The Simpsons finally has a rival for sharp, subversive, animated satire, but Zombie College can only be watched on the internet
Michael Collins
There’s something about the DIY aspect of a webpage that is in keeping with the punk ethic of another age, and from which sprang a million three-minute songs and equally as many fanzines.
Instead of a guitar and three chords at your fingertips, or some A4 and access to a photocopier, all it takes is a computer, some web space and someone who knows their way around HTML.
Setting e-business aside, and apart from its purpose as a research tool, the internet has been largely the home of the novelty. A web page was like a band – everyone wanted to form one, without necessarily knowing why, what for, or even having the wherewithal of an idea that would make it work. When it comes to the business of entertainment, the net always finishes a poor third, behind film and television. This is about to change as part of a process which is being touted as the “netification of the entertainment industry”.
According to Steve Stanford, the founder of the pioneering online animation studio Icebox, there is something like revolution in the air.
Next month Steven Spielberg’s company, as part of a consortium, launches POP.com, a site for short films. The director himself will be one of a number, including fellow film-maker Ron Howard, behind a roster of five-minute films screened exclusively online. But currently, it is the animated films on the internet, and most notably those at Icebox.com, which are having a real impact.
Previously, entertainment and animation on the web was solely a method to showcase technology rather than ideas. It’s a process currently happening in television, and elsewhere, in pop, with the evolution of virtual humans.
Since the launch of its test site in March, Icebox has been showing regular animated shorts, one of which, Zombie College, is having the appeal to the internet audience that a soap, or even an adult animation, might to TV viewers. The business of simply going online has been replaced by that of tuning in: same time, same page, each week. And this, after a mere seven weekly episodes.
In keeping with the image of animators as a kooky set who wear Disney ties and South Park socks, the Icebox people claim that the impetus for their output was the idea of selling monkeys online. Certainly the themes within Zombie College are within the comic-strip convention that hybridises the traditions of science fiction and the absurd B-movie concepts of scary monsters and super creeps.
The two big-headed, bug-eyed kids at the centre of the story are Scott and Zelda. The names appear to be the only points alluding to the Fitzgeralds – there is no mention of his small penis or her big drink problem.
Having become lovers at high school, they embark on their freshman year at college, where living students befriend dead students who eat each other’s brains.
Somewhere in the mix there is also an extraterrestrial redneck, and a monkey that works for Nasa. You can forgive the nerdy themes simply because, as with life lived in Springfield or South Park, the verbal and visual jokes are smart references to popular culture and the modern age.
A recent episode is probably one of the few animations to feature two characters embroiled in sexual penetration.
If the style of the characters, and the humour in Zombie College seem at times familiar, it is because Icebox has enlisted the services of not only animators, but writers and producers who have been on the credits of adult animation series such as The Simpsons, Futurama (one of its producers, Eric Kaplan, is the creator of Zombie College ), and King Of the Hill.
Animation, the most infantile of art forms, has in recent memory become the meeting point for the kind of subversion and satire often absent from live action comedy. (If Lenny Bruce were now living he’d have to have the appearance of a fuzzy-felt character or a marzipan blob before he had any hope of getting his jokes aired.)
Icebox sees itself improving on this condition. In keeping with the South Park theme of celebrity-baiting, Icebox selects Barbra Streisand as the subject of another series, entitled Hidden Celebrity Webcam. Husband James Brolin squeezes into an icebox between the matzos, bleating into his mobile about his new wife being a control freak. A previous episode had Calista Flockhart incensed at finding a crumb on a piece of ice that was to be her dinner.
As a studio, the company describes itself as an incubator of ideas, making efforts to provide a platform for new talent. The site is also a workshop that premieres short films by animators new to the craft.
Again, it’s the sophistication of the concept rather than that of the technology that Icebox is in the market for. For the established writers and producers involved in the company, the site is the powerbase for ideas that it would be hard to get roadtested on television,without becoming embroiled in the sequence of events that begins with a pilot and seldom ends with a commission and a transmission.
Apparently, even with the success of adult animation in recent years, and the huge sums of cash that have come off the back of it from merchandise, the chances of making a pilot are often remote, because of the cost.
Icebox provides the opportunity for animators to see their ideas realised exactly as they were conceived.
The content and the concepts are free from the vetting process implemented by a committee of TV executives. Although, not surprisingly, it is these very executives who are now turning to companies like Icebox, which have built up a net following, in search of ideas for future series.
Zombie College is at www.icebox.com