If Jay Ward, Hanna Barbera and Rankin-Bass rate biographical tomes, certainly the output of Total Television deserves a historical overview. Sight unseen (except for its fabulous Mike Kazaleh cover - click thumbnail below to enlarge image) I am recommending this forthcoming book by Mark Arnold: Created and Produced by Total TeleVision Productions.

Frequently compared to and confused with Jay Ward Productions, this is the company that created such characters as Underdog, Tennessee Tuxedo, Tooter Turtle, Commander McBragg, Go Go Gophers, King and Odie, The Hunter, and The Beagles. The history of Gamma Productions, the little Mexican animation studio that animated most of the Jay Ward Productions, is covered — and the book contains a complete episode listing of every known Total TeleVision production. Illustrated with storyboards and character merchandise, Arnold wrote the book using personal interviews with the four owners of TTV (Buck Biggers, Chet Stover, Tread Covington and Joe Harris) as well as voice artists Allen Swift (Simon Bar Sinister), Bradley Bolke (Chumley the Walrus), animators Frank Andrina of TV Spots and Roman Arambula of Gamma Productions. And the book promises to finally answer a question we’ve been asking ourselves for years: What the heck is The Colossal Show? Copies are now available from BearManor Media.

Comedy! Songs! Puppets! Magic! And God-awful cartoons from the wasteland of 60s and 70s Saturday morning television!

Frank Conniff, Erica Doering, J. Elvis Weinstein, Kristin Arrigo, Jerry Beck and special guest star comedian/magician John Carney

Steve Allen Theatre Tuesday June 23rd at 8pm. Advanced tickets click here.

There’s no debate that animator Irving Spector was, like John Dunn, an under appreciated cartoonist and storyman — working in animation at a time when the finished product didn’t do justice to the talents behind it. Thanks to Spector’s son, Irv’s work is getting some long overdue appreciation in a blog dedicated to his work.

Among the best of the late Paramount output, Chew Chew Baby was produced during a brief period when the studio put some actual effort behind its limited animation. This particular film is one of my favorites, and contains one of Jackson Beck’s (no relation) best performances. It’s also notable as one of the last cartoons to ignore political correctness and feature a pygmy cannibal - as well as one of the last cartoons credited to Isadore Sparber, released a few days before his death in August 1958.

This is also one of the “Harveytoons” not contained in Classic Media’s Complete Harveytoons DVD collection. Mike Van Eaton (of Van Eaton Gallery) recently unearthed a cache of original Spector storyboards from this film (click thumbnails below to enlarge). These drawings are a lot of fun - and this film may be the closest representation of Spector’s design style to make it faithfully to the screen.

This young girl appears to be more qualified to run Cartoon Network than any of the clueless execs in charge right now.

Here’s an update on the doings of my old colleague and friend Will Friedwald (my co-author on Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies: A Complete Illustrated Guide To the Warner Bros. Cartoons and Warner Bros. Animation Art). Will has gone on to become one of major authorities on vintage Jazz, Frank Sinatra, and American music in general — with numerous books to his credit. Most recently, he’s been writing a great series of columns on Jazz for The Wall Street Journal.

The latest news on Will is his donation of over 14,000 record albums, the largest personal Jazz collection in New York if not the United States, to two major music archives. The jazz albums are going to an archive in Washington, D.C. while the popular music and show tunes are going to the Michael Feinstein Foundation for the Preservation of the Great American Songbook.

Read more about it and see examples from the collection on this news report from NY1.

Jibjab just released this tonight and is too good not to share - so good, it’s even worth watching the behind-the-scenes commercial that follows it.

More heart-breaking than the first ten minutes of Up: this story from the Orange County Register.

A dying 10 year old with a rare form of cancer wanted to see Up. Her mother cold called Pixar and got through to the right person. The next day “a Pixar employee” came to the girl’s house with the DVD and a bag of stuffed animals of characters in the movie. “He shared some quirky background details of the movie and the group settled in to watch Up.”

There’s a lot of speculation as to who the “Pixar employee” is, but more important is that the act happened at all. Read the full story here.

Director J.J. Sedelmaier hooked up with design/illustration icon Seymour Chwast to create an online issue of Chwast’s publication The Nose. Animation is simple but effective. The piece takes a humorous look at the predictions that people have made throughout the past century.