Maybe I covered this, but for those who came in late: I thought of the summer of my junior year in college as my last break before "real life." I wanted to go into cartooning of some kind but animation seemed all but dead outside of Disney and that studio still employed the guys who started the place with Walt. (I didn't know that they were just starting a training program for new talent.)
Anyway, I decided to forego another stint as a camp counselor for the Woodcraft Rangers and spend eight hours a day trying to sell gag cartoons . Back then there were still magazines that carried single panel cartoons. By summer's end I had collected a wall full of rejection letters which I wish I still had. The closest I came to success was when The Saturday Evening Post kept one of my gags for further review before rejecting it. Also, McCall's published a cartoon that was the same as one I doodled in a letter to my girlfriend. I took that as a sign that I was thinking along the right lines. School started and I laid it all aside (when I should have continued in my spare time says Mr. Hindsight)
But all that work paid off later in my career when I moved into story on The Fox and the Hound. Don't waste your time searching the credits. I'm not there, I was beaten out by a worm. Disney animated features didn't use a script then, just a story outline that was developed visually. A story artist ( I believe Pete Young and possibly Vance Gerry in this case) would be assigned a sequence of a fox and hound first meeting and playing together like kids. He would draw gags of the animals playing various games, swimming, getting into trouble, whatever. The directors and directing animators would pick what they liked. The story artist would then expand on the ideas with more visuals and begin piecing together a continuity and maybe suggesting a little dialogue. Repeat until it's shipped downstairs to be animated.
So it was a variation of the same, single panel gag process. I repurposed some Chief animation and storyboarded the Hunter laying out his bear traps with Copper. The method is the same whether it's comedy or drama. Years later, when I began writing scripts for TV animation, I'd go through much of the same process but without doing the drawings. That kept my shows visually oriented or at least I hope it did.
But before that summer in college, the idea of coming up with gags from nowhere, and doing it every day, seemed impossible. But once I got started, it got easier. I didn't send one gag to each magazine to earn my rejection slip; each publication got eight to ten.
I learned to think in a different way. I began doing a sort of mental improvisation. Let's try an experiment. I promise not to cheat. I also do NOT promise to end up with a gag. I'm going to record my mental process. Let's say I doodle a drawing of a lizard and want to do a gag. I start thinking in visuals and will worry about punchlines later.
Lizard in a desert. Desert is hot. Lizard trying to stay cool. Lizard on two legs with ice cube tied on his head. Brain freeze? AZ desert = dry heat. T shirts with skeletons in desert talking to each other, "Yeah, but it's a dry heat." Lizard in lounge chair under cattle skull. Human skull? Geico lizard. Geico roadkill. Lizard dead in jaws of buzzard, holding little Geico attache case. "I'm guessing they don't cover this."
Okay, that was something. I went from lizard to environment. Jumped to Geico lizard and putting him into a nature environment instead of an office building. I could have focused on the lizard, the idea that they grow back tails. What if the tail grew another lizard? Lizard having scaly, dry skin using lotion. Sight gag of an overly moisturized lizard talking to friends? Lizard talking to snake, a lizard with no legs. Lizard diet? Eating bugs? Trying to eat something it thought was a bug. Stuck on the exhaust pipe of a VW bug?
At the end of that summer, I was thinking in a different way. Evidently I had etched new grooves into my brain. Now I find myself doing the same thing and finding it harder.
Most of the shows I did for Disney were mini versions of what they do in features: comedy/adventure or adventure with tons of comedy. Whether it was Chip 'n Dale's Rescue Rangers or Aladdin, we hung our gags on some sort of story with a character arc and a strong mystery, science fiction or adventure plot. What I have ahead of me doesn't have that sort of genre crutch.
These days my brain is split. By day I storyboard on BOB'S BURGERS which, for all it's extreme designs, is treated very realistically. I'm not a writer on the show but as a storyboard artist I look for ways of adding entertainment without adding time. It's more like an actor interpreting a script. In fact, it's exactly like that. There are few dynamic camera moves, very little exaggeration of action and almost no ability to open a track to insert a gag. And the result is hilarious. The scripts are funny, the actors are fantastic improvisers, and that attention to reality gives the show a unique tone when set between the worlds of The Simpsons and Family Guy. Watch for it in January of 2011.
Then by night, I work on my development for Cartoon Network. My idea is a comedy. Not a science fiction adventure comedy or a supernatural spoof comedy or detective dogs buddy comedy. It's four kids doing amazing, exaggerated things. Just as in BOB'S BURGERS, the tone of the show is very important. And the tone of this show is about 179 degrees away from our favorite burger slinger. It's a bizarre world filled with extremely bizarre people.
I'd say I'm about 75 to 80 percent down the road to where I want to be. Which is scary because everything depends on the pilot and that better be at 100% when I'm through with it. My character designs are getting closer to the spirit of what I want. The goal will be to find a designer that takes those as a starting point and pushes them to really capture the personalities in a single image. Voices? I know EXACTLY what I want... for two characters. Secondary characters. Characters who won't even be in every episode. But, hey, it's a start. I'll certainly be able to describe everyone in the show and what I'm looking for.
But the bulk of that missing percentage that I'm looking for has to come from new brain cells, or at least rearranged brain cells. When the CN execs gave me permission to go even crazier than what I had pitched, I was overjoyed. What got worrisome was that when I handed in the first draft script they encouraged me to push things even more. Why worry? It meant I hadn't pushed things enough. I wasn't thinking wacky enough. Then one of the execs pitched a gag I loved, not right for the pilot but a great example of the kind of wacky they were talking about. I worried, "Can I get there from here?"
Doug Langdale, currently working on a Kung Fu Panda series, is one of the funniest writers I know. I believe his first animation script was on Darkwing Duck working for Story Editor, Kevin Hopps. Nobody could write Megavolt like Doug. Perhaps he played with electric sockets as a kid. Only Doug would realize that if Megavolt robbed a jewelry store he would only steal the light bulbs from the display case in order to "set them free." Of course, when he lets them loose, the bulbs just shatter on the sidewalk. That was one of my, "Can I get there from here?" moments. Could I come up with gags like that. Zany yet perfect expressions of a character's personality.
The same happened with Disney's Winnie the Pooh TV series. I'm sure I could have developed a WtP TV series of some sort, but Karl Geurs and Mark Zaslove created a whimsical world that felt 100% in keeping with what Disney had done before. Karl pushed, bent and broke the budget to get the quality into that show that he felt the property deserved. And in doing so, he gave the character new life and started him on the path toward surpassing Mickey Mouse in merchandising which I take as a fair estimation of a character's popularity. That was the first time I stated, "There's no way I could get there from here."
So I dove back into my script. Much of what I did has been talked about in the previous post. But the point wasn't to add random wackiness. Like Megavolt playing "Born Free" with light bulbs, the wackiness must come from and help define the characters. Things got better, funnier. My limitations were set more by page count that concept. I need some wacky input so I'll be watching comedies, cartoons, anything funny... not as a blueprint but just to mix up the lobes in my head. It's true that I'm not where I need to be yet.
But I've got a compass and some charts, and I'm on my way. -- Tad
By the way, I covered a lot of this material in an early post entitled, "Brainstorming." There you'll find the same recap of my summer of gags and Fox and Hound work. But it all came back to me with my current development.
Hope you don't mind the rerun.
Posted by: Tad | 10/09/2010 at 09:49 AM
I read somewhere you animated for Fox and the Hound...maybe I trust wiki too much. *rollseyes*
Posted by: JerRocks2day | 10/12/2010 at 05:29 PM
BTW, cool drawing. I love how you got Darkwing, Mickey Mouse, Hellboy Jr, etc. stuff together trying to get out. XD
Posted by: JerRocks2day | 10/12/2010 at 05:40 PM
I have one animated scene in a Disney feature: Bernard mouse walking across a desk and turning when he hears a cuckoo clock. It never got a real clean up job. I moved into story soon after that. I did not animate on Fox and The Hound. I did story, also uncredited. It wasn't until The Black Cauldron that Disney began crediting everyone who worked on the picture, or who was employed in anyway connected to the feature.
Posted by: Tad | 10/12/2010 at 09:30 PM
Ah, the Rescuers. I remember that film. I still have that and it's sequel in my VHS collection.
As for Fox and the Hound, I've heard that Don Bluth directed/animated a few scenes, and was also uncredited. Did you get a chance to meet him during the film's production before he moved onto Secret of NIMH?
Posted by: JerRocks2day | 10/13/2010 at 06:43 AM
I'm very excited from your descriptions about Bob's Burgers. Which network will that be showing on?
Again -- I love reading about your thought process. It's really interesting to get an inside look on how a storyboarder/writer thinks about projects like this. Thanks for posting this!
Posted by: Amanda | 10/19/2010 at 12:07 PM
Glad you enjoy reading it. I enjoy writing them. The gaps between blogs are mostly a result of me not coming up with a topic.
BOB'S BURGERS will premiere on FOX in January.
Posted by: Tad | 10/19/2010 at 01:38 PM
Bob's Burgers was a great disappointment, can't believe i sat through the whole thing, such horror :S
Posted by: bob's burgers review | 01/11/2011 at 07:05 AM
http://www.daemonstv.com/2011/01/17/bobs-burgers-crawl-space-review/
Posted by: Why would you post a bad review to the site of someone who worked on the show? | 01/23/2011 at 05:19 PM
interesting
Posted by: csddept | 06/29/2017 at 12:50 AM
The description of Bob burgers is so exciting
Posted by: Evelyn Wangari | 06/30/2017 at 01:32 AM