I’m still waiting for some of the inventions showcased here. What new inventions will 2007 bring our way?

Happy New Year everyone!

-Floyd Bishop

I knew it! I knew I was on to something when I created a cartoon rhino.

I don’t want to say “I told you so”, but this British newspaper story, with photos, from the DAILY MAIL, about Rupert the Rhino will warm your heart. Domesticated Rhinos will be the next big thing… just you wait and see!

From last week in The New York Times Magazine:

Diana may be dead and Masako disgraced, but here in America, we are in the midst of a royal moment. To call princesses a “trend” among girls is like calling Harry Potter a book. Sales at Disney Consumer Products, which started the craze six years ago by packaging nine of its female characters under one royal rubric, have shot up to $3 billion, globally, this year, from $300 million in 2001. There are now more than 25,000 Disney Princess items. “Princess,” as some Disney execs call it, is not only the fastest-growing brand the company has ever created; they say it is on its way to becoming the largest girls’ franchise on the planet.

Read the whole article HERE.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.
-Jake

Charles Walker & the NYC Blues Band > Scratch My Back

The whole story of this record is too long and too good to go into in one short blog post. (Some day on the Oblivion blog.) Suffice it to say it goes from discovery to borrowed guitars in South Bronx pawn shops to money borrowed from friends to a Harlem funeral with dueling, crying wives.

My friend and partner Tom Pomposello was a bluesman (Italian, from Long Island, but truly, a bluesman) with an evangelical vision of New York, more known for Frank Sinatra and the Brill Building than blues. I’ve forgotten right now where he first met Charles, but Tom became convinced he was the ticket.

Subsequently he fell for every scam Charles laid on us, particularly the ones that required an immediate cash outlay (”You can never move too fast in this business, Fred.”) all the way to Charles’ aforementioned burial when the Lenox Avenue funeral director refused to go on with the service until the two suburban kids came up with the scratch.

Speaking of scratch, the band’s double harmonica version of Slim Harpo’s Scratch My Back is some of the deepest, funkiest blues to ever come out of a New York studio, especially with one of the harp players being a white guy.

–Fred

Charles Walker & the NYC Blues Band > Scratch My Back

Mississippi Fred McDowell > My Babe

In late 1971 I was 20 years old and visiting my hippie friend Tom Pomposello at his “liberation” record store in our home town of Huntington, Long Island. He asked if my college radio staion had any recording equipment, and would I please come to the (Greenwich) Village Gaslight and record him playing bass with bluesman Mississippi Fred McDowell. The only blues I knew about was what I’d seen during the rock blues revival at the Fillmore East like B.B. and Albert Kings, but I figured that anyone with “Mississippi” in their name playing the very cool Gaslight must be famous. How Tom came to be playing with anyone famous is a question unanswered to this day. I dragged my friend Roy down with me and the mono tape recorder; we recorded the show and played it on my radio show.

A couple of years later Tom and I got the bright idea to start Oblivion Records to release Tom’s own music and since Fred McDowell was indeed world renowned with lots of records to his name, we figured starting with a name brand would a great way to launch. We were right and the album’s been in various forms of release most of the thirty years since (Tom’s son and I are making plans for the latest reissue right now).

–Fred

Mississippi Fred McDowell > My Babe

Blog History of Frederator’s original cartoon shorts.
Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. Part 6.
Part 7. Part 8. Part 9. Part 10. Part 11. Part 12. Part 13.
Part 14.

Starting at Hanna-Barbera in 1992 it was clear I wanted the studio to produce short cartoons, but I was only beginning to figure out how we should actually go about it.

Anyone who would listen I’d talk to about shorts. And I picked up tips anywhere I could.

Buzz Potamkin was our new head of production. His New York studio had produced my original MTV “Moonman” animation before he packed it in to go to Hollywood to make Saturday morning shows, and over the years he’d given me a pretty fair education on how TV cartoon studios worked in general, and in particular how Hanna-Barbera had gotten into the sad shape it was in. Together with my operating partner Jed Simmons we figured we could credibly ask for enough money from our boss Scott Sassa to make 48 short cartoons. It would cost about the same as two series, but instead of two chances to succeed (or fail, like with 2 Stupid Dogs or SWAT Kats)) we’d have 48. “Scott, I know I know nothing about making cartoons. But with 48 shots even someone as ignorant as me can hit,” I pleaded.

Buzz also suggested Larry Huber as supervising producer. Having proved his ability to work with new people and new ideas on 2 Stupid Dogs he would be perfect.

John Kricfalusi had long preached the difference between traditional writers and cartoon-artist-as-writers (“Fred, every writer puts a cartoon scene in where ‘the bomb blows up in his face’ and thinks it’s funny. A bomb going off is not funny! It’s how the face looks before the bomb, how long it waits to blow up, how it blows up, and what happens after it blows up that might be funny. An artist shows you that.”) and I bought it hook, line, and sinker.

As a pitcher and buyer of shows I knew the limitations of the traditional pitch: Here’s the idea, here’s two pages describing the idea, and here’s a few pictures of what the idea might look like. After listening to folks like Friz Freleng, Joe Barbera, and Chuck Jones talk about shorts pitches back in the day, I determined we would only put a short into production after a full storyboard pitch from the artist originating it. Please show us the actual film you want to make, not describe the idea of the film. I’d been in advertising long enough to know the difference between an idea and the actual execution; the gap was light years. If we saw the storyboard we’d have some idea of whether or not the creator had any real notion of cartoons (versus animation, not the same thing at all), whether he/she really understood their character, and whether or not he or she actually understood story.

OK, so there was a framework to operate in. Now what?

(More next time.)

Blog History of Frederator’s original cartoon shorts.
Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. Part 6.
Part 7. Part 8. Part 9. Part 10. Part 11. Part 12. Part 13.
Part 14.

(L)Mike Lazzo, originating programmer, Cartoon Network & (R) Joe Barbera

It was almost an accident I became president of the famous Hanna-Barbera studio, but it was a chance to revive cartoons through my idea of making shorts the way they did in the theatrical days.

Blog History of Frederator’s original cartoon shorts.
Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. Part 6.
Part 7. Part 8. Part 9. Part 10. Part 11. Part 12. Part 13.

Cartoon Network had just launched and senior creative executive and programmer Mike Lazzo had a great idea for a “Cartoon Advisory Board” really just a great excuse to hang with legends. He assembled a room somewhere in Hollywood with Bill Hanna, Joe Barbera, Friz Freleng, Noel Blanc (Mel’s son), and John Kricfalusi. (…:::Later, Jerry Beck refreshes my recollections below in comments.) Mike had a bunch of questions he asked and they answered, but only one sticks in my mind. As I remember it went something like this:

Mike Lazzo: What makes a good producer?

Joe Barbera: Fred Quimby was a great producer!

(Note from FS: I knew Joe despised Quimby, so this confused me right off the bat.)

Quimby would come in around 10 in the morning, go right to his office and make some phone calls. Around 11 his barber would come in and give him his daily trim and shave. 12:30 he was off to lunch, back at 2:30 for some calls to East Coast distributors and then he’d go home.

Mike Lazzo: What was the production unit doing all day?

Joe Barbera: We were making the cartoons we felt like making. Like I said, Fred Quimby was a great producer!

I was listening closely. “Hey, I can do that job!” I said out loud.

(More next time.)

Blog History of Frederator’s original cartoon shorts.
Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. Part 6.
Part 7. Part 8. Part 9. Part 10. Part 11. Part 12. Part 13.

This is pretty #@%*ed up right here. Think of him what you will, but Saddam Hussein was featured in several episodes of South Park as well as the South Park feature film. With the recent news of his execution, I thought his animation connection had to be mentioned.

Before you get too down on Parker and Stone for showing Saddam in their cartoons, keep in mind that this is nothing new.

This image is from the 1942 Disney cartoon “Der Fuehrer’s Face”. It was directed by Jack Kinney and released on January 1, 1943 as an anti-Nazi propaganda piece for the American war effort. It won the 1943 Academy Award for Animated Short Film and was voted #22 of the 50 Greatest Cartoons of all time by members of the animation field in 1994.

-Floyd Bishop

Man! And they wonder why I love 1930’s cartoons!

We pull down the curtain on our On with the Show Week with a 1933 RKO/Van Beuren opus that actually commemorated the real life opening of the Radio City Music Hall. The theater in the cartoon is called the Roxy, a tribute to one of the Music Hall’s founding fathers, S.L.”Roxy” Rothafel (who, all you trivia-hounds, is, I THINK, caricatured as the fat cat in the control booth!)

Anyhoo, the short in question is an unholy mess, busy beyond words, sloppily animated, not so much “written” as dreamt up and, for my money, absolutely wonderful! It’s so full of stuff! We get grand opera, Santa Claus, a cast of thousands, bosom jokes, at least two on-screen decapitations and the whole affair ends with a giant, leering close-up of our star, the ever-bland-and-just-a-little-creepy Cubby Bear! (Cubby looks a lot like Mickey Mouse after ear reduction surgery — he also has that mask-thing around his eyes that makes you wonder if he intends to knock off a liquor store after the show.) Enjoy!!!

Next week we’re up to our armpits with elves here at ReFrederator. Come join us!

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