cartoons

Chris Knight's avatar

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 ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

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…...

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Chris Knight's avatar

About a month ago I showed what I would look like as a character from The Simpsons. That pic was courtesy of The Simpsons Movie website.

Then Darth Larry spotted another site, this one a promotional one run by Burger King called Simpsonize Me, also a tie-in with the new movie. But with this “you as a Simpsons character” thingy, you upload an actual photograph of yourself and the website does most of the work for you. Then all you have to do is fine-tune it with a variety of mouths, noses etc.

(Is it just me or is Burger King running some of the best movie promo sites lately? Their gimmick for Revenge of the Sith a few years ago was downright … spooky.)

So I uploaded the photo I used for the newspaper ad from my school board campaign and after “tweaking” it a ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Check this cryptic page out for some amazing Star Wars artwork. We already knew that Lucasfilm was producing a Clone Wars animated series and that there was supposed to be a second animated project: is this it? The page says “Stop by this Friday to find out more”. Since Star Wars Celebration IV is just getting started in Los Angeles and that Friday is the 30th anniversary of the first film, there’s no doubt that all kinds of saga wackiness could be erupting over the next few days.

Anyhoo, judging by this and the other pics on that site, me like!...

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Chris Knight's avatar

This morning reminded me once again why Bill Clinton was one of the worst Presidents in American history: because he single-handedly destroyed Saturday morning cartoons.

It was back around the mid-1990s that he did the deed. Clinton decided that children’s television programming wasn’t “educational” enough: kids were enjoying Scooby-Doo and Papa Smurf way too much for their own good. So Clinton handed down a decree through the FCC: a high percentage of children’s programming had to be “educational” in nature. Which was just the Clintons’ way of saying that they were going to expose children to more of their screwball propaganda. So we got a helluva lot less of The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show and a lot more @&$%-ing crap like Captain Planet and the Planeteers. Lord how I hated that show. Whoever’s responsible for putting it on the air should have been dragged out into the street and ...

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