“I was amazed that it even got made [into a movie],” Jones said. “And there I was at the premiere [last month], walking the red carpet. It’s such silliness. I’m not into the whole celebrity culture thing.”

It’s a slapstick ode to Warner Bros. and Tom and Jerry toons, in which a turn-of-the-century magician finds himself in a hilarious onstage feud with his hungry rabbit. Talk about a carrot and stick reversal. Presto, the magician, has never experienced such humiliation, as the crafty rabbit, Alec, gives him a taste of his own supernatural hocus pocus. There are plenty of magic hats and vaudevillian antics during the frantic five minutes, punctuated by iconic squash-and-stretch gyrations and bug-eyed reactions. Presto gets egg on his face, is attacked by a ladder, has his clothes torn off, gets electrocuted, uncontrollably dances a jig and is hurled high into the rafters. And the stuffy audience cheers every moment of it.

» Non Sequitur creator Wiley Miller was featured on Maine news network about his passion for cartooning and living in Maine.

» Patrick McDonnell, creator of Mutts, was interviewed by the Winston-Salem Journal about his crusade for animals both in and with his strip.

» Rod McKie wrote a very interesting essay on cartooning and The Long Tail. If you’re not familiar with the Long Tail, I suggest you read the original article outlining this new paradigm of digital content value and profits.

» Paul Gilligan’s Pooch Cafe is celebrating five years of syndication through Universal Press Syndicate. His feature originally launched with Copleys, but made the move to Universal when Copley got out of the comic syndication market.

» New Zealand cartoonist Mike Moreu who works for the Nelson Mail, is profiled about his work and impact in New Zealand.

» Found: A cool blog with early character designs from animated studios like Pixar, Dreamworks and Disney. I enjoyed seeing how the fluid and scribbly sketches were fleshed out, morphed and made into the well known characters that we see on the big screen.

“I wanted Eve to be high-end technology - no expense spared - and I wanted it to be seamless and for the technology to be sort of hidden and subcutaneous,” Andrew Stanton, Wall-E’s director, told Fortune. “The more I started describing it, the more I realized I was pretty much describing the Apple playbook for design.” It is, of course, not the first time a product has inspired a film character - think of the murderous HAL 9000 robot in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” based loosely on big IBM mainframes of the day.

But it may be the first time a character was based on a true corporate sibling. A call from Stanton to Jobs in 2005 resulted in Johnny Ive, Apple’s behind-the-scenes design guru, driving across the San Francisco Bay to Pixar’s converted warehouse headquarters to spend a day consulting on the Eve prototype. Stanton said that it was a “lovefest” with Ive, but that the notoriously tight-lipped design wizard offered few specific modifications. “Apple is so proprietary and so secretive that he couldn’t even really allude to where the future of technology was going,” says Stanton. “The most he could do is nod his head to the things we said we wanted to do.” (Through a spokesman, Ive declined to comment.)

» Slashfilm.com is reporting that Frank Miller will be directing a live action remake of Buck Rogers. The Buck Rogers story has been retold in many formats - movie, television, comic books and the original source - a newspaper comic strip that began in 1929.

An even more recent trailer can bee seen on StarWars.com

I pitched my treatment/vision of the Pooch Caf’e movie to Sony along with a number (not sure what the number was) of other experienced Hollywood screenwriters. Sony told me that after reading my pitch they were sitting around relaying to each their favorite parts and laughing, which they felt was a strong indication that I was on to something and at which point they decided I might be the best candidate for the job.

The contract I’ve signed is for a complete treatment, with two rounds of revisions. Sony has made me aware that despite the fact that I’ve already submitted a working treatment that this will be no walk in the park. Meetings are being held this and next week and I’m to prepare myself for a barrage of notes and comments.

In other movie related news, it appears that Sony is thinking the Pooch Cafe movie will be “B” release.

Theatrical release has been set for 2010.

The film is about two bickering wolves - one a disciplined, Alpha-bred wolf and the other a fun-loving, comical Omega wolf. They are captured and taken thousands of miles from their home. Determined to rejoin their pack, the two mismatched wolves begin a dangerous trek across unfamiliar terrain, battling the odds, the elements, the bears and one another — and finding love along the way.