What To Do During Important Meetings

I listen carefully to what is being said and turn off my drawing/thinking brain and just let my subconscious mind doodle things I have been recently thinking about.

This way I'm not concerned about perfect construction or control. Instead I'm looking for mindless inspiration and lucky accidents.

The picture above is Rip pushing a bullet slowly into his arch enemy Citracett.

Here is an idea for a costume for Citracett's other identity, Stinky Butt.

The Ripping Friends have a fan club run by their number 1 fan, a crippled boy who can run on his crutches. Li'l Crip sometimes joins them on their dangerous missions.
He has a secret decoder ring. The Ripping Friends communicate with him on the plasma screen in the middle of the ring. They give him secret orders. He must swear to uphold their secrets upon pain of being dunked in refried bacon grease.

I would never have consciously thought of that hand and finger shape. Luckily I was not really concentrating on what fingers are supposed to look like. I wrapped everything instead around the gag of the face in the ring.

The next time your boss or maybe your animation teacher is droning on about how Disney created personality animation, stare at him hard with one eye, and bend an ear toward him (Preferably your left eye and right ear).

Aim your other senses absent mindedly at a scribble pad and hope for some lucky uncensored inspirations. You might come up with some shapes you wouldn't think of while your more disciplined habit-ruled brain is guiding your pencil. Sometimes it's better to let your pencil drag your brain around.

Now you know what to do in your next important meeting.

The Real Ripping Friends

The original Ripping Friends-created in 1988 were actually a watered down spin off of my Brik Blastoff concept from the early 80s.
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2007/01/brik-blastoff-of-outback.html
Brik himself was modeled after Kirk Douglas in Detective story.
So was Rip. Crag is a variation, as are some TV and CG movie guys.

I watered the "CARTOONS FOR MEN" concept down to what I thought would sell on TV. It took ten years to get it on TV and then it got watered down even more, to the point where I shudder watching it. I shudder even more seeing all the rippoffs which are also watered down - in weirder and weirder ways.

But here's how they were originally conceived:
Here they are as super geniuses, drawn by the great Jim Smith.
Jim draws them tampering with the laws of the universe with their ungodly scientific instruments.
In an article from Chris Gore's Wild Cartoon Kingdom-early 90s.
Here's their girlfriend, Dr. Jean Poole.
People tell me they've seen her before, just not in my cartoons.

The drawing below was done by Lynne Naylor and inked probably by Libby Simon.
Here's a doodle I did for a line of children's clothing accesories. It's Rip modeling the latest Mattel Idiot-Ride-'em-Helmet.


I'm sure I have some more early sketches somehwere. I might even have an old story outline for a movie idea. I will hunt...This is as close as the show ever got to using my drawings. They still changed them and blanderized these from the originals, but they are at least recognizable as my style.

Scene Planning For TV - Setups for storyboard and layout 3

Once a layout/pose artist has drawn all his setups with all his character poses complete, and he has done a rough indication of a background, he gives to the BG designer to draw a more finished BG.

Hanna Barbera used the simplest possible staging in their first cartoons because of the severe budget restrictions. This drives Eddie crazy.

I used their staging in this manual just to give people the basic idea of how to reuse shots in other scenes.
Here is a sequence of storyboard from Ripping Friends which had a wider variety of shots.

If you look through these boards you can see shots that have been reused from earlier scenes. There are reuses and "works out of" poses and expressions too.

I still planned the show to reuse shots, but the layout artists were redrawing the same angles from scratch every time, because of the strange production system being used at the service studios in Canada. (This happens at overseas studios too-they hand out the same setups to different artists who don't know that someone else already drew a setup and BG that they themselves could use to save time, so they redraw everything 20 times) This cost extra time and money, and way too many backgrounds to paint when we couldn't even afford real background painters. The production managers tried to tell us they could paint in photoshop and we would never be able to tell the difference between fuzzy photoshop paintings and real paint. Now the Ripping Friends live in the Land Of Fuzz.


So I made this manual to help the production managers save time and money and make it easier on the artists. Unfortunately, the manuals sat on a shelf hidden away from the artists who could have used them to save some sweat.

Maybe they will help someone out there in the ether.
These gutsy manly storyboard drawings were done by Jim Smith. http://www.jimsmithcartoons.com/index2.html
The extra doodles and notes under Jim's drawings are my additional breakdowns of expressions for acting. All this stuff was way toned down in the layouts, and so I then had to make another manual explaining how to not tone down expressions and poses. Those production managers had impressive looking shelves, piled high with Spumco manuals that
were never opened!

BTW, this section is all exposition. In the story, it's meant to make fun of shows like Superfriends where there are too many characters in a scene and they all just talk and explain what's going on to each other. Those scenes are always hard to board, because you have to come up with interesting angles for static mouth flapping characters. Jim solved it by putting them in funny heavy poses and making funny compositions.

We were always trying to figure out how to make fun of seriousness. Serious superheroes to me are automatically funny, but not so to the audience, so we tried to emphasize how silly serious superheroes are.


more to come....

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.

CLICK HERE to buy
"A GODDAMN CHRISTMAS CARTOON"
From John K., the creator of Ren and Stimpy

Rip-a-Long CEREAL PRIZES

I've always considered myself a champion of the audience. While most of the industry conspires against being nice to humans, I fight to appeal to normal human desires. I don't succeed every single time, but at least I try.

When I do kids' cartoons I aim to give kids what everyone else refuses to. Like, can you imagine a super hero cartoon where the characters actually punch anybody? Well I had to fight executives for even the very few punches that appeared in a show about a genre that is all about punching.

In the Ripping Friends-a show that had many conspiring forces against it, I purposely crafted a segment to let the kids know that Spumco cartoonists were on their side.

I came up with a concept called "Rip Along With The Ripping Friends". In each of these sequences, kids would write the Ripping Friends to tell them who was being mean to them this week: Bullies, Teachers, Networks, Cartoon writers, Parents, Homework assignments, Lumpy toymakers, etc. The Ripping Friends would read the kids' complaints, empathize and then go after the monsters who dared to be mean to them.

Cereal companies are mean now, but they used to love kids. They used to cover their cereal boxes with great cartoon art, games and cut-out-activities. They made great entertaining animated commercials, they sponsored cartoon shows on TV, they coated every single nugget of cereal with glorious sparkly sugar, but the thing they did best was...they put PRIZES in every cereal box!

http://theimaginaryworld.com/cbarch.html

In this particluar Rip-Along, The Ripping Friends try to find out who's responsible for not putting real prizes in cereal anymore and then they rectify the affront.

RipAlongCEREALprize
Uploaded by chuckchillout8

This segment pretty much illustrates my whole philosophy of entertainment-let actual entertainers do whatever they can to entertain their audience and stay out of their way, then collect the money. The irony of the animation here is that much of it is pretty blandly executed. I drew the first half of the segment and did my best to try to get everyone along the production line to trace my drawings exactly. They didn't, they felt compelled to add lumps to every drawing, but you can at least recognize my style underneath the lumps- in the first half of the cartoon.







You idiot!

Those kids...

... believe in puppets...

...you're ruining...

...the MAGIC!

Yeah! Try to use your head, willya?!

I'm sorry fellas...

I'm just...

...Rrrr...

...eally...

...MAD!


The second half of the cartoon is some combination of me and the generic Canadian style. It was storyboarded in a very funny style by Mike Kerr, but his board then went through the blandifying Canadian studio who composed eveything in the middle, designed ugly incidental characters and liberally piled the lumps all over the stuff. I did some of the drawings of Rip, trying to keep the life and wackiness that Mike did in the storyboard, but of course that had to be covered in lumps too.

It was this bland, symmetric uncomposed lumpiness that drove me to write up the manuals I have started to post on the blog.
Even though the expressions in the drawing above are extreme by modern standards, notice that the features on either side of the face are totally symmetrical. The original drawings had a lot more life, but the Canadian director "fixed" them for me and evened them all out.
After I caught him, he explained he had to do it, because Jim Smith and my drawings were "off-model". Jim and I designed the characters.



That same "director" designed this wonderfully appealing pile of lumps above.



A lot of this art makes me cringe, but I'm going to show some clips now and then of stuff that I've screened at festivals that got a lot of laughs from the audience. Luckily for me, many modern cartoons have so dulled people's eyeballs that they can laugh at satire and gags despite many nasty drawings.







See the pin-point eyeball pupils in the characters above? Dead. Robotic. Non-organic. I had to make manuals just to show Canadian studios how to make eyes look like they are coming out of living creatures. The manuals were hidden in the file cabinet of the idiot production manager. What was his name again, Mike?

Wow! A slightly non-symmetrical drawing somehow slipped through the system! The director probably got fired for this.

Ripping Friends Satire

Ripping Friends had a sequence in each episode called "Rip Along With The Ripping Friends".


It was a segment meant to serve 2 purposes:

1) TO RE-USE STOCK ANIMATION AND SAVE A FEW BUCKS-like in 60s/70s Hanna Barbera and Filmation cartoons-the show was a very low budget so I thought this would be a good way to save some money for a few minutes that could be used to put more animation in the main story.
It didn't work though because the studios we subcontracted to kept redrawing the same drawings over and over again, even though I told them it was OK not to waste their (and my) money.

2) TO DO SOME SATIRE IN DEFENSE OF KIDS' NEEDS- This need was well satisfied despite some very bland drawings that were beyond Spumco's control.
The idea of the "Rip-Alongs" was to have the stars of the show take letters from kids who the corporate world or anybody else was doing bad things to, and RIP them to shreds.



So the Ripping Friends would rip bullies, corporations that ruined fun for kids by taking the violence out of cartoons and replacing it with morals, Cereal companies that stopped putting prizes in cereal, Home video and game compainies that design retarded controls and unitelligible manuals, etc.

This particular Rip Along was designed to force Hot Dog companies to get in synch with Bun manufacturers so that we didn't have to throw out 4 weiners for every bun pack we opened.

If only they had listened!



By the way, the evil networks made us cut out the funniest scene. (As always!) Maybe that's why the hotdog companies didn't respond.

I'm going to try to restore it in time for the San Francisco show on July 28, 29.

Wish me luck!