Filmation Bun Toons! Kind of Yay!

I draw these Bun Toons on Saturday mornings.  I wonder where it was that I figured out that Saturday mornings belong to cartoons?

There are millions of former kids who spent their entire Saturday mornings addicted to the TV shows that Lou Scheimer produced, scored, wrote (and occasionally performed voices for).    We lost Lou at the age of 85 yesterday, the day before his birthday today.

Darn it.

Too many shows to mention, and too many to include in this cartoon (I wanted a Tarzan, an Aquaman, the Teen Titans, Isis and a few others included but there was only so much room and so much time), but thanks for all of them.  Even the ones I didn’t like…because someone out there did.

I hope I leave one tenth that legacy.

Ty the Guy OUT!

Your bonus moment is my favorite Lou Scheimer Filmation production that WASN’T animated…

When I was a kid, this was the COOLEST thing I’d ever seen.  I was a HUGE Captain Marvel fan, and thought I was alone on the Earth.    Then Jackson Bostwick, Uncle Dudley and the Winnebago of Eternity arrived one weekend and made it all better.

Thanks again, Lou.

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Bonus BONUS Moment:

When I had the chance to write a Star Trek Miniseries for IDW a while back, one of the first things I asked was if I could include Lt. Arex, a member of the cast used ONLY in the Filmation Star Trek Series.   I pays my tributes when I can!

The beautiful artwork was by Steve Molnar, I wrote the script, and sneaked my ST:TAS character Lt. Arex in there the first chance I could.  Hee hee.  Fanboy Ty Strikes!

For last week’s hospital related Bun Toon, click the sick rabbit above.

For the Bun Toons archive, click the healthy rabbit above.

ALL NEW TOON DAY SATURDAY

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Yes, I know DC has ceased publishing them, but a man can dream, can’t he?  There was so much MORE to mine from the Elseworld’s vein.  If they ever come back, I’m ready…

That’s it for this week.   We should be doing this EVERY weekend for the next while, come on back and collect them ALL!

Ty the Guy

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BREAKING MAD MAGAZINE NEWS

In a move that shocked both the world of publishing, and the world of child rearing, power couple Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have adopted a copy of Mad Magazine #503 as their seventeenth child. “I’ve never been happier” a visibly glowing Angelina has told insiders.   “Months ago,  Brad and I agreed to start adopting from the print and publishing world, and we wanted to start with an American magazine, just to show everyone we’re not so addicted to things from foreign countries, though a copy of Paris Match was very nearly our first choice.”

Ty Templeton, a cartoonist whose work appears in this now-famous issue said “Good for them.  I’ve always liked Brad and Angie, and now I feel like family.  I’m wondering if I have breastfeeding rights or something.”

For those who cannot afford to adopt a copy of MAD #503 (called by some critics “the funniest magazine printed in March of 2010”), you can BUY one at newsstands, comic shops,  grocery stores, and hotel gift kiosks all over the world RIGHT NOW!  And, if you’re too cheap to afford the six bucks a copy will cost you, it’s available to steal from your dentist’s office in about eight weeks.

We have provided a handy guide to what the cover looks like, immediately above.  You may tear out this copy and bring it with you when you go shopping, to ensure accuracy in purchasing your own copy.

Go now, you have been tasked.  Do not give up until you have found one.

Ty the Guy

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Mad Puzzles and Games

Today is a real challenge.  We’ve put up an image of SOMETHING (hard to tell with all those numbers and lines) and are asking for YOUR help to see what it is.  All you have to do, is get out some paints that correspond to the guide seen at the bottom of the image, color INSIDE the lines, and send is the finished version of your artwork.  I’m curious to see how this turns out.

UPDATE:

It’s been up online for less than an hour, and we’ve already had a fan send us their attempt at the image.  This one comes to us from a MARK FREDRICKSON of the UNITED STATES, who did a fairly good job, but clearly coloured a LITTLE outside the lines.  Not bad, Mark, and you’ll do better next time.   Meanwhile, we were SO happy with Mark’s colouring, we’re using it as the cover for MAD #503, on sale NOW.  The fact that it contains a page or two of artwork by Ty the Guy should NOT be the deciding factor in purchasing it.  Consider how your birdcage needs lining, or if there are flies in your area that need swatting with a rolled up magazine.

But by it NOW, or we shoot this dog.  Oh, wait, that’s the National Lampoon.

Ty the Guy.

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HOVERBOY FRIDAY?!?!?

Two entries in a row on their correct days?  The calendar police have gotten to me, obviously.   They waterboarded me all night.  Well, I’m Canadian so it was more of a snowboarding—Hey!  Now an official Olympic Sport!

Today, we dig into the e-mail bag to post some Hoverboy appearances fans have spotted while going about their daily lives.    It seems that Hovermania is sweeping the land at astounding speed.  I can’t take full credit, obviously, as Stark and Nutt (the creators of Hoverboy, back in the thirties) had SOMETHING to do with it, but I like to think my online efforts are keeping the Bucket floating just a little higher.

First up:  A political cartoon aimed at those pesky obstruction republicans.  I think.  Another spot-on ribbing from the always witty FTR Simmons, or is that AZ Simmons, or maybe DJ Hummong**?  I can’t read it, but I’m sure he’s always witty.  He’s syndicated by the AQ Daily SPRUECK or something, so he must be good.  I can’t read any of that stuff up top, sorry.   This was sent in by a Richard Fader, of Fort Lee New Jersey, who noticed the cartoon in his local issue of the daily Sprueck, and sent me a scan of the image in a mere three or four months.  Richard:  To be fair, even though they are wearing superhero costumes, and Hoover-Boy does sound VERY much like Hoverboy, I’m going to assume this cartoon has something to do with the economy, and the reference is far more likely to be about J. Edgar Hoover-a well known millionaire, inventor of the vacuum cleaner, and the industrial dam. But thanks for trying.

Next up is a t-shirt that was for sale at a comic book and fantasy convention in Dallas last month.   Since I’m currently the owner of the Hoverboy trademark (along with Marcus Moore, curator of the Hoverboy museum) a vigilant fan in Dallas (David Waller) thought it was best to alert me to the obviously unlicensed and illegal use of the Hoverboy image on a shirt.  Well, there’s no trademark infringement to small to enforce, David, so we alerted a local law firm in Dallas, who got onto the case within days of the convention last December.   So far, we’ve got a few leads, and I’ve been promised a break any day now.  At only six thousand dollars a month retainer fee, plus expenses (some of which are pretty damn odd, let me tell you), it’s worth every penny to put pirating scum like this behind bars.

Next Hoverboy Friday:  The world’s most expensive Hoverboy toy, valued at almost a hundred dollars!

As always, more of this can be found at the seemingly fallow, but still fun HOVERBOY MUSEUM.

Ty the Guy

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HOVERBOY FRIDAY ON TUESDAY!

Hoverboy Fridays return, with another stunning find in the world of Hovercheology.  (Yes, I just made up a word, so that’s ten dollars you owe me, Mr. Webster’s Dictionary people. We shouldn’t be doing your work for you.)

This week, it’s sketches from the never-aired, never-filmed and never-paid for “Hoverboy Away!” Saturday Morning Cartoon show from 1993, theoretically produced by BUCKET OF GLASS studios.  They never got much further than these preliminary sketches by Jean Paul Rive Gauche before the plug was pulled on the project due to a misunderstanding.  A bad phone connection (from a fairly new form of mobile phone at the time) had caused a programmer at CBS to buy the show sight unseen believing it to be the animated adventures of LOVERBOY, a stadium rock band from Canada whose hits include “WORKING FOR THE WEEKEND” and “TURN ME LOOSE”.  When the CBS executive realized he had bought a show about the superhero created by the maniac who had shot up a shopping mall in Michigan just ten years previously, he ended his relationship with BUCKET OF GLASS immediately and found a studio that WAS willing to produce a show about Canadian stadium rockers who fight crime.  THAT show, “LOVERBOY vs THE PHANTOM OF THE PARK” was cancelled after two very low-rated episodes.

Little survives of the HOVERBOY AWAY! project beyond these few sketches, where clearly BUCKET OF GLASS hadn’t settled on a final look for Hoverboy’s costume.  We fans of Hoverboy can only sigh and wonder what “might have been” if they had actually aired some of this series…what would have been Hoverboy’s EIGHTH TV show.

Jean Paul would be better remembered by both the animation and the cartooning industry in general, had he not been struck by lightning mere hours after creating these sketches.    Another great illustrator lost to the “final gig”.

For more information about some of the Hoverboy shows that DID make it to the air…go to Hoverboy on screen at the Hoverboy Museum online.

Ty the Guy.

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Animation by Ty

We (he and I) have done posts before about animated projects Ty has been involved with (goodbye, months of our lives gone to Dexter Early Cuts!), but yesterday’s post made me think I should just quickly gather ’em all in one place.  So, here, with no fanfare whatsoever…

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Zellers Law of Toyland commercials

featuring Joker

featuring Penguin

featuring Catwoman

featuring Riddler

(Ty did storyboards, layouts, full-animation for all the parts that repeat for each commercial and then, reveals for the Joker and the Penguin (coming out from the cash register.  He was less-involved in the latter two)

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Jerry Seinfeld and Superman for American Express commercials

“Hindsight is 20/20”

“A uniform used to mean something”

There’s a third one I have to hunt down…

(Ty did the still images that transform into the live action…if you have an eye for it, you’ll recognize his lettering for the titles)

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Dexter Early Cuts, “Cindy Landon” webisodes for Showtime

Dexter Early Cuts, “Cindy Landon”

(Ty did all the drawings–not for the credits–and the colouring for those drawings.  With an assist from Yours Truly. Animation was done by KTV Media.)

And Ty says this re-mix of the Batman commericals amused the hell out of him, so he asked me to put it up for ya (we’re still busy arguing about where it should go in this sequence…as I’m the one at the keyboard, I currently am winning, but at any moment he could shove my chair out of the way–it’s on wheels–and take over).

Holy Perplexity, Batman

Keiren

MY FIRST BATMAN CARTOONS ARE ONLINE!

How amusing to see what the internet can dredge up from its depths.

Many years back, I worked on a series of animated Batman commercials, pushing the Toyland department of Zellers stores. ( Zellers is a Canadian version of K-Mart or Target, just a small step up from a Walmart.) I did storyboards, layout, background art and key animation for about 60% of these ads (more or less all the repeating parts, and all the villain “reveals” [except Riddler] are my work, and most of each commercial repeats quite a bit).  You can see how fond I was of Brian Bolland in the slavish imitation of his designs and style I followed.

This Zellers Batman gig, by the way, eventually led to my working on Batman: The Animated Series for about two weeks (where I drew nothing and wrote nothing), and eventually to my gig drawing and writing the tie-in comic (The Batman Adventures).  But that’s a story for another day.

As we only had video tapes to copy things onto back then, my copies are essentially destroyed–so degraded I can’t play them anymore, and I’ve wished I had playable copies for years.  But someone had copies and has uploaded ’em to YouTube.  Here’s a link to them , and here’s a link to an article over on Topless Robot that alerted me that these things were out there.

What blows my mind is that there’s remixes and dance versions of these things.  BWAH HAH HA HA HA HA HA!

It’s getting weird when the internet has better copies of your youth than you do.

Ty the Guy

Madly Mine, and now Yours.

When I first got into the funnybook business, well over sixty years ago…back in what we used to call “The Golden Age”, I had one dream and one dream only:  to someday work for Mad Magazine.  Of course, sixty years ago, Mad would have been two years in the future, but I was nothing if not precocious, and forward thinking.

So, just to show off, I’m running some of my Mad artwork on da homeblog, from time to time, and perhaps one or two of my strips from the late, lamented National Lampoon.  Today we see some more of the GREATEST COMICS OF THE DECADE covers, created for Mad’s San Diego Comic Convention promo of last year.   (I wish I could run the entire article, which was written by Evan Dorkin, but copyright issues prevent me!).   Here’s the rough work, and the final art on two more of these…

The rough was meant to look like an old Superman annual cover,  with captions suggesting how dull all of it was to see again and again.  The editor eventually opted for one image, and I wrote some cover copy to go with it.  Below is the final.

And here’s the rough work, and then final art for the X-Men cover for the same article.  I thought the casual body language of the characters sitting around the kitchen came off fairly well for so small a drawing (The originals for all of these are about eight inches tall, and the sketch itself is probably only three inches high!)  That’s probably size-as for the upload to the right.  I often find that drawing the rough sketch so tiny is the best way to make sure everything “reads” when it’s printed down at the small size in the final article.    Down below is the final, coloured version of the faux cover.  See you later with a few more of these…

Ty the Guy

Wow, I was clearly the reference for the busty babe in the Superman cover–right, honey?  Right?

Keiren

ALL NEW HOVERBOY DISCOVERY!

Can’t say how excited I am about this, Hover-gang.  This stunning collectible (worth it’s weight in double unobtainium)  JUST arrived in the mail.  It was sent in to me by fellow Bucket Brother, Mr. Richard Fader of Ft. Lee, New Jersey, who said he found two copies of this coloring book in a local Goodwill store (the copy he kept is in MUCH better condition, natch, but who could blame him?).  Oddly enough, the copyright date on the coloring book is 1988, which ASTOUNDS me, as I had previously believed that no Hoverboy product came out after collapse of the “Fists and Buckets”  cereal in 1985.

(For years, I thought the cereal box to the left was the last Hover-based product available in America–this was after Hoverboy co-creator Bob Stark’s 12 victim shooting spree at the Northview Mall in1982, which understandably caused the public to turn away from the Battlin’ Bucket character.   Perhaps I was wrong…this is all detailed in an earlier ArtLand post here.)

The coloring book itself is filled with page after page of what it promises on the cover.  Images of demons and monsters fighting, with Hoverboy floating to the side, passively watching.  Clearly the Hoverboy figures are drawn by a different artist in every image.

Oh, and for those who’ve never been, the Hoverboy Museum is a treasure trove of this stuff.  Be sure to visit the comic rack and the many incarnations of Hoverboy on TV and the movies while you’re there.  Or use the hyperlinks above you savvy hackers.

Ty the Guy