Back in the '80s Mike Kazaleh drew this parody, as part of a fake comics page he did where he poked fun at the strips that was running in his paper at the time. I thought it was hilarious, so with his permission I'm posting it here.
Thursday, September 13, 2012
Hymie
Kevin McCormick's Arnold never made much of a splash, but it did make an impression with many people who had the strip in their comics section.
Back in the '80s Mike Kazaleh drew this parody, as part of a fake comics page he did where he poked fun at the strips that was running in his paper at the time. I thought it was hilarious, so with his permission I'm posting it here.
See my interview with creator Kevin McCormick here.
Back in the '80s Mike Kazaleh drew this parody, as part of a fake comics page he did where he poked fun at the strips that was running in his paper at the time. I thought it was hilarious, so with his permission I'm posting it here.
Sunday, September 9, 2012
Conchy - Week of August 2, 1976
So I thought I do this. I came into possession a bunch of Conchy comic strips by James Childress. I decided that, every Sunday, I'm going to post one week's worth of the strip. So be sure to check back often.
These are the week of August 2, 1976
(this cartoon ran exactly one month after the bicentennial)
These are the week of August 2, 1976
Friday, June 22, 2012
Monday, February 6, 2012
The Gutsy Frog
And here's another episode of The Gutsy Frog. This is actually a second episode. Parts of the animation is really unusual here; the first couple of episodes were laid out by a different group of artists than the ones normally used in the rest of the run.
Director: Eiji Okabe
Animation Directors: Osamu Kobayashi, Tsutomu Shibayama
Scenario: Haruya Yamazaki
Storyboards: Noboru Ishigura
Key Animation/Layouts: Kazumi Shimada, Michiko Takahashi
Animation/Inbetweens: Kyoko Harada, Tamie Yuuki, Masayuki Oozeki
Director: Eiji Okabe
Animation Directors: Osamu Kobayashi, Tsutomu Shibayama
Scenario: Haruya Yamazaki
Storyboards: Noboru Ishigura
Key Animation/Layouts: Kazumi Shimada, Michiko Takahashi
Animation/Inbetweens: Kyoko Harada, Tamie Yuuki, Masayuki Oozeki
Monday, January 16, 2012
"Two Guys on the Border" by Shunji Sonoyama
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.
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.
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
David H. DePatie on cartoon violence
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."
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Donovan Cook interview, part 5
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
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
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