Channel Frederator Blog

Long before he wished that he had Jessie’s girl, Rick Springfield was the star of his own cartoon, called “Mission:Magic”. The show was produced by Filmation, and was supposed to cement Rick’s place as a teen idol.

The cartoon was a strange premise: a teacher uses a cat sculpture and a magic chalkboard to transport her and her students to another dimension, where they meet Rick Springfield travel through time and space, solving mysteries along the way.

The show aired  in the US from 1973 through 1975, even though there were only 16 episodes created.

-Floyd Bishop

The current economic crisis may be a bit tough to figure out. ABC News showed a great cartoon, created by Odd Todd, to illustrate the crisis in simple terms. You may remember Odd Todd from his very popular “Laid Off” cartoon.

While the economy has been better, and the stock market hasn’t had a great couple of days, at least an independent animator is making some money, and helping the rest of us put things in perspective at the same time.

-Floyd Bishop 

Tonight’s airing of “The Simpsons” will mark the start of it’s 20th season on the air. This ties the record held by “Gunsmoke”. The series is still going strong in the eyes of Emmy voters, picking up it’s 10th Emmy for Outstanding Animated Series.

To put the longetivity into perspective, I was in 8th grade when the series started after a run of hilarious short segments on “The Tracey Ullman Show”. I’ll be 33 this year. That’s an impressive run.

Watch America’s favorite yellow family when they start their new season tonight on Fox, 8 ET/PT.

-Floyd Bishop

Adam Koford over at Drawn! has posted a great link to Alex Toth art. While some of it has been seen elsewhere, there are some great unpublished pieces. It would be great to see artwork of this caliber in a modern television series.

-Floyd Bishop

Anime News Network is reporting that  Cartoon Network is ending Toonami tonight, after a run of 11 years. While the programming block has been showing only Naruto recently, some other featured titles included Voltron, Robotech, Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball, Ronin Warriors, G-Force: Guardians of Space, Blue Submarine No. 6, Tenchi Muyo!, Cardcaptors, Zoids, .hack//SIGN, Yu Yu Hakusho, Rurouni Kenshin, The Big O, Outlaw Star, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Cyborg 009, Duel Masters, Astro Boy, Gundam, Rave Master, Zatch Bell, One Piece, Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo, Pokémon, MÄR, The Prince of Tennis, Megaman Star Force, Bakugan Battle Brawlers, and Blue Dragon.

The 2002 live-action Spider-Man film will run instead of Toonami on September 27.

-Floyd Bishop

While I was moving this weekend, I saw some of my kids toys rolling around in a basket, and a song popped into my head. I couldn’t figure out what it was, but I thought about it a while and remembered something about Sesame Street. Thirty some years ago, this clip somehow cemented itself deep into the recesses of my brain, only to show up in a YouTube search.

What kind of animation related things are rolling around in your heads?

-Floyd Bishop

On this date in 1954, “Lassie” premiered on CBS. The show proved quite popular, and ran for many years. It was predated by both a film, and a successful radio series.

In 1973, Filmation ran a series caled “Lassie’s Rescue Rangers”. In the show, Lassie lived near Thunder Mountain with the Turner family. Head Ranger Ben Turner worked with wife Laura and children Susan, Jackie, and Ben Jr. as “The Forest Force”, a ranger-rescue team that protected Thunder Mountain National Park. Lassie also headed up a group of wild animals that lived within the national park, working with the Turner family to maintain a healthy environment that was ecologically sound, and to create a safe place for tourists to hike and camp. This renegade group of animal heroes was known as “Lassie’s Rescue Rangers”.

The Rescue Rangers were a band of about eight animals, including Groucho the owl, Toothless the mountain lion, [Read more…]

On  September 1st, “Life’s a Zoo” will premiere as part of TeleToon’s Detour (the Canadian version of Adult Swim on Cartoon Network). The show’s creators, Adam Shaheen and Andrew Horne, are heading up the production from their studio in downtown Toronto.

The show is about a group of animals living in a mansion as part of a huge reality show.  The animals must either work together or plot against one another, just like a live action reality show. The creators have mixed together aspects of just about every reality show there has ever been, and then went over the top with the material.

Perhaps the coolest part of the show is the music video section. Each episode will feature the music of a different Canadian indie band. This gives the show great music at less of a cost, and gets the band a wider exposure than they might get otherwise.

We’ll have to wait and [Read more…]

As a huge fan of Flight of the Conchords, I was curious about the mock animated series “Albi, The Racist Dragon” that showed up in Episode Seven. Well, after some intense Googling, I found out that the guy responsible for directing this terribly touching toon is Oliver Dear. Director, Illustrator, Animator, Painter, Production Designer, Actor–he has got it going on! (And his dad, William Dear, directed Harry and the Hendersons.)

After the jump, a bonus Conchords clip on that subject of getting it going on (warning: silly adult content)… [Read more…]

Andrew Farago (a curator at San Francisco’s fabulous Cartoon Art Museum) interviews Jorge R. Gutierrez at the Animation World Magazine website. Jorge is an exuberant artist and Flash maverick with a unique style that brings Mexican culture (especially folk art) into the digital age. He created the Nickelodeon show El Tigre with his wife, Sandra Equihua.

(One of my favorite parts of the interview is where he recalls telling his wife that they were going to become “…the Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo of animation” but “without the, y’know, cheating and the trains hitting you” part.)

For more on Jorge, see the Super-Macho site, the Super-Macho blog, the El Tigre blog (new!), and Nick’s El Tigre page.

You can also watch episodes of Jorge’s earlier web series El Macho here.

—Anne D. Bernstein