Here are some wonderful sketches of Rocky the Flying Squirrel and his nemesis Boris Badenov by our great friend Debbie Anne Perry!
Deb actually GETS how Rocky should look - proper cheeks and all - unlike the more modern designs like this!
Yeah... THAT'S IT!
12 comments:
Thank you for sharing my drawings. I used either actual Rocky and His Friends episodes or Dell comics covers for source material for my drawings here. The newer drawings aren’t bad, but they do seem to lose a bit of the rough edges of the “churned out” quality the original show had. But everything has to be “on model” for licensing purposes lately, it seems, even if the “approved” models really don’t evoke the feel of the work they’re representing. Of course, slavishly imitating the Jay Ward studio art would also end up looking phoney if you followed it too closely, so it’s really not as easy as drawing the Disney or Hanna-Barbera characters, who seldom varied as widely as Jay Ward’s characters or the Looney Tunes crew.
I suppose so, Deb… But I’ll take YOUR VERSIONS of these characters over the prescribed model sheet versions any day of the week – and twice on Sundays!
I’m betting most of my readers would too!
Yup, that's MY Rocky! When do we leave for Applesauce-Lorraine?
…As soon as we can get out of Frostbite Falls?
I feel like those modern versions are 'trying' to look blocky and stiff in a pale effort to imitate the HB animation style.
Fantastic art as always, Debbie!
Awww... The EARLY H-B stuff (I'll take it up thru 1964, even) was really good.
After that? Not so much... Scooby-Doo excepted!
These characters were designed to be flat--a concept which seems to escape R & B's modern-day style-guide designers. Attempting to render these characters in three-dimensional form robs them of their visual appeal, and gives them that awkward, off-putting appearance that you and I detest.
Couldn’t agree more, TCJ!
There was a prevalent practice in animation of the early-to-mid 1960s that went for that flat and simple look. It was defined by Jay Ward’s (Rocky and Bullwinkle, Hoppity Hooper, George of the Jungle) and Total Television’s product (King Leonardo, Tennessee Tuxedo, Underdog) and additional outliers like Roger Ramjet, Calvin and The Colonel, the original Alvin Show, and surely others that are not coming to mind at the moment!
Hanna-Barbera bucked that trend for quite some time… I’d say as long as Ed Benedict was the primary designer of the characters. And, for that, they were (certainly in the visual sense, if not for overall entertainment value) the… If you will pardon the expression “The Most Tip Top” (Sorry!) in then-contemporary television animation.
They had nowhere to go… but down! And, soon enough, they did!
Not sure about Scooby-Doo being an exception. It certainly had more ambition in the kind of things it tried, but as for lushness of the results? I don't know if you ever encountered the hilarious “Scooby-Doo Mistakes” website, but as much as we may love the old series (and so does the fellow behind SDM, by all accounts!), he's got a point.
Achille:
When I say that “Awww... The EARLY H-B stuff (I'll take it up thru 1964, even) was really good. After that? Not so much... Scooby-Doo excepted!”…
…I mean it was the best of the lot of its contemporaries! The animation might have been stiff, but the characters were well-designed (…so much so that they can still get away with wearing 1969-styled clothes nearly two decades into the 21st century), and the backgrounds were the best of their time!
Look at the bulk of H-B stuff in the ‘70s and ‘80s and you sure can’t say that!
Oh, and you can find mistakes in ANYONE’S work if you look hard enough… Even Chuck Jones’, Carl Barks’… and er, mine!
And, while I certainly do satirize individual bloopers from time to time (…How can you not?), I feel that’s somewhat different than hosting a site fully dedicated to digging-for and exposing the mistakes for one particular property!
…Unless, of course, they are the mistakes and bloopers of one particularly poor and unqualified comics translator! :-)
…I mean it was the best of the lot of its contemporaries! The animation might have been stiff, but the characters were well-designed (…so much so that they can still get away with wearing 1969-styled clothes nearly two decades into the 21st century), and the backgrounds were the best of their time!
Quite agree with you there — but then, so does the Scooby Doo Mistakes guy, as he has often restated off the record. It's all in good fun. Plus, the central conceit is that it wringers comedy out of details that one doesn't notice when watching at normal speed. There is something admirable about "cheap animation" that manages to slip so many bits of dodgy character models or background continuity past millions of viewers.
Heck, the chap even hosted an interview with one of the actual 1970's Scooby-Doo animators, once, and he quite enjoyed the site. Can't argue with that.
Achille:
Oh, I don’t mean to sound harsh, or anything like that! It really is all in fun, from what I’ve seen of it.
And I do the same thing in my “I’m Not an Artist, But…” series of posts.
It’s more from the place of… (to use an example of an artist I don’t like), if I were to host a dedicated Blog called “Where Kay Wright Goes Wrong”, or something similar.
Now, I realize that no single Scooby-Doo animator is being called-out for all of these, and maybe something called “Bad Charlton Art” would be a more appropriate analogy, but, despite the fact that Charlton did indeed have more “bad art” than the average publisher, I also find the good in what they did, as a matter of balance – celebrating both its “good” and “bad” as one whole! …Like today’s post, for instance.
Perhaps it’s because, despite what Esther (…or ANY wife, or ex) might tell you at times of disagreement, I’m really a nice, even-handed fellow, who tries to always balance everything to an even keel – if not err more on the “good” side!
And, if I’ve failed to do so in the case of “Scooby-Doo Mistakes”, here’s the link here’s the link for everyone to enjoy!
And, as a bonus, here’s one that *I* did!
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