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.

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