They say one picture is worth a thousand words. This one is worth fifty bucks - on ebay. Click here to view at full size.

Here’s the opening credits to a long gone (but not forgotten) TV series, My World And Welcome To It (1969):

What an odd show this was. It combined the writings and drawings of James Thurber with the conventions of a late 1960s sitcom. It also featured regular doses of animation (usually adapting Thurbers black & white ink line drawings) by DePatie-Freleng. I recall there was a controversy over using a laugh track on this show. The series was a bit laid back in some respects, and Thurber’s witty parables were possibly over the heads of much of its viewing audience. Despite winning two Emmys (Best Comedy Show and Leading Actor, William Windom) it was cancelled after one season. A DVD release of the complete series would be quite enlightening. I’d love to see it again.

In the meantime, here’s one of the show’s animation segments on You Tube.

In honor of today’s release of the next big leap in three dimensional, digitally enhanced CG — I give you Mike Grimshaw’s One D:

My friend Ben Applegate is working for Digital Manga, a Japanese comics publisher that owns a tour outfit called Pop Japan Travel. They do tours of Japan for fans of anime, manga and other weird and obscure subcultures. It all sounds pretty cool to me - I wish I had the time to go on one of these tours myself. The least I can do is give him a plug (and maybe they’ll give me a press discount - hint, hint).

Ben writes:

“We’re doing a tour in January and February of Tokyo and the Sapporo Snow Festival and we’ve added some extremely cool stuff to it: a sponsorship by Japanese anime mag publisher Gakken, a visit to Studio Pierrot (which animates Naruto, Bleach, pretty much every third action anime ever seen on Toonami), and a meeting with Hideyuki Kikuchi, a great Japanese horror writer whose best-known works are Wicked City and Vampire Hunter D.”

Tickets for this tour, known as the Cold Steel Tour, are on sale only until Dec. 15. The group departs Monday, January 28 and returns Wednesday, February 6. Other activities on the itinerary include a trip to the Ghibli Museum, a ride on a water ferry designed by Leiji Matsumoto (Space Battleship Yamato), and tours of traditional Japanese sights and modern Tokyo. The tour costs $2,500 plus a $200 fuel surcharge, and it includes round-trip airfare from Los Angeles to Tokyo, full hotel accommodations, bilingual guides every step of the way, all transportation and entry fees, and a customized guide book with maps, culture notes and a language primer designed for anime fans.

For complete itineraries and reservations, see www.popjapantravel.com!

A few years back, when MTV wanted to revive the Terrytoons characters, they commissioned an animation test in CG (of course, what else could a revival be done in?). Below is the test featuring Hashimoto, Sidney the Elephant and The Astronut. It’s about as good as one would expect it to be.

(via Animation ID)

Our buddy Oscar Grillo (above) writes about his latest exhibit of drawings and paintings inspired by a certain spinach eating sailor-man. Drawing The Sailor was part of Animacor ‘07, an international animation festival in Cordoba, Spain held last week. Grillo has posted a photo report on his blog.

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Click on this image at right to see a full-size newspaper ad from March 16th 1934 (a Friday), promoting the the first-run release of George White’s Scandals. This Fox film shared the bill with the latest Paramount Popeye cartoon, The Man On the Flying Trapeze, which was released the same day. This rare original newspaper ad demonstrates that block booking was not always in practice during the golden age - that a cartoon from one studio could (and often did) play with a feature from another studio.

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While we’re at it, here’s one more plug for Bob Jaques’ excellent new blog which studies the great Popeye animators from the Fleischer era. He’s updating it regularly and posting a lot of good information - go here often: Popeye Animator ID.

Ronald Searle fans can thank the upcoming live-action St. Trinian’s feature for the following book: St. Trinian’s: The Entire Appalling Business. No word yet on what exactly is contained within the book, but it’s cheaply priced, will be released in a couple months, and collects a whole bunch of classic Searle cartoons that have been long out-of-print in the US. Good enough for me.

Also, New Yorkers will be happy to know that there is currently an exhibition of original Ronald Searle artwork at the Forbes Galleries. The show, “Ronald Searle: A Lifetime of Drawing”, spans his entire career “from his drawings in a Japanese POW camp, to his early success as a magazine and book illustrator, to the enormously popular series of ‘St. Trinian’s’ drawings, to his work for movies and businesses, to his famous drawings of cats.” Admission is free. Gallery address and hours can be found here.

This is pretty good… a 40 minute speech by Simpsons director David Silverman from the recent Picnic 07 media event in Amsterdam this past September 26th. David reveals his secret past on Turbo Teen and Mr. T, and the origins of The Simpsons, (Note: the video of this speech is currently off line and is being re-edited. It should be available again soon).

(Thanks, William Phung)