#(Colossal) Pictures

[j4m3s-b4k3r]

BACK TO THE FUTURE: the animated series

I was working at Disney France when John Hays contacted me, looking for an overseas supervisor for a Saturday Morning cartoon that he'd be directing for Colossal Pictures. I’d done such things before. What interested me about this particular gig was that John wanted the supervisor to firstly work as part of the pre-production team at Colossal. I absolutely loved that idea. So headed to San Francisco to work on the BACK TO THE FUTURE cartoon.

I’d been introduced to John by mutual pal Tony Stacchi while backpacking in the USA a few years earlier. When Colossal diversified from special effects & TV commercials into longer form animation, John remembered me. Thinking my experience in Saturday Morning animation would fit with this new project, that both he & Phil Robinson would direct.. 

The crew had not fully assembled when I arrived in San Francisco. In fact, it was so early in production that even the look of the show had not yet been locked down. Many freelance artists, including Steve Purcell & Dave Fiess, plus Colossal staffers had a crack at design proposals, and I had a go too. 

Colossal had acquired a new building for long form production, but it was still being refit. So, a few of us worked in a cold drafty room at Colossal’s 3rd street building. As the crew expanded, we were housed in a cramped annex in their Custer Street sound stage. Until we finally moved into the facility on 15th street. (That building would eventually host the entire Colossal animation department).

When some designs of mine were selected for the main characters, the plan for me to supervise production in Taiwan was modified. Instead, I became one of two art director/character designers on the series. The mighty John Stevenson being the other. 

There was such a back & forth between Colossal & Universal over the main characters (even the actors got involved) that it was hard to do anything truly unique (although I was happy with how Doc Brown turned out). But we definitely had fun on the secondary character designs. 

Private Stevenson & Private Baker..

John & I both worked on designs for the first episode together, then took it in turns thereafter. I designed characters on even-numbered episodes, and John designed for odd-numbered episodes. We both sat side by side, cracking each other up with sillier & sillier designs. Joyfully competing as the series progressed. (In my opinion, John utterly killed it with his designs for his ROMAN episode..)

Directors John Hays & Phil Robinson really assembled a mighty crew for this series. Dave Gordon & Richard Moore did the BG styling, with Dave doing a lot of great VisDev too. Robin Steele, and future Pixar heavyweights Bud Luckey, & Joe Ranft did the storyboards. Two more future Pixar legends, Bob Pauley & Bill Cone, led much of the layout & location design. Future LucasFilm directors Bosco Ng, & Steward Lee were stalwarts of the art department. Colour styling was by future CNN design director Dewey Reid, and John Pomeroy animated the title sequence! 

After years of living & working in countries where I struggled to learn the language, it was great to finally be in a city where I could actually socialise. I was very lucky to be working with utterly inspiring artists. We often worked late, as we were all excited to be working together.

The pre-pro team was enthusiastic and worked hard, with high hopes for the show. However, by this point in my career I had a pretty good idea of how the Saturday Morning sausage was made. Having worked in the bowels of the sausage factory myself for 10 years by that point. I was hopeful, but also knew that it was anybody’s guess if the show would get the same care at the other end..

A show about a kooky scientist, his young buddy and a time machine had the potential to be absolutely great. The best of Doctor Who and a (family friendly) Rick & Morty. But stories that went to a new time zone each week needed a lot of design. I kept hoping that the scripts would contain less characters & locations. So that we could really refine the model packets. But every script contained tons of NEW characters & locations. Plus new outfits/gear for the main characters too. SIGH..

We'd been promised the 'top floor' animators at Taiwan's Cuckoo's Nest studio, but "Uh oh.." early footage made it clear that we'd gotten the basement crew instead.. "DOH!" Back when I'd supervised outsourcing myself, I learned that if the good artists are already assigned to another project there wasn’t much you could do. So, despite an absolutely stellar design & storyboard team, and early optimism, the show itself came out merely 'OK'. It ran for two seasons on CBS.

It has been one of the counter intuitive aspects of my career that sometimes the fave projects are NOT the best projects.. Despite being merely a footnote in animation history, this was absolutely a linchpin project in my own career, and I have fond memories of it to this day. Many great opportunities that came later were thanks to this show. I met many wonderful artists, who became lifelong friends, who I still work with and/or socialise with, decades later. On this project, I fell in love with San Francisco. And, after living out of a backpack for years, made this kooky town my home. I’d later go on staff at Colossal Pictures, which became my favourite studio I ever worked at. Where I finally escaped from Saturday Morning cartoons, into TV commercials and other more challenging projects.

[retrocgads]

USA 1997

[bestofgrrm]

Welcome to Direwolf Day. I’ve been holding my tongue for months now, sworn to silence yet dying to tell the world. Pardon my shouting, but… THE DIREWOLF IS BACK. Extinct for more than ten thousand years, but extinct no longer, thanks to Ben Lamm, George Church, Beth Shapiro, and the rest of their team of mad scientists at Colossal, the world leader in the science of “de-extinction.” I met them all in February, in… well, that would be telling. And I met Romulus and Remus too. Here’s me and Romulus. (Or maybe Remus. They’re twins, and hard to tell apart.

- Grrm, NotaBlog, April 8 2025

[troythecatfish]

[oldshowbiz]

Bert I. Gordon's all-time AIP classic

[notagaslightingcat]

never watched Star Trek, and i don’t know anything about it. but seeing as how the founding fathers: Spock/Kirk (Spirk) basically invented the term "slash" and gave shipping culture a massive push into what it is today, ALL THE WAY BACK IN THE SIXTIES, and now fans finally have a comforting closure, and essentially a confirmation of it being canon, for Spirk with Unification, that has everyone who understands how important this is reacting like:

truly is beautiful.. maybe the world is healing <3

congrats to Spirk shippers!!

[seud-luachmhor]

[laugtherhyena]

He's so tiny he's the size of a molecule (barely an exaggeration in her perspective)

[darklight-owl]

Honestly the thing that irks me the most about the ""dire wolf"" thing is that even without any experience in this field. Even if you have no idea what a dire wolf looked like. Do you guys not find it a LITTLE odd that these guys came out with wooly mice like barely a month ago and claimed it was "the first step to creating mammoths" and then immediately came out with what they claimed to be a dire wolf. These kinds of genetic modification are expensive as Hell they'd need a ton of funding to revive ONE species why are they sticking their fingers in as many pies as humanly possible (it's for media attention). Why are they pumping out so many press-friendly "new species" so quickly (it's for media attention).

[supmaww]

guys did you see they “invented” woolly mice? scientists reactivated the same hair gene that gave mammoths their woolly fur in mice and created some of the most delightful critters I have ever seen

look at them. look at them!! article here, this was done by a group of scientists working for Colossal, which is basically a very extensively funded group that aims to bring the Woolly mammoth back to life (via gene editing the Asian elephant).

[courseyoulovemeyoudontknowme]

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003, Peter Jackson)

04/07/2024

[doubtfultaste]

War of the Colossal Beast (1958)

[schlock-luster-video]

"A Seventy Foot Giant is Terrorizing Las Vegas ..."

Here's an original portrait of Glenn Langan inspired by The Amazing Colossal Man (1957)!

[kneel-to-seto-kaiba]

Me when I get surprised

[troythecatfish]

[pippersmcgee]

when i get into the groove of reading in my native language i "forget" that im reading at all and am able to focus more on the "images in my head" that appear as i go line through line of the story. (not sure if this is a common reading experience; absolutely let me know what it's like for you!) with japanese i still have to sound out the syllables and read very carefully; i actually think that one of the barriers to deeper understanding for me (again, not sure if this is universal for all language-learners) is that i'm not yet completely able to understand which images the words are trying to convey. presumably this should be even easier to do than with english since japanese is a logographic language?