Whenever I look at the news lately this image keeps springing into mind:
That’s from Mel Brooks’ woefully under-rated Silent Movie.
Then again, real life is looking more and more like a Mel Brooks production. Isn’t it?...
The perfect commentary
Fun with animated GIFs!
Seems like lately I’ve been feeling extra wacky and I’ve no idea why. Maybe the twisted creature that is my id is retaliating against the general nastiness that seems pervasive too much. So the best course of action is to go in the opposite direction and do what I can to make people laugh a little.
Perhaps that’s why I’ve been playing around with GIF-making apps the past few days. There’ve been a few that I’ve cranked out, so I figured I’d share them with y’all.
This first is a few seconds taken and edited from my first movie Forcery. In hindsight this should have been done a WAY long time ago. But in any case, here is Frannie telling her hostage George Lucas what she thinks about the “Han and Greedo shooting” thing:
Talk about toxic fandom!
Next up is a result of looking to see if this ...
“Peace on Earth” and “Good Will to Men”
The 1939 classic and still heartbreaking animated short, “Peace on Earth”…
The 1955 “remake” produced by none other than William Hana and Joseph Barbera, “Good Will to Men”…
Animated THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. ‘Nuff said…
What is regarded by many as the greatest Batman story ever told may be getting the DC animated treatment very soon…
Entertainment website Bleeding Cool is reported that The Dark Knight Returns is being adapted by the same team that worked on All Star Superman and the upcoming animated rendition of Batman: Year One.
Hailed as the defining treatment of Batman for the modern era, Frank Miller and Klaus Janson’s The Dark Knight Returns is as bold and striking today as it was when it first hit comic book stores in 1986. The tale of Bruce Wayne – now 55-years old and having stopped being Batman ten years earlier – having the ultimate mid-life crisis and coming out of retirement into a world indifferent and even hostile to justice, not only broke new ground: it put Batman back on track to where he was perhaps always supposed to be....
MAKE MINE FREEDOM: Amazing insight from a 1958 cartoon
Just over fifty years ago, Harding College produced a series of films “to create a deeper understanding” of American culture. This one, Make Mine Freedom, has been “re-discovered” in recent days and is making the rounds quite a bit across the Internet. Personally, I found it to be uncannily prophetic about the country we are living in today. Perhaps we should begin considering the wisdom of the past.
Here is Make Mine Freedom…
BRING ME THE HEAD OF CHARLIE BROWN
In 1986, CBS Television was presented with the following roughly-animated proposal for a new Peanuts holiday special. Apparently it was decided somewhere that Charles Schulz’s classic characters needed upgrading to become more timely and “Eighties” in order to “reinvigorate the franchise”. Network execs saw the proposal – a short film by Jim Reardon – and immediately and quietly chose to bury it within the CBS vault. More than twenty years later and thanks to YouTube, it has finally seen the light of day! Here is Bring Me the Head of Charlie Brown…
(For the real story of Reardon and his hilarious short, mash down here.)...
Another classic GARFIELD AND FRIENDS: “Invasion of the Big Robots”
Garfield and Friends rates with The Tick as having some of the most twisted humor done for a Saturday morning cartoon. Like this episode, where Garfield wakes up one morning and finds that he’s in the wrong cartoon! I love how the regular kind of Garfield and Friends animation gets mixed up with the futuristic Eighties-style for the Starwolf sequences. And then the Disney-ish look toward the end.
First airing on December 2nd 1989, here is “Invasion of the Big Robots”…
PEANUTS animator Bill Melendez has passed away
This is the third death that I’ve had to report in the past day or so. Hope this is not about to become a trend…
Bill Melendez has passed away at the age of 91. He was an animator who began work at Disney, and then moved on to Warner Bros. But it was a 1959 meeting with cartoonist Charles M. Schulz that would propel Melendez to everlasting fame. The two became fast friends after Melendez was hired to work on a series of commercials featuring Schulz’s Peanuts characters. And after that, Melendez was the only person that Schulz gave permission to animate Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus and the rest of the Peanuts gang. A few years later Melendez collaborated with Schulz to produce A Charlie Brown Christmas: forty years later it remains a seminal classic of the holiday season.
In addition to the various Peanuts movies and ...
Opening intro for STAR BLAZERS first season
One of the greatest title sequences for a children’s cartoon ever.
The theme song alone will make you want to go flying off into outer space on a World War II battleship with a bunch of other men…
Okay, so it wasn’t originally called Star Blazers, the original Japanese title is Space Battleship Yamato, but it’s still an awesome show no matter what language it’s translated in 🙂
Maybe someday the suits at Disney will finally give us that live-action version that’s been promised since 1995. Would be cool to see what the wave motion gun would look like…...
All kinds of DC Comics video goodness hits iTunes!
In the words of Geoff Gentry who first passed along word of this: “Get your debit card ready.”
iTunes has just added the DC Comics Collection to its vast video library. You can now purchase and download the first several episodes of Batman: The Animated Series, Batman Beyond and Superman: The Animated Series. It’s also got Max Fleischer’s animated Superman shorts from the 1940s, the first season of The Adventures of Superman starring George Reeve, the first season of Super Friends and the complete 2008 Aquaman series. Geoff adds that hopefully iTunes will soon add Justice League and I heartily concur.
But in the meantime, if you’ve never watched “Heart of Ice”, the episode that first hurtled Batman: The Animated Series to critical acclaim, you can now enjoy it for two bucks via iTunes. And as soon as they make “Apokolips… Now!” Parts 1 and 2 from Superman: ...