Cartoon Central

374 minutes of animated beauty, the South Park season 6 DVD, is coming. This season featured my favorite episode of all time, Jared Has Aides, in which the the Subway sandwich guy proclaims he lost his weight thanks to getting aides. AIDS jokes never worked so well. Of course, Amazon has it on a preorder sale at $34.99 (down from $49.99). You should, like, buy it, or something.

I’m a sucker for sharp political humor. I’m a sucker for ingenious Flash cartoons, too. These are just priceless:

There is a post up on Sonic State's The Gas Station dicussion Raymond Scott. Who was Raymond Scott? Ever watch Bugs Bunny? : ) Title link takes you to everything you might want to know.

Lastly, I must remark on what has got to be the most innovative and technologically impressive computer animated movie I have ever seen. FINAL FANTASY VII: ADVENT CHILDREN. You don’t need to be a fan of the game, or even know what Final Fantasy is, to enjoy this film (though it does add to the experience if you are a fan). It’s fast, it’s exciting, and it has some incredibly well done combat sequences (which, if you’ve ever seen a computer-animated movie, is probably the most difficult thing to animate). Now, it’s not fair to compare this film to the inexorable achievements of PIXAR Animation Studios, because they’re in two totally different categories. Instead, I’m comparing FFVII:AC to films like Kaena: The Prophecy, The Bionical Series, Titan AE, Final Fantasy: Spirits Within, Appleseed, and other films of that nature. Advent Children is simply incredible and towers over Square’s first attempt at making a feature film. Look for it in English arriving this holiday season. Those of you unable to wait that long, you know what a BitTorrent is, right?

Anthony Tardiff (just a total stranger whose blog I stumbled across today) asks the question, "Why is Pixar so good and nobody else?"

This blog is a celebration of a passion that I have been doing since I was seventeen, GAMING. The technology has changed, but the games are the same. So, I want this to be a "fun" blog for science fiction, fantasy, comics, cartoons, game loving bibliophiles like me who are 40 plus.

Funny commercials! Only all about a man, who cares nothing in this world, but his paper.

Whacking Doonesbury because of your new layout sounds pretty dumb to me, and being an editor and not knowing the difference between “it’s” and “its” is lame too. But what tops it all is the idea that an “obsession with all things American” is somehow skewing coverage — this coming from an editor at a newspaper that would blame it on George W if England had lost the Ashes (which it didn’t).

The next day, we spent at least thirty minutes waiting in traffic to goto Disney World. First stop, Magic Kingdom. Kirsten said that she wanted to eat at the Liberty Tree (I think) resturant, so we went there and tried to book for a table. I asked this Chinese girl at the door, and she referred me to someone else, who said that they were all booked up, and to check back at 16:15 to see if there had been any cancellations. So off we went around the Magic Kingdom. Of course, we went on the only ride there, Space Mountain. To be honest, we hung around Tomorrow Land quite a bit, going on the monorail ride quite a few times just so sit down. We also went around to some other areas for some other rides which haven’t really stuck in my memory, and I remember going back to Tomorrow Land to go on the Lilo and Stitch “ride”, if you can call it that. They’d converted the old Alien ride to Lilo and Stitch, and in my opinion, destroyed the atmostphere of it. After that, we went back to Liberty Tree resturant to see if there were any cancellations. I saw the Chinese girl there again, standing outside, and surprisingly she recognised me. I told her that we were back to see if there had been a cancellation made, and she seemed shocked that we didn’t have a table. Actually, I think she was more shocked that I didn’t have a table. She got us a table within five minutes.

BlogCritics blogger Anna Creech reports that her local paper found a recent Dilbert comic a bit too graphic.

Recently, Cartoon Network launched a new television program specifically for preschool aged children called Tickle U. As a mother of three boys, Cartoon Network is probably the most watched channel in our home. While the oldest boy loves most of the cartoons, most of the programming would not hold the interest of the toddlers. When I was offered the opportunity to join Tickle U's parent advisory board, I jumped at the chance!

Sometimes, especially when money gets a little scarce, I start thinking, "Hey, I’m a cartoonist. I could get some regular work with area newspapers doing political cartoons. What’s my problem?" Always a tempting thought.

Raymond Uhlir’s first solo show, “Hooray for Sanctimony: A Calvinist Adventure Through the Sophist Temple of Doom,” is a Saturday-versus-Sunday mashup of scriptural illumination and cartoon-morning psychedelia. In seven paintings and more than a dozen drawings, Raymond drafts the fundamental template for a fundamentalist mythology—told with a syntax borrowed from video games, cartoons, and choose-your-own-adventure serials. His superflat style is cousin both to Inka Essenhigh’s dramatic narratives and Takashi Murakami’s reflections on popular culture. And, almost as an afterthought, Uhlir captures the two crucial factors that have made religious observation the worldwide hit that it is today: fear and sexual repression.

But now Sundays don’t have that effect on me. The last of the laundry gets put away, the kitchen is scrubbed, livingroom dusted (usually … I try, you know), maybe I’ll go grocery shopping … everything sort of falls into place and I begin the week with a fresh start. No true miracle really, since I don’t exactly leap out of bed early on a Monday bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, but I’ve definitely made progress. Sunday night is the only night I have a tv schedule, too. My boyfriend, Tony, and I like to kick back and watch Family Guy and American Dad, by far two of the funniest cartoons on these days. (Besides the Simpsons of course, but that’s sort of a given).