Cutting the Cord: Return of a real cool cartoon cat
If you are upset that some of your favorite broadcast TV shows are going on hiatus — yes, Walking Dead fans, I can relate — well, never fear, Bee & Puppycat are here.
New episodes of the popular YouTube animated series have started to arrive on Channel Frederator's Cartoon Hangover, an ad-supported online network.
Since its arrival last year, the unique animated short series has collected quite a following. More than 10 million have watched either the full 10-minute pilot, or the original two episodes that hit Cartoon Hangover in July 2013 and August 2013 before being combined into one video.
Then Frederator Studios head Fred Seibert — a veteran of MTV and Hanna Barbera — decided to go to Kickstarter and ask for the bulk of the funding for a full season of episodes.
"We didn't have $1 million or so to make a season. For the Web, it is a relatively expensive show. It is finely tuned animation, detailed production and complex on a lot of levels," Seibert said in an interview recently. "As a production company, we had been trying to sell female-based animation for teens and young adult women for ten to 15 years and gotten the cold shoulder from traditional media. Clearly the audience is ahead of media companies, so we thought why don't we go out to Kickstarter and make the appeal."
The result? Just the biggest animation funding success in Kickstarter history — nearly $900,000 — and one of the top-funded film projects ever on the site.
It took a year, but the first two new Bee & Puppycat episodes debuted on Nov. 6. Episode three landed last week and episode 4 is expected sometime in the next two weeks. Six more are in the works and will appear beginning in early 2015.
Bee & Puppycat comes from good cartoon stock. The series is the brainchild of Natasha Allegri, a former artist on the Cartoon Network show Adventure Time.
The twentysomething artist lists her influences for Bee & Puppycat as the Sailor Moon manga and anime series and the Superbook Bible time-travel series in an interview posted on Channel Frederator.
In the pilot episode, the magical Puppycat literally falls out of the sky and lands on Bee, an unemployed young woman. She takes Puppycat home and they subsequently go on interstellar temporary jobs, among them babysitting a giant fish and fertilizing a funky space farm.
The new episode, based on the sneak peek, involves a visit to the beach and an overflowing toilet. "The voice Natasha brings to the filmmaking, the combination of almost mundane reality and an extreme magical fantasy, is what makes it hearteningly appealing," Seibert said.
The success of online video has given Allegri, and others like her, a platform, he says. "When we went from broadcast to cable, that is the only way we would have gotten Dora the Explorer or Beavis & Butt-head or Adventure Time," said Seibert, who started Cartoon Hangover as part of YouTube's original channels effort in 2012.
"The same thing is happening in online video. It has changed the very creative nature of what it is that creative people want to create and what it is people want to see. Without online video wouldn't be seeing anything from Simon's Cat to Dick Figuresto Bee & Puppycat," he said. "Literally the medium itself has changed the inspiration of the creators and opened up avenues to the audiences that they only could have imagined in the recesses of their minds."
"Cutting the Cord" is a regular column covering Net TV and ways to get it. If you have suggestions or questions, contact Mike Snider via e-mail. And follow him on Twitter: @MikeSnider.
