Alex's interview with Bill Kopp!

Well kiddies, today we have a special treat for you. A interview with none other than Bill Kopp. Bill has had quite a amazing animation career which includes The Simpsons, Eek The Cat, Tales From The Crypt and the Roger Rabbit shorts.

ALEX: Hello Mr. Kopp and thanks for taking some time to do this interview. I'm very excited for this chat. I love the Roger Rabbit shorts and I am a HUGE fan of Eek the cat.

What artists or cartoons do you consider to be your main influences?

BILL: Well, influences are the obvious ones; Bob Clampett and Tex. But I also think Michael Maltese is very underrated. His contributions on story are phenomenal. I think he was the true genius of the Looney Tunes. If you look back on those credits he was all over the place.

ALEX: How did your animation career get started?

BILL: My animation career was an accident. I just met the right people at CalArts. Savage Steve Holland was a super influence on me. He was the guy that told me to change my major into animation in my second year. But all the fellas back then were a huge influence on me. it was very healthy competition at CalArts.

ALEX: Could you give us a bit of insight to how do you come up with the stories for your cartoons?

BILL: How do I come up with stories... I'm not sure if there's a simple answer to that. It's a very complex process. And I'm never at ease with it. Writing is very hard, like torture. None of this stuff comes easy to me. I wish I was like Woody Allen, where it just flows. But I'm not. It's a fist-fight every time, somehow I have an instinctual knowledge of what seems to be funny. THANK-GOD! And my instincts seem to sync up with what makes people laugh. But a lot of it is nervous energy, comedy is like a defense mechanism. It's like the world scares me and I just fend it off with gags.

ALEX: Can you tell us some more about Tummy Trouble and how you got involved in that project?

BILL: The Roger Rabbit stuff came after we started the Simpsons. It appealed to me because it was high-end animation. And I wanted that chance to work on stuff that was challenging you on quality.

ALEX: What was the making of Roller Coaster Rabbit like?

BILL: Tummy Trouble and Roller Coaster Rabbit were awesome experiences. I was lead story guy on those and it was a fucking blast.

ALEX: Did you do any uncredited work on the third cartoon, Trail Mix-up?

BILL: I did. Pat Ventura and I worked that up along with another great one that was never made called: BEACH BLANKET BUNNY. But I left Disney and they got mad at me so I never got credit on that one. But I don't care.

ALEX: There was a fourth Roger Rabbit cartoon in the making that got canceled called "Hare in my soup" Did you do any work on that or have any more information in it?

BILL: Yes. I remember that one. There were one or two units working and Hare in my soup came from another unit. We were very competitive back then, and we didn't have much respect for the other units. Ours was the one that got shit made.All due respect of course.

we were a lot like musicians in those days. We just wanted to blow the other guys off the stage.

ALEX: Finally, on a different note: "When does the hurting stop?"

BILL: HAHAAA... It never stops....

Hare In My Soup

Thanks to our fellow friend Jarrod (webmaster of I’mNotBad.com) we’ve got those amazing pictures from the cells of the ill-fated, never released short “Hare In My Soup” and let me say they look quite great!

The character designs and backgrounds look really superb and quite similar to the preceding shorts which were released before (Tummy Trouble, Rollercoaster Rabbit and Trail Mix-Up). It’s a shame the constant feud between Steven Spielberg (from Amblin) and Michael Eisner (then CEO of Disney) ruined this short, since it seemed very promising (Spielberg demanded several changes to the story until he decided to shut this project down, as a revenge for not having any Roger Rabbit short to open his own movies like Arachnophobia).

One just can wonder about what could have happened if only Spielberg approved this short feature… What a bummer.

Thanks again, Jarrod! =3

The Totally unOfficial Toonography of Jessica P1

Thanks to Youtube user ImNotBadTV (who also runs the website http://www.imnotbad.com/ ) we can get “The Totally unOfficial Toonography of Jessica (Rabbit)”; a fan-made documentary which will gather anything related to Jessica Rabbit, from her earlier success and how she suddenly disappeared from the spotlights, along with some cool, rare collectibles and some unproduced items. It will be mainly devoted to Jessica, so many fans will be really delighted (although I’m more on the Roger side, rather than Jessica´s).

The first part of this documentary, featured above, shows some unseen drawings and concepts of the proposed-but-never-completed 4th. animated short, named “Hare in my Soup”, along with some animation cels of what appears to be the Roger Rabbit cartoon project, that was discarded because Disney and Amblin were not getting a fair agreement about the movie characters (as you might know, this is the real reason behind the existence of Bonkers and his saturday morning cartoon). As you can notice, both projects were looking fine and were ready to get off the drawing boards. Along with those projects, a Christmas special was projected and some theatrical animated shorts were being considered as well.

I can’t help but feel sad, and a little angry. Roger and Jessica deserved something better than some uninspired pins (which is the only thing we can get from the movie at this moment). Hope Zemeckis is really thinking about “Roger Rabbit 2”, since the honey bunny needs to make a lot of people laugh.

Thanks, ImNotBadTV!