As everyone gets ready for the long weekend, as always, New York City is abuzz with the excitement of FLEET WEEK! We’re probably going to check out a few ships, and maybe a few sailors, too. Because everyone loves sailors.
Click on more for our Memorial Day 2009 Sailor Salute!
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Michael Kupperman’s pilot for Snake ‘n’ Bacon airs tonight on Adult Swim at 12:45 am. That’s technically MONDAY, but we call it SUNDAY NIGHT. It’s followed by The Mighty Boosh, so for 45 minutes, at least, you can pretend that you live in an odder, funnier world.
Remember, the world will NEVER BE THE SAME.
Tonight, a very cool event takes place at The Boiler in Williamsburg, NY:
THE GREATEST FILMS YOU NEVER SAW with DEWANATRON
An evening of vintage silent 16mm entertainment curated by Mark Newgarden Comedies, Cartoons, Vaudeville acts, Scientific curiosities, Erotic dances, Strange people’s home movies, Something for everybody–even YOU! Live musical accompaniment by Dewanatron (Leon Dewan and Brian Dewan) and “honored guest instrumentalists,” David Scher, among others.
We attended a similar event a few years ago and it was an unforgettable evening of strangeness and mirth. Newgarden’s collection of film ephemera is world famous, and Dewanatron is almost like a living. breathing Raymond Scott. It’s like YouTube is happening right in front of you. Tear yourself away from Twitter and experience LIFE. Although, I will probably Twtter about it while it’s in progress. The show begins at 9 pm.
The Boiler is located at 191 North 14th St. in Brooklyn.
Also tonight: Chris Claremont and Matthew K. Manning discuss Wolverine with Peter Sanderson at MoCCA.
Shot In The Back Of The Head from Moby on Vimeo.
Like it says. David Lynch directed an animated video for the new Moby song.
Or should we say cartoonist David Lynch, whose “The Angriest Dog in the World” ran for several years in various LA alt.weeklies, and comics supporter Moby have collaborated on an animated video. See, we can find a comics connection for ANYTHING.
PS: “The Angriest Dog in the World” is still being produced, but for the subscription portion of Lynch’s website. See, he’s even figured out how to make money from webcomics!
Around Stately Beat Manor, few names are held in such reverence as that of Michael Kupperman, because he makes us laugh tears of unfettered joy and abandon. Well, not only is a new Tales Designed To Thrizzle upon us (a collection looming — can such laughs even be survived?) but a Snake’N’Bacon pilot will air in a few short weeks on Adult Swim!:
Snake’N’Bacon the TV show pilot is going to be broadcast as part of Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim block of programming, on May 10th at 12:45 AM. The cast includes Kristin Schaal, Dan Bakkedahl, Bill Hader, Peter Serafinowicz, James Urbaniak, Brian Stack, and David Rakoff, in live-action and animated segments.
Need we point out that this cast encompasses a veritable laffs-a-plenty Hall Of Fame, with the pedigree of SNL, The Daily Show, Conan O’Brien, Flight of the Conchords, and Look Around You? Kupperman posts a few stills from the show on his blog, and it’s pretty safe to say that the world is never going to be the same.
May 10th. Mark your calendars and prepare for the arrival.
The US Post Office has unveiled its Simpsons stamps and a whole bunch of Simpsons stamp products. Luckily, we need to go to the post office!
In addition to its many other achievements — torturing Saddam Hussein, preventing Steven Spielberg from ruining the Indiana Jones DVD, alerting Americans to the Canadian menace — South Park can now add taking Kanye West down a notch:
SOUTH PARK MURDERED ME LAST NIGHT AND IT’S PRETTY FUNNY. IT HURTS MY FEELINGS BUT WHAT CAN YOU EXPECT FROM SOUTH PARK! I ACTUALLY HAVE BEEN WORKING ON MY EGO THOUGH. HAVING THE CRAZY EGO IS PLAYED OUT AT THIS POINT IN MY LIFE AND CAREER. I USE TO USE IT TO BUILD UP MY ESTEEM WHEN NOBODY BELIEVED IN ME. NOW THAT PEOPLE DO BELIEVE AND SUPPORT MY MUSIC AND PRODUCTS THE BEST RESPONSE IS THANK YOU INSTEAD OF “I TOLD YOU SO!!!” IT’S COOL TO TALK SHIT WHEN YOU’RE RAPPING BUT NOT IN REAL LIFE. WHEN YOU MEET LITTLE WAYNE IN PERSON HE’S THE NICEST GUY FOR EXAMPLE. I JUST WANNA BE A DOPER PERSON WHICH STARTS WITH ME NOT ALWAYS TELLING PEOPLE HOW DOPE I THINK I AM. I NEED TO JUST GET PAST MYSELF. DROP THE BRAVADO AND JUST MAKE DOPE PRODUCT.
The Cartoon Network held its upfronts the other day — you can read the PR here – but like most cable channels, the name of the channel is becoming less and less accurate. Broadcasting & Cable assesses the changes:
Cartoon Network is boosting its live action fare and expanding into unscripted alternative programming in an attempt to woo a slightly older (and potentially more profitable) new crowd.
“Just like the boy that wakes up one day and starts to sound different, our voice is changing too,” said Stu Snyder president and COO of Turner Broadcasting’s Animation, Young Adults and Kids Media division.
Upcoming shows include a live action show about kids working with a demolition expert to blow things up, a show about teenagers asking silly questions, and various other sorts of quiz shows, viral videos and the like.
But there will be SOME cartoons — Genndy Tartakovsky has a new show , and more Ben 10 spin-offs and Scooby Doo movies are in the works. Tartakovsky’s show is called Sym-Bionic Titan, and it’s “an exciting hybrid of high school drama and giant robot battles.”
GIANT ROBOT BATTLES! Back in the olden days, that’s as exciting as it got! Kids didn’t need any fancy demolition quiz videos!
The Cartoon Brew comment section on the announcements has a “spirited discussion” of the announcements.
Every once in a while, a video crosses your path that changes how you view the world and makes you question the fundamentals of what you thought was true. Such a video is the above trailer for a 12-part CGI adaptation of the manga known, in the US, as APOCALYPSE MEOW, formerly published by ADV. In the rest of the world, it is known as CAT SHIT ONE. If you are not familiar with the series, we BEG YOU, just watch the video. The less you know going in, the better, but perhaps we can entice you with the phrase “Waltz with Bashir meets Kung Fu Panda.”
Have you watched it? Good! Now, it turns out that this trailer is not really a trailer, merely a teaser to raise funding for this PROPOSED series.
Please, to all of you reading this…this is crucial! If there is one cause which must unite the world — rich, poor, man, woman, black, white, Canadian — it is not global warming, not economic recovery, not eradicating rogue nation states. No, it is GETTING THIS CARTOON MADE! Please, please, please! Give, give, give until it bleeds …we’ve GOT to make this happen! We will be setting up a lemonade stand to raise money when the weather is a little nicer, and we implore everyone reading this to do the same. Together, we can make the world a better place, a place where cats kill bunnies in CGI slo mo.
[Thanks to Isaacada for the link!]
MTV’s Splash Page blog has a fantastic cover for perhaps the most unexpected — but delightful — crossover of all: Eric Powell’s THE GOON vs. DETHKLOK, the world’s greatest metal band.
The great monolithic Disney has just launched a new project called D23, which is an official fan club aimed at very serious Disney fans. Hardcore. People who own every copy of a Gemstone comic, basically. The site saves most of its goodies for paying members, but there’s also tons of free historical info. For instance, this page containsbiographies for Disney’s Top Ten cartoon characters and as soon as we saw Clara Cluck was there, we were satisfied.
Clara Cluck was born — make that hatched — to shine in the spotlight. Blessed with buxom good looks, aristocratic bearing and a magnificent singing voice, Madame Cluck was known as “the barnyard nightingale,” the illustrious title with which Mickey Mouse introduced Clara in Orphan’s Benefit (1934). No stranger to the thrill of applause and curtain calls, Clara is a performer serenely confident in her singing abilities. This not-so-little hen radiates stage presence whether she’s squawking an aria or just being a good neighbor to Mickey and Minnie.
The site also features Q&A’s with legendary Disney archivists Dave Smith, and daily comics strips, including Mickey, Donald, and Scamp. They go up every day but last only a day, so repeat attendance is encouraged.
Yes, it’s corporate as all hell but if you’re a serious Disneyphile, they’ve got you coming and going.
Technorati Tags: Disney
By Steve Bunche
The folks over at Warner Bros. Animation have proven time and again since the now-classic Batman: The Animated Series that they not only care about making genuinely good and entertaining superhero material, they also get it thanks to many of its bigwigs being comics fans themselves. That aspect helps immeasurably when bringing Wonder Woman back to the screen because, despite her six-decades-plus history, the Amazon princess remains something of a cipher when not in the right creative hands.
Over the years Wonder Woman’s stated purpose has been that of an ambassador between her immortal Amazonian culture and “man’s world,” and as such she’s been the mouthpiece for speeches about peace and love and understanding between all races and genders and such. But while that’s all well and good, she’s seldom been given a personality and as a result it’s been rather hard to really care much about her as a character. Sure, she looks fantastic and can kick ass better than damned near anybody else in the entire DC Universe — which she certainly should be able to do after being raised as a part of a hardcore all-female warrior culture that’s had about three millennia to absolutely master the arts of combat — but at few points in her career could the fan detect much personality in which to emotionally invest. In fact, Diana has almost always come off to me as being little more than the DCU’s equivalent to the quote-spouting animatronics in Disney World’s Hall of Presidents, and I say that as a lifelong Wonder Woman supporter. Thankfully, the recent efforts of writer Gail (Birds of Prey) Simone have made considerable progress in addressing this glaring oversight, but what the non-comics-reading world needs is a property that allows them access to a character whose potential has virtually never been lived up to and the upcoming Wonder Woman direct-to-DVD animated feature from Warner Brothers may go a long way to improve that state of affairs.
Technorati Tags: Reviews
One adage we live by here at Stately Beat Manor is that to win the office Oscar pool, you’ve got to get Best Short Film and Best Short Film (Animated). These obscure categories have been clogging up the Oscar® telecast with little known people in ill-fitting tuxes and inadvisable dresses for years, and while some think getting rid of them would shorten the telecast, we think you gotta keep the betting honest with something NO ONE knows about.
So as we have usually done over the past few years, here’s a guide to this year’s nominees in the Best Short Film (Animated) category. After reviewing the list, we feel confident that you’ll be one category closer to winning that pool.
(We don’t handicap the short films, but we should note that one of them — SPIELZEUGLAND (TOYLAND) — is about the Holocaust, and The Holocaust Always Wins Awards (see Reader, The.))
• La Maison en Petits Cubes by Kunio Kato
An old man stacks up boxes to avoid a flood. WE SAY: Poignant and haunting! Here’s a clip:
• LAVATORY - LOVESTORY by Konstantin Bronzit
In this simply animated entry, a homely bathroom cleaning lady finds romance in the stalls. While normally that is the kind of thing that gets you arrested and/or thrown out of the Senate, this is a cartoon we’re talking about. WE SAY: Touching!
No embeddable clips but if you wait long enough, one will come up here.
•OKTAPODI by Emud Mokhberi and Thierry Marchand
A cunning octopus embarks on a daring rescue when his love is taken out of the tank to be grilled with a bit of balsamic vinegar. WE SAY: The cute funny animals world of CGI animation has long cried out for invertebrate heroes! Watch below:
•PRESTO by Doug Sweetland
A magician wars with his rabbit over carrots and so on. WE SAY: This ran in front of WALL*E so millions and millions of people must have seen it. You saw it, right?
•THIS WAY UP by Alan Smith and Adam Foulkes
Two undertakers undergo comic misadventures as they head for the cemetery, WE SAY: Clever! Underexposed subject matter! A trailer:
AND THE WINNER IS: While La Maison en Petits Cubes has the poignant tone and innovative look that Oscar sometimes rewards, did we mention that PRESTO is from Pixar? And MILLIONS AND MILLIONS of people have seen it? Don’t bet against Pixar.
We hear that while Japanese directing sensation Takashi Miike was at NYCC to promote the premiere of YATTERMAN, all he could do was tell everyone within ear shot how he’d like to do a live-action version of AFRO SAMURAI, the cult anime about a wandering samurai in a savage retro-future. I guess you could say he was stumping for the job.
What do you think, fans? Could Miike get this right?
Sony Pictures Animation will team up with Platinum Entertainment for an unnamed toon, Variety reports:
Platinum — which controls a cache of comicbook characters that it adapts, produces and licenses for all forms of media — is the company that brought “Men in Black” into the studio fold.
“We’re looking forward to working with (Platinum CEO Scott Rosenberg) and Platinum to develop a feature from their library of stories and (5,600) characters,” said Bob Osher, president of Sony Pictures Digital Prods.
§ At last, we have our mocap Tintin and it is Jamie Bell, who starred in BILLY ELLIOT, JUMPER and…oh yeah, he was that Jimmy kid in KING KONG, so we should have seen that coming. (Peter Jackson is co-producing the proposed TINTIN trilogy.) If you are thinking Bell is too old, as we mentioned before, it’s going to be motion capture to cgi. In addition, Daniel Craig has been cast as Red Rackham! Gad Elmaleh, Toby Jones and Mackenzie Crook have also been cast. The screenplay is by Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish (variously, Dr. WHO, SHAUN OF THE DEAD), which bodes well.
§ People are asking: Is Seth Rogen’s GREEN HORNET Dead? after rumors at Sundance.
§ People are also asking: Has Production on ASTROBOY Shut Down?
Sadly, they’re now reporting that production on Imagi’s Astroboy movie appears to have shut down. This comes just days after I last reported on the film, on how it appears to have just scraped through its troubles with the recession. They have no official word on the matter, just information from those that have been working on the film.
§ This story on fiscal caution at movie studios reveals that Marvel Studios offered $250,000 to Mickey Rourke to play a villain in Iron Man 2, meaning they are being quite thrifty (or cheap, depending on how you look at it.)
§ A new comic-book based movie! It seems that Kevin Monroe (TMNT and WAR MONKEYS) will direct El Zombo Fantasma which ws based on his own comic for Dark Horse.
Published in 2005, the film is being pitched as a “Latino Hellboy”. The story follows “the mysterious murder of the world’s most notorious Mexican wrestler who bargains his way out of an eternity of fiery damnation by returning to Los Angeles to play guardian angel to a troublesome teen, Belisa Montoya. He soon discovers that the teen is not what she seems and that their fates have been intertwined for centuries.” LatinoReview’s Kellvin Chavez and IESB’s Robert Santchez are among the film’s producers.
If this movie gets made, it will be one of the VERY VERY few comic books created by a director/actor/nerdlebrity to actually go to the screen.
We made an oblique reference to the controversy over the casting of the AVATAR; THE LAST AIRBENDER movie the other day, but noted cartoonist Derek Kirk Kim has a rather impassioned take on it and a call for action on his blog:New day in politics, same old racist world on the silver screen. The gist of it is that the M. Night Shyamalan adaptation of the popular cartoon has cast all cute little white kids in the roles of Asain characters in the cartoon. Shyamalan is, of course, himself of Indian heritage, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t business as usual in Hollywood, and reading stuff like Kirk’s remembrance is a powerful reminder of how much this stuff hurts:
When my brother and I were in high school, our favorite class was Drama. While we were rehearsing for the next day’s class or participating in a school play or dancing it up at the after party, I don’t think there was anything we liked more. During such times, it even surpassed our love of—dare I say it—comics. But we never even entertained the notion of actually pursuing it as a career. Not because we didn’t want to, but because we had too much pride to spend our entire lives pretending to be Long Duk Dong, or a Chinese food delivery boy with one line, or a Kato to some Green Hornet. Or even worse, having our hearts broken over and over going after roles that specifically call for Asian Americans like “Avatar, The Last Airbender” only to see them go to white actors. Back in my Drama days in high school, I used to dream of being white so I could pursue acting.
With discrimination like this “Avatar” casting continuing to happen uncontested in Hollywood, my future kids will nurse the same pitiful wish.
And it infuriates me.
If my future kids feel a passion for acting, I want them to be able to pursue it just like any other American. If they’re forced to give up that passion due to a genuine lack of talent or hard work, fine. But I don’t want their dreams to be clipped at the bud by some unassailable, universally accepted dismissal of their existence on the face this country.
Much more in the link, with a call for a letter writing campaign to Paramount and Kennedy/Marshall Productions.
The entire ban on Asian-American actors starring in American movies is especially bizarre when you think of how many of the world’s biggest movie stars are Asian, and the massive influence of Asian culture on so much that is successful out of Hollywood for the past 15 years or so. Is is just denial?
May you be trapped in a world where this plays on loop.
§ There’s a new Japanese WATCHMEN trailer. Take that, Fox!
§ Horton helmer hears a Hex! HORTON HEARS A WHO director Jimmy Hayward has been tapped to direct the JONAH HEX movie, which Josh Brolin is set to star in.
Hayward began his career as an animator on the Canadian TV series “ReBoot” before becoming a member of the Pixar family, where he worked on such films as “Toy Story,” “A Bug’s Life,” “Toy Story 2,” “Monsters, Inc.” and “Finding Nemo.” He made his directorial debut with 2008’s “Horton,” which grossed $154.5 million at the domestic box office.
HEX comic scribe Jimmy Palmiotti put down his own thoughts on the Newsarama blog:
All day I have gotten e- mails from friends asking about the director and the supernatural elements. Justin and I read the script. I went to Los Angeles and met with one of the producers, a good friend from my “ASH” days, Andy Lazar, and even got to look at some of the art done for the film. First thing, the supernatural elements noted in the screenplay work with the main story wonderfully and they are minor…this is a hardcore action western at its heart, with its main focus on Jonah at all times. We really enjoyed the screenplay and the cool thing is, Andy and the crew are fans of the comic…something that I think is important. Now, as far as Jimmy Hayward as director, well…there were a lot of people wanting this gig and from what I hear they went with talent first…the right guy for the job that gets the character and wants to prove it.
§ We hope you are all sitting down, because there isn’t going to be a Shazam movie. Apparently SPEED RACER is to blame.
§ Seth Rogen will star in a superhero-themed episode of The Simpsons, which he also wrote:
Matt said: “He wrote an episode we’ll be reading soon, where Comic-Book Guy creates a superhero comic which then gets made into a feature film. Homer plays the lead and to slim down, Seth Rogen will play his personal trainer.”
Do you remember the Santa who rode on the electric shaver? Of course you do.
Norelco’s shavin’ Santa was a holiday staple for many years. For some reason, it also deeply disturbed my mother. The ads would disappear for a year or two, only to reappear in new, updated settings. Each year my mother would cry out, “No! Not again!”
The 90s version even has slick CGI-like animation.
As much as my mother disliked Santa on a shaver, we’ve been highly disturbed by the new Sprint Santa.
For the current world, not only is Santa so cool that he has to use a cell phone, but he’s magically been transformed into a young, hip “sexy” Santa, with a waxen, smooth countenance that suggest that he really looks like a Thomas Nast drawing but has been Photoshopped into someone you might spot out at the PInk Elephant and would avoid at all costs.
In a controversial decision, an Australian judge has ruled that a man with a pornographic drawing of the Simpsons on his computer is guilty of possessing child pornography, fined him $3000, and given him two years of something similar to probation.
The main issue of the case was whether a fictional cartoon character could “depict” a “person” under law.
Alan John McEwan had been convicted in the Parramatta Local Court of possessing child pornography and of using a carriage service to access child pornography material, the latter of which has a maximum penalty of 10 years’ jail.
The male figures in the cartoons had what appeared to be human genitalia, as did the mother and the girl depicted in the cartoons.
The magistrate said that, had the images involved real children, McEwan would have been jailed.
“One of the writers I heard the other day said he didn’t think there was any such thing as artistic genius, which is exactly how I feel. And I do feel that art is as integral to human experience as our autonomic nervous system. I think I said, it’s like saying somebody has a talent for saliva production. You’re a genius at producing saliva! Or man, can you grow hair! “He’s brilliant!” But I do think the converse is true. I do think people can be talked out of it, or shocked out of it. It’s amazing to me how frightened people are of making their own art. Terrified.”
-Lynda Barry(WHAT IT IS), from part one of a two-part interview with The Walrus.
…
(Above: from Tom Neely’s THE BLOT)
Tom Neely (THE BLOT) tells 20 Questions with Cartoonists whether drawing is a pleasure or a pain:
“When I’m not drawing it’s a pain. I will spend days avoiding it. Making art is a really hard process for me because I think about it so much. I often find myself very intimidated by the act of drawing. I’ll agonize over every reason not to do it. I sometimes have weeks go by with no drawing and I start to get really depressed and listless. The longer I go without drawing, the harder it is to start, and the more depressed I get. When I start getting stressed or depressed I’ll forget why I feel that way. Then my wife will tell me “Go out to your studio and draw!” And as soon as I pick up a pencil or dip the brush in ink, I’m the happiest I’ve ever been. I love the feel of dragging a brush full of ink across a toothy sheet of paper. That’s pure pleasure.”
Posted by Aaron Humphrey
Please enjoy this brief satirical cartoon by BRIT Harry Partridge, showing what AKIRA, Katsuhiro Otomo’s classic cyberpunk vision of a future Tokyo, would be like had it been made in America. Of course, a live-action AKIRA is supposedly underway, with Leonardo DiCaprio, maybe, playing Kaneda. Maybe it won’t be as funny as this.
[Via Cartoon Brew.]
Amazingly, we forgot to tell you about the premiere of The Drinky Crow Show, based on Tony Millionaire’s brilliant Maakies comic strip, on Sunday night as part of the Adult Swim ‘toon block. In these gloomy times, everyone will be needing a drinking buddy, and bibulous Drinky could be just the figurehead we need. You can watch the entire premiere episode online, or watch a bit of it above, as Drinky and Gabby diiscover the joys and dangers of “beer goggles.”
We should note that while The Drinky Crow Show includes the Adult Swim required scenes of vomit and eyeball injury, it also includes a storyline and humor, so it gets a big thumbs up from Stately Beat Manor.
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