In article ,
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I've pretty much lost interest in animated series (whether what they do
on South Park counts as animation is a good question; it's certainly
minimalist animation if it's animation).

South Park started out as *extremely* simple stop-motion animation of
paper cut-out dolls. They literally made paper cut-outs of the
characters, used pre-prepared stick-on mouths in varying positions to
animate speech, and moved them on top of a (badly) drawn background set
up in front of a camera. Move the dolls, take a frame, move the dolls,
take a frame... for eternity.

Sometime early on (I want to say in the second season) they moved the
whole thing over onto computers, but kept the animation look and style
from the original.

They even made fun of the process on the show -- they had the kids
decide to make a "Spirit of Christmas" cartoon using stop-motion
animation with paper dolls. (They ended up "making" the original pilot
for South Park, which was run in snippets as a cartoon-within-a-
cartoon.) They spent something like six hours to create the first
eleven seconds of their cartoon...

BTW, for those who don't know the series, the pilot really set the tone
for the irreverent flavor of the show. It featured a battle-to-the-
death between Jesus Christ and Santa Claus for supremacy in the Xmas
Icon business. It also introduced Kyle's signature line, one I use a
lot in my everyday life:

"This is really ****ed up, here, dude."

p.s. -- Too bad you're not interested in much contemporary animation,
Pat. I agree that a lot of what's running on Cartoon Network late at
night is awfully lame (seems to have been written by 12-year-olds), but
Family Guy is a truly innovative and funny show. The ways in which that
show takes off on 15-second tangents are masterful, and hilarious. It's
become a rather cult thing, and apparently the show (which was canceled
like three years ago) may well be going back into production this year.

--

"The problem isn't that there are so | Doug Van Dorn
many fools; it's that lightning isn't |
distributed right." -Mark Twain