Channel Frederator Blog

We’re all familiar with the classic “Got Milk?” campaign, which was sponsored by the California Milk Processor Board. Now another scrappy milk-promoting trade group, the British Columbia Dairy Foundation, is promoting a video contest on YouTube.

To enter, make a video with the message “Must Drink More Milk” and upload it to YouTube. Each month, two winners will be named. At the end of the year, one Grand Prize winner will win a MacBook Pro or MacBook Air (with Final Cut Pro). Oh yeah, you MUST BE A RESIDENT OF BRITISH COLUMBIA to enter.

I really like the video above, a stop motion fight scene where our underdog champion is a claymation version of one of those wobblies monsters you stick on the end of a pencil. I wish the BCDF would credit the animators and make it clear that eight YouTube videos most prominently posted were done by pros and had “real budgets” and the supervision of an advertising agency. The fight scene is by at Bent Image Lab. (Chel White, Ray Di Carlo, and David Daniels formed this Portland, Oregon studio in 2003.)

For more information about the contest, go to the milkvids YouTube page or the mustdrinkmoremilk website.

PS: For an online gallery of the classic milk mustache ads, check out this link.

PPS: Here are some earlier spots for the BCDF with animation direction by Curious Pictures.

After the jump, another Bent Image Labs video, starring Russian nesting dolls with very annoying voices. And a few videos by an actual contest entrants. [Read more…]

You may not think of the Alliance Française as a place to go watch cartoons, but on November 1st, the New York branch will present Serge Bromberg’s 100 Years of Animation: Treasures from a Chest.

“A collector of more than 20,000 early movies and the artistic force behind Lobster Films, Bromberg has become one of the great champions of silent films and a master at recreating the initial rush audiences felt when first entering the cinema house.

Throughout this exceptional event, Bromberg will present animated shorts that he has discovered and restored, accompanying them with anecdotes and piano music…”

(Serge is also the Artistic Director of the Annecy International Animated Film Festival.)

The program will include Fantasmagorie (Emil Cohl), Cartoon Factory (Fleischer Brothers), The Sinking of the Lusitania (Windsor McKay), Egged On (Charley Bower and H.L. Muller), and George Pal’s Tulips Shall Grow.

Tickets are $10 ($7 for students). Go to this page for ticket information.

By the way, 2008 is the 100th anniversary of Fantasmagorie, one of the earliest examples of a fully-animated film. If you’ve never seen it, do so immediately!

After the jump, a low-res recording of Serge Bromberg’s live performance with Windsor McKay’s Gertie the Dinosaur (at Annecy 2008)…with tuba score! [Read more…]

Thanks to Mark Mayerson for pointing out the presence of two George Pal shorts at Europa Film Treasures, an online archive of important European films. (Mark’s blog Mayerson On Animation is highly recommended, so check it out!)

The first film is “La Grande Revue Philips” (”The Great Philips Revue”). Made to promote the Philips brand of radios, this sassy, stop-motion extravaganza was produced at Dollywood Studio in Holland (where he worked with art director Joop Geesink). (Note: The portrayal of Harlem residents is definitely un-PC.)

Philip funded at least ten Puppetoons. The George Pal Site rounds them up here. (The information on the Pal website leads me to believe that the short on Europa is a combination of footage from “The Little Broadcast” (1935) and “The Big Broadcast of 1938″ (1937). Any experts out there to clear that up?)

Anyway, watch the film here and read more about it on this page.

The other Pal film posted for your viewing pleasure is “Tulips Shall Grow” (1942). It was made for Paramount after Pal fled WWII-era Europe for New York City. The evil Screwballs Army attacks a delightful, cheery, windmill-loving blond couple in a not-so-subtle bit of anti-Nazi animation propaganda. The hardware heavies are ultimately defeated and hardy flowers bloom. YEAH!

Watch it here and learn more on this page.

After the jump, a commercial from post-Pal Dollywood where coffee beans speak in a foreign tongue! [Read more…]

This cartoon short is The Interview (1961). The animated interviewee is Shorty Petterstein, a beatnik character/alter ego created by “sound artist” Henry Jacobs. Jacobs is an interesting and still rather obscure character who palled around with Lenny Bruce and Alan Watts, hosted one the world’s first “world music” radio programs, and experimented with audio collages and tape manipulation way back when such things were a time-consuming pain in the butt!

WFMU has posted MP3s of all the tracks from The Wide Weird World of Shorty Petterstein here.

Henry Jacobs has a website where you can purchase an autographed “Best Of” DVD. Listen to Henry’s 2005 interview for NPR here.

Ernest Pintoff directed The Interview; he’s best known in animation circles for his work at UPA, Flebus at Terrytoons, and his direction of Oscar winner The Critic —with voiceover by Mel Brooks. Len Glasser did the designs—he worked on Tom Terrific at Terrytoons.

Henry Jacobs also contributed to an early 70s oddball animated program called The Fine Art of Goofing Off, which used diverse animation techniques to illustrate meandering free association about the philosophy of pointlessness. 60’s counterculture figures including Alan Watts, Victor Moscoso, and comedy troupe The Committee also contributed to this artifact of Public Television’s early and experimental years.

After the jump, some excerpts from The Fine Art of Goofing Off: [Read more…]

I was always a big fan of the animated web series Murry Wilson: Rock and Roll Dad, created by cartoonist Peter Bagge and comedian Dana Gould. Its production was funded by Icebox, which was one of those famous dot com boom-and-bust concerns that burned through about 15 million dollars in a short amount of time. Well, after the company went under, the name and creative assets were bought at auction in 2001 by five guys from the original team (plus some secret investors).

Imagine my surprise when I found that Icebox still exists as a re-launched website. Seems the company has downsized considerably and is now run out of some guy’s house, but if you go to the site, you can watch all the web series that they used to host in the good(?) old days when everyone had enough money to pay for scores of Aeron chairs and animated webisodes written by real Hollywood writers. It’s free!

Zombie College by Eric Kaplan is my favorite. Queer Duck, Hard Drinkin Lincoln, Starship Regulars, Migrane Boy…they’re all here, including the still controversial Mr. Wong. So enjoy opening up this time capsule from the pre-Web 2.0 days by going to the “shows” page .

After the jump, three more Murry Wilson episodes. (From YouTube, since I can’t embed the vids from the Icebox site!) [Read more…]

This cut-out animation (in the style of JibJab) was made for the organization Birthright Israel. I think it’s worth watching just to see cartoon John McCain blow the shofar.

It was produced by Jewish Robot. Written and animated by William Levin. Voices by William Levin and Andrea Praet. Concept by Jesse Epstein.

Here’s an interesting article about William Levin (founder of Jewish Robot) and how he learned Flash during jury duty.

I’m off to eat pot roast. See you all Wednesday.

—Anne D. Bernstein

Guess what! It’s time to award September’s Cartoon of the Month prize! As a reminder, the Cartoon of the Month prize goes to the highest viewer-rated film. This means that you, our viewers, choose your favorite films. The winner of the Cartoon of the Month prize gets a $100 extra-special pack of Channel Frederator goodies.

This month, episodes 139, 140, 141 and 142 were eligible. The winner is A Little Sunshine, submitted by Jason Jones, from episode 139.

I’m so excited that A Little Sunshine is our winner. I have such a soft spot in my heart for happy little pencil animations, and this one was particularly cute. I took the time to ask Jason a few questions about his film. Check out his answers below! [Read more…]

Three episodes of David Fremont’s Glue are now up on YouTube. Glue was an early Flash web series that was produced by Wild Brain during the heady heights of the dot com frenzy.

This blog post from the creator discusses how the series came about.

It’s jam-packed with quite the line-up of crazy characters and a stream-of-consciousness plot executed in Fremont’s trademark funk-patchwork style. Oh…it’s hard to explain…go see it for yourself!

“…I get an abundance of ideas and get anxious to use them all. whatever popped in my head that day ended up in glue. I was kind of like a kid in a puddle of mud making soup; leaves, sticks, an owl’s hairball, all of it went in the bucket. a transvestite troll! an albino frog! yeah, wouldn’t it be funny if ted nugent was in it? and carpet cleaning…”

I hope they post them all, because I’d love to start at the beginning and see how the series evolved. Keep track of what’s up on the Wild Brain YouTube page.

I’m a longtime fan of Fremont’s work, back to the days when he did mostly illustration and comics and designed the board game “Land O Sugar” for Scary Hairy toys–I still have it!

More about Scary Hairy after the jump… [Read more…]

Yup, it was a tough day on the Stock Exchange. So here’s an appropriate cartoon: “Unnatural History of Wall Street”. It’s second in the series “Concrete Jumble” by Gary Leib for The New York Times website. Click here to watch it. What does this mean for your 401K? I have no idea. If things get really bad, I will have to sell my jewels (kitty kat pins from the1950s’s.)

—Anne D. Bernstein

If you are interested in a FLASH of enlightenment, check out these Alan Watts Theater cartoons. They were produced by Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park fame. According to Cold Hard Flash, animators Chris Brion and Todd Benson are the folks who keyframed original recordings of Watts.

For more on Watts, see this website.

On the jump, another Matt and Trey project from the vault, a hysterical video about Universal Studios . [Read more…]