There’s a holiday weekend coming up – and as usual, I’ll be spending most of it in a darkened theatre – starting tonight!

I’ll start the long weekend by showing vintage 16mm musical films and cartoons to open the Janet Klein show tonight at the Steve Allen Theatre. Tonight’s show is a party to celebrate her new album, Whoopee Hey! Hey!. It’s gonna be good. It starts at 8pm. Tickets: here.

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Beginning Friday I’ll spend four days watching 35mm prints of old movies, shorts, cartoons and trailers at the Egyptian Theatre, the home of the annual Cinecon. On Friday afternoon, at 2:30pm in a ballroom adjacent to the dealers rooms in the Renaissance Hollywood Hotel on Highland, I’ll take a break to sign my new book, The 100 Greatest Looney Tunes and show a few 16mm prints.

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When the weekend is over, on Tuesday September 7th, I’ll be hosting my usual first-Tuesday-of-the-month animation screening at the CineFamily (at the Silent Movie Theatre). This month I’ll be running a marathon of Crazy Cartoon Commercials. Join me as we run two hours of vintage 1950s and 60s animated commercials (in 16mm and 35mm), featuring rare early commercials featuring Charlie Brown, Bugs Bunny, Casper and Woody Woodpecker, in ads created by the likes of Tex Avery, Stan Freberg, Friz Freleng and Chuck Jones. The show starts at 8pm. Advance tickets available here. I’ll be showing stuff like this:

Check this out: A size chart of about 600 different Hanna-Barbara characters – from Ruff and Reddy (1957) to The Powerpuff Girls (1998) – drawn to scale by Chilean-based graphic designer Juan Pablo Bravo. Click Here.

(Thanks, Kelly Aarons)

The spirited fun of Tex Avery, Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones is alive and well in today’s animation world, and it’s in the Netherlands. The filmmakers are David de Rooij and Jelle Brunt, and their film Slim Pickings Fat Chances is our pick for this week’s episode of the Cartoon Brew TV Student Animation Festival.

More details about the making of Slim Pickings can be found on the film’s Cartoon Brew TV page. Comments are also open on that page.

Gotta hand it to Dreamworks… this takes marketing to a whole new level.

Below I’ve embed the entire one-hour episode of History Detectives which aired last night on PBS. The first 18 minutes is devoted to tracking down the story behind a cache of rare cartoon cels, which turn out to be from the long-forgotten first Buddy cartoon, a Looney Tunes cartoon from 1933. During the course of the investigation, host Tukufu Zuberi interviews animation art expert Mike Van Eaton, Woodbury University’s Dori Littell Herrick, ink & paint veteran Martha Sigall and yours truly, Jerry Beck. For your further viewing pleasure, the PBS website has also post the first Looney Tunes cartoon, starring Bosko, Sinkin’ In The Bathtub (1930).

Watch the full episode. See more History Detectives.

The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack ends its series run tonight on Cartoon Network after forty-six episodes. Chowder, which also ended its run earlier this year, lasted forty-nine episodes. The last eleven-minute episode of Flapjack titled “Fish Out of Water” will have live-action portions, and features an appearance by creator Thurop van Orman, and his son, Leif (pictured above), who portrays Flapjack.

(Thanks, Compn)

Animation video sharing website Aniboom has announced they’re launching a “virtual animation studio.” They’re unclear about how their business model works, but as I understand it, Aniboom intends to create productions for corporate clients by cherry-picking crew members from the large pool of animators who have uploaded videos to their site. On one of their pages, they advertise to potential clients that the 9,500 artists who have uploaded videos are ready to create animation of high-quality in a fast and cost efficient manner.

How can they do high-quality, fast AND cheap? A clue can be found in this section where they describe how animators who participate in their virtual productions will be compensated with “a variety of potential monetary benefits that include revenue share, employment offers and payment for series development with Aniboom.” Note that their ideas of compensation do not include any of those pesky line items that other studios have to contend with like salaries, health insurance, vacation time, retirement benefits, maternity leave, and learning and development opportunities.

Aniboom has been indoctrinating young artists for years through a savvy and systematic use of contests that encourages users to create work for corporations on spec and without any expectation of pay. We’ve warned readers about these contests on mutiple occasions. Now they appear to be pushing the exploitation of young artists to an entirely new (and more profitable) level, and for a company with millions of dollars in venture capital backing, that’s exactly what we’ve always expected them to do.

UPDATE: Aniboom’s rep has told us that everybody who works for them will be paid and they have updated their website, which now says, “We offer creators around the world the attractive opportunity to work from home, on their own schedule and get paid directly via PayPal or Payoneer.”

How much do they pay? Not much according to a couple readers in our comments. The most detailed comment is from Mike who quoted this response from Aniboom:

“Thank you for your response to our call for illustrators. We are gearing up to start production of the second season of a popular animated series for television. It’s a comedy-action show for children based on five heroes who travel to strange fantasy worlds, and fight innumerable foes to try and save their kingdom. We’re looking for character illustrators and background illustrators.

The major production will begin in September, but we’re starting in about 2 weeks to produce the assets and several sequences. Are you interested, and would you be available to work with us starting in around 2 weeks time?

We’re paying:

· $90 an average per sequence.

· $250 for a full character package with all positions and facial lipsync

· $100 for a character with only basic positions.

· $100 for background art

(Thanks, Chris Sokalofsky)

If you like Star Wars, you’ll get a kick out of this. The Solo Adventures was shown a few weeks ago at the Star Wars Celebration V in Orlando, Florida (I was there!), where it was an audience favorite and won a Best Animation prize. This 3D student film, written and directed by Daniel L. Smith and Jeffery Sheetz, was a class project by students at the DAVE School of Digital Arts and Visual Effects in Orlando.

(Thanks, Mike Stanfill)