According to the NEW YORK TIMES, Phoenix Suns forward Shawn Marion loves cartoons and has a collection of thousands of animation dvds. I got a kick out of this sentence in the article: “His stock consists mostly of classics like ‘He-Man,’ ‘Transformers,’ ‘DuckTales,’ ‘ThunderCats,’ ‘Hong Kong Phooey’ and ‘Scooby-Doo.’” Old school? Yeah. Classics? Hardly. Anyway, it’s a fairly amusing article.

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Independent animator (and former syndicated newspaper cartoonist) Chris Harding has a thought-provoking rant on his blog about the perils of allowing your cartoon characters to be licensed for merchandise. He writes:

Here’s how it works: You spend all your energy and passion, and it almost kills you, but somehow you manage to breathe a tiny bit of life into a character… your baby. And then some genius comes along and, bing-bang, sells the rights to print that character’s face on a napkin. That people wipe their food on. On your character’s face. That you worked so hard to breathe life into. Chocolate cake all over their face. It shows contempt for the very idea of a character, because they only exist where we put them. And if they are even slightly real to you, if you care even a little about them, it shows a lot of disrespect to wipe your filth on their faces. It only makes sense if your goal is just to cash out, leaving behind the husks of other peoples’ once lively creations to rot and stink in the nostrils of posterity.

I pointed to some surreal French animated commercials last week, but they don’t come close to this mid-century theatrical spot by German animation legend Hans Fischerkoesen. The commercial, which is kind of like Hitchcock-meets-Harryhausen, advertises Underberg, an herbal formula used to treat indigestion. And all we get in the US for heartburn is squiggly Blechman drawings.

Attention all Angelenos: Tom Sito, Disney animator, former president of the Animation Guild, and now author of Drawing the Line: The Untold Story of the Animation Unions from Bosko to Bart Simpson will speak Thursday, December 14, 2006, 7:30 pm, at the Hollywood Heritage Museum. No one has collected more stories about the Golden Age of Hollywood animation than Tom, and his book is a must have. The Hollywood Heritage Museum is in the Lasky-DeMille Barn at 2100 North Highland Avenue (across the street from the Hollywood Bowl). Parking is free. Admission is $8 (Hollywood Heritage Members: $5) for this special event.

Animation director Matt Ferguson (Harold Rosenbaum Chartered Accountant and Grossology for Nelvana) has, over the past week, been posting clips and full versions of the 2006 Annie Award nominees on his new blog, The Living Animation Festival. Matt’s also been posting all kinds of great stuff he finds on YouTube, including early films of John Lasseter and Michael Dudok de Wit. Well worth a daily visit.

UbuWeb bills itself as a “YouTube of the Avant-Garde” and I can’t think of a better description. Among other things, they have a great collection of avant-garde film, all available for free viewing. The animation offerings are kind of sparse, but there are some difficult-to-find films that are worth checking out including Robert Breer’s A MAN AND HIS DOG OUT FOR AIR, numerous shorts by Walerian Borowczyk, Ed Emshwiller’s early CG landmark SUNSTONE, Frank and Caroline Mouris’s Oscar-winning FRANK FILM, and a couple of stop-motion classics by Ladislaw Starewicz.

The fifth in a series of holiday gift-giving suggestions from your pals at Cartoon Brew.

This one is only for folks in southern California. It used to be that to get your hands on Stuart Ng’s amazing collection of out-of-print and contemporary illustration and cartoon books, one had to wait for the annual San Diego Comic-Con or arrange a personal visit to Stuart’s collection. But now, Stuart has opened a 1000-square-foot showroom in Torrance, and he’s holding his first-ever open house this holiday season. The showroom will be open from 11am to 5pm for the next two weekends: December 9-10 and 16-17. The Stuart Ng showroom is located at 22910 Crenshaw Blvd., Suite B, Torrance, California 90505. To check out his catalog or for more details, visit StuartNgBooks.com. But please, leave a couple Ronald Searle books for me.

Cartoon Brew Holiday Gift Guide
Animated Soviet Propaganda dvd
Terr’ble Thompson book
Scott Bradley cd
Silly Symphonies book

What happens when a nutty evangelical homebuilder decides to become the next Walt Disney, and hires a bunch of ex-Disney animators to build his own 2D animation empire in Wisconsin? That sounds like the set-up to a bad joke, but unfortunately, it actually happened last year and the results were predictably disastrous. The story of Tom Hignite and Miracle Studios is recounted in painful detail in the current issue of MILWAUKEE MAGAZINE. It’s a long but mighty entertaining read.