Imagine curling up in your comfy recliner chair, snug in your smoking jacket, slippers and monocle, pipe in your mouth and brandy snifter at your side, perusing your personal leather bound copy of The Hanna Barbera Treasury.

Yes, The Easton Press has just published a limited edition leather-bound edition of my H-B book for royal sum of $147. (payable in three monthly installments of $49.00). I don’t have one myself - I didn’t even know they were publishing such an edition - but I’d certainly recommend it for the cartoon fan who has everything - and I do mean everything! Place your order here.

Here’s one for you night owls: Once again I’ll be discussing classic cartoons with Morgan White Jr. on Boston’s oldest and biggest radio station WBZ 1030AM Friday night (or early Saturday morning, depending on where you are). Tune in or listen live on the Internet, tomorrow night (3/28) at 11pm Pacific (3/29, 2am Eastern). Live phone calls will be taken, and questions will be answered. Join us!

Tied in to the release of the new book about his life, BlackBook magazine offers a no-holds-barred interview with Ralph Bakshi. I’m not a fan of the man, but I respect what he’s done for the art form. In a few sentences below, he explains quite well what separates him from the average joe who works in this industry:

“I never for a minute thought, Ralph, you’re broke, and you can’t compete with Disney. Go out and do a commercial film. Go out and do Mary Poppins 2, Bugs Bunny 3—you could make fortunes. But, not caring about money or merchandising allowed me to extend the medium. I mean, I did Heavy Traffic, and that’s not at all a commercial picture: a Jewish mother trying to chop the Italian father’s balls off and a kid who never got laid. So, what I’m saying is, success isn’t why I work. Money isn’t why I work.

“People throw away their lives today on that shit. I know guys in L.A. who have hundreds of millions of fucking dollars, and I think, when are you going to stop this shit? I mean, what are you doing here? Jeffrey Katzenberg still gets up at five in the morning to run this shit at DreamWorks, and gets 300 fucking million dollars for Shrek 5. What is that? He’s a billionaire, and he directs Shrek 5 and 6 and 7, like he’s trying to prove something.”

Starting this Saturday the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles (at Fairfax and Wilshire) will be hosting an Art of Cars Exhibition. It’s a great way to see some of the original watercolor paintings, pastel drawings, three-dimensional pieces, and pencil and marker sketches created in the process of developing the 2006 Pixar animated feature. Admission price is $10 for adults, $3 for children and the Museum hours are Tuesday through Sunday and holiday Mondays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. The exhibit runs through November 2nd.

A nice introduction to the history of French animated commercials by Mark Webster. There’s an exhibit about animated French advertising in Paris right now, but it closes on April 6 so get there quick if you want to see it.

This’ll be the first of several previews and unabashed plugs I’ll be doing in advance of the April 15th release of Woody Woodpecker and Friends Vol. 2.

Above is one of the menus, and at left (click to enlarge) is the back cover of the DVD package. Universal has also just refreshed the Woody Woodpecker.com website with info on Volume 2 including new clips, a photo gallery, complete cartoon and bonus listing and more. Check it out!

Our rules for how to submit news items for Cartoon Brew consideration are quite clear, but that doesn’t stop PR folks, who have clearly never read the website, from constantly sending us wildly inappropriate items to post on the Brew. We get dozens of these emails every week. For the most part, I junk them without even opening them, but this one from CBS was so bad that I couldn’t resist sharing with readers. I’ll spare readers the pain of linking to their awful Flash animation, though it’s online if you wish to torture yourself.

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 17:38:03 -0700 [05:38:03 PM PDT]
From: “Walworth, Cori” cori.walworth@tvc.cbs.com
Subject: “Danny Bonaduce Life Coach”

Just wanted to run a fun idea by you, the Danny Bonaduce Life Coach show has a new mobile episode running tomorrow, it’s starring Pam Anderson.

On this episode, called “Pam Anderson: Mammiforous Matrimony”, Danny and his sidekick Catchphrase are summoned to save Pam from a failing career and failing marriages by becoming match makers. Will Danny’s skills save her from another divorce?

If interested I can send you the episode for you to review and post on your site. Be one of the firsts…

Thank you and hope to hear from you soon.
Cori Walworth
CBS Media Relations
323-575-2119

(Photo © Amy Drown)

I’m currently fascinated with the work of avant-garde filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek (1927-1984). There seems to be a dearth of information available about him online or in print which is a shame as he was a genius and innovator in so many respects.

In the mid-1950s, he began creating experimental collage animated films with a quick-cutting approach that prefigures the “MTV style” by decades. I’ve posted two of his shorts below—A la Mode (1959) and Science Friction (1960). The moment I saw these, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Terry Gilliam’s animation work, so it’s little surprise that in this interview, Gilliam cites Vanderbeek’s film Breathdeath (1964) as the inspiration for the animation style in Monty Python.

A La Mode (1959)

Science Friction (1960)

VanDerBeek was a relentless experimenter, even going so far as inventing a new type of theater, the MovieDrome, in which people watched films while laying on their backs. The theater used multiple screens to show “collaged projections of slides, film loops, hand-drawn animation, collage animation, live-action footage, and video images.” In other words, he was VJ’ing decades before the term even existed.

Another fascinating experiment of his was Violence Sonata, a public television special which mixed a prerecorded video work combined with a live studio audience’s response and interaction from viewers at home. When the show first aired in 1969, it was presented on two different channels, requring viewers to place two TV sets side-by-side to appreciate the full effect. More info and a short clip from the film can be seen here.

He collaborated frequently with avant-garde artists from other artistic discplines, such as filming the Happenings of Allen Kaprow and Claes Oldenburg, or working with John Cage and Merce Cunningham on the multimedia piece below (additional info about this project on its YouTube page):

VanDerBeek was also an early pioneer of computer animation, and worked to find ways of marrying art and technology. Here’s a 1972 video that shows him at work at MIT, followed by a CG short he made using the computer.

And to top it all off, he has a pretty awesome gravesite too.