El Panda Sweet & Sour made his "acting" debut this past Sunday on Showtime's "L WORD" show. It was pretty surreal seeing our toy on a television show! You can see the scene from YouTube below. It starts at roughly 3:20. If you have Showtime, you may still be able to catch a repeat. It's the 11th episode of L Words 4th season. The Episode's title is "Literary License To Kill". The El Panda bit starts around 20 minutes into the show.

El Panda Sweet & Sour made his "acting" debut this past Sunday on Showtime's "L WORD" show. It was pretty surreal seeing our toy on a television show! You can see the scene from YouTube below. It starts at roughly 3:20. If you have Showtime, you may still be able to catch a repeat. It's the 11th episode of L Words 4th season. The Episode's title is "Literary License To Kill". The El Panda bit starts around 20 minutes into the show.

A cleverly promoted mascot can do wonders for a company. Just look at what JACK did for JACK IN THE BOX. Jack was reinvented when Jack In The Box fast food restaurants were at the brink of extinction. In 1993, Jack In The Box's undercooked hamburgers led to an e.coli outbreak that caused the death of 4 customers and left several hundred sick. In 1994, the revamped Jack mascot was introduced as the spokesperson for Jack In The Box. He had a dramatic impact on the general public's trust and support for the restaurant chain. Here are two of my favorite Jack commercials.

In addition to traumatizing my childhood (with the MYSTERIOUS STRANGER...see below), Will Vinton also gave life to my favorite commercials. The "CALIFORNIA RAISINS" and "DOMINO'S NOID" commercials were so great that I would watch the commercials between the latest episode of Voltron or the Transformers in hopes of seeing them. Both commercials were so popular that they spawned toys, games, and cartoons based on these great characters. Naturally none of these byproducts were close to being as good as the original commercials. Here are two of my favorites:

I just began watching OBAN STAR RACER. Man, what a great show! Great characters, beautiful design, quality animation, epic story. Even though the show is geared at 8 to 12 year olds, there's something for everyone to enjoy. I've heard that the show will eventually be broadcast in around 80 countries...so no matter where you are in the world, you're bound to find a way to watch it.Much like Muttpop, the team behind Oban Star Racer is a multi-national group. Although originally conceived by Savin Yeatman-Eiffel and his SAV! THE WORLD company, he worked closely with an amazingly talented Japanese animation team to bring the animated universe to fruition. The results speak loudly for themselves.Here's a wonderful sequence where main character MOLLY races one of my favorite characters: THE SPIRIT.

I recently rediscovered one of those films that traumatized me as an 80s kid: the claymation feature film "The Adventures of Mark Twain". In it, Tom Sawyer and friends journey through various recreations of Mark Twain's stories. The characters had a wrinkly charm that made them oddly beautiful. But then came the mysterious stranger. That sequence mesmerized and frightened me to no end. Recently I have discovered that this movie was the creation of Will Vinton. Will Vinton was the Nick Park of the 1980s. If there was a great piece of claymation, chances were that it was done by Vinton Studios. I'll showcase some of my favorite Vinton claymation pieces in the coming weeks.