Not my favorite decade for animation, but James Eatock of Busta Toons Productions (the folks behind the He Man/She Ra blog) is starting cereal:geek, a new magazine that focuses strictly on animation from the eighties and, he says, “challenges the perceptions of the reader”.Eatock envisions a glossy publication, published on a quarterly basis, with articles, illustrations, scripts, storyboards, “a wealth of unseen production materials from your favorite shows, and interviews with those individuals that helped shape this particular decade of animation history”. Visit the website and register your interest and you will receive updates about the magazine in preparation for its January 2007 debut.

It’s been a Ralph Hulett kind of week around here. First it was his Christmas cards, now here’s a link to ONE GOT FAT, a bizarre (borderline disturbing) live-action bicycle safety film that he art directed in 1963. The real highlight might be the film’s amusing narration, which comes courtesy of character actor (and “Fractured Fairy Tales” narrator) Edward Everett Horton.

(Thanks, Patrick McCart)

UPDATE: Kevin writes to let us know there’s more info about ONE GOT FAT in the comments section of this post at the Animation Guild blog.

UPDATE #2: Ralph Hulett’s son, Steve, writes in with more info about the film:

This thing was filmed in La Crescenta (up above Glendale) in the summer of ‘63. It was directed by William Dale Jennings (who also wrote the script and whose idea it was to make the cyclists monkeys.) Jennings later wrote the novel “Ronin” which has become kind of a cult classic, and the John Wayne epic “The Cowboys,” (1971) based on Jennings’ novel of the same name.

Max Hutto, the cinematographer, had been a director on “Fibber McGee and Molly” in its radio heyday. Hutto, Jennings and Hulett formed a small film company they named “Interlude Films” and proceeded to make a few short movies, all shot on 16mm. My dad provided most of the start-up cash. The company was only in business a few years, and this is the film that has had a weird half-life on the Internet. It went out of copyright years ago, and showed up on YouTube. Somebody saw it and made a spooky music video out of it, and both continue to circle the globe on the Internet.

Father made the monkey masks out of papier mache, and did the titles. He also drove our ‘61 Chevy Greenbrier van that drove alongside the monkeys as they pedalled along La Crescenta streets. (They tied the van’s sliding side door open and filmed through the opening.) My younger brother Ralph is the monkey running on foot. My mother Shirley is one of the women (the blonde one) who is knocked into a tree. (I remember being steamed I wasn’t in it. I was too tall.)

Here is everything you ever wanted to know about BEWITCHED – the 1964-1972 ABC TV comedy series about a regular guy who marries to a immortal magical witch. This page has more than you ever thought possible about the show’s Hanna Barbera opening titles: frame grabs, audio, alternate titles, etc.(Thanks, Mike Owens)

Hmmm… the trade papers usually don’t post new stories over the weekend. Here’s one that popped up this morning in The Hollywood Reporter about Disney laying off 160 people in Feature Animation. It’s never a good sign when a company announces news late Friday so it appears in print Saturday (traditionally less people watch or read news on Saturday). The L.A. Times also has the report today:

“The management team at Walt Disney Animation has determined that each film will dictate its own appropriate production schedule,” Disney Studios spokeswoman Heidi Trotta said. “The result of this necessitated a reduction of staff.”

Brewster Rockit is a very funny sci-fi parody comic strip running in the L.A. Times and many other papers accross the country (via Tribune Media Services). Today’s strip was right up our alley. Perhaps Brewster’s fictional outer space Cartoon Network is starting to show live action? Now that would be science fiction – wouldn’t it?

The fourth in a series of holiday gift-giving suggestions from your pals at Cartoon Brew.

If you pick up one dvd of foreign animation this holiday season, make it the ANIMATED SOVIET PROPAGANDA four-dvd box set from Films by Jove. I’ve been working my way through the set for the past week and every disc is packed with unbelievable material that I’d never seen before. The films, created between the mid-1920s through the mid-1980s, are separated into four categories:

Disc 1: American Imperialists
Disc 2: Fascist Barbarians
Disc 3: Capitalist Sharks
Disc 4: Shining Future

As can be expected from the disc titles, the films are shamelessly propagandistic, taking aim at everybody from the Americans and the British to the Germans and Fascist ideology. The films have an endearingly kitsch quality at first, but after a few hours of watching this stuff, the material begins to take on a more depressing tone, and one begins to feel sorry for the Russian people who were fed this manipulative garbage for decade after decade.

What’s really fascinating about these films, however, is how much creative effort the Russian animators put into the visuals. They clearly believed in the messages of the films, and though they had little control over what they were saying, they could exercise their imagination with how they presented the same tired slogans. There’s a spirit of experimentation from the earliest films on the disc. For example, SAMOYED BOY (1928) uses regional art styles of northern Russian peoples and BLACK AND WHITE (1933) is graphically mature in a way that few cartoons in the US were in the early-30s.

The Russians weren’t tied down by the demands of creating entertainment cartoons with recurring characters; their assignment was to get across a particular message, and as such, they focused more on the filmmaking aspects than on character and personality development. Though in some of the later films, like SOMEONE ELSE’S VOICE (1949) and THE ADVENTURES OF THE YOUNG PIONEERS (1971), they also exhibit a solid grasp of traditional character animation principles.

If you’re looking for visual inspiration, there’s enough graphic ideas scattered throughout these dvds to keep you busy for a long time. A few of the visual highlights for me: INTERPLANETARY REVOLUTION (1924) is animation at its most Constructivist with photo montage and strong graphic design; the heavy use of black shadows in THE PIONEER’S VIOLIN (1971) gives Mike Mignola a run for the money; THE SHAREHOLDER (1963) is a 23-minute powerhouse of beautifully animated, elegantly staged characters that evoke high-style magazine illustration; and SHOOTING RANGE (1979) uses colorful, gritty ’70s style graphics that somehow still feel fresh today.

With politically-oriented films such as these, providing context is imperative to understanding the works and each disc is supported by a half-hour documentary. The documentaries are appreciated, but I thought they could have been even more helpful to a layperson like myself who isn’t well versed in Russian history. There were snippets of interviews with some of the filmmakers, but I would have liked to have seen longer versions of these interviews instead of extended clips of films that were already on the dvd set (though the clips that had narrative explanation added were very useful). Also, I’d be curious to find out just how much of this propaganda was seen by the average Russian compared to other forms of animation; non-propaganda characters like Cheburashka and Fyodor Khitruk’s version of Winnie the Pooh were also popular among Russian kids so they obviously were exposed to other types of animation. But this is all nitpicking. The dvd set, produced by Joan Borsten, is a must-have for any fan of foreign animation; it’s not only an incredible survey of Russian propaganda animation, but also of the development of the animation art in Russia.

The set is $89 at the Films by Jove store. The website also has a set of notes about the films and offers for viewing a part of the documentary included on the dvd.

Below are some of the inspiring visuals that you can find on the set:

The third in a series of holiday gift-giving suggestions from your pals at Cartoon Brew.

The self proclaimed “most obscure strip of the 1950s”, Gene Deitch’s daily and Sunday Real Great Adventures of TERR’BLE THOMPSON, Hero of Hist’ry has been collected in a wonderful trade paperback by Fantagraphics Books.I love Gene Deitch’s animated cartoons (especially his Terrytoons), and his print cartoons like The Cat are stylish, funny and – in the case of Terr’ble Thompson – Terrific! That’s because Thompson is the forerunner and template for Gene’s most popular cartoon creation, Tom Terrific. The obscure strip ran less than a year (from October 1955 through April 1956, while Dietch was running UPA New York, until he got the call to head Terrytoons) in no more than 14 papers. Gene himself didn’t save any of the original art. The book masterfully reprints all the original strips from digitally retouched newspaper clippings (you’d never know) and Gene recounts the entire experience in his introduction and footnotes (among the various tidbits, details of Jules Feffier’s failed attempt to become Gene’s assistant – with an example of Feffier’s try out strip; the villian, Mean Morgan, is a charicature of John Hubley; and information on the aborted Golden Record and animated pilot).Deitch’s modernist artwork and bold color design were way ahead of the curve for most comic strips of the era. The stories are great fun, and the art is eye-candy cool. Deitch’s son, Kim, and comics historian Dan Nadel contribute an informed foreword and afterword, respectively. Put it on your holiday list. For comics fans or animation fans, I think this is an absolute must.

I came across this commercial for BLIP, the digital game, while I was transfering to DVD some cartoon shows I taped in 1980. It’s not animation, but I thought it was worth sharing on You Tube. My, how far we’ve come in 30 years (the toy was first released in 1977).