[ICEknight]

I had the chance to take a look at the Liquid Television shorts included in the Aeon Flux DVD collection, and there was this short from Mark Beyer's "The Adventures of Thomas & Nardo" that caught my attention.

It's about some kid and his talking house, who live in a 3D environment mixed with flat animated people. When I saw it, I just thought "Wow, that's a quite nice parody of the PaRappa world, I wish the TV series had been made like this"... But then I realized that these shorts were made around 1991, so it looks like Rodney A. Greenblat has patented a style that wasn't his to begin with. =|

There's little documentation about these shorts, and no pictures of it seem to exist anywhere in the net. Does anybody have more info on them?

[ICEknight]

I just got some screens with my cell phone so you can see it just can't be a coincidence...


The insanely driven 3D taxi already gives it away, but even the shrinking ray is reminiscent of PaRappa 2. Not to mention Master Onion's firemen lookalikes.

[sebmal]

Wow, that really does look a lot similar. I'd love some video of this.

[I am Christina Aguilera]

As I understand it, Rodney Greenblat was working in that style back in the '80s - he was a slightly younger contemporary of Keith Haring's in the NYC art scene (take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_Greenblat). I'm not sure how early he actually started doing animated work in the style, though.

[Richter Belmont]

Very interesting. Thanks for sharing, ICEknight!

Does the Aeon Flux collection have a lot of Liquid Television shorts? That was a neat show...

[ICEknight]

[Baxter]

ICEknight,
I was the animator and director of animation as well as the creator of that particular animation style (Compu-cut: short for computer cut-out animation) in the "Thomas House" series. When I first saw the PaRappa vid game I, too, thought maybe it was a direct lift but honestly that style mostly came from the need to simplify the animation due to shortcomings in hardware and software at the time (1992). I was running a render farm of 8 Mac 2s all accelerated to a "scorching" 40Mhz and although I was using cutting edge software at the time (ElectricImage) each frame still took 2 hours to render and this was only after countless tests concerning timing, lighting, tex maps, etc.
It was a monster of a job for its day.
Years later, Rodney Greenblat, who I had never heard of till this posting (not that that holds any weight), may have been under the same constraints... dunno.
Anyway, if you want to know more email me at:
bingomalingo@aol.com
I'll gladly answer any and all questions.
If you have a secure mailing address that you are comfortable with giving me I'll mail out a DVD of all 5 episodes (broadcast quality).No charge.

Take care.

[Pullmyfinger]

Thos episodes look interesting, does the DVD apply just to ICEknight?

[Baxter]

Yeah, sorry about that.
I just don't have the time to open that can of worms but thanks for asking I appreciate it and sorry again.