Atom.com and Waverly Films won the hearts of the people and the pros with their raunchy, hilarious series Stickman Exodus, which nabbed two Webby Awards earlier this month. Now Waverly has been given the green light by Comedy Central to develop five webisodes for an Atom series called The Fuzz, which could hit prime time as a pilot later this year.
But just like last year’s Stickman Exodus (embedded above) was a mature departure from Liquid Television‘s similarly inclined ’90s hit Stick Figure Theatre (embedded below), so too will The Fuzz deviate from normal procedural cop series like Hill Street Blues and perhaps even the infamous Cop Rock. In The Fuzz, it is not stick figures but puppets who share screen time with humans, this time to drop the hammer on a city infested by crime. Like Stickman Exodus, Waverly Films‘ newest goof will live on Atom’s multiplatform distribution network, which includes mobile and internet destinations as well as Comedy Central’s showcase Atom TV.
Not that there’s much in the way of industry hurdles. Both Comedy Central and Atom huddle under Viacom’s monolithic umbrella. As does MTV, which exploded the stick-figure animation meme, what there was of it, on the criminally forgotten Liquid Television series that also made popular Peter Chung’s Aeon Flux, Eric Fogel’s The Head, Mike Judge’s Beavis and Butt-Head and more. Since then, MTV has more or less become a waste dump of dunderheaded teen drama bereft of cool animation or even music videos, paving the way for other Viacom properties like Comedy Central to pick up the slack with programs like South Park and so on.
The times they have a-changed. Too bad they can’t a-change back.
See also:
