Friday, 29 May 2015

The Eyes of Bleep

Colonel Bleep cartoons are more a curiosity than anything. The narration is strictly for kids and not very amusing. The interesting thing is watching how the people at the Soundac studio in Miami handled extreme limited animation. Some of the movement is pretty creative.

Here’s where the Colonel winks his eyes. The camera moves in. He closes his eyes and when he opens them again, a spaceship in distress appears in them.



The Colonel, Squeak and Scratch were first syndicated in mid-1957, pre-dating Ruff and Reddy in the made-for-TV-cartoon calendar of milestones.
Posted by at 06:56

1 comment:

  1. Craig L.29 May 2015 at 14:55

    I thought that the most creative cost-saving method Colonel Bleep used was to essentially eschew lip-syncing... none of the protagonists, Bleep, Squeak or Scratch spoke English so it was all up to the off-screen Narrator to explain EVERYTHING. And the main villain, Dr. Destructo, spoke but never showed his face. It probably gave Colonel Bleep's producers a little more leeway to be more visually creative than other early limited animators could afford to do. There were other ingenious cost-and-labor-saving gimmicks other TV toons used in the early days... you have seen how the makers on Tom Terrific went with the assumption of black-and-white TV so the characters weren't "colored in".

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