Our cartoonist pals, Johnny Ryan and Dave Cooper, have created a bizarrely funny and artistically gorgeous cartoon for Nickelodeon called Pig Goat Banana Cricket, which premiered on Saturday, July 18. Watch out the first episode in its entirety here!
[Update: Viacom gave me an exclusive clip to run, but when I uploaded it to YouTube so I could run it here, Viacom pulled the video from YouTube, citing a copyright violation. lol. A friend who did some work on the show gave me a link to a new video, which I’ve posted above.]
I asked Dave and Johnny, both of them cartoonists famous for extremely unfiltered comics, to describe what it was like to do a kids cartoon for a major network studio.
Dave: “One of the most exciting things about this whole adventure has been witnessing the passion and care that our amazing crew pours on. It’s the only way Pig Goat Banana Cricket could have turned out the way it has. It’s not just a job to them, it’s like they’re extensions of me and Johnny – they care deeply, and they work long, long hours, and as a result, everything turns out looking like we did it ourselves!”
Johnny: “It’s been an insane and exciting experience going from being a lone cartoonist working by myself in a room for 20 years, going at my own pace, only answering to myself, to running a tv show that’s going a million miles an hour, collaborating on this project with about 60 other people. It’s the most rewarding and fun thing I’ve ever done.”
Characteristic of their unique art style, the show features the lush charm of retro kids’ books and cutting edge illustration fused with sparkling characters and surprising industrial design. A startling mix of bubbly, loveable characters and rich, layered worlds burst with weird machines and lush, mysterious vegetation.
Pig Goat Banana Cricket is set in Boopelite City, a gigantic and whirring metropolis where many of the buildings look like archaic clockworks. The streets are constantly teeming with characters of intensely varied description, and the sidewalks are crammed with animals, robots, walking fruit, sea creatures, and more. The four roommates live in a treehouse, which sits in the middle of the city, surrounded by the forest, the seas and anywhere else the friends could possibly go.
