Saturday, June 28, 2008

It isn't name-dropping if you don't mention names

Bizarre story of the week (for me):

The producer of an infamous extreme right-wing national cable television show on a world-famous network told me on the street that his friends all think I'm "brilliant."

"They think you're WEIRD," he elaborated, "but they think you're brilliant."

I wish liberals liked me too! Actually, I wouldn't waste an actual wish on that, come to think of it.

Friday, June 27, 2008

The Dilemma of Distribution

ABOVE: Kyoko a Go-Go voiced by Angel Yau
I've been developing a new series of animated shorts for a while that I intended to put on YouTube, but it's been delayed for various reasons, all related to distribution. I had started a new YT channel for them and put one little intro cartoon on there.
ABOVE: Cherry Cheerleader voiced by Ashly Covington
I remember John Kricfalusi writing something once about how if it has 'toon' in the title, it's probably not a real cartoon. I thought I HAVE to use 'toon' in the title of these because they're actually puppet movies that just sort of look a little like cartoons. It's way more like "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Meets Archie Comics Meets Boody Rogers" than anything else I could compare it to. These are named Cougartoons after one of the characters who hasn't even appeared in a cartoon yet. It'll take a few films before people will be able to really see what the concept is of this series, and I expect the fan base to build slowly at first because of that.
ABOVE: Nerdy McBrain from Cougartoons
I applied for partner status for the Cougartoons channel so that I could put ads on the videos and make a little money off of all the effort. YT never responded to me about it-- they didn't say yes or no, they just never wrote back. I already have other partner channels though, so I figured I should move the new series over to one of them.
Re-enter Me Singing 418, a female Tony Clifton who can actually sing played by Lisa Peters from Ireland, the star of my local TV show. The Me Singing 418 channel on YT IS a partner channel, and we're wasting it with only one cartoon on the entire channel. Me418 is the same age (teenage) and class (rich) as the majority of the characters in Cougartoons, so I figured she goes to their school and she can be in some of the stories, and that should be enough justification for moving Cougartoons to her channel. Lisa's already recorded some new lines for the character and basically my work is now cut out for me.

Charlton Comics Always Sucked

When I was a kid in the 70s, we used to trade comic books a lot.But if you had a Charlton comic book, you were stuck with it-- nobody was going to trade a "real" comic book for a Charlton. Same with Gold Key. Anyway, I've been doing some research and it turns out Charlton had been sucking for decades before I was even born!

Huh??? How come Mighty Mouse has a letter "A" on his chest?
Whaaa--??? Dennis the Menace is a genius now? And where are his Dad's glasses?
WOW. That is the most BLATANT rip-off of Porky Pig I've ever seen. Did these people EVER do anything ORIGINAL???

Ummm... okay, I'm sorry I asked.

Thursday, June 26, 2008

Peter Lorre's Birthday

Peter Lorre was great in comedies as well as really sick and dark movies.
Plus, the voice of Ren is John K doing his Peter Lorre impersonation.Peeeetair Loreee! Eeet ees YOU who are our muse!! You, I say! YOU!!

Thanks to The Horrors of It All

I don't twitter or tweet or twellow or twerp

Okay I can't even deal with IMs because of their intrusiveness, there's no way I'm going to freaking PAY MONEY to be part of whatever Twitter is. As far as I can tell, this is a new plot (by the telecoms??) to get people to PAY MONEY to purchase some kind of "device" so they can WILLINGLY PLACE THEMSELVES UNDER PERMANENT SURVEILLANCE. I might be wrong, all I know about Twitter I learned from a Lisa Nova video I turned off in the middle. It was the first time I've abandoned a Lisa Nova video without finishing it, so unnerved was I by the very idea of Twitter.

In the old days, people fought and died for the right to privacy. These days people pay top dollar to LET THE ENTIRE WORLD KNOW WHERE THEY ARE AND WHAT THEY ARE GOING TO DO NEXT. Why doesn't the government just make it cost a lot of money to go to jail? Then all the trendies would willingly pay to go to the hippest designer prison. Then market fashionable, expensive suicide drugs and just do away with the entire consumer culture.

Very Serious Art Theories

If you think cartoons aren't a very deadly serious subject, you will be stunned by the sheer intellectual and existential gravity of Uncle Eddie's Theory Corner, hosted by former Ren and Stimpy/Mighty Mouse animator Eddie Fitzgerald (he also worked on Animaniacs but we'll forgive him). Perhaps nobody since Chuck Jones has been able to speak so seriously about funny cartoons. In fact, it's hard to imagine how a man so adult and mature could possibly make a living creating silly funnies for the kiddies.
If you like your cartoon commentary dry, humorless and severely intellectual, then Uncle Eddie's Theory Corner is the blog for you. Hats off to Uncle Eddie!

Happy Birthday to Marie

Eating Ice Cream

Another try at blogging

This is just a blog for whatever I come across that I think is cool, mixed with whatever I'm working on right now.