In celebration of my old buddy Von Zipper finding my site, I thought I'd post a picture that he'd surely remember. (Scroll down to it if you don't want to read this stuff)

Back in 1991, a friend and I drove out here to Los Angeles (from New Jersey) to break into the animation biz. We weren't doing so well when I got a call from a buddy back east who said a guy he had done some work with, who I'll call "R.K.", was looking for a property to make into a show - and he was told about my Spike Noodles flicks. This R.K. wanted to talk to me about it, so since things weren't panning out in Los Angeles, we drove back to New Jersey. Once rested, I gathered my Spike Noodles films and some artwork, and went down to meet this dude.

R.K. was in his late 40's and still lived with his mom, but he had some loose ties to the animation industry because he was a producer on a Bakshi film a long time ago, and apparently someone from Gannett Publishing wanted to hear if he had any ideas for a comic strip (which would be turned into a t.v. show, supposedly). As I was recovering from the initial weirdness of the situation, he and his mom took a look at my Spike Noodles stuff. Immediately upon seeing a drawing of Spike, the mom exclaimed, "Oh, no... this isn't what I pictured at all! I was imagining Benji with a machine gun!" R.K. wasn't much help, since he just seemed to agree with whatever his mom said. Being the naive newbie that I was, I offered to play around with the designs and see if I could make something he liked.

I called my friend Von Zipper, who I knew from my years at University of the Arts, to see if he had any ideas. We met up and started brainstorming. Meanwhile, R.K. enlisted the aid of an animation writer from New York to develop his own version of Spike Noodles. The day before the presentations were needed for the pitch, Von Zipper and I stayed up most of the night in his NYC apartment making a poster of Spike surrounded by his enemies, as well as 4 sample comic strips. The next morning I drove down to R.K.'s house to drop off the stuff, and he showed me what the New York writer came up with. His was an idea about a boy who lived in a happy neighborhood and had a pet robot dog named Spike Noodles. It was one page with the synopsis and some character descriptions (the buddy, the local bully, the love interest, etc.) and a few sketches. A tried-and-true formula that has worked since the days of the Peanuts, but R.K. had mentioned to me that Gannett wanted "something like the Ninja Turtles", so I figured my idea's action-oriented, good-vs-bad theme might appeal to them.

So R.K. gathered the stuff and went off to pitch. That afternoon, he calls me. I ask how it went. He asks, "What would be the worst thing that could have happened, in your opinion?" I replied, "If you gave them all my stuff and I've lost the rights to Spike forever." He said that didn't happen, but he did say they liked the New York writer's idea. I asked what they thought of mine. He replied, "I didn't even show them yours." I was speechless, and he added, "You should be happy, we're going to be rich!" I was new to the industry, but I wasn't that stupid.

So he and the New York guy in the beginning sort of included me in the project, but I knew I was a third wheel - especially since at this point the idea was just a comic strip, and it didn't require 3 guys to make it. I wished them luck and went to find other work in New York. Several months later I was in the neighborhood and stopped in to say hi to R.K. at the little animation school he ran. He seemed a bit down, so I asked what was up. Apparently Gannett, who had given the project a budget of something tiny like 200 bucks a week, wanted them to make an animated series - for $200 a week. This was obviously preposterous and the New York writer bowed out, leaving R.K. with nothing. Since nobody had officially bought the name from me, Spike Noodles was once again all mine. I left poor R.K. sulking in his office and went on to do other things, which eventually brought me back out here to Los Angeles. I'd occasionally hear bits about what R.K. was up to, but it doesn't sound like he ever got his big break.

Anyway, here's the poster Von Zipper and I scrambled to make for R.K.'s pitch. I touched it up in Photoshop because it had faded a bit.

(click to enlarge)

posted by Ubel at 8:49 PM