Getting to know the Sesame Street Animators

[Boober_Gorg]

Okay, here's something that should help us all dig into our subconscious.

[size=4]This is a thread that pays homage to the beloved, innovative, spectacular animations of Sesame Street.[/size]

This is an ongoing project I've started doing since June, for myself and the hard core SS fans. I'm trying to provide information on who did (nearly) animated sequence for the show. I need confirmation on a lot of these.

JIM HENSON
•Claymation series for first season
•The King of Eight

PAUL AND SANDRA FIERLINGER
•Teeny Little Superguy
•Six Soccer Socks
•Using a map to find a place to park

VINCE COLLINS
•Pinball numbers series
•Magician makes birds morph into fish

SALLY CRUIKSHANK
•Above It All (I Love To Fly)
•In With The In Crowd
•I'm Curious
•Part Of the Whole

JANET PERLMAN
•"That elephant just won't listen."

GAHAN WILSON
•"I made you another Igor."
•Space orchestra
•Alligator and elephant
•Animals escape from a building and encounter an ice cream salesman (that's how I remember it)
•The Bridgekeeper series ("No one crosses this bridge by me, unless they can answer my questions three.")

JOHN KORTY (his animations look like Eric Carle illustrations)
•"do you want part of my orange?"
•Irritated bird and the three boxes
•What's inside the street, according to a little bird

RICHARD CONDIE (who made a killer cartoon called THE BIG SNIT)
(I have no idea what he did, but I heard he did some work for the show)

KAREN AQUA
•Boy's book comes to life
•Dog dances between a girl and an alligator-headed figure

DEREK LAMB
•It Ain't Bad to Get Mad
•Simple Simon and the re-arranged animals ("Now I know what's wrong! Sheep don't wear boots!")

CRAIG BARTLETT
•Arnold uses his imagination

UNKNOWN (I must find out his/her identity!) (this is a list of sequences which I could swear were done by the same person/s)
•Snacks on Parade series
•The Carrot
•Me And My M
•The Noble Ostrich
•If You've Lost Your L ...
•Famous Inventions series
•Dr. Annie Eyeball series
•Dr. Nancy Einstein series
•The Cat That Hated Rain

UNKNOWN (various artists)
•Ten Fingers, Ten Race Cars, Ten Spies series (this is SO psycho delic)
•"MOM! There's an alligator in my room!"
•a cat struggles to open a can of cat food while his mistress is gabbing on the phone
•The Alligator King (and others in that series, from the LP [/b]The Count Counts[/b])
•Marty the chair looks around the dark room for his glasses (I think Marty Robinson did this voice!)
•Wanda The Witch, nancy The Nanny Goat etc.
•two hippie kids try to wake up a big house plant
•Henry the ape calls Muzby's Treetop Flowers with an emergency
•two apes scratch each other's backs (I swear this must be from the UK, since the music at the end is Rule Brittania)

Now I know I'm a geek. This list is far from complete, and I know there must be at least two or three animation fanatics who can help me out by correcting my mistakes and adding to the list.

Everybody post away!!

[scarecroe]

Awesome project! Good luck with it.

I was under the impression that also Jim did a lot of the quick-edit colored paper cut-out stuff too like what we see in TimePiece.

[Drtooth]

[SIZE=3]Mo Williems[/SIZE] (who brought us the Cartoon Network series Sheep in the Big city):

Suzie Kabloozie
Unhappy artest (a tale told in rhyme in which this artist is miserable, and then he kicks paint on a canvas, making him laugh)
amonug others
His web page is www.sheepinthebigcity.com


[SIZE=3]John R. Dilworth[/SIZE] (who brought us another CN cartoon, Courage the cowardly dog) along with Stretch Pictures:
Noodles and Ned series (incidentially, this was a cartoon films series before Sesame Street bought a new series of cartoons featuring the dou!)

Their webpage is at www.stretchfilms.com

[Ol' Buddy Bert]

Wow, man, I'm really impressed. How were you able to learn so much about the animators?

[MIKEB97]

Originally posted by scarecroe
Awesome project! Good luck with it.

I was under the impression that also Jim did a lot of the quick-edit colored paper cut-out stuff too like what we see in TimePiece.

Jim also did the psychedelic numbers that went from 1 to 10 duirng the first season. He also did a cartoon about the number 12 with rocks in a desert. Didn't Jim create "the Queen of Six"? The animation in that one is similar to "the King of 8". I wonder who did "Capital I" and "Lowercase N"?

[Drtooth]

www.artistmike.com/SesameStreet/Sesame1.html

[Boober_Gorg]

Originally posted by Ol' Buddy Bert
Wow, man, I'm really impressed. How were you able to learn so much
about the animators?

I started watching Sesame street in 1986, roughly, when I was about 3. I have had the ambition to work in the field of animation since I first attended Spike and Mike's Festival of Animation in 1994, and have been regularly attending ever since. My video collection has also expanding over the years. It now includes Spike and Mike's Festival of Animation and Sick and Twisted, The International Tournee of Animation, National Film Board of Canada, Paul Driessen, Bruno Bozzetto, and many others.

What did they do besides Sesame Street? Let me think ... this is a list of releases that I saw, which made me recognize the artists' Sesame Street work. I have also given out several more links that I have found over the years.

PAUL AND SANDRA FIERLINGER
•It's So Nice To Have A Wolf Around The House (short subject)

SALLY CRUIKSHANK
•Quasi shorts series
AWN site

JOHN KORTY
•Twice Upon A Time (1983 feature film featuring the voices of Paul Frees, Lorenzo Music and others)

MO WILLEMS
•Iddy Biddy Beat Boy (short subject)

VINCE COLLINS
My professor recently showed the class an educational short entitled Animation. [size=4] Those pinball sequences came into my head.[/size]
I also remember this one called Malice in Wonderland.

PS. Drtooth - thanks for the artistmike link!! I forgot about those! And thanks to the rest of you! Keep posting!

[Drtooth]

Okay, these ones are guesses, but:

Pink Panther's K: Depatie Freeling Studios

Jugheads' J: Flimation? They did the cartoon version of the Archies at the time, so that's my guess.

Voice of Jughead: Howard Morris

And as for the little Artist Mike cartoons (the ones with the Aliens) I think Danny Mann did voices for those.

Danny Mann has been in numerous cartoons such as J. Gander Hooter on Darkwing duck and Hector on Heathcliff and the Catallac Cats!

here's a partial listing of his voice credits: voices.fuzzy.com/actor.idc?actor_id=244

[Fozzie Bear]

Hiya,

Great project idea...I think it would work well in some articles section at MC when the thing's complete!! What you all thinkin?

FOZ

[Jeffrey Gray]

I think Filmation did the Jughead "J" segment, the Superman "S" segment, and the Batman & Robin cartoon segments. I'm not sure, though.

[Jeffrey Gray]

Hey, Boober Gorg...do you know who did the Billy Joe Jive segments? Or is that another thing you haven't figured out yet.

Also, in case you want to know of another SS animator, I think Ken Snyder (who did Roger Ramjet, among other cartoon series) worked on SS segments at some point...I learned that from a now-closed site with a filmography of his, but I dunno what segments he worked on...

[AnimationArchiv]

Hey Jeffrey,
I thought I would drop you an email in response to your Question about Billy Joe Jive.
I do not know who did the Animation, but I saw several animation cels from the Segment.
The Cels were in a Gallery called TheDeepArchives.
Their email address is TheDeepArchives@aol.com

Good Luck
AnimationArchiv

Originally Posted by Jeffrey Gray

Hey, Boober Gorg...do you know who did the Billy Joe Jive segments? Or is that another thing you haven't figured out yet.

Also, in case you want to know of another SS animator, I think Ken Snyder (who did Roger Ramjet, among other cartoon series) worked on SS segments at some point...I learned that from a now-closed site with a filmography of his, but I dunno what segments he worked on...

[MJTaylor]

Originally Posted by Jeffrey Gray

Also, in case you want to know of another SS animator, I think Ken Snyder (who did Roger Ramjet, among other cartoon series) worked on SS segments at some point...I learned that from a now-closed site with a filmography of his, but I dunno what segments he worked on...

If this is true, then Ken Snyder must have done that cartoon where the man plays his captial letter U like a guitar. You see, there was an episode of Roger Ramjet that started with the narrator saying something like, "As the episode begins we find Scotland Yard's greatest detective Armlock Hurts, playing his Violin". Indeed he is, and he is playing extactly the same thing that the man in the letter U cartoon was playing!

[Baughdie Howes]

More animation that looks like it's by the Hubleys:

S - A man has to dodge the "S" modes of transporation as he names them (scooter, skis, speedboat, subway...). At the end of the segment, they're all approaching him together from the distance, and just as they're about to hit him, he yells, "STOP!", and they all freeze.

V - A letter V is sitting listlessly atop a wall. The announcer says, "V is for Vitamins. You forgot to take your Vitamins." The V gulps down some polka-dots (the vitamins) and is suddenly full of "Vim", "Vigor" and "Vitality". This prompts the background to go all abstract polka-dotty, to an upbeat jazz piano tune. (Remember, the Hubleys did a number of animated shorts to jazz soundtracks.)

"Hey Diddle Diddle" - Jazz song aired on "The Electric Company", sung by a jazz trio of cats with 2 fat female cat backup singers (wearing large hats).

Opening credits for "Vegetable Soup" (produced by the New York State Department of Education in the early 1970s).

[Baughdie Howes]

Does anyone know who did the "I've Got a Mind" segments?

Each one started with a blank screen, on which a short horizontal line appeared, followed by an identical line beside it. Then hands appeared beside the lines, and a longer line appeared below the first lines. Then that line would turn into a smile.

The new character would then juggle some balls and recite this poem:

"I've got a mind
And my mind helps me
With ev'rything I do, or
See."

The segments proceeded differently from there.

One went:

"My mind tells me this is a toy
A wind-up, walking little boy"

When the character wound it up, it didn't work, so he gave it a bit of a nudge. And it turned around a bit him!

In another segment, the character found a ball, which then deflated.

In another segment, he found a box and reached inside it to try to figure out what it held. It was full of glue!


Does anybody know who did this?