There’s a new interview with Kenn Navarro, the co-creator of ‘Happy Tree Friends’ posted over at the Attack of the Show website. It follows the announcement from a few weeks ago that HTF would be airing on the G4 network, the home of Attack of the Show. To get up to speed, you can read the Cold, Hard Flash interview with Kenn from this past April here. Also check out the Flash-animated interstitial created to announce the partnership.

Starting in June ’05, the G4 Network, the cable network catering to the video game universe, will begin pumping buckets of big laughs and blood to their audience in over 50 million US homes.

June 10th at 7pm EST (4pm PST), Kenn Navarro, the co-creator of ‘Happy Tree Friends’ who was profiled here not long ago, will be a featured guest at the US cable network premiere. The shorts will be part of G4′s ‘Attack of the Show!’ program, and we’re being promised “full TV color, (including lots of red!)”

‘HTF’ is already flickering on over 350 million TVs around the world, but the US market had remained untapped, due to what is surely a more prudish marketplace. Hats of to G4 for stepping up to the plate.

Tonight, I’ll be joining a panel discussion at Cartoon Network
Studios in Burbank, California called ‘The Evolution of Flash.’ Joining me on the panel will be Flash animator Alx Meza; author, Producer and Director Clifford J. Parrott; Renegade Animation Executive Producer Ashley Postlewaite and JibJab co-founder Evan Spiridellis.

In thinking about tonight’s discussion, I figured it might be a good time to look at where Flash stands in the TV animation world. I’ve broken the list down into three categories – 1) Flash shows that are currently on the air and also in production, 2) Flash shows that are in pre-production or production and will be airing within the next year and 3) Flash shows that have completed their production runs and are currently on the air. This list is certainly incomplete, as I’m sure your emails will prove, so please send along anything I’ve missed or reported incorrectly. And let’s remind ourselves that this list is TV-centric, telling only half the story. Web-only projects like ‘College University,’ ‘Making Fiends’ or ‘Ninjai;’ or DVD/Internet shows like ‘Mr. Wong‘ or ‘Broken Saints‘ – these shows are almost more important, because they represent the new models of delivery.

And as we celebrate the rapid emergence of Flash animation production, let’s also remember that this amazing software is but a tool – and the real story here is the creativity, inspiration and vision that brings us armfuls of fun shows to work on and watch.

IN PRODUCTION AND CURRENTLY AIRING
01) Hi Hi Puffy Ami Yumi Show – Cartoon Network
02) Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends – Cartoon Network
03) Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law – Adult Swim
04) Atomic Betty – Cartoon Network
05) Bruno and the Banana Bunch – Nickelodeon
06) Being Ian – YTV
07) BB3B – BBC
08) Happy Tree Friends – MTV Int’l

IN PRODUCTION AND AIRING SOON
09) Coconut Fred’s Fruit Salad Island – Kids’WB!
10) Wubby Widget & Walden – Nick Jr.
11) Squidbillies – Adult Swim
12) Shuriken School – Nicktoons
13) Kappa Mikey – Nicktoons
14) Princess Natasha – Cartoon Network
15) The Wumblers – 4Kids TV
16) Captain Flamingo – YTV
17) George of the Jungle – Teletoon
18) Katbot – Disney
19) Omega Dome – Fox Sports Net
20) The Buzz On Maggie – Disney TV Animation

CURRENTLY AIRING
21) Mucha Lucha – Kids’WB! & Cartoon Network
22) Incredible Crash Dummies – 4Kids TV
23) Yakkity Yak – YTV

If you’ve been ingesting your daily dose of Cold, Hard Flash like good little boys and girls, you’d know that I recently posted the first half of an interview with Kenn Navarro, one of the creators of ‘Happy Tree Friends.’ And because you’ve all been so wonderfully patient, I now present you with the second half, hot off the presses:

AARON SIMPSON: The HTF message board crowd seems supportive of a HTF movie – has there been discussion of a longer-format HTF project?
KENN NAVARRO: Oh man! I think people, myself included, would jump off buildings after watching a mind-numbing 2-hour HTF feature! Ha, ha! We are in the process of trying out a half-hour block consisting of 7-minute episodes. There’s a real charm to the short episodes and I think it’s part of what makes the show work… I would not want to lose too much of that quality going to a longer format.

AS: Has there been discussion of producing HTF episodes in another medium? 3D perhaps?
KN: The idea has definitely been tossed around. I wouldn’t want to replace the episodes and go full 3D since I LOVE the 2D format, but we’ve certainly talked about doing a 3D episode, just for the heck of it. We’ve even had the idea to do an old-school, stop-motion episode with one of our writers, Ken Pontac (creator of “Bump in the Night“, “Gary & Mike” and “Clay Fighters”), who has a phenomenal stop-motion background. Maybe someday.

AS: Besides being a creator/writer/director, you’re also a Flash animator. Have you created any work in Flash of your own recently?
KN: No, nothing recently. Happy Tree Friends is a very demanding baby that ALWAYS wants to be fed and most of my creative juices go there. Besides, I also have a very voracious video game habit, so all my spare time goes there.

AS: When you first started at Mondo, what were you hired to work on?
KN: I was hired to work on the Flash cartoons actually. When I came on, Mondo Media was still doing animated service work, mostly in the 3D video game realm. I, along with two other guys, was tasked with making these Flash cartoons work over the Internet. Back then, only the guys at Spumco were doing any sort of character animated Flash cartoons and we took a slightly different approach to it. We rolled out with our initial line-up of three shows, “The God & Devil Show”, “Thugs on Film”, and “Like, News”.

AS: Do you have a sense of the diversity of the HTF audience?
KN: Yes, we have fans from all walks of life! My little brother started watching the show when he was 8 (he’s 13 now) and he LOVES it! All his friends at school watch it as well. On the other end, we also meet a lot of parents in their 40′s that love it. I would say our core demographic is 18-24 skewed male… although we get a surprisingly big female following also. Really, there’s something for everybody! Even my cats like ‘Happy Tree Friends!’

AS: There have been rumors of HTF heading for a US cable network. If so, would there be a need to cut back on the graphic nature the episodes?
KN: Not if I have any say in it! It’s a big part of the show and I think once you start taking stuff like that out it becomes totally different. The show would lose it’s flavor and punch that our core audience loves and it just becomes watered down. We might as well do an entirely new show at that point.

AS: Did you have an involvement in the design of the HTF vinyl toy sculpts?
KN: Yes! The guys over at Stevenson Entertainment Group are TERRIFIC people and were really receptive to our ideas! In fact, I would say they executed on about 90% of the things we wanted to do. For some reason, they couldn’t package raw meat in the figures. I guess it’s some sort of bio-hazard or something… who would have guessed?

AS: Do you have a favorite piece of HTF merchandise?
KN: I would definitely have to say the action figures and plush toys. I’m a huge toy collector and seeing ‘Happy Tree Friends’ in toy form is a dream come true!

AS: How do you respond to attacks aimed at the violence in HTF?
KN: There’s violence in ‘Happy Tree Friends?’ What the!?!? Well, we never claimed it’s for everyone. There’s people who “get it” and those who don’t. Dean MacDonald, our creative director here at Mondo, came up with a great tag line for HTF: “Not for small children and big babies”… which is spot on! First of all, I think people should chill out and realize that it’s a CARTOON! It’s all done for laughs and good times and no real bunnies or beavers are harmed during the making of the show… intentionally at least. It’s a strange double standard when nobody cries foul when the Coyote falls off the cliff or when Tom and Jerry go at it with swords. We just take it to the next level. Besides, they all come back in the next episode so no character really stays dead in HTF land.

AS: Have you ever been personally confronted by someone offended by the show?
KN: Not personally, although I already have instructions on what to do in case I suddenly disappear or something. We get a lot of mail (both snail mail and the “e” variety) about it and I actually like reading through that stuff because it’s quite funny. Recently we had a concerned parent tell us “I would rather put my children in a 4-way intersection before I let them watch this.” I guess that makes the kids more susceptible to the show somehow? And they call us crazy?!?!

AS: Do you ever find yourself feeling sorry for the sliced, diced and dismembered characters in HTF?
KN: Sometimes we’ll hit on a weird nerve when we come up with a gag and look at each other and go… “oh, that’s just wrong.” But then we quickly come to our senses and realize that’s the gold we’ve been digging for!

AS: HTF seems to be taking off all around the world, and especially in Europe and the UK. Have you gotten a sense of how well HTF is fitting into the European entertainment market?
KN: The Europeans really seem to get HTF. In fact, it seems like most of the world does since a lot of our fans are from all over the globe. There’s more European merchandise than here in the US, and the show was recently rated #1 on MTV Latin America.

AS: Besides Europe, where else have you witnessed HTF gaining a foothold?
KN: We’ve pumped HTF into the waters of South America, Australia, New Zealand, and it will soon reach Asia. Apparently it has taken control of Brazil in particular. There’s a small pocket of fans in Japan too.

AS: What animators, illustrators or painters inspire you?
KN: Oh man! There are way too many to mention! Inspiration hits everywhere! Features, TV, commercials, print, packaging and even some spray painted doodle on the sidewalk. I get juiced off all that stuff. I’m a total sponge… with square pants and everything!

AS: What animation DVDs have you picked up lately?
KN: I’m excited to pick up Genndy Tartakovsky’s ‘Clone Wars‘ on DVD. His team did a GREAT graphic spin on the ‘Star Wars’ characters. ‘The Incredibles‘ is another gem. Brad Bird and the team at Pixar did an amazing job on that feature. Truly, an incredible effort in story, design and craft. I also recently picked up a couple of Anime titles like the DVD release of ‘Giant Robo‘, which is just a classic; as well as ‘Samurai Champloo‘, very dammed cool.

AS: Are you working on any personal projects that you can speak about at this time?
KN: If I told you, I’d have to kill you… and I like you, so I don’t want to have to do that.

AS: For any future projects of yours, would you ever consider the web a good place to start the distribution?
KN: Yes! The web is just a PHENOMENAL tool to reach people. I actually think we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of what the Internet, as we know it today, can do. There’s so much potential with this medium and it’s really exciting to be living in such creative times. What other tool allows you to connect to the information you want at the click of a button, interact with other people, share and distribute all sorts of data and content, and receive some Viagra emails??? Ah, it’s a wonderful world wide web!

COMMANDMENT VI: PAYETH THINE RESPECTS FOR ASSISTANCE
Thanks, Kenn. Great interview. I also want to thank Christina Chavez for her help, and to the thousands upon thousands of fury HTF creatures who’ve sacrificed their lives to bring smiles to our faces.

COMMANDMENT VII: GO FORTH AND WATCHETH MANY EPISODES

COMMANDMENT I: Thou Shalt Not Rush In Head First

Remember Pop.com? It was Dreamworks’ planned web portal that was to act as an incubator for live-action and animated properties. Steven Spielberg, Jeffery Katzenberg and Ron Howard scuttled their plans in 2000 after spending $7 million and never streaming a single webisode. In Hollywood circles, Pop.com’s failure has become emblematic of the hype and flailing confusion that permeated the turn-of-the-millennium dotcom scramble. It just so happens that one of the shows ordered for Pop.com’s launch was a little Flash-animated show from San Francisco’s Mondo Media called ‘Happy Tree Friends.’

Pop.com was touting a roster of talent that included Jim Carrey, Eddie Murphy and Mike Myers, all of whom were on tap to produce the internet’s first big entertainment hits. None of these online efforts were ever realized, with the exception of Steve Martin’s ‘Morto‘ and a few odd shorts from Ron Howard’s brother Clint. As Pop.com handed out pink slips, the rights to ‘Happy Tree Friends’ reverted back to John Evershed at Mondo, and he and the creators of the show, Kenn Navarro and Rhode Montijo, decided to go it alone.

COMMANDMENT II: Honor Thy Cult Following

Dozens of episodes and 3 DVD releases later, ‘HTF’ is a bona fide entertainment blockbuster. It’s controversial, it’s contagious and due to its complete lack of dialogue, ‘HTF’ is immediately portable to any country or culture. Mondo has a licensing program that’s spawned a slew of products ranging from stickers to shoelaces; the DVDs have sold approximately 500,000 units; they stream 15 million HTF episodes each and every month and MTV International airs the bloody mayhem weekly to over 350 million homes. According to Mondo’s Marketing Director, Christina Chavez (who is also an Associate Producer on ‘HTF’), a new line of merchandise is due at the end of the year, and a DVD box set is due in October, so the ‘Tree Friends’ are about to get even happier.

This same allegory of internet success is evidenced in the rise of ‘Homestar Runner,’ Newgrounds, and Jib Jab. It wasn’t the big Hollywood conglomerates breaking out with big Hollywood names attached – it’s the little guys patiently brewing cult hits in cities like Atlanta, San Francisco and Philadelphia.

COMMANDMENT III: Thou Shalt Pay Homage to the Creator

Kenn Navarro has seen the whole story play out from the most humble of beginnings. Hired at Mondo to flesh out some of the very first online Flash shows, he wound up co-creating the hysterical, gory madness that is ‘Happy Tree Friends.’ Let’s check in with Kenn and see how he and his crew make an episode, what’s in his DVD player and what piece of equipment his friends call ‘precious.’

COMMANDMENT IV: Read

AARON SIMPSON: When did you realize that HTF was an internet hit?
KENN NAVARRO: It was probably the day we got numbers back about traffic and show views. I was expecting two people to watch, but when the report came back in the millions… I knew instantly that there were more crazy people out there than I had originally thought!

AS: What were your expectations for the release of the first HTF DVD?
KN: We had always known that there was a crowd out there enjoying ‘Happy Tree Friends,’ but I did not imagine how rabid that crowd was. I always thought after the DVD sold a few hundred units that we would move on to the next project; but to our surprise people really loved it and bought into it. It was just amazing!

AS: How big is the team that produces HTF?
KN: It’s actually a pretty small team that grows and shrinks depending on the workload. It starts with myself, writers Warren Graff and Ken Pontac, and maybe 2 to 4 other guys sitting together sipping juice, eating cookies and making each other laugh. Some of the writers are also animators and there will be 2 to 6 animators on a given episode. We also have a great colorist, Jenny Hansen, that does all the color stylings, and Jim Lively our “army-of-one” sound designer.

AS: How does the animatic stage of your production process work?
KN: Once we get all our Flash assets done based on the storyboards, we’ll do a rough layout in Flash which then gets colored. This file serves as the master template for the episode that then goes to the animators to do a tighter animatic with all the major beats and poses, scene by scene. Then we go play some video games and wait for the computer to “ding” when all the animation is done. I heart technology!

AS: The timing throughout the HTF series is very solid – describe how the final timing of an episode comes together.
KN: Thanks! A good watch helps for sure! A lot of the comedy that we mine in ‘Happy Tree Friends’ is timing related. We try hard to make sure that it comes across the right way. Most of the gags are worked out in storyboards and the animators bring a lot to the table when they animate the characters. After it all comes back, I’ll usually spend a couple of hours nipping and tucking here and there to make sure everything cuts the way the voices in my head tell me.

AS: When you or another writer first conceives an episode idea, what’s the process for getting the show into pre-production?
KN: Since the characters don’t speak any discernable language, we’ve found that writing a traditional script is a great way to waste good drawing paper. So, what we’ll do instead is jot down the beats from a brainstorm session. If I’m doing the storyboards then I’ll need to take down some notes on how the events unravel, or I’ll sit down with the storyboard artist(s) and pitch him/her/them the concept. We’ll work through a lot of the heavy lifting that’s associated with telling the story in this phase. Since there’s no dialogue, it’s even more important that we make the staging and layout read as clearly as possible so everyone understands what’s going on. Then it goes to asset creation and coloring.

AS: Is any artwork drawn straight into the computer with a tablet? Or is everything drawn on paper?
KN: In the early days we used to draw assets on paper, scan them in, bring them into Flash and use the “Trace Bitmap” feature to vectorize the artwork. However, we’ve found that doing them directly in Flash with a drawing tablet is much faster and gives us more control over the lines and saves valuable clean-up time.

AS: Has anyone at Mondo begun working on Wacom’s Cintiq pressure-sensitive monitors?
KN: No, we’re still in the stone age of Wacom technology. I do have friends that have those fancy new monitors and they can’t stop talking about them. For some reason, they’ve started calling them their “Precious”. Creepy…

AS: Your backgrounds look like bitmaps. How does the BG design process work on HTF?
KN: Backgrounds get roughed in the storyboard phase, but get fully fleshed out when we do the Flash assets. To get that bitmap look, we actually cheat! There’s a bitmap of a scanned paper texture we overlay on the BG. This bitmap is tinted and the opacity reduced just so it’s a subtle texture. It gives the BG a nice hazy, unified look and really makes the characters on the top layers pop. Makes the blood look especially crispy too!

AS: When you first saw HTF rendered for DVD, did you notice any differences when compared to the online version?
KN: Well we had a little learning curve to go through in converting Flash files into a DVD format. There was no real precedent when we first started doing it, so there were no resources to pull from. There was a lot of trial and error in building the pipeline. The biggest difference is the frame rate. We were going from 8 fps in our early shows to 29.97 fps for broadcast. I still cringe a little watching those early episodes, but I guess it’s like that for all artists… we can all see the mistakes! We’ve learned a lot since then and technology has certainly caught up and the process is much smoother and looks so much better!

AS: How long did it take to record the DVD commentaries for each release?
KN: We probably did about 2 to 3 takes on each commentary, all the way through, and picked the one that made us laugh the most and got in the least amount of trouble… and we ran with those.

AS: Are you guys Mac or PC or both? And what dictated these decisions?
KN: Primarily PC, except for our sound designer who is on a MAC. Either way, we crash just as often!

COMMANDMENT V: THOU SHALL RETURNETH SOON
Check back soon for the second half of my interview with Kenn Navarro, co-creator of ‘Happy Tree Friends.’