Friday Linkfest

Another batch of linkage to brighten your weekend.

Seth Green holds forth on his stop motion teevee show:

Q: Why don't we see more stop motion being used on television?

Seth: I don't think it's the fault of the medium. I think it's the content. Stop motion serves certain content very well, and other content not so well. Typically, it's used as a very artistic medium for Oscar-nominated shorts or films like Coraline and The Nightmare Before Christmas. Typically, it's not really used for comedy ...

I don't much like to get into the articles about new animation DVDs that pepper the intertubes. There's just too many of them, and who cares anyway? But sometimes there's a DVD that is just so heart-stoppingly big, so stunningly important to lovers of animation, that the rule must be waived. And now is such a time.

Super Friends: The Lost Episodes DVD Review

Wonder Twin powers, activate! Form of a collector's edition DVD.

... [B]ad, low-level animation, cheesy voice acting and goofy stories ... Quality here isn't all that great, but that's to be expected. I'm sure restoration folks at Warner did their best cleaning up each print, but there's only so much one can do to a print before things get really expensive. Dust, dirt, scratches and white specks plague each print. Colors are soft and murky. Details and depth are flattened by the degraded quality.

Cabler FX is wading into the cartoon biz:

"Archer" is a half-hour animated show that will premiere on FX sometime in the fall. It's more satiric drama than sitcom, and it's about the people who work in a spy agency.

They don't do much spying, based on the pilot episode. They mostly hang around, pull guns on each other and deal with their dysfunctional lives.

So it's more like, you know, a relationship show.

The bottom has just fallen out of my life:

Seth MacFarlane: master of the obvious. According to the Advocate (from and interview with Playboy), the Family Guy creator has outed the youngest member of the animated Griffin family, "he will be gay or a very unhappy repressed homosexual." ...

One small step -- however symbolic -- for artists who actually create the work:

Warner Bros. and DC Comics have lost a little more control over the Man of Steel.

In an ongoing Federal court battle over Superman, Judge Stephen Larson ruled Wednesday that the family of the superhero's co-creator, Jerry Siegel, has "successfully recaptured" rights to additional works, including the first two weeks of the daily Superman newspaper comic-strips, as well as portions of early Action Comics and Superman comic-books.

The ruling is based on the court's finding that these were not "works-made-for-hire" under the Copyright Act.

In our charming corporatist state, once in a while a person actually catches a break ...

ASIFA's Animation Archive has details of Disney veteran Clair Weeks lengthy stint in India, where he provided an early leg up to the sub-continent's animation industry.

Clair Weeks was born in India, the son of a Methodist missionary- a source of humor for his co-workers at Disney. (See caricature, right.) He spent 16 years at the Disney Studios, working on Snow White, Bambi and Peter Pan. In 1956, Weeks travelled to Bombay, India on the invitation of Information Films of India to set up and train the country's first animation studio as part of the American Technical Co-Operation Mission.

Have a rejuvenating weekend. And don't do any heavy lifting.