Animation Comic strips

History: The attempts to make The Wizard of Id into an animated TV show

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Alan Gardner March 6, 2015 1 minute 0 comments

Charles Brubaker wrote an interesting piece over at Cartoon Research about the attempts to make The Wizard of Id into an animated TV show.

I always considered The Wizard of Id to be one of my big cartooning influence. I always had a thing for Johnny Hart?s dry sense of humor, and I consider Brant Parker?s art to be wonderful. The artwork is arguably on the ?simplistic? side, but Parker did a great job with the character designs, giving interesting sizes and shapes for the characters, and it fits well with Hart?s writing.

Remarkably, there were several attempts to bring the strip to television. In 1969, Jim Henson produced a short pilot based on the strip, using Muppets. Henson himself voiced the Wizard, while Jerry Juhl did the King?s voice.