I will be the featured guest today on Shokus Internet Radio’s Stu’s Show. This will be my ninth visit to discuss all things animation with Stu and his listeners, live beginning at 4:00 p.m. PDT (7:00 p.m. EDT). Topics this time will include the upcoming Saturday Morning DVD box set from Warner Home Video, the 100 Greatest Looney Tunes book and as always, whatever the listeners want to talk about. You are encouraged to call in with your questions and comments on the station’s toll-free telephone number.

Stu’s Show airs live each Wednesday at 4:00 p.m. PST, with rebroadcasts at the same time daily. Access to the station’s feed is free, with no registration required, and is available either by clicking on the Enter Site button on the home page (www.shokusradio.com), by choosing one of the audio player links on the site’s main page, via iTunes by selecting Radio/Eclectic and then locating the station’s name alphabetically in the list, and now via iPhone by installing the WunderRadio program available from the iTunes online store. Cell phones with Windows Mobile and Internet access can also listen to the station via the new Live 365 Mobile software available at the station’s broadcast facility, www.live365.com .

Animator Elliot Cowan recently posted the following animation on YouTube featuring his characters Boxhead and Roundhead. The short uses an unlicensed piece of music by They Might Be Giants:

So how did the band respond to this? They called up Elliot, while he was taking a dump no less, to tell him they liked the animation and that he should change the credit at the end of the video from “Used Without Permission” to “Used With Permission.”

There are so many video sharing website contests and the like which encourage you to submit your work because you’ll get some “exposure.” If Elliot’s story proves anything, exposure is available to everybody, it’s free, and it doesn’t require silly contests. The key is to simply get your work out there. If it’s good, people will discover it and who knows what can come out of that.

Kat lovers unite - you’re about to be hit with a brick! Craig Yoe has just started a website devoted to cartoonist George Herriman.

It’s a treasure trove of all things Krazy including separate blogs filled with Herriman comic strips, rareties, animation, news and more! Go there now!

(In the archival photo above: producer Charles Mintz, unknown, Miss Krazy Kat, animators Ben Harrison and Manny Gould)

A new site launches today: CartoonMojo.com. It’s a video sharing site in the YouTube mold that focuses exclusively on animated shorts. In that respect, it’s similar to sites like AniBoom and MyToons. Notably, the site was created by artists–industry veterans Louie del Carmen and Octavio Rodriguez. It remains to be seen how Cartoon Mojo will distinguish itself from its already more established brethren but there is still plenty of room for competition in this arena. Below is one of the shorts featured on their website: “Anniversary” by the boys at Ghostbot.

It’s “Animation Month” for Stu’s Show on Shokus Internet Radio. The current voice of Porky Pig, Bob Bergen, kicks off things with an interview on the show today (Wednesday 1/7), live beginning at 4:00 pm PDT (7:00 pm EDT) and re-broadcast the same time all week. Batman: The Animated Series and Duck Dodgers writer/producer Paul Dini will appear next week (1/14) , followed by writers Mark Evanier, Earl Kress, with voice actors Janet Waldo and Gary Owens on 1/21, and last but not least, yours truly Jerry Beck on 1/28. As always, listeners will be encouraged to call in with their questions and comments on the station’s toll-free telephone number. Click here for more details.

The Mass Animation project headed by former Sony Pictures Animation exec Yair Landau continues to receive press, most recently in an editorial that ran in yesterday’s LA Times. To summarize the project via the Times:

Through Facebook, Mass Animation invited the public to create scenes for its first short video, “Live Music.” The company supplied the animation software, the story, backgrounds, characters and audio. Animators whose work is chosen will receive $500 per scene. All told, the project will cost about $1 million and take six months to complete, a fraction of the money and time required for a comparable Hollywood project.

The unsigned Times editorial believes that this is “an early sign of things that are certain to come” as “a new class of creators and entrepreneurs is coming to vie for its share of the global entertainment dollar.” We’ve written about the Mass Animation project before on Cartoon Brew here and here. As I argued in one of those posts, unlike previous technologies, the Internet empowers artists so that they no longer have to settle for exploitative compensation models handed down from above.

The LA Times gets it right in predicting that the days of corporate-driven entertainment are drawing to a close, but it won’t be because of shady production models conceived by the likes of Landau. It’ll be due to the burgeoning generation of savvy entrepreneurial artists who understand that the road to creative success and financial security doesn’t run through Hollywood any more. Execs like Landau are dinosaurs within this new digital/online paradigm, and they’re grasping at straws trying to find “innovative” ways of paying artists cheaply on the Internet. Their attempts at doing this will become increasingly desperate and outlandish as more and more artists recognize the uselessness of such people in an entertainment landscape where the means of production, distribution and promotion are accessible to all. That is the true definition of mass animation.

For an even less-flattering perspective on the Mass Animation project, see yesterday’s post by Steve Hulett on the Animation Guild blog.

Here’s a delightful Christmas gift to all our readers whose stockings went bare…

Kerry Cisneroz and Dom Giansante are lifelong H-B fanatics and have created a pool on flickr all to do with Hanna Barbera. The mission is to show as much of their collections as possible, highlight obscure characters, showcase art they have done and ask that contributors do the same. It’s a treasure trove of great pics and thanks to contributors, they’ve unearthed a lot of great paraphenalia. Dig in and enjoy!

Check out this great article on Hanna Barbera from the September 1960 issue from Popular Mechanics (that’s Carlo Vinci above shown animating Fred Flintstone). I found it using the new feature on Google’s Book Search which now includes magazines. It’s unclear how many magazines are currently in their system, but at launch it seems to include New York magazine, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Ebony, Jet, Vegetarian Times, and Baseball Digest.

For example, a quick search for Disney or Animation brings up articles like this 1945 classic from Popular Science about how Disney combines live action and animation. This looks to be a great resource for us as they add more periodicals.

(Thanks, Bill Robinson)