Jonny Quest was my favorite cartoon as an 8 year old. I loved the international locations, impossible creatures, and exotic villains!
There is an interesting multi-part documentary on youtube that while a little long-winded, is obviously done with a lot of fan affection.
My favorite part is this one, where the makers have lovingly stitched together the wonderful background pans from the series, by way of Photoshop! Enjoy.
It has been such a blast reading When Magoo Flew – a new book on the history of UPA animation studios – by Adam Abraham. What’s more, I am so thankful that many of the cartoons mentioned in this book are on YouTube, so I was able to watch what I was reading about at the same time, and I am even more thankful that I could attend last week’s 3 hour screening at LACMA of UPA films on 35mm!!! My all-time favorite – Rooty Toot Toot – looked amazing, and so did the cartoons I had been dying to see that are not (yet) on YouTube, like Ballet Oop, which is essentially an animated (parody of a) classical ballet class with very cool stylized character posing and layouts.
It’s so exciting that these UPA cartoons are finally on DVD!
I am working my way through the UPA Jolly Frolics 3-DVD Set this month… and loving all the stunning modern visuals and jazzy soundtracks.
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I am currently sort of fascinated by the Ham half of the Ham & Hattie cartoons which are so-bad-they’re-good. They are very much products of their time, with silly cultural stereotypes… (Interesting too, that most of these 50’s cartoons feature outsider-teenagers, doctors and psychiatrists…)
Hamilton Ham appears in Jamaica Daddy, a calypso-ish musical number about having more BA-BEES to PER-PET-CHUATE the FAM-LEE. Is it just me or do these Jamaicans look like Mexican caricatures? :)
Saganuki is a story of a woodcutter boy who wants to become a Samurai warrior. There is a Japanese singing accent and one hears “Ah-So!” quite often.
Dino’s Serenade … in which Hamilton Ham goes Italian.
More screengrabs…
From The Jaywalker (On YouTube)
Baby Boogie – love the layouts and colors!
Gerald McBoing McBoing on Planet Moo – which is actually a pretty bizarre story…
More screengrabs coming soon to my flickr set…
Related Links:
Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai – “a site dedicated to bringing you authentic, translated Japanese ghost stories, kaidan, yokai and yurei, kappa and tengu, and other weird tales.”
Atelier CroMagnon. How cute are these! (and a blog which unfortunately, I can’t understand) *Google-Translated to English HERE*
akaname
bura bura
The Fantastic Shigeru Mizuki English Language Resource Page (Everyone knows I love Gegege No Kitaro)
Flickr set: Pages from a Shigeru Mizuki book that I picked up in Japan.
Of course, all this also serves as inspiration and research for our Dead Ringo series.
Last year, when I first saw Guy Peellaert‘s comic strip panels in the French film Jeu De Massacre (1966), I realized that I had used these same images years ago as my desktop wallpaper but at the time, had no idea where they were from and who they were by.
And so I Googled for more Peellaert comic strip imagery, and learned about The Adventures of Jodelle and Pravda – the two ‘erotic’ pop-art comics that he produced in the late 60’s before he became famous for Rock Dreams. See my flickr set.
For months, I searched for these out of print comic books and the few copies of Jodelle on Amazon were going for close to $100. Imagine how thrilled I was last week, when I found a first edition copy for $16! The Jodelle story itself is kinda silly… the characters inhabit a “Roman” Space Age world with horse-drawn convertibles, naked/topless spy-girls, naked soldiers, and a few vampires. I LOVE LOVE LOVE the minimalistic yet dynamic style and the loud bright colors. Lots of hot pinks and oranges, reds and yellows.
I haven’t been able to locate a copy of Pravda but the great news is that Fantagraphics will be reprinting both of these books later THIS YEAR! I cannot wait.
Our passion with subcultures and style is ongoing, and so is our commitment to ‘Dance Crasher’, a story about what happens when characters with different aesthetics, outlooks and musical tastes collide. It’s a big story, and we want it to be a big movie…with a soundtrack that kills! Below are our character designs, development art and movie synopsis.
Also see:
Apologies for the lack of updates. We’re still working away on different projects…the ‘Dead Ringo’ pilot is finished, there are some ‘Mad Moments’ for Warner Bros Animation being done, and a self-produced series taking shape (which we don’t want to give away just yet!)…plus I am also swept up in the whirlwind of raising a 15 month hellcat-masquerading-as a toddler which is occupying my every waking (and sleeping) moment! Lili is also swamped with Doggie Drawing commissions, and has just put out her excellent ‘Boogie On scooters’ calendar for 2011.
To compensate for the lack of original material we can show, I thought I’d post some artwork by the late, great, Ken Reid which I am currently taking inspiration from. I grew up reading Ken’s work every week as a kid growing up in England, and I spent many hours trying to draw like him. Out of all the artists working in English comics, Ken drew the most twisted, grotesque, barmy characters by far. Here’s a sample of his inspired lunacy. More to come :)
I love animation, but after growing up reading Ken’s strips – these and others like Jinx, Jasper The Grasper, Faceache, Big Head & Thick Head (no, there wasn’t a lot of subtlety :) – I’ve always felt that no-one has come close to his anarchic sense of design and action.
(Images pilfered, half-inched, and swiped from a bunch of excellent Brit Comic blogs: Lew Stringer’s, Peter Gray’s, Comics UK!)
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of traveling to Japan with a friend and we visited the Tezuka Osamu Museum in Takarazuka (about 30 minutes train ride from Osaka). The minute I stepped inside the museum and heard the Astro Boy theme song, there were tears in my eyes. It was an overwhelming experience to say the least.
The museum was designed like a science lab with three levels and a futuristic elevator in the middle.
I wanted to take photos of EVERYTHING in the Permanent Collection of manga sketches! I had no idea that Tezuka did a version of “The Monkey King”/”Journey to the West”. Has the original manga ever been translated into English? (I don’t mean the Alakazam movie adaptation…)
The next time I return to Japan with Nihongo language skills, I want to spend a WHOLE DAY in this library!
There was also a small theater playing shorts by Tezuka Productions. We sat through “Butchy In A City” a silent movie about a down-and-out-artist character (clearly based on Tezuka himself) who becomes friends with a stage actress (perhaps inspired by the Takarazuka Revue ). A really sweet, fun and charming piece. According to this webpage , “Butchy In A City” was made specifically for the Tezuka Museum in 1995.
Downstairs… an Animation Workshop, headed by an animatronic figure of Tezuka!
I wanted to go to the Ghibli Museum too, but tickets were sold out. :(
NEXT TIME!
We are so excited about these Hammer Mexican Sci Fi screenings! A related article on Wired.com HERE.
La Nave De Los Monstrous in particular – because we have only seen this on low-quality VHS in Spanish, with no English subtitles, and it was inspiration for many a monster in Los Campeones! :)
Vampire women
Hitlerbot
Cyclops
Brain
Saving this date: Friday August 28th, 7.30pm. UCLA Billy Wilder Theater. See you there!
“En Pleine Guerre Froid” is a story by Froch and Fromental in Metal Hurlant issue 70. We recently repurchased this comic book from eBay because it was easier and cheaper to do this than to have someone relocate it amongst our storage items and ship it from Sydney.
“En Pleine Guerre Froid” is set during the Cold War as the title suggests, and thanks to Google Translate, the story goes a little something like this:
A Russian spy visits a fellow spy and famous comic book critic/reviewer who was once thrown in jail for peddling American comic books in the Red Square. In the home of this critic, he meets a kid who has won a drawing contest to see Walt Disney in America. Using a special device, the spy transfers his ‘mind’ into the kid’s body and vice versa, and off he goes to kidnap Uncle Walt.
As it turns out, Walt Disney was no longer alive.
This Walt Disney was a robot created by the KGB.
En Pleine Guerre Froid: Read the full story here (flickr set)
File under: Inspiration for the Kinky Kasperovich Konundum (Our Comrade In Cuba)
Speaking of Ninjas (which we were two posts ago). our longtime friend and colleague Keith Rainville (‘From Parts Unknown’ magazine, and Los Campeones scriptwriter) has released the awesome-est collection of everything Ninja on the planet; Vintage Ninja.net
As with his work documenting Lucha Libre, this is a fantastic one-stop resource for everything Ninja. There’s also a section on Books and Manga with cool art like this…
Grab Bag – feed Toonboombastic – feed
Fwak! Blog 