When I was a little kid, I used to watch cartoons on VHS tapes alot. Most of you probably remember VHS players, but it's so ancient and obsolete now that you younger guys might only remember seeing it as a big black dusty old box in their grandparents' basement. This strange device used to play videos.

Anyhow, there was a distribution company in the late 80s and early 90s called Celebrity Home Entertainment, that had a line of kids cartoons and movies called Just for Kids. Whenever you pushed the tape in and pressed play you got this.

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Man, remember the tracking buttons?? Most later VCRs had auto tracking.

These videos, from this fairly small distribution company that subsequently went bankrupt in 1997, were cool because most of them were obscure kids' cartoons from all over the world- Germany, Japan, Belgium, Canada, The Netherlands, Denmark, The Soviet Union, and more. I don't know if they're obscure in their home countries too, but it's hard to find info about most of them on the internet.

So from time to time when I'm feeling nostalgic I dig up some old tapes and pop them in the VCR.
It's hard for me to say if I'd like these cartoons as much if they didn't have the nostalgic value, but I think they're kinda charming.

This one is called Gallavants and somebody uploaded the whole thing to Youtube. I've been looking for the VHS forever and couldn't find it so I shit my pants the other day when I saw this:

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It's like a coming-of-age story about ants. This one ant can't grow a "kabump", which is a bump that grows out of an ant's butt when it gets old enough. I couldn't find a trailer or anything so I just posted part 1. You don't need to watch the whole thing, cause it's long and it's about ant butts.

The next one is super depressing, it's about whales D:

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I think this one is Danish. A young white whale goes searching for the legendary Moby Dick so he can protect his herd from poachers. This movie is particularly dark (in color and mood) but it's got a really unique look to it, it looks like the color was done entirely in colored pencil.

This one's one of my favorites. It's a Dutch cartoon that's like the Smurfs but in space and kinda gay

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The bad guy is a huge gluttonous pink blob that commands smaller green blobs to feed him and he's always antagonizing these pink yoshi-like people that are all based off of zodiac signs.

This one is Japanese, and it's just really cute

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I like this one, it's about a bunch of animals who live on an island and the main character is a platypus. A PLATYPUS. How many cartoon platypuses are there? This one was Belgian/French Canadian, and this is the Swedish intro:

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This show had a formula: the bad guy would see something on TV and get a sinister idea. Then the good guy would find out his plan by watching the same TV show and would come up with the solution.

This was an interesting find- I was looking for info on a movie called "Quark the Dragon Slayer", about a troll who slays dragons, but couldn't find anything on Youtube. Then, in a completely unrelated search I found this:

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The fat little troll at 44 seconds, that's Quark! I have never heard of this before but I'm gonna watch it when I'm done typing this.

This last one wasn't even part of my childhood or on any of these tapes as far as I know but holy crap is the song catchy:

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That's it for now, but I'm sure there's others I'm not thinking of. I feel like there's a million foreign cartoons I've never seen before and now I'm interested in finding what exists. The related videos on Youtube for alot of these has cool looking stuff I've never heard of. Some of these shows and movies you can actually find on Youtube, but for most you're on your own. I wish I could find Vicky the Viking in English but I'm not sure if it exists.

My next cartoon features a guy who has severed hands for eyes

Hi

So summer's just around the corner, school's over, I got a C- in a class I was sure I'd fail, and now.. NOW, it's time to get to work.

Sadly, as cool as the POWER OF FRIENDSHIP SUMMER COLLAB EXTRAVAGANZA will be, I don't think I'll be participating. I've got other things I've wanted to work on for forever, and have been waiting for summer for a chance to get started on Twelve Eyes.

So, start!

....starting :/

My main hangup is still on the story. I can't decide on how the beginning should be without it seeming silly and arbitrary, I kind of want it to make sense, perfectly. I'm so used to improvising with a simple main idea in my head, or storyboarding with little to no dialogue, that when it comes down to making up a story with an actual plot and many characters and heaps of dialogue while trying to make it as NOT STUPID as possible, I have trouble being satisfied with the outcome.

At any rate, I'm re-writing the script now, hopefully I'll come to terms and be able to say it's good enough reaaal soon.

I'm just too damn picky about the script when its a story I've been planning for a long time and actually care about. Does anyone else have this problem, or is it just me?

Hey.

I want to say Happy Birthday Tom and happy Pico day.

My grandma died yesterday. She had lymphoma. She's been sick for about a year now.

It's actually pretty remarkable she lasted this long considering her age and condition. She'd been living with us for five years, after breaking her hip. A year ago she was in the hospital and was diagnosed. She had been fairly well until her legs began to weaken, she broke her arm and became completely disabled. She was very old, she turned 93 last August.

Anyway.. somehow through this I was able to bring myself to finishing my month-long project collaboration with Molkman. Please enjoy ACTIONPALS. Happy Pico Day.

I wish I could be more enthusiastic about the sheer amount of ACTION this game has in it, but I feel bad that I needed to take some cuts to finish it on time, and the things I might've been able to finish I just lacked the enthusiasm for.

Sorry about the depressing post. This might come as a surprise to alot of people, but I'm actually an enormous bummer in real life. I'm sad a lot more than I am silly, but I try to have a fun, stupid and entertaining presence on the internet. I don't wear my heart on my sleeve and especially not here on Newgrounds.

I hope I've been entertaining to a lot of people so far and hope I've made you laugh. It's a shitty ugly world, all I want to do is make it a little more fun.

Thanks for reading.

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A school project I just finished. I don't know what it is about flying limbs that's so fun.

I've been busy as shit. All my procrastinating for schoolwork has come up and bit me, so most of my personal projects have to be on hold for a while. Twelve Eyes has been put aside and Gunjani, well, I'll probably get to that sooner. I'll say one thing though, that I hope to be releasing something by the end of the month. I dunno if I'm at liberty to say what, so I won't. It's more fun secret anyway :)

Over and over and over and over and OVER!!!!!

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Yeah so I'm dead now

But I've still been pretty busy, the script for the first episode of Twelve Eyes is nearly done, and I'm almost ready to start production on it. I'm finally pretty happy with the story, the beginning at least, so I'm finally ready to get this show on the road. Hooray!

Still looking for a coder for GUNJANI! Let me know if you know a guy who knows a guy :O

Happy New Year! I haven't made a news post in several months and just wanted to let people know what I'm doin

Things aren't going so great with Twelve Eyes, I haven't been writing it for a while and I'm losing alot of the momentum I had from the beginning. I'm always dissatisfied with the overall plot, which I keep changing, but even moreso with the characters. They're all very two dimensional and I can't write them the way I want to.. I guess I'm really just not that skilled at writing.

I made a Valentine's Day cartoon ... yeah!

That's pretty much it except I also made this short stop motion film for a class and I'd like to share it.

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And for your viewing pleasure, Charles Vs. Mini Charles Jr.

Happy Hannukkah! And, Merry Christmas! Though I don't celebrate it I spent the last 24 hours working on a short (very) Christmas cartoon all about coal and its many deceptive forms. By the way, it looks like Heat Miser struck this part of the world. Oh well... in any case the Yeti is still there.

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/
475698

Enjoy!

EDIT: Oh, and one more thing!
I've made a Campnorth account, so check back there often for artmakings from me. Toodles!

http://www.campnorth.tv/profile/ukinoj oe

Hello!

It has been a while since I made anything, cause I've been so heavily weighed down by school essays and stuff that it's been hard to find the time. I was gonna do lots of cartoons in the past two months but things got in the way and time ran out and blah blah blah nobody cares blah blah blah they're all canceled.

Anyhow, I want to just bring those who are interested up to date, with what I'm working on right now.

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Twelve Eyes is a series I'm developing right now, it's something that'll be a much more long-term project than anything I've done so far. Some people might be disappointed that it's not a parody or short cartoon, but this is really the sort of thing I've always wanted to do with Flash, but probably didn't have the ability until now (maybe not even now.)

Twelve Eyes is the story of six secret government agents who are assigned the incredibly important and secret task of protecting the world's most heavily guarded secret. The secret thing, which they don't know what it is, is entrusted to them in the form of a gigantic crate the size of a garage, simply code-named "IT". All of the secret government warehouses and army bases that house secrets have all been raided by enemies and resistance groups, and this one, the MOST SECRET SECRET OF ALL THE SECRETS, is the last to remain.

Before I go on I should add that despite the plot being about government secrets and G-Men, it's not a serious drama, it's going to be funny and light-hearted. The Twelve Eyes are bumbling and incompetent, the G-Men in charge are corrupt bad guys, and the world they live in is silly and whimsical and weird as hell.

IT can't be contained in a storage facility because it'll just get stolen, so IT is being given to the Twelve Eyes to haul around the world for a while, protecting it, constantly changing its location, until a proper procedure has been decided by those responsible. The idea is that at no point will one of the twelve of their eyes ever be taken off the most important thing: IT. They'll have to protect IT and keep the public from knowing about it, until they get too suspicious and IT has to be moved again. They'll go to an empty desert, a port town, the blistering tundra, the bottom of the ocean, a tropical island, a city where everyone and everything runs on coffee, the moon, and wherever else they'll have to go to keep IT out of public eye.

There's not a lot more I want to say about it, since I'm just scratching the surface in writing it, except that you probably won't see this for a while. I know how it ends, because I want it to be a pretty short series, but am still making up the specifics in the plot and designing some of the characters. I want it to be really good but at the same time I don't want to feel like I'm sacrificing one of my limbs for this project. I'm probably in way over my head in doing something this big, so I'll try not to CHURN IT OUT too fast, this'll be a learning experience I guess. I've been making cartoons too quickly and I want to just spend some more time on something and REALLY put effort into it. You might see other quickly made stuff in the meantime, but this'll be a while. I just wanted to let this cat out of this bag to see who's interested and whatever, and maybe get pressured to work harder on it.

I'm typing this up at school so check back later, I'll put up some drawings and stuff.

I'M SO SORRY EVERYONE

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HEY.

I was gonna write a thing about something or whatever but I'm suffering from some major case of the Mondays so I'm just gonna c+p an old draft I wrote last week but never posted. Also my birthday was today, zippity doo dah.

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First of all, I want to re-iterate my joyousness for being one of the winners of Madness Day, and perhaps also won a place in Krinkels' heart. That said, I had what I thought was an interesting idea for a blog post.

Anybody who's seen most of my movies might have noticed that they hardly ever have dialogue. I have no particular dislike for dialogue or dialogue-heavy cartoons, but I have to be honest and say I suck at writing dialogue. Stories work better for me when they simply fall into place with drawings to tell the story.

Now, for me, I see it as a weakness, but for the films itself, it's probably a strength. Have you realized that Castle Crashers has no dialogue? The stuff NPCs say and hints don't count. Not to sound stupid, but I didn't even notice this until I'd finished the game. The story is simple and the characters are too. They don't even have names, they're all like, Red Knight, Blue Knight, Cyclops, Necromancer, Evil Wizard. Proof that a rose by any other name yadda yadda.

I really think the game's got a good story, even though it's nothing new and very simple. You'll see alot of EXTREMELY convoluted stories in TV shows and movies and pretty much any form of entertainment today, but you don't really need to have all this explanation and character backstories and shit to have a good story with great characters.

What could it be, then? Could it be that their personality is hardly defined and your mind is supposed to fill in the blanks? Actions speak louder than words, so whatever little information about a character you get goes a long way. People will always say "THE BOOK WAS BETTER" after seeing a movie adaptation, is it because the embellishment of the characters was more up to the imagination but the film version is just the filmmaker's interpretation of it? Could be.

My favorite character in particular from Castle Crashers is the Industrial Castle King, who is a total coward and a narcissist. He's got several enormous portraits of himself all over his castle, and he never personally fights you. Unarmed, he dies in one hit. He's dead weight to his allies, so they don't even save him. You tend to forget all of this is happening without one English word being uttered.

Another great example I've seen of this recently is Wall-E. A lot of critics have probably pointed it out that there's hardly any dialogue, and it really does seem like a long version of a Pixar short, which are almost always silent. The back-and-forths between Wall-E and M-O were some of the best scenes, M-O was a funny character and they didn't even have to explain why! It's like, if you have a dog that's really friendly, you equate the dog to "a good person", even if they don't talk. Their actions speak for themselves and you're not bogged down with having to interpret their feelings through words.

So why do I think it's the future? Silent films were the FIRST films ever, they've been around forever in some form, they never fully fazed out. What I mean is that silence is going to become more and more popular in the feature length area, in more magnum opuses than just the little league stuff. We've come a long way since the introduction of all the film tools we have today, cameras, color, sound, chroma key, CGI, etc.. it might just be when we handicap ourselves from some of these that we realize other ways to tell stories. Simplicity is key, and pictures really are worth 1000 words. Think of those Garfield comics where Garfield is either quiet or taken out altogether. Human minds are DESIGNED to fill in the blanks to solve problems, storytelling can make great use of that. In fact, this entry is too long. Let me re-iterate the entire article in one sentence.

Your cartoons and games have too much damn dialogue, rip out your characters' tongues and you'll see a WORLD of storytelling opportunities.
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Ok I'm done. Happy New Year everybody.