Warner Bros. Offers...
Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming sci-fi action adventure Pacific Rim has...
Tag "Bill Hanna"
More Enduring Than the Average Bear
This week marks the 52nd anniversary of the premiere of The Yogi Bear Show on television, and it would seem that the smarter-than-the-average bear is busier now than he has been in decades. The 2010 feature Yogi Bear turned out to be a box office hit, and next year will [...]
Gene of All Trades
Some things stay with you for a lifetime. When I was a kid I read a Yogi Bear comic strip in the newspaper in which Ranger Smith punks Yogi by filling his enormous Christmas stocking with an enormous artificial foot. It sounds like a simple, obvious gag, but the memory [...]
Alexander Film: A Forgotten Toon Powerhouse
Some years back I was talking with a veteran animation director about animation’s Golden Age. “Golden age?” he replied, with an expression of disdain, “I don’t remember getting very much gold.” It’s no secret that the hardworking, talented artists who created the classic cartoons of the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s were [...]
Under the Table with J.B. and Friz
Most cartoon historians are aware that the fluid that fueled the medium during its Golden Age was not ink or paint, but alcohol. Among my favorite booze-related tales from the toon trenches involve enterprising studio reps trying to hire an established talent away from a competing studio by getting them [...]
Animation Block Party Spotlight: Doug Crane
Animation Block Party (www.animationblock.com) is the premier animation festival of the East Coast. In this interview series, the founder of ABP, Casey Safron will be introducing Animation Magazine readers to some of the award-winning animators who have screened at past ABP festivals. Animation Block Party has been fortunate enough to [...]
Remembering Gene Kelly in Toon Town
Legendary dancer, actor, choreographer and director Gene Kelly is being feted this week by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which is staging a centennial tribute to him. Kelly’s stint at MGM during the heyday of the movie musical, of course, resulted in such classics as Singin’ in [...]
Hoyt Curtin’s Jug band Session
You may or may not know the name Hoyt Curtin, but there’s no question you’ve heard his work. So has anyone who has owned a television since 1960. Hoyt was the musical director for Hanna-Barbera during their television heyday, and the composer of such classic theme songs those that opened [...]
Eep-Opp-Ork…Uh-Oh!
It was the rock song that defined a generation. All right, it wasn’t really. Instead, Eep-Opp-Ork-Ah-Ah, which highlighted 1962’s A Date with Jet Screamer, the second-aired episode of The Jetsons, is a spoof of two generations at the same time. But the combination of the wailing, jazzy tune by Hoyt [...]
Ed Benedict and the Cartoon Revolution
The recent release of Disney’s Winnie the Pooh illustrates just how much the look of animation has changed over the past twenty years. Today, of course, we regard such changes as being matters of dimension: two-dimensional, hand-drawn (like Pooh) as opposed to three-dimensional, digital imagery (like damn near everything else). [...]
The Case of the Copycat Concerto
It’s only August, but Oscar chatter is already starting to be heard. This has reminded me of one particular Oscar-winning cartoon, around which revolves one of the few genuine mysteries of the cartoon world: the uncanny, even suspicious, similarity between Warner Bros’ 1946 Bugs Bunny cartoon Rhapsody Rabbit and MGM’s [...]
Check Out New...
While we all steel our hearts and wait for the (second) final season of Matt...
Nexus Partners with...
London-based animation studio Nexus as announced an exclusive partnership with...
