Sorry I’ve been away for so long – I can’t believe how friggin’ busy it’s been. I’ve got so many irons in the fire, I’m ducking sparks! Can’t say too much right now but as soon as I can I will spill the beans.

I did want to mention a couple of things – the new Shane Acker film “9” is amazing. Shane has had several films with Spike and Mike including one of most squeamish we’ve EVER shown– “The Hangnail” (I get chills every time I even think of it) and his follow up, “The Astounding Talents of Mr. Grenade.” Shane is one the prime examples of great talent that is fresh and innovative and started his public career with Spike and Mike. His original short “9” won the 2005 Student Academy Award and was nominated for an Oscar in 2006. I just want to congratulate Shane and look forward to seeing his career move forward at light speed.

Also the New Generation Animation show is coming right along. I can’t believe how many amazing films I’m putting together into one show. I know there has got to be a couple of Oscar noms in the bunch.

A couple years ago I met Aussie Darcy Prendergast at the Annecy International Film Festival and picked up his student film “Ron, the Zookeeper” for the Sick and Twisted show. Needless to say, it was a crowd pleaser.

This year at Annecy it seems I had seen him everywhere, every where I was there he was. Not only did he have his new film “News” showing there but he also worked on Adam Elliot’s award winning clay animation feature film “Mary and Max” which was a favorite of Brian the Nice Guy. I did a couple of interviews vids with Darcy that you can see on earlier blogs.

Well, Darcy has just finished a new animated music video of “All India Radio’s” “Lucky,” an Australian electronic band. Its very innovative and original, but sadly no Grey Pandas! Enjoy.

There is going to be alot more video and stuff from me at Comic con and here is just the beginning. My friend Joe, who was a huge help at Comic con put this together to show the fun and craziness at our booth. I always have a cool damn time and love to make the deals!

OMG! That’s the way you say it, right? And LOL, BRB, etc. I’m getting into this, but I’m getting off the topic here, let’s start again. OMG! What an incredible month this has been, everything I wanted to with the website and the blog didn’t happen. The last month I’ve been getting ready for the San Diego Comic con, putting together a double feature for the Friday screening, 10:00pm in Room 6BCF. If you’re going to Comic-con be sure to see the screening and also come by the Spike and Mike booth #1536.

I have put together one of the best shows that I have EVER put together. Of course, I always say that and I’m always right. In this corner we have The New Generation Animation – a compilation of the best animation of this year and last year – most of the shorts come from the 2009 Annecy Animation Festival with a few other great ones I got in the mail. In the other corner is the champ Sick & Twisted - and what a program it is. Stuff from Annecy, stuff from the mail, stuff that I scraped off of the streets. It puts the GREAT into Sick and Twisted, if you mix around the letters and add a G and an R and an A!

Right now I’m trying to get my stuff loaded in the Convention Center. The lot was full and they wanted me to walk the stuff over from Horton Plaza! Do you believe that! But I think we got most of the stuff at our booth.

Come on over say “HI” and check out this spot for all the comic con Spike and Mike News!

I have a love/hate relationship with “The Gauntlet!”

It seems like a hundred years since we’ve been showing Sick and Twisted as well as the original festival at the San Diego comic-con. It started as a free current show and then morphed into something else.

One year I decided that it would be a great testing ground to gauge an audience reaction to new films. I mean it was a no-brainer, about 1500 kids stuffed into a room the size of a football field, a captive audience, and I can show them anything I wanted. It was a great an experiment and the weaklings were quickly weeded out.

Then one faithful year, I decided to let the audience into the loop, I told them that I was showing them some new films to see what they thought some were classics and some were dogs and asked them to cheer or whatever. I don’t know why I did this, it’s like telling sheep that they are… sheep. But these sheep were like wolves, they devoured the films like candy. If they liked it they cheered like crazy if they hated it, they booed loud enough to unfreeze Disney! One of the films got such a violently bad reaction that I told the techie guy to cut off the film and when he did a cheer of such relief filled the room you could taste it and as it did, a bolt from above hit me right between the eyes. An idea of such magnitude I would eventually regret it.

The last time something this happen was about 20 years ago at the University of California, Berkley. It was after a practically great show and Mike and I were digging it, then we asked the audience if they wanted to see something different, of course they cheered and we showed them Danny Antonucci’s “Lupo the Butcher.” If you’ve ever seen this thing you know how “different” it is!! It was like feeding crumbs to pigeons, they went crazy. Afterwards walking through the campus I knew we had something special and that was when “Sick and Twisted” was born.

Now back to the Gauntlet, the next year at comic-con I decided to let the audience in even further into the loop and make them part of it – I told them that if they loved a film give it props, if they didn’t thrash it and I would cut it off. They took their role to heart and for the most part they were right on, films I knew were awful found their way in the trash and great films were praised. For a couple of years, this worked very well, the audience relished in its role and I got a good idea of what film would work and what wouldn’t. Sometimes I played the audience, knowing a film started slow and had a great payoff. I would let them thrash it and when the film paid off, they knew they were in on the joke and the cheers showed their appreciation. The best example was when Bill Plympton had me show something and said, “Just keep it running.” And I did, the boos got greater and louder and we just sat there laughing our butts off, the film was basically two lines criss-crossing the screen until one gets shot and the other one berates the audience that the dead one just wanted to express himself. The crowd went wild – realizing the joke was on them.

But all good things must come to an end and last year was the straw that broke the Gauntlet’s back. A group of punks who must have been just let out of prison, disrupted every film even though others in the audience yelled at them to stop, they wouldn’t even listen to me and good films were thrashed even before the opening credits stopped. Even though I love the Gauntlet and it is a great tool for me – it is time to retire it for a while, but like all good things, it might RISE AGAIN!

Below is a little taste of what the Gauntlet was. It was shot at the 2007 show, which was the show at its best. Enjoy.

Sorry haven’t been blogging since I’ve got back but I hit the ground running when I got back. That and jetlag really kicked my butt. Comic-con is just around the corner and I putting together a killer show – one of the best I’ve ever done and then going on the road with it. I’ll write more about that later right now I want to address a tragedy that occurred last week – Michael Jackson’s untimely death.

Unfortunately, I had never met Michael but, like everyone in the world it seems, I dug his music, well most of it. Actually the first thing I thought when I heard about him was Weird Al’s parody of “Beat it” with “Eat it” and my favorite the parody of “I’m Bad” with “I’m Fat!” Weird Al in a fat suit cracks me up. It seems Michael was cool with the joke by first approving the lyrics and letting Weird Al film “I’m Fat” on the same subway set. How cool is that.

But the closest I ever got to the Michael Jackson train was through animator Jim Blashfield when he created the Jackson music video for “Leave me Alone.” We showed the video in our Original Festival and it always got a great reaction. Not only is it a great song but the animation is ground breaking. In it Jim combines, cutout, clay, and drawings all to the beat of Jackson’s song. I think it’s one of Jim’s best.

It is sad when someone that young and talented dies and I hoped we get to see some footage of his rehearsals of his latest tour. RIP Michael.

Well, we are back in California and it only took me 20 hours to do it! Three countries ,four cities and I made it back to La Jolla. Started out in Annecy at 10:00 in the morning, taxi ride to Geneva, Switzerland, to the airport. I’m not crazy about airports and it took us nearly an hour to get through check in, the security and then on the ramp to the airplane, I was singled out by this one guy just sitting at a table on the walk ramp, he did a full cavity search of me and my carryon luggage before I got on the plane. Just went through everything - and I wasn’t even wearing the funny hat.

The first leg of the journey was an eight hour flight soaring over the Atlantic Ocean. And that was after sitting on the runway for an hour because of a burn-out light bulb and they had to fill out paper work but they had to do it through the United office in Chicago. The flight was pretty uneventful, and since I’m a big guy, economy class is not an option! So I sat in Business class in these nice lazy-boy recliners and watched the film ‘Frost and Nixon,’ Frank Langella did an amazing job playing Nixon. Caught a few Z’s and we actually gained a day as we flew into Dulles, Washington. But because we were delayed an hour we only had an hour and a half to get through customs until our next flight. I got a little worried when I saw how long the line was but I must say the US Customs people sure know what they are doing and got hundreds of people through to their planes, in our case, with 45 minutes to spare. I just have a few things to declare including a new Swatch watch I got in Annecy – cool watch – big numbers!

The flight to San Diego was a five hour flight but there are no cool business class seats, though the seats were a little bigger than the poor guys in Economy. Got into San Diego about 8pm and was picked up by Brian the Nice Guy’s friend Peter. (Peter also took us to the airport at the ungodly hour of 4:30AM.) Got home around 9pm and just crashed until the next morning.
Glad to be home, glad I don’t have to do this for a while but now I gotta go through the stuff from Annecy, get some new films and start setting up for the San Diego Comic Con. It may be a few days before I start blogging again but I’m going to put up some more pictures and edited videos from Annecy, so keep checking back here.

Also, if you are reading these things give me your comments and questions and I’ll try to do blogs about stuff you wanna know - about Spike and Mike’s and Sick and Twisted or whatever!

Well, Annecy is over for another year. I came here not only to expand the minds of the French with Sick and Twisted but I went on a search for some great films for an additional show I am adding and calling “New Generation Animation.” It will feature Sophisticated, Innovative and Cutting-Edge Animation but not losing the sense of fun. I saw tons of great animation and received tons of submissions.
In a nutshell, Annecy is all about the shorts, shorts are king here. The main prize or the Annecy Cristal is reserved for the best short. Programs consist of Shorts in Competition, Shorts out of Competition, Graduate Films, Commissioned Films, TV films and Feature Films. I focus on the short films looking for that gem, Brian the Nice Guy also went to some of the feature films.

Saturday night was the closing ceremony, each year the Festival has a theme, this year it was the ‘Moon.’ The artistic director, Serge Bromberg, came out in a sort of astronaut costume and pretended to land on the moon. I think it was funny because the translations (a little headpiece where the translators would very dryly translate from French or English depending what they were speaking from the stage) were a little dry but the French were laughing!

This is the Moon set for theclosing ceremonies - this is the end with all of the winners mingling.

The winners of the shorts were: the Audience award went to Sick and Twisted favorite PES and his ‘Western Spaghetti,’ a cool film showing PES making spaghetti in the crazy creative way that he does, we hope to be showing this at San Diego this year. The Special Distinction went to David Oreilly’s ‘Please Say Something,’ a warped love relationship between a cat and a mouse. Special Jury Award (second place) went to Cordell Barker’s, (another Spike and Mike favorite, of “The Cat Came Back” fame) with his ‘Runaway,’ a funny film of a runaway train and what it takes to keep it going. The best first feature goes to my favorite, “The Man in the Blue Gordini”, a funny twisted film about standing up to authority. And first place went to ‘Slaves’ a dark, disturbing film about two children who were taken from their families by government sponsored militia in the Sudan and made into slaves.
On the feature side Henry Selick’s ‘Coraline’, tied with Australian Adam Elliot’s ‘Mary and Max.’ Audience favorite went to an Irish film ‘Brendan and the Secret of the Kells.”

The parties were not as great as they were in the past but the Danish Animation party at the old Bastille (prison) was pretty good. The Annecy closing party was great in the people meeting way; I hooked up with Peter Lord of Aardman fame and talked the very busy Serge Bromberg. Serge has always been good to me and Sick and Twisted.

Annecy Artistic Director Serge Bromberg and Spike confer at closing party.

A fan gets tagged by Spike.

Bill Plympton was there having a great time as well as Aussies Darcy Prendergast and Doug Bayne who were fascinated by a meat sculpture of a castle which they christened ‘Chateau d’Boueff.

This is the closing party.

All and all it was a great Annecy for me this year, I’m sure one day I’ll get the hang of it.

I toured historic Annecy after the Festival, Darcy Prendergast, director of Sick and Twisted Show “Ron the Zookeeper” helped me as I told the story of Eric the Red in his Chateau d’ Boeff!

I interview Darcy Prendergast, director of Sick and Twisted Show “Ron the Zookeeper” and upcoming “News.” Darcy is an Aussie and seemed to be everywhere at the Festival. I hooked up with his on Sunday after the festival as we walked around historic Annecy.