Like Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s web empire Google, Craig McCracken’s path to world domination began as a school project. While the TV series and the internet search giant launched within weeks of eachother, it was 1992 when McCracken first brought Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup to life in a student short titled Whoopass Stew! A Sticky Situation, initially introducing the threesome as The Whoopass Girls. The Google gang may preach their altruistic “don’t be evil” mantra, but The Powerpuff Girls immediately “dedicated their lives to fighting crime and the forces of evil.” Let’s watch a few scenes from this original short:

McCracken’s crime-fighting cuties wowed the execs at Hanna-Barbera, in particular Fred Seibert, who navigated Craig’s work into What A Cartoon! Show (initially dubbed World Premiere Toons), the seminal shorts program that spawned a string of animated hits like Dexter’s Laboratory, Johnny Bravo and Courage the Cowardly Dog. After producing four in-house shorts (only one was completed), the show was given a greenlight by the network for a 1998 premiere (all of this development material is available on the DVD that releases next Tuesday – The Powerpuff Girls: The Complete Series – 10th Anniversary Collection). McCracken’s college roommate Genndy Tartakovsky was already a rising star at Cartoon Network, having created Dexter’s Lab, when the two teamed up to produce the first season of PPG. On November 18, 1998, the series enjoyed the highest rated premiere in Cartoon Network’s history, setting the stage for a six season run.
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We may never get a look at the series itself, but the title sequence for Cartoon Network UK’s Little Rikke is a fine substitute. The show concept and character designs were created by Rikke Asbjorn, who had experience at Passion Pictures, and the Flash-animated pilot was co-direted by Asbjorn and Chris Garbutt. Sylvain Marc, who took a top spot in last year’s Flash Animation 10, joined on to help with character animation, layout, the animatic and background designs. Ben Marsau animated as well, along with Stephane Coedel, who handled the After Effects compositing. Chris Garbutt provided the storyboards.

The end credits are also posted on Coedel’s Vimeo page. Animation spotted at fousdanim.org.

Stephen Colbert’s Flash-animated series Tek Jansen has kicked off the new year with a freshly baked episode. Beginning’s First Dawn: Episode Three, premiered on The Colbert Report on January 5th, and it was produced by Flickerlab. [video is apparently only viewable in the US]

Should you live in the Los Angeles area, I hereby propose a new entry for your calendar – February 5th: a one-night-only screening of Los Campeones De La Lucha Libre (“The Champions of Mexican Wrestling”) at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood. This feature-length action-comedy from FWAK! Animation was produced in Flash, and premiered in Mexico on October 17th of last year. Over on the film’s Facebook page, I found this info about the night “Creators Eddie Mort, Lili Chin and other guests will present pre-production art, visual reference and never-before-seen rarities, followed by a surprise feature from the vast EL SANTO vaults shown in celebration of the 25th Anniversary of the icon’s death, a day celebrated in Mexico for the star’s impact on popular culture.”

Last summer we posted 3 “behind-the-scenes” vignettes for Ka-Ching Cartoon’s 7-minute Flash-animated short The 3D-Machine, which was produced in stereoscopic 3D. This week, Joost van den Bosch and Erik Verkerk, the Nethlands-based founders of Ka-Ching, have delivered a detailed, step-by-step “how to” video. Below, we learn how to produce the anaglyph images that create the illusion of 3D, using Flash and After Effects.