Posted on September 14, 2024
Historically, sitcoms make up the smallest piece of the TV cartoon pie with the fewest productions. Why? Because they're the toughest to find an audience for. The Simpsons is the clear standout, and a handful of competitors got as close as they could. After that, there's a steep dropoff into a chasm of one-shots and single-season experiments. Here are two stories from my time in that chasm.
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Posted in: TV Cartoons
Posted on August 19, 2024
GOING TURBO! The last time we checked in on Max Steel, he was the star of a clunky CG-animated TV series that ran from 2000 to 2002. Toy sales were tepid in the US, but overwhelming in Mexico and Brazil, which motivated Mattel to GO TURBO! with a series of movies. Starting in 2004, these became annual projects. I was invited to GO TURBO! and storyboard the fifth of these films, and I stayed on for several more. See the movie and background info here!
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Posted in: TV Cartoons
Posted on July 14, 2024
Anime was always going to win. It was just a matter of time. I use the word "win" as if it was a contest. It shouldn't have been, but American producers made it that way. We on the art side became their opponents, and we outnumbered them. So the results were inevitable. What am I talking about? Get comfortable...
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Posted in: TV Cartoons
Posted on June 19, 2024
What do you do when you start a TV series on the wrong foot, find nothing whatsoever to like about it, and have no interest at all in what happens to the characters? You shut up and draw, that's what. Storyboarding for the third season of Max Steel was a big, valuable lesson in pride-swallowing. But I kept some stuff from it anyway. See it here.
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Posted in: TV Cartoons
Posted on April 26, 2024
With every series I've worked on, I always found something to love and memories to cherish. Except this one. To the outside world, Nickelodeon is a playground of fun, excitement, and colorful cartoons. On the inside, the picture is quite different. Everyone comes out of it with a story to tell, and now you get to read mine. Spoiler: it ends with me getting fired.
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Posted in: TV Cartoons
Posted on February 11, 2024
Hulk's pulverizing brute strength and Tony Stark's high-tech brainpower come together to face off against the ultimate enemy. When "Zzzax," a seemingly invincible, energy-devouring monster threatens to destroy the planet, Marvel's unlikeliest pairing of Avengers is mankind's only hope. Alone, neither can defeat the awesome power of Zzzax. As a duo, they just might have a chance -- if they can find a way to work together without smashing heads before time runs out!
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Posted in: TV Cartoons
Posted on January 13, 2024
Nothing quite matched the spark, enthusiasm, and unbridled fun of Xiaolin Showdown. In many ways, we all made that show our own and those characters became our family. I hope I'm lucky enough to have that experience again. But if I don't, I have nothing but gratitude for getting to do it even once.
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Posted in: TV Cartoons
Posted on December 7, 2023
Following the disappearance of both Jean Grey and Charles Xavier, Wolverine becomes the new leader of the X-Men. The government organization MRD (Mutant Response Division) begins capturing mutants to "protect the safety of humankind." Magneto responds by welcoming mutants to his island sanctuary Genosha. Mix in a dystopian future war and the Hellfire Club's attempt to revive the Phoenix Force, and you got yourself a party.
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Posted in: TV Cartoons
Posted on November 7, 2023
Picking up where we left off, the second half of Season 2 gets rougher and rowdier with the villains getting more powerful and the paths of our Xiaolin warriors becoming less predictable. You might say the funny even gets seriouser! It was as suspenseful for us as we made the show as it would be for anyone watching it week after week on TV.
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Posted in: TV Cartoons
Posted on October 11, 2023
After season 1 wrapped in the fall of 2003, I already knew I wasn’t coming back as a director, but they were happy to have me back as a storyboard artist working for other directors. I wouldn’t be in a position to guide individual episodes, but I would get to contribute to more of them and actually leave a bigger mark on the series. Here's EVERY episode from the first half with notes for how to find my bits.
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Posted in: TV Cartoons
Posted on September 22, 2023
My largest DC project was The Brave and Bold (all three seasons), but I also dipped my toe into Teen Titans and Young Justice for brief periods. For even briefer periods, I worked on the two projects presented here: Legion of Superheroes and DC Superfriends!
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Posted in: TV Cartoons
Posted on August 15, 2023
Royal Rumble was the title of my fourth episode in season 1 of Xiaolin Showdown. It's also a good descriptor for the process of directing it. This turned out to be the last episode I directed, though I was still heavily involved in the show for its subsequent seasons. Why? Because there were some lessons I hadn't learned yet.
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Posted in: TV Cartoons
Posted on July 9, 2023
Never heard of this one? That's probably because it didn't get past the pilot stage. It was a 3-minute Looney Tunes-type showdown, based on a Mattel toy line, between top-tier WWE wrestlers Kane and John Cena. Since the project was so short, I'll take the opportunity to present something people outside the animation biz rarely see: multiple drafts of a storyboard as it goes through notes and revisions.
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Posted in: TV Cartoons
Posted on June 13, 2023
Our third episode of this series was where we took command. We'd already taken to the show like fish to water from the beginning, but now that the 2-episode shakedown was behind us, our funniest stuff was pouring out, and we drew the best-looking storyboards we could. See them all from start to finish here!
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Posted in: TV Cartoons
Posted on May 28, 2023
Following my five-season tenure on Avengers Assemble, I took on a new role as the “go to” guy for special projects while working on the next Spider-Man series, titled Maximum Venom. Those project are presented here for your general amusement.
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Posted in: TV Cartoons
Posted on April 16, 2023
I've spoken before about "magic scripts" in the cartoon biz. At least once on any given season, I get a script that I can see play out like a movie in my head the first time I read it. Then the storyboard flows out of me with seemingly no effort at all. That's what this one was like. The art was sharper, the gags were funnier, and more personality made it into the finished show. In many cases, the storyboards were better than the finished animation.
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Posted in: TV Cartoons
Posted on March 28, 2023
Tutenstein was based on a comic by Jay Stephens and produced by Porchlight Entertainment for Discovery Kids. I drew six storyboards for the series in the spring and summer of 2003. And despite being completely outside the intended viewership, I enjoyed every minute of it.
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Posted in: TV Cartoons
Posted on March 27, 2023
Somehow I wound up with an odd, sporadic history with the Men in Black franchise when it became the only IP that I encountered in both my comic book and animation careers. Afterward, any time I was asked what I'd worked on, eyes often lit up when I listed the MiB opening title. More than one viewer said it was the coolest opening they'd ever seen. I will go as far as to say it's the coolest opening I ever worked on.
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Posted in: TV Cartoons
Posted on February 25, 2023
Of the many TV cartoons I've directed and storyboarded, It's hard to pick one that was more fun to work on than Xiaolin Showdown. It featured four kids learning martial arts, racing villains all over the world to find mystical objects called Shen Gong Wu. It was like we stepped out of a jail cell, blinking in the bright sunshine as our producer handed us the keys to a hot rod and said to drive as fast as we wanted. I love it so much, I'm doling it out one episode at a time so you can see exactly how much fun it was.
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Posted in: TV Cartoons
Posted on January 24, 2023
When I was a kid in the 70s, building stuff with Legos was one of the ways I got my creative brain thinking about how to draw things. When I was looking for work in 2002, a studio named Creative Capers hired me to draw Legos. How does that click together for ya? This was only a brief storyboarding assignment, amounting to just 4 minutes of screen time, but it fun enough to make me wish I'd done more. See the whole movie here and my storyboard for comparison.
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Posted in: TV Cartoons