Channel Frederator Blog

While I was moving this weekend, I saw some of my kids toys rolling around in a basket, and a song popped into my head. I couldn’t figure out what it was, but I thought about it a while and remembered something about Sesame Street. Thirty some years ago, this clip somehow cemented itself deep into the recesses of my brain, only to show up in a YouTube search.

What kind of animation related things are rolling around in your heads?

-Floyd Bishop

On this date in 1954, “Lassie” premiered on CBS. The show proved quite popular, and ran for many years. It was predated by both a film, and a successful radio series.

In 1973, Filmation ran a series caled “Lassie’s Rescue Rangers”. In the show, Lassie lived near Thunder Mountain with the Turner family. Head Ranger Ben Turner worked with wife Laura and children Susan, Jackie, and Ben Jr. as “The Forest Force”, a ranger-rescue team that protected Thunder Mountain National Park. Lassie also headed up a group of wild animals that lived within the national park, working with the Turner family to maintain a healthy environment that was ecologically sound, and to create a safe place for tourists to hike and camp. This renegade group of animal heroes was known as “Lassie’s Rescue Rangers”.

The Rescue Rangers were a band of about eight animals, including Groucho the owl, Toothless the mountain lion, [Read more…]

On  September 1st, “Life’s a Zoo” will premiere as part of TeleToon’s Detour (the Canadian version of Adult Swim on Cartoon Network). The show’s creators, Adam Shaheen and Andrew Horne, are heading up the production from their studio in downtown Toronto.

The show is about a group of animals living in a mansion as part of a huge reality show.  The animals must either work together or plot against one another, just like a live action reality show. The creators have mixed together aspects of just about every reality show there has ever been, and then went over the top with the material.

Perhaps the coolest part of the show is the music video section. Each episode will feature the music of a different Canadian indie band. This gives the show great music at less of a cost, and gets the band a wider exposure than they might get otherwise.

We’ll have to wait and [Read more…]

As a huge fan of Flight of the Conchords, I was curious about the mock animated series “Albi, The Racist Dragon” that showed up in Episode Seven. Well, after some intense Googling, I found out that the guy responsible for directing this terribly touching toon is Oliver Dear. Director, Illustrator, Animator, Painter, Production Designer, Actor–he has got it going on! (And his dad, William Dear, directed Harry and the Hendersons.)

After the jump, a bonus Conchords clip on that subject of getting it going on (warning: silly adult content)… [Read more…]

Andrew Farago (a curator at San Francisco’s fabulous Cartoon Art Museum) interviews Jorge R. Gutierrez at the Animation World Magazine website. Jorge is an exuberant artist and Flash maverick with a unique style that brings Mexican culture (especially folk art) into the digital age. He created the Nickelodeon show El Tigre with his wife, Sandra Equihua.

(One of my favorite parts of the interview is where he recalls telling his wife that they were going to become “…the Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo of animation” but “without the, y’know, cheating and the trains hitting you” part.)

For more on Jorge, see the Super-Macho site, the Super-Macho blog, the El Tigre blog (new!), and Nick’s El Tigre page.

You can also watch episodes of Jorge’s earlier web series El Macho here.

—Anne D. Bernstein

Written By is a magazine published by the Writers Guild of America West. The Summer 2008 issue just came out and the theme is “Age of Animation”. The Cartoon Cover boy is Matt Groening, and you can read an except of his interview here. (One interesting tidbit that I didn’t know is that Bart’s name came from a bad novel that Groening wrote in high school. Bartholemew Simpson was the narrator who was “haunted by the fact that he looked like a beaver.”)

The issue is well worth purchasing: it includes interviews with Seth McFarlane (by Family Guy showrunner, David A. Goodman) and Brad Bird, an opinion piece by Mark Evanier, excerpts from unproduced animation scripts., and of course coverage of the history and present state of animation union organizing (by both the WGA and local 839). [Read more…]

In 2007, comix legend Kaz made an animated pilot called Zoot Rumpus for Cartoon Network, starring a junkyard dog living in a seedily tumbledown Kaz-erific setting. Part One has been posted on You Tube. (Part Two will show up soon, and I will announce when it’s viewable.)

The show is currently without a home, so why don’t you media moguls out there start fighting over it like dogs fight over a large, meaty bone?

Kaz is no newcomer to the animated life, having worked on Spongebob Squarepants and Camp Lazlo. He is also the co-writer of Derek Drymon’s Diggs Tailwagger Nicktoons pilot.

A little Zoot trivia: Kaz used to draw another character named Zoot Rumpus, a roly-poly worse-for-wear fellow who appeared in Underworld strips and also taught kids about creating cartoons in a how-to-draw strip for the Nickelodeon Magazine Comic Book.

After the jump, an earlier contribution to animation history: Kaz’s Dr.Worm design appears in a They Might Be Giants video on Nickelodeon’s KaBlam!
[Read more…]

Hanoch Piven is a unique illustrator who combines painting and 3-D objects in his artwork. He is best-known for memorable portraits of famous people, both real and fictitious. Behold Borat:

On his website, Pivenworld, you can see examples of his work. He also has a Drawger blog. And the book Faces: 78 Portraits from Madonna to the Pope contains a great gallery of merry mugs.

Now Piven’s art stars in a show called Superstuff, airing on Hop! TV (the Israeli pre-school channel). It’s fascinating to watch a pair of hands juggle a pile of miscellaneous junk until it’s transformed into a recognizable image and then springs to life. The show uses mostly real time live-action footage, but there’s a bit of stop motion animation sprinkled in.

More clips from the show after the jump… [Read more…]

If you don’t watch a lot of trashy Reality TV (I admit it, I do!) you probably missed last night’s episode of Sheer Genius, the hairstyling competition show on Bravo. Why post about it here? Because the challenge this week was to give your model a hairstyle based upon one of a select group of cartoon characters. The animated icons were: Wilma Flintstone, Betty Boop, Judy Jetson, Lucy from Peanuts, Jem, and Marge Simpson.

Here are three of the best interpretations: a Marge, a Betty, a Wilma, and a (Grown-Up) Lucy. Lucy won.

Strangely, they kept talking about capturing Lucy’s “innocence”, which is not exactly the first adjective that comes to mind (well, my mind) to describe this clever, high-strung, and rather manipulative young lady!

(Now if only Top Chef would have the Swedish Chef from the Muppets on as a guest judge!)

—Anne D. Bernstein

[Read more…]

The Anime News Network is reporting that “Gon” will soon have his own television series. Korean company Daewon Media has secured the rights to Gon from Japanese company Kodansha. 

“Gon” is a comic book series featuring a small dinosaur type character with super speed and super strength. The stories have no dialog and no human characters. They all take place in nature, and place Gon with realistic animals in natural surroundings and situations.

Look for “Gon” in early 2010.

-Floyd Bishop