Mighty Mouse Turns Twenty
Well, Ralph Bakshi's version of him, anyway. Yup, that's right, the second season (or half-season) of Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures was created in the summer of 1988. It was my first job in animation, and a pretty good one, at that! A bunch of future big shots worked on it, including Andrew Stanton, Bruce Timm, Rich Moore, John Kricfalusi, Vicki Jensen, and Jim Reardon. Tom Minton wrote some really funny scripts for the show, too!Ralph let us vent our spleens on television, and the result was wildly uneven, but it had its moments. I got to get a lot of stuff out of my system early, so it wasn't as big a deal when I couldn't do it elsewhere. I got to trot out my smart-ass obsessions with UPA design, Hanna-Barbera kidvid, Warner Brothers and M-G-M shorts. I didn't know what I was doing, so I got to make a lot of mistakes, learn from them, and get paid at the same time! It was crazy and rewarding, but I'm glad I don't have to do that now. I remember nights at home with my hand cramping up as I cleaned up character designs. TV animation schedules are rough!
Unfortunately, the rights are owned by five different people who don't exactly like each other, so they'll probably never come out on DVD. Ultimately, that's not a tragedy - in the context of what was going on in animation at the time, it was fun and experimental, but compared to Adult Swim shows today, it's pretty tame stuff.
The drawing I'm featuring here was done long after the show ended, in 1991 - I had wanted to make an anniversary crew tee back in the day, but I never finished it. It was going to picture the Cow and Bat-Bat squaring off - I'm not sure how Mighty Mouse was going to figure into the design. It might be fun to do, if I could finish it before the year is out!
If you're a fan, bust out those VHS dubs (or bootleg DVDs), pop on your favorite episode, and remember. Thanks for watching it the first time around!
PS - Ralph's releasing a career retrospective book that'll hit stores this April. I can't wait to see it!
Labels: 20th anniversary, drawing, jeff pidgeon, john kricfalusi, mighty mouse, mighty mouse the new adventures, ralph bakshi, the cow
posted by Jeff Pidgeon at
6:20 PM
5 Comments:
That makes sense--it means I would've been 12 when it hit the air; the perfect age to appreciate that kind of craziness. Now that I think about it, it looks like the show had a big influence on my drawing style too. Great work!
Thanks! I feel lucky that I got into the industry just as it began to revive. If I had been born ten years earlier, it would've been a much different story!
Heck Jeff-if you'd been born 5 years earlier it'd have made a huge difference!
So funny to think how lucky the timing was for all of us then just getting started...and even so, by '98 there was precious little of worth to have been on--and you did virtually all of them! Weren't you on "Family Dog" during your school breaks too, or am I hallucinating? Anyway, when MM went on the air the guys would play a tape of the show endlessly in the room we shared(now the Palace), laughing hysterically. My favorite episodes then & now were Don't Touch That Dial! and Elwy & the Tree Weasels.
Good times! Oh & btw--great drawing!
I never worked on Family Dog, though I had a lot of friends that did. It was a great special, but they needed animators, and I was primarily a designer at that point.
I loved those Mighty Mouse episodes, too - thanks for the praise!
This is the cartoon that lit a fire under me and inspired me to try animation in the first place. I taped all the episodes and used to stay up all night studying them! Congratulations on working on an underrated masterpiece...and for surviving the Bakshi experience!
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