Cartoon Dump
Thursday, May 8th, 2008Not sure if you can tell, but I’m really loving living in LA. There are so many interesting people doing fun things - it doesn’t take too much effort to find something engaging and cool.
A few months ago, I was able to commission a piece of art for Heather from one of our favorite contemporary artists, Ron Regé Jr. When he came by our place to drop it off, we talked for a while about the LA music scene - he’s in a band called Lavender Diamond - and he told us that there’s some cool programming at a place nearby called The Steve Allen Theater at the Center For Inquiry (West).
Recently, I picked up the program guide for the theater, and realized that there was a ton of stuff going on there that all seemed interesting. My first outing was two weeks ago, where I attended my first “Cartoon Dump”.
Cartoon Dump is a live version of a kids’ show. It follows the formula that was typical for so many local shows from the ’60s and ’70s - a wacky character in a cheap costume introduces the best cartoons that the station could afford to show. In this case, there’s not one, but two wacky characters: Compost Brite (played by excellent comedian Erica Doering) and Moodsy the Clinically Depressed Owl (as portrayed by MST3K’s Frank Conniff - aka “TV’s Frank”) - and the cartoons are the worst cartoons - ever. Actually, the cartoons are programmed by Jerry Beck, who is one of the foremost animation experts in the world. As an author and avid collector, he’s compiled a collection of truly horrendous mostly “limited animation” shorts. He showed them with commentaries at various comic shows, and the program was a hit - and the combination of Jerry’s cartoons and Erica & Frank’s comedy is a winner.
Cartoon Dump takes place once a month (the last Tuesday of the month) at the Steve Allen Theater. I’ll most certainly be back.
Here’s the first episode, which I swiped from YouTube: