More Milton Knight Goodness on YouTube!

You lot already know just how much I dig this guy's work, but here's another update e-mailed to me just today. Knight provided YouTuber Dan Variano with some amazing content of his, including the original pilot animation for Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog (remember how it turned up in one of the episodes, as shown previously? This is the original copy in much, much better quality, and how it was originally made to sell the idea), and scenes from the first episode of said cartoon (before the editing and sound process, with just voice acting in there).

What really caught me by surprise was hearing that additional animation in that pilot episode was done by Ed Love, a legend who had been in the industry since the 1930's at Disney, working on milestones films such as Flowers and Trees and Fantasia, then later working for Tex Avery, Walter Lantz and Hanna-Barbera. Wow! The raw talent of these animators shines through in the animation, which can be seen how it was meant to be at last (I've embedded it below):



It's a real shame the entire series didn't have even half of the amazing skill and fun seen in this pilot footage. The out-sourced animators tried sometimes, but were often quite lazy and didn't come close to the vision seen above. Hopefully Shout Factory can obtain this footage for the Adventures of Sonic DVD they have planned.

Not only is there footage from the Sonic cartoon, but also some episodes of The Twisted tales of Felix the Cat, another series from the early 1990's that Milton Knight often directed, storyboarded and animated for. I only vaguely remember this series as a kid, when it was aired on the satellite on the same channel as the Sonic cartoon, but I'm loving what I see now of it: the series had Felix's great surreal humor fully intact, even if they did give him a voice, as there's plenty of great 1930's style gags and lots of great animation throughout. I hope this series gets a DVD release one day, as it's easily up there with Ralph Bakshi's New Adventures of Mighty Mouse. I've embedded one of the Felix clips below:



If you wanna see the rest, (the Albert ad Einstein safety commercial animation is particularly great) get going to Dan Variano's YouTube account already! This is early 1990's cartooning at it's best!