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Thursday, December 22, 2005

Childrens Entertainment - Updated

I'm starting work on an animated series for children.
This morning as I watched yet another wretched, dreadful piece of supposed entertainment, I finally worked out exactly the ingredients I need to make it a success.
1) Start with a really, really mediocre idea.
2) Hire a writer who has never worked in animation. It's preferable to hire someone who has written lots of stuff for radio, that way most of the show can be characters blabbering endlessly to each other and we wont have to worry about all that movement (or animation as we like to call it).
3) Hire someone who can't draw that well to design the characters. This person should have some drawing ability, but only enough to liberally borrow from artists whose names he doesn't know.
The final character designs should be simple enough that they can hire pretty much anyone with a minimum of drawing ability to copy the style.
4) Hire some people to do shitty cartoon voices. It's important that these voices have a speech impediment (thank you Oscar) and an American accent.
It is perferable to hire voice actors who don't actually have an American accent and then get them to do one - poorly.
If you need a voice actor to do any accent from the British Isles, then hire an American.
In Australia it's important only to hire voice actors who think that an animated character voice is simply your own voice but speaking like you are mentally deficient.
If these things aren't working for you, hire a reasonably well known celebrity with a generally indistinguished and characterless voice to do VO duty.
Whoever does the voices in the end it's important that they are either a) forgettable, or b) annoying.
5) Make the show. Put in just enough effort to make it appear that everyone's put in an effort, but not enough effort that the show is any good.

SIMPLE!

8 comments:

Oscar Grillo said...

...You forgotten...."voiced by people with speech impediments and American accents".

Anonymous said...

Also make all the actors yell... all the time... regardles of anything else, just yell. Kids love yelling. Its "x-treeme". Just look at our research...:P

RedDiabla said...

You forgot the most important ingredient, Elliot.

Make sure that there's more producers than artists on the series. Especially note that the producers don't do a damned thing on the production other than muck up anything that resembles a creative spark. Of course, the producers are allowed to tell the artists how to do their jobs, but the artists certainly can't turn around and tell the naked emperor to at least put on some freakin' underwear, fer heaven's sake.

Also, everything MUST be dumbed down to the level of a retarded mudskipper so that the lowest of the lowest-common-denominator of mouth-breathers will watch the show endlessly.

PEPE said...

You truly are a unique individual!! more please!!!

Elliot Cowan said...

Eric and Red - I'll update the list after the holiday season.

Pepe - I'm not sure if that's a compliment! But thank you anyway!

Uli Meyer said...

Hi Elliot,
Also add the TV producer who claims he (she) is one of the few elite players who know what the ingredients are for a successful show but wouldn´t know a good thing if it slapped them in the face repetatively.


Have a great 2006.
And thank you so much for your Christmas wishes. Your drawing is up on the studio wall. We all loved the pictures of blue sky and that wrinkly dead animal. Will reply in more detail soon.



ULI

limbolo said...

you'll never eat lunch in this town again, elliot.
Obviously, a very merry xmas to you.....

Elliot Cowan said...

Uli - I'll add it to the compile!
I also left off something about dreadful overloud music...
I'm pleased the pictures arrived.
Catch you soon!

Limbolo - I'm not usually welcome at lunch mate!
Cheers.

 
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