Forgive me if this is overly stupid.
I’ve been watching Adult Swim lately and wondering: Are the cartoons they show (namely Space Ghost, Harvey Birdman, and Sealab2021) cartoons that once existed and are now being redone entirely, in some twisted fanfiction sense? They have that “unanimated” feel as though characters were cut out and pasted together.
I sincerely hope I’m not being incredibly ignorant.
To answer your question: yes.
The first of these was Space Ghost Coast To Coast, in which animation from old *Space Ghost * episodes was digitally edited from the existing prints, and superimposed on new backgrounds. Nearly all the animation and poses and suchlike of S.G., Brak, and Zorak, are straight from the old show, sometimes with some minor alterations (like when S.G. is seen holding a card with his lines on it, for example; his arm and hand was partially redrawn for this.)
*Sealab 2021 * is a somewhat more ambitious project, but uses the same idea: digitally edited animated characters from the old early-seventies eco-friendly adventure cartoon Sealab 2020, superimposed over the backgrounds from that same show, sometimes with new material added. In this instance, though, they actually went so far as to rework the characters’ movements in some fairly extreme fashions, and I’m pretty sure they’ve produced some new animation for some parts of some episodes.
Harvey Birdman… um… I dunno. Some parts look like they might have been lifted from the old sixties Hanna-Barbera Birdman superhero cartoon… but much of the show appears to have been digitally animated from scratch, perhaps using the heads and suchlike from the original cartoons. Harvey Birdman is, perhaps, the most ambitious of all, since EVERY episode includes characters from several Hanna Barbera cartoons – Harvey’s clients are always other Hanna-Barbera cartoon characters, the Judge is, in fact Mighty Mightor, and in some episodes, Peter Potamus can be seen working at Birdman’s law firm (and was briefly spotted boinking a secretary in his office during the Christmas party…)
I think the current incarnations of Space Ghost, Brak & Zorak got their start on Cartoon Planet before Spacey got his talk show.
I’ll never forget the episode where Brak kept provoking Space Ghost because he was safe, since he “wasn’t animated to explode”.
Heh, heh. I musta missed that one.
I could have sworn it was Moltar who claimed he wasn’t animated to explode. Maybe both did it. In later episodes he does get shot.
While we’re on the favorite episode sidetrack, mine is the one where Space Ghost spends the entire episode being angry, totally ignoring the guest, and talks about his poodles.“I shave their butts, so they know I am angry!”
I guess this is as good a time as any to ask a mostly irrelevent Adult Swim question. I routinely watch the Futurama-Family Guy hour, but I find that every so often they switch the two’s timeslots around. Is there a reason for this? Is it explained on the commercial bumpers, because I only sometimes read those.
I think they just do it to try and keep them fresh. They only have so many, run them 4 times a week. Actually “Futurama” goes 5 nights a week beginning today. I believe they hope that changing it around just a bit will hope keep people from getting the feeling that they’ve already seen them all a few times and stop watching.
Hope no one forgot that Adult Swim expands to saturday today. “Animatrix” today and “Inuyasha” and “Wolf’s Rain” premieres next week saturday.
Aack! “Futurama” expands to sunday beginning tomorrow. Sunday.