#primal screen

Primal Screen, an animation studio that has worked on animated bumpers for several channels, is shutting down in May. They did a lot of the promos and interstitials for Cartoon Network during the Powerhouse era, and even recently they worked on the Titans of the NBA interstitials. They did a lot of other work, too, such as Animal Planet, CNN, Disney Junior, Nickelodeon, but all good things have to come to an end.

Here's one of the promos they worked on.

Context:

Just recently, David M Strandquest had uploaded high-quality (and possibly upscaled) as well as drafts of Powerhouse bumpers that he had made for Cartoon Network and Primal Screens, including ones of SITBC, onto his YouTube channel.

I decided to upload them onto this blog (as well as my Archive.org account, which you can find here. Though will make a proper post about the account soon.) for archival purposes.

Source:

7 years have passed since Samurai Jack got back to the past...

Highlights of events regarding Genndy Tartakovsky and the like during this time include the following:

Genndy in interviews talked about the importance of visual storytelling (including an obvious disliking for "This is me"-type openings in animated movies), reducing dialogue in the script for a sexual animated comedy called Fixed (produced by New Line Cinema, Sony Pictures Animation, and Renegade Animation), and the viewpoint that "Character design informs posing, and it all works together."

Samurai Jack has the Checkered Past lineup on [adult swim] joined, airing on Fridays (soon to be Thursdays) at 6:00 PM... technically like around 5:59 PM, due to other Checkered Past shows having end credits time-compressed. Cartoon Network's social media accounts promoted this with a clip from EPISODE XCVIII, which is the second post they made regarding specifically Season 5 since their first one, in which they used Mao Mao x Samurai Jack fan art to promote Samurai Jack: Battle Through Time... which is now deleted due to Warner Bros. Discovery purging Mao Mao: Heroes of Pure Heart in an effort to save $3 billion.

Speaking of WBD's animation purge: Cartoon Network Studios' building is now abandoned as the crew was forced to relocate to a new building joining Warner Bros. Animation with affiliate CNS as another cost-cutting move. The Cartoon Network logo on the building was originally moved to the new building, but it was soon sold off letter by letter.

As if things couldn't grow worse; after MGM (on the home entertainment level, still an affiliate with Warner Bros. Home Entertainment/Studio Distribution Services) turned 100, Primal Screen, the studio behind much of Cartoon Network's branding including the Powerhouse era, announced that they were to shut down (likely due to financial issues - thanks a lot Warner Bros. Discovery). Buck's Pastel / Prism / Split-Screen branding is by far the cheapest, blandest, and ugliest one CN ever used, and the negative consequences of Discovery on Turner & WB make this era of CN truly the worse, with little sign of any improvement in their branding and their programming.

Unicorn: Warriors Eternal got the ACME Night marathons and airings it was promised to have, but that is unlikely to happen again since Cartoon Network stopped at 5PM with the debut of Checkered Past, causing ACME Night to be part of [as] as well (that may be just technical laziness on Discovery's part - they're already forcing Turner channels to use Discovery's rating & closed captioned screenbugs). Any future airing of Unicorn on TV, if any, so far will remain with the [adult swim] label, even on ACME Night (even though it was supposed to be for CN).

Relative to samurai in general; the Looney Tunes Cartoons episode "Yosemite Samurai" made its TV debut on Cartoon Network, though airing minutes earlier than the 9:30 AM schedule due to longer episode lengths.

Teen Titans GO! celebrated the 100th anniversary of Warner Bros. in October 2024 (was planned for September but was pushed in part due to revisions), and apparently "JACK, SAMURAI" was on the list! Dexter and Dee Dee, along with The Powerpuff Girls (in altered versions of the 2016 models), made cameos as well.

Tara Strong (a Zionist Jew and the voice of Ashi as well as Ilana Lunis) became controversial due to posts she made and liked speaking against the attacks against Jews by the Hamas, a terrorist group in Palestine. I may suffer from flack over this, but I honestly doubt that she is ultimately racist with the people of Palestine in general - just speaking against a terrorist group in Palestine killing people of her own race. May be that we're just too woke about racism?

The Powerpuff Girls Season 10 (the Hanna-Barbera Studios Europe revival; I personally count the 2016 "reboot" as Seasons 7-9 for a number of reasons) is still in production with people from Titmouse on the crew.

Dexter's Laboratory: The Complete Series DVD is set to release in June 2024... featuring the long overdue official US DVD release of Dexter's Laboratory: Ego Trip! There was a planned US DVD release long ago.

Warner Bros. may be 101 years old now (impressive considering that Discovery put them at over 60% risk of bankruptcy by December 2023), but they're not finished with celebrating their 100th anniversary; a screening of various WB (and affiliate-owned) shorts including Cartoon Network episodes like Dexter's Laboratory and the Steven Universe pilot "The Time Thing" (on which Genndy was the timing director) was announced for Annecy 2024.

Relative to a block that Samurai Jack used to rerun on; [adult swim] announced another nostalgic block: Toonami Rewind! This is so far exclusive to anime.

Personally, Cartoon Network entering into the Pastel era was bad enough, but Discovery exercising more control of WB affiliate Turner Broadcasting System pretty much killed CN for me (regardless of the many older shows airing on special occasions that weren't rerun on the network in years and even decades). I still remain faithful to a fair extent to CN, but, as you can see, there's a lot about the animation industry that's crumbling.

I'll add more to this post if I find anything else that happened.

Highlights of Year Passing 1

Highlights of Year Passing 2

Highlights of Year Passing 3

Highlights of Year Passing 4

Highlights of Year Passing 5 (incomplete; I know)

Primal Screen

Study of embryo development in the mouse at its earliest stages: cells known as the primitive endoderm are sufficient to form an embryo in the absence of other cell types, and a counterpart cell population identified in lab-grown tissue also has similar capability

Read the published research article here

Image from work by Madeleine Linneberg-Agerholm and colleagues

Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Stem Cell Medicine (reNEW), University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Cell, June 2024