The cartoon blog of Andertoons cartoonist Mark Anderson. He discusses his cartoons, cartooning, comics and, oddly enough, LEGO.
I loved MetLife’s cartoon-filled Superbowl commercial yesterday! (So much so, in fact that I dissected it here by identifying each character, pointing out some errors, and revealing where Waldo was.)
But some additional kudos are due thanks to some awesome additional content. Enjoy:
Director can’t find Waldo
Snagglepuss has issues
Yosemite Sam hates fur
Voltron dances
Kudos again, MetLife!
MetLife’s Superbowl ad this year is pretty tremendous if you’re a cartoon fan. Not only do you get the Peanuts gang, you get a whole host of cartoon awesomeness not seen since Roger Rabbit or that 2005 MasterCard commercial.
Here, take a look:
Isn’t that fun? Wanna know who’s all in it? Here’s the list as far as I can tell in order of appearance more or less:
I looked at MetLife’s Facebook page to double check myself, and found that they did make a few errors:
They list Captain Caveman as being in the ad, when in fact it’s Rock & Gravel Slag:
They also fail to list Witch Hazel, Ranger Smith, and Tex Avery’s wolf.
And, this isn’t an error per se, but did you notice Charlie Brown and friends only appear in the very beginning of the ad? And they’re not in the cast list on Facebook. (I’m thinking legal issues or something.)
I do need some help, though. Can anyone tell me who this is?
Is it a Scooby-Doo villain? They only appears in a few frames, but I just cannot figure it out. And did I miss anyone else?
Also, wanna know where Waldo is in the commercial? Actually, he’s all over the place:
Now you can impress your friends when it airs!
Anyway, it’s always a hoot to see so many cartoons in one place. Nice job, MetLife! (And don’t miss the extra videos here!)
What did you think? Anyone you’d have liked to see included?
Hat tip to Bleeding Cool!
(BTW, if you need some more MetLife cartoons, check out my Peanuts All-Star cards at Flickr.)
Only 2 weeks now until Cupid’s big day! So, to get you in the mood, I thought I’d share some recent Valentine’s Day cartoons!
I thought of this cartoon early one morning and had to keep repeating it to myself under my breath to remember it.
This is actually pretty much how I, and I suspect most men, shop for cards. Not being comfortable with the flowery romantic stuff, we tend toward ones including the words hubby with cartoon bears that fold out like an accordion.
I’m betting the Mrs. would prefer something mushier, but, especially when you marry a cartoonist, goofy usually wins out.
(BTW, you can watch a video of me sketching this cartoon here.)
I thought of this because it’s impossible to think “box of chocolates” without thinking “life is like a.”
It’s annoying and irritating, sure, but instead of pushing past it, I decided to embrace it and finally define exactly what you’re going to get.
You’ve got your basic chocolate, your thin disappointment, your renamed knockoff (I’m looking at you, “tortoise” candies), and, my personal favorite, white.
Now you know.
This Valentine’s Day cartoon was a bit of a trick. Te idea is that more than one arrow makes the person a stalker instead of just in love. So, you have to make the guy look like something is wrong with him, but not so disturbing that the cartoon goes from funny to creepy.
After scanning in the original sketch, I spent a good amount of time in Photoshop tweaking things to get what I hope is juuuust the right expression. I hope I got it, I think I did.
Also the Cupid’s name changed a few different times. He was Larry (too funny name-ish), Lloyd (too Gary Larson-ish), Bill (not funny enough) and Phil (used too often in other cartoons). But for some reason when I was typing in the caption, Stan just worked.
This is another take on getting away from Cupid. I’ve done some more standard heart themed cartoons before (heart as organ, heart as playing card suit), but this is a decidedly different tack, heart as flowchart shape!
I actually had to look up some flowcharts to see how they looked and worked (it’s been a while), and I think this one looks complicated enough to make sense for the gag, but not so complicated that it doesn’t read quickly.
One thing I noticed almost too late was that the name I’d used in the caption started with a different letter than either of the first name initials in the heart, so I had to make a last minute change to “Debbie.”
Recently I’ve been playing with the new iBooks Author, and there’s been a bit of a kerfuffle over Apple’s EULA. Some people assume Apple is trying to make some sort of giant content grab, others assume it’s less onerous. Either way, it got me thinking about EULAs in general, and this cartoon popped out.
I think it totally makes sense that before someone shoots you in the heart with an arrow that there would be some sort of legal paperwork, and kudos to Cupid for using an iPad!
Well, I hope these get you in the mood for the big day! Feel free to check out all of my Valentine cartoons, and don’t forget to use the decoder!
Hey everyone, new cartoons are up! Enjoy!
Andertoons.com is one of the best and most popular cartoon websites online.
There are thousands of great cartoons to choose from, and buying and downloading them is a breeze. Can’t find exactly what you’re looking for? I can create custom cartoons to meet your needs, quickly and at a fair price.
We also offer free daily cartoon widgets, a daily email cartoon, RSS feeds for over 20 different topics, books and minicomics, and over seven years of great blog content to peruse.
Andertoons also partners with outstanding sites like Small Business Trends and GoComics, shares thousands of cartoon related images on Flickr and Pinterest, and with over 13,000 followers and over 10,000 tweets to date, Andertoons is definitely on Twitter.
But…
After almost a year of planning, and more than 4 months of design and development, I’m very excited and proud to announce that we’ve just launched the best Andertoons.com yet.
Here’s just a few of the awesome new features:
It’s spectacular, so let me show you around. Let’s start with the…
Andertoons has always looked good and worked well:
But we’ve taken that great design and tweaked it in all sorts of subtle but substantial new ways:
Here are just a few changes:
But while we’ve made all sorts of improvements, the site feels and functions almost exactly like the Andertoons.com everyone is comfortable with. Pretty much everything is right where you left it, but it’s been cleaned up and polished a bit. Have a look around and you’ll see what I’m talking about.
I think it’s amazing, and I know you’re going to love it.
We were one of the first cartoon sites to really implement robust cartoon search. Users can quickly search captions, tags, and topics, making it quick and easy to find great cartoons. But sometimes the previous database’s brute force SQL approach gave you a quirky result. For example you might search for “cat” and get a business cartoon with “categorically” in the caption.
The new Andertoons search is really smart and lightning fast. It’s based upon the same open source full text search server that powers gigantic sites like Craigslist and DailyMotion. And not only are the search results better, but you can do all sorts of fun things like searching ‘”cat” and “office”‘ to find cartoons about cats in the workplace. You can even search for cartoons by their inventory number if you know them.
Our new search is really outstanding and it makes finding the perfect cartoon faster and easier than ever.
As I mentioned above, the new search function is unbelievably fast, but we’ve also employed some ingenious Ruby/Sinatra, CSS3, and image optimization to speed up page load times by as much as 600% in some cases.
Want to see just how fast Andertoons is? Check out the new “page generated in…” stat at the bottom of each and every page. I just loaded the home page in 0.282923666 seconds, and found a batch of cow cartoons in 0.029928941 seconds!
No more waiting for images or databases, just good old fashioned zoom.
When I started Andertoons 10 years ago, the internet was a vastly different place. Sites still asked you to sign their guestbooks, no one knew what a blog was, and screen resolutions were 800 x 600.
It was sort of a wild west and anything went, which I think explains my decision to present my cartoons at 340 x 273 pixels. Here’s an example:
We began with limited space and a goofy design and those dimensions worked for a long long time. But it was time for a big change (no pun intended):
Each and every cartoon in the inventory has been recreated from the large original 300 DPI TIFs to a more usable 480 x 360, that’s around 40% larger than the previous images. And as long as I was doing that, I individually adjusted every cartoon for contrast and sharpness, and cleaned up scanning errors. I also replaced the variously sized captions with a uniform, legible font that’s really easy to read.
Basically, every cartoon is bigger and better.
So that’s the new Andertoons.com. Completely redesigned from the ground up, but comfortably familiar too. Have a look around, give everything a try, and I know you’re going to love it as much as I do!
