The Pen Is Mightier Than the Mouse
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Calabash stayed away from Saturday morning cartoons–“a tough market, where they’re always looking for ways to cut corners,” Kendall says. Most of the work on those shows is done in places like Korea, China, and the Philippines. But in 1990, Fleischer gave it a whirl. He went to work as a technical director for StarToons, a new outfit in south-suburban Homewood. StarToons was owned by Hanna-Barbera alumnus Jon McClenahan, who thought he saw a production niche in the huge Saturday morning market. As Fleischer explains it, “Hollywood writes the scripts, records the voices, and does all the preproduction work. Then they send everything overseas and keep their fingers crossed that it won’t be misinterpreted.” As a U.S. company, StarToons would offer more complete and reliable service, including storyboards (though they’d still be sending some manual tasks abroad). McClenahan cut a deal with Warner Bros. that had his company working on projects like Steven Spielberg’s Tiny Toon Adventures, Road Rovers, and Animaniacs, the last of which snagged them a couple of Emmy awards.
On September 11, 2001, the newly unemployed Fleischer was scheduled to fly to California for an interview with Disney. “I wanted a job so bad, even after the first two planes went down I was willing to get on another flight that day,” he says. He wound up in California for a year, working on the Powerpuff Girls movie and the PBS show Liberty’s Kids, then returned to Chicago in the fall of 2002 to take a faculty job at Columbia College, where he’s now happily ensconced. “After 20 years of being in deadline hell, busting my butt on other people’s projects, working 60-hour or more weeks, now I’m teaching and working on my own short films,” he says. With $15,000 from relatives, friends, and a Columbia faculty grant, he and former StarToons colleague John Griffin are producing Lemmings, an eight-minute short he’ll pitch for development into a feature film or television series after it travels the festival circuit. The animation is being done by a former StarTooner who just started a new company in Minneapolis.
The ASCAP Foundation/Disney Musical Theatre Workshop, under way at the Cultural Center this week and next, includes River’s End, a new play by Chicagoans Cheryl Coons and Chuck Larkin; Becoming George, based on the life of George Sand, with book and lyrics by another Chicagoan, Patti McKenny; and Breathe, a collection of seven short musicals celebrating gay and lesbian life. Sessions are held at 7 PM Wednesdays and Thursdays through April 29. The public’s invited, but seating is limited. It’s free….The NEA announced this week that it will help returning troops write about their wartime experiences in “Operation Homecoming,” a series of writing workshops conducted by the likes of Tom Clancy. “Operation Homecoming” will be produced in partnership with the Department of Defense and sponsored by the Boeing Company. According to the announcement, Jim Albaugh, president of Boeing Integrated Defense Systems, already knows what the results will be: “Their wartime experiences…will be a powerful portrait of courage, sacrifice, and patriotism.”…Fifteen six-foot, 700-pound Mickey Mouse statues, each a cloying variation on the original, will be installed on State Street from Wacker to Jackson for a two-month visit beginning May 22. Some things really are better in 2-D.
