Thursday night I’m once again showing several musical shorts (and cartoons) at the Steve Allen Theatre in Los Feliz. This is my monthly 16mm film program, as opening act, for the fantastic Janet Klein and her Parlour Boys who perform the first Thursday of each month at this location, at 8pm. Janet sings and plays authentic 1920s jazz, while I open the show with several 16mm shorts from the 1930s. This month I’m showing YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOIN’ (1931), MERRY MANNEQUINS (1937) and a wild Fleischer Screen Song, SONG SHOPPING (1933, with Ethel Merman). It’s musical madness! Join us!

GREASE producer Robert Stigwood should never, I repeat NEVER, be allowed within a hundred miles of an animation studio. He’s planning to remake the Who’s 1975 rock-opera feature TOMMY into an animated film, which is fine, but he wants to spend $400 million to do it. Is it even possible to spend $400 million on an animated film? What are they going to do: produce it five times in a row and then pick the best version? Stigwood’s insane reasoning: “It will feature the biggest names in the music industry. The original movie costs $3-4 million but this will cost $300-400 million. If you are going to do it, you’ve got to do it right.” This is a textbook example of what happens when people without the faintest clue of how animation works get the notion that they should produce an animated film. What’s even more frightening is that there’s probably some exec right now at a movie studio, with an equally abysmal understanding of animation, thinking to himself, “You know, that sounds like a damn fine idea.”
(link via Animated-News)

Flash animation producer Aaron Simpson has a new blog called ColdHardFlash.com which tracks the latest developments in Flash animation. Simpson knows what he’s talking about, and the site is shaping up into a nice insider resource for Flash artists, particularly in the area of TV animation.

Shane Glines recently posted a series of articles on his Cartoon Retro message board about “good taste” in art. They were written by painter Fred Taubes and published in issues of AMERICAN ARTIST during 1948. The points that Taubes makes in his pieces are as relevant today as they were nearly sixty years ago and provide for some valuable reading.