Gaming World Forums
General Category => Entertainment and Media => Topic started by: denzquix on July 17, 2013, 11:14:00 am
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I'm a big fan of this sidelined little pantheon of American animation. Both the early stuff, all super-basic "talking heads" animation, sleepy and low-key, with dialogue based mostly on edited/re-recorded improvisation...
pilot episode of Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist, "Pot-Bellied Pigs" (1995):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lz7yrnP3KpY (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lz7yrnP3KpY)
pilot episode of Home Movies, "Get Away From My Mom" (1999):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7IhZ0PahL8 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7IhZ0PahL8)
...and also the later, increasingly ambitious stuff with tighter scripting & slicker animation, like Home Movies by the end, and even more so the latest show Bob's Burgers, which I think is due to start a new run of episodes (4th season) in a few months
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I am a really big fan of exactly this type of stuff, but I would have never brought something up like this myself, so thank you.
It's funny how you don't actually need the squiggly lines anymore to tell whether or not something "looks like" it belongs with that style of animation. (of course I have just as hard a time listening to Jon H Benjamin's voice and not imagining the lines on whatever character he's playing all squiggling out)
It's also funny how that today, it actually costs MORE to produce an animation where the animators don't care how inconsistent the lines are from frame to frame.
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U.S. Patent #6,252,604: Mr. Thomas F. F. Snyder's Method of Animating an Image by Squiggling the Edges of Image Features (https://www.google.com/patents/US6252604)
(https://legacy.gamingw.net/etc/i.imgur.com/4i8W6vt.png)
"we have a patent on the crappiest thing in the world..." - h. jon benjamin
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dr katz is the best because it looks like it was made on an Amiga or like OS/2 WARP
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dr katz, home movies, bob's burgers are all great!
as I recall, home movies switched to flash animation because they wanted it to "have its own style" and because fluid animation is impossible with squigglevision, and also because it ended up being a lot cheaper.
jon katz recently did an internet series called explosion bus, in another iconic money-saving style. it looked promising, but ended up being scrapped after some confusing changes
http://youtu.be/mGkUL-hbZpc (http://youtu.be/mGkUL-hbZpc)
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http://youtu.be/p5Ghg1MD5ZI?t=26m10s (http://youtu.be/p5Ghg1MD5ZI?t=26m10s) dr katz mr show
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"Are you double-bagging the hot chocolate mix, Ben?"
"Three bags."
"Ben, that's too much."
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late to the game but hey, you know what? this is really sort of revelatory for me. i have fond memories of dr katz because i used to watch it in the late 90s and it introduced me to mitch hedberg, and home movies is legitimately one of my favorite shows and i think i probably made a thread expressing this many years ago on pre-sw gw, but the discussion didn't really go anywhere. but!! i watched the first episode of bob's burgers a few years ago, generally being a fan of h jon benjamin's stuff and sort of thought it sucked! later on my girlfriend insisted it didn't because she'd watched a few episodes while getting stoned with our neighbors and i kinda wrote it off as their all being high but i never realized there was a connection between it and the earlier two series. i feel like this is going to make me give it a legitimate chance.
having said that, i think a lot of the humor in dr katz and home movies was derived from conversation-driven scenes set against pretty mundane backdrops (e.g. therapy, soccer game, dinner, etc), and the one episode of bob's burgers i watched, iirc, had a very different narrative structure to it? but honestly my memory is hazy so i should probably give it another shot.
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i don't blame you, a lot of people wrote off Bob's Burgers after the first episode, it's kind of unrepresentative really... but for me it was even earlier than that, I saw a trailer that made it look terrible, and i was worried about the show... but i loved it from very early on, these are episodes from the first season I would recommend:
"Art Crawl"
"Bed & Breakfast"
"Crawl Space"
if you think those suck too, yeah, you might just not like the show... but for me the Dr Katz/Home Movies style of conversation comedy does come through (some episodes more than others though, for sure...)
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yeah, I remember early on B's Bs seemed to consist of a formula of deliberately oddball "they can't show that on TV!" sort of junk that's been popular for the past several years, but it's not really that at all. I do think you need a little time to get used to the characters. It's not the same as DrKPT or HMs but I do think you start getting invested in the characters in a very similar way to brendon and coach mcguirk and ben and dr katz.
I don't think emo philips has done any voices for the show yet tho so that is a major difference
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ooo i only just noticed there are some episodes of the Squigglevision kids' show Science Court up on the 'tube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxmys7IRgKg (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxmys7IRgKg)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tNrNJOz2To (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tNrNJOz2To)
etc... it was a saturday morning show intended to educate about a different science thing each week
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ooo i only just noticed there are some episodes of the Squigglevision kids' show Science Court up on the 'tube
etc... it was a saturday morning show intended to educate about a different science thing each week
Damn nostalgia bomb just blowing up in my face. Paula Poundstone does some of the best deadpan.
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huh I vaguely remember that show. I don't remember if I had any idea what was going on in it though.
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early pilot "biography of mr katz" (1992)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zK7BtNdy6KA]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zK7BtNdy6KA (http://[url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zK7BtNdy6KA%5Dhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zK7BtNdy6KA)[/url]