Shockingly, no. Disney, certainly, and Warner Brothers, now, have restored the cartoons from the original negatives. These cartoons on the Disney and Warner Brothers DVDs actually look like we’ve never seen them before – crystal clear and brand new. There’ve been horrible prints that have been on TV for years and years – they’ve just never upgraded them. This is an ultimate upgrade for DVD.

The other studios really don’t care. When you’re Paramount Home Video, you’re connected to Nickelodeon and your big thing is SpongeBob SquarePants – you don’t care that they happen to own Mighty Mouse and Heckle and Jeckle and these old characters I grew up with. They don’t care about that, they really don’t – that’s totally off the radar because the idea is that cartoons are a kids’ medium. That’s how they’re perceived by Hollywood, by everybody. There are some rare exceptions to that, but cartoons are considered just for kids. So the fact that the kids have grown up and really want to see their nostalgic favorites doesn’t mean anything. So if it isn’t SpongeBob or the PowerPuff Girls or whatever is the latest flavor of the month, they really don’t care about the library that much.

Now, I say that and you’ll quickly point to the fact that there are DVDs of the complete Underdog – there are some really obscure, wacko things out there. That happens to be by small companies that own all the Courageous Cat cartoons, so some of them do put that stuff out. So it’s both the best of times and the worst, in some ways. But I’m very optimistic that the other studios will fall in line on this.

What do you think of the current state of animation and the upsurge in computer graphics?

I think it’s really healthy right now. There was a big scare a few years ago because the feature end of it has practically gone completely CG. And the hundreds of employees that were working at Disney, Dreamworks, Warner Brothers, and Fox doing these films five years ago – Anastasia, Prince of Egypt, all these films – are sort of out of work. A lot of them are training on the computer and they’re now working on the Robots, the Shreks, and the Madagascars, that are coming up. There was a scare that everybody was going to lose their job, and a lot of people did. We have a complete duplicate of what happened 10 years ago. In 1994, The Lion King came out and was a mega- mega-blockbuster – it grossed over $300 million, it was the biggest hit of that year. And it caused all the studios to jump on the animation bandwagon. Animation movies are very profitable, but it soured a little bit. And now with Pixar emerging with Toy Story and the grosses of these CG films – plus the Academy having this new category of Best Animated Feature – this has reinvigorated Hollywood to get back involved, just as they did ten years ago.

Now, this past year, Shrek 2 was the biggest film in Hollywood, period. We had a weekend in November where the top three films out of five were animated features: SpongeBob, The Incredibles, and Polar Express. So Hollywood is aware that animation in theaters is great box office, but it’s CG. Which is great. We’re going to see lots of different CG pictures in the next few years – different styles. I’m very excited by what I see. Obviously, things like The Incredibles are taking it in a new direction. Some of the designs and the characters that I see in the films coming up this year are exciting. I really didn’t like the look of Shrek, I didn’t like Antz – everything looked robotic and fakey. We’re going to look back at those films and laugh because that’s how primitive they are. But what I see coming up is a great sense of design. Art is coming back into these CG films.

Does traditional, hand-drawn animation have a future?

Two-D is still alive on television on the Disney Channel, Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, and many others. There is still traditional, hand-drawn animation. SpongeBob is the biggest character right now – it’s so big it’s threatening. And anime, which is 2D, is huge on video. So animation right now is really exciting. I just think that all the companies are going to “up” what they’re doing. I still remember the days 15 years ago or so before Nicktoons when animation was just He-Man, Smurfs, and that’s all it was. It was only on the three broadcast TV networks. Now we have made for video movies, made for Internet movies, we’ve got people doing cartoons on the Internet that become TV shows or movies. So it’s definitely the best possible time for animation because everybody’s doing it.

Has animation made inroads to more mature audiences with programs like the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim?

Despite what I said before about animation being perceived as a children’s medium – and it is – we obviously have more animation aimed at different segments today, like Adult Swim and what’s on Comedy Central. It’s not really aimed at kids; it’s aimed at teenagers and adults. And The Simpsons is accepted as an adult thing right now, and even when you go to the movies now, The Incredibles is something that works for the whole family. So we do have that, but it’s forgotten too quickly. Animation for adults is considered very “nichey,” if that’s the right word. It’s very much for a particular audience, not quite the mainstream. When The Simpsons first came on, and about ten years later, all the networks decided, “Hey, The Simpsons is so big, let’s do lots of animated sit-coms.” And none of them stuck – maybe King of the Hill is about it. They all gave up.

Other countries like Japan and France don’t consider animation to be strictly a kids thing – it’s just a medium, and it’s how you tell stories. I keep telling people, I guarantee you that 20 years after The Simpsons goes off the air, it will be considered a kids’ show, and it will be highly censored like Looney Tunes are today. People will have forgotten that it was on prime time because it will have been on at 6 o’clock every day for so long – that’s what happened to The Flintstones. The Flintstones was a prime time series. Obviously, from our point of view it looks like a kids’ show now, but it wasn’t meant to be – it was actually a sophisticated adult show in its first two seasons. Even the Looney Tunes with Bugs Bunny were aimed at the whole theater audience, especially adults. A lot of people keep asking on my website, “Why do they keep editing Elmer Fudd’s gunshots and these explosion gags?” Because they don’t understand that these were not meant for kids. They think it’s for kids so they edit it for kids.

Related Sites:

www.cartoonresearch.com

www.cartoonbrew.com