After months of production delays my copy of BITTER FILMS VOLUME ONE finally showed up on my doorstep, and It was worth the wait. Collecting the animated shorts of Don Hertzfeldt on to one DVD and crammed with extras out the ying yang. We've shown a few of these at HELL over the years. GENRE, BILLY'S BALLOON, REJECTED, they're all here and they've been cleaned up and restored for optimal viewing pleasure. If you've watched Don Hertzfeldt's cartoons online or have them stored on your harddrive you owe it to yourself (and Don) to get this DVD.
animehell
11 comments:
I tend to think the only work of Hertzfeldt's I enjoyed on a personal level were "Genre" and "Lily & Jim". Anything else hasn't interest me in the same level those two films had.
GENRE was the first Hertzfelt short I saw. A friend had brought a VHS of it to show at HELL, and Dave did. Dave showed GENRE quite a few times that I remember.
I'd never seen LILY & JIM until I got this DVD. On the Disc Extras Hertzfelt takes some of the unused audio from LILY & JIM and created an animatic, really funny stuff.
GENRE is still my favorite, but AH, L'AMOUR gets me every time...
Tohoscope said...
GENRE was the first Hertzfelt short I saw. A friend had brought a VHS of it to show at HELL, and Dave did. Dave showed GENRE quite a few times that I remember.
Heh, it's a rather effective film for what Hertzfeldt was probably very interested to do with a simple animated figure. It sorta reminded me a bit of "Duck Amuck" in some way.
I hate to admit, I often wasn't too fond of his later stuff like "Rejected" or "Billy's Balloon", but I can see how many would go for those anyday of the week. Adult Swim also wanted to show "Rejected" before they got cold feet at the last minute. The best they could've gave Dan as a consolation was let him animate special bumpers they could've aired instead.
I do admit, I think Hertzfeldt at least understands timing a lot. Often I see people do things similar to this but they can't always get the timing just about perfect and it comes off too fast or slow if they can't pace it well. Just not nearly a fan of his "stick figures", but he sorta came into it at a time when we started to see people rise into animation from backgrounds that weren't always art-related
I'd never seen LILY & JIM until I got this DVD. On the Disc Extras Hertzfelt takes some of the unused audio from LILY & JIM and created an animatic, really funny stuff.
Then I guess I beat you by about a decade on both films! Both GENRE and LILY AND JIM had been seen on MTV back when they had a show called "Cartoon Sushi", a sort of ugly red-headed stepchild of "Liquid Television". That was the first time I had seen any of Hertzfeldt's work and found them to be quite interesting for what they were about. Nowdays an online equivilent to what I saw on Liquid TV/Cartoon Sushi could be the Channel Frederator podcasts.
GENRE is still my favorite, but AH, L'AMOUR gets me every time...
I've seen this as well some years back from a Spike & Mike tape. I think he did that while attending a college he must've studied animation in.
I missed out on Cartoon Sushi. That was during a period of time that I was pretty much flat busted broke and on my own with no cable or tv. Then I wised up and went to Texas!
Tohoscope said...
I missed out on Cartoon Sushi. That was during a period of time that I was pretty much flat busted broke and on my own with no cable or tv. Then I wised up and went to Texas!
Heh, I'm sorry to have learned that. I had to go through a similar case when my parents (after nearly 20 years of having cable TV in our household) pulled the plug during the summer of '91 as they couldn't afford to keep paying it monthly. I never got to see the transition of Ha! to Comedy Central, nor the first season premiers of the Nicktoons (Ren & Stimpy, Rugrats and Doug), or the first year of Liquid TV on MTV. I had to put up with crappy TV reception of the local stations, anything I could get from the UHF indoor antenna in my bedroom like out of Canada, and perhaps actually reading! At that time, watching PBS actually felt like the best thing I could ever do, and I was very low to a point that I found Barney that interesting!
It wasn't until the fall of '92 that cable came back into the house and I had to play catch-up to what I had missed from an ENTIRE season!
I do have episodes of Cartoon Sushi I wouldn't mind sending you if you like, by the way, did you recieve a package from me lately? I sent out some DVDs to you last week to the address you gave out in the blog last summer and I wasn't sure if that was OK with you or not, but I felt I had to cheer you up.
I just got those discs the other day. Thanks! I haven't had a chance to watch them yet. I've been too busy watching horror movies on AMC and TCM. I love a good spook show around Halloween.
I miss the local horror host show back in Minneapolis. We had HORROR INCORPORATED hosted by Count Dracula on KSTP Channel 5. I wish I'd taped some of the host segments. Google says the show went off the air in 2002:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0384741/usercomments
Any horror host shows in Toledo?
Tohoscope said...
I just got those discs the other day. Thanks!
Glad to know you did! I should have made some announcement of that, but figured you'd get it soon enough. I could've sent me, but I was running out of time last week.
I haven't had a chance to watch them yet. I've been too busy watching horror movies on AMC and TCM. I love a good spook show around Halloween.
Nice to see both channels doing something about that, though I hardly watch AMC anymore.
I miss the local horror host show back in Minneapolis. We had HORROR INCORPORATED hosted by Count Dracula on KSTP Channel 5. I wish I'd taped some of the host segments. Google says the show went off the air in 2002:
I hardly saw much of this in my area.
Any horror host shows in Toledo?
The closest we had (at least one tha I saw) was "Dr. Shock", some guy who dressed like a crazy scientist who presented movies late nights on WUPW-TV36 (already a FOX affiliate at the time), but the thing only lasted a few years until the station decided infomercials did better than he.
http://dr.shock1.tripod.com/
Detroit though had a few over the years. One that was around up to the mid 80's was "Sir Graves Ghastly" that ran on WJBK-TV2 (formerally CBS at the time, now a FOX O&O).
http://www.sirgravesghastly.com/
Another guy who had a show up in Detroit (and subsequently in Cleveland through stations owned by the same company) was "The Ghoul", though I barely know anything about him other than online...
http://www.theghoul.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Sweed
Couldn't help but noticed this Wikipedia entry that clears things up for me...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horror_host
Cleveland (though reception from there is very moot in my parts) had a rather famous one named "Ghoulardi", which aired on WJW-TV8 in the 60's.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoulardi
Ironically, the station was owned by Storer Broadcasting, a Toledo-based operation that also operated WJBK in Detroit, and Toledo's own WSPD for a number of years before the stations were sold to another group.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storer_Broadcasting
Apparently channel 8 in Cleveland (now a dirty, stinkin' FOX O&O), still shows a rather goofy locally-produced Friday Night Movie thing with two guys as the host that looks interesting, as it has been going on for quite a good number of decades...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoolihan_and_Big_Chuck
Sadly knowbody has the balls to do something "local" in my town anymore.
Hey Gavv! Are you doing a Madness at SugoiCon, too?
-d!
Man... I wish I had known this was coming out before I bought REJECTED on DVD from Bitter Films this summer. This looks like a much better value than REJECTED by itself.
Coderjoe said...
Man... I wish I had known this was coming out before I bought REJECTED on DVD from Bitter Films this summer. This looks like a much better value than REJECTED by itself.
Wonder if you can replace your copy for the latest disc (of course knowbody follows AnimEigo's lead)? :-)
I'm not too bummed out about getting both the Rejected DVD and the Bitter Films DVD. Maybe I'll sell the Rejected DVD in a few years when it's out of print.
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