The Precious Years

MORE ABOUT THE PRECIOUS TALES OF CHILDHOOD INNOCENCE

Who wants to see THE HE HOG MOVIE?

Here is my totally mainstream family oriented kid's movie idea. G rated. I just pitched it again and everyone laughed like crazy but then worried that it's too edgy, which it's not. We live in a strange world where no one in business seems to want to make money.

PROFESSOR MOLE AND HIS EVIL INSECT BMF THREATEN ARMAGEDDON!
THE BRAIN THAT PUNISHED A PLANET

This is the brain that almost wrecked a planet. It is packed with dangerous ideas. Moles grow on the brain in front of our very eyes. They devour the brain impulses causing the scalp to tingle with a burning urgency too intense for our puny imaginations to contemplate. The brain must constantly feed the moles with fantastic ideas that tamper with God's laws. The brain longs for peace and respite from the gnawing voracious moles that demand ever more frightening ideas. The more awful the ideas, the more delicious they taste.
This is Professor Mole, hapless human host of the itching pulsating brain.
The Professor is quiveringly deranged but not technically evil. He just has a burning brain that must needs tamper with God's laws. The brain wishes it could survive without its primitive and morally infused host. But the brain cannot live without the precious blood supply pumped into it by the generous professor's empathic heart and so for the moment must put up with his restraining ethical principles. The brain needs a willing ally in order to follow through on any of its shocking innovations.
Professor Mole is dedicated to benefitting society through the advance of science. He himself though is so hideous that he is shunned by the very society he longs to benefit and must conduct his awesome experiments in a hidden basement laboratory. The basement is putrid with dank mold and segmented creeping things of a lower order. Professor Mole has an unusual fascination for segments and collects them in jars. Sometimes he makes new things from unrelated segments. It's one of his many harmless obsessions. He thinks maybe humans would get along better if we had crisp segments rather than rude connective tissue.

MIKEY MANTID

Mikey is a praying mantis who lives in the basement of the same tenement building as professor mole. The professor discovers him one day hovering in the dank shadows, grooming his segments - which makes an eerie and beckoning musical call. To Mole's surprise, Mikey is not afraid of the professor's deeply ugly countenance. The professor befriends Mikey and feeds him. He massages his segments, oils them and keeps them in perfect working order.

Mikey is professor mole's only friend. Unlike his kindly master, Mikey is truly evil and joins forces with the Professor's throbbing ghastly brain. Mole, blinded by his love for Mikey, unwittingly commits unspeakable atrocities upon mankind in order to please his voracious segmented buddy.


ask about FEEDING TIME if you dare...

The danger of Professor Mole's Doomsday machine is so great that He Hog enlists the aid of the fantastic otherworldly
BOTTLED CITY OF HUMAN WOMEN!



Beautiful sculpts by Hryma!

Mighty Mouse Pitch circa 1994?

Here is some presentation art from a pitch we did at Spumco in the mid 90s. I wanted to get Paramount to let me revive the Terrytoons characters. I would have shown some of this stuff earlier but it had all suffered water damage. But now, thanks to Alex, Jojo and Tommy, some of it has been restored through the magic of insufferable digital technology.

These guys here are "The Catnip Gang" who appeared in at least 2 of the original TT Mighty Mouse gang. I think that was drawn by Mike Fontanelli. Possibly inked by Shane Glines and I don't remember who colored it. Looks like water colors?...Hey I bet it was Rick Altergott! Famous creator of "Doofus".I added another character called "The Big Puss" (originally "The Big Pussy" but everyone talked me out of that). The Big Puss is the head of the crime syndicate in Catville. He is the Catnip Gang's boos and we never actually see all of him at once. Usually we just hear his gutteral grumbles from behind an imposing door in his office. Once in a while we will see just his face pressing against the frame of his open door. Jim Smith drew a hilarious storyboard about the Big Puss sending the Catnip gang on an impossible mission - to steal the shorts of Mighty Mouse. He figures that the shorts are magic and that is where Mighty Mouse gets his power from. I used this story idea later for "The Ripping Friends".

Richard Pursel had an especial fondness for these bedfellows and dubbed them "Gandy and Sourpuss: Wards Of The State". We wrote stories about them being on the dole and getting into tiffs with their unemployment officers and stuff.
Of course I included some of the characters we created for the Bakshi version of Mighty Mouse. Here's Petey Pate in his insane glory. In this story he steals all the eyebrows from the mice in mouseville and Mighty Mouse has to come save the day.
Here are his witless thugs who fear nothing - except insanity. The broken mind instills the fear of God in these poor crooked souls.
Here are my favorite characters from the Bakshi show.
These look like they also might be drawn by Mike Fontanelli.
I love the ignorant - and so did Rich. The original Deputy Dawg cartoons are pretty terrible, even for Terrytoons, but the characters are great.
Rich came up with a story about nearsighted Vincent Van Gofer marrying Deputy Dawg's pants. The set up was: Deputy, Musky and the gang are skinny dipping at the old swimming hole, when Vincent Van Gofer ambles up to the edge of the pond and sees Deputy's pants hanging over the branch of a tree. Through his blurry eyes he sees a beautiful apparition of female gofer loveliness and he whisks the pants away to the Sheriff's office for a quick wedding. Wedding bliss turns out to be less than he'd hoped for and the marriage soon sours. Meanwhile, Deputy Dawg has no pants and has to do his job while moving his hands back and forth really fast in front of himself to maintain the picture's family rating. That no-account egg-stealin' rascal, Musky takes advantage of the situation with zany-ass results.

I have lots more of this stuff if anyone else likes Terrytoons as much as I do.

Bottled City Of Human Women

A MAGICAL STORY ABOUT SAVING ALL THE HOT ONES

Kaspar's Toenails 1. Wild Ruthenia

It's been a long and brutally cold winter in Ruthenia. Kaspar is in deep hibernation in his lair.Between snores, we hear his toenails growing ever longer.

Spring arrives. The snow melts, buds sprout, rocks come alive again.

A slavic pecker bursts out of a tree and flies into Kaspar's cave. In Ruthenia, God has assigned one woodcock per every bear as part of his perfect cosmic plan.

Kaspar is fast asleep, snoring as the springpecker is perched on his head.

Peck, peck,peck comes the rapidfire tapping of the birdie's little beak on Kaspar's unkempt noggin. Kaspar's eyes twitch and slowly open one at a time, ripping away the tranquil crusts of winter's slumber.

Kaspar is awake!
Up, alert and ready for spring habits.

He checks his toes.

Yes! The nails have grown extra long this year!

He wiggles them vigorously, forcing the warming blood to rush into his leathery lower digits.

To be continued...

BTW, I'm not sure how long I'm gonna keep the blog open, so if want any past lessons or resources, you might wanna snap them up now, while I think of some better way to bring back cartoony cartoons.

I never expected to get thousands of visitors a day, I just put it up for a few of my cartoon friends, but now it's become a stranger responsibility and understandably, personal opinions are not always welcome in public. Just that I have the opinion that there should be a place in the animation business for plain old cartoons to reach a wide audience seems to be a radical idea to some readers. Who could have guessed?

Thanks for all the nice comments. They are well appreciated!

PART 2

Doodle Action

Doodles cont.

I have some of you that are almost ready for the cartoon college. Just gotta finish some stuff this week and I will be more communicative.
If I've given you positive comments on your construction studies, try next:

Your own poses of classic characters that you have studied

composition/hierarchy studies - click the labels - you need this to do layouts

more

Doodle Day

I don't have any earth shattering theroies today, so here are some latest doodles.