For as unimpeded as their Emmy award winning show seems, South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker actually run into a fair amount of censorship issues. Back in 2006 the pair were prohibited from showing an image of Mohammed in the aptly titled two-part episode Cartoon Wars. Then there was the Tom Cruise dust-up regarding the Trapped in the Closet episode, after which Parker said in an ABC interview “as soon as we can’t make the show we want to make, we’re not going to make it anymore.”

Back in 2001 we may have seen a precursor to what could follow the end of South Park - Princess. This 2-episode series was
commissioned by Shockwave, a division of Macromedia (now owned by Adobe), intended for online distribution. The Flash-animated shorts were part of a reported $2 million dollar deal for Parker and Stone, which was summarily torn up after a screening by the Shockwave executives.

The shorts eventually leaked out, and you can view them below. You’ll also see a short documentary from the Trio Network on how this brief animated series came to life. The two episodes are extremely graphic – and surely NOT SAFE FOR WORK (masturbation, animated sex and violence).

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A good year before Cold Hard Flash came into existence, Australian filmmaker Hamish Koci’s Fog Eyes had screened at all the major animation festivals – including Annecy and Ottawa. This 6-minute student film takes on the subjects of religious zealotry and euthanasia, and its apparent that Koci didn’t make use of Flash’s potential for limited animation. With a high drawing count and a rhyming narrative, this traditionally-animated short from 2003 is charming and provides a thoughtful perspective on a complex and controversial topic.

Hamish assembled an interesting lip sync tutorial for Australia’s ABC website. Koci has since worked on Flash-animated series, including The Amazing Adrenalini Brothers.

This, the fourth Cold, Hard Flashback, focuses on the Flash animation work from the Spumco gang. Sure, we took the wayback machine off to John K land in the 1st Flashback, but when, my friends, can ever have too much Spumco? Spumco, the now dormant animation pioneer, was early out of the Flash animation gate, delivering The Goddamn George Liquor Program in 1999, and a few wacky Hanna Barbera remakes that we’ll get to eventually.

The Spumco team also created a hysterical music video for Tenacious D’s ‘F*ck Her Gently.’

The video was directed by Gabe Swarr, and it featured work by a laundry list of the new generation of Hollywood animation talent. Gabe & Fred Gonzales recently worked on Disney’s ‘The Buzz on Maggie’; Derrick Wyatt & Ben Jones who recently finished up their 4th season on ‘Teen Titans’; Ray Morelli who I’ve worked with for a few years on various Flash projects; Tony Mora, who’s at Mike Young, and Matt Danner who I’m currently working with on ‘Coconut Fred.’ They all make cameo appearances in the opening camera descent into hell. The video is perhaps clunky by today’s standards, but you can’t deny the hysterical posing, beautiful layouts and clever and economic use of the software. I highly recommend you turn down your speakers at work, as ‘F*ck Her Gently’ is not in the least bit suitable for work.

The Spumco artists eventually disbanded, and in 2001 two talented youths by the name of Eric Pringle, who’s Animation Director over on ‘Fosters’ and Matt Danner started toiling on their own project. Now, to fully appreciate this short, you should familiarize yourself with a man by the name of Cal Worthington. Cal is southern-California-based car dealer who hosted a series of fairly humorous commercials featuring a ‘If You’re Happy and You Know It’ reworking. Now Pringle and Danner twisted this reworking even further, and came up with ‘PussyCow.’

It’s infectious, perverted and it features what I believe is the world’s first ‘nun punch.’ Matt does most, if not all of the voices, and he and Pringle are responsible for the animation, which shows hints of their Spumco upbringing. Matt & Pringle were part of Nebulous Films at the time, who ended up producing several hundred PussyCow dolls, and they’re now rare collectors items I occasionally see in offices around town. As the saying goes: “He’s half pussy, half cow….all good!” And don’t miss the recently released ‘PussyCow’ bonus clips, unfinished shots from the original short.

Hoping to join Cartoon Network’s Web Premiere Toons effort that began back in 1999, Dana Muise submitted a half dozen cartoon ideas. Sam Register and his team of Cartoon Network creatives wisely chose three of these shows – ‘Time E-Lapse,’ the ‘Bickleshnotz County Flying Club’ and ‘Journey to the Center of My Dog’s Head,’ which eventually came to be known as ‘Wendell and Wuggums.’ It wasn’t animated all that smoothly, but ‘Wendell’ was full of beautiful layouts, clever sight-gags and elaborate background designs. Not much emerged from the Web Premiere Toons project, but shorts like these surely inspired many in the early days of Flash animation.

In previous posts, I’ve singled out ‘Morto the Magician’ before. It ranks amongst my favorite Flash shorts of all time, and it’s not just because it was written by Steve Martin. The timing is phenomenal, the character designs are so unique, and the understated but unexpected color palatte is so well chosen. I also think it’s the charcter’s expressions that really send this one over the top. The little looks that Morto gets from his team are so wry and understated – the gasps and the confusion and the blank stares – they all add up to a completely satisfying experience. The short was directed and boarded by Conrad Vernon (a story artist, writer and director on ‘Shrek’) and the animation was executed by Makai Media.

The second Cold, Hard Flashback focuses on the upside of plus-sizes and how inebriation can lower inhibitions.

In 2000, there were few Flash animation companies doing quality work like eStudio, the now defunct interactive unit out of Venice, California. The team consisted of the uber-talented Mark Cohn and Ken Martin, who now run Blitz, the bad-ass Beverly Hills interactive agency headed up by my good friend Gregg Apirian. The eStudio team produced many notable Flash pieces during their heyday, but one in particular stands out – ‘I Want A Fat Babe,’ a parody of the massive Backstreet Boys hit ‘I Want it That Way.’ The short was storyboared by John Watkins-Chow with background designs by Alx Meza, the talent artist whose work can be seen on Cartoon Networks’ ‘Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends’ and ‘Hi Hi Puffy Ami Yumi.’ The eStudio gang was one of the first crews to use bitmap blur transitions, and their fluid animation was a benchmark back in 2000. ‘I Want a Fat Babe’ went on to win many awards, including ‘Best Comedy Animation’ at the 2001 US Comedy Arts Festival, and the team also notched a 2001 Annie Award nomination for Outstanding Achievement for an Animated Production Produced for the Internet. Head on over to Atom Films to relive the plus-sized hilarity.

Aaron Augenblick and his Brooklyn studio buddies have had their hands full lately with a bunch of animated shorts for MTV2’s hysterical ‘Wonder Showzen.’ But back in 2001, Aaron was hard at work on another fascinating little gem – ‘Drunky – In Through the Out Door,’ a hallucinatory Flash short that recounts a few nights of inebriated homosexual encounters. The character designs pay homage to Max Fleischer’s studio, but the result is surely something all unto itself. The funky shading, the muted color palette and the superb line-work all add up to one of the most beautiful shorts in recent memory. The animation is also quite remarkable. Aaron and his crew were one of the first teams to effectively use tweened mouth shapes, and their brand of squash and stretch goes a long way to make re-use look like the fullest of full animation. The result is jaw-droppingly good, and the judges of the 2001 Level13.net Film Festival agreed, handing Aaron the 1st place award in the 2D category. If ‘Drunky’ is your brand of booze, you’ll also be happy to hear that a new installment titled ‘Fish House Punch’ is currently in producing at Augenblick Studios. Now order up a round of ‘Drunky’ and then check out this glowing article on Aaron in the Delaware Journal.