What About Thad?

Haven’t had time to screw around with a website for some time now and still really don’t. I promise to post something cool soon. I just wanted to pop out of the woodwork to say how I find it surprising that none of the animation websites I regularly read covered the announcement that Brad Bird is directing Mission: Impossible IV for Paramount. You’d think that the fact that America’s leading animated feature director is moving to live-action franchises, and that it’s confirmed, without a doubt, that Pixar will never make a movie worth watching again, would be headline news and serve as fodder for the discussion of whether or not it’s impossible for a director with real ambition to be a success in mainstream animation. Oh well.

When I made the decision to move my blog to a new server, I had to purge a lot of my online archives in the process. A lot of stuff is lost to cyberspace forever, but I can still salvage the most important things. One item that I regret got purged was the Emery Hawkins interview that was exclusive to this site. I’ve put it back up online again, and you can view it at this link.

GO HOME.

Not really.  Having some REAL FUN with a server move.

Yes, the name of the blog changed again, and it’s to cater a new ‘discovery’ that has nothing to do with animation.

I knew of the existence of this educational film thanks to Tom posting images from the title to a film forum, but I never saw it until Jerry Beck sent me a DVD transfer of it. As Jerry wrote on the envelope, “This film explains EVERYTHING!” With the exception of getting shallow comfort from a dog (replace it with a cat), this happened to me about once a week during grade school. The twerp even looks something like me at age seven. Enjoy.

[wpvideo 5HWMKrlT w=400]

I can’t say I’m a fan of most of the artwork being posted at the Chuck Redux blog, but I absolutely love the reprinting of the letters Chuck Jones wrote in the early 1950s. The tone of them is the same as what we’d later read in his autobiographies, so the guy was like this long before the accolades came in, when he was still putting out brilliant work on a regular 9 to 5 schedule. I like this one in particular, about some incident that started with Mr. Warner’s wife mistaking the Bugs Bunny Bond Rally she saw on TV for Krazy Kat, with his “bricks of freedom”.

That’s me with David Gerstein (both of us sporting sexy t-shirts of cartoon characters nobody gives a shit about). David has a blog. Go visit it. NOW. One of his first posts is about a Warner cartoon ending I told him probably didn’t exist. I’ve been proven wrong. One of the nicest things about being proven wrong by David Gerstein is that you’ll hear about it once, but that’s the end of it.

David is one of the most generous animation/comics guys out there and his blog will be a reflection of it. David’s own non-cartoon shenanigans in real life are just as interesting as anything he’ll post, but as Lou Jacobi says in Irma La Douce, “that’s another story.”

We all knew there was more to these two than meets the eye.

If you like even further wasting your time on the Internet, please join the Intellitoons Forum started by Tom and I. We felt there was a necessity for an unfiltered cartoon message board in this wasteland, so you can pretty much say and do whatever you want here (except rip people off in our “For Sale” section).

http://s1.zetaboards.com/Intellitoons_Forum/index/