Once More, With Freleng

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As you may know, blogs everywhere are participating in a great Friz Freleng Blog-a-Thon today, in honor of the great man’s 100th (maybe) birthday. So here’s a Friz tribute I wrote a long, long time ago–it appared in Animato #18, which cover-featured Jerry Beck’s Friz interview, back in 1989. (Amazing in retrospect to think that back then, not only was Friz still with us, but I wrote of his career as a Warner Bros. director in the present tense.)

If I was going to write about Freleng today, I might come to different conclusions, or discuss them more artfully–or maybe not–but I decided to present my essay exactly as I wrote it back in the 20th century. In fact, after initially planning to OCR it into ASCII text, I decided I liked the scanned image–Times Roman type, crummy newsprint, and all (including at least one typo). It reminds me of the fun we had desktop-publishing Animato, back in the era when communicating with animation fandom required printing up magazines and begging comic-book distributors to take them so they could wind up in retail stores.

So here’s to you, Friz:
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The Other Site I Work On

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I haven’t had much time lately to work on this site or Scrappyland, although I did just fix (I think) a nagging problem that was hobbling the ability to leave comments here.

But I have a good excuse, and it’s not that I haven’t been investing time in Web stuff. It’s just that most of my energy has gone into the total redesign that PCWorld.com has launched. We started work on this in early 2005; we’re still ironing out some kinks, but I’m really pleased with it overall.