With primaries in both Texas and Ohio, today is a pivotal day in the American presidential election process, and this Flash-animated short by Xeth Feinberg helps set the tone. A Political Quickie: How To Be a Media Pundit, which bowed yesterday at 236.com, details the step-by-step process of how to be more like Ann Coulter, Tucker Carlson, Rush Limbaugh or Bill O’Reilly. You may know Xeth’s previous work which includes Queer Duck: The Movie, Hard Drinkin’ Lincoln and his recently revamped original series Papu Smash.

Xeth Feinberg, the director of Queer Duck: The Movie, created a series of Flash-animated shorts back during the dot-bomb era that put a tidy, little bow on the crumbling web world. It was titled Papu, and the big, blue monster only knew how to smash stuff.

Well, for this holiday season, Xeth has created a new Papu episode titled A Smashing Holiday. Music is by Sam Elwitt and Rose Bevans provides the voice of Mrs. Claus.

Xeth was interviewed here at CHF back in 2005.

‘Queer Duck – The Movie’ is due on DVD on July 18th, as reported here back in April. The DVD is currently available for pre-sell over at Amazon, and it’s listing at $13.99 for 75 minutes of Flash-animated wackiness.

Variety, the entertainment industry news magazine, recently gave a strong review of the DVD, and said it “registers surprisingly vividly on the bigscreen, deserved a theatrical shot before its July 18 DVD release.” Take that, Paramount! ‘Golden Blaze’ shouldn’t be the only Flash-film to get a stab at the silver screen.

Alright, I’m off my high horse now, and I should probably give kudos to Paramount Home Entertainment for funding a feature-length LGBT cartoon. Either way, I would’ve loved to have seen this get a wide theatrical release.

Here’s an excerpt from the Variety review that give praise to Xeth Feinberg, the director, and his crew.

Tech credits are intelligently primitive. Feinberg and Richard Codor’s unshaded, blocked-out character design unabashedly delights in pure two-dimensionality, while background artist Jon Ehrenberg’s large monochromatic blocks of color (Salmonella’s Restaurant awash in a coral hue) recall UPA abstraction or Maurice Noble’s Frenchified backdrops for late Pepe LePew cartoons.

Xeth was inteviewed here at CHF back in November of 2005.

Ryan Ball from Animation Magazine recently posted an article announcing the release date of ‘Queer Duck: The Movie.’ July 18th is the date Paramount Home Entertainment has decided to re-introduce the world to Queer Duck and his friends Openly Gator, Bi-Polar Bear and Oscar Wildcat. Ryan also point out that this will indeed be the first Flash-animated feature film from a major studio. There’s been other feature-length projects like ‘Lil’ Pimp’ and ‘Golden Blaze,’ but none from a big studio like Paramount.

What the article missed was naming the actual director – Xeth Feinberg, whose recently discussed the movie here at CHF.

Last week, Evan Spiridellis and I spoke at the 2006 Flashforward Conference, an event produced by Lynda.com. The title of our session was JibJab’s Animation Process and How a Small Studio Can Reach a Big Audience, and we spoke for just over an hour. Evan walked the audience through the JibJab animation process – from animatic to animation to finished product. I presented several animators and small teams that are reaching big audiences, first which was JibJab, who had over 80 million people watch ‘This Land‘ and ‘Good to be in DC!‘ during the 2004 election. Here’s the slides from my presentation detailing JibJab’s recent successes.

Back then, it was really 2 guys doing it all, and this is the story I repeated many times over during the night.

Next I spoke about Jennifer Shiman and her ‘30 Second Bunnies Theatre,’ the Flash-animated series currently airing on Starz! on Demand. As many of you know from reading the CHF interview with Jennifer, she pretty much a one-woman band, writing, animating, and directing alone, and she gets over 1.8 million unique views a month at her angryalien.com site.

Amanita Design was the next studio featured. This 2-man shop out of Brno, Czech Republic is creating viral click-along games like Samorost 2 and linear music videos with a very small team. Jakub Dvorsky, the founder, gets over 500,000 unique views a month at his site.

Weebls-stuff.com is the playground for Weebl, the British animator. He and a small cadre of animators create ‘Weebl & Bob’ and other funny series like ‘Magical Trevor.’ They get a staggering number of cartoon views every month – over 5 million!

Bernard Derriman animated the music video for TISM’s ‘Everyone Else Has Had More Sex Than Me,’ which went on to become a hugely viral video. He animates alone, and he gets over 50,000 unique visitors to his site, arjandpoopy.com, every month. I completely missed posting about Bernard’s holiday ‘Arj and Poopy’ episode, but you can still see it here.

Adam Phillips, who happens to be an old working buddy of Bernard’s, won his 3rd Flashforward festival trophy for his Flash-animated short ‘littleFoot.’ He too is a one-man Flash army, writing, directing and barely sleeping while crafting his Brackenwood series. In a good month, he gets over 300,000 unique visitors to his site.

James Farr, the creator of ‘Xombie,’ is currently in production on a direct-to-DVD feature version of his Flash-animated series. All by his lonesome, deep in the heart of Tulsa, Oklahoma, James has written, animated and produced 7 online ‘Xombie’ shorts, and now he’s teamed up with Wetsand animation to create the long-form version. He has over 1 million subscribers to his ‘Xombie’ mailing list.

Laith Bahrani’s ‘Low Morale’ series brought down the house during our presentation. We screened episode 9, and the crowd went nuts. Very funny stuff. Laith is the sole animator on his shorts, and he’s welcomed over 800,000 visitors to his site since 2004.

And last, but not least, we talked about ‘Queer Duck: The Movie’ which is due to wrap production sometime soon. It’s a Flash-animated feature project penned by Mike Reiss, a Simpsons writer, and Xeth Feinberg is heading up the animation effort. He’s working with a team that’s usually smaller than 10, and he’s been in production since last summer.

While it’s not always about the size of the audience, it’s still impressive to see so few reaching so many. Thanks to everyone for contributing to our presentation, and to Lynda Weinman (of Lynda.com) for hosting us up in Seattle.