Colorado Springs cartoon studio strikes TV deal

April 11, 2012 - PRLog -- ARG! Cartoon Animation Studio is producing a series of short cartoons for YouTube and TV, Edward Lear's Nonsense Stories.  The show premiered April 1st on YouTube, and the studio released the 3rd webisode in the series on April 8.

Based on limericks by Edward Lear from A Book of Nonsense (1846), the show features the vocal stylings of Rhode Island based impressionist Ron Hayden.  Hayden claims to include more than 200 celebrities, politicians and sports personality impressions in his act, and thus far more than 50 of these characters have been satirized in the first season of Edward Lear's Nonsense Stories.

Artie Romero is the producer-director of Edward Lear's Nonsense Stories. From the ARG! cartoon studio's 3-story facility in North-Central Colorado Springs, Romero manages a crew of more than fifty artists, animators, interns and technicians to bring the production to life.  Many of the crew members are Colorado based, including local caricature artist "Colorado Bill" Crowley of Caricatures America. Romero has 30 years of animation experience including digital effects work on Keanu Reeves' Johnny Mnemonic (1995) and numerous TV, movie and commercial production credits and awards.  He founded the ARG! studio in Colorado Springs in 1994.

Currently there are 33 cartoons in production for the show's first season. Romero stated, "We've gotten seven million video views on our YouTube channels, and we have high hopes for this new series.  By late April, ARG! plans to have completed enough shows to enable us to compile a five- to seven-minute anthology for distribution to TV and film festivals."

According to Dallas based TV producer Joel M. Stevens of Morcaman Productions, Inc., the HOT TV (History Of Television) network plans to include the Edward Lear's Nonsense Stories anthology program in its fourth season of Sprockets and Splices, a nationally syndicated showcase for independent film shorts.  Stevens previously accepted several other short cartoons from ARG! for his show's upcoming season.

The timing of this new cartoon series may prove to be fortuitous.  On May 12, 2012, Edward Lear's 200th birthday will be celebrated worldwide. Besides A Book of Nonsense, Lear, a contemporary of fellow Englishmen Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll, created childrens' stories such as "The Owl and The Pussycat," and is credited with coining the expression "snail mail."