Thursday, April 09, 2009

Crew has Goode Hopes

Various news outfits reported yesterday that Mike Judge's new comedy The Goode Family will roll out on May 27th.

This is a couple of months later than what the crew believed was the show's original launch date, but even with the resulting looong hiatus, that might not be a totally bad thing. As a crew member told me today:

"Most of us have been away from the show for a while now. When we got layoff slips, we thought the show was airing in March, April at the latest."

"I didn't want a long break. I hoped The Goode Family would get on the air earlier rather than later, and we could go back to work before summer. But now that I know about the end-of-May date, I'm thinking maybe that's not a bad thing.

"The word I've gotten from people is that ABC execs like the film they've been seeing, and that's why they've held the show back. They didn't want to launch it while American Idol was on, and have it get smothered.

"So May 27th not be a bad time to have it debut. I've heard that ABC has already ordered four more scripts, so those will be ready to start working on if we get a green light.

"I'm not disappointed with the May date at all. If it means the show gets an order for more episodes, the longer wait will have been worth it."

Be nice if The Goode Family got a pickup and a nice long run, especially since its parent King of the Hill is over after 300+ episodes.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's a summer show now? Isn't that bad? This is exactly what happened to ABC's last cartoon Clerks back in 2000.

Unknown said...

The show is premiering this summer? I guess that's good, since the competition won't be that much.

Dave said...

I don't know how to email you guys , but there's a post on Cartoon Brew right now that I think would be worth discussing here on the TAG blog in light of the constant discussion of outsourcing , new production models, etc.

Also the interview is a fascinating insight into the "development process" used at places like Cartoon Network, which seems to me to be a very wasteful process.

http://tinyurl.com/cy6gz4


I was struck by something that co-creator Fran Krause mentioned during the interview about creating the 11 minute pilot for Cartoon Network:

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Question: Describe the animation process a bit. Like Superjail, a Flash-animated series that both of you worked on, Upstate Four is refreshingly free of the Flash shortcuts that we’re so used to seeing nowadays. It feels more like a traditionally animated cartoon than Flash. Would it be budgetarily possible to maintain this level of quality throughout the entire run of the series?

Fran Krause: "It would definitely be possible - it’s what was done on Superjail, though the workflow was different. We started with an animatic of the boards, from which the key animators based their layouts and Will started the backgrounds. I tried to key out as much as possible to keep the style consistent. From there, it went to the animators to rough out the movement. The assistant animators handled the clean-up and lipsync, and the interns covered the in-betweens and coloring. Shadows were also blocked in with Flash. The scenes were composited in AfterEffects, at which point the camera moves and shadows were added.

Oh! Also, this cartoon was produced entirely in the USA!

No outsourcing whatsoever!


In fact, except for the music, which was composed and recorded in LA, the entire production, animation, voices and sound were completed in New York."


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