Friday, October 29, 2010

Inside Ursula Hitler's Head 12: Little Miss Meany, pt. 1


You can really feel Sweetie and Mr. Meany's personalities clicking into place around this point. Meany has been changed into a girl and he's crabbing about it in that Mr. Meany way, while Sweetie is having the time of her life teasing him. It's a dynamic that gets repeated over and over again in these cartoons, and one I never seem to get tired of.

Inside Ursula Hitler's Head 11: Mr. Meany's New Body, pt. 4


Here we go. This storyline felt like sort of a breakthrough for me. Turning Meany into a teenage schoolgirl and listening to him bitch about it was really, really fun. And this cartoon attracted a much larger audience than anything I'd done before in the series, which encouraged me to keep going with this weird, sort of fetishy transformation stuff. It was a real rush to go away for two hours and come back and see that hundreds of people had watched it. Just like that, I was hooked for life.

Pardon me for a serious TMI dump, but I was absolutely dizzy with horniness when I made this cartoon. When I was just a wee little tranny, I watched countless hours of Bugs Bunny and other cartoons with a lot of gender weirdness just beneath the surface. (Talk to almost anybody with a kink, and they'll tell you it all started with Bugs Bunny. Some of those old cartoons are twisted.) Now it was a new millennium and I was all grown up, and suddenly I had the power to make my own animated movies where I could just magically turn boys into girls with a few clicks of my mouse. O, brave new world!

Inside Ursula Hitler's Head 10: Mr. Meany's New Body, pt. 3


Yet another possible new body for Meany, this time a sort of Lollapalooza Ewok. Kinda funny, but damn does Meany ever seem evil, here.

Inside Ursula Hitler's Head 9: Mr. Meany's New Body, pt. 2


Another possible new body for Mr. Meany.

At this point I was just cranking the cartoons out, giddy with the possibilities of this new toy I'd discovered.

Inside Ursula Hitler's Head 8: Mr. Meany's New Body, pt. 1


Meany wants a new body... And can you blame him? I like this episode fine, although there's something weird about me giving myself an Indian accent. Really, there were only so many voices to go around.

Believe it or not, the part where the twinky guy blows a kiss at Meany was an accident. I clicked the wrong item on the pull-down menu, and suddenly there was a joke in the cartoon that I hadn't written. I love it when Xtranormal surprises me like that. It almost makes me feel like I'm directing real actors, and they're throwing in little improvised touches of their own.

Inside Ursula Hitler's Head 7: An Experiment In Error!


The strained pun of the title aside, I still like this one. Meany and Sweetie are now well on their way to being the characters we know today, with Sweetie being quite blase about the latest changes I've inflicted on them while poor Meany is having a panic attack.

(At last, Meany finally has his snooty British accent.)

Inside Ursula Hitler's Head 6: Name Your Poison


Now we're talking. Rough as it is, you can see the series starting to take shape. "Ursula Hitler," the powerful and mysterious creator of the party girl and the mean old man, has now arbitrarily assigned them names - Sweetie and Mr. Meany - and Meany isn't thrilled about it. He'll do a lot more bitching about this kind of thing as the series continues.

Meany's rant about hating all things is based on something I used to say to my long-suffering girlfriend when she'd ask how my day went. I have no idea where Sweetie's big poetry slam thing came from. That was really peculiar.

Inside Ursula Hitler's Head 5: Happy Birthday!


From January 8, 2009, celebrating my 30-mumble-mumble birthday. Basically I noticed that Xtranormal's old lady character looked a lot like their old man character, so I decided to make a cartoon about crossdressing. Kinda cute, I guess. I mean, it doesn't make me wanna slit my wrists or anything.

After a few episodes where Sweetie had her normal voice, now she's back to her icky robot-lady voice again.

Inside Ursula Hitler's Head 4: Ursula's Diseases


Sort of a funny one, but it comes from the days when I still thought of this series as a kind of animated blog, and it's a bit awkward. At this point the nameless "party girl" and the "mean old man" are these two weird little people who stand around in a dorm room and talk a lot about this person who never arrives - me! We're still a ways off from the situation that ultimately developed, where Meany and Sweetie are characters with their own hopes and dreams, and I'm the cruel Cartoon God who constantly dicks around with their lives.

(And yeah, I really do have most of these diseases... And plenty more I didn't mention! If I tried to list them all, you'd eventually get so sick of me droning on that you'd probably kill me with a spoon.)

Inside Ursula Hitler's Head 3: "Ursula HITLER?!"


Getting better, if still a bit rough. The farting still kind of makes me chuckle (I am the world's oldest 12-year-old) and I think this cartoon basically says all that needs to be said about my stupid name. If you're wondering why a freaking drag queen would name herself Ursula Hitler, well, here we go.

Inside Ursula Hitler's Head 2: Nobody's Watching


Ouch. Some really rough going in these early episodes. This isn't false modesty here, folks... I genuinely cringe to watch these first few episodes. That ending doesn't work at all. And Meany and Sweetie still don't have the right voices, or proper names!

This was basically me dicking around with Xtranormal's software, and seeing what it could do. Feel free to skip this one, you won't be missing much.

Inside Ursula Hitler's Head 1: The Party Girl and the Mean Old Man




From all the way back in January of 2009, the very first episode. Wow. Things were pretty rough back then, huh? Not only did Meany and Sweetie have different voices, they didn't even have names yet! Their relationship is also quite different, in these early cartoons they seem to genuinely dislike each other.

Early on I made these cartoons very quickly, intending them to be a kind of animated blog where I would just blab about my life and whatever pop culture silliness was on my mind, using these characters as my sock puppets. But Meany and Sweetie soon evolved into something more than that, they became characters I actually cared about and their stories became much stranger and more complicated.

Looking back, there's a lot of stuff about this series that I'd change, especially in these early cartoons. I like to think that the cartoons I make today are much better. (But talk to me in a couple of years, and I'll probably cringe about the cartoons I'm making now, and tell you the stuff I'm making then is so much better!)

Honestly? If you wanna skip ahead to episode six or so, you won't be missing much.