Tag: cartoons

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Friday night at Comic-Con. After walking around all day in costumes, we returned to our hotel, got cleaned up, had dinner at the hotel restaurant and got in line for the shuttle back to the convention center to catch “The Worst Cartoons Ever” at 9:00.

Except only one of us made it onto the bus.

Missing the Bus

We’d thought about going back to the restaurant for dessert later (they had Bailey’s cheesecake), so I did something stupid and went back to check the hours. (If they were going to be closed, we’d go somewhere in the Gaslamp area like Ghirardelli.) This took longer than expected, and the shuttle arrived in the meantime.

The shuttles only run every 20-30 minutes at night, and we had barely 30 minutes to the screening. Chances were if I didn’t catch this one, I wasn’t going to make it.

I fought my way upstream through the crowd that had just gotten off the bus, saw that Katie wasn’t at the stop, and ran halfway down the block as the shuttle pulled away…and immediately stopped at a red light.

I ran to the front of the bus and knocked on the door. The driver gestured toward the back of the bus. I looked back to see if there was another door. Nothing. I knocked again. He glared at me and pointed toward the back of the bus again. It became clear he was not opening that door for anything.

Words Exchanged

So I pulled out my cell phone and called Katie, who was in the process of calling me to ask where the hell I was. Whichever call connected, I started out with something like “The &@^#*& driver wouldn’t let me on the bus!” We each fumed a bit, the light turned green, and the bus pulled away.

I wasted a precious minute trying to decide whether it was worth trying to catch a trolley or something. I figured their schedule was about as bad. Driving didn’t even cross my mind — it probably would have taken me long enough to park that it wouldn’t have helped anyway. If I’d really been thinking I would have walked around to the front of the hotel and hailed a taxi.

Maybe it was that I’d spent the day dressed as the Flash. I decided to run.

Continue reading →

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Re-watched some classic cartoons yesterday.  It started when we were talking about Duck Dodgers at breakfast, and wondered when it had been made.  That led to an IMDB lookup, which mentioned it was #4 on a list of 50 Greatest Cartoons of all time from 1994, and that had me looking up “One Froggy Evening” to verify that it was in fact the cartoon with the singing, dancing, Michigan J. Frog… and that had a link to the cartoon on YouTube.  And YouTube brings up a list of related videos at the end of each clip…

By the time we stopped, we’d also watched “What’s Opera, Doc?” “The Rabbit of Seville” — absolute classics — and a couple of World War II propaganda cartoons featuring Daffy Duck and Donald Duck (the latter in a cartoon based on “Der Fuehrer’s Face”).

At the other end of the spectrum, a week ago I watched 2 DVDs worth of 1967 Filmation cartoons starring various DC super-heroes.  I wanted to do a write-up of the Flash, Justice League and Teen Titans cartoons, and figured I might as well watch the whole thing and do a review. They were seriously cheesy. They were played straighter than Super-Friends, but can’t stand up to the Bruce Timm-designed Justice League series.

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Justice League New Frontier DVD.One of the highlights of WonderCon this weekend was the premiere of Justice League: The New Frontier. I really liked Darwyn Cooke’s original mini-series, DC: The New Frontier, and I’d been looking forward to the animated adaptation. Overall, I’d say the film succeeds.

The story links the dawn of the Silver Age of comics, and the formation of the Justice League of America, with the dawn of the Space Age, set against the political background of the Red Scare. It focuses most heavily on Green Lantern-to-be Hal Jordan and on the Martian Manhunter, but touches on Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman and the Flash as well.

What Works

Cooke’s drawing style and the 1950s retro look to the artwork both translate well to the screen. Continue reading →

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Went to the Los Angeles Comic Book and Science Fiction Convention on Sunday. I’d only been to one before, last June, and it was pretty pathetic. The dealer’s room was sparse, and hardly anyone was in attendance. Or maybe they were all in the movie (IIRC it was a Wonder Woman fan film). All this seen through the context of my search for affordable copies of 1940s-era Flash Comics led to me spending a grand total of an hour there before leaving.

In fact, I wouldn’t have gone back if it weren’t for three things:

  1. The writers on the new Flash series would be there, signing autographs.
  2. One of them posted a reminder on a message board that I frequent. (I would have looked at the calendar next Friday and realized that I missed it.)
  3. They were screening Teen Titans: Trouble in Tokyo, a full-length movie that will otherwise only be shown on Cartoon Network.

With #3, that meant Katie wanted to come along too.

So we got up early (for a weekend), went out to breakfast at Ruby’s and drove up to LA.

I was shocked to see a line to get in. And the place was comparatively packed. I could swear there were twice as many dealers, and 2 or 3 times as many attendees. My best guess is that a lot of people stayed home in June since it was only a month before San Diego Comic-Con.

I cruised the dealer’s room, found some comic book adaptations of The Colour of Magic (1/4) and The Light Fantastic (full set), and a couple of Elric books, looked at what I thought might be the autograph table to see if Bilson and DeMeo were there (the Flash writers), didn’t see them, and joined Katie as we waited for the movie to start.

And waited.

And waited.

You see, the actor who does the voice for Beast Boy was signing autographs (and using it as a way to collect money for PETA — you got an autograph by making a $2 donation). They wanted everyone in line to get an autograph. He wanted to keep reminding people that they really should pick up some of the PETA literature he had up front.

The movie was supposed to start at 12:30, and didn’t get underway until at least 1:00. Fortunately it was a lot of fun… until 45 minutes in, when the DVD started skipping and catching. And no one did anything about it. The guy sitting at the control table, as near as anyone could tell, wasn’t even trying to do anything. After a few minutes — yes, minutes — of this, people started leaving in earnest.

I decided to make one more circuit and see if I could find the main autograph table, and it turned out that it was the table I thought, and I just hadn’t recognized them (one of them did most of the talking at the Comic-Con panel I went to, and he shaved off his beard between then and now). I spoke to them briefly, got them to sign the new Flash #1 and the Flash TV Special from 1990. (They were really impressed at the condition it was in, and asked where I got it. I explained that I’d picked it up when it was new, and kept it that whole time.)

About this time the people running the movie finally got around to fixing, cleaning, or whatever they needed to do to the DVD, so we got to see the rest of the movie.

Trouble in Tokyo was very good. The story was a bit predictable in places, but it kept up a manic pace and had tons of humor. There was a travel montage early on that was just one joke after another, and some drop-down-funny parts scattered through the film.

The one that practically had us on the floor was in a sequence with a sushi chef trying to convince Cyborg to leave his all-you-can-eat restaurant by handing him ever-more-ridiculous dishes.

We still left after maybe 4 hours, but it was an interesting four hours!

(Originally posted at LiveJournal)

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Animaniacs DVD colume 1 cover artEver since TV shows started coming out on DVD en masse, I’ve been waiting for Animaniacs. I didn’t grow up with the show, but it was a big part of my senior year of high school and the first couple of years of college.

They didn’t even have the whole series on VHS—just a paltry five or so tapes with cartoons stitched together by theme.

Well, this morning I got an email from aeryncrichton that Pinky and the Brain would be coming to DVD in July. I figured, great, but what I really want is still Animaniacs. So I started looking around the site, and it turns out that Animaniacs Season 1 is being released on the same day!