Universal Studios’ Woody Woodpecker & Friends Classic Cartoon Collection DVD is now available to pre-order on Amazon - where it’s a steal at $27.99.

In addition to the 75 restored, uncut cartoons, there will be several juicy bonus materials, including:

• Walter, Woody and the World of Animation a nice little 1975 documentary featuring Walter and his wife Gracie, discussing their careers in animation, filled with great clips.

• Cartoonland Mysteries - a rare 1936 Lowell Thomas “Going Places” short subject showing step by step how the Lantz studio makes an animated short - in this case an Oswald Rabbit cartoon, Soft Ball Game. Restored from the original neg.

• Behind-the-Scenes with Walter Lantz - six of the great Lantz segments from the 1957 Woody Woodpecker TV show explaining how they make cartoons - restored, in beautiful Technicolor.
1. The Origin of Woody Woodpecker (from Episode #1)
2. Drawing Woody and Andy (from Episode #5)
3. Creating the Stories (from Episode #6)
4. Animating Woody (from Episode #8)
5. The Development of Woody (from Episode #9)
6. Directing Animated Cartoons (from Episode #10)

• “The Woody Woodpecker Show” Special 1964 Halloween Episode, Spook-A-Nanny - rarely seen, now restored, featuring all the Lantz characters in a strange made-for-TV one shot.

3400 Cahuenga Blvd. Thursday, 4.19.07, 2:40pm

I was driving south on Cahuenga this afternoon and snapped this pic from my moving car with my cell phone. The signage was just erected. It’s official: The former Hanna-Barbera Studio is now an LA Fitness location.

Very depressing.

…and you thought the early Disney character costumes were ugly?

Popeye, Olive Oyl and Wimpy arrive for a performance of the Broadway musical revue Hellzapoppin, in this 1939 news photo currently for sale on ebay. Larger full size version here.

Popeye is one of those properties that is such a pure cartoon, any attempt to personify him in live action simply does not work. Even three dimensional Popeye toys have a history of looking grotesque - in a fun way.

(Thanks, Leonard Maltin)

While I was double-checking facts for the Seventies advertising post a couple days ago, I discovered this useful resource—A Critical History of Computer Graphics and Animation created by professor Wayne Carlson. The site is more overview than in-depth examination, but it does appear to be fairly thorough and is packed with rare video clips and stills of early CG work. While it’s easy to criticize computer animation for everything that it lacks, a site like this is a reminder of how young the technique is and how quickly it has developed. It’s certainly humbling to watch this early CG experiment (streaming RealPlayer file) by Ed Catmull and to think that just a few decades later his studio is producing Ratatouille.

Any Baby Boomers out there recall those odd foreign cartoons that ran on TV in the 1950s and 60s, packaged under the Capt’n Sailorbird or Bozo Storybook names?

Toon Tracker has some information… but the burning question is: Where are these cartoons today?

The cartoons were usually rich and lush, and animated on ones. The original soundtracks were usually stripped off and replaced by an unnecessary narrator. But they were pretty cool.

An anonymous blogger has posted on Kino en Esperanto rete a group of very attractive animated shorts from 1951-3 based on folktales from Russia and various Asian countries. They look a lot like the stuff of Capt’n Sailorbird. These films are subtitled in Esperanto (as is the rest of the site), but if you can get past the language, our benefactor has the full films available for streaming and download. There is some bizzare stuff here.

(Thanks, Eric Wilson)

We don’t do many links to non-animation websites but I wanted to share a few of my favorite visual blogs along with a couple other online finds that I’ve enjoyed recently. Feel free to share the visual blogs and sites that inspire you in the comments section. After all, it’s hardly a secret that the best animation is produced by those who have the broadest visual education.

Background layout and production design in the real world
BldgBlog

Great design is great design regardless of medium
Ace Jet 170

America when it was truly retro
Shorpy

Assorted bits of visual goodness
NotCot

To be used in conjunction with NetFlix
Like Anna Karina’s Sweater

Inspiring video talks from some of the world’s greatest thinkers
TED conference

The video below, Reyner Banham Love Los Angeles, is an awesome 52-minute BBC documentary by the British architecture critic who wrote THE book on the city: Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies.

Animator Dan Meth (of Hebrew Crunk fame) just completed an animation experiment. He animated his latest film while getting drunk in a local pub.

Dan went out to a bar with, as he says on his blog, “a stack of index-cards, some markers, a lightbox, and no storyboard”. He drew and drank himself silly, all the while covering over 300 cards with drawings for a short film he’s completing this week, part of a new Frederator shorts series of one minute cartoons.

He’s post all 329 drawings on a Flickr page for everyone to see in advance of the film. Don’t know if anyone’s posted any archive like this before, or used Flickr to create an animated film, but it sure seems like a good idea to me.

This is a fairly amusing promo for Cartoon Network Latin America. It was accepted into this year’s Cannes Lions advertising festival.

Directors: Daniel Xavier and Manoela Muraro
Production studio: Soapbox Studios
Post-production: Magick Lantern.

And here is a behind-the-scenes video showing digital post work by Magick Lantern’s Adam Plouff and Jesenko Fazlagic.