Hello, all you happy people! J.D. here. It’s been a while since the podcast stopped abruptly, so felt I should give you an update.
My health is still not great, but I should have clarified that I’ve never been suffering from anything directly life-threatening. I was diagnosed with severe double sleep apnea right around the time that I started developing the podcast. I’ve been embarrassed to talk about it since it doesn’t sound that bad – everyone is tired and weary these days, right? Well, I kept getting more tired and weary, and more tired and weary, and more tired and weary, until at a certain point I couldn’t manage a full-time workload or accomplish much of anything on the average day. Consequently, my life’s been in disarray for a while, and the amount of time, energy, and thought that the podcast was sucking up made my life almost entirely dysfunctional.
Fortunately, I am making progress with my treatment and I still have some income, so I hope you won’t worry about me too much. With that said, I’m not ready to jump back into a regular release schedule any time soon – I have too many other priorities. However, given that my priorities are more boring than cartoons, I’m still reading and learning more about animation history every week.
I decided I needed a place to keep sharing my animation thoughts, so I created this nifty little blog. To all who come to this happy place, considering reading Cartoon Research instead.
To kick things off, I thought I would share a little behind-the-scenes look at the podcast’s development. This is probably only of interest to the most devoted Stick to Shorts fans (Sticky Shorties?), so it makes more sense to put it here than in the podcast feed.
Development
The idea for the show grabbed hold of me in August of 2024 and didn’t let go, no matter how many times I tried to shake it. I was quickly overwhelmed by the sheer number of shorts I wanted to cover, so I started creating spreadsheets and Letterboxd lists to keep track of them. This might have only made it more overwhelming as I saw the number climb. While I think I planned on doing one short per episode from the jump, there was a long stretch when I was drawn to the idea of dedicating most episodes to more than one short.
Here’s a glimpse of what this version of the podcast could’ve been as I conceived it in September, 2024:
I weighed the pros and cons for a while before finally admitting to myself that I’m much better at zooming in on small things than summarizing big things. That’s part of the point of the show, after all. So I gave each short its own episode and changed around the order… and I never stopped changing the order, even after I had the skeletons of the first four seasons figured out.
During this time, I didn’t feel ready to record anything, or even to write scripts, because I still didn’t know whether or not the show would have a co-host. I wouldn’t get that squared away until I started recording episodes the next year. By then I had been thinking about what I would say for the podcast almost every day for the previous five months, so I was dying to get started.
I decided that a good way to find an audience would be to release the first episode or two just before The Day the Earth Blew Up premiered. That way anybody who came out of that movie with a hankering for more Looney Tunes content might find my podcast. To accomplish that, I had really to hustle.
The One Froggy Evening episode was recorded first. That was on February 4th, followed by Superman on February 23rd and the conversation portion of Porky in Wackyland on March 3rd – the same day the podcast’s trailer was released. That last one was for the premiere episode, which required a ton of writing. I bounced back and forth between writing, recording, editing, and rewriting in a chaotic scramble over the weeks that followed. The episode was put together from over a dozen recordings of my voice taken on different days. The show ultimately premiered March 31st. If the movie’s release date hadn’t gotten pushed back somewhat last-minute, I might have given up before I had one episode finished.
Complications
What I learned while doing the Superman episode is that different sources conflict with each other a surprising amount when it comes to animation history. I already kind of knew this, even if I didn’t know how much it would throw me for a loop for most episodes. I listened to the Cartoon Logic episode on oft-repeated myths so I knew what to avoid, but that turned out to be the tip of the iceberg.
I was lucky to have already heard about animation historian Michael Barrier’s lengthy critiques of Neal Gabler’s biography of Walt Disney, but Gabler’s book was the one I had already finished reading. (Embarrassingly I’m still slowly working my way through Barrier’s Disney biography, not to mention his invaluable book Hollywood Cartoons. I now have his lists of corrections and clarifications for Hollywood Cartoons and the Gabler bio printed and placed in the back of each book.) Gabler’s Disney bio is longer and more detailed than Barrier’s, so I don’t always avoid relying on it, but I approach it with a great deal of caution.
I could write for a while about my shifting epistemic concerns as I’ve continued to learn more about this topic, so I’ll probably devote some blog posts to it, but for now I’ll say that I wish I had done a lot more reading before I started the podcast. That’s not self-criticism, for what it’s worth. I know the podcast was good. What I mean to say is that I wish I had waited to start the podcast until I felt more comfortable speaking on the subject matter rather than rushing to line up with The Day‘s release date (which seemingly had little to no effect on my reach). Making the first episode was a chaotic sprint, which is no way to start a long jog.
Producing each episode created conflicts between how eager I was to get to the next episode, how much more homework I had to do to become knowledgeable on each topic that came up, and how determined my body was to shut down after two decades without any good sleep.
If there’s one lesson I’ve learned from all this, it’s that I’ll be happier if I take my time. I think my work is best that way too. For now, while I still have some big obstacles in my life keeping me anxious, I am hopeful about my treatment plan, relieved to have time to read more about a subject I care about, and grateful to have folks like you who care enough about my animation thoughts to make it to the end of this post.
Thanks for reading, and please remember, the next time you feel tired and weary… stick to shorts!
-J.D.