'Whack Your Boss' Cartoonist Taking His Show on the Road
Tom Winkler was an animator on The Simpsons and at present runs his ain destructive cartooning empire. He's best known for the scatalogical anti-hero "doodieman," but his app, Whack Your Boss, just celebrated a decade of helping people live out their darkest fantasies while staying employed.
Along the way, Winkler appeared as an player in the TV series Double Rush and Adam Sandler's Little Nicky, and was John Malkovich's body double in Con Air. Now he's about to accept his outset live one-human being show on the road. PCMag talked to him in Los Angeles to find out more.
Tom, what was the inspiration behind your app, Whack Your Boss ?
[TW] The last time I worked in cubicle-country was back in the mid-90s on The Simpsons. But Whack Your Boss is really about my sheer frustration with corporate America. It's not so much most the boss, just the style you lot have to behave in an function, the way they speak to you. I was in a meeting the other mean solar day and, even though I own my own visitor and was there as a free agent, I wanted to hit something when someone at the meeting said: "Data this granular is non actionable." My blood just turned to water ice.
There'due south something about firing upward the app, letting rip on an animated cog in the wheel of corporate America, then calmly going about your 24-hour interval that works.
I like to recall I've created a useful stress-busting tool for people who tin can't afford to lose it IRL.
Dearest the 'Cleaner' push. Were you inspired by 'Victor le nettoyeur' (Jean Reno) summoned to remove the dead bodies from the bathroom in Luc Besson'due south La Femme Nikita ?
Exactement! Plus, from a technical standpoint, you've got a screen that needs reverting, so I had to have a mechanism to clean it upward and first again.
Your concept has expanded into an empire of whack-ness now: like Whack Your Calculator
A decade ago I got a call from a company in Zurich, which expressed interest in my work. I threw out a number in an email, went back to cartoon murder, mayhem, and poop, and thought nothing of information technology. The next thing I know, they sent me a airplane ticket to London, and I'm drawing storyboards for Whack Your Calculator for a corporate campaign. The rights reverted back to me years later and it'south proved popular ever since.
The 'cartoon land' version has been cleaned up, literally. At that place's no claret. Can you explain?
To put it just, things changed as the internet moved into its post-internet neutrality corporatization stage. The original version, with blood, was available as a paid-for app, at $1, for three years on the Google Play Store. I sold tens of thousands and then, 1 day, Google updated their terms of service and it became articulate I needed to upload a milder edition to their platform. In fact, Apple had refused to run the earlier version, which is why my download numbers are much smaller on the App Store overall.
Can you lot share download numbers?
Certain, since launch, on Android, I've had millions of downloads of Whack Your Boss, Whack Your Computer, and Doodieman. Less on iOS, [as I explained]. All the apps are free and ad-supported today. I've partnered with Florian Erlemann from Petesso Media Solutions, in Germany. He handles all the tech side of the apps.
And then, bankroll up, how did you lot get your start in animation?
Growing up as a child in Connecticut in the 1970s, I drew all the fourth dimension. My grandad gave me his old 8mm camera, and I started to do claymation, what we call end motion now. I even so have hundreds of drawings from grade school onwards.
Did y'all go to fine art schoolhouse?
Eventually, yes. But first I left for the W Coast and worked in a video store in Los Angeles circa 1982, which was a cracking pedagogy, considering I got to take the tapes home, freeze frame the VHS, and learn how the animation worked. Then I went back and studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which had a pretty gratis syllabus where you could walk into some other grade if y'all didn't like the one you were in. I'yard a chip of a dominion-billow and then that worked for me.
In those days, there were two schools of animators: people who were into superheroes, and Japanese anime, or those guys, like me, who preferred Bugs Bunny and MAD magazine. I take e'er appreciated that style of satire, and I was too influenced profoundly by Ray Harryhausen. My paternal grandparents came from Republic of hungary, and my mother'south family are Italian, so I capeesh the subtlety of European filmmakers; the silent easy jokes, the concrete humor of Jacques Tati.
First gig?
Olive Jar Animation Studios, in Boston. They hired me to work on some of the early on claymation on MTV when the channel was all the same brand new.
You lot were on The Simpsons. At that place must be some mad stories to tell.
One night a agglomeration of usa went to Casa Vega in Sherman Oaks, which has to be the darkest Mexican restaurant in North America. It wasn't far from the studio and, if you ate at that place at lunchtime, it felt similar information technology was midnight when you came out blinking into the harsh L.A. sunshine. Anyway, that nighttime I woke upwardly with what felt like a knife in my stomach, without going into as well many details. At the time, The Simpsons' fifty or so animators worked in two big chunks of cubicles with a hallway in between and at that place was a blank wall where we'd obsessively paste upwards drawings to share with, and outdo, each other. Equally I came in the next morning, not feeling and so hot, I drew what I can only depict as potty humor. Suddenly everyone became obsessive and added to the general theme I'd started in the wall. Information technology got out of hand.
Was that the get-go of Doodieman ?
In his earliest incarnation, I judge, but way before I named him or developed the character.
Have you always been drawn to the more than scatalogical side of life?
I have to admit I love potty humor. For instance the movie Aeroplane always makes me roar.
How did you make the transition to computer animation?
I trained as a pencil and newspaper animator, so a friend introduced me to computers in 1995. I was a purist and mocked the concept at first. But and so, once I'd mastered the basic skills of pixel-based animation, my work really took off and I sat dorsum and said: "What do I desire to animate now?" That was when I started animating Doodieman. And so the internet came along. I learned Wink and at present use Adobe Animate, on my Apple Macbook, using a Wacom tablet and stylus, to describe.
Last question, what's side by side for you?
My ain alive one-man show. When I travel or do alive blitheness sessions, like the one I did at YouTube L.A. terminal year, I constantly meet people who remember the Doodieman cartoons from the dot-com boom and want to know more than. And then I'm crafting a story about my piece of work and how it all came about. I'll be talking in front of a visual projection screen so I tin share really early drawings and explicate techniques, while telling stories. I accept a dark side, and I'll be going at that place too.
Will you take the show on the road?
My goal is to premiere it at the Hollywood Fringe Festival in June, then head to Scotland for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. After that, who knows? I was only in Seville, Spain at Animalada, and showed some of my animations on my phone to one of the organizers, who loved them. I told him I was writing a show, and he seemed really keen. I'd love to have my prove to Spain.
We'll take hold of upward with you towards the end of 2022 to get an update then.
Hey, sure thing. I'd like that.
Source: https://sea.pcmag.com/news/19529/whack-your-boss-cartoonist-taking-his-show-on-the-road
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