Talking Simpsons - An Interview With Animation Legend Bill Kopp!

Episode Date: December 3, 2020

Bill Kopp is the co-creator of Eek! The Cat and The Terrible Thunderlizards, creator of The Shnookums and Meat Funny Cartoon Show and Mad Jack The Pirate, AND he was one of the first animators on The Simpsons way back in 1987! We chatted with Bill recently about his career, covering a lot of the early days of The Simpsons shorts, some of our favorite Eek! memories, his creation of the Press Your Luck Whammies, and so much more. And if you enjoy this, be sure to check out our MANY previous interviews all on Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons!!!

Hey folks, while we experience this technical difficulty, let's talk about the Metropolis Kittens Hospital. They need donations. Used cat boxes, little bits of string, a patch of ripped up carpet. All donations are welcome and appreciated. Kumbaya, I have all that stuff. I can help those little kittens. It never hurts to help ahoy ho everybody and welcome to another talking simpsons interview i am bob mackie hoping for no whammies who is here with me today uh henry gilbert and it never hurts to help exactly and today we are talking to the great bill kopp an animation legend and if you existed throughout the 80s 90s and hell even

today you've seen definitely at least a few of the things he's worked on right henry including the initial tracy allman simpson shorts yeah that was uh i had reached out to bill kopp a while ago after after we did the dav Silverman interview, you know, hearing about Bill Kopp that I had seen his other works like Eek the Cat, Terrible Thunder Lizards, the Press Your Luck Whammies, but I wasn't aware that he was like the third man of the original Simpsons animators with David Silverman and Wes Archer. And so we wanted to seek him out and chat with him on a podcast. And he shared with us so many interesting details

about those early days of animating The Simpsons on Tracy Ullman. Yeah, we talked to him about his entire career, both The Simpsons stuff and also working on the Roger Rabbit shorts,

working on Eek the Cat, working on the finale for Tales from the Crypt and so much. He basically tells us on the podcast he has not been unemployed since he left CalArts.

And we talk about CalArts too. Yeah, yeah. Because he's in the Cal arts mafia really well he was part of the that group of folks who would leave cal arts in the early 80s and change the animation industry in the united states and he has so many interesting stories about his time there and yes he is the voice of eek the cat and if you love eek the cat you will hear him do voices so just close your eyes imagine us talking to a purple cat uh the friendliest purple cat in the world yeah it was it was so cool talking to bill definitely check out his website for a lot of his content there uh bill cop animation.com uh definitely check that out sadly he's not on twitter the fool he should be

on twitter miserable like the rest of us so i guess without further ado give a listen to our interview with bill cop about all of his work including the earliest days on The Simpsons. Well, so Bill, thanks so much for coming on. I guess I wanted to start first with asking, you know, you got your start at CalArts, I believe, which, you know, a lot of folks who'd go on to change the animation industry like you were starting then. Like, were there any other memorable alums you were with then? Oh, my God. Everybody.

Gary Trousdale, Rob Minkoff, Kelly Asbury, Chris Sanders, Peter Chung. I know I'm forgetting some, but yeah, it was a whole. Joe Ramft was there. John Lasseter was a couple years ahead. Tim Burton, of course, went there. He was gone by the time I got there. But yeah, it was great. Savage, of course.

Yeah, yeah, it was. What was the feeling then at CalArts? Like, you know, the early 80s isn't known as the brightest period in American animation. So what was it? No, that doesn't come until later. It was, well, I was a painter when I first went there. But I became quick friends with all the animation guys. And then I switched my major into animation.

Because the animators were just way more fun than the brooding painters so my second year i was officially in the animation program and did mr gloom and observational hazard and those both won the student academy awards yeah no those those look so great you can see so much of the of your skill in those you know you see some some folks is you know student stuff and you're like oh i can see the a little bit of what they've come to be but like there's there's so much like great experimentation in in in those ones for sure yeah well that was the experiment there was there was character animation which was where most of my buddies were but the experimental animation program was where i

was assigned to or whatever you want to call it and they we were really just trying to do weird stuff i mean i there was a lot of drawing a lot of drawing went into those films so how did you come to start working with uh savage deep holland especially with his first two feature films well savage was um i met at cal arts he was a couple years ahead of me one or two years ahead i can't remember but i was uh 18 i was too young to buy beer. And Savage was like the hall manager of the dormitory that I was in. And of course, you know, he likes beer. So we became quick friends. And we just were always really friendly and funny together. And that's how that started. Yeah. He was my first mentor, really, I think, you know, he taught me

really how to write fast. And just he was just a really funny guy. Yeah. He was my first mentor, really, I think. You know, he taught me really how to write fast. And he was just a really funny guy. And, yeah, in those early days, like, what were some of your first jobs? I know there was a game show I definitely am interested in. But was there a thing, anything before that? Well, that came later. Okay. My first job was Better Off Dead.

Oh, okay. Wow, man. And actually, i was still finishing my second film that that came right after i graduated and i still was finishing up my my lap my senior film and and then as soon as that was done like in september then that october of 84 i went right to work to with savage and then right after that we did one crazy summer and then after that the simpsons man yeah i think i first got to know your work because uh it existed as a cartoon in a place where a cartoon usually wouldn't be like especially one crazy summer i was captivated when that came on

hbo just from the crazy insane intro with the hyper violent cartoon oh it was hilarious wasn't it yeah that's great yeah um that was what was cool about it you know it was throwing something in there that was really like a sideways thing you're not expecting yeah i mean that kind of satire is carried on my tales from the crypt is like that it looks like a really goofy cartoon but then it just goes horribly wrong yeah it's fun to do that with i mean it's a cartoon it's fun to get super violent what i mean and and violent cartoons like were really not happening in tv i mean there wasn't like if it was theatrical animation then it was probably just disney and like that was in shambles in the early 80s yeah yeah yeah and then a lot of guys that

graduated before me you know were going off and they you know they come back to visit or whatever and they'd be like i'm working on this thing called He-Man and I want to pull my head. And I was looking at those drawings and I was like, I couldn't, I would not be able to draw that. I don't know how to draw that. I can't draw that. I've been really lucky because I really, my drawings are like really mutated, but I've somehow managed to make a living off of it. Yeah. The, in, in those live action films, like the, when I saw One Crazy Summer the first time, just the Rhino short, it freaked me out, but I also loved it as a kid. I'd never seen anything like that.

I didn't know cartoons could do that. Well, we were animating really hard, too. Most of that animation is all shot on single frame. That's why it's very, very smooth. We were young animators, so we really, we were, we were young animators. So we really wanted to do the, you know, the hardest thing you could do is like, yeah, animate really smoothly. Thousands of drawings.

So was it on One Crazy Summer that you first worked with David Silverman? Is that how you worked on the initial Simpsons shorts? Well, I met David Silverman because I had a film called Mr. Gloom. My second, my junior CalArts film won a Focus Award. And at the same year too, that's when I met Catherine Hardwick because she won also. And Silverman had won the year before.

And that's, we all met each other there. So, and you know, we became fast friends. And then David was obviously a great animator. And then when Crazy Summer started up, I was just like, dude, you gotta get in on this. And then we went on a great animator. And then when, when crazy summer started up, I was just like, dude, you gotta get in on this. And then we went onto the Simpson.

We've chatted with Silverman before he had, he had mentioned that on one crazy summer that the, there was, would have been more animation, but something got cut from it too. There was a lot more. Yeah. Was it just a budget thing?

I saved everything. I've still got all the pencil drawings. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, there was, there was a couple other big sequences that never pencil drawings. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, there was. There was a couple other big sequences that never got finished. Ah, that's too bad.

Well, they got finished, but they, you know, some of them didn't. They all got shot in pencil tests. And some of them got to the cell color point. And then a lot of them, they just cut it for time, you know. Was it an accident that Steve Holland got into live action or did he wanted to oh no no he was doing that at cal arts he was doing both animation and shooting live action plus he's that was just very charismatic and very funny and you know he's got and he had a there's a lot of confidence so he had written better off dead already while he was still at

cal art it is funny we were just watching watching some of the earlier shorts before this interview, and we can see that is a Bill Kopp drawing. That is a David Silverman wild take. Oh, yeah. That is a Wes Archer famous twister mouth on a character in those shorts. Yeah, right? Yeah. I'm the really crude one.

David's the guy that really can draw, and Wes is the freak. We had so much fun doing that, but we were locked up in that room for like two years, just the three of us. And Matt, Matt would come in like once a week, once or twice a week, and we'd work stuff out. But, um, and then when it really got cooking, of course, David was, you know, David was the one that really had an affinity for it. And he, he's the guy that really took it into the series and honed the style and

pulled it together. He was, he loved it. And, um, and thank God for the guy that really took it into the series and honed the style and pulled it together. He loved it. And thank God for the world that he did. And what did you think of Matt Groening's writing and ideas for these shorts? Because they really are, these early ones, very much paced like a three or four panel comic strip. Yeah, they were very much like that. Well, we were big fans of Life in Hell. That was in the Reader or the LA Weekly, I forget. So we were big fans of life in hell that was in the was in the reader or the la weekly i forget so we were already fans of his and then west was the one that got together with gov or

chupo and got the gig i mean i remember getting the phone call from west saying like hey because we we'd all shot out of cal arts and we had never been out of work here it was 1986 and all of a sudden it's like oh my god that's right we have to look for a job and west called me and got me started and he and i were the first two guys there and they were like they were just like this is too much fucking work we need another guy i was like let's get silverman in here and that was that and then i think we brought tim bjorklund down the road but it was a it was about two years of we lived at that studio but you know we were in our mid-20s or whatever back then so we didn't give a shit we didn't have

anything else to do but turn around and animate well yeah what was the uh like the Klasky Chupo offices were pretty new at that time right so it yeah it was a little it was down on Seward and and Melrose and in this really old part of Hollywood. We used to call it Film Town. And where all these old editing places were, and they were all populated by these really crusty old men, you know, who were, like, smoking while there's nitrate film around. They're just like, ah, fuck it, kid.

I did a bunch of shorts for Fox, right, I think, the Simpsons started and I would go down there all the time to edit. So we'd rent these little editing rooms and you just have some, it was like being on a fishing boat. You know, you have this crusty old guy like, ah, you don't know shit kid here. Let me show you how you do this. And he'd be editing for you and they all smoked and they really did. They looked like pirates, man. But that whole part of the town was just all little

film hovels that had existed probably since the 30s well and i've we've heard before too that like it was super fast like turnaround for the animation you had to do on that like well yeah every every week it was a minute and a half of animation so we we would split it up into threes so each of us would have 30 seconds to do to animate and actually when it first started there was another sequence too that they cut um it was a mk brown of underground comic artist lady and yeah that dr negatu and that got dropped and then um but that was like you know because we're still animating like crazy people so our stuff was even though it looks so crude it was like animated really well

oh yeah so 30 seconds in a week is a lot for one person yeah we noticed uh there's so much fun to watch just because a character will kind of look different in every scene but they move so fluidly and there are so many fun things they can't do on the tv series was there any sense of a character being on or off model or was it just like, we have to get this finished. They can look like what they kind of vaguely look like. and Mac running general idea of these characters. Well,

I'm sure you've seen Matt's early drawings. Oh yeah. Matt can barely draw. Let's be honest. And then when it comes to animation, you know, then we have to like try to pull his gun but we're trying to retain his vibe because we loved that's a joke i mean he just draws the way

he draws yeah but it's not about that it was about the writing you know and that was that was good story stuff for us too because it was fun to watch you know we're already liked him so it was fun to sort of see how stories evolve and character characters came to be but no we never worried about being on model because they're really I mean it was crazy and until the later part of those shorts and then when it went to the into its first season that's when Silverman pulled it together and said okay look you know but it was great you know but no we never worried about we just wanted it to be funny we wanted to animate funny you know i was curious like how much your biggest impact on them like character

design wise because definitely like marge changes and bart changes a lot i think most of all like yeah well marge's hair and i'm i'm on record for this that was me marge's tall blue hair because the original drawings of marge she just had this short hair you know thing and all my like older relatives older lady relatives were like the blue classic blue hairs and they all have like big like beehive type hair and that's where that came from i was like let's make it blue and make it big yeah that should be that should be in your imdb bio inventor of marge's hair you know my imdb i don't know who wrote them it's all messed up and i just was talking to my agent the other day and she's like you gotta fix that i don't i don't know i don't have time for that but yeah i should yeah

so you can't rely on imdb or Wikipedia for that matter. They get everything wrong. I was also curious about in the first run of episodes, there's an infamous scene that got cut after the first airing of Maggie putting a fork in a light socket. I was curious if you remember that. Oh, yeah. I think I animated that one. She gets electrocuted big time.

The take does look like one of yours, I'd say. She goes all fracky and lightning bolt. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's fine. Did you know they got cut after the first airing? I didn't know that, no. Yeah. Fox, there were concerns about kids imitating it.

Oh, I'm sure. I'm sure, yeah. Broadcast centers and practices. Well, that's pretty cool to know. Somebody pulled that out and put it on YouTube. Somebody made a collection of my Simpsons stuff and it is in there. So you can still find that somewhere. Yeah. Unfortunately, you can't buy those shorts commercially. They've never been made available. How do you feel about that? I feel like it's an important part of Simpsons history. You know, here's the thing about being The Simpsons. I loved it and it was great, but I was still really young and I wanted to learn more about animation and the animation process. And right as The Simpsons went into going into series,

I got an offer from Disney to go and work on the roger rabbit shorts and i and i couldn't turn that down so so i left to go do that and i'm glad i did because i learned a lot but no so i don't have any i'm not i mean i love the simpsons but i gotta be honest like i just i don't i haven't watched probably 80 percent of them no other reason i just don't you know it's like i don't know. I have no ill feelings. I get shit all the time from people like, oh, you left before the thing.

It's like, dude, I was like 26 or whatever, you know? I was still learning, you know? An offer from Disney to get into, with other CalArts guys that I love, you know? So of course I went for that, you know? Yeah, to be part of that movement, just the animation renaissance that was happening there, Roger Rabbit was sort of leading the charge.

Oh yeah, I remember the day that movie opened, we all went to the Cinerama Dome. Every animator in town was there. Man, that kitchen scene just blew everybody away. And it's funny, too, because I remember, I think we were going back to work after that, and I said to the guys i was

like man wouldn't it be awesome if they made shorts like that and then like two weeks later i get a phone call wow we're making roger rabbit shorts you know well did you get a feel i definitely want to talk about roger rabbit uh but when you were at simpsons in those late days did you get a feel like it was starting to get popular or did it feel just like a weird little thing okay oh yeah we we definitely knew that people liked it but you know you can't no one could have no one could have predicted the success that it would have had i mean that that'd be that'd be like going to see the beatles play in hamburg and going like wow these guys are great you know but i mean any having any idea that I would take over the world. But we knew it was popular.

Yeah, we did. I was also like, I really was still, like I said, I was learning. I wanted to learn more. I'd been working kind of on other people's stuff for a while. And the Disney experience, still I'm working on something else. But it was in a different level. And I got to really get into story there. And that's where I really learned how to

write. And if I hadn't done that, we wouldn't have eat the cat or mad Jack the pirate or Toonsylvania or any of those other things, because I never would have taken the time to sit down and learn how to write. So we I mean, we know most of the public story of what happened with Roger Rabbit. How much of that did you work on? We just know like Disney had invested so much into that character. It's why Toontown was built in Disneyland, but because of the Eisner Spielberg dust up, that project essentially just kind of fell apart because he wouldn't approve anything. That's what the public knows on the outside. Do you have any insight into that at all? Well, we got to the point where I think we had one really funny one that was called Beach Blanket Bunny that never got off the rails.

And after the trail mix-up one, Pat Ventura and me and, oh, here I go. Here's my brain not working. Anyway, so they kind of said, we're putting the Roger Rabbit stuff on hold until we figure it out. And they gave us, they said, we want to make Mickey Donald Goofy shorts we were like great bring it on and they're like here's the scripts and we were like scripts what is that we never we never wrote we did story but we never wrote we always drew everything and we read these scripts and they were terrible and clearly not written by anyone that knew anything about animation. And I don't know who wrote them, and I don't care. But they were awful, and I got into a big argument with my boss at the time,

and I said, I can't do this. I can't work on this stuff. I left after that to go, right? I went on to Tasmania. It took a while, but I can remember the question. Did I answer that? Yeah, yeah. There was also a feature script kicking around with the Roger thing,

and that never came to be either, and I don't know why. I mean, I don't really remember the story. I'm sure it had great stuff in it. Yeah, I believe it was. After the shorts, I mean, it just kind of all phased out. I think that Jeffrey might have been leaving around there too or something. It was getting a little goofy. Yeah.

Yes, I think what you're saying is the plan was a transition from Roger Rabbit shorts to Mickey, Donald, and Goofy shorts then? Was that their idea? Yeah. Okay. It seems like that never happened. We would have loved to do that. Well, I think the guys that do the Mickey Mouse show now

have kind of filled that. I mean, that's the kind of thing we would have ended up doing. I love that show. I love those shorts. I think they're great. Oh, they're amazing, yeah. I think they got out that one Runaway Brain one, but even that was too extreme for Disney.

Well, you can't really do that with Mickey, can you? They were also doing a lot of weird merchandising stuff like a lot of tacky things happened back then you know they also had me and pat ventura working on the toontown thing we did a a lot of work on that for gags we worked with wed a lot oh nice on coming up with stuff and oh, yeah, we had a whole Goofy's bus tour thing. That's what really the ride devolved into. There were some tacky things that were happening, too, where they do Mickey with the hat,

and he's posing like, you know, it's just like, what? Weird stuff. Well, yeah, I remember Tummy Trouble and Rollercoaster Rabbit. They were both just amazing-looking, like the animation quality level. You guys had such a high bar with the Oscar winning animation that was in the film. But it had to at least get there, if not top it.

So I mean, those are all, I think it's the last time they actually people were doing like hand-painted watercolor background wow and uh how how involved was steven spielberg uh like hands-on with those uh shorts because everywhere everywhere he was great you know i remember pitching him especially on roller coaster and i'd have a weak gag and i'd kind of try to skip through it you know and I'd get to the end and he'd be like okay but what about this over here and he'd go right back to that weak spot he was great he was super nice I really I worked with him a couple times after that too he was great oh yeah yeah and uh on Toonsylvania right that was uh that was one of the first DreamWorks

shows but it was even there too yeah uh the the roger rabbit thing i remember those like they felt just like classic cartoons like that was what was so special about it like because as roger rabbit like introduced you know uh me and bob's generation to the the classics in a way we weren't really seeing on the he-man shows and all that so i mean well we were looking back at guys like bob clampit and um you know early tex avery psychedelic animation you know our theory was like and i still live by this it's like if you if you grab them by the eyeballs the their brain will follow shortly thereafter so it was about being visually stunning enough where like, this is so fun to look at. Then the rest of the cartoon can take you, you know, wherever, wherever we decide to take.

So in the nineties, you had quite a good run on Fox kids with the, uh, eat the cat series, which Henry and I both grew up watching and love. Uh, can you talk, can you talk about like, uh, the pitching process of that and what was it was like to work, uh, under Fox kids? It seems like you can get away with a lot on that cartoon. Well, after all the Simpsons Roger Rabbit stuff settled down, I went to Tasmania. They wanted me to direct on that, but I wanted to write because that's what I was doing.

And then I hooked back up with Savage. And we started kicking around this idea because he had done some work for Fox and he had sort of an in there. And he had this cat, so we just kind of started messing around with that character i the idea of this really sympathetic positive guy who just gets the shit kicked out of him a basic cartoon axiom and um you know i think we did we did um storyboard and we had it animated up in vancouver and i can't remember the guy's name

but he did it was like a minute or maybe a little less and um so we took that into fox to show margaret lesh and then i guess we made her laugh because she bought it that early time fox kids was kind of finding themselves like it's definitely before uh they got batman and uh the x-men all the action stuff like yeah well they kind of had they had that before eek they had tiny tunes and they didn't have animaniacs yet and i think batman was sort of when we sold eek i left tasmania and i think batman was just getting started or had maybe just started. But Margaret Lesh was the key person, you know. We just made her laugh. And she trusted us and she would just let us go do our thing.

That's why the show worked because they just left us alone. Oh, boy, I wish more executives were like that. Now I hear you. Yeah. They don't realize how much trouble they cause just by trying to do the right thing, supposedly. And really what they're doing is wrecking the opportunity for great fun. There's a big trick to doing it. And you're also the voice of Eek, and that's all I can think of when I'm talking to you now on this call.

That's right. Absolutely, I was. This is not the era in which creators voice their creation. I mean, there was John Christopher Lucey on Ren and Stimpy, but that would come much later. How did you end up being the voice of the character that you created? Alright, well, this is going to sound insane, but when I was a kid

growing up, I had a cat named Chompy. And when he talked to you, because all our animals spoke in my family. Everybody did the voices of the animals. He would call you a sap sucker, and he'd ask for, you know, do you have this list?

And that's the way he talked. So whenever we were messing with Eek the Cat, I would just do that voice in the meetings. Yeah, I like this. We tried to get real actors to do it, but nobody would listen. It just came down to, like, we're recording next week and you're doing it. It's such the perfect voice for this, you know, forever put upon helpful guy who's just destroyed.

Though the show had amazing voice talent too. Like, I mean, just Gary Owens alone, like, it was just so good. There's so many people in there. I mean, I can't even, God, I wish that I had taken more pictures, you know. But, yeah, I never wanted to be that guy like, hey, you know. But, man, we had William Shatner, Mr. T, guys from X-Files, Buck Henry, Tim Curry. I mean, it just went on and on.

People just loved it, you know. So we could get anybody we wanted, really. And yeah, I mean, were there any like, you know, sensor issues on the show? Because it was. Oh, my God. OK. Don't drop the word job. There's a really funny article.

I think I have a copy of it somewhere from like Entertainment Weekly or something like that. And it was the list from broadcast standards and practices about the certain gags that we couldn't do. And we gave it to them, and they published it. And it was hilarious because it was just like, please don't give the postman a machine gun. Can you use an ax? But, I mean, yeah, we were always fighting Broadcast Standards and Practices because mostly, I get why they're there, but they're mostly full of shit.

Yeah, it really doesn't matter you know so like eventually uh in the run of eek the cat it became a vehicle for other characters and shorts uh when did that idea come about of course talking about terrible thunder lizards and clutter as well yeah clutter was later the thunder lizards came i think the thunder lizards came like on on top of the second season and then i went uh god i top of the second season. And then I went, God, I think after the second season or maybe right towards the end of it, then I went to Disney to do Snickers and Meat. I went back to Disney.

I was still doing, at Sandwich I would still work on stories together. Snickers and Meat, the offer for that show was the first time I had my own show. And that's really what, I'd been working for all these other people. So it was time to dig in and do something on my own. Yeah, unfortunately, that show is a bit lost. It's not on Disney Plus.

And I find it an interesting outlier from the traditional Disney afternoon style. It's really funny. I mean, the cat and the dog part of it are probably the weakest part. Tex Tisar and Piff Possum. I mean, the cat and the dog part of it are probably the weakest part text tits are in pith possum i mean the animation is incredible and the stories are really funny yeah it was a great great experience was terrible thunder lizards originally planned as like a full eek spinoff and or was always going to be a second uh short with it i think savage just wanted to expand the universe of the whole thing a little bit and it was a funny idea and we just said we're just gonna make it part of the part of that show

it was it was a way to try to you know expand the um the franchise i guess you'd call it and man charlie adler is so good his his pain is is just perfect he's so good i have so much respect for that guy and i still talk to him periodically uh he's great he's one of those guys i think he was in every single cartoon show i ever made yeah i think so i think yeah so i have one more e question i i really want to get into is my favorite episode as a kid was the Melvis episode. Great balls. See, that was a joke that made me hysterical as a kid, because just the repetition of that of every Elvis movie was so, so funny. I love Elvis because I just love tacky.

Hey, man, daddy. Oh, I just love that voice. I love doing it. I love Elvis because I just love tacky. Hey man, daddy-o. I just love that voice. I love doing it. I love Elvis. And it's just so funny to say like, I don't want to be a guy sweeping up the basketball court, Lou Elson or whatever he calls her. I want to be an astronaut.

It was, oh, Elvis. You know, the girl was like, oh, Elvis. Oh God. Yeah, that, I just, I love that episode. I mean, too, that like, you know, in 92 or, it was still going around the like Elvis lives kind of stuff. Oh, yeah, yeah. That was, yeah, yeah.

There was a big show Bill Bixby hosted about Elvis is still alive, maybe. Oh, yeah. We were all over that. There were still Elvis sightings reported. I just, that story is great, you know. I mean, I did him again in Mad Jack. There's an episode where they meet this guy the great kapow he's like the it's like elvis but he's like the wizard of oz he's

hiding he's this god and they keep the islands made of food and they keep it's called the great kapow if you if you like my melvis you gotta watch that one all right that was just my my total favorite there i i did you know to backtrack a little bit i did want to ask about the pressure luck whammies because those i didn't like watching most uh as a little kid i didn't really care about game shows but yeah but but those just waiting to see a whammy do a thing i i love that and that that was way way way before digital drawing was a thing so that was a machine called the quantel paint box and it was this really crude device where you that and that's why the anime the whammies looked like shit because there was no way to really animate on

the thing and savage had been doing that as a freelance thing. I think it goes back. So, you know, everybody pins it on me, but it was really Savage. And then he gave it to me kind of in between movies. He's like, here, do the whammy. And then it stuck, you know. But yeah, I can't believe how I still get, you know,

emails from people that, you know, it's like, we'll give you 50 bucks if you yeah I know there's been a reboot of press for luck but I don't know if they kept the whammies I was too afraid to check because they'd be like CGI whammies now I bet well they I remember too when they were doing that I actually got called into a meeting with whoever was doing it and they were like yeah we're gonna do it like cg or whatever you know and i was like great that's better than what we did i didn't want anything to do with it it was i mean as a kid it was just a treat to see anything drawn on

television just to see it yeah yeah it's weird it's like looking for a prize in a cereal box or something like that it's just an oddball thing and they weren't funny it was so dumb it's weird. It's like looking for a prize in a cereal box or something like that. It's just an oddball thing. And they weren't funny. It was so dumb. It's like you never know what people are going to like. I mean, you know, so the worst thing you could draw ends up, you know, being like something that people love.

It's just weird. I mean, you can work so hard on one thing and nobody gets it and then just like throw something off. And then it's like but i think you're right i think it was the culture at the time and the audience you know were just like it was just so weird it was unique yeah something you've never seen before yeah especially in afternoons on cable before you know cartoons were on every cable channel it was like there's no cartoons on but i can watch this game show and i will occasionally get a

cartoon three percent cartoon content and then there was that guy that figured out the board remember oh yeah he made a whole documentary on that guy i uh another thing i did want to ask about was the the tales from the crypt episode the third pig like that's the it's the final episode of the the original hbo tales from the crypt like so how did that come together to do a whole animated episode of tales from the crypt well for years and i mean years like maybe like a decade i'd been trying to pitch the tales from the crypt this story called little dead riding hood i finally did a book last year of it and i got in with

somebody at Joel Silver's company, like, I don't know, right, maybe during the EEC thing, or maybe it was Tasmania, but I would call the office, his office every day at like noon, and his secretary just got sick of me. You know, finally, she set up a meeting. And still, it didn't really go anywhere. And then years, I i guess into the early 90s because that was 94 i think um i finally got a meeting and i pitched it to to joel silver and and nalvana had helped set this up because of all the eek stuff yeah he's like okay good yeah it's funny i like it and then like the next day i get a phone call from his not from him but from his office saying like joel wants to know if you got a Three Little Pigs one instead.

And I'm like, yeah, I got it right here. Which I did not. And I wrote that script in five days. I just sat down and wrote it. And then I took it in and pitched it. And he was like, great, let's go. It took about six years for me to get in there so i could finally get a an episode no it's uh it's a really it it starts as a like kind of a parody of the disney three little pigs and then

it grows from there i i especially loved like how i mean you definitely take advantage of being on hbo yeah with oh yeah well that was the whole that was the gag it's like you know we're not doing classy animation here it's gonna look like rocky like Rocky and Bullwinkle, but it's going to be so... You know, if we'd have done, like, one crazy summer-style animation or Roger Rabbit on that with the blood, it would not have the same joke impact. The reason the violence in that third pig works is because it's drawn so expressively crude that it works and if it were

done with like glory would the joke would not have been it's the same like in holy grail and python with the black knight it has to be that absurd it's some of the most disturbing screaming i've heard cam clark do in something i think he was great i i especially love it it ends with a blackout gag but then the wolf pulls it open like no you're gonna watch me eat this pig like it's gonna well you still don't really see me i mean well you kind of do but it still goes just and then there's blood and maybe say pork the other the other light meat because the white meat phrase was copyrighted oh that's gee man i we could uh ask a million more you can see him eat him actually now that i'm right he bites his head off yes you see his insides it's intense the i think you see everybody's inside

yeah i say put it on hbo max yeah what the did? I think the Tales of the Crypt, it's not on there yet. It's not. Not yet. No. It's like none of it. It's on Prime. You can find it. But yeah.

It's also on YouTube. I mean, the whole thing. Oh, yeah. Yeah. But Bill, is there anything you want to talk about you've been working on lately that you'd like people to check out? Well, I did my Little Dead Riding Hood book, which I'm really proud of. And there's only like 100 copies of that.

There's a couple on eBay and there's some on my site. I am right now getting involved in a new show, but I can't talk about it yet. But it's really cool and it's pretty big. It'll be soon because things are starting to – progress is moving ahead. That's good. It's a new show. It's a show that everybody's going to like. There's a little bit of familiarity to one of the characters.

Okay. I really can't say – I'm under orders. There will be something said probably in a few weeks. Okay. Cool. I'm looking forward to it then i well i mean you just recently i think did a voice on that uh the series amphibia i believe are you are you doing yeah also i want to say on this new show i'm also working with the kyle caroza he's uh i made him supervising director on on the thing that we're on the secret thing that we're doing and then i did

some voice work on his magic swords thing oh man fish man awesome wow all right man i mean i can't wait to hear what this is i love pierre i love him because i'm frank uh man oh but but thank you so much bill yeah thank you bill we are looking forward to that you're welcome these are good questions sometimes I don't get as good a question I'm gonna be a man