Bat-Mite Presents: Batman's Strangest Deleted Scenes!

Cartoon Network has announced airdates for a couple of new B:TBatB episodes, starting with Battle of the Superheroes!, which is actually the fifth episode of Season 3, airing March 25th. That's the one with Superman, but I can't say anything much about that until Warner Bros. decides to let some stuff leak out, so instead, I'll use this post to gab on at further length about Bat-Mite Presents: Batman's Strangest Cases!, which also had its airdate announced. And that airdate is...

April the First!

That's pretty much the perfect airdate for Bat-Mite. Well played, Cartoon Network!

But now that an airdate has been announced, I feel hesitant about posting any more B-MP:B'sSC spoilers. So that spoiler-filled Batboy post I was planning will have to wait, but I wanted to post something more than the news about the airdates, so here's the compromise - I'll post stuff from the Bat-Mite episode that never actually made it to the air. No spoilers in footage that isn't actually in the show, right?

Normally we don't have much in the way of deleted footage, but Bat-Mite has a knack for messing up our normal schedule one way or the other. This time around, when we finished the storyboard, we found that it was a couple minutes short of a full show, so we had to scramble to make some stuff up to patch up those gaps. We put back some of the gags that had initially been cut from the Batboy and Rubin section, James wrote the bit where Bat-Mite magically adds fight scenes to the Scooby section, I wrote a shark safety PSA, and James came up with one last thing - a commercial parody that we would have squeezed into the act break during the manga section.

First, a little history - for those who didn't live in Canada in 1987, you might have missed these department store commercials (although they were being rediscovered on the internet around the time we were working on B-MP:B'sSC).




They were directed by the amazing Greg Duffel in Toronto at his Lightbox Studio, with designs by the great Ty Templeton.




That's also Greg as the voice of Robin, by the way.




As a side note, these commercials eventually led to Greg's studio being hired to do some test animation that was used to sell a little show you may have heard of called Batman: The Animated Series.



So along with all of the other stuff, James wrote a script for our own fake commercial, and we whipped this little number up (pardon the crudeness of the drawings, I had to bang it out pretty quick)-

But then, a funny thing happened - when we added all the new stuff into the show, we were actually a minute OVER. So we cut the commercial, since it was easiest to lift out and also, it saved us from doing a bunch of new designs in an episode that already had to be completely re-designed three times over already.

That's it for now - the show will finally be on the air in a month, so everyone will be able to enjoy all the stuff's that's actually in the show, and I'll be more comfortable posting some more spoiler-heavy Bat-Mite stuff again. Superman news before that, hopefully!

Batman characters ™ and © DC Comics

Zellers logo and commercials ™ and © Zellers, probably

Zigglers logo and commercial ™ and © Warner Bros Animation, maybe?

Bat-Mite Presents: Batman's Strangest Comic Book Pages (Manga Edition)!

Sometimes people ask me how to get into animation. Mostly I encourage them to keep drawing, preferably from real life to get those fundamentals solid, and that's pretty good advice, I think. But the curmudgeon in me just wants to warn them away, because the truth of the matter is that animation is, by and large, a lot of work for very little reward.

By way of example, lets consider a sequence from Bat-Mite Presents: Batman's Strangest Cases! As a transition from Bat-Mite's lair to the manga section of the show, we had to come up with a few fake pages of a Japanese Batman comic, based on the old comics by Jiro Kuwata. Legal wouldn't let us just use scans from the originals, so we had to cobble together some fakes, made to look enough like Jiro Kuwata's art to be recognizable, but not enough to exact duplicates of the original.

So I spent a couple weeks coming up with these 6 fake pages -

-and then we sent it off to legal, who had some tiny changes. Next up, inks-

-so with the legal hurdles cleared, we got Craig Cuqro to colour the pages, and added a layer of aged paper texture from Bill Dunn. We also got some dialogue translated into Japanese by Toshi Hiruma (I can't remember what it says any more, sorry) -

 -and wrapped it all up in this cover, drawn by Lynell Forestall, inked by Robert Lacko and again coloured by Craig Cuqro and aged up by Bill Dunn -

All told, the whole process probably took about a month. Now watch it go by onscreen - 

And that's after we duplicated the cycle to extend it. So in a nutshell, we compressed a month's worth of labour into three seconds of screentime. So there's my advice for aspiring animators - always remember that animation is a medium that will drain years off of your lifespan and leave you mere snippets of footage in return.

And keep drawing!

All characters and art ™and © DC Comics

Hey, look at this!

I would've plugged it sooner, but I didn't know they were putting it online - a brand new Super Friends short, directed by Ciro Nieli, with boards by four of the world's top board artists and also me!

It was made (I was told) to be packaged with a Fisher-Price toy, but thanks to the magic of the internet, everyone gets to enjoy it for free!

Also, the Doom Patrol is on B:TBatB tomorrow - get your piping-hot images and clips here or here!

DOOM

Here's something weird about blogspot - if you start a post in, say, February, and don't publish it until July, it'll still post as a February post. Just sayin', is all.

Any ways, here's an old page of scribbles from the days of the second Doom Patrol episode of Teen Titans. Glen had designed a bulky Robotman, and I was messing around, trying to get a feel for it.



At the time, someone had suggested Mr. T as a potential voice actor for Robotman. But then, that same someone suggests Mr. T for just about every voice being cast, so I don't think there was ever any serious consideration of the idea.



This drawing is just for fun.



Robotman, Negative Man, Robin, Elasti-Girl, Raven, Slade, Cyborg and Robin ™ and © DC Comics.
Mr. T ™ and © Mr. T.

So how's everyone been?

I've been extremely busy lately. But now I'm finally just really busy again, so I can post infrequently on my blog.

Not "often" or "occasionally", mind you, but "infrequently". Which is more than every two months or so. I'll try to get back onto a weekly schedule.

But in the meantime, please check out the many awesome (and much more frequently updated) blogs on my sidebar at the right. Michael Chang has a swell new post with storyboard images from "Things Change", which is an idea I'm absolutely stealing.

You know what, I almost forgot the copyright stuff. So Beast Boy, Cyborg, Robin, Slade and Starfire are ™ and © DC Comics. The gorilla might be Monsieur Mallah (I can't remember whether I meant it to be or not), and if he is, then he's ™ and © DC Comics. Otherwise, he's ™ and © me. Also, I guess the donuthead guy is ™ and © me, but I'm pretty sure I'm not the first person to draw a guy with a donut for a head.

In search of a gag

Some time ago I promised to post an example of an idiot-style drawing that had a practical application. Of course, I also promised a moratorium on the Super-D - but I'll still keep the first promise. Here's a page of idiotic scribbles in search of a gag for "X".



Sometimes it helps to feel your way through a scene like this before you storyboard it. Most of this was in the script (probably not the multiple SD Starfires), but I can't find a copy of the script around, so take my word for it for now. I still wonder if the gag would have played better with a full-sized Starfire standing on Robin's head. Also, it looks like I forgot to include the drawing of Robin with an X in place of his eyes. Oh well. Another X gag lost to the pressures of deadlines. Remember kids, haste makes waste. I think we hid enough Xs in the show as it is. In any case, that becomes this -
















And then we make this (this is my only character design for Titans)-



Then Derrick takes a pass to make it actually look like the rest of the show, Chris Hooten colours it, and we get this-



And then Tom McLaughlin adds the timing, and it gets sent overseas, where Lotto subjects it to their mysterious and wonderful processes. Then they send this back to us-



Then Joe Gall plugs that into his avid and turns it into this (I don't know why this is the only version I have in widescreen)-



The next step is very mysterious to me, since I'm not involved in any way. Someone writes some music, someone else adds some sound effects, Scott redubs a line or two of dialogue, and they all get mixed together to make this -



I guess I kind of lost track of the point in there somewhere.

So much for Plan A

I was planning to update this weekly at first, and then gradually drop off to semi-annual posts, but I forgot that Brianne Drouhard's magic internet ninja skills would alert her to my blog the instant I made it (her blog is linked in my sidebar). I also neglected to anticipate that she would then set up a link, drawing people here when all there is to see is one page of messed-up Cyborg heads. So here's another post, and I'll post, say, every other day for a while, dropping to twice a week, then weekly, and eventually forgetting my password and drifting away, as originally planned.

This one is a drawing I did with a red Sharpie during the recording of Haunted.


As you can see, it totally encapsulates the somber atmosphere of the episode. Here's another version of the same idea, this time going over the rough red layer with a black Sharpie, while still failing utterly to achieve a finished look.


Robin and Slade ™ and © DC Comics.