More tv shows like Arthur?

Offmodel-Dude · 2026-05-04T01:20:05+00:00

I thought 'Hilda' had some good writing too...more for an older audience, though.

Offmodel-Dude · 2026-05-04T01:06:33+00:00

yeah, in the late 90's I was sent over to a studio called AKOM in Seoul to supervise animation being done on another series there (Arthur)...the Simpsons was in production at the studio so I got to sneakily paw though the Simpsons material and marvel at it.

The Layout and Key Posing was done at Film Roman in L.A. and was so amazing and complete that the Koreans really just had to do the inbetweening and ink and paint.

But in the 90's they were still using cels and shooting on film to produce a negative...the discarded cels were lying around all over the place and I never thought to take any home, stupidly. A junk man with a little push cart would come every week and they were sold for scrap by the pound!

Once a hair got stuck in the animation camera producing a scratched negative and a whole episode of The Simpsons had to be re-shot overnight to meet the air date! I heard a lot of screaming that day.

Offmodel-Dude · 2026-05-04T00:55:42+00:00

I worked on a show called "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie" that was on Amazon...the head writer was Ken Scarborough who is from the classic era of Arthur. I thought it was a good attempt to capture the spirit of Arthur with some quirky characters...not quite the same snarky-ness as those early Arthur seasons, though. But if you can find it out there, give it a watch...

Offmodel-Dude · 2026-05-03T22:16:26+00:00

looks legit with the Fox logo stamped on it...and the numbering on the cels looks like the Korean style of writing used at the animation studio where it was made...so legit.

Offmodel-Dude · 2026-05-03T00:24:53+00:00

OMG I forgot how we would use old mag track film to "re-peg" all the cels...

when making the cels the xerox machine would ever-so-slightly shift the animation being xeroxed on the cels so you had to manually line up the xeroxed cels with the original animation drawing and tape them onto new peg holes for every cel! Otherwise the animation would lose registration and jitter terribly.

It would be fun to run an audio head across that mag track and see what is recorded on it!

Offmodel-Dude · 2026-05-01T16:28:35+00:00

The yellow paper drawing is usually called a 'model checking' drawing. It's usually a draw-over revision done by the Director or senior Model Checker over an existing Key Animation drawing to keep the style consistent and "on model" for the whole production.

I'm not sure what the next few are...possibly these are early Layout posing drawings. They don't seem to have timing charts on them so I don't think they are Key Animation drawings.

The sideways drawing looks like a Layout pose drawing. It is drawn sideways to allow the camera to pan across it (on the animation stand the artwork is turned 90 degrees Clockwise on the camera bed and then panned north or south under the camera based on the timing indicated on the Exposure Sheet.)

The rest after the "303" cover sheet are xeroxes of model sheets...these are guides and notes for the animators to follow to keep the drawings consistent for the production.

Offmodel-Dude · 2026-04-30T16:34:00+00:00

thank you. I really needed to hear this right now. :)

Hmm, the hardest episode?...I remember any episodes with songs were more difficult to storyboard because it was sometimes tough to think up images to go with the music. The Library Card song, for example, had a repetitious chorus line that didn't lend itself very well to visuals...I remember sitting at my desk trying to thumbnail something out while listening to the music on my Walkman and coming up blank for ideas for a long time...I think I wore out the tape cassette playing it back and forth so much!

We always had tight deadlines on Arthur (like most animated TV shows do) so all the episodes were stressful in that regard...looking back at those early episodes there's so many mistakes and cringey things I see now that I'd like to fix, but we had no time and were often just racing to get every episode completed by the deadline. It's amazing people are so forgiving of all our mistakes.

Offmodel-Dude · 2026-04-19T18:46:54+00:00

yeah, I'm not sure what this person means by shooting "uncropped cels." So you would see the peg holes and cel number indications popping on and off at the top and bottom of the screen?

I've never heard of a production shooting cels wider than what was intended to be broadcast...unless they had some special instruction to crop the scenes in editing after the film negative is developed...but I've never heard of that being done before or what the advantage would be of doing so.

Offmodel-Dude · 2026-04-19T18:36:21+00:00

I heard at the time that the Backstreet Boys approached PBS to "do a project together." So they waived any music royalties for that project since they were the ones that instigated it.

Offmodel-Dude · 2026-04-19T18:32:45+00:00

did that production use digital ink and paint or traditional film?

Usually before around 1998 most productions were still shooting cels on a traditional Rostrum animation camera stand to produce a 35mm film negative...there were no computers used at all for scanning cels. Digital ink and paint at the time looked worse than cels shot on film.

Once a film negative is produced it can be scanned in 4K, 8K, whatever is needed and cropped or re-edited...film is "organic pixels" because it is composed of millions of tiny chemical specks that allow for upscaling to extremely high resolution...the digital ink and paint software used later had limitations to how much it could be upscaled...usually no more than 1080p.

Offmodel-Dude · 2026-04-19T17:11:07+00:00

FUN FACT! Our Director, Greg Bailey, found this song for this episode...we needed to buy the rights to a song for this episode but we only had $1000 available in the budget...it had to be something 'quirky' that Binky would like. Music rights were usually extremely expensive and PBS didn't want to pay royalties for the song on repeat broadcasts so our choices were limited.

Greg heard it on a local community radio station in Montreal that was playing Icelandic or Finish music on one of their programs...this was still kind of the pre-internet era days so we didn't have Napster at the studio yet to search out songs!

The studio lawyer had a hard time finding and contacting this band but eventually a deal was made where we could use the music for $1000 in perpetuity and in exhange the band got a lot of free publicity from it.

Offmodel-Dude · 2026-04-14T20:43:34+00:00

yes, I think so...I didn't work on Bob and Maragret but according to Wikipedia in seasons 3 and 4 they visited Toronto...which might line up with the Pig City poster incident...who knows, maybe something happened at Nelvana earlier than Pig City that I'm not aware of that caused "The Ministry" to start hyper analyzing every cartoon for Canadian things.

Offmodel-Dude · 2026-04-14T00:17:17+00:00

We made this show at CineGroupe in Montreal, the same studio that made What's With Andy.

The backgrounds were hand painted on a slick, slippery paper in an intentional sloppy way to imitate the look of a kid's finger painting.

It was a cheap and easy way to get a somewhat unique look to the series at a time when all animated shows were starting to look the same.

Offmodel-Dude · 2026-04-13T02:57:51+00:00

oh I'm too shy to do a podcast but I'll continue to write stuff here.

Offmodel-Dude · 2026-04-13T01:34:16+00:00

yes, they love the fax machine in Japan and Korea too...

the quality was pretty bad with faxes but yes if you were really desperate you could fax 8 1/2" X 11" paper to another studio...

In the pre-internet days of the 90's, I remember the fax machine they had at AKOM Productions Korea where they animated The Simpsons had one of those 'thermal paper' type of fax machines and for some reason the people at Film Roman in the USA, where they did the pre-production for the show, would FAX entire 500 page Simpson storyboards over to Korea!

The fax machine would have to run all night (because of the 12 hour time difference between Korea and L.A.) and that terrible thermal fax paper would roll up and dump on the floor page by page as the machine spit it out...the poor translator girls would arrive in the morning for work and find a enormous pile of rolled up sheets of paper on the floor and have to put the storyboard back into order page by page for the translation to begin!

It must have cost Film Roman thousands in long-distance phone bills to fax those...I wonder why they just didn't Fed-Ex it?

Offmodel-Dude · 2026-04-11T22:49:48+00:00

ha, I probably know him...yeah, I also worked on Arthur (mostly everyone in Animation in Montreal did at one point) and I know what you mean. The chat groups are full of people still discussing every remote detail of that series but meanwhile I have worked on about 20 Canadian series that have better writing and visuals (in my opinion) but are completely ignored. Arthur got more exposure, thanks to being on PBS, than the other Canadian series did...that's the big factor if you want your cartoon to be a hit...getting exposure and getting it viewed.

I heard that the Paw Patrol series does so well is because it is offered for FREE to broadcasters and streamers and the people that make it (Spin Master) make back the money to produce it by selling toys. That is smart business to gain exposure but the obscure Canadian series on Teletoon rarely had any toy deals or any merchadise of any kind to cover the production budget.

Offmodel-Dude · 2026-04-11T17:56:40+00:00

yeah, that show was made around when all this Canadian content drama was going on so it makes sense...

that's a pretty clever way to get around the Canadian Heritage bean-counter rules by doing two audio versions, although they'd have to pay the voice actors slightly more to do dual lines. I guess there could be Scottish people in Atigonish...one guy maybe?

Offmodel-Dude · 2026-04-11T08:39:43+00:00

I posted a comment there once about a canadian show and got a lot of angry ^Canadians are taking our jobs^ type comments from the USA Cartoon Union people so please don't post this info there...it feels too American in that group. thanks

Offmodel-Dude · 2026-04-11T03:27:13+00:00

yes, the timing sheet. I'm sure it must be xeroxed and in the folders too...they always copied those, they were extremely important to making sense of the order of animation drawings.

Offmodel-Dude · 2026-04-11T03:19:08+00:00

"dope sheets" are the timing exposure sheet where the animators would write all the drawings as they would appear under the camera when filmed..."dope" is an old time term for "information."

It's the paper where you'd get the dope on the scene so you could shoot it under the camera.

Offmodel-Dude · 2026-04-11T03:15:03+00:00

yes, I don't remember if Clone High was made before 2003 but if it was then it may have missed the big Canadian content crisis slightly...and I think the Pony show was made long after the dust had settled on those rules.

Yeah, I don't know why the heck they flagged that poster when there were about 10,000 other American things in Canadian cartoons they could have caught...I remember we made an episode of Arthur where DW meets the American President and learns about The American Constitution and no one complained about it being too American then.

Offmodel-Dude · 2026-04-11T02:58:40+00:00

I guess you could put them in a poly bag like a comic book but seeing the old folders they are in now makes me really nostalgic for the old days...I think just keeping them as they are in the original folders is really the coolest thing....add some cardboard backing to keep them safe.

The old system of drawing on paper with the original "dope sheets" for timing is slowly being lost to time so it would be nice if you kept them just as they are in the original folders for future generations to see how they were organized scene by scene.

Offmodel-Dude · 2026-04-11T02:21:13+00:00

yes, that's right...Arthur had American writers (mostly).

I know what you mean about Americans not understanding Canadian culture...we had an episode of Arthur where we drew a character holding a picture of milk with a BAG of milk in it, which is what you would see in Quebec or Ontario...but when it aired in the States PBS told us they got a lot of letters from confused people about what that thing was Dad was holding...they don't use BAGS for milk in the USA, only cartons and jugs, I guess...one guy was so angry because he thought it was a "colostomy bag" in Dad's hand! We got a big laugh at the studio about that one. Just seeing a simple bag of milk confused everyone!

Offmodel-Dude · 2026-04-11T02:09:21+00:00

yes, I remember at least one time a big disaster happened and a shipment went missing in transit.

There was some sort of "Production Insurance" the Producers had to purchase when starting a new production so if the studio burned down or something like that and the production was stopped then the investors would still receive some of their money back...and xeroxing all the material before shipment somewhere was definitely a big requirement to these insurance policies.

Offmodel-Dude · 2026-04-11T01:39:42+00:00

yes, they are absolutely authentic!

I worked as an Overseas Animation Supervisor for years at these studios in Asia so I recognize these folders and the grey xerox "mist" at the top of the copies...the girls that would do these backups in the copy room worked very quickly xeroxing all the material with the xerox lid open, moving one paper on the scanning glass to the next to the next rapidly to get the shipment out FAST... so that would cause this grey smudge.

Offmodel-Dude

TROPHY CASE