My Experience With Pop Culture In Cartoons

 

Artmania is one thing. It's my art, and it's filled with creativity like no other.

I always wanted to add references to my cartoons and drawings. I've been doing that since Day 1. I was drawing toy versions of licensed cartoon characters I had in my house. 

I had loads of  Disney princesses, Mario characters and TY's. 

I haven't became fully aware of pop culture references until I watched cartoons like Spongebob and Looney Tunes and also Watchmojo since sometimes they would do Top 10s based on references in cartoons.

My taste in pop culture is mostly the 30s-50s. I feel warmth with these decades since the music and actors back then were more appealing than what came later.

When it comes people using pop culture in cartoons, they usually do it in a unique manner.

Political Cartoons

These types of pop culture jokes don't make sense to me. I know they are willing to use these beloved characters to reflect on our chaotic world of today, but to me I don't care for these.

Cutaway Gags/Satire

 This is possibly the worst use of adding a pop culture reference to a cartoon. Some of Family Guy's cutaway gags left me confused, they were REALLY stupid. I know that's what the show likes to do, but this stuff needs logical sense somehow. 

I think the best way to cameo or reference characters is to have those characters with their original personalities and visual elements in order to make them feel like their needed.

Even a few second gag can help it. Other cartoons like Simpsons, Family Guy and MGM do it.

But let's not go into pop culture with the joke aspect, I have done some drawings that were inspired by references to media. And I'm willing to send some pictures. They are official and I want them to be in my animated films and storyboards.

I always imagined making a Mickey Donald and Goofy cartoon back when I didn't watch too many of their cartoons. I thought they were slow at first. But nowadays I think their rapid and fast as ever.

I always liked these cartoons the best. My favorites are Mickey's Service Station, Boat Builders and Mickey's Fire Brigade.

Do you know those Simpsons couch gags guest animators worked on for the show? 

Almost all of them I find interesting. My favorite is the pixel one since it pays homage to retro video games. 

They also hired John Kricfalusi to do an intro, but I have mixed feelings about it. The "never make the same face twice" is in here, and it just ends up looking too weird. For a guy who respects classic animation as I do, this is not how you do it.

This isn't going to be official I think, but just as an usual idea if I ever did a collaboration with Simpsons, I might want to make my own version of these characters.

I think it's a solid show even though I'm not a huge fan of it, I love alot of the character designs.

Homer is easy to draw. I had alot of fun drawing him myself. 

This expression here is referenced to Droopy.

I don't think The Simpsons characters ever had smear animation, so it's a good idea for Homer to have a more expressive personality. 

Hollywood caricatures need to be a thing in Artmania. Because it's been a thing in every animated show. Looney Tunes, Disney, MGM, Animaniacs, you name it. 

I find myself liking the classic hollywood caricature cartoons. Not all of them, but some of them are funny. 

Like I was saying, there's something more likeable with these actors than nowadays. 

It's probably more appropriate to draw them. If I drew a current hollywood celebrity today, I would get more trashy comments, but honestly, I wouldn't want to make them that offensive. 

Trust me, even animators aren't the nicest to be around. 

(This is horrendously grotesque. The fact that this cartoon has human designs and these awful designs makes this a fever dream, YUCK.)

Back then, I thought having a cameo of an old hollywood actor into a cartoon wouldn't make sense. It's stuff I get through like today's comics and adult shows. But honestly, these people are timeless, and I'm okay if I can reference them at least once, but correctly. 

I think the first week I experienced Bing Crosby, I always pictured an actual TV show of him. It's not gonna happen. But how astonishing would that be?

Man, classic cartoons were truly the best. Bob Clampett once did a Warner Bros. cartoon where he did a Horton Hatches The Egg adaptation. It was really hilarious. And I wanted to do something like that too. 

There's this book I remembered having when I was little, I had alot of these beginner books and this is the one I vaguely know the most.

Not only was it funny, but it was also simple and easy to understand. 

There was a few animals introduced in the original story. I wanted to add an additional one. And that's a turtle.

Just like with the fish in the Horton cartoon, I wanted to add a celebrity reference in this adaptation. Yeah, really quirky for me to add Al Jolson in this. 

This scene goes like this...

The bird's walking, until he steps into a turtle's shell. He says his usual phrase, "Are you my mother?" 

Then, the turtle's head appears inside the shell, looking at the bird and saying "No, I'm not your mammy!" The turtle kisses the bird unexpectedly. 

Finally, the bird feels unbalanced for a second and then says "Well now I definitely know that thing isn't my mother!"

It actually makes sense because Jolson is well known for saying that catchphrase. It's really outdated nowadays, but it's still memorable.

Looney Tunes would sorta do these quirky segments where classic entertainers would be turned into objects. Wholly Smoke is a perfect example since when I first saw this, this was weird.

I think having a pop culture reference once in a while can be a good thing. People nowadays just don't understand, they just want everything to be deep and original. 

There's still an audience that love cartoons like Looney Tunes and Tex Avery's MGM's cartoons and I think that's awesome. 

I don't want that genre of cartoons to die, it was timeless back then and is now.