Sunday, December 31, 2006

Well I Guess I Have To Bribe You

C'mon folks, there must be some of you who like new-fangled web apps.

The one who writes the best explanation of how Raketu and its features - particularly the multi-media, video on demand -podcast type stuff works on Raketu will win a prize.





I'll draw your caricature and add a cartoon character to it.

Scroll down to the last two posts, use Raketu and then describe how it works for you.

If you write it super clearly, you will win! Maybe I'll even hire you.

Your pal,

John

Thursday, December 28, 2006

Raketu Universal Instant Messaging

Here're some more of my scribbly "bus-drawing-style" storyboard sketches for Raketu. On cheap-ass crummy paper. Kali witnessed this whole process and will describe to you what happens to my anatomy during the creative act in a comment. ...If you beg her to.The best place to create scribbles is at Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles. It's a soul-food restaurant that has the best fried chicken ever. http://www.roscoeschickenandwaffles.com/
I recommend "The Stubby" and a side of greens. They have the bext textures to squirt out of your mouth as you furiously try to wring your story sketches into life.

I pitched "Man's Best Friend" to Chris Reccardi at Roscoe's and a brother got mad and threw his knife and fork down and started yelling at us "Hey Hey Hey Hey!!! I'm trying to eat here! And you're talking about shitting and eating dog puke! What kind of a show do you call that!!..."
But don't think about that. Think about how cool it would be to get all the gossip from all your friends in one Instant message window.Get Raketu now. It's super easy to download and start and then you can talk to everyone on any IM service.
Think about how cool it would be to get entertaining ads that actually tell you what the product does.
Think about daring innovative companies like Raketu that could sponsor whole cartoons and just add their commercials in them, using my characters to sell their futuristic products.
Think about Sody Pop sitting in her flimsy static-clinging negligee Instant messaging you on a dark lonely night.

UNIVERSAL INSTANT MESSAGING

If you have AIM, then you can't talk to your friends who have MSN or Yahoo, etc. Not without downloading each service and leaving all these windows open at the same time. SCREW THAT! Raketu lets you talk to anyone on any instant message service all at the same time. You just tell Raketu which services you want to be active.

COMBINE ALL YOUR ONLINE APPLICATIONS INTO ONE AND DO MULTIPLE TASKS AT ONCE

Podcasting, multimedia, games, entertainment and more stuff can all be done. To be honest, I haven't used many of these services anyway, but if you do, then you can be useful to the whole world.

So listen. Do me a favor and help me do my job here and you will see more cartoons fast-by the end of January!

DOWNLOAD IT NOW! IT'S FREE AND THE FASTEST DOWNLOAD EVER!
If you have a PC (which I don't) download Raketu and sign up (don't even pay the 10 bucks yet if you don't need the phone stuff right away, just use all the free stuff) and then post comments telling me what you like best.

I'm gonna put cartoons up on the Raketu that advertise each of these aspects of Raketu so now's your chance to feed me some input!

I'm counting on you to help me get you the cartoons you want....

Raketu Web Page Design and Cartoon Action

So the Raketu ad I did worked out pretty well...well enough that they asked me to design their web page in a similar vein and animate some cartoons. Here's some of my thumbnail boards for it.I met with Greg Parker, the genius rocket scientist who created Raketu and did the programming and he gave me a live demo to show me what Raketu was and what it could do.

His iconoclastic headstrong Irish marketing rebel, Oliver McIntyre and I got together to cook up swell new ways to advertise the product that will be entertaining even while it explains why your world will be much simpler by using Raketu.

Greg's partner, Martina is from a Slavic nation (like me!) and she told me about a really funny cartoon series about a wolf who chain smokes and is creative, who chases a sissy bunny and tries to murder him.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nu,_pogodi!
908/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-8362439-0595360?ie=UTF8&s=dvd

My problem is how to sell a product that does so many things. It seems to coordinate all the activities you do on the internet into one window and program. That's hard to say in an ad! People want to know simple and clear specifics, so we decided to break up the Raketu application into broad main categories.

FREE PHONE SERVICE THROUGH YOUR COMPUTER OR SMART PHONE

The most obvious thing it does is save tons of money in phone bills. For $9.95-as a one time payment, you get to start a Raketu account and then you get to call national and international for nothing in 42 countries. The countries that aren't free are still waay cheaper than any phone company or other VOIP service. So if you get Raketu for nothing else, you will see your phone bills dwindle to just what you pay for your monthly internet bill or your cell phone minimum minutes payment.

These are some of the storyboard sketches I did for a cartoon which brings old George Liquor into the world of the future and saves him a shitload of cash (which is the only way to get him to soften his distrust of anything new!)



You have to get a phone or headphones with microphone to hook up to your computer, then you call thousands of miles away and talk as long as you like.

Raketu is mainly for PC users, not Mac yet and it simplifies your nasty windows within windows torture.

Some other key selling points:

UNIVERSAL INSTANT MESSAGING

If you have AIM, then you can't talk to your friends who have MSN or Yahoo, etc. Not without downloading each service and leaving all these windows open at the same time. SCREW THAT! Raketu lets you talk to anyone on any instant message service all at the same time. You just tell Raketu which services you want to be active.

COMBINE ALL YOUR ONLINE APPLICATIONS INTO ONE AND DO MULTIPLE TASKS AT ONCE

Podcasting, multimedia, games, entertainment and more stuff can all be done. To be honest, I haven't used many of these services anyway, but if you do, then you can be useful to the whole world.

So listen. Do me a favor and help me do my job here and you will see more cartoons fast-by the end of January!

DOWNLOAD IT NOW! IT'S FREE AND THE FASTEST DOWNLOAD EVER!
If you have a PC (which I don't) download Raketu and sign up (don't even pay the 10 bucks yet if you don't need the phone stuff right away, just use all the free stuff) and then post comments telling me what you like best.

I'm gonna put cartoons up on the Raketu that advertise each of these aspects of Raketu so now's your chance to feed me some input!

I'm counting on you to help me get you the cartoons you want....

Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Joe Barbera Tribute 1


Joe Barbera and Bill Hanna


When I was about 8 years old and started seriously getting obsessed with animated cartoons, I had 2 favorite studios: Walt Disney and Hanna Barbera.

The motion in Disney seemed completely magical to me, but I didn't really get into the characters. The early Hanna Barbera cartoons intrigued me for the drawing style and that the characters seemed real-which was largely due to Ed Benedict's designs and the great voice work of Daws Butler, Don Messick and Mel Blanc and others.

It was very hard to find any written information about how cartoons were made in 1963 or who made them. I had an article in The Books Of Knowledge that talked about Walt Disney, but the only info I had about Hanna Barbera was the back of a record cover that had a paragraph on each of the partners.

I taught myself to draw by watching the cartoons and drawing as fast as I can. I then bought all the comic books and coloring books and used the grid method to get the basic proportions of the characters. I mostly drew HB characters, but I also drew everyone else's-even Tom and Jerry, whose cartoons I had never seen.

Well I memorized how to draw Huck, Yogi, the Flintstones, The Jetsons, Quick Draw McGraw and I used to draw my own comic stories of them.

By the time I was a teenager and trying to be cool and stuff, I STILL drew the characters only now, I drew dirty drawings of them and developed a caricatured style of drawing them. This ability kept me popular with the football team who I would amuse with my "Cave Nudes" and other wacky cartoon stories and filthy flip books. It kept me from being beat up for being a wimpy cartoonist.

By this time though, Hanna Barbera's cartoons had gone to shit. Scooby Doo was the dominant style, a style lifted from Filmation's cheaper uglier Archie cartoons. I couldn't figure out why HB had abandoned their earlier appealing style for something so purposely ugly. Even the voices were terrible by this time. I found out later by working at Hanna Barbera and eventually talking to Joe and Bill themselves.

http://www.animationarchive.org/2006/04/biography-john-k-interviews-bill-joe.html
http://www.animationarchive.org/2006/05/biography-john-k-interviews-bill-joe.html


In 1984, after working on horrible and typically depressing 80s cartoons for 4 years, I heard that Hanna Barbera was going to revive the Jetsons and I desperately wanted to work on something fun. I'm not able to work on ugly bland cartoons without getting severely depressed. I don't know how so many people do it.

I had just finished a stint as a designer for Dic's Heathcliff cartoons. This had been my best job so far, because I didn't have to do storyboards from bad scripts or layouts from bad storyboards. It was my first character design job and they gave me a lot of freedom to draw characters as cute and funny as I was then capable. I did about 7 shows a week then with Bruce Timm, Jim Gomez as my clean up artists and Lynne Naylor designing some of the characters with me.

So as soon as I heard about HB reviving the Jetsons, I raced over there to apply to be the character designer. I got an interview with the head of the incidental character design department - Bob Singer. Bob was a decent guy, a reasonable draftsman, but extremely conservative and with no design ability whatsoever. His natural design style is the cop and mailman characters you see in Scooby Doo and other 70s HB cartoons-REALLY BLAND. Bob was an enemy of style and cartooniness. He hated it!

I drew up a big stack of sample Jetsons style characters to show him and he looked through them with much attention and was mildly impressed. He said, "Well you seem to have a knack for this old UPA-ish style, but you are tending to overdo the flatness and designiness of that period. The Jetsons aren't actually flat. They are 3 dimensional.

Tell you what, Bill and Joe are not happy with the development sketches on the New Jetsons and I have a couple trainee designers who are struggling with the style and don't quite get it.

I'll give you a test. If you work in house on The Smurfs as a designer for awhile, then we'll see how you do and I'll consider showing your stuff to the bosses."

AAAARGH!

torture.

So I had to sit in an office next to the two kids who were "struggling" with Jetsons characters and listen to them complain about how hard it is to draw Ed Benedict's style while I suffered under the cruel blandness of the Smurfs and Gerard Baldwin and his team of moronic evil writers. These two Einsteins would come in and tell me how envious they were of my job on The Smurfs.

A month or two went by as I got more and more depressed, and the whole time I would hear rumors that the show's producer Alex Lovy and Bill and Joe themselves were rejecting everything that the design department was doing.

Finally, I guess Singer must have been taking some heat, so he came to me and said "OK, John I'll give you your chance. Here, take home these character descriptions for an episode of the Jetsons and then design them the best you can." I did them that night and brought them in to Bob the next day and then he looked at them with disapproval and told me that they were still too flat and designy There was no way he could show them to Bill and Joe or Alex. But I could still work on the Smurfs if I wanted to.

That was one black day in my early career. I was just dying to barge into Joe's office to see for myself whether he thought I could do it or not. Instead I made up my mind to quit. I couldn't stand another day of the Smurfs and listening to the toddlers in the next room deciding that Superman was easier to animate than Fred Flintstone, because Superman was more 3 dimensional.

Well, I figured, I'll take a chance. Maybe I'll get blackballed for going over Singer's head, but I was just DYING to work on a real cartoon, so I marched over to the executive building of HB and was walking down the hall hoping to run into Bill or Joe, when I bumped into Alex Lovy. He's the Walter Lantz director and storyboard artist, who was going to produce the new Jetsons.

I was clutching my huge stack of Jetsons samples and was nervous as Hell but I blurted out, "Mr. Lovy! You don't know me, but I'm a big fan of yours! I love Woody Woodpecker and I know you are producing the Jetsons and I'm dying to work for you!"

Alex was real nice and invited me into his room and said "Let's see what you got , son!"

He started flipping through the drawings and his eyes lit up and he said, "Hey kid! This is just what we're looking for! You got this old style down! Let's go see if Joe is in his office!"

Alex whisked me down the hall and knocked on the door to Joe's office. Joe opened the door and there he was! I was looking at my childhood hero in the flesh for the first time. A tall suave Italian guy in a nice suit and jet black curly hair.

Alex said, Joe, you gotta see what the kid is doing! Take a look at this stuff!"

Joe led us in and started flipping through the drawings and chuckling. He smiled real big, then smacked the stack of drawings and said. "This is what we've been trying to get for months now! I keep telling the guys that this is an old fashioned UPA style and that it's supposed to be flat but no one will do it!"

He then looked serious and a bit worried. "Iwao and Bob are great artists but they just don't seem to get this style. Tell me about yourself kid. Why is this so important to you?"

So I told him how I used to draw his characters all the time when I was a kid and that I loved this style and always wanted to do it. I had begged Bob Singer to let me work on it but he kept telling me I was drawing too flat so he wouldn't show you."

I went on, like an idiot to tell him I hated Scooby Doo and all modern cartoons, and Joe said "Me too kid. I've never understood why the networks keep ordering more episodes of it. What is there to it? A big dumb dog and some teenagers. Every show is the same Goddamn story! It doesn't make sense to me but they can have it as long they want it."

I was amazed that Joe wasn't offended by that. This was my first inkling that Joe really knew how awful the cartoons were that his studio had been churning out for decades.

Joe was rubbing his face and thinking.

By the way, he had the coolest office. It was filled with toys of all his characters and awards and he even showed off his private shower! He didn't get naked or anything, luckily.

Joe said, "Son, I want you on this show but I gotta figure out how to do it without offending Bob and Iwao. These guys got feelings you know. They been here a long time and figure they have seniority. But don't worry, I'll work it out and get you on."


To be continued:

I have so many stories that I think I will spread them out for a bit.

Coming soon:

Being a development artist for Joe on a project for Fred Silverman.

My stint on the Jetsons and trying out an early version of the Spumco production system.

Developing "Perry Gunite" in a trailor with Eddie's wife on the HB lot.

Being consultants for Cartoon Network with Bill, Joe, Friz and Don Messick.

Helping Fred Seibert revolutionize Hanna Barbera and starting the shorts program.

Making Hanna Barbera merchandise with Fred and showing the products to Bill and Joe.

Interviewing Bill, Joe and Friz for the Hollywood Reporter.

Joe reveals his selling secrets to me.

Joe's thoughts on "writers" and "executives"

Making my own caricatured Hanna Barbera cartoons and having other cartoonists try to imitate them.

Interested??


Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Hold The Lion, Please (1942) - Chuck Jones, Bobe Cannon



Bobe Cannon is becoming one of my favorite animators. Here's a scene I think is him in an early Chuck Jones cartoon.

It's very soft and subdued, but with careful solid drawings, a little different than the fast loopy stuff he usually does.


I always liked his stuff in Jones' cartoons, but now I'm recognizing more and more of his scenes in 30s Clampett cartoons, and late 40s Avery cartoons and I think I like that stuff even better because those directors seemed to encourage him to be funnier.


In the Jones cartoons, the direction seems to be more restrained as far as funny action goes, but Cannon was completely capable of combining his lyrical loopy style with the very funny actions and accents demanded by Clampett and Avery.

I've always wondered why Cannon left Warners to join Avery at MGM. Simply money? Or did he have a falling out with Jones?


I haven't heard Jones talk much about Cannon, yet I think he is Jones' strongest animator.

Anybody know some history here? Greg Duffle? Jerry? Anyone?
His animation in Avery's Senor Droopy is so full, and exciting and funny. I find it baffling and ironic that a couple years after his best most fully animated funniest period, he completely went the other way and directed stiff pose to pose cartoons for UPA. You can see his transformation on the way to being stiff in Avery's Rural Riding Hood. He animated the buck toothed country girl in a halfway pose to pose style. It's very good, but less fully animated, with lots of holds and a more graphic angular design.
























Slow-motion (close-up):


Slow-motion (medium shot):




Monday, December 25, 2006

Merry Christmas-Kali made pictures

Hey remember when Kali did a study of Mel Crawford and I critiqued her?

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/12/kali-copies-mel-crawford-and-i-give_08.html

Well, she thought about all the critical points and then went and tried another one, and because she took the advice seriously, Jesus rewarded her with the gift of progress!

Look what she made now.
What a killer eye she has. She didn't even trace this.
This is the value of studying the works of really good artists-and then methodically analyzing the differences between your copy and the original, then correcting your mistakes.

After copying actual pictures as exactly as she could, she took the next step of trying to figure out what Mel's thinking was behind his artistic decisions. She analyzed his general theories then gave this to me for Christmas!

And wait'll you see the ones she did for Marlo and Katie! I'll post them after they see them, so as not to spoil the surprise.

Merry Christmas all you cartoon lovers out there! I hope Jesus rewards you with critical acuteness and methodical planned progress!

Sunday, December 24, 2006

Random Golden Book Stuff

Look how much fun kids used to have. Have you seen what the drawings look like in kids' books today?http://www.illustrationweb.com/style_gallery.asp?gallery_id=5

Here's two Disney books. One's from the late 40s and the other's from the 60s. The Cub Scouts is painted in a soft warm style and the 60s in a sharper cooler style. You can find tons more Mickey and Donald books all painted in different styles. Here's two giants: Tenggren and Crawford.
http://www.childscapes.com/bookpages/tenggren.html

http://inspiration-grab-bag.blogspot.com/2006/03/mel-crawford-pebbles-flintstone-1963.html

http://inspiration-grab-bag.blogspot.com/2006/01/mel-crawford-magilla-gorilla-big.html
I'm not sure who painted this, and it's not a Golden Book, it's a similar type of book-maybe Whitman's Tell-a-tales.
I like the weird puppet-dog.



Sorry, nothing mind-blowing today. I'm still shopping for last minute gifts.

Friday, December 22, 2006

hotdogs and buns should get along

There is a scene cut out of this ripalong by the evil network censors. See if you can guess where.

Rip-A-Long: Hot Dog & Bun
Uploaded by chuckchillout8












I can't imagine why they cut this heartwarming scene out.
HotDogHug
Uploaded by chuckchillout8
I have a personal conflict similar to this one happening even now. If only the Ripping Friends could help me and my feuding cohort together again.

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Merry Christmas Cartoon from John K.




Hey folks,

here's a clip from a Christmas cartoon starring George Liquor, Sody Pop and Jimmy the Retarded Boy.



You can download the whole interactive cartoon here for a mere buck!



Here is a clip from one of the first Flash cartoons we did. In the spirit of capitalist Christianity and giving, feel free to give me some cash and download the whole Christmas cartoon here!: I had the wonderfully talented Kristen McCormick update the animation to make it snazzier, slipperier and more MODERN!



It was originally drawn by me, inked by Shane Glines. Flashed by Robyn Byrd, Annmarie Ashkar, Tony Mora, Gabe?... voiced by Mike Pataki and me and Wendy Balomben.


Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah and try not to kill anyone or give too many notes for the next couple weeks. We've had enough of that.

Sing lots of carols and roast a nice yuletide log for me!

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Ren and Stimpy in Life Sucks Animatic- Nick Cross - Eric Bauza- Direct To video




It being the Christmas season, I thought it would be a good time to share a Christian story.


This is a storyboard reel (animatic) from an epic Ren and Stimpy story called "Life Sucks". Many of the folks who worked on it figured it was the best R and S story we had ever written. Unfortunately it was never produced.


LS2
Uploaded by chuckchillout8



Life Sucks explores the difference between Ren and Stimpy's outlook on life. They each look at the world and see the same evidence yet judge it in opposite ways. Stimpy is an optimist and Ren is a pessimist. In Life Sucks, Ren realizes it's his duty to cure Stimpy of his naivety and he takes him on a journey through biology, religion, history and evolution in an attempt to make him wake up and smell the coffee.

This is just one sequence from the cartoon. Ren tells Stimpy a story from the history of his religion, a story of people's devotion to the divine Cat-Jesus. Richard Pursel and I concocted this warm little Ren and Stimpy scene.

This is the story of the Children's Crusade, which many history books say actually happened.




I asked the great Nick Cross to draw the sequence and he did an amazing thing. He drew Ren and Stimpy in one style and the Children's Crusade in the style of Mary Blair's Golden Books.

Nick Cross' Plog


Working with Nick is great. I get to scribble out some ideas for the compositions I want and he takes them and turns them into beautiful finished illustrations in his own style.

I can't tell you how fun it is to work with rare stars like Nick or Katie or Helder and a small handful of stylists, who give me back better than what I give them and then let me add my name to the work. How unusual it is today to find artists whose drawings have a point of view! I imagine the old days when Clampett and Avery were surrounded by nothing but top talents, each with their own styles, already trained and all they had to do was direct them. No bland scenes, no on-model crap. Heaven!

The multi-talented Eric Bauza edited and did the sound fx and music for the animatic.

Take a look at this and tell me if you'd like to see the whole of Life Sucks produced as a straight to DVD release.

Later this week I'll put up another clip from Life Sucks. Keep your eyes peeled!



Saturday, December 16, 2006

Hokey Wolf "Lamb-Basted Wolf", 1960, Art Lozzi

Here's a Hokey Wolf painted by Art Lozzi. The grabs are kinda yellow, because they are from an old faded vhs, taped off TV.
You can still see his style in the cool textures.
Art does a lot with a little.


Hi Art,
I just posted your last email in the Frank Tipper post-High Fly Guy. I think that is Frank trying to paint the modern style that you and Monte did naturally. Do you remember anything about Dick Bickenbach or Walt Clinton? Johnny Johnston? Hey did you ever work on commercials?
Art says:

Hi John,

Did I ever work onCOM mER Ci aL s? !?!? Me? Did Stravinsky ever play guitar in a west coast jazz band?DidBill hanna ever walkatightropein a circus? OrOr february have 30 days?????Oh, It's not that I'm against the idea. You got a job for me?Actually, without opening the Dec. 10th post, I started replying to your letter.. and this is as far as I got.

Tipper??? Did I miss something. I didn't see it.

After looking:re: Those insipid wolf cartoons, Hokey Pokey
something or other, I ask, "Isn't it possible that these were done far away from our own studio? Like Japan or another country? These could not have been produced in the USA, and certainly not at H-B. Frankly I don't remember them circulating at 3500 Cahuenga. I for sure would've seen them and raised a big stink... unless I was already gone by then. I knew that many jobs were given overseas for the cheaper labor and for the lack of time we were facing... or to outside painters who worked at home.

actually HB didn't start sending work overseas till about 10 years later-JK

What you showed is ghastly. Ghastly! Flat, tasteless, yukky, yekky and icky. I see that whoever the artist was used a few bg items that were done before for Yogi Bear and the Flintstones such as the low stone wall (pink, though), a pink sky, and a pale green one, little bushes with flowers -or ones that the studio had given to them to use as a guide, such as trees, the clumps of tree-leaves, and not much else. The thought of good color flew out the window. That painter didn't know what good color was!

Do you know of these cartoons being done overseas? It also looks very light feminine-handed. No balls. The person'd be better at painting butterflies and rose petals on porcelain cups. It was a conglomerate of elements from all the shows we were doing. I think I'm going to puke.

Bickenback from MGM days ("Bick", soft spoken and always had a ready twinkly smile. Prominent front teeth. What else?), Walt Clinton, J. Johnston. I'm afraid that I can't offer you anything that could widen your knowledge of them, except that Bick and Walt were there at the studios, doing their own jobs, layouts and animation, consulting. I liked them, but we were separated by our "specialties".

Layouts and bgs didn't intertwine strangely enuff. And besides, the bg department was on the second floor. Rarely did we mingle at the "new" building. I'm sure, though, that you could write books about them.I'll look up your post on Frank Tipper tomorrow, with my coffee.

More later?Art L








Hi John,

OhMyGod! When you asked me, "Did you ever work on commercials?" you meant, "Did you ever work on the backgrounds for any of the Kellogg's, Winstons things?"

Right? Obviously that didn't come across. I thought you were asking if I ever worked on any commercial commercials, like for non-Hanna-Barbera on my own time, for automobiles, Florsheim shoes, for magazines, newspapers, TV.

But, did I ever do any of the bgs for a Kelloggs

all kinds of stuff: Direct Sponsorship 1

all kinds of stuff: Direct Sponsorship 3 -end credits - leave the audience with a good feeling about the sponsor

or such, very likely, yes. In fact, playing the Winstons one where the wives are mowing the lawn, etc, I'm sure that one was mine....probably among others too. Very recognizable. Very Art Lozzi - inspite of what the credits might have shown or not shown.


As for seeing my name in the credits, you mustn't give that a lot of weight. They were not always accurate. According to credit lists, it looks like I painted only 12 or so backgrounds in my career. And I've seen my own name on shows that I never worked on, or as one of a long list of BG names where I never participated....and many times it was embarrassing.

I've seen mixes of bg styles where someone was given the job to do, but where many of the older, already-used backgrounds from the files were slipped in, not to have to paint them again. I recognize my rock textures, my skies, my clouds, my colors, my wood grains. I recognize my trees....that have been copied and recopied by others -like the flat ''cut-ribbon" technique that is applied onto the bark....along with awful colors. "Hey, Lozzi changes tree colors and adds lines and textures. I'll do the same."

I even saw one now -this morning- on one that J.K. himself presented. I'll also scan or forward one that I found on 11/11/06 (from deviantart.com) that illustrates how that style is STILL being copied, 45 years later! In a way it's flattering, but it's also very unimaginative on the part of the artist. What the hell are they teaching in art schools today? What the hell AREN"T they teaching?


As for work being sent overseas, I remember them talking about it while I was still in Hollywood. I left permanently in 1968, and was already involved with Hilton and cruiseships in Europe for two previous years. I couldn't have heard about it while living in Greece.


Now those Hokey Pokey things: There is NO WAY I worked on any of the ones you show, in spite of what any credit list shows. There is NO WAY I'd have brushworked a sky like that, with those colors, the ground, those horrible trees. It all looks like bad 1932. I even find it incredible that they might've been done in our studio. That year, 1960, the studio was near the base of Laurel Canyon, while the "new one" was under construction. The bg people then were Monte, Neenah Maxwell (Ollie Hanson's niece) and me. Bob G, at home. Work had to have been given out....somewhere. Where?


Actually I don't have more insight into Frank Tipper. I didn't even know he painted backgrounds. I thought he was just doing layouts. But what you show is more of the bland, uninspired stuff. The elements, as with the others who were doing H-B backgrounds are straight from what I had been doing: the colorations (but without the strength of color) and the outlines of leaves and stones, etc. This is not original. I cannot believe that they could've been done by a name such as Frank Tipper. This looks like a newer addition to the bg department who was tryng to apply the style, or work done at home (or again, even overseas).


Now, the above "contributions"will probably add confusion instead of enlightenment. I hope not. Keep asking, keep commenting. SOMEthing will shine through my misty and distant past. Stay strong.

Art L.

another EZ-POP commercial, John Hubley

























all kinds of stuff: EZ-POP, little old lady in shoe, John Hubley

Thursday, December 14, 2006

Direct Sponsorship- sell toys of the characters-Soaky commercials


Let's travel back in time to when cartoon companies liked their audience.
Tennesse Tuxedo and Superman
Soaky Toys


In the 60s capitalism was so open that you could mix "brands" in the same commercial. Cartoon characters from different companies would team up to sell a product line that licenced characters from multiple studios. It was a really cool thing to do and added fun to the commercials.

Soaky Toys has to be one of most popular kid products in history. Kids hate to get clean so the best way to get them to do it is to trick them into doing it with their favorite cartoon characters.

"Look who's staring at me in my birthday suit!"

Cartoonists creating cartoons + a smart sponsor = commercials that sell the product and sometimes BE the product equals great success for all and happiness for the kids. What a simple formula!

The 60s was a Golden Age for kids because everyone involved in kids' entertainment and products knew you had to be nice to your consumer if you wanted to be successful.

Today's giant corporations are so unwieldy and operated through strange mystical pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo theories like focus testing and 4,000 levels of middle managers that all disagree with each other and the actual people who ARE logical and creative are at the very bottom of the heap.

Wash with Soaky bubbles and you'll grow up to have proportions like this!








Donald Duck and Porky Pig
Soaky Toys


Disney and Warner Bros....arch rivals in the same commercial!







You'll be so clean and shiny that you won't ever wanna wear pants again!
Let's bring back logic and fun. Let cartoonists and sponsors do what's right for the audience.

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Direct Sponsorship 3 -end credits - leave the audience with a good feeling about the sponsor

The last thing the audience will see and hear after laughing at one my internet cartoons is the sponsor's name and logo. This will leave the audience with a great feeling about the show and the people and products that made it possible.
The Huckleberry Hound Show end credits sequence:






Huckleberry Hound and Cornelius Rooster drive around the circus tent, picking up other Kellogg's mascots....


...like Kellog's Rice Krispies mascots: Snap, Crackle and Pop...




... and Kellog's Smaxey the Seal, Tony the Tiger, Tony Jr., and Sugar Pops Pete...