Jim Henson once allowed me to visit the Muppets on set and spent an entire day showing me how he and the other puppeteers performed Kermit and all the characters! After that, I was lucky enough to work with both George Lucas and Steven Spielberg on many fun animation projects and learned so much from them.
For years, humorous characters in cartoons have been almost exclusively male.
The old Rankin-Bass animated specials seemed to exist in a loosely shared reality, which is what attracted me to them. Santa, Snow Miser, Rudolph, Frosty, even the Easter Bunny seemed to be on nodding acquaintance with each other, even if only in cameo appearances in each other's cartoons.
One Thanksgiving weekend, I had a lost weekend at a friend's place with 'Grand Theft Auto.'
With 'Tower Prep,' Cartoon Network wanted to go into a new area where no other kids' programming was going. There were a lot of kids' sitcoms on the air, but they wanted to really go with more of like an adventure/drama feel.
I was one of those goofy kids whose year narrowed down to focus on Christmas from about September on. I guess I was like Ralphie in 'A Christmas Story,' in that I would get swept up into the anticipation of the holiday, watching the lights go up, hearing the songs in the stores, getting special Christmas issues of comics and all that.
Hugo Strange is interesting in the sense that he's a master manipulator. He doesn't really engage Batman in any sort of physical way. His weapon is his mind, and he's very incisive and clever: he reads people and sizes them up almost instantly.
I remembered what it was like: the weirdness, being the odd man out, trying to make my way around campus, and trying to figure out who my friends would be, who to steer clear of. I wrote it all down in a fanciful way - the feelings of alienation, the feelings of uncertainty, of being away from home for the first time.
If your child has something creative they really want to do, it's up to you, their parent, to help make that happen.
I remember when I saw 'The Dark Knight' movie, and I was sitting there watching it, and there actually came one or two places where I had trouble divorcing myself from the reality of the locations because it was filmed in Chicago, and I know that city quite well.
I always think of the Joker as the ultimate bully. Nothing he says is funny except to him.
I like artists to have some freedom.
