quoted from the Cynopsis Kids newsletter:

ABC will premiere Lanny and Wayne the Christmas Elves in Prep & Landing, the network’s first special produced by Disney Animation Studio, on Tuesday, December 1 at 8:30p. Executive Produced by John Lasseter, the half-hour holiday special follows an elite high tech unit of elves, known as Prep & Landing, which makes sure that homes are ready for Santa’s arrival. A small group of these elves, Wayne an elf passed over for a promotion, an enthusiastic rookie named Lanny, and Magee, the North Pole Christmas Eve Command Center Coordinator, work together to guide Santa and his reindeer through a dangerous storm. The voiceover cast includes Dave Foley, Sarah Chalke, and Derek Richardson.

Is this a sign of the End Times? An ABC/Disney/Pixar Christmas special about Santa’s Logistics Elves?!? Is this supposed to give kids the Christmas message: “when you grow up, you’ll probably have a very boring job…” And Dave Foley is the guy who made watching people play poker more boring, IMO. Maybe, if CSI could make the nerds in the Crime Labs interesting, this might be entertaining, but NOT in a Christmas Special kind of way. Sigh. Now I understand why the elf in the Rankin/Bass Rudolph show wanted to be a dentist…

Mark Evanier is, and has been for eons in Internet Time, one of my favorite bloggers, partly by being a “Show-Biz Insider” who knows what he’s talking about (and the parts of Show-Biz he is the most Inside Of are Cartoons and Comic Books), and party by being a simply entertaining writer (he was singularly responsible for making the Garfield TV shows funnier than the comic strip… and honestly, it is).

Both qualities were on display recently with the following quotes:

upon recently visiting the Secret Lair of the Evil Garfield Empire…

Jim Davis is a gracious employer/host and we had a fine time, meeting and dining…and even hearing tales of Jim’s old college buddy at Ball State University, David Letterman. A lot of folks think Jim made his fortune by creating the world’s most successful newspaper strip but that was small change compared to what he’s made blackmailing Dave.

And on the subject of “What Hollywood Thinks”…

Hollywood doesn’t speak with a single voice. Heck, all the people who work on any one movie or TV show don’t speak with a single voice. I had the same agent for 27 years and we didn’t even speak with a single voice. The only people I ever met in this industry who ever spoke with a single voice were Paul Winchell and Jerry Mahoney.

That’s what I call “eminently quotable”. And you can quote me on that.

It used to be that the Halloween “Season” was only a couple weeks before October 31st, but then it expanded into the whole month of October, and beyond (basically starting the day after the stores finished their Back-to-School sales, because they had all this empty space for Seasonal Merchandise).

But here’s one case where I don’t mind stretching it a little, since it’s only one day (and September 30th is my birthday, which is already plenty scary) and the fine folks at Need Coffee Dot Com have, for the last 3 years, started their “32 Days of Halloween” with an appropriately ’scary’ cartoon.

In year one, it was Vintage Classic Early Mickey Mouse with “The Haunted House” (in ghoulishly glorious black and white), proving that Fleisher wasn’t the only old cartoon studio that could do dancing skeletons.

In year two, it was Not So Early But Very Classic Bugs Bunny with “Hair-Raising Hare”, introducing the Big Hairy Monster Later Known As Gossimer and featuring Bugs doing a Groucho walk better than Groucho.

And this year, hot off the presses is a masterfully-animated Mickey Mouse from 1995, “Runaway Brain”. That’s not a typo, that really was just 14 years ago, and I remember the enthusiastic-but-futile promotion campaign for this seven-minute thrill ride on film. It just goes to show you that, on rare occasion, they DO make ‘em as good as they used to.

Happy (Month-Early) Halloween!

Sunday Night saw FOX’s season premiere of its Animation DominationShoveitalloverhere block, with The Simpsons reminding us it’s been around for 20 years (and showing its age) followed by THREE Seth MacFarlane shows giving us The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, not necessarily in that order.

The Simpsons started their 21st season with an inspired concept that seemed rather similar to several inspired concepts it had done before, but whenever Springfield meets Hollywood, it’s good for a show-load of rather obvious jokes. The whole idea of the Everyman superhero was good enough that it left me wishing it could be spun off into its own ongoing comic book parody-fest (THAT’S A HINT, BONGO COMICS), but last night’s episode was oddly missing the usual B-story and with a Homer-centric A-story, that’s WAY TOO MUCH HOMER. Even Comic Book Guy seemed wasted in the story once he set it in motion. NOT the Worst. Episode. Ever., but a mix of everything that’s good and bad about having 400+ episodes under a show’s belt. Like I said before, showing its age.

Then came the debut of The Cleveland Show, spinning Family Guy’s token black character off into his own sub-universe, and it was, shockingly, more than a little boring. It was replacing King of the Hill, which is probably the only truly character-based Prime Time Toon ever to last more than one season, but King’s Mike Judge is one of the few people who can pull it off (something that was obvious to me ever since I saw the other early Judge toons a million years ago on MTV along with the one that introduced Beavis & Butthead). It seemed like MacFarlane and company were following in Judge’s footsteps and using the entire episode to set up the series with a credible premise. And if it’s one thing MacFarlane should avoid AT ALL COST it’s CREDIBLE ANYTHING. Of course, Cleveland Brown was one of the LEAST over-the-top characters in the FG universe, and maybe they wanted this to be something different from a usual MacFarland toon. But it all seemed too tame, with the only character that couldn’t exist in a live-action sitcom a bear with a Russian accent and only a couple ‘random digression’ sequences (Family Guy’s bread and butter), one of which was referred back to in the show’s final gag. But that gag was also quite telling in the way it showed how painfully aware the producers and writers are that this was a cartoon about BLACK PEOPLE. Yes, it appears Seth MacFarlane has committed what for him should be the ULTIMATE SIN: POLITICAL CORRECTNESS.

Reviewer’s note: I don’t think being PC in itself is a bad thing, unlike many so-called funny people, as long as you’re not hanging out banners saying “HEY, I’M BEING NON-OFFENSIVE HERE”. Of course, these days, unfunny humor more often comes from the people waving the Political INcorrectness banner, but humor is all about making people LAUGH, not making them comfortable OR uncomfortable. And Family Guy is its best when it’s just bouncing off the wall, and not pointing out the walls it’s bouncing off.

Which leads us to the season premiere of Family Guy, which rewarded us for our patience through Cleveland with another semi-brilliant “Brian and Stewie in The Road to…” episode. For me, the world-weary dog and megalomaniac genius toddler are FG’s best characters, not to mention having the best chemistry together, so it’ll be a long time until I’m likely to declare an episode has TOO MUCH BRIAN & STEWIE. And the “Multiverse” premise was a perfect blank canvas on which to splatter just about anything. And they splattered it all, and most of it was inspired madness. It seems the entire world has declared the sequence in “The Disney Universe” to be the best thing Family Guy has ever done and I am NOT going to fight that wave. But something in me wishes so much that the scenes in live action, low res and the “Robot Chicken Universe” were more than a quick one-off gag. And did anyone besides me see the final gag coming a mile away (like an oncoming truck)?

The final half-hour of FOX’s Animation DominatrixOhwhatever was American Dad, previously known as “MacFarlane’s Other Show”, but now with Cleveland hanging out for as long as it can, it becomes “MacFarlane’s Other Other Show”, reminding us that he’s not all that skillful at politically-based satire either (thank goodness for the alien with Paul Lynde’s voice). AD was pretty much what you could usually expect (but some of the visual gags in the “Vietnam War Re-creation” were better than usual), which does severe damage to any hope I may have that the New Show will get funnier as it goes on.

And could it be FIVE YEARS since I personally previewed the debut of American Dad for MSNBC.com? And could it be that AD is the ONLY show in that entire collection of “New Comedies for ‘04-’05″ that is still around? That does severe damage to any hope I may have PERIOD.

Posted at MetaFilter, I had to repost here.

The Electro-Plasmic Hydrocephalic Genre-Fiction Generator is the latest inspired creation of Wondermark’s David Malki! (exclamation mark his), a slight departure from his usual victorian clip-art comedy (previously) to a wordier bit of satire/inspiration/wackiness/wit/archetyping/talking fish.

Speaking of webcomics and formulas, the "young woman inexplicably transported to a totally weird alternate universe" scenario is being used differently – but successfully masterfully – by THREE different artists: Ramon Perez’s Kukuburi, Eldon Cowgur’s Astray3 and Michael Lee Lunsford’s Supernormal Step (links to the beginnings of the stories… because you gotta). I’m rather surprised the Pirannhamoose has not yet appeared in any of these, especially since Astray3 has featured every other creature you can imagine (or have nightmares about) in its first year.

Meanwhile, Malki! is also co-hosting a weekly talkback-enabled interactive audio podblast with fellow webcomicker Kris Straub, that starts with absurdity and goes out from there…

A MetaFilter post about “Classic Saturday Morning Cartoons” that included Cartoon Network originals from rather recently, prompting several Gen X MeFites to comment that you had to go back to the 1980s for REAL Classics. I had to set them straight.

I’ve mentioned before that I was born the Friday before the debut of both Captain Kangaroo and The Mickey Mouse Club, so I consider myself eminently qualified to spout off regarding ‘kids TV’.

It must be noted that Crusader Rabbit (linked by Guy_Inamonkeysuit) was truly the first cartoon made for television, debuting in 1949. Three-and-a-half minutes daily episodes of serialized ‘adventure’ stretched out over several weeks syndicated to individual stations by NBC to fill time in the local ‘kiddie shows’. Compared to the theatrical toons available at the time (mostly early ’30s or silents with added-on music) it was apparently pretty impressive (I don’t know, I hadn’t been born yet). One of the co-producers was a guy named Jay Ward, who, after losing the show to another production company after a couple seasons, sold real estate for a few years until he met an animator/voicer named Bill Scott and they brought us Rocky & Bullwinkle.

When the Mickey Mouse Club showcased Disney theatricals from only a few years before, it was a big deal, as was Captain Kangaroo’s resident toon, Tom Terrific (created by UPA veteran Gene Deitch). The first TV cartoon produced in color was Colonel Bleep in 1956, with a very stylized look and characters (an alien, a caveman and a pinocchio-like puppet) who didn’t speak English, so the narrator did all the talking and it never had to bother with lip-synching. In the no-budget world of TV cartoons in the ’50s, a smart move.

Hanna-Barbera’s Ruff and Reddy on NBC was the first cartoon made for Saturday Morning, but still in the three-and-a-half-minute serialized format, on a show alongside some recycled theatricals (sadly, NOT Tom & Jerry) and a live host with puppets. H&B got the reputation as ‘pioneers’ in ‘limited animation for TV’ although they weren’t, but when they started doing the syndicated half-hour Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear and Quick Draw McGraw, they became the best at it, and the quality of those shows led to their Saturday Morning domination from the mid-’60s into the ’80s.

When I was a kid, I had a record player and lots of kid-targeted records, including the yellow vinyl “Golden Records” that played at 78RPM. My first 12-inch-33-and-a-third albums were ’story records’ of early H-B cartoons, which essentially contained the soundtracks of the 7-minute cartoons and added some narration to fill in what you couldn’t see. What I realized, even at a young age, was how little the pictures were really needed.

Then there was Beany & Cecil, produced by former Looney Tuner Bob Clampett (and previously done as a puppet show with Daws Butler & Stan Freberg doing voices and operating the puppets) which rivaled Rocky & Bullwinkle for ‘grown-up wit’ and beat it hands-down for animation quality (Bullwinkle was one of the first to ‘outsource’ its animation… to Mexico, where Gamma Productions was essentially ‘learning by doing’).

And the first Japanese import was Osamu Tezuka’s AstroBoy, dubbed and translated by Fred Ladd for syndication by NBC (who rejected the literal translation of the character’s name, “Mighty Atom”, as too generic), followed by giant robot Gigantor, Speed Racer, Kimba the White Lion (which Lion King DID steal from) and my favorite, The Amazing Three, about aliens sent down to observe and judge humanity, disguised as animals (and disguised well, the alien duck had all of Daffy & Donald’s personality flaws).

The Marvel Superheroes beat Superman and his DC allies to TV cartoons by several years, using the limitations of animation to look like comic books brought to (semi-)life (including visual sound effects stolen by the live-action Batman show). But when SpiderMan got his own show, they recycled the same animation of him swinging across town for almost a third of the air time, making it the most boring superhero cartoon I ever saw.

Many shows generally remembered as “Saturday Morning” actually started in Prime Time and only aired in Kiddie Time as reruns: The Bugs Bunny Show, Rocky & Bullwinkle, The Alvin Show, Top Cat, The Jetsons, Jonny Quest, and Calvin & the Colonel (a version of Amos & Andy that tried to skirt the racial issues by making the characters animals).

To many of us, the Banana Splits was a giant step backwards for its use of live-action segments between the cartoons (even if the Splits were voiced by Daws Butler, Paul Winchell and Allen Melvin), and the live-action Danger Island seemed like Jonny Quest with less action. But the guys who designed the Splits, Sid and Marty Krofft, went on to better things.

And THAT is “Classic Saturday Morning Cartoons”, next to which the “Classic ’80s stuff” pales in comparison (except Thundercats, which was the first TV toon I ever saw that impressed me with its action animation).

I think I covered everything about TV toons that I ever will want to here.

Yes, I am late to the party that I pushed the premiere of this blog specifically to do. Real life interferes, and every time I get back to this, there are more masses of content to filter through. My goal here is to point out the best (and a couple of the worst, just for snarking practice) of the obvious Marvel/Disney mashups that came from the minds of various online sources. And besides, this is closer to the time I really intended to start this…

Writing up a list of ideas is a lot easier than drawing them, so everyone from MTV.com (okay but obvious) to the Washington Post (except for the pun-derful “Fantasia Four”, kinda lame) to Kotaku (extra lame, and shouldn’t it’s sister blog io9 be doing this?) to Blast Magazine (never heard of them before, but less lame than most) to Firefox News (Firewhowhat? still lame and kinda depressing too) to the Woot! Blog (stick to funny sales pitches, please), with Chicago Now (not now, dear) taking it a step further to Disney-Marvel Hookups, as if relationships in fictionalized universes aren’t already tough enough.

So it’s fairly clear that the good Disney/Marvel mashups are going to be graphically based, and when I saw that Worth1000 was doing a photoshop contest on the theme, I thought ‘game over, I can do this with one link’. But as skillful as W1K’s members are, most of them didn’t quite capture the essence of the characters – or most of the obvious puns. In fact, some of the best mashups pre-date the announcement of the merger, some by decades; after all, Disney + Comic Book Superhero has long been a formula for fun. Like this version of Mickey Mouse done by Marvel veteran Jack Kirby for Craig Yoe’s 1991 book The Art of Mickey Mouse

This is as good a time and place to note my policy on reproducing others’ artwork: I’ll only post them in a reduced size and/or cropped format and link to the site where I found them wherever possible. So click on the pic if you want to see it full-size, and if you see something here that shouldn’t be here… email your ‘take it DOWN’ request to webster@oneswellfoop.net with proof you have the right and I’ll lose the pic and leave the link. Reasonable? I hope so.

Of course, Mickey is going to get mashed-up far more than any other Disney property, and Spider-Man more than anything from Marvel, so there are a lot of Spider-Mouses running around.

An interestingly varied assortment of looks, but the best conceptual representation, riffing on one of the most iconic Spider-Man scenes, was done by webcomicker R.J. Milholland (spoiler alert: this is the final panel of eight in his 8/31 comic, but the joke should be obvious from panel one)

Mickey/Wolverine mashups are also rather obvious, if a bit unpronounceable. ( Mouserine? Wolviemickey?)

What about something a little more Wolvie than Mickey?

The most quick-and-dirty way to symbolize the Disnification of Marvel is to slap a set of Mickey ears on a superhero, and Wolvie seems to have gotten that treatment more often than anyone else.
(And if webcomickers have done particularly well interpreting this topic – as you will see more examples of later – editorial cartoonists haven’t, as shown in this rundown at Comics Alliance)

There are plenty of other superhero Mickeys, mostly Iron Mouse or Captain Amickeymouse, and mostly undistinguished, but why does the ubiquitous rodent always have to be a good guy?

And why should the Mouse have all the fun (which is something you’d expect Donald Duck to say)

And you know I’d love the punnery behind M.O.D.U.C.K. (and here we have either Donald M.O.D.U.C.K. or Scrooge M.O.D.U.C.K.)

And finally, we make our first move from visual mashups to crossovers, as Donald meets Howard…

Of course, we have more from ‘The Goof’ than just being a casualty in drag. The ‘Goofy as Thor’ meme shows up frequently and rather boringly, but nothing can beat the image of Gooflactus…

The star of Disney’s first feature-length cartoon and first of the “Disney Princesses” is represented by the mutant Snow Storm and what I can only call ‘Snow Green’.

Speaking of the ol’ Hulkster (and I don’t mean the wrestler… is he still using that name? Disney’s lawyers will put a stop to that…), it’s worth remembering that the Big D owns the rights to the Muppets, so Kermit can get some help explaing that it is SO not easy being green…

Another common theme in these mashups is having Belle of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ hooking up with Marvel’s biggest and ugliest characters…

But waitaminute… Marvel has its own character known as Beast in the X-Managerie… where is he? Well, the astute comickers at Penny Arcade have an explanation for that…

With some of the most successful features from both Disney and Pixar being set undersea, there seems to be no shortage of new opportunities for the Sub-Mariner…

Some concepts work on so many levels that I can accept an unfinished sketch… like Stitch (of Lilo &) as the Silver Surfer…

And some puns are so awesomely groan-a-rific that nothing else matters.

And while these images may not be the best by any standard, I must include them only to raise the question: what is it about Disney Channel’s teen stars that scream out “MUTANT?” (High School Mutant Call and Hannah Mutana)

And somewhere in the outer reaches of Disney’s far flung collection of creative properties, there exist concepts like these…

Finally (and I mean it this time), I was somewhat disappointed in the lack of good concepts using Disney’s Winnie the Pooh characters. Casting that silly willy old bear as The Thing or The Punisher are what I consider abuse of irony. But, with the addition of one strategically placed letter, one of Spider-Man’s iconic moments gets, well, seriously reframed…

For those of you unfamiliar with my oeuvre (hey, look, Ma, I spelled it right!), I’m one of the contributors to Square Root of Minus Garfield, the open source Garfield mashup webcomic from the Irregular Webcomic guy among others.

Until now, all my Square Roots involved crossovers with other comics (because, shockingly, nobody else was doing it), including Calvin & Hobbes, Peanuts, 9 Chickweed Lane and The Laugh-Out-Loud Cats.

But this recent strip inspired me to try something different:

(click to view larger)
I thought that the ancient gag needed a different set-up and wondered ‘why Garfield may NOT be serious for a moment?’ And the answer was obvious.

(click to view larger)

You’ll see more from me on the “Square Root of Negative Garfield” site, and that’s both a threat and a promise.

When I decided to resurrect the Funny Paperless blog, I knew I wanted to expand its scope from just Webcomics and Newspaper Comics to every kind of cartoony and comicky thing that has ever interested me – and even a few that didn’t, because nobody reads a blog that doesn’t snark at something, right? And when I stumbled on the Tooned.In domain name (thank you NameCheap and thank you India), it seemed like the perfect umbrella to park underneath.

I’ve been holding off on this for some months as made obvious by that mysterious pink box in the header… What is it? It’s the last frame of the ‘New High Def’ opening sequence of “The Simpsons”, when the family’s HDTV fell off the wall after displaying the credits. See? Two holes where it had been bolted (poorly) to the wall, broken hanging cables (with a little sparking action that only cartoon-based cables do) and an electrical outlet over to the right. All on a pink wall…who else, even in the alternate universe of cartoons, paints their living room pink? Anyway, my first post for Tooned.In was going to be a critique of the Hi Def Simpsons opening (Spoiler Alert: I didn’t hate it as much as some folks, but I had serious issues with parts of it.) But it’s really too late to talk about that.

My actual timetable for the Grand (re)Opening was for later this month, but then came the big news about Disney acquiring Marvel (both entities a cartoon blog can’t ignore). For the record, Stan Lee approves, but Standard & Poor does not. But the most interesting aspect of the deal is the instant reaction of artists and writers of various skill levels creating Marvel/Disney mashups… like the one I put into one of the other header boxes… the best of which I am collecting for a post later today. Stay tooned…

Okay, Talk Like a Pirate Day is over, and the On-and-Off-Line-Comic World’s reaction has been rather underwhelming. Even Devil’s Panties showed a lack of swashbuckly enthusiasm. Irregular Webcomic, which has something like a two-year buffer, remembered the date this year. Medium-Large injected a dose of disturbing modern reality. Pearls Before Swine brought us a croc pirate (with obvious results). Cow and Boy not only had a character who got it wrong, but ran the strip a day late.

In other comicality, Bruno the Bandit has achieved a comics crossovers that may have been even too bizarre for Medium-Large. Savage Chickens proved once again that nobody can sell an old joke like Tommy Tofu. And the deeply pun-centric Get Fuzzy has come up with a trifecta – punny, nerdy and put-downy from the usually-just-annoying Bucky Katt.

Meanwhile, in real life, the endeavor to use Comic Press to give this Comics Blog a unique look has fallen into so many complications (including thoroughly fubarred navigation) I may have to pull the plug. So if this looks any more “unique” in the next few days, it’s just in transition to something less unique.