Direct from District 9:

Amid brought me a gift from his recent trip to Singapore - a package of these Tom & Jerry Prawn Crackers. Hey, don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it… but I don’t see this coming to the Whole Foods Market anytime soon.

Lou Scheimer tells all . . . like about the time he produced something crappy, or that other time he produced something crappy, or those few decades where he had an impressive streak of producing lots and lots of crap in a row. There’s also an uplifting personal story about the time he vowed to produce something decent, but then realized it was more important to stay true to himself and produce crap.

Lou Scheimer: Creating the Filmation Generation drops in July.

As part of Cartoon Network’s efforts to reinvent themselves as a cheap knockoff of The Disney Channel, they’ve hired “Weird Al” Yankovic to direct a live-action feature film. According to Weird Al, “Cartoon Network had requested that I develop a show with a much younger protagonist – the actual star of the movie will most likely be teenage.”

(Thanks, David Blumenstein)

The story of a British grandma who decided to get surgery to look like Jessica Rabbit. “You only live once,” she said. “Do what makes you feel good.” I’m guessing that’s the same rationale the talk show host had when he touched this woman’s chin implant.

The country of Georgia now has a homegrown yellow cartoon family of their own—The Samsonadzes. If the clip above doesn’t convince you of the inspiration for these characters, check out the animated opening at the beginning of this video in the Guardian. The creator of the series, Shalva Ramishvili, says in that video:

I want to say it straight—this is not The Simpsons. This is The Samsonadzes. This is all about a Georgian family, with Georgian jokes, Georgian plot, with Georgian developments, and with Georgian social humor. The fact that it is about a family rings a bell for people and there is a certain resemblance in the family name of course. And I would be proud if anyone compared this series with The Simpsons…

(Thanks, Mike Grimshaw)

Nick Rodwell, the British lawyer who married the widow of Tintin creator Hergé and now controls the Tintin estate, has embarked on a malicious crusade to sue people who use the character—even historians of the comic whose use of the character would qualify under “fair use” doctrines in the United States.

Rodwell’s latest target is Bob Garcia, “a detective novelist, jazz musician and Tintin aficionado,” who has been ordered by British courts to hand over £35,000 or face the possibility of having his house and belongings seized. His crime: writing five essays about the character. According to the UK’s Telegraph paper, “One pamphlet drew links between his twin passions – Tintin and Sherlock Holmes. Another looked at the cinematographic references in Hergé’s works. Two of the five, printed on average 500 times, used ‘graphical citations’ of Tintin drawings.”

More details from the Telegraph:

Hundreds of Tintin fans have already backed Mr Garcia, who on Thursday called for a boycott of the film and claimed that many supporters were heeding his demand. More than 500 people have joined his page on the Facebook website which expresses “anger and disgust” over the issue. More supporters have also backed his cause on other websites.

Tintin is one of the most successful comics of the 20th century, selling over 250 million copies and translated into 50 languages. Mr Rodwell’s company, Moulinsart, stands to take a huge cut from spin-offs after Steven Spielberg’s film, The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, is released in 2011.

“Mr Rodwell is trying to clear the decks ahead of the film on anything or anyone who speaks about Tintin to have the absolute monopoly on the brand. For him, my studies are just spin-offs of that brand,” said Mr Garcia.

A sidenote about the lawyer Rodwell that might shed some light on his personal character. His official blog was shut down by Tintin.com last year after he started making personal attacks on journalists. One bizarre claim he made was that certain journalists disliked him because the children of those critics had autism and couldn’t appreciate Tintin. This is a link to a translation of Rodwell’s writings.

Here is the link to the Facebook page for those who wish to support Garcia (I’ve joined it myself). Below is a video of Garcia talking about one of his books on a TV show. The scholarly nature of his Tintin studies is clearly evident in the visual samples shown onscreen.

(via Boing Boing)

You know this can’t be good. A press release from Mumbai brings news of a new television series to be based on legendary screen comedian Charlie Chaplin:

Charlie Chaplin is to be brought to life as a cartoon character via an Indian-French collaboration that will see the legendary British comedian featured in an animated television series. DQ Entertainment, an animation and special effects firm based in the southern city of Hyderabad, says it is to reproduce the entertainer’s slapstick in 3D and computer-generated images for television.

The eight-million-euro (11.5-million-dollar) project is a joint venture with French media groups Method Animation and MK2, according to the companies. Further details were set to be announced by DQ Entertainment at a press conference in Mumbai on Friday. DQ and Method Animation will make a total of 104 six-minute episodes in India and France, Method’s chairman Aton Soumache told AFP in Paris last November. The animated shorts — aimed at children aged six and above — will not have any dialogue and are set to hit screens from early next year.

“We’ve been working for more than a year on the graphics concept to find an original way of adapting Chaplin’s world,” said Soumache. “It won’t be a realistic portrayal but more like a puppet in an offbeat universe. We’ll put him in modern situations but at the same keeping his poetic, child-like view of the world with a retro feel.” The episodes have been inspired by sketches and gags culled from some 70 short films made by Chaplin involving his trademark bowler-hatted vagabond character sporting a toothbrush moustache, ill-fitting suit and twirling cane. But there will also be original content, Soumache added.

Hoo-boy! I predict disaster. I doubt it will be even half as good as Edna, the 2005 short film by two students from SupInfoCom (Arles, France), or even an Otto Messmer Chaplin cartoon from the teens:

The only thing worse than knowing they’re making a live-action/CG hybrid of Tom & Jerry is reading an interview with the film’s producer and finding out that he’s completely ignorant about the characters and animation in general. That’s the disappointing discovery I made when I stumbled across this interview with Dan Lin. He displays his prolific lack of knowledge about the cat and mouse duo in his very first answer about the film:

My kids love the show. It’s two things-my kids love the show, I love the show. It’s really the originator of cartoon violence.

It’s hard to botch two fundamental concepts in such a brief answer, but Lin somehow manages that feat. First of all, they’re making a movie based on characters that were established and became famous in theatrical shorts. To call it a “show” displays a profound lack of context and understanding of the history of these characters. It’s perfectly understandable though how somebody who doesn’t even recognize this basic fact about the characters could then make the outlandishly stupid claim that Tom and Jerry is “the originator of cartoon violence.” Somebody get this guy a copy of Leonard Maltin’s Of Mice and Magic…QUICK! It gets better. He then says:

And the way I view it is it’s almost like sibling rivalry. It’s the way my brothers and I fought growing up, Tom and Jerry fight.

I may be an only child, but even I know that sibling rivalry doesn’t typically involve high-grade explosives, disembowelment, and attempts to eat the other sibling. Tom & Jerry is a classic predator-prey setup with the survival of the characters at stake. Diluting their relationship into a wimpy sibling rivalry is a massive misunderstanding of the motivations of these characters and strays perilously close to Tom and Jerry: The Movie territory, which we know turned out all kinds of awful:

Then again, having Tom and Jerry be friends is possibly the only route Lin can go since he appears to be willing to bend over backwards and change the personality of the characters willy-nilly to appease the marketplace and the MPAA. His last comment in the interview is the most ominous of all:

So we really want to retain the spirit of the original Tom and Jerry. We’ll see how that changes as we go through the filmmaking process and also the MPAA process.

Note that it’s not “I’m going to fight to retain the spirit of these characters;” it’s “We’ll see how that changes.” Spoken like a true producer without creative principles or vision.

(Thanks, Virgilio, for the article link)