Online teen and young adult comedy content destination SMOSH will launch a new animation YouTube channel called Shut Up! Cartoons on April 30. The toon channel is led by former Disney TV Animation head Barry Blumberg and SMOSH co-founders Anthony Padilla and Ian Hecox.
“We are very excited with our initial batch of programming for Shut Up! Cartoons and are grateful to our partners at YouTube for offering us the opportunity to participate in their unprecedented original programming initiative,” says SMOSH president and Alloy Digital exec VP Barry Blumberg. “This ambitious undertaking provides these brilliant creative minds with a tremendous platform to showcase their talent and passion projects.”
Shut Up! Cartoons has enlisted the talents of many top animation professionals and artists including Peter Hannan (creator of Nickelodeon’s CatDog series), Cory Edwards (director of Hoodwinked!, Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil), Peter Hastings (Pinky and the Brain) and Prudence Fenton (Pee-wee’s Playhouse, Liquid Television).
The animation channel twill initially deliver 18 short-form web series comprising 180 episodes in the first year. Three series will premiere the week of April 30, 2012, leading with Do’s and Don’ts: A Children’s Guide to Social Survival debuting on Monday April 30, Pubertina on Wednesday May 2 and Zombies Vs. Ninjas on Friday, May 4. All three series will debut at 12:00pm Pacific Time.
Padilla and Hecox will work closely with the creative team while also delivering their own project, Teleporting Fat Guy, in which the time-traveling hero of many SMOSH sketches lands his own animated series.
“We’ve set out to establish a welcoming environment to entice a diverse and extremely talented group of individuals to the channel, covering the entire spectrum from accomplished filmmakers to college students – we even got a pitch from a 10-year-old kid,” notes Blumberg. “We have given our creators the creative freedom to be as off the wall as they want within content guidelines. In fact, we take the Shut Up! from our name as marching orders for how we work with talent. We just try to ‘shut up’, let them do what they do best, and deliver what could be the next huge breakthrough multi-platform hit.”
Shut Up! Cartoons will benefit from ongoing cross-promotion through other Alloy properties, including SMOSH’s two YouTube Channels, with established audiences of more than six million subscribers from the coveted 12-24 year old demographic, and www.smosh.com, which draws more than 13 million monthly visitors. Shut Up! Cartoons will additionally work closely with Alloy’s in-house production division, Generate Studios. Alloy Digital acquired SMOSH in July 2011.
Scheduled initial programming will include:
- Do’s and Don’ts: A Children’s Guide to Social Survival (Ryan Naumann): Horrible lessons for youngsters in trying situations.
- Pubertina (Emily Brundige): Life is hard when you’re an eleven year old going through that awkward stage.
- Zombies vs. Ninjas (Michael Granberry): Stop motion series filled with over the top zombie vs. ninjas battles
- Krogzilla Gets a Job (Cory Edwards): Japanese monster shrinks down to human size and is forced to seek a variety of jobs.
- Snowjacked (Kelsy Abbott, John Olsen): An action comedy that follows the search for our protaganist’s snowjacked family.
- Nature Break (Mike Hollingsworth): Nature vignettes with horrible outcomes
- Weasel Town (Nathan Hamill, Eric Filipkowski): Traditional buddy comedy from superstar creators
- Oishi High School Battle (Daniel Dominguez, Joe Gressis): Hanna Montana meets Sailor Moon. What would happen if an Anime character is forced to attend regular High School?
For more info, visit www.youtube.com/ShutUpCartoons.
