Thursday, January 12, 2012

Expanding Cartoons

A worried artist on "The Simpsons" asked me today if the animation business is growing or shrinking. When I said "growing" he was surprised. I told him that one island of animation expands while another erodes, but overall, there are more people working in the animation business in Southern California than ever before.

Of course, you have to count cgi work, visual effects, games, television graphics, animated features, and television product, but if you do, there are one hell of a lot of people engaged in making blocks of entertainment.

To underscore my point, there was this from a few days ago ... that I somehow overlooked ...

Fox Broadcasting Co. is betting on cartoons to challenge NBC's "Saturday Night Live."

The network, which already relies on animation to fill its Sunday night prime-time lineup, is getting even more invested in cartoons with a new Saturday block of cartoons that will compete with "Saturday Night Live," the reigning champ of weekend late-night TV..

Fox is about the only television network that believes in animation and keeps making new shows for new time slots. Of course, there is a reason it believes. Rupert and his minions keep making Big Money out of cartoons.

Now if only some other webs would try the same thing.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It was published recently that Murdoch can make $750 million easy cash from new syndication deals simply by canceling the show. And Murdoch does have some legal bills coming due....

Anonymous said...

that new Fox block sounds like what they were going to do online with the Inkubator but never happened. Saw (& worked on) a few of those "pilots" but nothing ever came close to being done from what I've heard & seen.

Sad 'cause some of those were really good & I would have loved to see in primetime & would have kicked some of the new show's butts. Others.... let's just say online only is the place to go.

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