BACK AT IT! (on Sonic...for Paid Subscribers Only!)

More Bio; before FELIX:

BACK AT IT

I was still at the Sherman Oaks apartment, freelancing. I got a call from an editor at Archie Comics about a SONIC THE HEDGEHOG comic. I hadn't heard of the character. I had kind of an antagonism towards video games. I saw them as wastes of the brain. I still do.

The editor envisioned the comic as an Otto Messmer FELIX spin. It sounded good, and the characters looked okay. So I pencilled a prospective cover (they paid for them then). The overlords at Archie raised an objection I've heard all my life, that “it looks too animated”. The editor had a disagreement about content and left the company. Likewise, a few days later I got a call from Kent Butterworth, late of COOL WORLD, that they were beginning a SONIC THE HEDGEHOG series. Boy, this characters must be the latest craze.

So I went to the DiC studio. By then I had learned to drive and hated doing it. The studio was a non-studio, like a lot in town, meaning the finished animation work was sent elsewhere; a COOL WORLD coworker and I took to calling them “our friends overseas”. There was room for a working studio, but very unlike Bakshi's, it was quite empty of people. There was one group doing adventure shows (they handled the “serious” SONIC) in their own set of cubicles, And there was our group, doing the goofy stuff.

Kent's approach was very loose, in an early 60s TV fashion. Got a show, hey, let's do it. “As long as you can recognize the character, he's on model.” One episode in and out per week, airing daily. No time for nitpicking, and fuck politics. Kent was a cartoonist. I saw him in his office, swimming in a sea of exposure sheets, timing episodes. He loved his work, not in the artistic sense as much as knowing his job and delivering it. Pride.

I prefer this work ethic. “Okay, what am I gonna do with this piece of shit?” No self delusions, no toxic positivity necessary. Whatever you've got, even a job you like, “What am I going to do to make this better?” The old guys cursed at their own work, and say irreverent things like “that fucking Duck” and “Mickey Asshole”. And none of it meant they were going to do a crappy job. Their work outdid the work and will outlive what the boosters and team players are making today. They had guts and balls. It was their job, not their identity.

An artist “plussing” a job is not wanted in the industry now. You daren't outshine the creator.

I don't think there were official dealings with any execs.

Ed Love, whom I never met, was doing sketches adapting the hero in rounder, more “animation” proportions and body attitudes. Kent was hot to try to hire as many old timers as he could, including more than one who were no longer up to the task. Crazy about the old timers. Unprompted, he gave me a list of them with their numbers. I didn't call them; they dropped off one by one. I met one man there who had worked at Terrytoons in the CinemaScope period. I asked him to tell me of his experience, and the first thing he said was, “Well, you have to understand, they were stupid men. Stupid, stupid men.” Without a snarl; he meant they were no more brilliant than the average schlubs we all meet daily.

My old New York friend, one who encouraged me to use the brush, Gary Terry, was also there, as well as a couple of Spumco guys, biding their time until John K got started up again. REN AND STIMPY were huge, and these fellows were iron cast acolytes. Many artists in town had fallen into lockstep about Krisfalusci being the best artist that ever lived. Period. His following was militant in its day. I wasn't buying. Eventually I went back to working from home.

I don't recall whether I saw model sheets of the perfectly round design of “Eggman” from the original SONIC game or “serious” poses of the Saturday morning show. Kent asked me to work up a humorous version of the character. I decided to shape him as an actual egg, and unconsciously gave him a face that was part Yosemite Sam and part Wally Walrus. Wanting to inspire the foreign animators to loosen up, I put down the notes about “sexy” and “handsome”, and “Draw 'Expressively', Not 'Well'.” Thirty years later, a developing fan interest in the show caused them to interpret the slogan as an excuse for lazy, thrashing drawings. I was talking about this character alone. I was encouraging our friends overseas to pull the sticks from their assholes and stop being so dang literal. Stretch and boing stuff was, well, foreign to Far Eastern animators, whom are directed to finish the work, not have fun with it. And a couple did. For the most part, the animators calmed the design, evening it up so it was ugly in an unintended way. I cannot watch overseas animation for US television. Aiming for “quality”, no character stands still, and hovers about meaninglessly while another character dominates the scene. When in want of a gesture, the characters shrug. That seemed to be an industry Commandment.

“Limited animation”. A dirty phrase to a lot of people.“Limited animation” is as old as the industry itself. If it's done well, it isn't noticed.

People think the first season of THE FLINTSTONES as fully animated now; back then, it was a new low. The creators were veterans wise enough to design the show

Making the pilot film was fun. We concocted gags and I animated again, this time with Jim Tyer's SNUFFY SMITH cartoons in mind, a bumptious, odd approach. Ed Love animated scenes I had designed and planned. On COOL WORLD, Johnny Gentilella animated an all-too-quick scene from my layout, so I get two badges. Gary Terry designed Robotnik's lackeys. Kent had the famed French cartoonist, Mobius, to design a pan background.

I'm not sure why this 'pilot' was made; the show seemed to have been sold already. Gags were the name of the game. Kent encouraged us to put in as many into the storyboards as possible, and to ignore the dialogue if we figured the scene could do without it.

We saw the difference between what we were doing on the daily show, which was syndicated, and the network weekly show when someone accidentally sent a script for one of the dailies to the network. It came back bulging with a plethora of objections and censored bits. We were the plebeian show and never got censored!

Gary Terry was made cynical by the stupidity of the TV animation industry after over 20 years of it. It was realistic cynicism. He had a dry sense of humor, of observation. One time we looked at some character designs, and I said, “Look, that one's called 'Sizzle'! Because she sizzles in the sack, right?” He shrugged. He said they gave characters names like 'Sizzle', 'Swat Bot', etc. to imply action that will never happen. Incredibly, Gary, a female coworker, and I had an after hours conversation about “humanizing Robotnik”. All three of us were sick of the one note villains, and we supposed Robotnik could be more than that. Dimension, etc. Later Gary confessed to me he was just bullshitting. No way would that happen on a tv cartoon.

I try to remember having any pissing matches to make this interesting reading, but I don't remember fighting with anyone at the studios. They tended not to be tense atmospheres, which would change as management bulled its way in the creative departments. But I never worked on any of the major shows; the stakes were lower. Nobody was jockeying for power. Anyone who could work could get work on the strength of their portfolios. The mover and shaker Hollywood types nauseated me. To me, it's stupid to jockey for power when it has nothing to do with getting the work done. Things were going to change.

The studios were riding the “creator driven” wave in television animation, thanks to the boom REN AND STIMPY made. Because of that boom, producers wanted to have a “created by” credit on every show. Plus they were saying, perhaps these cartoonists are capable of making us money, let's butt out. Often, that was just a front. The studios had a way of encouraging “creativity” and then taming the outcome. A lot of it was pure Spumco imitation. I don't remember how many series used the irritable guy/stupid guy combination, but there were quite a few, and some made hits. Also being repeated to death were 1950s homes, chirpy housewives, and dork husbands with pipes. But I was getting work, and I must admit, nothing turned my stomach much.

Unfortunately, when the REN AND STIMPY producer failed to behave professionally, the networks and studios took it as the chance to wrest back their power. Now the lead of THE SIMPSONS was taken, and everything was “writer driven”. Artists were nicknamed “wrists” and hired to follow rules only. Later the term “show runner” made the corporate picture complete.

My approach to storyboarding was to give the script a quick read, then keep it beside me as I drew. I began with some sketches, very \quick drawings like a hasty comic strip. I think it was Kent that gave us xeroxed, legal sized paper with, like, thirty squares, so we could zoom, zoom, zoom our way through the first planning stage. I consciously made the sweep of the action, say an arm going to the right, followed into the next scene; a prop or something, echo that direction.

I experimented, or fooled around. There was one time, I had an image of a huge eyeball fade in and out as a transition. This was not accepted, and I can't blame him.

On another occasion, I had a woman love struck, and the camera zoomed into her chest...very quickly...to show an x-ray view of her heart beating its way out of a block of ice. The heart proceeded to grow until she became heart shaped. Kent didn't want to take any chances by zooming into a woman's chest, so he shortened it into having her pop into a heart shape. Some might see that as an improvement.

Kent suggested that we, the storyboarders, submit plots to get a truer cartoon going. As

My approach to storyboarding was to give the script a quick read, then keep it beside me as I drew. I began with some sketches, very \quick drawings like a hasty comic strip. I think it was Kent that gave us xeroxed, legal sized paper with, like, thirty squares, so we could zoom, zoom, zoom our way through the first planning stage. I consciously made the sweep of the action, say an arm going to the right, followed into the next scene; a prop or something, echo that direction.

I experimented, or fooled around. There was one time, I had an image of a huge eyeball fade in and out as a transition. This was not accepted, and I can't blame him.

Kent suggested that we, the storyboarders, submit plots to get a truer cartoon going. As far as I know, I was the only one to submit a synopsis. The others were too experienced, too cynical to believe anything would come out of it. They were right; my synopsis was rejected, but the writers wrote in and constantly reprise Robotnik getting into weird costumes, which Kent said I introduced.

Once in a while I'd get a script that was borderline illiterate. One would be Road Runner script had a baddie pulling a gigantic slingshot back. In the script, the rubber band snapped and the character was sent hurtling forward, which obviously makes no physical sense. That left me to create a gag of my own to lead to the next bit of business. One coworker rationalized that we should not contribute any new material as Kent was encouraging because, hey, they're making their bed, and why do additional labor for no extra pay? I can definitely appreciate his dismissive attitude, but the gags came naturally to me. And if I can make it less nauseating to watch, hey.

Another time, they had Sonic find a bag in the lost and found to use. He says, “Somebody lost it, so I found it.” I thought that made the character even more obnoxious, so I dropped that line, and had him say, like a boy scout, “We'll return it later.” Simply because I, personally, wouldn't appreciate somebody steal my bag.

We were pretty free. A coworker was always saying “OH, NOOOO...I'M TURNING INTO STONE!!” as a reaction when seeing something repulsive. Well, a script had Sonic being frozen into stone, so I dropped in that line. And Kent saw to it that the line was delivered with the same inflection, perfectly.

I have no need to kid myself. The program was mediocre. It was a daily, so everything ended on the same note so the formula could be repeated the next afternoon. There are episodes I boarded that I still haven't watched. It made no impact on the industry whatsoever. When I was auditioning for a Disney Spumco ripoff, I ran an episode I had boarded, and its cliches got jeers. It was a tv show, no more, no less. Most of us did our best, not because we loved the show, but because that's what pros do. What's next...

Meanwhile. The quality of rentals in Los Angeles, I've been told, is spotty. That I learned. I think it was one afternoon after SONIC ended that I said, hey, I'll do what I haven't had a chance to do; stretch out on my living room couch, read and gloat over my San Fernando Valley success. I go to the couch. The carpeted floor feels squishy under my feet. A pipe below had busted open. The management sent over people to rip up the floor; drilling through mounds of dirt to patch up the leak. And this kept happening. First the living room, then the bedroom. And, as would be the custom, the landlord would patch and not actually fix. My lease was up anyway, so off I went. Gantz Management, you suck.

I picked out a place on the border between North Hollywood and Burbank. The neighborhood was a strange combination. The major street was, I think, Burbank Blvd., and lined with film services, used car lots, and food places. Not too far down was the landmark of a towering neon clown, holding a drum reading “CIRCUS LIQUORS”. But turn on to a side street and it was suburban residential. Mine was an utterly typical two story facade, painted white, with a second floor porch and interesting metal banisters and stairs. Many years later, I learned that at one time, Ed Wood, Jr. lived a few doors down.

I was kind of in love with the manager, a brunette with beautiful, clear eyes. My auto mechanic told me some time earlier, she had been very prim; I think he said she was a very straightline Christian. Something happened, and she was suddenly more casual and sexy looking.

I bought a lot of used office furniture at a place nearby. And unwisely stretched a floor mat onto the lawn to flatten. Unwisely because the grass had died under it; a patch of ugly yellow. One day, I came out and she was watering and rebirthing the grass. No complaint, just the usual smile.

One time I came home with a framed vintage Mexican travel poster. She complimented me on having such interesting décor. I told her the girl on it looked like her, and she said, “I wish!!” Another time, she said something about not having lipstick, and I told her that with her natural color, she didn't need it. She told me that women liked to hear things like that.

But she had a live-in man.

The place was enormous. It would have been perfect...

But it was right under the flight pattern of the Burbank Airport. Landing planes made the building quake every five minutes, and being on the upper floor, I got the worst of it.

Those were my Thrift Store Years. Magnolia Blvd. was lined with them. Actually, the entire Valley was infested with them. Every time I had an idle hour, I'd drive around town. Small, independent charity ones, many crowded and even dusty. Layers of stuff. I could put things off to the side and find some treasure esoterica under the second layer. Pretty, well designed ashtrays and knick knacks, priced to sell, for crying out loud. Those, framed pictures; my place looked like a cultured Pee Wee's Playhouse.

Records were a whole 'nother story. That was the first area I'd hone in on. I wanted to live in a place that had its own soundtrack. So much music that was a mystery to me, and was in reality considered dreadfully unhip by the hardcore music appreciators. About the “hippest” stuff were the brassy percussion LPs at a time before they became “new” again. A lot of pop-jazz stuff. Big bands, airy and fresh. Unusual combos; harps with jazz, bands of woodwinds and guitars. Overorchestrated “beautiful” easy listening, violins dripping with chicken fat. From the fifties and early sixties, mostly, with the white spines that always impressed guests (“These are all so OLD!!”). There were a number of “Record Surplus” stores in L.A., and I drove through them one afternoon and evening, not giving a thought to driving from Burbank to Beverly Hills. I'm hot after mysterious media.

I had a party one Saturday night; it almost was the bacchanale I had in mind when I drew up the invitation, a big clown head with two chicly dressed little cats toasting with cocktail glasses. Animation friends, musicians, Depressive Anonymous colleagues, and just plain folk. I saw to it that there was lots of beer and eats. A friend brought over an enormous ice tub for the beer. I played the big band stuff. It was a true “adult” party. Disappointingly, no one wanted to come by solo too help me finish off the beer.