I was standing over an open grave in a snowy country cemetery out in the wastelands of rural Brooklyn last weekend and I got to thinking, “I should really take a vacation from funerals.” Three funerals in three weeks, it starts to feel like a routine. I know so many people who died this year, it’s like living through the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1919. Few more days left in 2008 and I’ll count myself lucky if I get out of it alive myself.
Let’s ignore all that, shall we, and get some updates out of the way. The body count may be out of control, but life marches on. My career is taking off, even while the number of friends and family who might be pleased by that fact dwindle.
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Eloise and Friends started running on Saturday mornings on Treehouse recently. Two of my episodes are somewhere in the mix. Supposedly Noggin and Nick Jr. is airing it too, but I have no clue when. No one tells me anything. I suppose I could look it up myself, but I’m lazy. And there’s a limit to how interested I am in watching Flash animated cartoons aimed at five-year-olds, even when I was one of the writers. Someone will send me a DVD eventually. But if you have any five-year-olds handy, don’t let me discourage you from plopping them down in front of the boob tube bright and early Saturdays while mommy and daddy stay in bed and get busy making more pre-schoolers to fill the ranks of that essential pre-branding demographic broadcasters lust after like a salivating pedophile chaperoning a pajama party.
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Looking like a lot of fun for older kids up to my own advanced age is the televised Drew T. Doodle series. Apparently only a few episodes aired earlier in the fall as a teaser to the regular run that hasn’t begun yet. But a couple of episodes on Youtube have surfaced, including one from a development episode I wrote, and they look pretty damn cool. Of course, I can already tell the end results have been toned down from my original scripts. A bit. Gone, it seems, are the days of the Looney Tunes ramming dynamite up each other’s asses and lighting it with a flame thrower. And I don’t think Standards and Practices will let those happy days return anytime soon. Still, I encourage you to keep an eye out for DTD on YTV, and scan the opening credits for my name, which will be on four of them.
