The Stuff

A scene from the recent season of Metalocalypse.

Venture Bros. fans have been clamoring for merchandise. Their prayers have been answered with the Venture Bros. shirt club!

Here’s one way to spend 40 minutes:

Peep Show season 5, episode 3: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. New personal lows for the boys.

And the latest episode of Metalocalypse is up on Adult Swim for the next 6 days. Don’t bother clicking the link after May, 23rd. The episode is called Dethwedding. Pickles must attend his degenerate brother’s wedding, much to the amusement of the rest of the band.

Metalocalypse will be back on May 18th, at the decent hour of 12am midnight (on Adult Swim, Cartoon Network of course).

The Venture Bros. kicks off on June 1st at 11:30pm, making for what will then be 45 minutes of the finest television available to eyeballs and earguts.

Adult Swim schedule.

I Am Baby Cakes might be the worst animated cartoon ever created, but it’s funny, and insane, and that counts for a lot. The show is moving to Adult Swim renamed as China Illinois.

Here’s the web series, make sure you watch episode 2 at least:

As I’ve said before, the 3rd season of the Venture Bros. starts on June 1st. The Quick Stop website has a season 3 teaser video which features spoilers, but it will definitely whet your appetite, so it’s worth watching.

Last week I went to an evening with the creators of the Venture Bros. at SVA in NYC, invited by my friend Cliff who belongs to ASIFA East and runs their Blog. The panel featured Venture Bros. creators Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer, as well as Liz Artinian (color supervisor) and Stephen DeStefano (storyboard & design director). The night featured about 2 hours of Q&A, and a full episode from season 3 (featuring Dr. Henry Killinger, and it was mind-blowing).

Some facts:

• The show is written, planned, designed, storyboarded and edited in NY, but animated in Korea. The animation comes back from Korea with about 100 defects per episode (such as eyes pointing the wrong direction). About half the defects are fixed in Korea, and half in NY during editing.
• There’s no cool merch for the show (my words, not theirs) because Adult Swim owns the show and all the characters entirely, and they (Adult Swim) don’t do such a good job with merchandising.
• Season 3 will be in High Definition. I did not know there was an HD version of Adult Swim.
• They’re currently writing season 4 and editing the last episodes of 3. They really don’t get a break, and it seems like they work 12-16 hours a day non-stop.
• Season 4 might be the final season.

South Park managed to combine parodies of Heavy Metal (the movie), Anne Frank and Elliot Spitzer tonight. Truly brilliant. They lost me on the first 2 episodes of the season, but they have my interest now.

Today I realized that there are quite a few post-modern parodies and edits of Garfield cartoons. Most make Jon look like he is certifiably insane.

garfield minus garfield is a collection of Garfield comic with Garfield removed.

Realfield is Garfield, but with a realistic looking cat.

Fuckfield takes Garfield and gives the characters new and occasionally vulgar dialog.

Lasagna Cat are video interpretations of Garfield comics. I’ve posted this mess before:

Thanks to the Multimedia Darling for sending me the link to the USAVICH site. USAVICH is/are 3D animated cartoon shorts featuring two bunnies, a Pacman Toad (yes!) and a bird with human lips. The weird part (well the lips are weird enough) is the toons feature the bunnies in prison or on the run from the police. The animation is unique; colors are soft and the 3D animation is smooth and never crappy (like the Nasonex bee). The humor is in line with 50’s Looney Toons or MGM (think Droopy Dog) cartoons.

Watch every USAVICH cartoon!

Cartoon Dump (cartoondump.com) is a sketch comedy troop that use spandex, song and old cartoons to delight audiences on stage and on the interweb. The troop features Frank Conniff from Mystery Science Theater.

Here’s a sample of their antics (YouTube):

Speaking of spandex, part 1: is it me, or does spandex make women look like superheroines?

Speaking of Spandex, part 2: Spandex Justice posted Comic Character Resolutions for 2008.