If you had a crazy weekend, these singing cartoon animals will set you straight.

The studio that created this vintage curio is Rick Reinert Productions. Reiner got his start animating at MGM where the cartoons were considerably less Commandment-oriented.

(Thanks, Celia Bullwinkel)

To promote Major League Baseball’s All-Star game in Anaheim this summer, the MLB has teamed up with Disney to display 36 seven-and-a-half foot Mickey statues around Southern California. Combining two all-American ideas like baseball and Mickey Mouse probably seemed like a smart idea during the boardroom meeting, but turning Mickey’s face into a baseball pushes the idea to a disturbing and unnecessary extreme.

Call me a purist but I don’t find characters with stitches in their face appealing unless their name happens to be Chucky. The various Mickeys will feature him sporting the uniforms of all thirty teams in the league because, you guessed it, mini-statuettes will be available for purchase online at the MLB.com shop, DisneyStore.com and stores like Walgreens and Dick’s Sporting Goods.

Pray for animation, these are scary times. The animation industry has been experiencing a nasty relapse into the crumminess of decades past. First, there was the news that Hasbro is launching its own toy-driven animation network and recruiting talented artists like Lauren Faust to shill My Little Ponies. As if that wasn’t depressing enough, now comes the news that shlock producers Joe Ruby, Ken Spears, and Sid and Marty Krofft have teamed up to develop new projects using characters that Jack Kirby created or developed in the eighties.

According to the NY Times, the combined stroke of genius of these four geriatric gents was to drive to their storage unit and pull out boxes of Kirby’s artwork. The Times doesn’t bother to ask why, if these ideas are so brilliant, none of them ever managed to get off the ground when Kirby first developed them twenty-five years ago. The quartet has somehow convinced Ari Emanuel of William Morris Endeavor to rep them and help turn these ideas into animated shows, live-action movies, comics and videogames. The ideas include:

“Roxie’s Raiders,” an Indiana Jones-style serial about a female adventurer and her allies; “Golden Shield,” about an ancient Mayan hero seeking to save earth in the apocalyptic year 2012; and “The Gargoids,” about scientists who gain superpowers after being infected by an alien virus.

The NY Times website offers a slideshow of Kirby’s development artwork. My humble suggestion to Ari would be to hook up Ruby-Spears and the Kroffts with these guys. They appear to share the same aesthetic sensibilities, and who knows, maybe they can even get Sean Connery to do a voice.

I wasn’t going to post about this. I was sent these images of CGI Yogi and Boo Boo a few days ago and decided they were so horrible that they couldn’t possibly be the finals. Now they seem to be all over the internet (you can see larger versions on The Movie Insider.com) and many readers have sent them in to me, wanting my opinion.

My opinion? As much as I hate the idea of this CGI Yogi Bear movie, I can’t believe these are the actual images of the characters that will be animated in the film. These designs are simply awful. What about you? What do you think?

My eyes cannot unsee what has been seen, and now neither can yours. This rendition of Spongebob combines a real sponge, features of Tom Kenny (the voice of the character), and Madonna’s arms. The artist is Nicole Hamilton.

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.