ColdHardFlash.com is officially 5 years old today!

In November of 2004, I was working at Warner Bros. Animation and me and a small crew of Flash-converts were still fighting an uphill battle. We were trying to convince the studio chiefs that Flash animated series were a good idea. The seminal Flash-animated series ¡Mucha Lucha! was already well underway, but I think my superiors thought the show’s budgets would magically be cut in half and rainbows would burst out at every schedule meeting. The truth was somewhere in the middle, and animating a TV series with this “web-toy” was still kind of a nutty concept. So I figured I would blog about the prevalence of Flash-animated series around the world, and somehow justify that this was a growing trend. The gorgeous and successful Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends had just premiered on Cartoon Network, which made things a bit easier, but I’d heard of dozens more out there. With a little research, I discovered 9 series that were either in production or planned and that was my first post, titled Flashing the Studios (2 of those series, Omega Dome and Katbot, never surfaced).

Regular posting over the next few weeks brought a trickle of regular viewers, but what I saw as more of a research project had helped my cause at WBA. Spreading this information around internally helped justify further Flash exploration, and soon handfuls of Flash-pilots were in production, including Coconut Fred and Johnny Test, which both made it to TV. To their credit, WBA executives like Marge Dean and Christopher Keenan were way ahead of me, and even if they didn’t use the software, they understood that a revolution was underway.
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This Sunday, Cartoon Network will air its’ last cartoon. Wait, that’s next year. This year, they’re airing the final Foster’s cartoon. Starting at 1pm on Sunday, the network will begin airing the show’s final 5 episodes, concluding with the series finale Goodbye to Bloo. Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends began in 2004 and has delivered over 75 episodes and received numerous awards. I know most of the crew has already left the building, but here’s to an exceptional run. You guys created something quite special.

For more on the topic, check out our interview with series creator Craig McCracken and animation director Eric Pringle.

On his blog, Cartoon Network animation director Eric Pringle offers a swan song for the departing crew from Craig McCracken’s Cartoon Network series Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends. With 54 episodes behind them (many animated by Dublin-based Boulder Media), he wraps up the 5+ years he spent at the studio with a parting gift – a 6-page PDF tutorial of how to animate Bloo. I know I’m not alone in saying that Eric’s Emmy-award winning crew helped raise the bar of what Flash animators could do and will do in years to come. Happy trails, Foster’s team!

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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At this year’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York, a Flash-animated series was complicit in one of the most elaborate Rickrolling pranks of all time. As the float for Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends “rolled” down the street, the massive crowd had no idea what was about to happen. The horror…

Read more about the incident here.