When networks were in on the fun
Originally, this was going to be about channel bumpers and how overlooked those are compared to other filmed and animated media that hasn’t been archived, and I will get to channel bumpers in this piece. It will merely open up into the springboard of wider media and what the bumpers mean. As a guy who jackhammers the corner of the YouTube mobile app screen hoping in vain that it’ll skip the ad sooner, this may seem odd, but the bumpers weren’t just a showcase of the network you were watching ChalkZone on.
It seems to be something of an exercise in animation. Already an expensive and labor-intensive medium, be it hand-drawn or stop-motion (the latter of which I have experience with TTwTT), making a silly animation in an extremely crude manner is nothing to sneeze at. The history of the medium has a rich lineage as attributed to the likes of Walt Disney and Warner Bros. With tech catching up and more and more animators and studios abusing the new tech to see what can and can’t be done, eventually some madman would turn channel idents into an art form.
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