Tulips Shall GrowFor the last three years, you can usually find me and Marea on Monday nights hanging out at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences on Wilshire. Starting April 11th, we’ll be back for the rest of the year when Great To Be Nominated: Part Two begins. Each Monday at 7pm a feature film from each year (starting with 1940) which received the most nominations without winning the Best Picture Award will be screened, along with nominated animated and live action short subjects, original advertising trailers, out-takes, newsreels and other surprises to recreate an evening at the movies of that particular year.The very best prints available are screened at the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater, one of the finest screening facilities in the world. Bugs Bunny’s debut A WILD HARE (1940) will be screened with the first program (4/11); Fleischer’s initial SUPERMAN (1941) and Tex Avery’s debut SPEAKING OF ANIMALS short, DOWN ON THE FARM will screen the second week (4/18); and a Technicolor nitrate print of George Pal’s TULIPS SHALL GROW (1942) will accompany the third program (4/25). Seeing these prints in 35mm, at the best possible theatre in L.A., is worth the price of admission alone - and get this, the tickets are only $5. each show, or $30. for the entire series (18 weeks!). It’s the best bargain in town.
See you there.

Pssst! Hey, Bud! C’mere… Here’s a good tip: for the next four hours - till midnight Eastern Time (9pm Pacific) - you can download three of the five Oscar nominated animated shorts (and two live action nominees) at Salon.com. Guard Dog, Ryan and Gopher Broke. Go now.

A reminder that tomorrow afternoon (Saturday February 26th at 3pm) I am hosting an Asifa-Hollywood program devoted to the rarely-seen ABC primetime series CALVIN & THE COLONEL (1961).Though show was originally broadcast in black & white, we will screen several 16mm episodes of the series in color. Special guests from the cast & crew will attend and a Q & A after the screening will include voice actress June Foray and animators Phil Roman, John Sparey and Frank Andrina. The screening will take place on The American Film Institute campus, in the Ted Ashley-Warner Bros. Screening Room, at 2021 N. Westen Ave. in Hollywood, CA. Asifa members admitted FREE. General public admission price is $10.Here’s a nifty shot of the Milton Bradley Calvin & The Colonel board game.

Harry McCracken laments the loss of the former Fleischer Studios building in New York - 1600 Broadway - with pictures, at Harry-Go-Round.

MR. BUG GOES TO TOWN (1941), Max Fleischer’s second and arguably best animated feature film, is considered a classic by animation buffs - and completely forgotten today by the general public.Brew buddy Vince Waldron just spotted this item on ebay:

This curious item caught my eye on eBay. Looks to be an animators model for the Honey bee character in that film (or one of them, anyway.) What struck me as interesting is the little tag attached to it which would seem to indicate that this sort of thing was given away at the end of a production. Can you imagine the attention a similar Disney item would garner?

Holy Mackeral - an original maquette - and it’s signed by Dave Fleischer! Good luck to potential bidders on this item. If any Brew reader wins this baby let us know. We are already jealous!

Lili Chin has a report on Toy Fair in New York City and Ronnie del Carmen writes about WonderCon in San Francisco. Good reading and pics.

Looks like Christopher Hart may have some new competition. Behold, animation and drawing lessons from Klasky Csupo. What’s next - singing lessons from Ashlee Simpson?

Amazon has enabled the “Search Inside This Book” feature on my recently published book, THE ART OF ROBOTS, and because a handful of names appear throughout the book, you can view most (if not all) of the book’s pages online. For example, type in “Bill Joyce” and over fifty pages turn up, and then see even more pages by using the ‘forward’ and ‘back’ buttons. Unfortunately, Amazon limits the number of pages you can view online (somewhere around forty), but it’s still a nice way of previewing the book before deciding whether or not to buy it.