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- A Day at the Beach - A Flip the Frog Cartoon by Eric Schwartz.
-
- This animation requires at least 3 megs of memory to play correctly. Two
- floppy drives are not required but are recommended because the disk
- swapping would kill most normal people. Users of hard drives and/or
- Kickstart 2.0 with only 3 megs may have trouble because of the memory taken
- up by the system. In this case, you may have to run the animation from a
- CLI without loading workbench. The CLI command is:
-
- CD FlipDisk1:
- Movieplayer A_Day_at_the_Beach
-
- There Should be Three Disks in The Set. Two contain the Floppy disk
- version, and these two disks MUST be named Flipdisk1: and Flipdisk2: . The
- third disk contains an archived version of the animation to be unpacked
- onto a Hard Drive. Instructions for unpacking are provided on the third
- disk. I feel this method is much easier than you having to construct your
- own HardDrive version from the floppy version .
-
- This animation sets a new record for SIZE in my animations. It plays for
- approximately four minutes thirty seconds with little repetition.
-
- A HISTORY OF FLIP THE FROG:
-
- Flip was created around 1931 by animator Ub Iwerks. Iwerks was
- originally a friend and partner with Walt Disney in their fledgling
- cartoon studio. Ub designed the original Mickey Mouse and animated the
- first few Mickey short cartoons almost single-handed. Iwerks was the
- skilled draftsman and animator, while Disney wrote and directed. Around
- 1930/31, A producer named Pat Powers offered Iwerks the chance to have his
- own studio and he Accepted. The cartoons Iwerks created Powers would
- distribute to MGM. Iwerks' first character was Flip the Frog, and flip's
- debut was in a VERY early 1931 two strip color(three strips are needed for
- a full spectrum) cartoon called Fiddlesticks. in this cartoon Flip
- resembled a real frog. after a couple cartoons, the producer urged Iwerks
- to redesign Flip into something "cuter". In the process Flip gained a hat,
- gloves, shoes and shorts, making him look a lot less like a frog and more
- like Mickey Mouse with the ears and black nose ripped off. Flip the Frog
- cartoons, and Iwerks' cartoons in general, did not have much success
- because Iwerks lacked the inventiveness and storytelling ability to match
- his abilities as artist and animator. (The reverse could be said about
- Walt Disney, which is why the two made a very good team) In 1933, Flip the
- Frog was abandoned for the character Willie Whopper. several years after
- that, the Powers/Iwerks studio shut down completely. Iwerks went back to
- Disney, and became a sort of mechanical engineer, pioneering the process
- of xeroxing pencil drawings onto clear cels (to make the animation process
- quicker and cheaper). Flip the Frog and the Iwerks studio were almost
- completely forgotten, except to animation historians. --- -- Until..
- In the year 1990, Eric Schwartz attended a presentation of old cartoon
- shorts at the Columbus College of Art and Design, where he attends classes.
- One of the Cartoons shown was a Flip the Frog cartoon, "Room Runners",
- which impressed Schwartz with its good animation and surprising amount of
- sexual jokes for a 1930's cartoon. Eric Began to storyboard his own Flip
- the Frog Cartoon. He originally intended to copy 'Room Runners' but
- switched to his own storyline. Flip was redesigned, stylized, and
- modernized (he also looks something like a frog). Using the Amiga computer
- as his medium, Schwartz brought Flip the Frog back to the world. Flip has
- appeared in two modern cartoons so far; 'The Dating Game' in 1991 and
- 'A Day at the Beach' in 1992. More cartoons are planned, for an as yet
- undetermined date.
-
- As Always,
-
- Eric Schwartz
- E.S. Productions
- P.O. Box 292684
- Kettering. OH 45429-0684
- U.S.A.
-
- P.S. This is ESTSA (Eric Schwartz's Third Shareware Animation). As is my
- policy with these, If you feel its worth it, send whatever you feel like
- to help me pay for college. If not, don't.
-