At Universal Cartoon Studios (high up in General Electric's black tower), the Curious George crew is busily at work on Season Three of George with -- apparently -- more seasons to follow ...
Most series today don't go out beyond 39 episodes, it's not like the big days of syndication, when there were orders of sixty-plus half-hours. But we could end up doing something like that with George. We seem to have a good-size preschool audience. PBS seems to hold on to its little-kid base year after year ...
Across the Valley, Disney TVA has good news with a new series:
Disney Channel scored with "Phineas and Ferb."
The new show became cable's most-watched animated series premiere among tweens 9-14 (1.6 million) and Disney Channel's second-most-watched animated series premiere in total viewers (4 million) and across key boy and girl demos.
Phineas is a non-scripted "premise" show that's been in the prccess of becoming since the last half of '06; it's nice to see all the work paying off. Back near P and F's beginnings, story artist Chris Headrick had these observations about premise shows and Phineas:
"Nightmare Ned", which was the first show I worked on in the industry, was a Disney premise show back in 96-97.
Unfortunately, "Ned" might have turned DTV off premise shows for a long time: it ran quite a bit over budget ...
Now there's a concerted effort at DTV to make cartoons like CN and Nick have, hence taking the risk on premise shows again.
[T]he "premises" are still eight pages or so long on Phineas and Ferb! It's tough to wean people from scripts when they are used to them. Nevertheless, it is starting to be evident to the powers-that-be at Disney that 8 pages of script = 8 minutes of screen time, but 8 pages of premise = 20-30 minutes of screen time...
...the exec comments I've witnessed on P&F have been like I've never seen before at Disney...for the most part light, easily-accomplished and even helpful at times. There's a good vibe ...
Hopefully the good vibes and ratings will carry on.
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1 comments:
haha that must be a very old comment. chris quit the show. his #1 reason? the SUFFOCATING amount of executive notes and executive meddling on the show. A lot of P&Fs best storyboarders left the show for other projects, and the typical Disney mountain of notes was a big reason they chose to move to other places. next time you see chris, just ask him--the stories of DIsney execs with their hands messing all over that show are crazy.
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