A day in the life...

Eddie's new desktop pic

The note we received from Standards and Practices was to replace the Spanish word, pulpo, with it's English translation: octopus. Why? Because they thought pulpo sounded like (ahem) a kid-inappropriate word ...

*UPDATE:  Amid @ Cartoon Brew has linked to us on the subject of BS&P. 

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 Speaking of kid-inappropriate things, we have been re-watching some of those censored cartoons - eg, Coal Black and the Sebben Dwarves, Tin Pan Alley Cats, and some other titles we'd never seen before. One that really blew us away was Harman & Ising's Swing Wedding aka Hot Frogs (1937) with frenetically animated caricatures of black jazzy musicians. The animated 'Cab Calloway' was AMAZING. Really really awesome.

(Just found out that some of these cartoons are available on DVD at the Video Beat)

My friend in Sydney, Ravi  occasionally sends me funny little stories about his work and what he's up to. I feel compelled to share this one.

... On Wednesday, the agency shot one of my TV commercials for NINE MSN Messenger. The script I wrote featured the NINE MSN Butterfly Man and a whole bunch of sheep.  In the ad, one of Butterfly Man's friends can't sleep and is counting sheep. These sheep appear in Butterfly Man's world as real sheep. Well, that's the basic idea of the script. Anyway, the client loved it so we had to make it.

Now, sheep are pretty dumb. Some think they are profoundly stupid. One thing is sure - they cannot act. Imagine trying to get a sheep to look into a camera when you want it to? It's one of the challenges we had to meet on the day.

The way you do it is to put a sheep dog in front of the camera, because the sheep will look at the dog so it looks like they're looking at the camera.

So here we are on set, with sheep and sheep dogs and sheep handlers. There's all this baaa- ing and barking and animals surging around. There's also the crew, the stylist (the sheep had their own stylist, but that's a long story in itself. how do you get to be sheep stylist?)

It was so funny. There I was surrounded by all these hard-core ad types, a dozen sheep, a film crew and a man in a blue butterfly costume.

What was I thinking.

Just another day at the office for me..

Coming Soon

from Mucha Lucha - 'Meet The Muertos' (Day of the Dead episode)

• The Imagen Awards! This will be our first time ever at a Hollywood award ceremony, with ML's Meet the Muertos episode nominated in the Best Children's Animated Programming category.
• Trip to Atlanta! Is there anything else we need to know before we go?
• Eddie's birthday! (September seems to be the most birthday-intensive month on my calendar)
• Kaiju Big Battel in L.A.! Buy your tickets now!