Phantasm

I still get a kick out of this one.



I have no idea why there is so little blood. If I were to do this today, the blood would blast out in a crazy spray, emptying gallons from Harry's head before slowing to a trickle.

I guess it was still early in the game, and I didn't know how far I was able to push things, either for the readers or for Harry himself. I probably should've known better.

Dracula

Ugh, this one pains me to look at.



In the annals of cheap-ass limited cop-out animation, my bat's flapping wings will go down as most cheesy.

Mummy

So this one introduces the weird disembodied hands. What can I tell you? It meant I didn't need to worry about animating arms.



I've never really been satisfied with the spin animation. Taking the lazy way out, I just repurposed the Harry rotation that I did for reference, and added motion lines. If I was animating this today, I would animate the spin fresh. There are always things I wish I had done differently looking back, but that stands out as an especially poorly chosen shortcut.

Terminator

The early heads were all somewhat non-specific. Today, they tend to parody particular scenes, but at the time, it was enough that Harry's endoskeleton be revealed.

Oh, My AICNheads!

Hello there!

In the year 2000, or maybe even earlier, I started contributing small animated .GIFs to the website Ain't-It-Cool-News.

At the time, I'd been teaching myself Flash, (Flash 4, no less) animating with the mouse as a drawing tool, (no easy feat) and creating animated shorts for my own short-lived website. I was a fan of AICN, reading it daily, and in the upper left-hand corner of the site there had always been a static logo, a loveable cartoon version of the site's only very slightly less cartoony host, Harry Knowles.

Just as I was finishing a short, Harry replaced the static .GIF with an animated one. A puking possessed-Regan version of his cartoon-self. It was great to see animation in the corner, and it was a cute parody, but I really thought it could be improved on. It was good, but the site deserved something better. And I was just enough of an egotist to think I was the guy to provide it.

Which brings us to the first animation I contributed to the site:



Harry liked it. The Talkbackers liked it. I liked doing it. And so I was compelled to do more. And with the exception of a three-year Lost Weekend that I don't fully recall, I've been doing them ever since.

These little cartoons each play for a few weeks and then, (having served their purpose) they are tossed away, never to be seen again, replaced by younger and sexier animations. It's the natural way of things.

But, never one to shy away from the unnatural, I've decided to use this blog to resurrect these wadded-up cartoons from the dark depths of the internet wastebin. Give 'em a new lease on life! Shamelessly re-purpose obsolete animation to fill a blog, rather than create fresh material! I am, after all, so VERY lazy.

I'll be doing my very best to update regularly, so be sure to check back often.