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“What A Doll! What A Doll!”

16 Jan
Still featuring most of the cast of "Sabrina, The Teenage Witch"

"Sabrina, The Teenage Witch" image from ultimatedisney.com.

by Kevin Wollenweber

As you probably know by now if you’ve stumbled across this page within the last couple of days,  my blogging partner Rachel Newstead and I are thinking of expanding the scope of this blog to include comments on other media, as much as we can with our limited resources, and whatever else is going on in our lives.

I know that Rachel will intrigue you with her memories and current viewpoints and, hopefully (gulp), I can come up with an intriguing point or two.

So what changed my blogger’s viewpoint within the past few months?  Well, I really enjoy animation and know that it still remains the most flexible of all the art forms.  Or at least it is the stepping-off point at which all or most imagery in film exists, again from my own perspective.

As I have stated before, I could easily be accused of far too much TV watching.  At the time I began watching extensively as a kid, TV was already being hailed as this vast wasteland,  and not the medium of hope that some originally saw.  While I agree that TV will never be this artistic variety that we all hope it could possibly turn into, there are some ridiculous things that I have committed to memory over the years as twisted pop art, and that includes TV commercials.

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LEAVING IT TO THE ANIMATOR: Remembering The Best Work of Bill Melendez

5 Sep
Charlie Brown fails again, from the Bill Melendez-directed "Charlie Brown's All-Stars" (1966). Below, a frame from his work on Bob Clampett's "Baby Bottleneck" (1946)

Charlie Brown fails again, from the Bill Melendez-directed "Charlie Brown All Stars" (1966). Below, a frame from Melendez' work on "Baby Bottleneck" (1946)

By Kevin Wollenweber

I was saddened to hear of the death, on Tuesday, of Bill Melendez. He is most remembered for his excellent production work on the adaption of the Peanuts (Charlie Brown) comic strip to the medium of the animated cartoon and with good reason. Those earliest Peanuts specials were exactly what I expected an animated cartoon of this particular newspaper strip to be! It was so perfectly suited to the “limited” or stylized animation of the age of TV, where animation production had to be done in a timely fashion yet still be appealing to an audience on the small screen. So Melendez did indeed deliver a very likable and inspired version of the popular comic strip and actually won an Emmy his first time out with the first special, “A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS”, a Holiday tale in which Charlie Brown believes he’s lost the spirit of Christmas due to its horrific commercialization, an emotion that I’m sure we, religious or not, have all had around the holiday season.

Each special neatly adapted actual strips, complete with original images and poses from the respective four panels that appeared in newspapers and, later, in paperback books that reprinted the weekday and Sunday strips, many of which I was, at that time, long before the specials, avidly collecting!

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Animated Mix Tapes In The Age Of Digital

29 Aug

By Kevin Wollenweber

Well, actually, that title is rather misleading.  The format I now use, when I can, for “mixing” favorite cartoons from all studios together is DVD, but as some of you collectors and swappers know, this is extremely limited because each and every professional release made today is copy protected.  While I totally understand why this has to be so, it is disheartening, because there are so many great matches I’d like to make, being a kind of “toonhead” of sorts, but I cannot do so because the copy police are watching at all times!

I treat cartoons in much the same way as I treat music.  In fact, when the station was truly thriving or trying to be something more than what it has become (in other words, when it truly had a focus), Cartoon Network had inspired me to start mixing and matching favorite cartoons with a running theme that would morph and twist into sub-themes as the compilation continued.  In fact, I sent the station one or two such compilations, perhaps in mild support of them just being around with programs like Late Night Black and White or Toon Heads.

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