I had heard of this parody from Dark Horse’s Hellboy Jr. #2 (Nov. 1999) in passing but have never seen it until now. Story and color by Bill Wray, art by Stephen DeStefano. It’s a little hardcore (as well as outrageously funny), so don’t say I didn’t warn you.
(Thanks, Kevin!)
Filed under comics
Mark Mayerson’s posting of some rarely seen Mickey Mouse footage got me watching a few more of the Mickeys from this period, and I’m really stymied by how slowly everything is timed and moves in the studio’s cartoons even at this early in the game. I only selected The Karnival Kid (below) because that was the last one I watched, and it embodies a lot of the problems. There’s nice fluidity and appeal to the drawings and animation (and a certain amount of showing off perspective at the beginning), but every action and gag feels like it was timed like it had to read for viewers a few hundred yards away from the screen.
It’s not a problem exclusive to any particular era of Disney shorts either. I’ve already pointed out how Carl Barks’s first ever gag for a finished cartoon Modern Inventions reads great as a board and on paper but totally falls flat animated. It’s probably too late in history to find out why molasses timing was so contagious at the Disney studio, but who knows… With all the stuff David Gerstein is coming up with, I’m sure we’ll find some 1934 Maple Syrup Memorandum from the place shortly.
Filed under classic animation
There are reams of documentation covering abandoned shorts from Disney, MGM, Fleischer, and other Golden Age studios, but coverage of TV cartoons that met the same or a similar fate is sparser. An example of one with an interesting history: a rejected Tiny Toon Adventures story became one for Ren & Stimpy. No April foolin’!
Jim Smith and Bob Camp mostly storyboarded Hi, Spirits, a planned segment for one of the Acme Acres Zone half-hours, when he was in the newly formed Warner Bros. Animation unit in 1989. [UPDATE: See Kent Butterworth’s comment for the correct date and place, as well as some more info.] He and Bob Camp lasted a whopping six months on the show before becoming fed up with the industry altogether and joined partners John Kricfalusi and Lynne Naylor in forming Spumco, the haven for animation’s malcontents.
What follows is the entire storyboard Smith and Camp did. (They’re littered with great unrelated duck sketches of theirs too.) There are discrepancies in the page numbers, but the board is complete. It’s criminal the final shows never retained the sort of liveliness found in this board.
Fast-forward two years later when The Ren & Stimpy Show began its second season of production. The show had risen the bar for what TV animation was capable of far more than any of its contemporaries in the fabled ‘animation renaissance.’ Hi, Spirits was flip-flopped into a story premise with Ren and Stimpy in the roles of Hampton and Gogo. (The Paul Tsongas ghost and yak remained. A fat naked black man was added.) It was one of the “C” cartoons that John K. handed over to layout supervisor/timing director Ron Hughart to see through production as director in mid-1992.
For your enjoyment, here is the uncut version of the episode, unavailable on the “UNCUT” box set. See what remained the same from the Tiny Toons board – and what got changed!
Contrary to ‘facts’ circulating the Internet, the scene with the bloody-head fairy (here Doug Funnie instead of Elmer Fudd) was not added by Games Animation. The finished animation from Taiwan’s Color Key Studio arrived a week before the transition from Spumco to Games commenced.
Filed under modern animation, Ren & Stimpy
It’s fitting that the curtain on Paramount’s fifty-plus year association with animated shorts was brought down by Ralph Bakshi, who would usher in a wave of animated works the old-timers he apprenticed under never dreamed of. More fitting that it escalates the studio’s timeless (?) association with cat-and-mouse cartoons to astronomic proportions, serving as a commentary on the shifting political climates in the late 1960s. A bumpkin who enjoys being a tyrant is taken to a foreign land where he is pitted against a scourge beyond his control. He is given accolades for his failures. He finally seals his own doom with a nuclear quasi-holocaust. Is it any wonder this made during Nam?
Filed under classic animation
