Saturday, October 11, 2008

Model Criminals

The following is a rerun. It's a warning I've posted here before and I'm going to post it every few months because this kind of thing is still victimizing people who purchase animation cels...

Every so often, you see some dealer selling "color model sheet" cels from old Hanna-Barbera cartoons or other TV productions. Sometimes, they claim these were used in the production process. Sometimes, this is implied. Sometimes, it's even true.

But about 95% of the time when you see a hand-painted, full-color model sheet cel, what it means is this: Some person who may never have worked for that studio or even in the industry got hold of a Xerox copy of a black-and-white model sheet. Then they had this line art Xeroxed or otherwise copied onto a cel. Then they painted it themselves. Usually, this was all done a decade or two after the cartoon show in question ceased production.

The dealer now selling this cel may not have done this. He may have acquired the piece from someone who recently manufactured it...or from someone who acquired it from someone who recently manufactured it. But the point is that most of these pieces were not produced in or for the studio. If I had a set of the right cel paints here, I could whip up one that was just as "authentic."

There's a lot of fake cartoon and comic art out there. eBay always seems to have at least one "original Charles Schulz drawing" up for bids that the Six Blind Men of Hindustan could spot as bogus. Common sense should tell you which ones would be the easiest to fake and among the easiest would be shaky sketches of Snoopy done in Flair pen, and alleged cels that anyone could have painted. They're not all fake but a lot of them are. Be wary.

• Posted at 11:46 PM · LINK

Saturday Afternoon

I've voted. A few weeks ago, it looked like I might have to direct something on Election Day...and since my polling place is inconvenient enough during non-peak hours, I applied to vote by mail. My ballot is now marked and sent and I can report that Barack Obama will get at least one vote in the great state of California. It wouldn't surprise me if there were others.

I was reminded of how little my vote in that particular contest mattered when I was in Ohio last week. The state is "in play" so you couldn't turn on a TV or walk past one without seeing a McCain or Obama ad, usually a negative one. For the record, if I was even vaguely in the Undecided column, none of the attack ads would have budged my vote in the direction of the person doing the attacking. They all would have made me think less of the attacker.

So here's what we do next election to get our guy, whoever he is, elected. We form one of those 527 groups and we run attack ads...against the candidate we want to see win.

We make them outrageous and full of provable lies. We tell America that he's Osama bin Laden in a clever plastic disguise and that he molests small farm animals and embezzles money from orphanages and in his spare time, he's personally responsible for sending every piece of spam you ever got in your e-mailbox. We slam our guy so many ways that the opposition to him looks like a bunch of lying sleazeballs who deserve to be repudiated...and voters flock to him as a result.

I'll bet it would work. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if the Obama people had the same idea this year.

• Posted at 3:02 PM · LINK

Today's Video Link

I only vaguely remember these from long ago...a series of commercials for the Ford Motor Company that were designed and probably at least co-written by Ted "Dr. Seuss" Geisel. I don't know who animated them but some or all of the voices seem to be by Marvin Miller. Neat stuff. This runs four minutes...

• Posted at 12:23 AM · LINK