The Universal Animation Studio Tour That Never Was. In 1966, Grantray-Lawrence studios produced 195 six minute shorts featuring the Marvel superheroes Iron Man, Hulk, Sub-Mariner, Captain America and Thor. (Previously they had done animated commercials and assisted on animation for other studios like Hanna-Barbera. The studio was run by Grant Simmons, Ray Patterson and Bob Lawrence.) They also produced the first animated Spider-Man television series for ABC in 1968.
Ray Patterson remembered, “Spider-Man was different. It was completely drawn from the beginning, just like a regular show. We had around eighty people working on the show so it was a pretty big deal. Thirteen half hours for ABC. We took over that old hotel across from the Universal Studios entrance (in California) and remodeled the whole thing, made it look all cartoony with different colored doors and everything. As a matter of fact, we had a booth all set up on the Universal tour that would have animators in there and girls painting cels. We were all set up to do it, but then we closed the studio in 1968, after the first season of Spider-Man was finished, and that was the end of that. We trusted the wrong people.”
Making Ends Meet. Animator Bob Givens said that he loved doing animation and it wasn’t because of the money. “We weren’t making that kind of dough, just an average salary. In 1938, Dave Swift, Rich Hogan and I (along with two others) were living in a single bedroom apartment. One guy slept in the bathtub, two guys slept in a bed, another slept on the couch and one slept in the kitchen. That’s how we were able to pay the rent.”
Why You Should Love The PJs. Whether you liked comedian Eddie Murphy’s The PJs (1999) clay animated television series or not, it was definitely groundbreaking in a major way. Thanks to the aggressive advocacy of producer and writer Steve Tompkins, after weeks of negotiations and discussions, the Writers Guild of America signed an agreement with Imagine Television in May 1999 to cover the series under the union’s Minimum Basic Agreement. Basically, this meant that for the first time ever, writers on an animation series were given the same salary, rights and benefits that live-action writers had enjoyed for over half a century.
Did Don Bluth Inspire Joss Whedon? Don Bluth in 2009 stated about his unmade Dracula feature (planned to begin production for Fox in 1998): “Dracula was a very interesting project. It was shelved because of story problems. The first pass at the story played Dracula as the hero – a not too sympathetic one, you can imagine, since he went about the city biting people on the neck. We originally thought we could find some form of redemption in this infamous vampire, but we failed. I couldn’t help notice, however, that a vampire series called, “Angel,” appeared on TV shortly thereafter. Scripted by Joss Whedon. Wait a minute, Isn’t Joss Whedon the same writer that sat in on the story meetings hired by Fox to write the Dracula script? Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.” Whedon did contribute to the script of the Bluth animated feature Titan A.E. (2000).
What’s In A Name? The wonderful animated feature by Brad Bird, The Iron Giant (1999), was inspired by a British sci-fi novel, The Iron Man, by writer Ted Hughes published in 1968. When an American book edition was printed later that same year, the publisher changed the title to The Iron Giant to avoid confusion with the Marvel Comics superhero character, Iron Man, who was soaring in popularity. Hughes wrote a sequel in 1993 entitled The Iron Woman.
Charlton Heston Animation Reference Model. Kristof Serrand was the supervising animator of the older Moses in the animated feature The Prince of Egypt (1999). “I tried not to look at Charlton Heston’s performance (in the 1956 film The Ten Commandments). When I did look, it was to try to avoid doing the same thing. The challenge was to make him believable and alive. In every scene, I was thinking, ‘What would an average person do when put into this kind of situation?’ or ‘How would I react?’ This is kind of difficult when you think of meeting God. You can’t really rely on your own experiences.”
The Mr. Hankey War. Trey Parker of South Park fame talked in 1998 about the controversy surrounding talking poo generated by the December 1997 episode Mr. Hankey, the Christmas Poo.
“When we were getting courted by all the networks, for people wanted the show, I remember I sat down with (Comedy Central executives) Eileen Katz and Debbie Liebling at our first meeting like two years ago, at dinner. I said, ‘You know, one thing I have to know before we really go any further. How do you feel about talking poo?’ And Eileen, I remember, just was like ‘I love it’. We had the idea for ‘The Mr. Hankey Show’ even before South Park. It’s what we originally pitched to Brian Graden (who became the president of MTV) and he was like, ‘Sounds great. Let’s NOT do that.’
“John Kricfalusi, the guy who created Ren & Stimpy, after the Christmas show had aired was making some big noise about the fact that Mr. Hankey was rip-off of some character he created on his website (Nutty, the Friendly Dump). It really pissed me off just because I actually wrote him specifically saying ‘Mr. Hankey has actually appeared on the opening sequence of South Park since it aired in August and even before that when we made the pilot a year before that’. Like I said, we pitched that to Brian years ago and before that Mr. Hankey was something I did in college.
“And so, you know, Brian Graden was the first one to come out and say ‘I was pitched Mr. Hankey four or five years ago’. (Kricfalusi) wrote a letter back saying ‘oh, okay, I see how it could just be a coincidence but you should admit to the press you are a big Ren & Stimpy fan’. I’m not a Ren & Stimpy fan. I have nothing against it. I saw an episode or two but that’s about that.”
Jim Korkis is an internationally respected animation historian who in recent years has devoted his attention to the many worlds of Disney. He was a columnist for a variety of animation magazines. With his former writing partner, John Cawley, he authored several animation related books including The Encyclopedia of Cartoon Superstars, How to Create Animation, Cartoon Confidential and Get Animated’s Animation Art Buyer’s Guide. He taught animation classes at the Disney Institute in Florida as well as instructing classes on acting and animation history for Disney Feature Animation: Florida.
Poop-Boy was a frequently-appearing character in the “Dr. Slump” Japanese animated TV series, which ran for 243 weekly episodes from April 8, 1981 to February 19, 1986. It was a favorite of American anime fans in the 1980s; practically every anime fan who collected bootlegged video-taped anime had at least one episode. So talking, anthropomorphized poo in TV animation was well-known by a lot of young Americans at least ten years before “South Park”. I particularly liked the “Dr. Slump” episode that was a parody of the American movie “Quest for Fire”, which we got in untranslated video tapes off Japanese TV. None of us could understand the dialogue, so we called it “Quest for Toilet Paper”.
Yeah, I was going to mention that Japan probably had “talking poo” characters. Almost always in comedy shows to undercut any shred of seriousness by heading a character or macguffin turn out to be a pile of poo (or have a pile of poo for a head).
I guess someone would point out that the typical anime “pile of poo” differs from from the South Park depiction of a talking “poo log,” like the John K creature. It would have been interesting as a court case, to see if lawyers would try and dig up the earliest recorded creative property of a talking poo log.
Yeah, I was going to mention that Japan probably had “talking poo” characters. Almost always in comedy shows to undercut any shred of seriousness by heading a character or macguffin turn out to be a pile of poo (or have a pile of poo for a head).
I recall one incident involving a talking pile that gave directions to a cockroach in the 1987 anime/live-action combo “Twilight of the Cockroaches”. It just sorta came out of nowhere and then they move on without looking back.
“I guess someone would point out that the typical anime “pile of poo” differs from from the South Park depiction of a talking “poo log,” like the John K creature. It would have been interesting as a court case, to see if lawyers would try and dig up the earliest recorded creative property of a talking poo log.”
No doubt Mr. Hanky would probably be the first there if only for the choice of log over swirl pile (of course poo in Dr. Slump got the upper hand for getting legs to go with their arms and an already pleasing pastel shade of colors than the traditional brown.
There’s also a thirty-minute South Korean animation called Doggy Poo. It’s…rather touching, actually.
Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5A9gukuizDU
…You know what, I’m just not going to comment on John K anymore. Life’s too short to spend so much of it spitting bile.
Hi JIm, thanks for the stories, as usual!
Re: Spider-Man animation studio tour
“We were all set up to do it (the tour), but then we closed the studio in 1968, after the first season of Spider-Man was finished, and that was the end of that. We trusted the wrong people.”
I’d love more information. Did Ray Patterson only do one year of Spider-Man? If so, why? And did someone else do it after that?
Or did Ray do only one year at that location? And if so, why? And where did they move to?
I know the show ended up being moved to Toronto for the remaining seasons.
The PJs didn’t use clay; it was foam rubber over a metal armature. (And at least sometimes the characters’ mouths were done in CGI.)
I learned this on a tour of Will Vinton studios I took when the show was in production. I actually got to handle a worn out Thurgood Stubbs, too.
I remember reading about that years ago and was surprised some were misled to think they were still using clay when they were in fact using different materials altogether for that show.
A couple of points. I suspect Joss Whedon was brought into Don Bluth’s story meetings *because* of his experience with characters like Angel, rather than being inspired by the “Dracula” meetings to create Angel. He wrote the “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer” movie in 1992, several years before his meeting with Don. And Angel was a character in the Buffy TV series starting in its first season, in 1997.
Also, while “The PJs” was *one* of the first animated TV series written under a WGA contract, it wasn’t the first. “Pocket Dragon Adventures”, a series I co-created and executive produced, story edited, and was a principle writer for, was the first. We had been trying to convince the writers at all of the Fox primetime animated series to ask for a WGA contract but many of them were afraid they’d be fired or just thought Fox would never go for it. We managed to get our deal signed and it was announced in The Hollywood Reporter on a Friday. On Monday, the WGA got a call from the writers at Fox. They were now ready to go forward. “The PJs” was one of those shows, along with “The Simpsons” and “Futurama”, but was produced by a different production company so had a separate contract with the WGA than the other two.
Angel wasn’t in the original movie. Depending when Joss was working with Don on Dracula, he could have been inspired to create or alter a pre-existing character.
Helen Kane sued, claiming she was the original poop-poop-a-doop girl.
BOOP-BOOP-a-doop.
Poop-Poop-a-doop is dealt with elsewhere in the comments.