Movillis, Stipenditz, Killotzil
Another unproduced television series based on a comic strip for you today, this time for George Herriman’s masterly Krazy Kat.
In the UK in 1996 a three-minute pilot was created to hopefully launch a new series of Krazy Kat cartoons. Now, Krazy Kat had been animated often before, and always in long-running and successful series. There were theatrical Krazy Kat cartoons in some form or another running from 1916 to the end of thirties, and in the sixties the character was brought back for a television series.
So what makes this 1996 Krazy Kat cartoon so interesting if the strip has been animated so many times before? The difference is that, apart from being British, it was the first (and so far only) time the characters of Krazy Kat had been brought to life using stop-motion animation. The pilot was produced by Spitting Image Productions, who had recently been having great success in the field of stop-motion with their Channel 4 sitcom Crapston Villas and their Academy Award-nominated short The Big Story, and directed by Derek Mogford, an animator who had previously directed several stop-motion children shows including Postman Pat and Bertha.
The pilot was never aired and did not lead to a series. It has, however, been shown at animation festivals, and was in competition at Cinanima ‘96, held in Portugal from the 5th to the 10th of November 1996 - one of the shorts it was competing against was, of all things, an episode of Crapston Villas.
- Zon.
