Amazing Screw-On Head

Sci-Fi Channel has the Pilot episode of Amazing Screw On Head up on their site. For those of you not in the loop, Mike Mignola, creator of Hellboy, wrote and drew this comic for Dark Horse back in 2002. I didnt know this until just now but apparently it won the Eisner Best Humor Publication Award in '03.

Anyways, this new pilot has the voices of Paul Giamatti, Molly Shannon, and David Hyde Pierce and stars Screw-On as a robotic secret agent who along with his stuffed dead dog takes orders from Abraham Lincoln on matters of the supernatural.

I just watched it and thought it was awesome. I've always liked the dark shadowy style Mignola put into the Hellboy books and didnt think I'd ever see any of his work animated this well. Especially, since the guy does like one Hellboy story a year.

Personally, I'd rather have had an animated Hellboy show, but the offbeat humor in this one works pretty well, I think.

Check it out, At least for the scene where Emperor Zombie smokes up his prisoner in a giant Huka/bong, if for nothing else:

http://www.scifi.com/amazingscrewonhead/

That does look nice.

Wasn't their an animated Hellboy Project?

Yeah, an animated Hellboy is in the works, should be pretty far along by now. Doesn't really use Mignola's style, though.

Here's the site.

The thread title was very deceiving. :cry:

It's cool that Mignola's doing something besides Hellboy. I'll be sure to check this out.

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Originally Posted by Diff-chan

The thread title was very deceiving. :cry:

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Yeah, sounded like porn.

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Originally Posted by Bacon

Yeah, an animated Hellboy is in the works, should be pretty far along by now. Doesn't really use Mignola's style, though.

Here's the site.

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Didnt know their was an animated Hellboy in the works. From the couple of pics they had up on that site it looked like complete shit compared to Screw-On Head. You would think Mike Mignola would actually, I dont know, want to work on the material that got him where he's at. The Screw-On pilot looked to be done entirely by him, and looked awesome.

The art style of this pilot is spot-on, but the animation and voice direction are rather lacking in finesse and subtlety. Has that same "35 rpm record running at 45 rpm" sort of execution that plagues a lot of animation these days.

Doesn't anyone know how to properly establish a setting or set-up/transition a scene anymore? It's almost all quick cuts, the best you can hope for is a retardedly quick pan across an environment. It's like it's been put into law that you can't go 2 seconds without focusing directly on a talking head.

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Originally Posted by Bacon

The art style of this pilot is spot-on, but the animation and voice direction are rather lacking in finesse and subtlety. Has that same "35 rpm record running at 45 rpm" sort of execution that plagues a lot of animation these days.

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Really? I thought the animation and voice over were really well done. Especially Emperor Zombie's. He just has that funny, "pricky" voice that makes you want to laugh and hate him at the same time.

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Originally Posted by Bacon

Doesn't anyone know how to properly establish a setting or set-up/transition a scene anymore? It's almost all quick cuts, the best you can hope for is a retardedly quick pan across an environment. It's like it's been put into law that you can't go 2 seconds without focusing directly on a talking head.

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Well, without the quick transitions we would have been looking at a hour long show. We could have had more background on the demi-god etc., but honestly we didnt need it. Not in this comedic take on the paranormal hellboy universe. A lot of the settings did look cool, but I understand why they didnt linger.

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Originally Posted by Jetman

Really? I thought the animation and voice over were really well done. Especially Emperor Zombie's. He just has that funny, "pricky" voice that makes you want to laugh and hate him at the same time.

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The animation is great in terms of quality of individual frames, it's just, I dunno, they seem to rush the frame rate or something and it just makes the movements look rushed and weird. I notice it in a lot of stuff nowadays, it's like they tell the animators to make shots at 10 frames a second, they make something that would look great at that, but then they actually shoot it at 15 frames a second. It seems like some artificial patch to make the animation look more fluid.

The voice acting was okay but I felt that a more serious/deadpan delivery would have worked better in a lot of cases. A lot of times it seems like they were playing it as a comedy show, but parody and comedy are not the same thing... Parody works better the more you keep with the tone of what you're trying to mock, and let the comedy come through the script and situations moreso than the delivery.

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Well, without the quick transitions we would have been looking at a hour long show. We could have had more background on the demi-god etc., but honestly we didnt need it. Not in this comedic take on the paranormal hellboy universe. A lot of the settings did look cool, but I understand why they didnt linger.

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It doesn't require much lingering. Old Looney Tunes cartoons use proper trasition techniques and still manage to come in at under 10 minutes.

I'm not talking about backstory or anything, I'm strictly speaking scene transition and setup. A fade in from shot to shot, a slower pan to create atmosphere (this was done well in some scenes, given)... it would add little to nothing to the running time.

My main issue is with the intro, it's your first impression and it was completely chaotic and rushed. The rest wasn't without its problems, but much better.

Pretty damn funny. I love Mignola style, and weirdness. Didnt had problem with the animations either.

I do hope this becomes the show past the pilot.

Emperor Zombie was awesome.