#animation interview

[dalt20]

Tooning In. 21 Greg Bailey part 8 of 10

DL:So, you directed the controversial episode of Arthur, Mr. Ratburn and the Special Someone. Where Mr Ratburn marries a chocolatier. Many fans and parental/religious groups were upset at the episode and stated that Ratburn wasn't gay but an effeminate man (I.e. Metrosexual). What are your thoughts? And the process of creating the episode?

GB:Ratburn is most definitely gay and now he is married. There was always some discussion in the fan groups wondering if he was gay and we never addressed it one way or another. You remember we did that episode Sugar Time in the Postcards from Buster series where the kid being visited Buster lived with his 2 moms. Same sex marriage was already legal in Canada by that time so it was not really an issue here but that episode really blew up in the US. It cost the head of PBS kids her job. There were interviews all over the place in the Us about that show . I did an interview here with CBC news about it and at the end of the interview the reporter turned off the camera and said to me "It really isn't any kid of news issue here but we are covering the story because it was a big deal in the US." It was actually a local story since it was coming from Vermont and Montreal is kind of the local big city for that part of Vermont. Anyway 10 later and we were having the story meeting for the last season of Arthur. My main interest at that meeting was to try to wrap up all the questions that fans had and other loose ends that we had in the series after all those years. One of the things was that some people I know had suggested to me that Ratburn was gay. At the meeting I tossed out that idea of doing a show about Ratburn coming out and getting married. I really did not think the idea would get even the least amount of traction and it was almost a joke considering all the trouble we had been in for the Sugartime episode. Everyone kind of laughed when I pitched it but the producer Carol Greenwald immediately said " Sure we could maybe do that now if we were pretty careful with how it is handled/ " I think Peter Hirsch nearly fell off his chair when she said that. It was just agreed that time had changed even in the US by that point. I think that non gay parents and people that claim they are involved with a church need to get out more and see the real world. I mean there are an awful lot of kids out there that live with gay parents and up until then we never really gave them a nod even though we covered so many other social and health issues that kids are living with. We had a lot of positive feedback on that show from kids and parents. The kids still love their parents and television never really gives them examples of other kids living the same life they are totally familiar with. Everyone really liked working on the show including Arthur Holden who we worried might be bothered by it since he voiced that character all those years and he was never supposed to gay. But Arthur was immediately on board with it because he is quite open minded and saw it as big development for the character.

DL:How do you feel about the backlash from Alabama Public Television, who refused to air that episode alongside that Postcards from Buster episode, Sugartime?

GB:Well nobody in Alabama is gay. So I guess it's fine in that case. On the other hand I've heard Alabama is the gay capital of America.

DL:The irony there is amazing! How was 2018, When the series was ending? I heard that in 2019, you guys had a wrapup party celebrating the end of the show. How did you feel that the series was ending?

GB:For a lot of years I had heard that the show was going to end that season. Normally shows ended at 65 episodes when we started Arthur but we were winning Emmy's and a Peabody around that point. But I think every year after that the production company that was doing the show was pretty sure it would end that year. So finally Carol told me would end the show in that 25 season before we had our story meeting at the start of the season. Like I said I wanted to sew up the loose ends. I don't know why I was so concerned about that now but when your identity is so tied to your creative body of work like that series you get kind of obsessed with it. I probably should have quit before the end and gone onto something else because it was not as sharp as it once was and it never really looked the same once we went digital and each season brought one more thing that made it less good. Between changing production companies and animation methods and having less budget and schedule each year it was less interesting. Anyway, I didn't feel like I could leave the show before the bitter end because I wouldn't have directed every episode and special. I wished it had gone on a few more seasons but that is purely personal preference so I could finish up my career with it rather than trying to move on to something else. I realized that would be hard to do after directing such a well known show for so long. We did do a big wrap party at the end of the series. WE were still working on the last few shows at the time. It was a nice big party. Some of the people who worked on the show for a lot of seasons showed up so it was fun.

DL:So, How was the last episode, All Grown Up? Was it bitter sweet for you?

GB:It was funny that all through the season I kept saying that this was the last season and some of the older hands on the show would say that we said every year. So sometimes it was hard to get people to believe it. That last show was kind of sad to do for sure. We wanted to do something that was really big to actually end the series with a twist or a real cliff hanger. I keep thinking of the Bob Newhart series set in Vermont where he wakes up in bed and it was all a dream. The last episode was great though. Peter did a terrific job writing that last episode. Gerry Capelle, my main storyboard artist all those seasons did the storyboard and it was great as well. We still did the 2 specials tagged onto the end of the series and those were kind of drudgery when I think of them. It seemed like the crew was all leaving before they finished their job so I had to fill in a lot of missing pieces myself. We had missing designs and stuff. Some stuff was tedious though I guess I quickly learned how tedious some of the production had become and some of it was a good learning experience for using ToonBoom Harmony.

DL:Also how was bringing back the first voice of Arthur, Michael Yamurish to come back to play adult Arthur?

GB:That was fun. I had used Michael on some other parts over the years. Slink I believe. So I still spoke to him occasionally. When Peter wrote that ending with the kids being older I suggested we get Michael to do the role. It fit quite well there and made an interesting twist. It would have been great getting Michal Caloz to do DW but we had lost track of him after he moved to California about the same year he quit doing DW.

DL:So how was Marc Brown during this, What were his thoughts on the show ending? Did he say anything to you while directing or doing voicework in the booth?

GB:I imagine Marc was about the same as me though Arthur for him still continues after the series ends because he can keep making more books. I don't remember the voice session with him. Maybe he was recorded in NY or Boston. I forgot that he had a few lines of dialog in that show but it's true that he must have been in a booth somewhere. We often spoke during the course of the season about various things. He was also up at the wrap party at the end so we had some time to reminisce then. WE usually did the start of season story meetings at Marc's house or studio over the years. So we would touch base at various points. I even remember taking a quick swim in the ocean at his house at Martha's Vineyard one year. I didn't grow up near the ocean so I can never pass up a chance to do that even if it is a token swim.

DL:So, did you direct the Arthur PSAs that tackled Racism after the death of George Floyd in 2020?

GB:No I didn't.

DL:So that was done by a different person.

GB: It's the first time I heard of it.

DL:Which is strange because I thought you directed everything Arthur related

I show Greg the Arthur Short : Talk,listen and Act, which was not directed by him.

GB:Yeah I guess they found someone else. I see from what you just uploaded that all the characters are cross eyed. I just watched what you uploaded and it makes me kind of angry to watch it. The lip sync is terrible and the eyebrows are upside down a lot and they keep holding up their hands and pointing to the sky with their finger when making a point. WE even had a name for holding your hand up in the air like that . We called it "weighing air." It’s just a bad habit a lot of storyboard artists have that don't know how to make the characters act. If you watch most low end tv animation they do this all the time because they don't know even the basics of acting. We did our best to avoid the weighing air and pointing to the sky all those years. It looks really badly boarded and animated. It must have been done at Oasis from someone that doesn't know the show very well. They used the rigs from the series and reused some old back grounds. The cross eyed eyes drive me crazy just looking at the still image from YouTube. One other thing I did not direct was the 3D CGI Arthur movie. It was made back around 2001. It was also terrible. It was called, My Missing Pal or something like that.

DL:That was called Arthur's Missing Pal and ended up being done funnily enough in Vancouver at Mainframe Entertainment, the same guys who did ReBoot! You know Mainframe?

GB:That's right. We pitched to do that but it was pretty clear that it was only a token that they let us pitch even though they were going to put it through Mainframe. Even when pitched the producer Lion's Gate in Vancouver was part of the project. So they just put the job in their own production company. I think there was also something about the production being from the US, because a few of the actors violated the union rules and worked on the show without authorization from the union. The director I believe was from the US. We were working on a way to do the show using mocap which would have been really suitable I think . Pal obviously could not be mo cap. About that same time we did this bizarre thing called You are Arthur. You could send a photo of your kid to this company and they would put your kind on the body of an animated character so it would be in the cartoon. It was really weird looking and I believe they didn't pay the bill in the end. We did the animation part of it and the character had a cross hair of the cursor to position the photo head onto the character. It was not a highlight of my career.I remember watching ReBoot. It was the first CGI tv series I recall. I knew some animators that I went to school with that worked there.

DL:A lot of VAs except for Arthur,DW and Buster in the film were replaced by Anime voice actors from Naruto and Cowboy Bebop from the US. It was directed by the Director of the Beavis and Butthead movie and storyboarded by Dan Haskett, Larry Leker, Lenord Robinson and Rich Arons!Like some very big names were in this film!

GB:I liked the B&B Movie. I don't know why they made such a cheap Arthur movie. It looked really cheap. It was shocking. I don't know those storyboard artists. Again they could have just used the storyboard artists that already worked on the series. They are all freelance and would have been available if it was off season or maybe even have done it if the pay was good. If they had such good talent why did it come out so incredibly bad? I don't think it's just me. I showed it to other people not connected with the show and they said it was unwatchable. Something must have been happening behind the scenes for them to produce that. Did you think it was ok?

DL: boring plus I felt that it was disconnected from the show. Also those Storyboarders were from Disney and Warner Bros. Dan Haskett animated Ariel and Belle from The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast for crying out loud!

GB:It's funny about the feature. When we won the first Emmy I remember sitting with Ron Weinburg and saying that we should make a feature. It didn't even need to be fancy but we had all the ducks in a row at that point. Joe Fallon was still working on the show and we were animating at Akom and we had an incredibly large fan base. He wasn't really well connected to find funding for a feature but if we had just made a large size tv episode at that point it would have been amazing and really true to the series.It's funny about the feature. When we won the first Emmy I remember sitting with Ron Weinburg and saying that we should make a feature. It didn't even need to be fancy but we had all the ducks in a row at that point. Joe Fallon was still working on the show and we were animating at Akom and we had an incredibly large fan base. He wasn't really well connected to find funding for a feature but if we had just made a large size tv episode at that point it would have been amazing and really true to the series.An animator from Disney does not necessarily make a good storyboard artist. It may look pretty with nice drawings but its really a different thing. Sometimes a person coming from one part of production like animation makes a bad storyboard guy because they draw scenes that are fun or cool to animate and they avoid other things that are hard but that doesn't make a good film. It's like a good layout artist does not always make a good BG designer. It's hard to stop trying to make the job easy for the layout team. That's why often the storyboard artists come from illustrators and comic book artists. Does that make sense?

DL:How was winning that Daytime Emmy back in 1999? Were you up on stage getting the trophy or was it Ron or Michelle? Also were they with you?

GB:Definitely I was up on stage. It was incredible when we won that first year. I don't think Micheline came. I remember I was so excited that I ran down the aisle with my arms up over my head screaming. The next year on the Emmy commercial they showed that clip of me looking like a crazy guy. I even got a mention in IMDB for that little 2 second long shot of me in that commercial. WE really didn't think we would win. The fans loved us but we weren't from LA and shows from there always won before that. We also didn't have such an amazing budget as the other finalists. I remember watching the little clips they show when the names of the finalists and our clip looked so boring compared to these big music extravaganzas that the other shows had from WB and Disney. I think that was the year we also won the Peabody and got the award on the same weekend. The Emmys were fun in those days when you were with all the soap opera stars walking down the cordoned off street in NY on the way to the gala. Later years they just put the kid's shows in with the craft category awards, such as the best hairdresser or nail technician in a talk show. One year we had to eat dinner in a back room at Madison Square gardens and it absolutely stunk because the circus was just in town and they used that room as the barn for the elephants. I don't know if you ever smelled an elephant but it's pretty pungent.

DL:You got the clip? Because I need to see it.

GB:Not sure. I think I once had it on a vhs at best. I tries finding the clip online once, but with no luck

DL:Ah ok, so you were a supervising director for HouseBroken for FOX and Bento Box.How was communicating from Montreal to Los Angeles?

GB:That's a bit a jump in my timeline but I loved working at Bento Box. Unfortunately I wasn't the supervising director. I was an animation timing director. It was during the covid days so I think most everyone was working from home at that time. At least the department was all working online.Sorry I'm all over the place. I just found the daytime Emmy award clip from 2000.

Greg shows me a promo for the 2000 daytime Emmy’s on ABC. Greg is the man throwing his hands up at 0:14.

Yes that’s him!

I guess I exaggerated. It's more like 20 frames long, not 2 seconds.

DL:Were you the guy in the crowd? No wait, are you the guy who's throwing his hands up?

GB:Yeah I'm that handsome guy putting his hands up coming down the aisle.

DL:You musta felt great like you won the Super Bowl!

GB:Yeah I looked pretty crazy there. Everyone else in all those clips look so well behaved and composed but I think for me it really was a surprise. I felt like none of the others in our group could believe it and no one was moving even though the time restraint of getting up there for the award is really tight. Everyone just seemed frozen so I jumped up and raised my arms hoping to get energized enough to get up on stage and get it over with. The next year I did the acceptance speech and that's another highly embarrassing moment. I was so incredibly nervous and it showed a lot. I could hardly speak and I remember looking out at the crowd and a woman was gesturing upwards. I thought she meant to speak louder but she really meant that I didn't need to lean over and put my mouth beside the mic. I think if she hadn't distracted me I probably would have passed out instead.

DL:Can you describe to me what an animation timer is? What does it mean?

GB:Remember I mentioned working in Tokyo when I was young working on sheet direction and dialog. Anyway the animation timing director indicated frame by frame on the x-sheet how long the animation for each movement takes. So everything from walking footsteps to the length of a turn how many frames for a blink or whatever moves. Effects or characters or when the pans or zooms happen. So on Housebroken the big thing was that they always had a million characters on screen at once. It was the trademark of the series. So each character is timed in a separate column and if the characters interact then they need to be coordinated. The shows are pretty closely timed out by that stage so you cut the scene to the right length and time each scene. In the old days of traditional animation all series had to do timing and also lip sync because the work went to Asia. Now it is only some high end shows for primetime that still do animation timing. And lip sync is only provided for shows that are animated by non native English speakers. The big difference now from when I didn’t this earlier is that the timing on House Broken was done using Harmony so you could add or change the drawings in the panels on the storyboard. which was a nice addition of control for the timing director. It also makes it harder to find someone to do the job.

DL:Also, What did you think about the show?Did you like the concept of a dog running a therapy group with pets?

GB:I really loved that series. For one thing it was an adult (as compared to children's) and it was prime time. So the quality was really good and it was a really good change for me after a lot of years of doing kids TV. The writing was super and the acting was quite amazing. Lisa Kudrow is one of my favorite TV actors ever since that episode of Kimmy Schmidt where she played Kimmy's delinquent mother. The animation was painful because of all the crowd scenes but if you just accept that on day one it's fine. It was the thing they were going for. I liked the humor because it wasn't just sophomoric style of humor like most current adult shows. The platonic relationship, (because they are neutered pets), between Honey and Chief made for a really interesting buddy type relationship. It was funny to hear the pets all speaking in English and describing all their neurotic issues and it made a lot of sense considering the weird life that house pets need to live. It's a pretty unnatural way for these animals to live with people that expect so much from them. You knew something was going to be kind of messed up when Lisa Kudrow was playing the part of group therapy leader. She always acts like she is one step away from the loonie bin herself and to be the advisor to the group was pretty funny in itself. It was a really good show and had a lot of good comedians.

DL:I like that show because I thought the animation was good and that the character designs were cute and appealing. Compared to other series like Family Guy and Rick and Morty which every adult animated series based their style on nowadays.

GB:Agreed! Though I just saw an article from 11 days ago saying Fox has canceled the show. Not too surprising because it's been shut down for a few years now. It stopped at the start of the writers strike which was the end of the production season by coincidence. Too bad. I liked it because it was better humor than just everything being too fast and constantly gross jokes. There aren't many shows like that for adults. Like I said, most stuff is very sophomoric.

DL:Weird because I remember that there was a hiatus in like 2022 and season 2 was coming out in 2023.Guess they backtrack on that then.

GB:My work ended on Nov 1 2022. They would have still been animating for a few more months after that. So it must have wrapped somewhere around Feb 2023. I hope I have my years right. The numbering was confusing to me. Season one had already aired when I started and they were almost at the middle of this combined season 2/3 when I started. There was no break between 2 and 3 for production but I thought they were going to roll out a season 3 by separating those shows. I'm not really sure and would not be the person in the know for that.

[tootern2345]

According to J.J. Sedelmaier in his interview with Sean Beard and his Late Night Morning Wood series. The reason why MTV Animation itself was formed and Sedelmaier’s company left after season 1 is because Mike Judge & MTV executives didn’t like the inconsistent look of the earlier episodes. Judge wanted a more traditional studio structure, something more on-model and subtle while Sedelmaier liked the more expressive tone of the show. Creative differences much or less. Said interview also reveals that Judge and his family once lived in Port Chester and the compositing for B&B earlier on was done on videotape via USAnimation in North Hollywood, California.

[alaa-pales]

Don't skip my story read till the end 😥👇

Cases of Skin Rash are increasing everyday because of bacterial , fungal or viral infections , on the other sides alot of insects such as mosquitoes, ticks, fleas and flies, which act as vectors. What we are witnessing in shelter centers and displacement camps from the accumulation of stagnant water and inadequate management of waste and sanitation provides a fertile ground for disease vectors. Every day we see in our Medical point about 50 cases of multi-cause rash. 😥💔

Save our children from this war. Link for donation 👇🔗🍉

Verified by Operation Olive Branch line 395 master line

We still very far from the goal. I hope everyone will donate even a little. I am confident that you will stand with me and support me until I reach my goal and remove my family from the danger of war. Share my story. Pin my story to your page. Everything helps.

[zamanassad]

vampire with a pearl earring

[sami--onley]

My wish and dream is to have a loaf of bread and a drink of water for me and my family to live on. What is your dream here on Tumblr? Donate here.

[dunmeshistash]

I don't usually post much about the Dungeon Meshi anime but I came across this interview with the anime director and it is pretty fun!

My favorite section

Nobody wants to eat the monsters LOL

WHAT DO YOU MEAN LAIOS VA DOESN'T KNOW THE ENDING, amazing

[micropaloma]

they're having a moment

[jeyneofpoole]

louis mon cher the children on the cables are pronouncing me ‘cancelled’ i do not know what this means. je déteste this abhorrent phrase, i have never cancelled a concert, much less postponed, dieu nous en garde. they say i am ‘problematique’ and that my shows are unsafe for visitation. je ne sais pas this century will never cease to confuse me. louis they are blocking me. louis they are leaving me vile comments hiding behind the infernal animated cartoon faces they wear as masks. oui the ones with the women with brightly colored hair and large breasts. breasts do not function in this manner louis it is simply gravitationally impossible this is nothing more than a masquerade of vagabonds. je vais pleurer we must kill them all.

[krea2re]

one of my finals :) i made a full title sequence for iwtv youtube link

[buotella]

+ the sugar glider in question

[dalt20]

Tooning In. 20 Greg Bailey part 7 of 10

DL:So, I guess after Cookie Jar got attacked and shanghai-ed by DHX media, you made a little escape boat to 9 Story Entertainment.

GB:I was already gone before DHX took over Cookie Jar. I thought it was just a sale to DHX after some unsuccessful business moves. I never thought that CJ was attacked. It was quite small by the time I left to 9 Story.

DL:So, I learned that DHX media doesn't own the CiNAR/Cookie Jar episodes of Arthur but they own the spinoff series Postcards from Buster. Why was that? Did Cookie Jar sell the distribution rights to WGBH in boston?

GB:I have no idea. They just sold off everything they possibly could over the few years that CJ existed. They did that with everything else. It was a long way from the start of Arthur when Cinar owned a good part of the rights of Arthur and we had the distribution in 110 countries. Cinar had distribution everywhere in the world except the US. They may have sold off the Arthur rights to WGBH just before they gave up the show. That would be in the period after they bought DIC and the Strawberry Shortcake fiasco. So any cash would have been welcome at CJ.Postcards from Buster was a dumb move for Cinar (pre CJ era) to get involved with. It was a good enough series but there was no market for a show that was so specifically about the US . WGBH had the rights for US distribution and Cinar had the rest of the world. But the series was not able to sell anywhere other than the US> It was made in the post 9/11 and Iraq war period. There must have been a dozen scenes in each episode that featured American flags and with the war in Iraq we entered a strong period of anti American sentiment around the world. The show only sold in the US and Israel. All the other customers passed on it. It was referred to as the series that could not be sold by the sales teams that tried pushing it.

DL:So, how was the move to 9 Story?

GB:That was very fast. CJ gave up the show in August and 9 Story was starting production by October. We had been doing the pre-production at Oasis in Montreal the years that Cookie Jar existed. So all the digitized models and files we had were destroyed by Oasis when they found out that the show wouldn't be done at Oasis anymore. They should have turned over those models because CJ owned them, not Oasis. At the same time Cookie Jar had destroyed the well organized vault of the old paper material in Montreal . The storage building was being abandoned and all the material that was catalogued and filed properly by the librarian was lying in a huge jumble of boxes just thrown into the room awaiting the shredding of the paper. The pile of boxes was over 10 feet high and 100 feet long and everything there was a horrible jumble. It was literally heaved up into a big pile of boxes that were spilled open. I had to go through the boxes and try to find some old paper model sheets in order to base our new models at 9 Story on. So we had a lot of work to do at 9Story to get up and running in the short time we had. We also started doing the animation in Flash that year so it was a big conversion job at the same time we were trying to organize the files of reuse. Which is like all the backgrounds designs and the character and prop designs from episode 1 to around 125. 9 Story did a great job and people were enthusiastic about doing the show but it was a big undertaking considering the time we had to do it.

DL:So, how did you adapt to flash? Was it an easy process to adjust

GB:It was really difficult. If it was a new series it wouldn't have been a problem but in this case we had to get something that sort of matched what we had already done as traditional animation for 125 episodes. We had established a style of show that used a lot of dramatic angles and exaggeration of drawings and also we would often break off into new styles of drawing for a fantasy sequence or even a whole show. Like we did on Tale Spins or The Contest. In digital it is really slow to rig a new character and only using it for one sequence is not efficient. There were also some things like the jiggly line broken line style and the thin line that was problematic in Flash. And just so many things that just kept coming as they started rigging that became a problem that I never anticipated. Just small things like they first the pupils in the eyes were too large. So those large pupils got used in a bunch of main models and by the time we started getting animation those big eyes were put into many versions of the character rigs like Muffy in Winter clothes and Muffy in baseball uniform. So we started calling revisions on the first episode for the eyes then we had 5 more episodes already in production with those crazy eyes. That sounds picky and insignificant now but it seemed like it would never end for a while. It was nice that the animation was back in Canada so it was something I could see before the shows were completed and shipped from overseas. It was more hands on.Many of our background designs that we used since episode one were upshot or downshot angles and that isn't very good for digital animation because the rig is only one angle, eye level. So that made for some hard scenes in animation.

DL:Many people have commented on the designs of the animation as they said that it's robotic, stiff and lifeless. As the characters have this floaty like feel to them whenever they walk or run.Your comment on that?

GB:It was my feeling a few years earlier when tested a bunch of companies with the idea of changing to digital. I found that when we did tests one company Animation Services did the test traditionally and even though they weren't the strongest animation company around the characters looked like they breathed or were alive. Digital animation is very still when it stops and the face is exactly the same drawing in every scene. When it is hand drawn there is some mild nuance to the drawing because each scene and each inbetween is a different original drawing. I think it has some subconscious effect on the viewer even if the animators in digital animation would put more bounce in the walk . Even in a walk the traditional walks are all drawing each time they have a walk. So even if it is off model like you said some people thought Akom was like, then at least each walk was new and unique. When you draw you can squash things a little and when a hand turns over there are a bunch of inbetweens that are all different. In digital it basically pops from one hand to another hand when it turns over. A good animator can kind of distort or bend the hand but basically it just pops. There was a lot of the art of animation lost in the sort of digital cutout style of animation . For me the worst thing is that a 3/4 head of Arthur in one scene is exactly the same drawing as a 3/4 head in every other scene. Wgbh was very happy with it because everything was on model all the time. Or at least it was the same model. But they were never able to notice that the animation was stiff or the walk was exactly the same each time.I always felt that 3D animation was the worst for floaty movements though. The feet never seem to actually touch the ground. I think a good 2 D digital animator does a pretty good job with that if they have time and budget.

DL:So, did you move to Toronto to work with 9 story?

GB:No, I commuted once a week and I worked online the rest of the week. I guess I was in training for Covid.

DL:Ha! So, I wanted to talk about the Guest Star designs because I remember someone saying that the designs like Art Garfunkel, Mr. Rogers and Backstreet Boys designs look good but the Matt Damon or John Lewis ones.....

Matt Damon guest stars in the season 11, sixth episode, The Making of Arthur.

John Lewis guests stars in critically acclaimed episode, Arthur Takes a Stand from season 21, episode 4

What was up with those? It's like the character designer gave up and just traced a photo for these people. Compared to these!

Art Garfunkel guests stars as the narrator of the first episode of season 3, the ballad of Buster Bunny which marks the return of Buster Baxter and his voice actor, Daniel Bronchu. Who had took a sabbatical to Australia in 1997 during season two.

Mr Rogers makes an appearance as himself in the epic crossover, Arthur meets Mr.Rogers (season 2, episode 1)

The Backstreet Boys starred as themselves in the Arthur special, It’s Only Rock N’ Roll. Arthur in the center.

GB:I did the initial sketch on Matt during the live recording we did in Florida when he came in in his sweats after coming in off his run. He is even wearing the same shirt with some political message on it with the Congress. I remember him being hard to design because everyone had a different movie in mind for what he should look like. He is also a bit hard to do because he's so handsome. Marc Brown did a nice sketch of Art Garfunkel and Mr. Rogers models. The BSB’s were kind of a mix of a few artists. John was done by a designer in Oasis. It's a little touchy doing visible minorities if you have a room full of white designers and a director. But we had a great character designer who is black so he knew that design would be coming his way. Over time we probably made the characters less like animals and more like human faces. It might be a mistake but political correctness was starting to weigh in over the years. So we had to be more cautious on some characters like John Lewis.

DL:Most of the characters were bears. It's like Bears was your default character model when drawing characters.

GB:I would say that it was actually mostly rabbits. The WGBH people thought it was their duty to ask the guest stars which animal they wanted to be. They would always say rabbit. Who wants to be a dog or a monkey right? I would say most guest stars were rabbits. Yo Yo Ma, Lance Armstrong if I recall correctly were rabbits. One show that featured a music troupe named Bang on a Can there was a woman whose last name is Wolfe. When they were asked which animal they wanted to be she said rabbit. It was the one time I had to convince someone that she should really not be a rabbit. funny that she would have chosen anything other than a wolf. Maybe it isn't her maiden name though. I don't think anyone ever picked monkey.

DL:And when I saw her I thought that she was the only good looking Arthur Guest star in the later seasons.

GB:Ha ha! Yeah, she was more extremely animal looking. She was brave for a woman to imagine herself with a big long nose though. Neil Gamon was the lone cat character that I recall. I wonder if he chose cat when he did that show.

DL:Also Michelle Kwan was a bear even though I was hoping because of her last name she would be a swan.

GB:We didn't have a bird option though. We never did many birds in the series. She was a bear I saw and so was Marc's friend Jack Prelutsky. So maybe you are right that most are bears. It seemed like everyone picked rabbit when we would ask so I was pretty sure they were mostly rabbits. People that wore hats were problematic if they wanted to be a rabbit. Bears are the most generic looking of the choices.

DL:And also my statement on guest stars weirdly goes to pets too because Alan Cumming played a poodle who was Killer's rival in one episode and

Alan Cummings guest stars as Sebastian, Killer’s rival in the first episode of season 17,Show off

Someone got a picture again but then again " they wouldn't know if it was Alan Cumming! We gotta make it look like him!"

GB:That's right I forgot that show with Alan. It was amazing that he went along with us on that. What a strange ideal to make a male character a poodle now that I think about it. Andy Warhol was a warthog but that was because the script writer wanted the name and he was a guest star either. We didn’t do many warthogs or reptiles or birds in the show. Joan Rivers was a monkey but she was related to Francine and she had a brutal sense of humor and would not have protested about being a monkey I'm sure. BJ Novaks was a rabbit.

DL:Also It's a popular accusation in the Black community of people saying characters like Arthur were black even though Brain was confirmed to be black.Comment on that?

GB:That is true. There was always a strong suspicion of that. Which is fine. There is no reason Arthur had to be a white kid. That got played up more in the last special we made where they go to the ancestral farm in Ohio. Arthur's relatives were black in that show. When we started Francine was supposed to be a black character. It changed over the years once they made her Polish in one show and then Jewish on the Christmas special. We were even casting for a black actress for Francine when we did season one . Jodie Resther has been with the show as Francine's voice since she was a kid.Brain didn't start off as being black or not black. It was only the Christmas show that we had to define some nationalities or ethnic qualities on the characters. We added a Martin Luther King poster in his room. In the special Brain would celebrate Kwanzaa and Francine became Jewish. Arthur was some kind of Christian Protestant , George became Swedish, and Buster remained non aligned to any ethnic group or religion.

DL:Also Brain in that special was played by a young right wing commentator Steven Crowder.This guy.

Steven Crowder for those who don’t know was the voice of Brain in the fourth season of Arthur but more baffling, Arthur’s Perfect Christmas

GB:Wow he got bigger. Does he have issues with minorities as a right wing commentator or is he just politically right wing? I haven't heard his commentator stuff.

DL:Yes he has said racist and Homophobic stuff on his YouTube channel.

GB:Ok well that is kind of a nasty thing about S Crowder in that case. I guess the Arthur show didn't have any lasting impression on him.For a while everyone was saying John Legend looks like Arthur but he wouldn't come on the show unfortunately.

DL:Yeah, surprisingly.So back on track. The Arthur show then moved to Oasis Animation back in Montreal in 2016.What was the reason behind that?

GB:The owner at WGBH pulled the show out of 9Story in a dispute. He felt he owned a piece of them because he had a show there, and when 9Story started pitching new series to PBS WGBH thought they should have a say in that since they would be competing with them. 9 Story understandably didn't want to stop producing their own shows that would own rights on, so the contract was cancelled. I would have been happy staying with 9 Story another season because we were starting to make some big headway in the production and they were always nice to me there. I never heard the story from 9Story point of view. 9 Story would have just seen me as part of the enemy in the dispute at that point. WGBH was always doing battle with the partners over the years. It was like that with Ron and Micheline and with Michael Hirsch and then with Vince at 9Story. They were always pushing for more and cutting the money being contributed to the show each season. It wasn't ever a warm and cuddly relationship between the co producers.

DL:So, How was the move to Oasis Animation?

GB:I was able to hire a few of my previous designers from years earlier. Not as many as I had hoped but we had a few people come back. We threw away all the material from 9 Story because they now wanted to do the show in Toon Boom Harmony. So the rigs needed to be rebuilt. They did trace them off or something to save some work but they didn't rig all the extra poses we had made in Flash. So it was again a new learning experience. The animation artists were all doing the show for the first time again so it starts off difficult and gradually improves over time. We set up the crew structure more like I was used to when we did the show at Cinar/Cookie Jar. With regular designing crews for characters and props and designers for background design and color design. So I was more used to that structure than the way 9Story operated.

DL:To tell you the truth I didn't see a difference when Oasis took over.I thought you used the same models!

GB:Since it ended up going on a few years it was probably better by the end than if we had stayed at 9 Story. Toonboom Harmony is just so much better and more versatile than Flash which was being phased out quickly at that time. The design on the shows improved a lot. We went from one designer doing a few rough characters and Background designs to a crew of 3 people doing characters and 3 doing background design.

DL:Also I found out that Glen Kennedy was doing the boards for Arthur while at Oasis! You got him to do boards?

Glen Kennedy infamous for his work on Tiny Toon Adventures was a storyboard artist on the three Arthur Specials, the Rhythm and Roots of Arthur, An Arthur Thanksgiving, and Arthur’s First Day.

GB:Yeah he was in Vancouver freelancing. I had people from Toronto, Ottawa , Vancouver and Montreal doing storyboards. My main people that were doing the storyboards over the years including at Oasis were Gerry Capelle, Al Jefferies and Jeremy O'Neil , Elie Klimos and Cilbur Rocha. Glen came in on the last season or 2.I had some of the same storyboard people since season 1. Specifically Gerry Capelle and Al Jeffries. It was one of the constants of the series. Gerry did most of the opening storyboard even.

DL: I talk about him because he is famous in the Youtube poop community, As his animation is way more off model than AKOM's ! As none of his animation has weight and would squash and stretch all the time! https://youtu.be/KCIFNCO1ic4?si=764AdwiJaViotfyX

Glen Kennedy’s Animation Reel.

GB:I've never seen that. Is that his animation reel or did he storyboard it? It's a lot of animation. Great animation for sure.

DL:His animation Reel.But it caused him a lot of jobs.

GB:Wow! great work.Kennedy Cartoons was an annoying company. It is probably not Glen personally doing all that animation, it would have been his company. He had that company with his brother in Toronto. I remember we tried sending layouts for R. Scarry or maybe even Arthur there at one point. It didn't last long.

DL:Wait, Kennedy Cartoons was going to be doing Richard scarry or Arthur!

GB:Yeah I recall sending out some freelance layouts at one time. I don't think it lasted more than a few shows. Ever since then I keep running into people that tell me they used to work on Arthur doing layouts in Toronto or Ottawa and I don't know them and wonder how they got layouts.

DL:What you just told me was extraordinary!

[erebus0dora]

something something a chat i am in discussing the loneliness of Armand who needs someone to define him and see him, so

"...it was ghastly and awful and loathsome, and beautiful all at the same time."

and yeah i kinda just want to give ppl hugs with anything i do and talk to them in hushed tones, so there you go

[tuserlivia]

Interview with the Vampire 2.01 "What can the damned really say to the damned"

[lokihiddleston]

THE PUPPY INTERVIEW Tom Hiddleston

[kiddokori]

yoo joongwoof han soonyan and kim stoatjaaa

[jazze-bee]

Animated a question from the papyrus interview because skeletons are cool and apparently ill never be over my undertale fixation.

I might animate the full thing if anyone's interested