End of Week Linkomatic

Cartoon linkage for a weekend free from care, beginning with ...

Ed Asner talking about landing the part of Carl F. in the oncoming Pixar epic:

Mr Asner: Pete Docter and Bob Peterson were aware of my work and they came to watch me in a one-man reading I gave in San Francisco where I was playing the part of a Holocaust survivor. How they thought a Holocaust survivor would blend in with the concept of “Up,” I’m not sure.

Mr. Docter: The first time Ed saw the model we’d made up of Carl here at Pixar, he looked at it and gruffly said, ‘That doesn’t look anything like me." That’s when I knew he was perfect for the part ...

Newsarama details the beginnings of Japanese animation in the U.S of A.

... In 1963, one Fred Ladd, who was working for NBC’s syndication wing NBC Enterprises, came on a fast and dirty solution for the problem. He found he could buy the rights to a hit Japanese animation series entitled Tetsuwan Atom for the price he once described as “three bowls of rice per episode.” He took the show, gave it a catchy theme song, hired the likes of Pete Fernandez and Corinne Orr to voice over a dozen characters each, and renamed the series Astro Boy.

Next thing Ladd knew, he had a hit on his hands ...

The rest as they say, was a stream of money. And this Fall, c.g. Astro Boy on the big silver screen comes to an eager public.

Nickelodeon will be ginning up yet another DreamWorks series after Penguins and Panda:

Nickelodeon has ordered a pilot from DreamWorks Animation for a series based on the studio's recent "Monsters vs. Aliens" movie, DWA CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg said Tuesday. ...

DWA knows a winning hand when it sees one.

And comic strip artists are aware of when they are eating it:

"We're going to hell in a handbasket," said [Lalo Alcaraz], the creator of the comic strip "La Cucaracha." ...

"We live and die by our newspapers," said Cathy Guisewite, who created the comic strip "Cathy" in 1976. "We've all built our careers on trying to be content for newspapers. If newspapers are struggling, then we're struggling as well." ...

... [T]hose not entirely convinced by the revenue stream generated online are looking to animation as their next target. Alcaraz has dabbled with producing "somewhat animated" editorial cartoons and has pitched an animated version of his comic to Fox.

Hot dog! Up has won an award at the Cannes Film Fest

The movie “Up,” ... has won the Palm Dog prize, an award given annually during the Cannes Film Festival for best canine performance, BBC News reported. The prize, a satirical alternative to the Palme d’Or and voted by British film critics, was given this year to the animated character Dug

The screen's first Lois Lane (Fleischer edition) has died at age 94:

Joan Alexander, 94, a leading radio actress of the 1940s best known for playing Lois Lane, the ace reporter who was constantly being rescued from peril by Superman, died of an intestinal ailment May 21 at New York-Presbyterian Hospital.

... Ms. Alexander and [actor Bud] Collyer provided voice-overs for 17 animated Superman shorts, made by Fleischer and Paramount studios, that played in movie theaters during World War II.

Ms. Alexander and Collyer reunited in the late 1960s to do voice-overs for the Saturday morning cartoon "The New Adventures of Superman" on CBS ...

Diz Co. has come up with a pretty ingenius (and retro) way to promote its other holiday animated release:

Four Disney-branded train cars left Los Angeles' Union Station last week as part of a stunt to promote "A Christmas Carol," the performance-capture pic starring Jim Carrey that bows Nov. 6.

The effort is unique not only because of its length -- it stops in 40 cities in 36 states and runs through November -- but also what's on board. The remodeled passenger cars from the late 1940s and '50s are plastered with images and slogans from the 3-D toon ....

This kind of thing happened a lot in the olden days. (Warners had a cross-country train trip for its Western epic Dodge City in 1939). But the train publicity gambit has been absent of late. Bet it garners a lot of publicity at less than exorbitant cost ...

Have a splendiferous three-day holiday ... and be good to one another.