Arlo and Janis by Jimmy Johnson for February 13, 2013

I saw what you did there, Jimmy… ;)

And so did I :-)

Uhhh, guys, every panel is identical except for the text.

If you look closely, the wall is actually various shades of white in each frame, giving each one a distinct look.Most people just aren’t sophisticated enough to notice such intricacies (sarcasm, in case it wasn’t obvious)

Oh! Jimmy, jimmy, jimmy, Jimmy!

Janis? Where are you?

Aren’t all modern cartoons computer animations now?

Sadly newspaper cartoons/comics met their match when the size kept shrinking (leading to Bill Watterson’s many fights over size and his ultimate departure).

Should have saved that trick for a Sunday strip.

Nice. Very clever shortcuts.

Clutch Cargo…

hmm, a little history is order here. With the advent of TV, stations needed filler and cartoons made for Movie Theaters fit the bill exactly. Just remember that those cartoons (Warner Bros, etc) were NOT made for children, but the stations plugged them in especially when children were watching. Thus a whole generation grew up on Road Runner and Tom and Jerry etc. (Disney kept their own to themselves on the Mickey Mouse Club). But….some industry people realized that making cartoons that way for TV would be outrageously expensive (way to many cels to color), but didn’t know what to do. Enter ‘Crusader Rabbit’, the first animated cartoon made for TV which used the revolving background and really cut the number of cels to a minimum. And who were some of the illustrators working on Crusader? Hanna and Barbera, and with the advent of Quick Draw McGraw (and others) the rest is – sadly – history. I know, I watched Crusader in 1951-1952 when I was 4-5. It wasn’t Mighty Mouse, but it was animation. What IS sad is the dumbing down of today’s cartoons. Generations are growing up with insipid and trite presentations instead of very layered and textured cartoons with lots of subtle adult themes.

I’ve heard that kids prefer the old hand drawn cartoons over the computer generated ones.

This comic strip today is so true. The cartoons I watched growing up are so superior to today excluding some animated movies of course. Those have improved greatly.

I wonder how many people were introduced to classical music by watching Chuck Jones cartoons.

Attacking yourself as if you don’t notice is a cute joke. ;-)

I looked again a few times, and this is correct. Looks like definitely an optical illusion. Compare each of the panel backgrounds separately to the white GoComics background instead of comparing them to each other. They are not different shades after all. Good call!

JJ’s blog:“It also was a gentle poke at a lot of comic-strip artists out there, particularly those who produce exclusively with digitial tools. You see a lot of it these days, identical panels except for the lettering and a few cosmetic tweaks from panel to panel….However, at Arlo & Janis we make cartoons the old-fashioned way. We grind them out with pen and ink.”

Cheap, limited animation on TV in the 60s and 70s was derided as “Animated Radio”. Lots of dialog, little action.

Ha ha

What’s interesting are the Tom & Jerry cartoons. When they moved production to Czechoslovakia, the animation and sound effects were so appalling that they moved it back to the states.When my kids (20 & 18 now) were little, we would watch the old animation from Disney, Hanna-Barbera and Warner. They enjoyed the old animation, the classical music and, believe it or not, having to think to get the joke. I never realized how fortunate I was to be exposed to the old classics until I realized how bad animation was getting and the fact that adults felt children weren’t worth the effort.

@coz69 Clutch Cargo was my first thought as the absolute nadir of good cartooning. I watched an old episode a while back, and it was completely painful to watch.

Ahhh … the irony! Love it! :)

Those old Warner Bros Merry-Melodies and Looney-Tunes, the old Popeye cartoons and Disney’s movies like Dumbo etc. You can’t beat those. Not just the artwork but the sneaky humour that was never intended for kids! These new things on Cartoon Network are awful!

Fun to see Johnson making fun of himself.

Good animation comes and goes. Look at old Felix or Betty Boop cartoons and note all the repeated motions. I’ve been watching a disc full of Winsor McKay animations, which are amazingly sophisticated, but also make use of the shortcut of repeating frame sequences over and over.

For recent animation, see Tangled. Or contrast The Simpsons with South Park.

One of my pet peeves is the way that characters in Dreamworks, I believe it is, register astonishment and what- have-you. Always, always the same. According to my daughter, someone used motion-capture technology on an actor responding to something, and the same response has been used in perpetuity. If that isn’t so, it certainly seems like it. Almost as bad is the way that animated characters seem to glide along as they walk. Can’t someone program a computer to show something like a weighted person making an impression on what he/she waks on? @Dragon0131 said, “I never realized how fortunate I was to be exposed to the old classics until I realized how bad animation was getting and the fact that adults felt children weren’t worth the effort.” I imagine that it’s that adults feel that children aren’t worth the cost. Quality requires $$$.

You’ve seen how Alley Oop and Nancy turned out.

Ha-ha! It’s true — you Americans just don’t do irony! (apart from JJ, who does it VERY well)

Crusader Rabbit one of my favorites…showing my age.

You get 4 pages? We are lucky to have one whole page!

This is one of the best!

Taking a page from the Garry Trudeau book, eh, JJ? I recall seeing a parody that actually did use the same panel over and over and over … sorta like this strip.

Doonesbury did it deliberately, in homage to Jules Feiffer, who started it. BUT, they drew every panel. As for repeating backgrounds in animation, how about TV shows. Watch the credit roll on Taxi. Same strip repeated over and over.

Plus Charles Schulz did something similar in an early Peanuts cartoon, where he had Charlie Brown speaking paragraphs in each square, to make a point about strips that had too much dialogue.

whmIII: I vaguely recall eight pages on Sundays, five daily. Now the Dalla Snooze runs six on Sundays and two and a half daily.

It is because of the passion these cartoon creators put into these works!

Clutch Cargo was the best at limited animation