Artists use a color wheel for inspiration; to help select colors and mix pigments. Last month, a group of writers at Slate.com created this clever cartoon color wheel, which is both useful and a lot of fun. Check out the larger version at Slate where you can select each character and enlarge each image.

We don’t usually post trailers twice, but three months ago we posted the trailer for Disney’s “Cars-inspired” direct-to-DVD movie Planes – and after two days and 100 plus comments the studio pulled the video from the internet. They’ve just officially uploaded it to You Tube again today and we thought we’d let you have at it once more (embed below). Above, the first official image of lead character “Dusty” voiced by Jon Cryer. The movie goes on sale Spring 2013.

Here’s some fun for a Saturday afternoon. Courtesy of Stuart Shostack, and his incredible collection of TV GUIDE magazines, comes this 1955 piece of the career of Cliff Edwards (then currently employed doing Jiminy Cricket for The Mickey Mouse Club). Edwards has always been a favorite performer of mine, whether a scat singing jazz vocalist, character comedian or western sidekick – he’ll never be forgotten as Pinocchio’s companion and “official conscience”. (click image below to read enlarged version)

I saw Tom Brown and Daniel Gray’s t.o.m. several years ago, when it played the festival circuit in 2007 (winning the top student prize at Annecy that year). This charming film deceptively walks the line between innocent and twisted. I hadn’t known it was on the net until our colleagues at Motionographer posted it yesterday. Since 2009, Brown and Gray have been running Holbrooks Films in the UK, producing stylish commercials and viral pieces.

Here’s one of the most trivial discoveries in all my years of cartoon research.

So last night I was catching up on some movies I recorded off TCM and in the middle of a 1944 Columbia Pictures B-musical, Kansas City Kitty (1944, Directed by Del Lord), star Joan Davis is standing in the office of a music publisher. On the wall behind her (see frame grab below) are several pieces of sheet music tacked to the wall. It isn’t hard to notice that one of them is Cow Cow Boogie, from the Universal Walter Lantz cartoon, with a cover by Alex Lovy.

It just goes to show, you never know where references to classic cartoons will show up…

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Here’s a close up of the real deal…

Yesterday, the Parents Television Council released its latest study, Cartoons Are No Laughing Matter: Sex, Drugs and Profanity on Primetime Animated Shows Kids Watch Most, documenting the “shocking levels of adult content on networks with the highest-rated primetime animated cable shows”. The networks cited in the study included Adult Swim, Cartoon Network, Disney Channel and Nick at Nite.

The report has it in particularly for Adult Swim. Says PTC President Tim Winter:

“Adult content isn’t just creeping into the cartoons that kids today are watching the most; it has overtaken much of that animated programming. We’re not talking about cartoon characters slipping on banana peels and ramming into doors. Our data demonstrates that today’s norm is profanity-laden storylines involving everything from rape and cocaine to STDs and crystal meth. There is now more sexual content on these cartoons than violence – even when counting traditional ‘light’ cartoon violence.

“Parents might not be surprised that there is an abundance of adult-themed content on a cable network called Adult Swim; but those same parents are likely to be very surprised at just how adult the content is and how often teens and pre-teens are flocking to the network. Many don’t even realize Adult Swim appears on the same channel as the decidedly kid-centric Cartoon Network“

Major findings in the report include:

Sex

• Sex (680 instances) surpassed every form of violence (674 instances) in animated primetime cable programming.

• Sexual depictions included simulations or obscured scenes of sexual intercourse, pornography, masturbation, pedophilia and prostitution.

Drugs

• There were a total of 208 incidents relating to drugs, including cocaine, marijuana, crystal meth, psychedelics and alcohol. Eighty percent of the drug-related incidents were depictions rather than references.

Profanity

• The study identified 565 incidents of explicit language on shows rated TV-PG and TV-14. Twenty-seven percent of the uses of “f**k” and “sh*t” occurred on TV-PG programs.

Content Ratings

• Eighty-five percent of the TV-PG shows and 64% of the TV-14 shows containing sexual content did not have an “S” descriptor warning parents.

• Cartoon Network failed to use the ratings system to warn parents about sexual situations (S), suggestive dialogue (D) and coarse or crude language (L) 100% of the time.

You can download the entire report (as a PDF) HERE.

I’m not intentionally ragging on the Tintin movie. I love the character and the original stories, worship his creator Hergé, and admire filmmakers Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson. And I really hope this movie is good. But this latest U.S. one-sheet poster (below) looks awful.

What a big crowded mess of ugly images. I mean really, this is how you are selling the movie to U.S. audiences – a large percentage of them who have never heard of or seen these characters before?

Manitoba-based indie animator Jason Doll makes modest little shorts between his higher paying professional gigs. His latest production, Steve the Super Hero, is a traditionally animated kid’s music video about a boy who battles Bad Guys using “only his natural stinky boy body odor powers”. It feels like a Sesame Street spot, or the opening credits for a pilot – and I mean this in a good way. Jason has just started a blog which features a few posts on the production of the video.

Here’s a real curio – and a treat for fans (like I am) of Louis Prima. The son of late song writer Floyd Huddleston (The Aristocats), Huston Huddleston, has just posted the first of several lost songs produced by Disney for use in a proposed version of The Rescuers. Says Huston:

“This is a song written by Floyd Huddleston, recorded at Disney in Burbank by Louis Prima, Sam Butera and the Witnesses. EXTREMELY rare recording, not even Disney has it, and was not used for the final film. To my knowledge, there were only storyboards and sketches for the Louis The Bear version of the film, most of which Disney has never released.

“Over the next few months, I will be releasing ALL of the unreleased songs and Demos from the film including “Rescuers Aid Society”, “Misery”, “I Never Had It So Good” “Sittin’ In My Favorite Position Doin’ Nothin’‘” and “All I Ever Do Is Think Of You“.

“Unfortunately, the demo version of “Someone’s Waiting For You” sung by Nancy Adams (singer of Love from Robin Hood) is, to my knowledge, forever lost.”

It’s certainly a pleasure to hear this, though its debatable if this version of the story would have made a better film. Who knows how much more discarded material the Disney vaults hold (if they kept it all)?

Here’s a clever cut-out style digest version of The Wizard of Oz animated by Reed Gauthier, to a score comprised of samples from the 1939 movie by VJ Pogo

(Thanks, Mike Stanfill)

Experimental animator Robert Breer has passed away. Breer was a fine art painter who became interested in creating films as art in the 1950s. In his early shorts he experimented with the form by creating films using distinctly different images photographed one frame at a time. He became one of the most important figures in the 60’s New York experimental scene. In his later years he taught at Cooper Union in New York and created films for PBS’ The Electric Company. His longest piece, an experiment using the rotoscope, Fuji (1974), was added to the National Film Registry in 2002.

You can watch a nice selection of his shorts at UBUweb. Below is one of his most celebrated later films, Swiss Army Knife With Rats and Pigeons (1980):

We celebrated the date August 11th, 1991 earlier this week by marking the anniversary of The Ren & Stimpy Show. But that same second Sunday morning in August also marked the beginning of Nicktoons itself and the start of a creator driven cartoon explosion. Since today is 20th anniversary that symbolic second Sunday of August, I thought another post to mark the occasion was due.

Long gone – but not forgotten – is the cool Nicktoons ID intro and several character bumpers created by J.J. Sedelmaier. His collaborator Craig Yoe recalled how it came to be:

“20 years ago Nickelodeon’s VP of Creative, Scott Webb had seen an MTV ID that J.J. Sedelmaier of J.J. Sedelmaier Productions (still knocking out great animation) and I had done and drafted us to do an opening and closing for their new cartoon block, Nicktoons. Webb’s assignment was to “do an intro so cool that it will become as famous as the beloved Looney Tunes one”. Oh, sure, no problem there! We came up with the bit below joined by animators Doug Compton, JP Jacquet, and John Dilworth and with the music/sound design of the long missed Tom Pomposello. It debuted with Nicktoons, won some awards, but was quickly shit-canned by some suit who had other ideas and some political pull and, well… that’s all folks!

Sedelmaier just posted the original Nicktoon bumpers on his site. Click the image below to see them: