This year’s Channel Frederator Awards will take place on June 4th in New York City, and I hereby implore you, as a Flash-loving fool, to go vote - especially in the Best Flash Film category. Last year Jessica Borutski took the top prize for her I Like Pandas short, and this year the 3 finalists should all be familiar to CHF regulars - The Bros. McLeod (The M Man), Doug Bresler (Trapped in the Drive-thru) and Chris Harding (Make Mine Shoebox). We posted about Make Mine Shoebox, a collaboration between Maura Cluthe and Harding, back in 2005 - but let’s enjoy that again…

Alex Dron, who was featured here back in November, is up for the Kiwi Award, which will highlight the top film from New Zealand. His short Fot is up against Mukpuddy’s Sparkle Friends - go vote!

Below, Allan Dye introduces us to Last Minute Man in the nick of time. This superhero of financial responsibility reminds us Americans that it’s Tax Day! Allan submitted this Flash-animated short as part of Channel Frederator’s Tax Day A GoGo project, where animators were encouraged to send in 2-5 second animations reminding people to do their taxes. But, seriously - finish your taxes.

The Meth Minute 39 just released a new episode titled The Craigs Phone It In. You may recall the oversexed Craigs from an earlier episode.

The Meth Minute 39’s Internet People was one of the most watched shorts on the web in ‘07, and in this video below Dan Meth, the creator, explains his process, how the series came to be, and how he got his start in animation. Flash-specific details come in around 2:45 of this special Behind the Scenes short.

The Meth Minute’s weekly post is live. This week’s short is titled Ultra and the Lazer Hearts, which is a spoof of the rotoscoped 80’s series Jem - who rocked with her glam-band The Holograms. Dare to compare! (NSFW)

The Jem title sequence:

The latest Meth Minute features an animated version of Mike Tyson that will be familiar to Nintendo gamers from the 80s and 90s. Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out was a successful cartidge game for the the original Nintendo platform, but he sure didn’t talk like this (NSFW). Pull up ringside for Mike Tyson’s Brunch Out.

I actually sat down with Dan Meth (the creator of The Meth Minute 39), earlier this week during a brief visit to Next New Networks, and I got an eyeful of his process.Dan typically records 3 or 4 episodes of this weekly series at once. His voice direction is loose, and while he arrives at the studio with an outline of where the dialog should go, he relies on improv surprises to deliver the funny. Home Movies and Dr. Katz were both inspirations for the series and for his process. During a record, the actors typically riff for about 45 minutes, then Meth will edit it down to his minute-long episode.

His team is fairly small. Dan has some help with the music, but he writes the lyrics himself, and he has animation interns from Pratt and The School of Visual Arts who come in 2 days a week. By the time he’s done, each production takes about 10 working days to complete, so it shouldn’t surprise you that they banked 17 episodes of this weekly series before they launched the viral hit, first episodeInternet People.

It surprised me to hear that pop-culture junkie Meth is the equivalent of a Luddite in his apartment. While he’s equipped with the latest technology at work, once he gets home, he eschews cable TV and the internet for books.

Channel Frederator’s The Meth Minute 39 premiere almost couldn’t have gone better. Internet People!, the first, immensely popular Flash-animated episode, was seen over 1.5 million views on YouTube alone.

Dan Meth’s next one-minute episode is due out tomorrow, but you can watch it here…. right now!

Sex Machine features the late R&B singer James Brown as some sort of sex-obsessed cyborg. Creeeeeeepy.