Vanity Fair has published an extensive oral history about The Simpsons. The piece includes the thoughts of everybody from cartoonist Gary Panter to Fox CEO Rupert Murdoch, as well as many people who have worked on the series including Brad Bird, Gabor Csupo, Kent Butterworth, Bill Oakley, Larry Doyle and Hank Azaria. The same issue of VF also has an interview with Conan O’Brien discussing his time working on the series. I think the following comment from Conan really hits the nail on the head about why the humor on the Simpsons more often than not feels so tired and lacking in spontaneity:

By the time an episode came out, you had maybe heard the script read through like 20 times, and if for some reason the joke wasn’t getting a laugh on the 21st time, you had to rework it. Sometimes your first pitch is your best pitch, but over time, if you revisit it constantly, you’ll grow weary of it, it will start to wilt, and then you’re just coming up with a different pitch that’s maybe not necessarily better. Obviously it’s clearly a strength of The Simpsons that by the time you see it, things have been road-tested and thought about and so much work has gone into it. But sometimes I felt like, “Let’s bake the pie and serve it.”

Here’s a sneak peek at some finished footage from the new Flash animated George Of the Jungle, in production by Studio B in Vancouver for Cartoon Network (U.S.) and for various other toon channels around the world. This clip is from cable’s G4 Tech TV network in Canada. Producer Kevin Gamble and director Jayson Thiessen do a good job of explaining the basics of producing animation in Flash for TV. The actual GTJ footage starts around 1:16 and was animated by artist Emmett Hall.

What hath South Park wrought?

Rick & Steve debuts on the Logo cable channel July 10th. A sneak preview clip is posted here.

Direct TV posted this press release on May 23rd with a somewhat apt misprint in its network listings.

Considering the direction Cartoon Network is going with live action programming, this “typo” may portend the shape of things to come.

Tony Mines of Spite Your Face Productions sent me a note about an early-1960s British animated series, The Pingwings, which had been considered lost for the last forty years. The prints were recently found again and a small label in the UK has released the entire series onto dvd. I asked Tony if he could shed a bit more light on this stop-mo series. Here’s what he says:

Pingwings is, so far as I can gather, the very first production by Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin’s Small Films. The pair would go on to create pre-school classics like The Clangers, Bagpuss and Noggin the Nog that generations of British children and parents have grown up with. I mention it because while the latter are household names over here, Pingwings is almost completely unknown. Which is criminal, because it’s amazing.

Demonstrating a gleeful disregard for the shortcomings of filming stop-motion out of doors, the show concerns the adventures of a family of wooly penguins that live in a farmyard. Even the most famous of Small Films work is notoriously low-tech, but here you can see how they started out, working literally out of a barn.

Shown only once in the UK, the series was thought lost until recently, and has now been released on DVD, under a small label here. You don’t even seem to be able to get it on Amazon. The DVD contains all three series of 6×5(ish) minutes episodes.

One of the greatest thing about it is to watch how everyone involved develops over the three series. Not only do the Pingwings themselves grow a little older as the show progresses, but story elements and new characters come into play that you can see were developed and reused in later series, notably Bagpuss and The Clangers. In that sense, it forms the blue print for a whole generation of programming.

Here’s a clip from the first episode:

In all my years of watching and collecting animated cartoons, only a scant few of the shows I grew up with have eluded my review in recent years. One of those, The Beagles, has just surfaced this week on You Tube. It’s a clip of the opening — a kinescope, in black & white — but it’s all we got.

The show was Total Television’s (Underdog, Tennessee Tuxedo) final production and it aired two seasons (26 episodes) on CBS during 1966-68 (Saturday afternoons at 12:30pm). That’s Sandy Becker doing a Dean Martin impersonation for Stringer, and Allen Swift as Scotty their agent. Toontracker reports the possibilty that all the master elements are lost due to being thrown away. The show was never syndicated, and hasn’t been seen since 1968. Even though the characters are not a parody of The Beatles (as reported in numerous cartoon histories), I suspect King Features (who had the cartoon rights to The Beatles) or the Apple Corps. themselves may have had a hand in this series mysterious disappearence.

Whatever happened, thanks to Freenbean, some of my brain cells can now rest easy with the Beagles garage band theme song now restored in my memory bank.

A few weeeks ago, I posted a few pages of Bruce Timm storyboards from The New Adventures of Beany and Cecil (1988). I also said if any reader wanted to scan in the entire set of Timm storyboards from this episode and share them with the online community, I’d be happy to send over my copies. Brew reader Micah Baker took me up on the offer and has generously scanned the boards for everybody. He’s posted the entire storyboard set onto Flickr. Also, another reader has posted the finished episode onto YouTube so if you’re curious to see how Timm’s work was adapted to film, compare his boards to the cartoon below.

Australian cartoonist Elliot Cowan recently discovered that he could receive Cartoon Network on his digital cable. After watching it, he created a visual document (posted below) of his virgin CN viewing experience. It’s a brilliant piece of editorial illustration that perfectly sums up the vast majority of children’s TV animation being produced nowadays. Elliot’s brief comments accompanying this piece can be read on his blog.

(click for larger version)