation: Yoshifumi Kondo, Hisanen Motogi
Animation/Inbetweens: Megumi Ueno, Takao Horie, Yumiko Suda

I love the sight gags in this one, especially how the thief is among the pile of junk that Hiroshi emptied from the storage.

Here's one episode in original Japanese. This is probably as close as it gets for a true cartoon premise in an anime. Bully Gorilla-Imo tries to hit Hiroshi with a can, but keeps missing and hitting his henchman instead. Just a warning that there's a brief nudity in the beginning. If that's not your thing than I suggest skipping it.

Series Director: Tadao Nagahama
Scenario: Yu Yamamoto
No Storyboard Artist credited
Animation Directors: Osamu Kobayashi, Tsutomu Shibayama
Key Animation: Akira Hosouchi, Moichi Maekawa
Animation/Inbetweens: Kiyoshi Yamamoto, Kazuo Tada, Midori Kobayashi

GeGeGe no Kitaro

2011-11-12T22:54:00.003-05:00

I've always been fond of Japanese cartoons. There's noticeable difference in how Western animation and Japanese animation play out, in terms of storytelling. Even in comedy-focused shows there's always more emphasis on characters and settings rather than gags. Some people view that as a bad thing in animation, but I like 'em, personally (keep in mind that I love both joke-based and character-based cartoons). My ideal cartoon has both elements go hand-and-hand.

I think this is a good example. It's an episode of the 1968-69 GeGeGe no Kitaro show. There's ton of character focus in the storyline, between Kitaro, Nezumi-Otoko, and the two thugs. But there are also humor played between them as well, especially with the two thugs near the end. I've always been a fan of Kitaro and it still holds up well.

The original Kitaro comics by Shigeru Mizuki are pure gold, and none of the animated series captured the spirit to the core, but there are still good things about them. The '60s and '70s shows are pretty good, I think.

It's in Japanese but has English subtitles.

Watch GeGeGe no Kitaro (1968) #7 (English subtitled) in Anime | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Monkey Love (1995)

2011-11-11T21:43:00.002-05:00

I thought I dreamed of this cartoon, but as it turned out it exists. It's a short film directed by Jim Keeshen from 1995. Cartoon Network later aired it on late nights around 1997-98. I don't know why CN picked it up; they were never that big on independent animation (they aired Don Hertzfeldt's "Rejected" on Adult Swim once, but that's the only other instance that I can think of)

But anyway, I think the short holds up. I love the bouncy animation to it, and the rhythm to the music. Thanks to the wonders of YouTube here's the cartoon:

Kodak on DePatie-Freleng

2011-11-09T08:19:00.003-05:00

This is from Kodak's The World of Animation (1979), a book I highly recommend. There were sections dedicated to contemporary studios, amongst them Hanna-Barbera, Filmation, and DePatie-Freleng, the latter I'm posting below.

The studio was on the verge of shutdown by the time the book came out (it closed circa 1980), but it's interesting that Friz had plans for a feature length movie, which never happened.

How Astroboy was made

2011-10-30T00:25:00.007-04:00

Fans of old-school anime will enjoy this. It's a short documentary Mushi Production put together that shows how Astroboy was made. It's in Japanese but there are English subtitles.

It's fun to see how Japanese studios make cartoons vs. how American studios does. It was a standard back then in Japan for the director to do the storyboards themselves; it still is today, although due to heavy workload there are also separate people doing the boards under the eyes of the director.

And then there's the voices. If you wondered why lip-sync is often wonky in Japanese cartoons, it's because voices are done AFTER the animation has been inked and painted and photographed. In America the voices are done first, which are then broken down onto timing sheets and given to the animator to animate the mouths with.

Although I believe at Max Fleischer's studio the voices were done after the animation was completed. Can anyone verify that?

At the Zü books

2011-10-20T23:07:00.003-04:00

I've posted about At the Zü before, but just recently I realized that the strip is being collected into books.

I consider this to be an underrated comic strip. It was only around for three years back in the late '90s so it was obscure even then. Still, it's nice that the strip is getting SOME availability.

Both books are being published via CreateSpace. I bought one and the printing's great. Planning to buy second one today.

See sample strips here. In the meantime you can buy the books here.

Capitol Critters

2011-10-15T21:44:00.002-04:00

In the 1960s, after The Flintstones became a hit on prime-time, networks tried to duplicating the success by picking up other cartoons for the evening timeslot, which included Calvin and the Colonel, The Alvin Show, Top Cat, The Jetsons, and the ilk. None of them made an impact until they started rerunning them on Saturday Mornings.

Similar thing happened in the 1990s. The Simpsons half-hour debuted in 1989 and it was a screaming success on FOX network. Naturally other networks wanted a piece of the action. This resulted in Capitol Critters (ABC 1992), Fish Police (CBS 1992), Family Dog (CBS 1992), and The Critic (ABC then FOX, 1994-95). Alas, they didn't make impact as the yellow-skinned family and was gone after a short time.

Capitol Critters is an interesting one. A co-production of Hanna-Barbera and Steven Bochco Productions, the show followed a mouse moving in with his relatives in the White House after his home got destroyed. The show had 13 episodes, but only 7 were broadcast on ABC. It wasn't until Cartoon Network picked it up in 1995 that the remaining 6 were shown anywhere.

From what I've seen it wasn't bad. It's not great, but not awful either. But I think the big problem was that the show's style is, well, kiddy. This is a style you often associate in children's animated films from the likes of Don Bluth, not on prime-time cartoons. Really, if you took out the swear words and maybe tone down the current issues presented in the storylines this would have fit right in on the Saturday morning time slot. Hell, it probably would have lasted longer there if ABC had done that.

The Third Pig

2011-10-12T16:41:00.006-04:00

Halloween is coming up, so I'd figure I'd post this. This is an episode of the Tales from the Crypt show that aired on HBO years ago. For the final episode they decided to animate the story, courtesy of Bill Kopp and Pat Ventura. The animation was produced by ~~Nelvana studio in Canada~~ Toonz Animation in New Zealand.

It's probably one of the funniest cartoons ever made for television. Delightfully gross with funny drawings and voice acting. Many people have mixed feelings about Pat Ventura's cartoons, but I think he (and Kopp) really hits the spot in this one. So I'm linking it.

Just beware that the cartoon can get really gruesome at times (although it's more of a super-extreme "gross out" show) so if you're not into that stuff, stay away.

Super 6

2011-10-06T22:29:00.005-04:00

Mike Kazaleh sent me this. It's John Dunn's original lyrics to the Super 6 theme song. The show was DePatie-Freleng's first foray into the world of Saturday Morning cartoons, airing on NBC starting 1966. Note that some of the words was changed to fit the tune of the tune better (see video below).

Bill Lava did the music and Gary Lewis sang the song.

Country Cornflakes

2011-09-25T09:46:00.001-04:00

I know very little about Len Glasser, but I love what I've seen of his work. Here's a very funny commercial he did for General Mills' Country Cornflakes. Any commercials that has "please buy our cornflakes" in their song deserves extra attention.

David H. DePatie on cartoon violence

2011-09-21T23:14:00.002-04:00

An example of network restrictions. Image on left is from the theatrical version of Pink-A-Rella (1969); image on right is from the same cartoon but with the scene re-animated for Saturday Morning broadcasts.

Pink Panther Creator Talks About TV Restrictions on Children's Shows
By Jay Sharbutt
AP Television Writer
(Columbus Dispatch 12/4/1978)

LOS ANGELES - For some reason, I thought recently of a wild bit in a Pink Panther cartoon wherein a piano falls on - but doesn't harm - an old lady the Panther tries to help across the street. ["Super Pink" from 1966]

"Yeah," laughed Dave DePatie, "that was in the days before the network restrictions" on such cartoon mayhem.

DePatie, co-creator of the panther with Friz Freleng, just finished the first-ever P.P. special made for prime-time TV. But he doubts there'll be any gripes after ABC airs the show this Thursday.

Called "Pink Panther's Christmas" [actually "A Pink Christmas"] and based on an O. Henry tale, it only concerns efforts by the Panther, broke, frozen and friendless in New York, to get tossed in a warm jail cell Christmas Eve.

It isn't knock about comedy in, say the manner of Tom & Jerry or Roadrunner cartoons, he says, but then "we've never had the real daucous, violent gags. It's more of a sophisticated comedy."

His observation came when a veteran Panther observer asked if those who gripe about cartoon mayhem on Saturday kid shows on TV don't seem bent on outlawing the classic kid-show form known as Punch 'n' Judy.

DePatie, 47, a tall thoughtful man, father of two grown sons and a teenager, said that was a fair characterization: "I think so. That's a pretty good way of putting it, as a matter of fact."

His "Panther," which leaped to fame 14 years ago during opening titles for a film comedy about an Inspector Clouseau, aired Saturday mornings for eight years on NBC. It is on year No. 9 at ABC.

There's been no specific gripes about his series, he says, but pressure has been put on the networks over the past five or six years to generally reduce the slambang comedy of Saturday cartoons.

The pressure mainly was generated by the Boston-based parents' group called Action for Children's Television, he said, and it has led to certain network no-no's in kiddie cartoon matters.

"I think possibly the most important one is physical contact of one character with another," he said. "No more slapping in the face, hitting on the head. 'No one-to-one contact' is the standard way their broadcast standards people put it."

But DePatie, who has two other Saturday kid series on the air, says the restrictions don't crimp his firm cartoon comedy style.

But he does regard as exaggerated the fears of various groups about cartoon mayhem and possible effects of same on of young viewers.

"I think they go back to that Surgeon General's report (about TV violence)," DePatie said. "But I think there's a big difference between realistic violence and comedic violence."

I'll sign the contract

2011-09-20T01:39:00.004-04:00

The Dogfather theme song (click to listen)
Lyrics by John Bradford
Music by Dean Elliott
Sung by Bob Holt

I'm going to make you an offer
You can't refuse
On my hot proposition
That you can't lose
Since you muscled in
On my bullet proof heart
What a gang-land war you started
I thought that I was taking you for a ride
But Boom!
Oh you got me Bonnie
Right in the Clyde
So give me half your action
Or wind up in traction
Or in the sea in cement shoes
Oh baby!
That's my offer
My final offer
That's an offer that you can't refuse
I'll sign the contract
That's an offer that you can't refuse

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic

2011-09-17T00:05:00.008-04:00

I've written about the show before and if you follow my blog you know I've done alot of fanarts for it, but with season 2 starting today I thought I'd do a brief post about it.

Cartoons based on toys will always carry a stigma with me, and I'll admit I sometimes feel dirty that I watch this show. But I wonder how much of the stigma is based on the commercial aspect of it, and the fact that all the other toy-based shows just plain suck.

Sorry to any anti-capitalist animation fans reading this, but I have no problem whatsoever with doing something for the sake of commercializing it. Hell I sometimes do it myself, whether on this blog or elsewhere. So in principal I have no problem with the idea of doing a TV show with the intent of making money from selling toys of it.

But I do have problem with badly-made cartoons. And pretty much every toy-based cartoons fall on that camp. There are many reasons for it: content restrictions, uninspired staff artists/writers, and just plain no interest in the work. Friendship is Magic, however, was produced by an artist (Lauren Faust) who was intent on making a good show, and many of the staff (in US, Canada, and the Philippians studios that co-produce the show) working on the show actually gives a crap. Much of the crew is made up of Powerpuff Girls, Foster's Home, and Ed, Edd n Eddy veterans and their previous experience on those shows really shine in FIM.

Lauren Faust is no longer on the show, but the crew has stated that season 2 is shaping up to being great. This week's and next's episodes were actually made during the production of season 1, so we won't truly know how season 2 is shaping up until the third episode airs.

Equestria Daily, a FIM fanblog, recently put up an in-depth interview with Faust. It's actually a fascinating read with some interesting info. Who knew that it was Lynne Naylor (Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, Ren & Stimpy, Chowder) who designed Princess Luna?

The Texas Toads

2011-09-04T00:54:00.003-04:00

One of the theatrical series DePatie-Freleng produced for Mirisch and United Artists was Tijuana Toads, which had 17 shorts released from 1969 to '72. In 1976 they tried to get the shorts to television as part of the Pink Panther Laugh and a Half Hour and a Half Show (a 90-minute block of DFE shorts) on NBC but ran into problems. As David H. DePatie explained in our interview last December:

When they went on television, we had to completely change them around and the series became known as the Texas Toads, and we had to redo all of the tracks that had any type of ethnic content and it really watered down the series down. We all thought it was a hell of a lot more funny when it was the Tijuana Toads, but at the time we had to do it in order to bring the thing on television.

With that the characters, Toro and Pancho, became Fatso and Banjo respectively.

Interestingly enough, both versions of the Toads were shown in syndication at the same time throughout the 1980s. There were two different DFE shorts package that TV stations could have: as a half-hour Pink Panther Show (with three shorts plus bumpers) and also as individual shorts that the stations could run however they want. The Texas Toads version was included in the half-hour Panther Show package, but the original theatrical Tijuana Toads version were available on the individual shorts package.

From 1993 to '95 MGM Animation produced a Pink Panther revival where the formerly silent character spoke, voiced by of Matt Frewer. The new show also featured appearances of DFE stars such as the Ant and the Aardvark (John Byner reprised his role), the Inspector and the Commissioner, and the Dogfather and gang, abet with drastic design change. According to Mike Kazaleh MGM was trying to revive all the DFE theatrical characters at the same time.

And apparently there were plans for a revival of the Toads. The 60th and final episode of the new Panther featured a stand-alone Texas Toads short. It's pretty obvious that this was made as a backdoor pilot for a possible spin-off (the same episode also featured a Ant and Aardvark short).

There's a Portuguese-dubbed version of the cartoon on YouTube (embedded below). I don't know how the voices sound in the English track, but the new designs don't really work here. It's also apparent that they were planning to re-imagine them as sheriffs for the possible new show.

Remakes

2011-08-27T02:03:00.006-04:00

It wasn't uncommon for cartoons from the "Golden Age" era to be remade, but this is probably one of the few times a cartoon was redone not once, but twice.

Friz Freleng directed His Bitter Half (1950), which showed Daffy Duck marrying a rich widow in order to get access to her wealth. Unfortunately Daffy has to deal with her overbearing nature and her pesky son.

12 years later Friz made another cartoon with a similar premise, Honey's Money (1962) this time with Yosemite Sam in Daffy's role, making this one of the two times that Sam was used without Bugs Bunny.

Few years later Friz was running an animation studio with business partner David H. DePatie. Even there he wasn't shy about reusing old ideas from his days at Warner's.

So it's no surprise that the story premise used in the above two cartoons showed up again. This time Rattfink filled Daffy and Yosemite's role, in A Taste of Money (1970). Veteran animator Art Davis directed this version.

The 2nd remake isn't great, but it does have a few interesting notes:

- Roland doesn't appear at all, the only one in the series where he's absent.
- No writer credited. Probably for a good reason in this case.
- Junior was actually voiced by a child actor (Peter Halton, who was 9-years old when this cartoon was released.)

Flebus

2011-08-26T11:58:00.006-04:00

Thought I'd link this. Somebody uploaded Ernest Pintoff's magnum opus, Flebus, with original screen credits. It's still cropped, but it'll do until somebody releases the CinemaScope shorts with the correct aspect ratio on DVD.

I got to see this cartoon last year in its widescreen form on the big screen (projected from Mark Kausler's 35mm print). You haven't truly seen the cartoon until you watch it from film.

Bronies, get ready...

2011-08-23T01:30:00.000-04:00

September 17 is the day

Pan-and-scan vs. CinemaScope

2011-08-19T13:21:00.003-04:00

It just goes to show you, pan-and-scan can really ruin a scene sometimes.

From Dustcap Doormat (1958 - Terrytoons). Top image came from my 16mm print; bottom from my video copy.

Donovan Cook interview, part 5

2011-08-17T19:07:00.001-04:00

Read Part 4 here

Did the two dogs ever had names?
[laugh] Somebody asked me about that recently.

Mark Kennedy, Ash Brannon, Chris Ure...I called them up and said "Let's get together and make a cartoon," because I was working at Disney Features, and I think Mark Kennedy was there, and Chris was at Warner Bros., because they had a shorts division at the time, and Ash I think was at Warner Bros. too. So were were all working and I was like "Let's not disappear into Studio Whatever, let's keep making stuff, you know?" So I brought everyone up to The Alamo in Valencia, and at that dinner there were a bunch of ideas that came out. I still credit Ash Brannon for saying "Hey what about two really stupid dogs?" I liked that, and I think I wrote down three or four things out of that meeting, but it was the stupid dogs one that I thought was the funniest, and I loved dogs, I always had dogs when I was a kid.

Not long after that I happened to see a stray dog in the apartment complex where I lived. There was something about this one dog and scared and whatever, but he looked like he was living in a fantastic, adventurous life. That became a real spark of inspiration for me. They wern't humans, they [wern't humans drawn as dogs], they were actually dogs that lived in the human world as dogs. They were strays, they wern't pets. It was important to me that they wern't pets, that was a big part of the concept. I figured, a dog that wasn't a pet wouldn't name itself, it would just be "I am a dog."

Their names were "Big Dog" and "Little Dog", and that's why they never really had proper names. But there were a couple of episodes where, especially the Big Dog who had a couple of different names that were put upon him in an episode. There was an episode were he was called "Jonathan" once, by a hamster who was played by Maureen McCormick, who was Marsha Brady in "Brady Bunch" as you recall. There was a dramatic love scene between the Hamster and the Big Dog, and she called him Jonathan. That was a second season story, and in second season I kinda loosened up the reigns and things got a little wackier.

That's why they didn't have proper names. I'm surprised the studio let me do that. That's something I can credit to Fred [Seibert]. Fred was very experimental. He wasn't afraid of making a cartoon that, I dunno, had a flaw. I think he figured "Well, if that doesn't work, we'll make another one." That's a risk that nobody would let you make now. Like, let's have two characters that don't actually have names. I'd hate to think that in hindsight that it was a mistake, but, I dunno, maybe it made it harder to market them. [laugh]

Did you direct all the voice sessions on the show?
Yeah, I did. That came from...at CalArts, you basically learned, it's been many years since I've been there but I think it's still the same, but you basically learned to make your cartoon, it's very collaborative and you had all the classmates to help you, but you basically learned to make cartoons, really the old way. Which is kind of a small group of people, and at school it's mainly you and you do basically most of the work, but at school you had all these people supporting you and so that, to me, if I was going to be the guy who run the show, I need to direct the voices and at Hanna-Barbera at the time, they had a voice director, Gordon Hunt, who ran the casting department and was the main casting director and voice director. They had Kris Zimmerman, who was basically his protege, and who was about to take over the department. But I thought "why would I have someone else direct the voices when they wern't involved in creating the storyboards and writing the materials?" and John [Kricfalusi] of course directed his voices at Spumco and at the time I spent on features, on Mermaid and such, the directors directed the voices, so to me it was a very foreign idea that the person running the show wouldn't direct the voice. So while I didn't know what I was doing I remember John Musker, an amazing talented director and super nice guy, and also generous with his time when I interned and the year I spent there, so when it came time for me to direct the voices I asked if he would have lunch with me to spend an hour going over the approaches on how he would direct the voices, there's a little bit of, that I learned alot from John K., and alot from picking through John Musker's brain about, we just did it. I think there's some really talented voice directors, I had worked with them, and there's nothing wrong with it, but I think there's a false idea that animators, cartoonists, directors, don't really know how to talk to actors, and therefore you need voice directors to bridge the gap of language or whatever, but I think that's completely false. I think any directors, be it live-action or animation or whatever, your job is to communicate your ideas to the people you're collaborating with, and there's certainly there's ways to talk to actors and to gets actors motivitated, get them to visualize things, but there's no reason why an animation director can't do that. So I directed all the voices for that. Larry and I traded off directing voices for Secret Squirrel.

Some of the writers, board artists, including Mark Saraceni, sometimes went to the voice session with us. We never put the actors in a position where there were multiple direction, but we were there as a group.

How much work was done in pre-production before everything went overseas?
That was a very standard process, for television. Especially at Hanna-Barbera. Basically you would write outlines, draw the storyboards. At times, during outline, we would design something, like a character that we knew as new. But more often than not there were no designs done before the storyboard artists boarded it. They would make up a new design that worked for the storyboards, and once the storyboard was done, like if there was a new character, and there would always be a new location, we would design a show from the storyboards. At times, the board artists had a great design sensibility so in that first season it would have been Craig or Mike. Take, for example, that character Cubby. He first appeared at the Drive - In. Chris Ure drew him first in the pitch board, then it was Conrad [Vernon] who did the production design. So Craig basically did the final designs based on what was drawn in the storyboards. But we had times when the character designs in the storyboard that looked really, really different than what we wound up designing because we didn't really like the designs in the board, but we didn't have time to go back and revise the storyboards so I had a stamp that said "Character Off-Model. Follow the Model," and I sometimes had "Character Off-Model, Follow the Board," if the drawings were so funny I didn't want to mess up the drawings by putting them back on-model. So we would board it, then we would design it, and then we would record it after the board was done, and then after we recorded it we would create the story reels. We would lock the timing in the story reels and we would do animation sheets for the animation timing, and we would send it overseas from there. Months later it'd come back in color and we would frantically call for retakes, and then it was on TV. That's the process in television. It's a little different now with all the digital stuff, but it's still pretty much the same. We didn't invent anything how we did it in pre-production, although back then not too many places were doing story reels [animatics], we were doing it at Spumco, but Hanna-Barbera didn't and we invented that [at the studio], but now it's pretty standard practice, but back then nobody was doing it.

Part 6 coming soon

Donovan Cook interview, part 4

2011-08-15T22:39:00.003-04:00

Read Part 3 here

Did the Standards and Practices ever gave you hard time on the show?
I'll tell you, at the time we thought we were getting hard time, but when you look at what people are like to you now versus what we did then, we got away with murder. We had shows where the dog's caught on fire and jumped out windows, drove in cars without seatbelts, all this stuff you can't do now. We were free as a bird.

I think the best story from S&P comes actually from a Secret Squirrel episode. It was [the one with a possum and his bat henchmen], all these nocturnal animals, so there was a scene where these bats beat the living hell out of Secret Squirrel with these baseball bats. We put it through...there wasn't really a formal Standards and Practices because we wern't doing it for a network, like if you were doing something for ABC, CBS, NBC, or Fox, back then, the networks have formal S&P people, but we were doing it for syndication and TBS, and TBS never had original children's programming so basically there was Mike Lazzo at TBS who wanted to do basically everything, and guys like Buzz Potamkin [...] Buzz would handle production so they would basically look at stuff and say "I don't think we should do this," but we shipped that show overseas and it was animated with these characters beating Secret with wooden baseball bats, but when that one came back they saw it and they kinda freaked out, saying "You guys, no. We can't do this, it's too violent." But we wern't a rich show so I remember Larry and I, and Paul, I think it was a Rob Renzetti show [actually Paul Rudish, David Feiss, and Tony Craig] so we all started brainstorming and discussed what the hell we were going to do so finally we all thought "let's leave all the animation exactly the same" so instead of full retakes we added one scene where instead of picking up baseball bats the two bat characters blew up a long, narrow balloons. So we changed the bats to balloons but all the animation stayed the same, so it was still fantastically violent but they were hitting him with these balloons and they still beat the hell out of him. It was still hysterical, but that was one of the few times they wouldn't let us do something.

But yeah, I'm sure that if you asked me that question 15 or so years ago "Oh, god yes I have a long list of things they wouldn't let us do," but now in hindsight all I can do is look at almost every Stupid Dogs cartoons, there's a joke that would never, ever let me do now. In the "Door Jam" one, the Mike Mitchell one, where they misunderstood the concept of automatic doors and think they need shoes to get through the door, so they inexplictly start collecting shoes, and there's a scene in that cartoon where the two dogs go to a damn strip club, hollering at the stripper girl to take off her shoe! "The shoe! The shoe! Take off your shoe!" [laugh] And this wasn't, you know, Adult Swim or Comedy Central...I don't think Cartoon Network or Nickelodeon or Disney XD or any of those places would let you do that joke. They wouldn't even let you think about that joke.

So we had alot of freedom, especially in hindsight.

One of the characters in 2 Stupid Dogs was a big guy named Hollywood. What's the story of that?
Hollywood was inspired by a guy...I have a group of friends that go all the way back to high school. Every summer we'd run a beach house down San Diego, and one year there was a guy living in a house next door who was just incredibly loud and would always holler at things at the top of his lungs and we started him "Hollywood," I don't remember why we called him that, but that was the summer before we started production of Stupid Dogs so we were in development on the show. I can't remember exactly when Spumco got shut down 'cause I was still working there for the first few months when we were trying to figure out how to get a full greenlight on the show but, so, there was this crazy guy that me and my buddies, not from the animation world, called Hollywood and it was Cornflakes, the first Hollywood episode where he's a farmer, I think, and so we were talking about what do we do with this farmer and we decided to make him this guy with the joke that he had, that some people seemed to like, "Isn't that cute but it's wrong," which I thought was funny. I don't remember whether Rob [Renzetti] invented that in the board pitch or whether that was in the outline but that came up for the first time in that one and we all thought it was funny so we started using it everytime we used Hollywood.

Some of the secondary characters that came out of this show was Hollywood, or Cubby, the pimply faced teenager...he was in the "Drive-In" and I think that character got repeated because of Rob Paulsen, who voiced him. We all thought the voice was funny and we wanted to hear him again. So we started writing him into more cartoons. Funny thing is in the pitch there was a group of characters that never made it into a single cartoon. For example, when I pitched the show there was a gang of cats that would sometimes terrorize the dogs, but the cat gang just never seemed funny when we were developing the premises so we never used them.

Continue to Part 5

How Jim Tyer worked

2011-08-14T23:57:00.007-04:00

On 8/13 I talked to veteran animator Doug Crane, whose credit includes Terrytoons, Paramount, Archie Comics, and many other places in New York (and some in Hollywood). During his stay at Terrytoons he assisted the crazyman of all animators Jim Tyer, so naturally I asked him how he worked. Here's what he told me:

It depended [on the scene]. If there was a weird piece of animation that had to be done like a guy who does not know how to dance...if it was a regular dancer he would have to animate on a beat. If a 16-frame beat he would have to go "bump...bump...bump" and the foot would have to hit the floor on the beat, so it would've meant drawing one, thirteen, twenty-five, etc. And that would be a dance and Jim could do that superbly.

But he would be much better off if he had a fellow who DIDN'T know how to dance was trying to dance. And this way you don't do drawing one, thirteen, twenty-five and work into it. You just go straight-ahead. He would put down alot of paper on his pegs, and the rubber band going around the pegs so the papers wouldn't fall off. He would pick up all the papers and he would do drawing one, then he would do drawing two, then three, then four. He never knew where he was going and you'd never know what was going to happen along the way, with this guy slipping, stepping on his fingers, and then stretching them and all. He was a master at stretching and squashing and expressions.

And with that, here are some of Tyer's animation

[and I'll continue posting my Donovan Cook interview tomorrow]

Donovan Cook interview, part 3

2011-08-13T21:57:00.004-04:00

Read part 2 here.

Was writing on storyboards a big challenge? For years, throughout the '70s and '80s, cartoons were being written on scripts.
Personally I think a challenge is writing a cartoon with words. Great cartoons are visual, all their entertainment value is visual. The drawings are funny, the animation...the dialogues and things like that are never supposed to be primary. If you look at your favorite Warner Bros. cartoons, or if you're a Disney person you look at the old Disney shorts, it's all about visual storytelling and visual humor.

When I get a script, especially for a short cartoon, it's very frustrating to me. You have to develop the materials and the jokes and everything, visually. The challenge was that they haven't really done a storyboard-driven show for a while, so it seemed kinda new to the people at the studio, but that's how we made our films at school. Craig, and Genndy and Rob, had all just come right out of school, and...that's how we all did, so we kind of knew how to do it.

About a year ago I talked to Eddie Fitzgerald and he said that one of the frustrating things about scripts is that they're always too long, and whenever they trim it down they always took the funny part out.
[laugh] Yeah, and Eddie knows them. You know, it's really weird. For some reason, if you're going to make an 11-minute cartoon often people would script them at twelve, thirteen, maybe fifteen pages even, and it's like "Whoa whoa wait a minute. You've got a paragraph here that takes up three-four-five lines of script page but this is a huge piece of business. It can be a huge slapstick thing that I can develop for twenty-three seconds almost. You can take a great cartoonist and tell them to write with words and they're going to find themselves relying on words to tell the story rather than visuals, so when you've done that and you need to trim, you don't want to cut the dialogue, you want things that don't look like they're part of the storytelling. So yeah, he's right. The first things they cut are the comedy, but you know. It's all different ways. There have been people making great cartoons that are from, you know, scripts, but for me it's not the way I love to make it, and it's not the way my favorite cartoons are done.

Did you develop the art style in 2 Stupid Dogs, or did Craig McCracken?
Craig and Mike Moon were largely responsible for what the show looked like. When I pitched the show it had been with designs that were mainly done by Chris Ure, with a little bit of work by Barry Johnson as well, both were also in our class at CalArts. But when Craig came in I was really big fan of films and how they function, and we knew that on television...it's not like Hanna-Barbera was going to rain money on us to make this crazy little cartoon show so we didn't exactly have alot of money for the animation, so I knew that anything we could do to make it easier to draw and look good when it wasn't moving was going to be a smart move. So we were talking about that and Craig said "You know, do you mind if I took the shot at the character designs, and I can simplify them." My mantra was "simplification, simplification, simplification," so I though they were very simple, and they were, but I said "Absolutely. Take a whack at it," so he redesigned as they are and as everybody knows them. I knew Mike from school, but it was Craig's suggestion that I take in Mike to basically create and do all of the environmental stuff. So it was Craig and Mike who created the looks of the show.

We were really big fans of Ed Benedict at the time, who was an amazing designer.

What was the first episode of 2 Stupid Dogs that was in production after it got picked up?
The first that that I think we put into production was the Drive-In one, because when I was pitching the show I didn't have a full continuity storyboard but I had a storyboard that Chris Ure and I had done, that was like what I call sequence board, that basically had all the story, all the gags, just not fully fleshed out but I used that to pitch the show, and so that was the first one that was partially ready to go so I gave that pitch board to Conrad Vernon.

They never really came in and stayed on staff, but Conrad Vernon and Mike Mitchell were really influential on the first season of Stupid Dogs in terms of storyboarding. So Conrad did the drive-in storyboard. Conrad invented the whole, I don't know if you remember in the show, but the little dog does the little celebration dances, and Conrad invented that in the first Drive-In storyboard. And Mike Mitchell did it again, his first board was the one called "Door Jam," where they're trying to get through the electronic door at K-Mart, or whatever we called it. This, to me, is a great thing about storyboard-driven show where a crew pitches a storyboard to the crew. Everybody laughed so hard when Conrad pitched that celebration dance that Mike then wrote one for his cartoon, when they got through the door. That wasn't the thing that we sought around and said "We need to have this thing the little dog does where he does a little dance and sings a song. It just happened organically because it was funny to us and we kept doing it. That's the really organic way to develop characters and character personality trait.

I think Genndy's first one was called "Where's the Bone?" where the little dog thinks he lost his bone but it's sitting on his head, and they travel around the world looking for it, and big dog sees the bone on his head but doesn't know that's the one he's looking for.

I can't remember what Rob's first board was.

Cornflakes?
That might of been, yeah. That might've been. I think Tony Craig's first board was the one where the big dog gets his head stuck in the fence. It's funny, those early boards have some really fun moments and really rough moments, because we were all young and made our fair share of mistakes along the way.

The great thing about this summer is that the show's running on both Boomerang and on Cartoon Network so I hope they still stand up. It's great when people find me and they're fans of the show when they were kids. I love that people can still see 'em, and hopefully they still hold up, even the ones we made our mistakes on.

Continue to Part 4.

Donovan Cook interview, part 2

2011-08-12T20:46:00.008-04:00

Read Part 1 here

How did you pitch 2 Stupid Dogs? Who did you go to?
Specifically at Hanna-Barbera? We pitched Stupid Dogs pretty much anywhere. I think the only place that never got us to Stupid Dogs pitch was Disney TV. At the time nobody was really making short cartoons. John [Kricfalusi] had been doing it on Ren & Stimpy.

Just to be clear on the timeline, we created Stupid Dogs before the Ren & Stimpy pilot came out. Some people have been a little nasty about saying that Stupid Dogs was a ripoff, and if you watch the two of them back-to-back they're very different shows. John K. is a really amazing guy but he had different sensibilities than I do and the people that made Stupid Dogs, with me and Hanna-Barbera. So when I went to work at Spumco on Ren & Stimpy I had already pitched the show everywhere and we were in the long process of making a deal at Hanna-Barbera.

So we pitched all around and Hanna-Barbera was one of the last places. Hanna-Barbera happened to be making Tom and Jerry Kids short cartoons, so when I took the show to Warner Bros., or Fox TV, or alot of those places they would say "yeah, it looks like it could be funny but their shorts. What do you do with them?" I would be "well, you put three of them together and you get half-hour." I mean, that's how we watched Looney Tunes, so it was a little weird that so many television and production executives wouldn't really know what to do with it but at Hanna-Barbera they were making these Tom and Jerry Kids shorts so they immediately knew how to put shorts on television and I pitched to Margot McDonough, who was the creative executive there at the time and she got it and liked it.

The crazy thing is this got pitched on a Tuesday, and on Thursday Turner took over the company. So there was quite a bit of turnmoil and it took quite a long time to make the deal because they were interested and liked it, but for months they had no idea who was going to run the company. David Kirschner was running Hanna-Barbera at the time but they had no idea who was going to run it and finally they found Fred Seibert but it then was months before he actually came to California to take over so it was a long, drawn-out process as it often is, but it all worked out in the end.

Was Bill and Joe anywhere at Hanna-Barbera at the time?
Oh yeah, they were both there. They came in everyday. It's funny, I look back at it now and I regret not spending enough time with them but we got to see them alot. My best Joe Barbera story...we made updated Secret Squirrel cartoons at the same time we made the first season of Stupid Dogs and I took the first storyboard we had for Secret Squirrel and took it to Joe to show it to him. He was so funny because when I first took it to him to say "Hey Joe, how are you doing? You know, we're doing new versions of your cartoon, Secret Squirrel and I wanted to show you one of the storyboards". Joe said "we didn't make Secret Squirrel!" [laugh] And he literally had a plush toy of Secret Squirrel on his shelf. I took it off the shelf and handed it to him and said "yeah, you did. Look, you have a toy of it."

So I pitched him the whole storyboard, I think the first one was the one we called "Goldflipper." I pitched the whole board, the big damn thing, doing the voices, and at the end he cuddles the plush toy and looks at it and says "Oh Secret, they ruined you!" [laugh] It was heartbreaking, obviously, at the time but it's hysterical because it was like "Wait a minute! Ten minutes ago you told me you didn't create this character and now you're cuddling the toy and saying that I ruined it." But they were both great and they were always there and they obviously had alot of stories and good advice. It was a real treat to be able to spend time at the studio when they were still there.

Was it your idea to include Secret Squirrel in the show, or someone else's?
Yeah, that was my idea. For some reason Hanna-Barbera didn't think it was a great idea to run three Stupid Dogs cartoons in a row, which I never did understand that, so Fred said "Let's put something inbetween. What do you want to do?" I said that one of the many Hanna-Barbera cartoons that I loved as a kid was Secret Squirrel, and asked if I can mess around with that, and they said "sure".

Paul Rudish was also in our class at CalArts and I've always been a giant fan of Paul's work and so I called him up and asked if he wanted to come in and redevelop the show. I was there couple months on my own so Paul was the first person that I hired and he came in and immediately worked on redeveloping Secret Squirrel. I think alot of the Secret Squirrel cartoons we made are fantastic, but I don't know if it ever really worked having them inbetween Stupid Dogs. Back then we got some feedback from audiences saying they were confused, so it might not have been the best choice for what to put inbetween, but on their own some of those Secret Squirrel cartoons are fantastic. Paul really worked hard on those. He was really hands-on.

Was Larry Huber in charge of all the Secret Squirrels?
I had never produced a show before and didn't really have any idea of what I was doing, because when we finalized the deal and they hired me to be the creator/producer/director of the show...I was 22, I had been out of school for not long, I think two years, so I really had no experience, so it was Fred...I owe alot to Fred. Some of the people in the production management at Hanna-Barbera were pretty reluctant to let me run the show, but Fred was the one that said "Let's let him try, but let's give him someone who knows what he's doing as a partner." So they teamed me up with Larry and he was amazing with not just with me, but everybody, including Paul and Craig [McCracken], Genndy [Tartakovsky], Rob [Renzetti], everybody that was there. They all learned so much from Larry. But pretty quickly, Larry and I decided to split duties, so he basically teamed up with Paul to work on the Secret Squirrel, and I ran Stupid Dogs, but we collaborated on all of them. I think I directed quite a few of the voice sessions for the Secret Squirrel shorts and all the storyboard pitches...Larry was there for all the Stupid Dog pitches, and I was there for all the Secret Squirrel pitches, but we decided to stay out of each other's hair for a little bit, by splitting up the two shows that way.

I have no idea what he's doing now, but Larry spent years working on these really great stuff; he had a great run before any of us kids showed up at Hanna-Barbera. He was really a special guy and he was a real veteran, but he embraced a kind of this chaos this new generation showed up and all wanting to try crazy ideas for new cartoons. He had alot of impact on alot of cartoons that were made in the '90s and the 2000s with Cartoon Network and Frederator and stuff. He's tremendous guy.

Who would you consider to be the key people in 2 Stupid Dogs, (writers, storyboards, etc.)?
Mark Saraceni was story editor, but we all wrote outlines. I think my role was for seven-minute cartoons we'd have no more than a three or four page outlines. So what we would do is anybody who had an idea for one of the cartoons...I had a pretty long list of 'em from all the development work that I had done that I spent trying to pitch it, but we would have lunch meetings trying to talk about premise ideas for cartoons and then we would pick the ones we like and then Saraceni would go off and, he wrote alot of the outlines and Lane Raichert I think wrote some, Henry Gilroy wrote some outlines, Richard Pursel did us a favor and wrote up a few, I met him at Spumco...but then majority of the writing was done on the wall in the storyboards.

So the board artists would get the outlines, which like I said was three or four pages, which really had just, here's the setup, here's what's the conflict's going to be, some ideas of what will happen, how things will escalate, and sometimes it will have a solid ending, sometimes it will not. And the storyboard artists would spend maybe two or three weeks doing a rough storyboard where they would develop much of the material and the gags. It would get pinned up and pitch it and we'd spend a day or so kinda tearing it down as a group. Most of the storyboard artists and much of the crew would watch the pitch and stay together for the rest of the afternoon and pitch new gags and new character stuff and situations and kinda cover the wall with post-it notes and the board artists would go away for couple more weeks to sort it all out.

So the guys that were doing so much of the storyboards...Genndy, Rob Renzetti became really key guys in the storyboards. Tuck Tucker was there for a while in the first season. But the key people on 2 Stupid Dogs were Craig McCracken, he was huge. Mike Moon, and Rob Renzetti, Tartakovsky. All those guys that wound up running the place for years after that. We were all part of the first season here and everyone was tremendously impactful on the show.

Continue to Part 3

Interview (C) Charles Brubaker
2 Stupid Dogs, Secret Squirrel (C) Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, Inc.

Donovan Cook interview, part 1

2011-08-11T22:39:00.015-04:00

Donovan Cook is the creator of 2 Stupid Dogs, which aired on TBS and in syndication in 1993-95. It was then subsequently rerun on Cartoon Network where it gained following within animation fans. He has also worked at Disney, Spumco, and Klasky-Csupo. The phone interview took place on August 11, 2011.

Where are you from? What were your influences?
I'm from California. I grew up in northern California, then moved to southern California as a teenager. Influences, early on, were Disney cartoons, Warner Bros. cartoons and particularly a couple of Peanuts animated television specials. The Halloween special, the Christmas special. I loved those. Heavily influenced by those early on and Schulz in general. A little bit later, toward high school, obviously Calvin and Hobbes was huge for me back then.

And you went to CalArts?
Yeah, from '87 to '90.

Made any films there?
I made four films there. Generally in the character animation program at CalArts you make one film a year. I made a first year film, made a second year film. In the second year we started making some collaborative films, too. Made a couple of group films in the second and third year, but made terrible films the first couple of years. Last year I made my first film that was actually coherent. Got some laughs and things like that. I was in the same class with Pete Doctor, Ash Brannon, Chris Ure, Mark Kennedy. We were a great year. Great class.

Did you made any acquintances with fellow students that you would work with on other shows?
Oh sure. Quite a number of people from 2 Stupid Dogs were from CalArts. Craig McCracken, who art directed Stupid Dogs was a year, maybe two years behind my class. And Mike Moon, Genndy Tartakovsky, Rob Renzetti, Tony Craig. Almost all of us were from CalArts, right around the same time.

Did you get a job in animation after graduation almost instantly?
I was really fortunate. At the end of the second year I did an internship at Disney Feature Animation on Little Mermaid. At the end of my third year, which is when I graduated, I went back to Disney for a year. I left Disney to create 2 Stupid Dogs.

You worked at Spumco on Ren & Stimpy?
I did, yes. For a little while. I was at Spumco when all the really nasty stuff went down, when Nickelodeon shut it down. I left Disney, I was 22. I thought it would take me few months to sell Stupid Dogs. Ha ha. Took a year and a half. So in the meantime I did a few things and I was fortunate enough to meet John K. and spend some time there. I had never done any television work before so my first lessons in how to make TV cartoons was at Spumco with John K. so that was a great time for me. I learned alot from John, and Ron Hughart was there. Ken Bruce and Dan Jeup were there at the time. Those guys were all there directing and I came in as an assistant director and really learned alot about television and how to keep it from getting too rough around the edges. But then all hell broke loose. Luckily that happened right around the time when we had just finalized the deal with Hanna-Barbera so the timing was okay. So I left Spumco and went directly to Hanna-Barbera to start working on Stupid Dogs.

What did you do as an assistant director at Spumco?
Spumco was a great place. They were very hands on. They did what's called character layouts. Once the storyboards were done you would make story reel, or what people now call an animatic, to time out with the storyboard and the dialogue tracks. And then instead of immediately shipping it out overseas they would do character layouts, where alot of really talented artists would do, not all the key poses you would use if you were to animate, but, say, if you were going to have a scene you were going to animate with it was going to have maybe twelve key poses, in the character layout you would probably do maybe four or five of those, the really, really key ones. And so as an assistant director I helped work with the directors in timing some of the character layouts and if something wasn't working I would do some fixes to it. So I was there as a second hand to some of the directors, dealing with timing and character poses and things of that nature.

Continue to Part 2

Interview (C) Charles Brubaker
2 Stupid Dogs (C) Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, Inc.
The Ren & Stimpy Show (C) Viacom International

The Ant and the Aardvark

2011-08-09T17:54:00.003-04:00

I have nothing much to say about the recently departed Corny Cole except that he has an impressive career record and a talented artist.

Corny Cole did a few things for the DePatie-Freleng studio, mostly on layouts and backgrounds, and even directing a pair of television specials starring Flip Wilson, but possibly his biggest accomplishment for the studio was designing the Ant and the Aardvark, both the settings and the character designs. John Dunn initially created the characters before he even joined DFE (at a studio called Spunbuggy), but Cole redefined the looks to what we know today.

Keep the Cool, Baby (1967)

2011-08-08T12:33:00.003-04:00

This was the final cartoon to come out of Shamus Culhane's reign at Paramount, and it went out with a style.

The voice acting (done by Joe Silver and Allen Swift) is great and gives the cartoon a great feel. The designs, while incredibly minimalist, is brilliantly animated by Nick Tafuri and Doug Crane (Crane especially did some great animation in this short). All this under the direction of Chuck Harriton, who I consider to be one of the underrated greats in animation.

Doodles

2011-08-07T04:55:00.002-04:00

I need to post my own artworks more often, so here they are.

The cat-fox thing is done with pen and paper. The others are on Wacom Tablet.

REPOST: A Bridge Grows in Brooklyn (1967)

2011-08-06T13:01:00.002-04:00

I had a poor-quality video capture up, but I got a cleaner video copy from Jerry Beck so I'm reposting it.

This was the last thing Howard Beckerman worked on at the Culhane-helmed Paramount Cartoon Studios. He wrote it, co-designed, and also did some animation on it (Beckerman said that he left the studio before the cartoon was even completed).

The director was Chuck Harriton and he shows promise here. While the designs and animation are simple there are few quirks I love about it, including how Hard Hat (the big guy) goes insane with the flower and starts pummeling it. The broader drawing and the timing made that scene work. I always notice those quirks in cartoons animated by Doug Crane and Nick Tafuri (they always seemed to be paired together in Culhane cartoons)

Mini-Squirts (1967)

2011-08-05T17:40:00.006-04:00

It's a shame that Ralph Bakshi's reign at Paramount Cartoon Studios (formerly Famous Studios) was extremely short-lived. The very few cartoons he did showed promise, a great extension to what the previous producer/director Shamus Culhane had done at the studio.

One of the cartoons that managed to escape through the cracks during his short stay was Mini-Squirts (1967), which shows two kids (a boy and a girl) playing house, only to take the roles of husband and wife in a movie/soap-opera fashion, complete with organ music and overly-dramatic dialogues.

View the cartoon below. Thanks to Jerry Beck for the copy.

Broken Down Film (1985)

2011-08-04T01:11:00.003-04:00

As a film collector I really got a bang out of this short film directed by Osamu Tezuka. I bet it looked even better on the big screen, projected from a film print.

I wonder how the effects were done.

Threes

2011-08-01T21:36:00.002-04:00

It never occurred to me until now that everything in the Matzoriley's hideout in The Great DeGaulle Stone Operation (1965) is in threes.

That Tom Yakutis, such a clever one...

La Feet's Defeat (1968)

2011-07-29T02:38:00.004-04:00

As a whole I love the early Inspector shorts. Has wonderful designs, funny gags, and the character interactions between the Inspector and Sgt. Deux-Deux makes it worthwhile. However, half-way through the series Deux-Deux began appearing less and less.

John Dunn, who wrote the earlier shorts with the character, stopped writing on Inspector and the duty went to Jim Ryan instead. Dunn, Tony Benedict, Jack Miller, and David Detiege occasionally filled in during this time.

Unfortunately Jim Ryan was a weak writer. His gags often fell apart and the story can be incoherent, and he never seemed to know how to end a cartoon.

This cartoon marks the only time Ryan used Deux-Deux and it ended up being his last appearance. However he's a completely different character here; while in his other appearances he would play as Inspector's reluctant sidekick here he's portrayed as an eager young recruit. He even has a different voice as well, courtesy of Don Messick.

Sir Blur

2011-07-26T22:34:00.005-04:00

One of the characters Shamus Culhane tried when he took over Paramount Cartoon Studios was Sir Blur, a nearsighted knight voiced by Allen Swift.

While I unabashedly love most of the Paramount entries from Culhane, I consider Sir Blur shorts to be the weakest of the bunch. The character was essentially Mr. Magoo that takes place in the medieval time period and the jokes can get old fast. Oh well, not all can be gems.

The character managed to appear in four cartoons before being retired. Below are all the films:

A Wedding Knight (Paramount, 1966) by WackyJacky

The Blacksheep Blacksmith (Paramount, 1967) by WackyJacky

Jack Kinney

2011-07-22T14:49:00.009-04:00

For years I've only been familiar with Jack Kinney through the god-awful Popeye cartoons he did for King Features in 1960s. What I didn't realize was that he worked as a director at Disney's, working on shorts. I now actually consider him to be one of my favorite animation directors; the Goofy cartoons he did were laugh out loud funny.

This is a good example. I love how it just escalates as the cartoon progresses, complete with what I consider to be one of the wildest cartoon endings I've ever seen. There's also many inside references to Disney staff (click here for a list). It makes me wonder if Al Bertino and Norm Ferguson had real-life animosity.

Here's another short from Kinney. This is also notable because it was co-written by Virgil Partch. VIP was a print cartoonist who appeared in Playboy and other magazines. He also had a few syndicated strips, most notably Big George. VIP worked at Disney for few years but found himself out after the strike. This was his only screen credit.

Here's Nudnik

2011-07-17T13:54:00.004-04:00

Paramount had their own in-house animation studio, Famous Studio (later Paramount Cartoon Studio), for years. Even then, however, they had no qualms about releasing animated shorts from other studios, such as the George Pal Puppetoons, Hal Seeger's Muggy Doo, few from John Hubley, and the various shorts directed by Gene Deitch. In fact, they released an entire series of shorts from Deitch called Nudnik.

Deitch recalls making Nudnik with fondness and remarked that they were his favorite cartoons to do. The pilot, Nudnik #2, was nominated for the Academy Award, which may have spurred Paramount Pictures into picking it up.

Paramount released the Oscar nominated short as Here's Nudnik. One big difference in this short than with the rest in the series is the music. According to Deitch Paramount requested that they don't use the blues music (done by SH Quintet, a Czech band) so they opted for the ragtime-ish tune done by Stephen Konichek, who did music for various Deitch shorts including his Tom and Jerry.

Here's the cartoon in question. Note that my copy was very out of sync but I managed to get it fixed before I uploaded it.

Boobie Baboon

2011-07-12T13:25:00.008-04:00

Paramount sold their cartoon lineup to Harvey Comics in the late 1950s. No longer having the rights to Casper, Baby Huey, Herman, Katnip and others they needed to create a new line of characters to star in their cartoons as the 1960s rolled by.

Only, it didn't happen that way. They did countless one-shot cartoons with different characters, all created with the hopes of becoming Paramount's next cartoon star, but none of them stuck. There were recurrers such as The Cat, Swifty & Shorty, Honey Halfwitch, and Goodie the Gremlin (a Casper-expy), but none of them made any impact.

One of the characters they tried was Boobie Baboon, who managed to appear in two cartoons (both 1965) under the creative supervision of Howard Post. Oddly enough, both cartoons involve prisons (in one he's trying to get in, in another he's trying to get out). I wonder what other ideas they had in store had the character continued to appear in more cartoons.

You can judge for yourself. Here are the two shorts. ~~That sounds like Bob McFadden doing all the voices in Solitary Refinement, but in The Outside Dope it sounds like Eddie Lawrence is the voice of Boobie.~~ (See edit below) Can anyone speculate?

EDIT: According to Mike Kazaleh, Howard Post never used Eddie Lawrence in his cartoons. The voices are Bradley Bolke and Bob McFadden

Larry & Steve

2011-07-11T21:14:00.006-04:00

I've been thinking of Cartoon Network's World Premiere Toons (WPT) lately. Looking through them now, it was a mixed bag. Some good, some okay, and some that was just terrible.

Of course, the program led to CN picking up shows that gained popularity. This is how we got Dexter's Laboratory, Cow and Chicken, Johnny Bravo, The Powerpuff Girls, Courage the Cowardly Dog, and others.

Believe it or not, it was through WPT that we got a version of FOX's Family Guy. Before becoming the king of FOX's prime-time cartoon line-up Seth MacFarlane was a writer at Hanna-Barbera. He worked on all three of the original Cartoon Cartoons lineup (mostly on Johnny Bravo, but he was on Dexter and Cow & Chicken as well). He also did a WPT short called Larry and Steve.

While family-friendly compared to the raunchy, fratboy Family Guy, the short exhibits some of MacFarlane's trademarks. The gags are fast-paced, some of which makes no sense (Nicky the Xenophobic Scottsman), and pop-culture references ("Luke this is your landlord, you still haven't returned my weed whacker."). Not to mention, the two main characters pretty much evolved into Peter and Brian. However, unlike much of the TV show, the short has some level of legitimate storytelling, and while the character designs aren't anything special, it's more appealing than the bland style seen in MacFarlane's more popular TV shows.

Push (1987)

2011-07-08T17:03:00.004-04:00

Osamu Tezuka is often regarded as the "Father of Anime". He introduced the world of cartoons with big eyes and small mouths that still lingers on to this day, which ironically enough was inspire by the American works of Disney and Max Fleischer (at the time they were big in Japan).

However, none of those traits are present in the various independent shorts that Tezuka directed, including this one. The theme of the short, war and destruction of mankind, is fairly common in Tezuka's works but it has an interesting style that makes it worth watching. If it wern't for the credits no one would guess that Tezuka did this.

Taro

2011-07-06T00:26:00.001-04:00

Animation stand

2011-06-30T18:23:00.004-04:00

My home-made animation stand. All the metal parts adds up to roughly $160. I still need to install the peg-bars to hold the drawings (and the glass plate to hold it down), but for the most part it's done.

Cajun Granny Stew

2011-06-30T12:58:00.002-04:00

I thoroughly enjoyed Courage the Cowardly Dog as a kid. It was an interesting take on the horror genre mixed in with slapstick comedy. The designs of the characters were creative and the voices (from New York, where the show was produced) were good too, complete with Lionel Wilson (Sidney the Elephant) voicing Eustace the old farmer.

This is an interesting episode. Despite that this is about a fox trying to kidnap an old lady so he can cook her in a stew it has very little to do with the "horror" motif. It plays like an old chase cartoon instead. In addition to that this is the only one in the entire series where Eustace does not appear at all.

It's still a really good episode, though. The scene with the steamroller is quite possibly one of the funniest moments in the show. The entire first season is out on DVD. I think I need to get it soon.

Nine to Fire

2011-06-24T23:30:00.007-04:00

I like independent cartoons sometimes. I don't share Amid Amidi's enthusiasm for them (he seems to prefer the artsy, maybe abstract type of films), but whenever I see an indie short that focuses on humor and characters I'll always get around watching them. Sometimes they're awful, but there are gems, too.

I like this one. The designs, as crude as they are, makes me laugh. I do notice a trend in the type of humor seen in cartoons lately, though. There seems to be a big popularity in cartoons that have surreal, absurdest humor. Sometimes it doesn't work; I'm not a big fan of Adventure Time (sorry, Cartoon Brew). On the other hand I do enjoy Regular Show, which is just as weird, but have good characters to make it work. And I consider this short to be a success.

What do you think?

Paint Markers

2011-06-23T23:42:00.002-04:00

Just wondering. You know those paint markers? The kind like Uni Paint Pens here?

Well, does anyone know exactly what kind of ink (paint?) they use for the markers? And whether I can buy a jar of it somewhere? Let me know.

Calvin and the Colonel

2011-06-12T02:43:00.000-04:00

David Feiss's Cheetos commercials

2011-06-09T16:51:00.002-04:00

I actually remember seeing these commercials when I was a kid. However I never made the David Feiss connection until now, even though I was an avid watcher of "Cow and Chicken" and the Feiss-style is very evident.

It was animated at WildBrain in San Francisco.

The Animation Insider

2011-06-06T14:38:00.003-04:00

Sometimes I like to interview people who works (or worked) in animation. So imagine when someone from the "biz" asked ME questions.

That happened with Mike Milo (Chowder, Pinkie and the Brain, etc.) recently. A nice change of pace, I guess. Especially since I'm still working on my first film (animation's half-way done now).

Read it here.

Dan Vs.

2011-06-05T14:11:00.001-04:00

Dan Vs. is another cartoon on the Hub that I'm enjoying right now. Not as much as FIM, but it's a perfect counterbalance. Unlike the Ponies, Dan is an obnoxious jerk who has no kindness whatsoever inside him, and it's hilarious.

That's No Lady - That's Notre Dame! (1966)

2011-06-03T00:18:00.001-04:00

One of my favorite "Inspector" shorts. Directed by George Singer.

Another video,,,

2011-05-31T03:34:00.001-04:00

What I've been working on...

2011-05-30T23:24:00.002-04:00

Decided to shoot some of the footage I animated. Looks okay so far. I'll photograph more later...

Some other drawings I've done

2011-05-28T02:50:00.005-04:00

Some stuff I've done when I'm not animating.

What I've been working on lately...

2011-05-27T04:39:00.001-04:00

Hamilton the Musical Elephant (1961)

2011-05-22T23:42:00.002-04:00

I don't know much about the outputs of the British animation studio Halas & Batchelor (which was run by a husband-and-wife team John Halas and Joy Batchelor), but I came across this short the other day and I had to share it.

There's a joy in this cartoon. The designs are clean and simple and the animation is bouncy and fun. The elephant is an appealing character and the jazz music fits the mood very well.

Like I said, I'm not too familiar with Halas & Batchelor so I'll just link it here.

Funny is Funny (1966)

2011-05-18T20:02:00.007-04:00

Ed Graham Jr. ran an animation studio in the '60s and '70s. He was primarily producing cereal commercials for Post featuring characters such as Sugar Bear and Linus the Lionhearted.

The studio, however, also did some other works, including a TV series based around Linus and other cereal mascots, and also a few short films. Funny is Funny (1966) is a rather daring piece that focuses on the merits of cartoon violence and whether they are funny or not. This was around the time many grassroots organizations started objecting to cartoon violence in Saturday Morning shows so this was rather timely when it was made.

The film's script and voice work was provided by Ed Graham Jr. and Carl Reiner. Graham is also credited as a director but I suspect that Clyde Geronimi, listed as an "animation director," is the de-facto director here.

Fester Fish

2011-05-16T13:08:00.001-04:00

I like this cartoon. The voices aren't perfect, but I love how he meshed the old-school animation style with modern humor. It gives an interesting combination.

F

Arthur! and the Square Knights of the Round Table

2011-05-14T02:28:00.002-04:00

Back in the '60s and '70s the Australian animation industry pretty much existed as a place where American studios can have tons of footage produced under low budget. King Features and Hanna-Barbera in particular took advantage of this.

Eventually though, the folks down in the southern hemisphere decided to create their own cartoons for their television. The first of those was Arthur and the Square Knights of the Round Table, produced by a company called Air Programs International (API) and broadcast starting 1968.

The show was syndicated throughout the world, including the United States where it was distributed under 20th Century Fox. Unfortunately it was unsuccessful in US. This may be the result of the show's style and humor being very similar to that of the Jay Ward cartoons produced in the 'States. It's a shame because it's actually quite enjoyable. The animation, while crude, is very bouncy and fun, and the dry humor appeals to me. I also love the "comic strip"-like character designs. The show was directed by Zoran Janjic, who originated from Zagreb, which partially explains the style.

Here are some videos:

Animation fail

2011-05-11T14:57:00.004-04:00

This is why animators sometimes need to fix the layouts they receive. From Hip Hip Ole (1964 Paramount).

A little something

2011-05-09T03:52:00.001-04:00

I don't want to talk too much about this, but it's something I'm going to work on during the summer (and possibly beyond that). We'll see.

I'll just leave this up for now.

The Pink Package Plot (1968)

2011-05-07T12:16:00.008-04:00

The Pink Package Plot (1968) was Art Davis's first cartoon as a director for DePatie-Freleng. For the next five years he directed over 30 theatrical shorts for the studio, not counting various TV projects they did during this time.

Not everything Art Davis did for the studio were great (he was mostly stuck directing on those weak Roland and Rattfink cartoons) but he did pretty good job on the Panthers. Not as good as Freleng's and Pratt's but generally better than Chiniquy's. And the first Pink Panther cartoon he did came out were among my favorites in the series.

This was also the only time Ed Love (1910-1996) animated on a Pink Panther cartoon. Love was an animator who did work for various studios, including Disney, MGM, Walter Lantz, and Hanna-Barbera. He had a very loose animation style, and I mean loose. His original roughs were notoriously sloppy and his many assistants over the years had a hard time cleaning them up. Despite that he did some of the most organic animation on many of the cartoons he worked on. Don Yowp has a pretty good blog post on Love that you can read.

Cartoonist extraordinaire Mike Kazaleh ID'd some of the animators for me:

Ed Love animated the ladder sequence up to the dog throwing the package into the garbage.
Warren Batchelder ('Batch') did the Panther kicking the door in, the high wire, and call box scenes. (He adds "If you're watching a mid-fifties to early sixties McKimson cartoon and the animation looks like animation, it's one of Batch's scenes.")
Herman Cohen animated the Panther dressed as a woman.
Ed DeMattia, who he notes didn't really have a distinctive style, most likely animated the anvil/teeter board sequence.

A ticket for you...

2011-05-04T17:04:00.002-04:00

This is how "The Ticket Master" should have ended.

Cartoon Collective

2011-05-01T15:06:00.003-04:00

There's a Kickstarter campaign for Cartoon Collective, an animation studio that hopes to do traditionally animated cartoons.

It looks interesting. It looks like it's a mix of new-comers and old-comers in the profession. If you want to donate, go here.

Killarney Blarney (1973)

2011-04-30T07:44:00.000-04:00

When I was researching the DePatie-Freleng theatricals few years back there were two titles that drove me crazy: Nippon Tuck (1973) and Killarney Blarney (1974), both part of the Blue Racer series of shorts. At the time these two were left out of the list of BR cartoons and I didn't even know these two existed until Jerry Beck gave me his list (before that I found a German copy of Killarney; at the time BR was very hard to find and thus I used any little material I could get my hands on)

By the time Blue Racer came out Hawley Pratt pretty much stopped directing shorts. He did a couple of Hoot Kloot and Dogfather shorts later but he eventually retired from the animation business. Art Davis stuck around for a while and did a handful of BR shorts that were actually pretty good (Camera Bug, Blue Racer Blues, and Support Your Local Serpent are my favorites in the series). Gerry Chiniquy's entries were either shrug-worthy or just not good, but I felt he got one out of the park: The Boa Friend.

Then eventually Art Davis left the studio to Hanna-Barbera. While there were occasional guest directors such as Roy Morita, Art Leonardi, Bob McKimson, and Sid Marcus, the only real director left at this point was Chiniquy and he really went downhill as the seventies went by.

I think this BR short is the the point where the downhill sets in. While the animation in DFE shorts were always low-budget and limited, they were at least livelier looking than the works of their competitors such as Filmation, Hanna-Barbera, or even Walter Lantz, mainly due to the presence of Pratt. However by this point the animation had downgraded to the point that it looks no different than the Saturday Morning schlock that was on contemporary TV.

The animation of the Racer is scrappier-looking than usual. The one part that gets to me is where he tells the leprechauns "Well what do I look like? I'm a snake!". The Racer, for some reason, has a very brushy eye-brow in this scene. After he says that line, however, the brushy eyebrow suddenly disappears and returns back to his usual floating eyebrow seen in the rest of the series.

And just to add to the seventies-ness of this short, they got Paul Winchell to guest voice the two leprechauns.

Don't touch that dial

2011-04-29T17:29:00.010-04:00

Paul J. Smith must be so proud.

I'll be back to regularly talking about old-school animation (ya'know, the stuff that really matters) and less about Flash-animated Technicolor Ponies on this blog tomorrow.

But until then, read the AV Club's review of Friendship is Magic.

My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic isn’t just kids TV that won’t make parents want to kill themselves; it’s legitimately entertaining and lots of fun. The best word to describe it is probably “relentless,” in that it’s relentlessly cute, relentlessly happy, and relentlessly entertaining. In its own way, it reminds me of a movie like Singin’ In The Rain, in that both properties aim to overwhelm any cynicism directed at them via sheer and utter joyfulness. It seems like it should be easy to watch either property with an ironic sneer of detachment, but both utterly wear down all defenses. I think I realized this around the time I was giggling maniacally at a tiny cartoon pony being dragged against her will toward a giant rock, adorable frown affixed firmly to her face. She was such a cute little pony! Yes she was!

If you're wondering why a half-hour toy commercial about girly ponies is so damn popular, that link pretty much explains it.

Friendship truly is magical

2011-04-27T19:37:00.003-04:00

Ponies!

2011-04-26T20:03:00.004-04:00

Why not? Everybody's doing it.

The Piquette Poquette of Paris (1966)

2011-04-24T22:26:00.006-04:00

The one director that DePatie-Freleng studio had that I'm curious about is George Singer (1923-2002). I don't know much about his animation career as whole, but before his brief stint at DFE he worked at Jay Ward, and after that he seemingly spent many years at Hanna-Barbera. In 1988-89 he was a producer on Film Roman's Garfield and Friends.

His career at DFE was short. He was only credited on five Inspector films (The Pique Poquette of Paris, Sicque! Sicque! Sicque!, That's No Lady - That's Notre Dame, Unsafe and Seine, and Le Cop on Le Rocks), plus the Saturday Morning shows The Super 6 and Super President. It's a shame his time at the studio was short because the Inspector shorts he directed were among the funniest in the series. His shorts had more broad animation compared to the rest, and the timing is snappier than much of the Chiniquy-directed entries.

Here's one of the shorts he did, The Pique Poquette of Paris. This cartoon has an example of what we in the internet age refer to as the Brick Joke. This is when an element of a joke is delivered in the beginning, but before the punchline comes something else kicks in and the element introduced is promptly forgotten. In the end, after everything else is said and done, the joke element finally returns, delivering the punchline. This was used a few times in the Road Runner shorts directed by Chuck Jones, where a failed trap by the Coyote would return later in the cartoon after the audience had forgotten about it to deliver a blow to the Coyote.

I believe this was Singer's first Inspector short, and he did a good job, althoug the funniest from him is either Sicque! Sicque! Sicque! or That's No Lady - That's Notre Dame.

#1 Assistant, I am disappoint

2011-04-23T01:42:00.004-04:00

Why do I like this show???

The Beary Family

2011-04-20T00:13:00.006-04:00

It's no secret to animation fans that the Walter Lantz shorts directed by Paul J. Smith are not exactly the finest the theatrical animation had to offer. Poor animation, inconsistent sizes, slow timing...basically list any animation defects you can think of and the chances are the Smith shorts have it.

It didn't seem to matter what artistic staff was behind these cartoons. For a brief while Michael Maltese was writing on some of the late fifties Lantz cartoons, many of which were directed by Smith, and while they wern't awful, story-wise, the cartoons would've been much much better if someone like Chuck Jones directed them.

Possibly the worst of the bunch were the Beary Family cartoons. Jack Hannah directed the first two, but all subsequent shorts were Smith's entries.

It wasn't all bad, though. The early ones with the pet goose were actually somewhat funny, although they were nothing to write to home about. But as the formula got put in place, it was all downhill from here. The series actually lasted 10 years, 1962-72, although there were only 28 shorts made (they only released like three shorts per year, on average).

To bring back into the subject of the cartoons being subpar no matter the talent behind it, here's a good example. The entire first half of this cartoon (up until the scene where Charlie answers the phone after the dog ate the ham) was animated by Virgil Ross, one of the best animators from the theatrical age, mostly known for his work at Friz Freleng's unit back in the Warner days. Note the characters are drawn more "gruff" than in the second half of the cartoon, animated by Al Coe*. Despite having one of the best animators in the industry working on this you can't tell from this picture, making Smith's hack-work more magnified. Imagine if someone like Jack Hannah or Sid Marcus was still around.

* - The other credited animators, Tom Byrne and Joe Voght, are actually assistants.

Pink at First Sight

2011-04-08T12:28:00.003-04:00

Just noticed this was up. Pink at First Sight was a Pink Panther TV special directed by Bob Richardson. It was a Valentines' Day special although it was originally broadcast three months later on May 1981 on ABC. This was produced after DePatie-Freleng split up, when much of the studio's crew was transferred to Marvel Production with David DePatie as producer.

If you can't view the video you can see it on YouTube here.

Osomatsu Kun

2011-04-03T14:33:00.010-04:00

Osomatsu Kun
(Little Osomatsu) was a comic created by Japanese cartoonist Fujio Akatsuka, which ran in Shonen Sunday magazine from 1962 to 1967. There were various revivals and remakes of the comics from the 1970s to all the way up to the early 1990s.

The comic was a hit and gave Fujio Akatsuka the mark as a cartoonist, later creating many more titles. You can read English translation of the very first story here

The basic premise is that it's about a misadventures of a family with identical sextuplets. One of the running gags in the early story was that noone can tell which is which because all six looked exactly alike (clothing, hairstyle, etc.) This was later dropped as the comic went on.

However, Fujio went into a rut because the characters didn't have much personality, aside from them being sextuplets. He later introduced side characters Chibita, a tiny bald kid that loved to play pranks on them, and Iyami, whose designs can be described as a Japanese parody of American stereotype of the Japanese (does that make sense), complete with squinty eyes and buck teeth. He like to present himself as being from France even though its hinted that he never even went there.

The two characters were a hit with fans, though, mainly because they were actually interesting. As time went by more and more stories were dedicated to them, to the point that they took over the series. Osomatsu and his siblings barely appeared and eventually were relegated to being side characters. At this point they might as well should have changed the name of the comic to Iyami and Chibita.

This trait went into the two animated series, a black and white one from 1966-67 and a color revival from 1988-89.

The 1960s series were more faithful to the comic and many episodes did at least try to feature Osomatsu and his siblings prominently.

This series was thought to be lost for years. It wasn't until the early 1990s when 16mm prints of every episode were found in a TV station warehouse. The cartoons are an interesting oddity and many are even funny, but the poorly done animation makes it hard to watch sometimes. It was done at Studio Zero, which at the time was one of the most shoddy animation studios in Japan.

Here's one with Osomatsu being prominent (until Iyami shows up half-way through)

Unlike most Japanese cartoons Osomatsu Kun didn't take strict character setting seriously. Many stories were stand-alone and in some cases there were a few where Chibita and Osomatsu would meet for the first time, despite interacting alot in other stories. Sometimes they would do things like making Chibita a businessman, a political leader, or a former safecracker who got released from prison after many years. It didn't matter to Fujio that Chibita is a kid, if he thinks of something interesting with the character, he'll do it even if its impossible.

Here's another black and white episode illustrating the above statement. This one is better-done than the others from the series although it's still shoddy in places.

In the color revival the lack of focus on Osomatsu was very evident. They barely made an appearance in the THEME SONG, the studio opting to focus it entirely on Iyami instead.

The 1980s episodes were wackier than the 1960s show. While it had its problems the animation was better done here. Here's one of the episodes:

EDIT: I'd figure that I'd post a page from the (later) comic. Not too many online, but I found this, the original comic version of one of the black and white episodes I put up.

Frog in a Suit episode 3

2011-03-25T11:24:00.006-04:00

I'm really hoping KaboingTV takes off. It'd be nice to have a platform for a quality animation in the age of internet.

Third (and, for the time being, last) episode of Joe Murray's new series, Frog in a Suit was posted and it's really growing to me. After an admittingly slow first episode, the subsequent two episodes really grew my expectations. Hopefully more will be made.

The ending scene was funny. And having guys like Carlos Alazraqui and Tom Kenny doing the voices makes it better, too.

So spread the word of KaboingTV.com, why don't ya'?

Nephew Newton's Fortune in color

2011-03-24T22:01:00.002-04:00

Months back I posted a Calvin and the Colonel episode "Nephew Newton's Fortune" in black and white.

Recently somebody put up the episode in color. Watch it here.

The Wizard of Id

2011-03-22T21:12:00.006-04:00

I thought this is amusing. It's a 4-minute film produced by Jim Henson that features Muppet versions of the "Wizard of Id" characters.

Henson did the voice of the Wizard, and Jerry Juhl did the King and Spook.

More info on the film here.

The Payoff

2011-03-19T22:13:00.002-04:00

This is why I took part in the Guard Dog Global Jam: an original artwork from Bill Plympton's "Guard Dog"!

The Pink Panther Show bumpers

2011-03-17T22:19:00.002-04:00

The videos below are short bumpers that DePatie-Freleng created for the various incarnations of The Pink Panther Show that was broadcast on NBC's Saturday Morning lineup throughout the '70s. Many of them feature the Panther interacting with the Ant and the Aardvark, suggesting that these were made when the A&A shorts first started appearing on television.

That's Marvin Miller narrating.

Rocko's Modern Life and KaboingTV

2011-03-11T11:40:00.006-05:00

I still consider Rocko's Modern Life to be one of the funniest TV cartoons ever made so I was pleasantly surprised when it was announced that Shout! Factory will release season 1 on DVD this summer.

I've never bought anything from Shout! before but from my understanding they actually care about their products and use the best available materials possible, so hopefully their release will be uncut. Plus Amazon's pre-order price is $14 right now, so why bother going for the $50 MOD DVD that won't play on most computers anyway?

You can preorder here.

And while we're talking about Rocko, it's appropriate enough that creator Joe Murray recently launched his long talked-about website, Kaboing TV. His goal being to produce quality, creator-made cartoons for the age of internet. As a long-time supporter of artist-driven cartoons I support the website and hope that it will bring great cartoons. See the site here. Hopefully it will expand.

Transition from print to animation

2011-03-09T13:16:00.019-05:00

(above, a page from the original "Umeboshi Denka" comics, published in 1968)

My last post on Umeboshi Denka promoted a comment from Disney animator Will Finn saying that animated adaptations of Japanese comics tend to lose something when transitioning to small screen. As an example he cited "Lupin III", noting that the animated series tightened the loose artwork present in Monkey Punch's original comics.

This led me to think about other comics-to-animation adaptations over the years in regards to Japanese shows. In the beginning most Japanese cartoon shows were adapted from pre-existing comics; very few shows at the time were created specifically for television (and even then the networks preferred that a comic version is published first just to see how the public reacts).

Specifically, how much liberties should studios have when it comes to making what the character was originally created to be seen in print to work in animation? Obviously this depends entirely on how the character were drawn in the first place.

Some shows they try really hard to retain the look of the source material. Will mentioned Shunji Sonoyama's Gon (original title Hajime Ningen Gyators, lit. "First Human Gyators"). The original comics were drawn in very shaky style. A Japanese version of "B.C.", stylistically.

(a page from Gyators)

Tokyo Movie later turned it into a series as a replacement for Dokonjo Gaeru ("Frog with Guts", itself based on a comic, but that's for another time)

There were some necessary streamlining in order to make the designs work in animation, but they still managed to retain some of the shakiness from the source material. This article from AniPages Daily writes that this is what the studio was apparently going for. To prove the point further they reproduced studio notes that instructed animators how to draw the characters.

So sometimes studios are successful at retaining the loose style in original comics. In the case of "Umeboshi Denka" and other Fujiko Fujio manga, despite the cartoony designs and exaggerated facial features the characters are drawn rather conservatively compared to the works of Monkey Punch and Shunji Sonoyama. As a result not too many are lost in transition...usually.

The first Fujio-duo comic to be animated was their break-out hit, Obake no Q-Taro (Q-Taro the Ghost). While Japanese shows that aired before it featured comic reliefs and in some cases cartoony character designs, "Q Taro" was the first show that was specifically gag-comedy oriented.

Even though the show was a big hit back in the day it was barely shown after its run (1965-67 for 97 episodes) ended. It's cited that the reason for that is because it was shot in black and white. However from the little I've seen of the series the quality may have affected the rerun issue. Tokyo Movie Shinsha is often regarded as the best of the Japanese studios and I theorize they may be embarrassed by this show, which is quite frankly shoddy even by 1960s standards.

(a page from Q-Taro comic)

In 1971 TMS produced a revival called "Shin Obake no Q-Taro" (New Q-Taro the Ghost), this time in color. From the little of what I've seen they were much more loose than the 1960s series. TMS by then had gotten the hang of doing shows and improved. Many fans feel that this was the most faithful adaptation of the three "Q-Taro" shows (one more was made in 1985-87 by another studio, and the only one of the three that's available in home video).

Sometimes the transition from print to animation can be done right. This rests entirely on how the source material is presented. I have to agree with Will, in regards to Lupin, that the comic's looseness could have been transitioned to animation, even if the low budget meant that certain liberties had to be taken. The pilot film, embedded below, is much more faithful to the source material than any subsequent cartoons featuring the character.

So what do you think? If anyone's interested in me going over American comic-to-animation adaptations, write in the comments.

Umeboshi Denka (1969)

2011-03-06T18:30:00.008-05:00

Fujiko Fujio were a popular cartoonist duo from Japan, made up of Hiroshi Fujimoto (1933-1996) and Moto Abiko (1934-). Together they've created many comics, the most popular being Doraemon, which was adapted into a TV series that ran from 1979 to 2005 (26 years!) only to be revived about a month later with a new show which still goes on to this day.

The duo has a long list of comics that they have created, many of which have been adapted into TV series. Tokyo Movie Shinsha (then simply known as Tokyo Movie) produced several in the '60s and '70s, many of them in black and white. "Obake no Q-taro" (Q-taro the Ghost) came first, followed by "Perman" (literally "Superman" without the "Su"), "Kaibutsu Kun" (Monster Prince), then this one...

"Umeboshi Denka" (Denka from Star Ume) was actually the last black and white show that TMS made*, broadcast on TBS (Tokyo Broadcast Service) from April to September of 1969 for 26 episodes. It was a gag-comedy about a royal alien family from another planet who moved to Earth after their planet got destroyed. A Japanese family took them in, resulting in comedic hijinks.

There were attempts to revive the series in color, but it was unsuccessful. They did a feature-film based on it, hoping to gain interest, and Denka even made a guest appearance in one episode of "Doraemon", but all attempts were futile.

As for the 1969 B&W series, the only thing available on the internet are the opening and closing sequences.

Notice that the end sequence has a lot of empty space in layouts. This was because they superimposed screen credits where the empty space is. The video presented above is a non-credit version.

* - One more B&W show from TMS came out after "Denka", called "Chingo Muchabei", broadcast in 1971. However this was actually made in 1968; it didn't air until years later.

Brad Caslor's early work

2011-03-03T09:30:00.002-05:00

Brad Caslor is known for his short Get a Job, but before that he animated on some of the Canada Vignettes that NFB produced in the late '70s/early '80s. They were very short, usually 1 to 3 minutes long, but they generally clever. Multiple filmmakers worked on them, so there are a variety of styles.

Fort Prince of Wales (1978)

Spence's Republic (1978)

More information here.

AIEEE!

2011-02-25T13:27:00.002-05:00

Because I still love this strip. Somebody uploaded a bunch of Arnold strips on this flickr site.

You can still read the strip here, here, and here.

Sing another song

2011-02-25T02:18:00.003-05:00

Sad part is, I actually like the show (the one with Lauren Faust at helm).

Any resemblance to Derpy Hooves is strictly coincidental.

Snuffy's Song / The Method and Maw / The Hat

2011-02-24T13:16:00.007-05:00

I have to admit that the made-for-TV cartoon adaptations of King Features comics (Beetle Bailey, Krazy Kat, Snuffy Smith) leave alot to be desired. The animation quality varies due to it being contracted out to several places all over the world but they were generally shoddy. And the script-work wasn't exactly the best in the business.

That said, there are interesting things about them. The voice acting were great, with guys like Paul Frees, June Foray, Howie Morris, etc. doing a good job. Visually the Gene Deitch-directed Krazy Kat cartoons remained faithful to the comic (even with Deitch redesigning the characters) although the scripts that producer Al Brodax handled completely misunderstood the Herriman comics.

The Snuffy Smith cartoons is generally agreed to be the weakest, although several of them benefits from being animated by Jim Tyer, the only animator I know of who can make even the lamest of all cartoons look interesting, despite the limited animation.

Then there's this, which I didn't even notice until somebody pointed out at Cartoon Brew. Apparently the first three episodes formed a storyline with Barney, Snuffy, and Loweezy being stuck in the big city after one of Barney's crazy scheme failed. "Snuffy's Song" featured the trio going to the city in order to make Snuffy a singing star, while parts 2 and 3 ("The Method and Maw" and "The Hat" respectively) features them stuck in the city and trying to return home.

While they were created for television Paramount Pictures decided to release them to theaters one year before that, and as a result this ended up being the only time a multi-part storyline was done in theatrically-released animated shorts. Unfortunately there's a reason why most cartoon shorts were stand-alone: they liked to run the cartoons out of order. "Snuffy's Song" and "The Hat", parts 1 and 3, were released in June 1962. The second part, "The Method and Maw", didn't come out until October, four months later.

I presume that some TV stations ran the shorts in correct order, but who knows. Unlike most multi-part cartoon storylines, though, these three were made so that it can work as stand-alone shorts, so this probably didn't matter much.

But whatever's the case here are the three in chronological order:

Robert McKimson

2011-02-19T23:43:00.002-05:00

Of the three Looney Tunes directors working in the 1950s (the other two being Freleng and Jones), Robert McKimson is pretty much the "forgotten" one in the group.

Recently Michael Barrier put up the interview he did with him back in 1971. McKimson died in 1977 so he never got the recognition he deserved when he was still alive.

You can read it here.

Pyun Pyun Maru

2011-02-15T14:45:00.004-05:00

This goes in my list of favorite theme songs of all time: Pyun Pyun Maru (ピュンピュン丸), a Japanese cartoon that aired in the late '60s/early '70s.

"Pyun Pyun Maru" was about a ninja boy and his little brother that works for a private detective that accepts any type of work they come. The show takes place in Samurai-era Japan but there is alot of anachronism in the stories, with the characters having working telephones and often seen watching TV (in the opening credits you can even see the TV antenna sticking out on the building). It was very heavy on slapstick and general cartoon silliness.

These days it's not that unusual for anime to have a "wacky", "zany" style. Heck, one studio, Gainax, runs on this. It was, however, pretty rare back in the '60s. "Pyun Pyun Maru" was Toei Animation's first attempt on this style, and it did very, very poor in ratings.

26 episodes were produced in the same production season, but they were broadcast years apart on NET-TV (a Japanese network now known at TV Asahi). The first 12 aired from July 3 to September 18 of 1967. The sponsor pulled the show, citing poor ratings and the fact that the stories were batshit insane. The remaining 14 remained dormant until it was dusted off the shelves and broadcast from December 29, 1969 to March 30, 1970. Throughout the 1970s to the 1990s the show was rerun, where it got better ratings there.

Unfortunately I've only seen very little of the show. A complete collection DVD was released in Japan few years back. If anyone could help me find it, I'd much appreciate it.

For the time being, here's the opening and closing credits. Don't bother asking for English translations; it wouldn't make as much sense as listening to it in Japanese.

Influence Map

2011-02-13T00:44:00.000-05:00

There are many more, but these cartoonists were on top of my head.