ParaNorman

Speaker D: 00:03:24

Hi, everyone. I'm Em, and welcome to Verbal Diorama, episode 284 ParaNorman. This is the podcast that's all about the history and legacy of movies.

should listen to. She died in: 2006

Whether you are a brand new listener to this podcast, whether you are a regular returning listener, thank you so much for returning. If you are. Thank you for being here. Thank you for choosing to listen to this podcast.

the midst of animation season: 2025

This is the fifth annual animation season. It's something that I love to do on this podcast I love to feature every January and February amazing animated movies.

All forms traditional 2D hand drawn CGI stop motion. Like this one mix of all of the above.

It doesn't matter from some of the greatest animation studios of all time like Liker, like Aardman, Disney, Dreamworks, Sony Animation Studio, Ghibli, Cartoon Saloon, even studios that are no longer with us and only Norman can speak to like Fox Animation, Blue sky and Don Bluth Studios. One of the mantras of this podcast has always been that animation is not just for children, it's also not a genre either.

It really annoys me when people call it a genre. Animation is the perfect art form. It is capable of depicting anyone or anything without limitations.

Which also kind of irks me as well why we're kind of transitioning from animation into live action remakes when the animated originals are so much better because there are no limitations. But this is one of the reasons why animation season is so important. It remains so important and it will continue to be so important to this podcast.

To highlight these incredible films that you may have seen. You may not have seen every movie this season and every season I would highly recommend.

But it might also be something that you've discounted for whatever reason, and I suspect Paranorman may be on that discounted list purely because it's not one of Leica's most best known movies. However, it is absolutely well worth your time and if you have seen Paranormal, then you will know how worthy of your time it is.

I also just wanted to say a huge thank you to everyone who obviously does listen to this podcast, has continued to listen to and support this podcast.

This podcast is very almost six years old and it remains crazy to me that I've been doing this for almost six years and that I've almost hit 300 episodes as well. Genuinely, from the bottom of my heart, it means so much to have your continued support. Thank you so much.

And if you are a new listener, well, I mean, you've got a lot to catch up on, let's be honest.

But let's jump straight into ParaNorman, because you may not immediately go to animation as a medium for horror, but it's actually a remarkably interesting way to adapt the horror genre while also aiming it at that really important family market. ParaNorman wasn't the first. It was preceded by Coraline, by its own studio, Leica. Tim Burton's Frankenweenie came out the same year as ParaNorman.

Before Christmas came out in: 1993

orpse Bride. That came out in: 2003

Maybe less obviously so than some of the others. These movies that I'm talking about are all previous episodes of this podcast, by the way. So please go and have a listen to all of those episodes.

But ParaNorman walks that fine line between genuine scares and having an important message of tolerance, acceptance, and, I don't know, maybe don't kill children. Here's the trailer for ParaNorman.

Speaker D: 00:10:05

Norman Babcock has a special ability to see and communicate with the dead. This ability gets him constantly bullied at school because everyone thinks he's crazy. After his sudden death, Norman's great uncle, Mr.

Prendergast, approaches him as a ghost to tell Norman about the upcoming zombie uprising 300 years ago. The members of Norman's town sentenced a witch to death and she put a curse upon the town.

Norman must go to her grave before sunset and read from a book to stop the curse. But Norman is stopped by the local bully and zombies rise from the dead. Let's run through the cast of this movie.

This is a stacked cast as well for an animated movie.

We have Cody Smit McPhee as Norman Babcock, Tucker Albrizzi as Neil Down, Anna Kendrick as Courtney Babcock, Casey Affleck as Mitch Down, Christopher Mintz Plass as Alvin, Leslie Mann as Sandra Babcock, Jeff Garland as Perry Babcock, Elaine Stritch as Grandma Babcock, Bernard Hill as Judge Hopkins, Jodelle Thurland as Agatha Prendergast, Tempest Bledsoe as Sheriff Hooper, Alex Borstein as Mrs. Hencher and John Goodman as Mr. Prendergast. ParaNorman was written by Chris Butler and directed by Sam Fell and Chris Butler.

er the release of Coraline in: 2009

But what we can say about Laika is they have never been one to follow the leader.

And so not only was Leica moving forward in stop motion, but without Henry Selleck, the director of Coraline, it was also going to focus on family friendly horror, which isn't really something that tends to go together, but they'd already done it with Coraline, which had enough spookiness, and also other mothers with buttons for eyes, which still freaks me out to this day.

Coraline is episode 63 of this podcast, by the way, so it was way back in the 90s when Chris Butler originally thought of making a stop motion zombie movie.

Zombie movies always contained social commentary and used zombies as a metaphor, so why not also use that for a school based situation with children as the protagonists? He wanted to juxtapose the horror of being a zombie to the horror of being a pre teen kid.

He took inspiration from Scooby Doo, Ghostbusters and the Goonies as well as Universal's very own horror movie history with Paranorman.

e of Universal's centenary in: 2012

rd to co direct ParaNorman in: 2009

on Lowry. They took more than: 4000

The digital photos were then printed out and pinned up for reference, including houses that were dilapidated. They even took photos from a child's perspective with the idea to make the buildings seem even more imposing.

Now I mentioned a couple of episodes ago on Turning Red that animation allows you to depict certain things in a more palatable way than live action does. And zombies are a great example of this because it's hard to not make live action zombies too dark and scary.

They are the backbone of horror cinema for very good reason, but with animation the designs can look a little more cartoonish. But fundamentally this is a movie that is making somewhat light of very real, very gruesome events.

Not in Blythe Hollow, Massachusetts which is made up for the movie, but in Salem, Massachusetts.

gs and live events in October: 2022

And this isn't the only movie that's been inspired by the Salem Witch Trials. Movies like the Crucible, Hocus Pocus, the Covenant and the Autopsy of Jane Doe are all inspired to a degree.

Obviously Hocus Pocus is very family friendly leaning, but an animated story based on the Salem Witch Trials is a fairly unique prospect.

f witchcraft between February: 1692

Was officially exonerated three hundred and twenty nine years after she had been found guilty of witchcraft. Mob mentality is unfortunately not a 21st century thing.

And the dangers of baseless accusations and more importantly, the fear of the quote other is a theme that ParaNorman explores remarkably frankly for a family movie.

We discover that Norman might be called Norman, but he's really not the norm, that there's a strange family trait that he's descended from the Prendergast family and that means that he can talk to the dead. This is a movie full of ghosts, a multitude of ghosts, you might say, ghosts from all walks of life throughout history.

dier ghost saluting Norman, a: 1950

He doesn't seem to fit in at school, he's being bullied, and he can also talk to the dead. And the dead seem to understand him better than the living seem to understand him. However, he does find a kindred spirit in school friend Neil Down.

Now, having two or more directors on an animated movie is fairly commonplace, but it's also quite easy when you do have two directors that they may have two different visions for the movie.

Luckily, Chris Butler and Sam Fell were very unified on the look and feel of ParaNorman, and they really needed to be, because ParaNorman took three years to move from drawings to sets to shooting to screen, and was the biggest production ever to be made in stop motion animation, at the time being only the third stop motion movie to be made in stereoscopic 3D, following Lyca's very own Coraline and Aardman's the Pirates in An Adventure with Scientists. As I said, Coraline is a previous episode of this podcast. It is episode 63. The Pirates in an Adventure with Scientists is episode 192.

The Design of the characters and their home was imperative to how that mix of animation and horror would come off.

Character designer Heidi Smith, then a recent CalArts graduate, made monochrome pencil on paper sketches and her work was used as a rough edge template for things to be a bit wonky in Blythe Hollow, for things to clearly be a bit off. They wanted the town to have a stylised perspective, but also a contemporary setting.

Her drawings didn't only comprise the town, but also the various characters, which were then adapted by character sculptor Kent Melton into Clay Maquettes the movie also opens with a pastiche of a grindhouse zombie flick, complete with scratched film, poor framing and your classic scream queen. Only she's battling away boom mics rather than zombies. It turns out that this is what young Norman Babcock likes to watch.

And at least it's not sex and violence, right?

Paranormal's animators got into the requisite mindset by looking at not only zombie movies, but but also movies like Frankenstein and Nosferatu, among other classic scary movies. But Leica intentionally making a bad looking movie in a movie wasn't the easiest thing for them.

Because we know that Leica are perfectionists and trying to make something bad is actually really really difficult. In total, the three year production of ParaNorman took place in a 151,000 square foot building at Leica Studios in Hillsborough, Oregon.

It had more than 320 designers, artists, animators and technicians on staff. There were 52 separate shooting units and they were operating virtually continuously during the production.

At the time, it was the joint most ever stages used in a stop motion animated film. Only Coraline had used as many. ParaNorman, however, had more stop motion puppets than that it had used on screen before.

Four of the stages made up the Blythe Hollow town square which was created by 18 carpenters, 18 model builders, 6 riggers, 12 scenic painters, 11 greens artists and 10 set dressers. Everything you see is completely hand built. Even roads were hand built.

ed with three types of paint.: 2000

Every single horror movie poster in Norman's room was hand drawn and his room designed to look like a young boy's bedroom. And the inspiration for Norman's middle school came from Nelson Lowry's own local middle school.

The Blythe Middle School set had an eight foot high facade and was built as a sandbag anchored elevated structure to reinforce Norman's apprehension about going in each day.

It took nearly four months to create on a soundstage at Leica Studios when the fluorescent classroom lights visible through the windows are actually made of pieces of foam. While the sets they had were already large. Leichel also wanted to increase the scope of the stop motion world using digital set extensions.

As real buildings and set dressings were being created for stage visual effects, artists were photographing, scanning, modeling and texturing digital versions to ensure they could seamlessly extend the environment. Once the world was made much larger, it was populated with digital background characters.

Some shots contained hundreds of angry Townspeople rioting in the streets and the largest crowd shot in ParaNorman contained over 4,000 CG extras. But CG extras are one thing. The actual puppets that they use to do stop motion movies are something else. Completely different.

I've talked about stop motion puppets a lot in the past. But moving on from Coraline, Laika really wanted to step up the production of these puppets.

The zombie characters were the only characters that had mechanical faces. They were made of rubber and silicone and contained clock gears for movement. Every other character in Paranormal has replacement faces.

And replacement faces were printed using a technique known as rapid prototyping. And ParaNorman was the first stop motion movie to use full color 3D printers for replacement animation.

The team was able to create the numerous puppet faces needed for the movie.

And that was mostly because Coraline pioneered and popularized the use of black and white 3D printers, which significantly accelerated the puppet production process. Try saying that really fast while you're drunk. For ParaNorman, over 31,000 separate face parts were printed.

int time. The faces comprised: 1257

The 3D printer was so intricate, it could add skin translucency and color variations. For the 61 characters in the movie, 178 distinct puppets were made. More than 8,000 faces and 28 full body puppets were made just for Norman.

48 animators, riggers and modelers comprised Leica's rapid prototyping department.

Norman, with his more than 8,000 faces and all of his individual pieces, including brows and mouths, meant the team could animate 1.5 million possible facial expressions. Each of his puppets was also 9 inches tall. His armature had 122 individual parts, including 80 different metal components.

And Norman, as the main character on the movie, was the first puppet that they made for this movie. But if you have puppets, they can't be walking around naked. They also have to have intricately detailed miniature clothing as well.

120 different costumes were also made for the film, and these were also made by hand as well by the costume team led by costume designer Deborah Cook. They were all made with locally sourced or recycled materials. Wherever possible.

To plan the costumes, a real person of comparable real life height and stature to the character would walk around in an outfit. So Cook's department could see how the planned costumes hung and flowed. They tested movements in costume and Then also tested with puppets later.

Norman has five costume changes, his parents have three. Elder sister Courtney has two. They use size 15 extra long beading needles to stitch these tiny costumes.

And these needles are about the circumference of human hair. They are that thin. With animators handling the puppets thousands of times, there were at least half a dozen duplicates of each costume.

The ghosts appearances were also enhanced by tulle, not as a material for their costumes, but as the substance that doubled on screen for the particles and vapor that they float around in and with.

As for shoes, Cork and her team had learned on Coraline that antique Victorian gloves offer the best and thinnest possible leather out of which to fabricate the puppet's shoes, including Norman's Converse sneakers. As the Zombies were previously 18th century Puritans, costuming and hairstyles from that era were researched.

and her team also watched the: 1996

Only fabrics or details found in 18th century clothing were used and then distressed to reflect 300 years of being a corpse. They even looked at archaeological finds and clothing to see how that clothing had decayed over time.

For the puppet's hair, the production experimented with various types of human hair, animal hair, and even tinsel. Human hair was too porous and didn't stick. On Coraline, they used mohair, which they laid thin wires into.

They wanted to make Norman's hair even more of a character than Coraline's was. Norman's hair had a goat hair base.

It was fused with glues, hair gels, fabric adhesives, thread, and like with Coraline wire, last came paint and some human hair dye.

They also created stunt wigs for action scenes, which is just one of those random facts that I love because you could really imagine having a stunt wig on a puppet for an action scene.

And if you're not already impressed by the sheer stature of this movie, 31, 600 handmade props were also constructed for ParaNorman, including 26 moving vehicles with working lights, windows and functioning suspension and steering.

The town hall archive sequence was built over two full sets with over 20,000 miniature books, over 5,000 paper items like maps and files, and over 400 hand folded file boxes. The smallest animatable prop was Norman's mother's perfume sprayer, which gets used while they're in the car to ward off the zombie judge.

It's made of brass and then chromed for A brushed stainless look. It measures 5.8of an inch in length and 1.8of an inch in diameter with the pump nozzle 1.16of an inch in diameter.

And this perfume sprayer genuinely works. It genuinely squirted perfume.

Cinematographer Tristan Oliver was no stranger to stop motion, but he was too stereoscopic to shooting in 3D for the first time and also while using a wider screen aspect ratio. He wanted to follow traditional zombie movie conventions and chiaroscuro lighting.

But to shoot the movie's ghosts, he referenced early Russian photographs taken on glass panes and looked to the work of fellow cinematographers Conrad hall, who shot Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, American Beauty and Road to Perdition. Roger Deakins, whose best known works are the Shawshank Redemption, Fargo and Skyfall, and in particular Seamus McGarvey's work on atonement.

The forest scenes were influenced by martial arts movies such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and hero. They used 63 Canon 5D Mark II cameras with left and right sliders to record stereo pair frames in order to film the majority of the main animation.

They also used 21 motion control track and boom rigs and 53 motion control systems, 36 Cooper systems and 17 proprietary systems. The camera department produced 20 hours and 29 minutes worth of footage.

The bathroom sequence alone, where Norman is contacted by the ghost of his great uncle, Mr. Prendergast, took one whole year to shoot.

Principal photography on ParaNorman lasted 18 months, with a total of 35 animators working on 52 separate sets. Each animator shot an average of 4.38 seconds of film per day, which means only 12.78 minutes were completed per entire week of production.

Despite being a stop motion movie, digital visual effects were used to enhance a number of scenes. I've already mentioned set extensions and crowds, but also things like ghost effects, rig removal, face replacement, line removal and atmospherics.

In order to give the surroundings more weight, Leica experimented with the foundries Cortana in their lighting pipeline to match textures and make clouds appear more realistic. And one of my favorite visual effects in this movie is Agatha herself.

The full bodied angry Aggie is a stop motion puppet enhanced by a digital dress to make her look like a Tesla coil. The dress was based on actual physical designs of shredded paper and cloth and her hair based on handmade blown ink artwork.

They also added hand drawn elements to her to enhance her confusion, pain and fear. The version of Aggie we see as a witchy face in the sky is based on practical tests of Bridal Veil material.

The look and Translucent quality of this material was replicated using Houdini and then sculpted and animated into the terrifying face of the giant witch.

for LGBTQ characters, back in: 2012

And he's never the butt of any joke. He's not the stereotypical gay tropey character.

And in the world of ParaNorman, a world where being anything other than normal is seen as wrong, which makes the town descend on Norman Mitch's quiet acceptance of his own sexuality, the fact he has a boyfriend, it's not hidden, it's normal. This is a movie that just turns preconceptions on their heads.

You think the muscular jock character must be straight, just like you think the zombie who's returned from the dead wants to eat your brains. But you're wrong on both counts.

Co director Chris Butler, who's also gay, has said that the character being gay was explicitly connected with the film's message. Quote, if we're saying to anyone that watches this movie, don't judge other people, then we've got to have the strength of our convictions. Unquote.

This is a movie that loves other horror movies and not just the obvious zombie flicks. And George A.

Romero, with its handheld shots paying homage to Sam Raimi's Evil Dead, visual references to Friday the 13th's Jason Voorhees and Chris Butler's favorite reference, a ringtone of the opening bars of the Halloween theme by John Carpenter, which they never thought they would obtain the rights to, but by some miracle they did.

This is in many ways a beautiful coda to a movie that is so influenced by John Carpenter as well as the works of John Hughes, but unfortunately not at all by the works of Keanu Reeves.

And this is the easiest segue into the obligatory Keanu reference of this episode, which is the part of this podcast where I try to link the movie than featuring with Keanu Reeves for no reason other than he is the best of men and all men in the world should always be a little bit more like Keanu Reeves. So originally I was trying to think logically about linking Keanu to ParaNorman, and I couldn't find anything.

Nothing really obviously stood out to me, so I did the next best thing and linked him to another Norman, and in doing so, actually also linked him to zombies. So Keanu did a motorcycle ride with the actor Norman Reedus through Utah on the TV show Ride with Norman Reedus.

Norman Reedus obviously starred in the Walking Dead, which is also Zombies. So technically Norman Reedus is the closest to a real life ParaNorman that we have. And Keanu's done a TV show with ParaNorman. So there you go.

That's the easiest way for me to do it. John Bryan composed the score for ParaNorman. He also did the score for Eternal Sunshine at the Spotless Mind, which is one of my favorite movies.

I love that movie so much. I've also done an episode on that one too. By the way, he also worked frequently with Paul Thomas Anderson.

The score for Paranormal was based on Brian's compositions for previous films, which were used as temporary tracks and then replaced with his actual ParaNorman score. For that score he used an EMS VCS3 synthesizer, which was notably also used by the one and only John Carpenter.

raNorman at Comic Con in July: 2011

This was the year before ParaNorman's release. These puppets and props included Norman's room and also a room from the house of Mr. Prendergast.

The idea being obviously to wet the appetites of people who loved Coraline to come out and also see ParaNorman.

was released in the summer of: 2012

ParaNorman had to settle with third after The Bourne Legacy. It stayed at third for its second week and would stay in the top ten for six weeks.

Now it's important to note that ParaNorman was never make or break for Leica, and the reason for that is Leica is owned by Nike billionaire Phil Knight and ran by his son Travis Knight, who was also the lead animator on ParaNorman, as well as a producer.

The Knight family are the 25th wealthiest in the world, so it's pretty safe to say that Leica could afford to pursue its vision no matter how this film performed with critics or at the box office. But naturally they wanted the movie to do well, and they did have high expectations after the success of Coraline.

ry of ParaNorman on Halloween: 2022

Now ParaNorman is almost universally adored by critics. Rotten Tomatoes has an approval rating of 89%.

The critical consensus reads Beautifully animated and solidly scripted, ParaNorman will entertain and frighten older children while providing surprisingly thoughtful fare for their parents. Paranormal was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated film, losing to Pixar's Brave.

It also lost to Brave for the BAFTA for Best Animated film.

It was also nominated for nine Annie Awards, winning three for character animation in a feature production, character design in an animated feature production, and Foley mixing in an animated feature production. There was a proposed TV series for ParaNorman.

footage posted on YouTube in: 2017

Now, ghosts and zombies are pretty scary, right? But the thing is, there are way more scarier things out there than ghosts and zombies. Because you know what's scarier than ghosts and zombies?

Bullying, intolerance. Hatred, persecution. All of those things are way scarier. And that's probably because they are real.

And not only have they happened, they are still happening. Babies aren't born with intolerances, they grow up into.

Children are young people and adults who are taught intolerance, taught that being someone different to yourself is wrong. And quite simply, that's how people end up racist, homophobic, xenophobic, transphobic, all of the phobics.

What sets Leica apart, and what has always set Leica apart is that they are a truly independent studio outside of the mainstream, and they aren't afraid to be bold and different with their movies. They're not beholden to a bigger corporate overlord.

And what sets Paranormal apart from many of its animated peers is that it has the strengths of its convictions. It's here to tell a story of intolerance. And it does it, quite frankly.

And there's no executive worried about how the impact of a gay character will affect their audience. Mitch is gay, just as lots of people are gay. And quite frankly, the audience kind of has to deal with that.

But it's also so throwaway that I expect a lot of people miss that and its relevance. So in many ways I actually wish they did a bit more with that revelation. Or alternatively, maybe they just don't need to.

Death is something that's usually handled in a very family friendly way in animated movies. If you think of something like Coco, with its beautiful depiction of the land of the dead, this movie is a bit more frank about it.

Not only do we have the death of Mr.

Prendergast, which we know because his ghost visits Norman in the toilet, he implores Norman to go to his recently deceased corpse to retrieve the book. Rigor mortis and all that will keep the ghost of Agatha at bay.

We also have Aggie herself, and not only did she die, she died horrifically murdered by the townsfolk who accused her of witchcraft.

These are adults that murdered a child, and it takes the compassion of a child for the adults of the town to realize their own prejudices and ignorance and fear. It also speaks on how the passage of time and recording of history is blurred and defaced.

Historic atrocities are treated like festivals and holidays, and the real people they affected are either demonized like the Blythe Hollow witch, given a hideous appearance and celebrated for being vanquished evil, or the town is utterly unrepentant in its history of murdering innocent civilians, not only commodifying the events, but celebrating the townsfolk who perpetuated the myths. It really is no wonder Aggie is so pissed. Blythe Hollow has never given her a moment's peace.

Movies about humans being the real monsters are ten a penny, but rarely in the capacity of a horror movie aimed at the family market.

While the Nightmare Before Christmas might be the obvious choice, I felt like ParaNorman offers something more in the way of a version of reality that feels like it could be real, and that's mostly because it's based on real events.

Zombie movies can be social satire or spoofs, or they can be out and out horror, but ParaNorman takes the genre and asks the question, what if zombies weren't malevolent? What if they were humans who made a terrible, terrible mistake? And what if their righteous cause was anything but?

We think we understand witches or zombies or ghosts, but assumptions are dangerous things, and assuming anything about anyone is never the right way to go about things.

Norman creates change by actually talking, and let me tell you, coming from someone who actively talks a lot all the time, I can tell you it makes a huge difference. Talking and empathy. Norman has both of these in spades.

He knows what it's like to be bullied, be an outcast, and he knows what it's like to feel alone. Revenge is an all consuming disease. If someone wrongs us, we want them to feel the way they've made us feel.

If anything, ParaNorman isn't about scaring us. It's about taking what we fear, confronting that fear.

And while there are monsters in this world, and there will always be monsters in this world to stop us from being so consumed with hatred and fear that we also become the monsters, true justice isn't about revenge, but about breaking the cycle of hurt, pain and fear. Kill your adversaries with kindness. Laika is one of the most underrated animation studios in Hollywood.

Always visually splendid and thematically innovating, they are due the same level of admiration and acclaim that other studios get.

And Paranormal is a movie made by people who not only love stop motion, but they also love the horror genre and pay beautiful homage to it while also subverting the traditional zombie movie lore. Like Norman's grandma says when Norman tells her that zombies eat brains, he's going to ruin his dinner.

I'm sure if they just bothered to sit down and talk it through, it would be a different story.

Paranorman gives us hope that even in the crazy world we currently live in, that the weirdos, the misfits, the others, those who truly believe in all things good and kind in the world, that we can stand together against the raging mob who want everyone different, everyone who's not puritan to burn. We can face the mob together and we can fix what's broken. We can address the past and not let it ruin the future.

We can all be a little bit more Paranormal. Thank you for listening. As always, I would love to hear your thoughts on ParaNorman.

And as always, thank you for your continued support of this podcast. If you have enjoyed this podcast and you want to help this podcast grow, you can get involved by telling your friends and family.

You can leave a rating or review wherever you found this podcast and you can find me on social media. You can share like posts on social media. It all helps with visibility. I am on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, threads, Blue sky and Letterboxd.

I am at Verbal Diorama on all of those places. I don't really kind of use Twitter much anymore but the others I am all over that.

Feel free to find me, feel free to add me and feel free to talk to me about really any movie that I've ever featured but feel free to talk to me about ParaNorman because this is a movie that I could talk about forever, clearly doing a podcast about it.

And if you did enjoy this episode on ParaNorman, you might also like I've mentioned episode 63 on Coraline because it is genuinely one of the greatest movies that Leica have ever done. Also episode 135 on Corpse Bride and also the classic episode 186, the Nightmare Before Christmas.

Just literally one of the greatest stop motion movies ever made. And really in that list, you can't go wrong with either Henry Selick or Tim Burton.

As always, give me feedback, let me know what you think of my recommendations. So the next episode is going to be an interesting one because it's a movie that fans of this particular show waited a hell of a long time for.

This show is the longest running American animated series series, longest running American sitcom, and the longest running American scripted primetime television series, both in seasons and individual episodes. The Simpsons was and is quite frankly a phenomenon.

ow that originally debuted in: 1987

So please join me next week for the history and legacy of the Simpsons Movie. Now I always like to say this podcast is free and it always will be free.

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Speaker D: 00:50:05

Bye.