Channel Frederator Blog

Today’s Channel Frederator Awards episode features the film that you voted as “Funniest Film”. We had some serious side-splitters in this category.
Mike Bell’s Super Santa in ‘Vegetation’ comes to us from the “Oh Yeah! Cartoons” archives. Just the concept of this buff bearded Santa and his buxom wife are enough to get you chuckling, but when you see Santa duke it out with a room full of vegetables, it’s tough not to loose it.
Mortimer Pigmun and His Time Traveling Chums is both unique and hysterical. The story of a smart little pig, Mortimer, turns hysterical when his nemesis steals his secret to time-travel. It’s hard to summarize such a unique plot, but Matt Witham and Jeff Wallenhorst, the twisted minds behind this film, must have licked a lot of frogs in preparation…

In the end, the prize went to Doug Bresler of Doogtoons for his animated music video for Wierd Al’s “Trapped in the [Read more…]

Today’s Channel Frederator Awards episode features our Best Design winner. We see a lot of amazing cartoons float through here and it was so difficult to choose nominees for this category.

Nina Paley’s “Sita Sings the Blues” trailer was a quick add to our list. The design on this film is truly unique, and Nina managed to find ways of fitting numerous different styles into the same cartoon. “Carlos, My Name Is Not” was the little film that could. This film oozes french influence. Musician Maxime Robin worked with illustrator Pascal Blanchet to create this super-swanky and hip music video. Finally, Dave Wasson was another must-have to our nomination list, and the one to take home the prize for “Max and the Pigeon Incident”!
An industry vet, Dave has had a hand in a countless number of cartoon series. My favorites include the “Max”(see the two “Max” cartoons in Channel Frederator Episodes 58 and 13) and [Read more…]

Congratulations Carlos Ramos for winning the March Cartoon of the Month for Channel Frederator! Carlos’s short, Twins Crimson is one of the many “Oh Yeah! Cartoons” shorts that Frederator produced with Nickelodeon. This oldie, but goodie, is still going strong with our Channel Frederator Fans.
Twins Crimson rated highest among all of the cartoons to run in February, which included episodes 118, 119, 120 and 121. Head on back to episode 121 to re-watch Twins Crimson. Also check out a great writeup that Fred did about Carlos a while back, here.

http://www.channelfrederator.com/episode/CFR_20080226

Drunken Blonde Twins.
This title might be a little misleading.
Watching these cartoons, however, is a bit like hanging out with a pair of drunken blonde twins.
Except without the twins, all the blondeness, and the alcohol.
I guess all you are left with is Fun. And that’s not half bad, right?

— Portland D&D, submitted by Cascade ACM SIGGRAPH
Our Portland Brethren in Animation, the Cascade ACM SIGGRAPH had their Second Annual (can I say that?) Drinking & Drawing Event the same night we held ours in NYC, Jan. 23rd,2008. I hope their hangover was a lot better than ours. [Read more…]

So with Channel Frederator showcasing Alex Kirwan’s Oh Yeah! Cartoon, “Magic Trixie”, last week, and on the heels of Jeaux’s interview with the creator, Alex lent me these two original backgrounds to scan and post. Most of the short’s bgs are scattered to the far winds, but these two were relatively handy. Emmy Award-winning Dan Krall handled the bg designing while Emmy Award-winning Seonna Hong painted the keys (these production bgs were created by someone in Korea of whose Emmy Award-winning record I’m unaware). It was Seonna’s first credited animation work. In this pair, the purple and beige colors are on the backgrounds; the Zeroxed line art on cell overlays.

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This interview was a treat for me to do because Alex Kirwan was one of my first champions and also the catalyst for me to get into Calarts’ animation program. His character design class was one of my fondest and funnest memories of Calarts. Alex was and still is one of the nicest, most genuine, brightest talents in the animation industry.
[Read more…]

Do you smell the smoke? I smell Smoke.
Oh wait. It’s just the hotness that is this Tuesday’s cartoons on Channel Frederator this week. You might wanna grab those oven mitts if you’re planning on viewing this smoldering piece of awesomeness.
It’s like playing hot potatoe.

— Paris is On, submitted by Joel Trussell
Paris is on is about a scarred Muppet on a quest for fulfillment. It reminds me of that mind blowing scene in the muppet movie where Kermit was riding his bike, except skuzzier and designed a little better. Joel Trussell and crew did a great job for this Paul Brill vid.

— Matches on Fire, submitted by Roger A. Gihlemoen
Matches on Fire is just that. Matches. On Fire. Hilarious in it’s simplicity. Reminds me of a few drunken parties in college. Ah youth. Those were the days. Except, none of those parties ended up with anyone on fire, or dead. But still.

— Magic [Read more…]

I wish I had a story or two about Zac Moncrief to share with you all, but I didn’t really attend his classes while he taught at Calarts. But what I can share with you was how I felt about him, his teaching methods, when I did crash a class or two of his.

Zac is a very funny person, and was a very sharing and encouraging teacher. It’s to bad he’s not teaching at Calarts still, because the kids there need people like Zac.

Zac, himself, attended Calarts and obtained an internship on the animated film, The Pagemaster. Soon after he moved into the role of assistant animator on Cats Don’t Dance. During his time on Cats Don’t Dance, Fred Seibert (who’s that guy?) had bought a pilot from Zac entitled, Godfrey and Zeek, for the Hanna-Barbera What-A-Cartoon Series.

Zac then found himself doing work on another HB series, Johnny Bravo in the story department.
Some time passed, [Read more…]

The fact we’re showing Dave Wasson’s “Tales from the Goose Lady: The Ugly Duck Thing” on Channel Frederator this week inspired me to go deep into the old Oh Yeah! Cartoons vault and pull out the big box of Zip disks (remember them?) full of production art from the short. Well, for some reason, the disk for OY! short #811, “The Ugly Duck Thing”, was missing. So I decided, well, we showed Dave’s “Tales from the Goose Lady: Hamzel and Grande” cartoon back in episode #31, so I can at least blog art from that (#635). Better late than never. It, too, was gone. Sigh. How about #813, “TFTGL: Dot and Randy’s Sad Tale of Woe”? The disk was there, but the $100,000 Mac here had trouble reading the Zip. Ultimately, though, I unwedged a few pieces of art from #812, “TFTGL: The Fisherman, the Fisherman’s Wife, and the Fish”. The quality could be [Read more…]

May Day Channel Frederator Confessional: “When my sister was around five, she had a bear that would start singing Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star if you squeezed its paw. One day, I snuck into her room, squeezed the bear’s paw when her back was turned, and dove under her bed to hide. I did this three times. Scared, she called my mom into the room to explain that her bear was magically singing without her touching it, and my mom accused her of lying.”

— Hey Look!, submitted by Vincent Waller. An Oh Yeah! Cartoon adaptation of one of Harvey Kurtzman’s comic strips.

— Bad Dad, submitted by Tasha Hollywood. Why is it that little British kids always sound so cute with their accents? They could be telling us to go to hell, and we’d just want to pinch their cheeks.

Watch Channel Frederator by downloading the episode at our Website or by subscribing to the whole series through [Read more…]