Some Random 80s Stuff

The Unfettered Creativity Of Filmation

Animation is an imaginative medium, capable of anything you can dream up.

80s Development Liar

Here's Percy Pimplepuss from a presentation I drew for TMS thousands of years ago.
Percy has a condition. He tends to swell and fill with viscous fluids.
But then comes release.

And relaxation.THE 80S WAS A BIZARRE TIME
I worked in just about every animation department in the 1980s but the job I liked best (before I ever sold my own ideas) was being a "development artist". This job is kind of a lie because you are doing drawings mainly to impress someone into buying a show. You don't have to do the drudgery of drawing every pose in a storyboard or layout on a boring show - or have to waste hours unscrambling some sloppy writer's ill-thought out script before you even start drawing.

A development artist makes a few drawings and renders them up all nice (these are crappy color xeroxes so you can't really see the details) in a way that they will never look on screen. This is to impress the network execs into hopefully buying the show. Once they do, then the studio redesigns everything stiffer and blander, and ships all the work off to a third world country who burns it out as fast as possible. When it comes back and the network sees it, they ask, "Why doesn't the show look like the presentation?". The studios never say "Because you can't do rendering on cels." or "Because you paid us so little we had to ship it to the cheapest fastest animation studio on the planet" or "Because we have a different department called 'character design' whose artists are not as good as our presentation artists, and they redesign everything to make it 'animateable' and stiff."

"WILLY WAX BUILDUP HAS TROUBLE HEARING YOU"

Anyway, as development artists, we didn't have to worry about practical realities. We were just supposed to trick someone into thinking a show might look good if they paid for it. We did a lot less drawings than production artists, but spent more time on each one and actually got to be somewhat creative- although we knew not to expect the shows to have anything to do with what we drew. That was baffling to me, but at least it wasn't so stressful as working in a studio on what should be a real job and knowing it's all going to end up awful anyway.
These were from a presentation for a cartoon show based on "The Garbage Pail Kids". I knew from the beginning that even after somewhat toning down all the gross stuff that the show would never sell, but CBS really wanted to develop it - because the bubble gum cards were a huge hit with kids.

In the 80s, networks would only buy new cartoon shows that were based on already-successful characters in other mediums. They wouldn't buy brand-new creations from cartoonists. - That was considered "too-risky". This was before Ren and Stimpy, Rugrats and "Doug" established the trendy "Creator-Driven" fad of the 90s and put Saturday morning cartoons practically out of business.

When the kids in the 80s went nuts for Garbage Pail Kids cards, the networks had just discovered that kids liked gross stuff. Amazing.

But they couldn't really bring themselves to take the money by doing the show. They paid for the development and then rejected the show and the potentially huge ratings that were sure to come.
These look so mild to me now, but were considered really radical in the 80s.

POSTSCRIPT:

The SM execs of the 80s never understood why the finished shows had nothing to do with the presentation that tricked them into buying it. They were at least smart enough to see the difference. But they were ignorant of the actual production process at an animation studio, so had no idea that every step of the assembly line was designed to tone down and blanderize the idea.

I knew what was happening because I saw it ever day. I realized that it didn't matter what you started with on a cartoon. It only matters what you end with.

Most people think a show is good or bad based on how good or bad the "idea" is-whatever an "idea" is. Ideas are only good if there is a production system that not only allows them to end up on the screen, but encourages them to improve and evolve along the production line. That didn't exist then, existed for a short time here and there in the 90s and has since disappeared.

Well that's a subject for another day.

If You Can't See It, It Doesn't Matter

Some people think that bad drawing is just another "style", among many. People like to say "Not everything needs to be cartoony" - which is usually the straw man argument used to endorse stiff bad drawings like you get in most TV cartoons from the 70s on.
Even when good artists who worked on those bad stiff TV cartoons tell you these cartoons are bad and that we are ashamed to have contributed to them, there are still holdouts who won't believe it.
Well there's nothing anyone can do about that.

If you can see that organic well drawn cartoons are obviously better than stiff dead ones, but just can't figure out why, you can probably learn some of the techniques that make old cartoons much better in general than cartoons drawn in the last 40 years or so.

If you can't see it at all, no amount of evidence or argument is gonna change your mind. So I encourage commenters to not yell at each other just for not being able to see the difference. It's a pointless argument if your eyes can't recognize it.I sometimes wonder why some folks who so strongly disagree with the whole point of this blog keep coming back every day just to get mad.

There are plenty of sites that revere modern cartoons where the fans can enjoy them in peace.
I agree that not everything needs to be cartoony. Everything isn't. Far from it. But in the cartoon business there ought to be at least a few homes for cartoonists to do what cartoonists invented and have had stolen from them.

Why on earth are cartoons such a rarity in the cartoon business? And how can that be controversial?

Eye Direction Is Important

Eye contact was a seemingly impossible skill at Filmation, no matter how much they begged for it.

Will Finn at Filmation

Ram Man "surprised"

Will Finn said...

i gotta add one more memorable moment that's relevant to "on model" dogma:

my first week on HE-MAN, the cleanup crew were given model sheets of "Ram Man" where the designer had drawn his thumbs on the wrong side of his hands.

In his "full front" pose and side pose, the thumbs were right, but in the rear pose, they were drawn incorrectly, it was an obvious mistake.

When we pointed this out to the clean up supervisor, she went ashen and told us we had to follow it anyway, until the proper protocol had been addressed to look into the problem. Whenever he turned his back, we had to have "Ram Man's" thumbs inbetween around to the wrong side of his hand to be perfectly "on model."

I swear to God I am not making this up.

It took a couple of weeks, but we were eventually given new "corrected models" and the crew went into overtime to re-do all the incorrect clean up we had been doing in the interim.

Ram Man "fiercely symmetrical"

If Kafka had ever written pure farce, even he could not have topped FILMATION.

P.S. the original FAT ALBERT characters were done by some very good artists for 2 TV specials that were not done at FILMATION. These are for some reason not available and have not been aired in nearly 30 years. When the subject was sold to TV FILMATION, bastardized the models and the results were...well, typical.

Ram Man "determined"

The Most Important 80s Rule

"Fat Albert Surprised"

This is from a Filmation layout manual but it represents the philosophy of every 80s cartoon studio that I worked at. Boy the requirements to be a layout artist sound hard!

That sounds like you'd have to go to art school in France for 10 years before you can get a job at Filmation.

And here's how they want you to apply all those skills

This instruction means: only use 2 poses for dialogue. A front or 3/4 view. That's it. That way you can keep the rest of the drawing completely still- and don't forget to trace it! But be creative like the manual says.
Be creative, but make sure if you make a radical "extreme change" like evening out the arms above, that you get official permission from the foreman.
Test: name each of their emotions.

Thanks to Jeremy for uploading the whole giant manual. There are more gifts of wisdom in it.

Depressing Studios 3: DiC

DIC?

Do I even need to say anything?

I will anyway. In terms of sheer ugliness, it would be hard to beat this stuff. DiC came out of nowhere in the 1980s and seemed to have no rules or standards as to what made cartoons work. So they just made it up.
The combination of the worst character designs I'd ever seen, with sending all the creative work to the cheapest service studios around the world added up to a style that makes Filmation look like 40s Disney.
When I went to work in-house for DiC, they had not even heard of what a layout was- let alone an animator. They had storyboard artists that had never animated, and believed that any camera angle and any number of characters in a scene was no problem to animate- because they didn't have to do it. They drew storyboards with downshots of characters they couldn't draw themselves even in a straight on pose and then sent the storyboards to some poor nation across the globe. 6 months later, finished cartoons would show up back in LA and everyone here would slap each other on the back for the magic they had achieved- not knowing what miracle made the stuff move- when it actually did once in a blue moon.

A visual style that developed out of poor taste, uncaring business men, ignorance, shoddy design and cheap production values later developed into the style adopted by studios that could afford to make movies that cost 20 times the budget of Pinocchio. Go figure.

The influence of DiC