Trollheart

I'll certainly look into that, thanks.
Do me a favour and read my intro; it explains it all and I have no intention of repeating myself for your benefit. TVM.

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Trollheart

Part One: Early Animation: Forefathers, Godfathers and Wizards

Timeline: 1911-1914

As I said in the introduction, I don't really consider all animation to be cartoons, and my intention is to keep away from movie animation, but in order to properly position the history of television cartoons it would appear to me necessary, even vital, to look back to how they originally came to be. After all, television cartoons were not invented on telly, but began life in the only way people could see them, which was on the silver screen. Often used as a “short” to prepare people for the main movie, they became very popular and although it was Walt Disney who first really took the reins, as we shall see shortly, and made the cartoon a separate and important event rather than just a backup for a film, he was not the first to animate drawings. That honour goes to a man by the name of Winsor McCay, and he had three important animations out before Uncle Walt was even thinking about that mouse.

Little Nemo or Winsor McCay: The Famous Cartoonist of the NY Herald and his Moving Comics (1911)

As a way of introducing what would basically be the first ever cartoon, Winsor McCay, who as you can see from the above subtitle worked as a cartoonist for the New York Herald, and in fact worked under William Randolph Hearst, the supposed inspiration and model for the protagonist in Orson Welles's classic movie Citizen Kane decided to shoot much of the movie in live action, setting up the story whereby he bets a group of laughing colleagues that he can animate drawings. Although the film is over eleven minutes long, the actual animation sequence lasts barely four, and is nothing more than a flip-book like we all used to use and make as children (didn't we?) but it's easy to scoff at this now. When you think though that this was just after really the turn of the twentieth century, and that actual movies were yet in their infancy, it's quite an amazing feat. Deaf to the laughter of his peers, McCay promises to produce four thousand drawings by the next month, and by showing the drawings through a Vitagraph camera he does exactly what he boasted he would, animating the drawings and making them move.

It's truly remarkable. This is 1911, remember, when there were no editing, special or indeed any effects, and yet this film really fools you into thinking, not only that the characters on the paper move, but that they do so seamlessly. And they don't just move up and down or left to right: there's a whole story being played out here, even allowing Nemo himself to “draw” a princess for himself, present her with a seat in a dragon's mouth which then bears the two of them away. And because he has drawn all the pictures with coloured ink, this is, in a very real sense, not only the first animated film, but the first colour animated film! At least twenty years before movies had colour. Amazing. Just totally amazing.

(You can skip to about 8:45 for the animation)
I know you'll look at it and say it's crude by today's standards, and I guess it is, but remember this is one hundred years old! And it's almost completely flawless in its motion. Even the early silent movies jerked and missed frames; this is totally seamless. My hat would be off to this guy, if I wore a hat.

Not satisfied with that, he went on to produce another “animated movie” the next year, this one being totally silent (no music) and in black and white but just as impressive. How a Mosquito Operates is another classic of early animation by this man, who can surely be called nothing short of a genius?

But his piece de resistance would come with Gertie the Dinosaur, produced in 1914, and the last of his animations before Hearst put his foot down and ordered him to concentrate on his day job, drawing cartoons for the newspaper. How a man like Hearst could fail to see the potential in McCay is just staggering. Gertie is even better than the other two films, with McCay actually integrating himself somehow into the animation, in such a way as to make it look like he climbs on the dinosaur's back and it takes him for a ride! Unbelievable!

Even more stunning: this man who had basically invented a whole new system of animation – virtually, in fact, invented animation itself – refused to hoard his secret or protect his methods. “Any idiot that wants to make a couple thousand drawings for a few hundred feet of film is welcome to join the club”, he said, and never patented his idea. His last major work was the first record of the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 by the German Navy. It's an amazing piece of work, again, this time requiring no less than 25,000 drawings, and really comes to life on the screen. It's of course not a cartoon, but a serious animation, again positioning McCay at the very top of his field, a field with few if any others in it at his time.

McCay declared himself – probably deservedly – as the “Originator and inventor of animated cartoons”, but during a meeting with other animators he deplored the way these men were turning his “art” into a “trade”. He died in 1934 as a result of a cerebral embolism. It would not at all, I believe, be hyperbole to call this man the father of cartoons, and he certainly set the ball rolling, a ball others would pick up and run with over the next few years.

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Trollheart

Timeline: 1919-1923
Fast forward five years after Gertie the Dinosaur had made her mark and established Winsor McCay as the first true animator of cartoons, and you have the debut of a little guy that most of us (certainly people of my age anyway) will be familiar with. Whereas Gertie was a simple creature who responded to commands (though she could disobey, as she does in the cartoon, throwing Jumbo the elephant into the lake and eating trees instead of carrying out her master's commands) Felix the Cat was the first truly anthropomorphic creature to walk across a cinema screen, again, more than a decade before Mickey Mouse.

Felix the Cat (1919-1932, 1953 - )
Although some doubt seems to exist as to who actually created him, it's generally accepted that Felix was the work of Australian cartoonist Pat Sullivan, and his creation became a big hit on the big screen, starring in his own adventures and, even though silent, able to connect to the audience and communicate his feelings through facial expressions. The first film to feature Felix was Feline Follies, released in 1919.

In this first short he is not called Felix, but Master Tom (one would assume, from tomcat) and initially at least walks on all fours, like a domesticated cat, but is soon standing on his hind legs and behaving more like a human than an animal, as he falls in love with Miss Kitty White and does his best to win her heart. It's a clever if simple little cartoon, with attention paid by Sullivan not only to Tom and his lady, but to extraneous factors, such as the mice popping up out of the floorboards as Tom prepares himself for his date, and then doing a little dance when he's gone. The romance of two cats meeting is given a realistic twist when, as Tom proudly declares to his lady love “I have only nine lives to live, and I'll live them all for you” (how romantic and cute!) the neighbours hear only yowling and screaming, and shout at the two cats to get lost. Undeterred, Tom sets up another date, the following night at the trash can, and this time he brings a banjo and plays it while Kitty White dances happily. Back at home, the mice are wrecking his house and eating all the food.

In a very clever demonstration of what could be even then done with cartoons, and as we already saw could be accomplished in McCay's work, Sullivan makes Tom play notes, then take them out of the air and make go-karts out of them for him and his lady. When he gets home he goes asleep, not noticing or caring about the state of the house, but when his owner wakes up and sees the mess she throws him out of the house. He goes to see Kitty, but is less than happy to see he now has a whole brood of kittens to look after! In a perhaps grim ending, he runs to the local gasworks and lies down, taking his own life.

I didn't expect such a dark ending, but the film did well so people obviously didn't catch on to that, or just laughed at it, I guess the same way we would later laugh at Tom being beaten up by Jerry, or the Coyote falling off a mountain into the distance. That's the thing I guess about cartoons: they're not real, and they don't purport to be (later, more sophisticated animation such as The Simpsons and Family Guy etc do, but that's a different matter) and the idea of a character dying, or suffering immense injuries in one scene and then coming back in the next would become a staple of cartoons as the decades wound on. Pure escapism, anything could happen in cartoons and there were no consequences. Pianos, anvils and rocks regularly fell on characters' heads, they suffered all sorts of injuries, even death, but were right as rain the next time we saw them. Still, you'd have to admit that there is a certain darkness in cartoons often, but in general it's not taken seriously. The fact that this one ends with the main character committing suicide rather than face up to his responsibilities as a parent speaks perhaps to the prevalent attitude of the time, and I guess at its heart it's quite brave.

Master Tom was back a week later with a second feature, Musical Mews, though I can find neither information on nor a video for that, and for the third outing for the little black and white cat – now walking upright like a human – the name was changed to Felix, resulting in The Adventures of Felix, which debuted just before Christmas 1919. Again, no video appears to be available, but it was immensely successful, and by 1923 Felix was a star. He even had his own film, Felix in Hollywood, where he got to meet cinema stars such as Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin, and was written about by noted author Aldous Huxley. Felix became famous not just for his cuteness and cleverness, but for the sense of surrealism and fantasy that his world occupied. His tail became a tool he could shape to whatever he wished, using it now to make an exclamation mark (remember, this was still the era of silent movies), now a shovel, now turning into a bag to trick his owner into carrying him to Hollywood.

Another thing this movie did (as did the first Master Tom/Felix cartoon) was to use actual speech bubbles in the drawing, though they were more speech rectangles really. Whereas before, any speech had been communicated by a blank screen showing an ornate card – you know the kind of thing – and then cutting back to the character who had said it, here we see the words appear above the heads of Felix and his owner, at the same time as they are spoken. The mouths don't synchronise obviously – I don't think they even move – but it's a much better and more immediate representation of the actions of the characters without having to cut back and forth. The integration into the cartoon of popular themes – sword fights, cowboys etc – was surely another good way to secure the approval of the audience, who would have bought into such a story. The cuteness of Felix himself can't be oversold, and you find yourself rooting for him in every scene, despondent for him when he fails to land a movie role and then delighted when he manages to make his dreams come true.

By now Felix had also become the first cartoon character to metamorphose into a brand, with toys, clocks, all sorts of things sold with his image on them, to say nothing of being sung about and even starring in his own comic strip. His popularity inevitably spawned imitators, and of course he was the template for such later cartoon cats as Sylvester and Tom, while he also amassed his own entourage of co-stars, including Skiddoo the mouse, his nephews Inky, Dinky and Winky (surely the inspiration later for Huey, Dewey and Louie, Donald Duck's nephews) and of course his girlfriend from the early Master Tom cartoons, Miss Kitty White. He also had the honour of being one of the first images to be broadcast on the new television medium, when RCA broadcast the image of a papier-mache doll of him. Later his image would be co-opted by everyone from the New York Yankees to an American Naval bomber squadron, and as time and technology moved on, he would make the inevitable transition to the small screen as television grew more popular and more widely available.

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Neapolitan

When you get to Mickey Mouse, please let it be known that it was actually Ub Iwerk that was the one who originated the character.

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Trollheart

And yet again Disney broke new ground, as the idea of the Silly Symphonies was extended into full feature format to encompass The Sorcerer's Apprentice and bring Mickey Mouse into the public eye. The gloved rodent's popularity had declined somewhat with the attention being taken up by Snow White and then Pinocchio, and Disney felt it was time to remind people of his earliest creation. Moving away, for the first time, from the idea of having songs written for the movie and returning to the Silly Symphonies format of setting cartoon sequences to classical music, Fantasia was born.

The idea was quite courageous. Given that his audiences had so far seen the happy tale of a young woman living with seven dwarfs, followed by a puppet discovering how to be a real boy, and that even the previous shorts had all followed some sort of definite storyline or plot, the plan to have a series of separate “longer” shorts, all set to classical music (which might be a turn-off for younger audience members, you would think) that really never meshed to tell one cohesive story, must have seemed a pretty big gamble, but it would pay off. Securing the services (for free!) of the conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski, Disney was ready to create a real extravaganza, and though I've seen it once and was not terribly impressed, you can't argue with box office returns of between seventy and eighty million, for an initial outlay of just over two.

There would be no real cast for this outing, as there was no speech, only music, and one narrator, but that didn't stop the budget equalling the previous movie. Again, World War II would restrict the distribution of the movie, and combined with the expense of fitting out theatres with Disney's new Fantasound state of the art stereophonic sound system, would lead to slow uptake on the movie, but Disney insisted on the new system, as the movie stood or fell as much on the audience's enjoyment of the music as the animation. Fantasia thus became the first feature film to use stereo sound. It was also the longest animated movie at the time, clocking in at a somewhat attention-challenging two hours and six minutes.

Fantasia also became, if not the first animated movie, then the first full-length one, to mix live action and animation, as the opening sequence is live action with the orchestra tuning up. Personally, I think this takes from it, but that's just me. A brief rundown of the various sections follows.

Opening with, as mentioned, the narrator introducing the film against the background of the orchestra tuning up, we get Toccata and Fugue by Bach. This is a pretty abstract piece, moving on to a scene of growth and flowering, the changing of the seasons in Tchaikovsky's The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, with fish, flowers and mushrooms all dancing, then the most famous sequence, where Mickey Mouse is reintroduced to cinema audiences for The Sorcerer's Apprentice followed by Stravinsky's Rites of Spring, showing the birth cycle of our planet.

A scene from Greek mythology plays out against the backdrop of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony before Dance of the Hours takes us into a comic ballet scene with hippos and elephants, and finally Night on Bald Mountain features a danse macabre as the Devil summons forth the dead from their graves. An odd one to end on, though the dead are sent back to their rest at the end and it finishes with the Ave Maria and a procession of monks.

In essence, it has to be accepted that Fantasia was an animated movie – perhaps the first one ever – if not actually intended for then definitely aimed at adults. It's hard to see what children would have got out of it, other than the dances and the flashing lights, and of course Mickey Mouse and his unruly mop. But over the course of two hours, you could see kids very easily getting bored, and the music would likely have done little to assuage that boredom. So really, Fantasia sets the most precedents, at this point, for an animated full-length movie:

1. It has, basically, no cast
2. It has no speech save that of the narrator
3. It survives entirely on classical music as a soundtrack
4. It was the first to use stereo sound
5. It was the longest featured animation at that point
6. It was the first to try to reintroduce an old (perhaps even, at this time, in danger of being forgotten) character and succeed in raising him back to, and then astronomically above, the original level of his popularity
7. It was the first animated film made primarily for adults
8. It was the first full-length animation to mix in live action (Winsor McCay did this of course, but his movie was much shorter and more basic)
9. It was the first animated movie not to follow a definite, planned storyline and to use different sequences (Lotte reiniger's Die Abenteure des Prinzen Achmed uses sequences, but they're all from the same source)

That's a lot of firsts. Disney was always a man to take a gamble. They laughed at his plans for Snow White in the same way as Winsor McCay's associates laughed when he claimed he could make drawings move, and both proved their doubters completely wrong. RKO worried about his insistence in installing his Fantasound system in theatres, and the length of Fantasia, and they were proved wrong too.

Inevitably, much of the staid and stuffy classical music community railed and sniffed at the movie, declaring their music was being debased, and arguing over which parts had been changed or omitted. Stravinsky, the only living composer at the time of those whose music was used, was unimpressed. I suppose when you've created serious music it's a bit of a culture shock to see hippos dancing to it! Lighten up, guys!

With or without these objections, it would seem that Walt Disney was unstoppable, and his studios would certainly dominate cinema animation for decades to come, though soon enough others would get in on the action, as we will see. Nevertheless, for now everything Disney touched, while not initially turning to gold, would turn out to be a winner. And that would be doubly true of his next two outings.

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Trollheart

While Disney is the unchallenged king of animated movies, certainly in the forties and fifties, I don't intend to explore all his movies, as initially this began as an examination into television animation, ie cartoons, and though it quickly became apparent to me that I couldn't ignore the genesis of these cartoons, ie animated films, I have no intention of recounting the history of Disney. I've acknowledged his rightful place in the history of animation, and in all likelihood I'll come back to him later, but I'd like to just set him aside for now and look at what else was happening in the 1940s in terms of cinema animation.

Before I do, though, one final accolade to Uncle Walt. With the release of Dumbo (1940) and later the already-mentioned and long-delayed Bambi (1941), Disney introduced the idea of anthropomorphism, in other words, the assigning of human emotions, actions and thoughts to at first animals but later even inanimate objects, as we have seen with the likes of Pixar's Cars and Planes. Up to then, with the exception of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, animated movies had featured humans, or human-like creatures such as dwarfs (they're in some small animated movie released around 1937, you probably haven't even heard of it) and while things like squirrels, birds and other animals were in this movie they acted as squirrels, bird and other animals. They didn't talk, they didn't show any real sense of reasoning. Rabbits ran if trouble threatened, birds flew away. Birds tweeted, squirrels, well, did whatever squirrels do. Honest John and Gideon did certainly make a case for anthropomorphic creatures in Pinocchio, as did Jiminy Cricket to an extent, but Dumbo was the first animal to star in their own movie and have it built around them, and as fae as I remember, though that had some humans in it Bambi, which followed (though it was written before Dumbo) had none at all, so you were really taken into a different world, the forest the animals lived in.

But Disney was breaking down so many barriers and winning awards left right and centre, and setting the standard for the genre, what was left for those who would be his competitors to do? Well, I'm glad you asked.

Remember this guy?

Though his last (and first) real full-length animation, Gulliver's Travels had been released in 1939, and it might seem he had not done much since, nothing could be further from the truth. Sure, he had yet to produce another full-length animation, but as I mentioned in a previous entry, he was already very popular for two cartoon characters who would challenge the dominance of Mickey and Donald, and who are both known to just about everyone reading this, if only by reputation.

Betty Boop (Created 1930)

Originally created as an anthropomorphic poodle figure as part of a series of shorts created by Fleischer called Talkaroons, Betty appeared in the fifth instalment as a companion to another popular character, Bimbo. Very quickly, as her own appeal became obvious, her form was changed into a far more human woman, and Bimbo, who had been positioned as the star and a potential rival to Disney's big guns, especially Mickey Mouse, faded out. Supposedly based on singer Helen Kane, Betty was depicted as a 1920s “flapper” girl, and it is perhaps ironic that while her male companion Bimbo was named as such because at that time, the word meant a man ready to fight, she would come to encompass what we would call today the characteristics of a bimbo. If I hadn't known better, I would have thought she had been based on Marilyn Monroe, though of course at this time Norma Jean Baker was a child of four years old. At any rate, Betty soon progressed beyond her role in the Talkaroons and acquired her own strip, becoming one of the most loved and well-known cartoon characters ever.

Although originally designed by Grim (seriously? A cartoonist called Grim?) Natwick, the transformation from canine to human was mostly attributed to five men – Berny Wolf, Seymour Kneitel, “Doc” Crandall, Willard Bowsky and James “Shamus” Culhane. I honestly can't think of another cartoon character so expressly sexual and attractive until 1988's Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (in which she has a cameo herself), when Jessica Rabbit made us lads all lust after a cartoon woman. She really is proportioned (other than her head) as a totally sexy woman, and her “Boop-oop-de-doop” line is maddeningly sexual too. Fleischer would create firsts of his own, rivalling Disney for the honour of presenting the first properly-proportioned sexy female cartoon character (and this in an age where sexual attitudes were still very repressed) and indeed be the first to portray sexual harassment onscreen in a cartoon, when in Boop-Oop-a-Doop (1932) she is threatened with rape by a villainous ringmaster and only saved by another character. That's strong, strong stuff for eighty years ago!

Betty's cartoon series lasted from 1932 to 1939, but the interference of that bastion of the guardians of public morality, the censor, particularly the National League of Decency and the Production Code, both forced Betty into a more conservative, less sexy role, and she began to be eclipsed by her support characters from about 1935 on. Though there were two television specials, in 1985 and 1989, Betty did not make the same transition to the small screen as did Fleischer's other, more popular character.


Popeye (the Sailor Man) (Created 1932) *

The first of his characters not to be created by his own studios, Popeye was licenced by Fleischer in 1932 from King Features, the publishing firm owned by William Randolph Hearst, in whose New York Journal daily comic he had starred since 1929, having been created by Elzie Crisler Segar as a bit-part player in her series Thimble Theater. He instantly became so popular that not only was he brought back quickly, he took over the series and became one of the best known cartoons at that time. His appeal still lasts today, where his cartoons are regularly played all over the world.

Unlike Walt Disney's cute creatures and cuter people, Max Fleischer preferred to draw his characters in a more abstract, caricaturistic way, and with more down to earth settings reflecting the Great Depression through which he lived. Working in black and white a lot longer than Disney he used the medium to his advantage rather than feel restricted by it. I suppose you could perhaps call his cartoons a sort of film noir, certainly compared to Disney's more kid-friendly, happy and uplifting style. Or to put it another way (and anyone familiar with his work and/or film in general, correct me if I'm wrong, as I may very well be) if Disney was animation's Spielberg then Fleischer was its David Lynch. His cartoons were rougher drawn, more symbolic and surreal, and often contained hidden (or sometimes not so hidden) messages of sexual innuendo. They were also, in general, darker in content than Uncle Walt's stories of happy forest creatures or flying elephants. This in itself I guess probably prevented Disney from really seeing Fleischer as a threat (even though they were personal rivals); they were almost working at opposite ends of the spectrum, and with Disney moving on to full-length features while Max was still producing Betty Boop shorts, it seemed unlikely the one would ever challenge the other.

Popeye however did become immensely popular, starring in his own series of movies. Fleischer's last ever full-length feature, Mister Bug Goes to town (1941) was a complete disaster. Apart from the fact that a rift had developed between Max and his brother Dave, to the point where they only communicated in writing while working on the movie, it was released two days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor signalled the US's entry into World War II, and Paramount lost their shirts on it. They demanded the resignation of both brothers, which they duly got, and moved in to take over the studios.

Under new management and in really what amounted to a new world now, Popeye became a war hero, starring in shorts in which he dealt out American justice to the Nazis and the Japanese. The studios were renamed Famous Studios, and in 1943 Her Honor the Mare became the first Popeye short to be released in colour. Although he was now gone, Fleischer's long association with black and white cartoons was forcibly over, and Popeye was dragged into the world of colour cartoons. In 1957 Paramount sold the rights to Popeye and three years later he made his debut on the television screens of America, but we'll pick that up when we get the the TV era in this history.

Popeye was of course a sailor (more of a sailor than Donald Duck, as he actually did go to sea) and had average strength until he ate spinach, which increased the size of his muscles and allowed him to take on whatever foes he was facing. Whether the idea of using spinach was a marketing ploy or just coincidental, it did succeed, as American (and later British) kids started eating more spinach so as to be just like the cartoon sailor. So influential was he on the sales of spinach that several statues to him were erected, including one in Chester, Illinois, home of his creator, Alma, Arkansas, said to be “the spinach capital of the world” and Crystal City, Texas. Popeye had an entourage of supporting characters, originally the main ones in the Thimble Theater series, such as his girlfriend Olive Oyl, Wimpy, The Sea Hag and Bluto or Brutus, his eternal nemesis and rival for Olive's affections.

Prior to their forced departure and the takeover of their studios, the Fleischer brothers had reluctantly accepted a commission to bring the comic book character Superman to life on the screen, and though they quoted what they believed to be an exorbitant price per episode, citing the difficulty of working in Superman's world and bringing Metropolis alive, they were bargained down and ended up being stuck with the project. Although Superman ran for a total of seventeen episodes, the Fleischers only created nine. The remaining eight are generally considered inferior to them, as the original ones had a more science-fiction theme, while the later ones leaned more in the direction of WWII propaganda films, and were created by a team of animators made up of Seymour Kneitel, Isadore Sparber, Sam Buchwald and Dan Gordon. Kneitel had worked on the humanisation of Betty Boop for Fleischer, if you remember, so he was obviously kept on by Paramount/Famous.

One thing the Fleischers apparently are credited with, rather amazingly if it's true, is the power of flight for Superman. In the Action Comics, he was only able to leap from building to building, but when the brothers originally animated this it looked silly, and they decided to have Superman fly instead. Action, and later DC, okayed this and had the ability written into the character's canon. I think I'm also correct (though admittedly I've not researched it) that the Superman cartoons were a) the first time a superhero had been depicted onscreen b) the first time a superhero had been animated onscreen and c) the first time a character had appeared onscreen in an animation which had originally taken place in comics (as opposed to a newspaper strip, a la Popeye). So again, keeping up with Disney by pioneering the way and planting a few milestones of their own, these guys.

Later on of course, the series would follow Popeye across the divide to television, where it would entrance a whole new and younger audience, and reawaken interest not only in Superman but in superheroes, leading to such series as Batman: the Animated Series, Spiderman and others, and writers such as The Dark Knight's Frank Miller would quote the cartoons as a major influence on his writing. DC would honour the Fleischers by naming tje as one of The Fifty Who Made DC Great in 1985. Max himself would succumb to Arterial Sclerosis of the brain and pass away in 1972, earning himself the title of “the dean of animated cartoons.” Dave would survive him by seven years, taken in 1979 by a stroke. Both would outlive Walt Disney, who passed away in 1966.

* Refers to the creation of the character for animation purposes; Popeye was originally created in 1929

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Trollheart

I find it mildly amusing that you seem to take offence every time I open a new journal, but never comment further than that. In other words, you see a new journal from me, you post your sneering comment about how unnecessary you think it is, and that's the last we ever hear of you. You never post anything meaningful after that, never join in. I have to admit, it comes across as really spiteful. Doesn't bother me, as such, but I'd prefer you to keep comments like that to yourself. What does it matter to you if I have a hundred journals (target set for 2020!) as long as the mods approve them and don't have a problem with me having all these journals? After all, at least when I open a journal I stick at it, unlike so many of the half-begun ones you have started yourself and then dumped when you lost interest. I'm not saying they weren't good ideas, but when I have an idea I generally see it through.

Not that I need to explain, but for the sake of clarity I will. Here are my thought processes that led to this journal.

1. I was writing the review for Jaws in my film journal, and thinking about going Pixar next.
2. I checked and found that, despite what I had initially thought, there are only 17 Pixar movies, and many of these are sequels, even sequels to sequels.
3. I thought then why not do all the Disney ones too?
4. That led to a thought about cartoons.
5. I then thought I'd do that in The Couch Potato, obviously, but once I decided it was going to be a history of cartoons, and given that I am working on new material for The Couch Potato, in particular Game of Thrones coverage, I didn't want to take over the journal with this new history, nor did I want to just do it piecemeal, fitting it in where I could.
6. I briefly considered doing the "journal-within-a-journal" thing I did with Excelsior! in my comics journal, but that wouldn't work for a history.
7. The only option then open to me was a new journal.

tl;dr: I've no problem with you not liking, or being interested in, my journals, Ki, but I'd appreciate it if you didn't post your snarky comments in them. It helps nobody, makes you look bitter and petty, and in the long run, it's certainly not going to make me stop creating new journals. So it's just a waste of your time, time you could perhaps spend better looking after your own journals, nomsayin?

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Stephen

Speaking of weird and trippy cartoons check out Liquid Television from the early 90s. I think it was an MTV thing but was shown here as an independent series.

Key

It's just too much fun.

Trollheart

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