A Zoom Toast to Kelly

Top row: Kevin Lima, Steve Moore, Chris Bailey, Fred Cline.  Middle row: Kirk Wise, Dan Jeup, Rob Minkoff, Wendell Luebbe.  Bottom row: Tim Hauser, Butch Hartman.

Friday night I took part in a toast via Zoom - the pandemic's next best thing to being there.  We were toasting our friend, director Kelly Asbury, who had passed away a week earlier.   There are hundreds of industry people who would have turned up for this, but we kept it to a core group who hung out as CalArts character animation students in the early eighties: Chris Bailey, Fred Cline, Butch Hartman, Tim Hauser, Dan Jeup, Wendell Luebbe, Kevin Lima, Rob Minkoff, Kirk Wise and myself.  These guys are more than an animation who's who to me - they are my brothers. 

For the most part, the gang looked the same - a testament to living the animation life, I guess.  Most of us wore glasses now.  Kevin was rocking a new, bearded cue-ball look. And me with my COVID lockdown '70's hair  (cowbell band, anyone?).  The only real sign of age is that we were on Zoom for more than three hours and never talked shop once. 

Stories I either didn't know or had forgotten kept us laughing for hours - the crazy shit that makes us glad cell phones and social media did not exist back then.  These were not the flattering stories told at funerals, but hilariously human stories about Kelly.  Maybe you had to be there. I'm glad I was.   

"He was like the Sun." Kirk said.  "People just gravitated to him."

Cheers, Kelly!

-Steve

CalArts dorm, July 1984.  From left: Mark Rouse, Kirk Wise (white shirt), Butch Hartman, Steve Moore, and Kelly Asbury. Photo by Kevin Lima

Butch Hartman's YooToon Studios

My old chum Butch Hartman is chumming for new talent.  Butch has become the King of Cartoons at Nickelodeon with his Fairly Oddparents, Danny Phantom, and T.U.F.F. Puppy series getting heavy rotation in the programming day.  And yes, I have given him grief over the obnoxiously loud soundtracks in his shows, but he's still kind enough to listen, then tip me for polishing his Bruno Maglis.


He has launched the YouTube channel "YooToon Studios".  Butch explains:


"YOOTOON STUDIOS is an area where aspiring animators of every age, shape and size can get their work seen by Hollywood professionals. If their videos get lots of attention we'll give them a small budget to make even more! The bigger the audience, the bigger the budget! Also, I'll be doing my own original stuff, too. Videos should be between 10 seconds and two minutes, ideally. But, hey, if your genius exceeds two minutes, let's see it anyway!"


And that's the carrot in a nutshell.  Get to it, kids!
-Steve