If you’ve been watching the new season of Fox’s Mad TV, you no doubt chuckled, if not belly-laughed, at a series of crudely animated and highly edgy animated shorts called Weekly Kids News with Toby. Animated by Toby Morton, the cartoons pretend to offer a child’s perspective on current events, though the results are very adult. In fact, you could say that Morton is getting away with murder, or at least the comedy equivalent thereof.
Morton knew a friend who knew a friend who got him a job on Comedy Central’s South Park back in 2001. He started doing production assistant duties but became known as the goofy guy who did all kinds of voices around the office. Series co-creator Trey Parker liked what he heard and asked him to come in and provide the voice of Scott Tenorman, the kid who sells Cartman his pubic hair. He did various other voices and eventually made his way into the writer’s room, working on the show until 2005. During this time, he got more serious about animation, creating his own shorts in his spare time. One of these films, featuring a character named Jo Jo, helped him land a sketch-writing gig on Mad TV.
‘Jo Jo is a little, Mr. Bean meets Mr. Bill type of character, a very short, Danny DeVito-looking guy,’ says Morton. ‘It was called Jo Jo Saves Jennifer Lopez from a Tree. It lasts like a minute and he literally has to shoot her down from the tree with his little bow and arrow.’
Around the time Morton started at Mad TV, Mel Gibson went crazy on the Pacific Coast Highway, making headlines and leading Morton to wonder how a kid might explain the drunken, anti-Semitic tirade.
‘I thought it would be funnier if I just had a kid draw it but I ended up just drawing it myself with crayon. I’m not an artist. I can draw, but not anything you’d look at and say ‘Wow, this guy is great!’ I think that’s what I love the most, not the fact that I can’t draw very well, but the roughness and simplicity of the drawings. That’s what I love about South Park so much, that it looks like it’s cut out and the choppiness.’
Morton’s crayon drawings are scanned into a computer and animated with Adobe AfterEffects. The animation is then exported as a Quicktime file and edited in Apple’s iMovie before going to the post technicians at Mad TV. To get the audio to sound like something recorded by a kid using a Fisher Price tape recorder, he delivers the high-pitched voiceover narration into a standard desktop computer microphone. It takes him about four days to put together an installment using this setup, which allows him to keep the comedy topical.
After mercilessly skewering Mel Gibson, our intrepid child reporter turned his attention to Major League baseball players using ‘needle juice’ to get super strong and took time to comment on the Pope’s September 12 remarks about Islam and terrorism.
Whereas Sinead O’Connor caused outrage when she ripped up a photo of the Pope on Saturday Night Live several years ago, Morton was able to depict the pontiff getting his head cut of by sword-wielding Muslims without drawing fire from neither Catholics nor followers of Mohammad, who consequently is represented by a photo of actor Scott Baio from the ’80s.
‘I was waiting for the notes on the ‘Pope-a-Dope’ episode and the first note I got back was, ‘You know, the naked boys and the Catholic thing, can we tone that down a little bit?’ And I said, ‘Anything else?’ ‘No, it’s pretty good.’ I’m getting away with more than I thought I would. I can say that now but maybe they’ll actually start to pay attention.’
Morton tells us that other writers on the show are handing him edgy material that probably wouldn’t fly in a sketch and asking him if he can incorporate it into his animation. ‘You can get away with so much more in animation.’
A fourth installment of Weekly Kids News focusing on the stem cell research debate between conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh and Michael J. Fox is scheduled to air this Saturday during Fox’s late-night sketch comedy show. ‘My take on it is how the media is making more of a fuss over it than anybody else,’ Morton remarks. ‘I have Rush Limbaugh, Fox News and CNN giving their own takes on it and it really becomes a big mess. Then I actually have a scene with, as best as I can, a baby being aborted and what they do with the dead babies. It’s not as graphic as I’m explaining it, but it’s from a kid’s point of view as he’s sitting there watching the news and going, ‘I have no idea what they’re telling me.’
Though he still write the occasional sketch, Morton has been working on the animated segments since they have become such popular part of the show. He’s also working on bringing his Jo Jo character into the mix and is developing other animated shorts, including some twisted bedtime stories and something called Bad Kitty, in which a household pet’s behavioral issues turn into a horror movie. That one will debut in a few weeks. Until then, you can look forward to a new Toby short each week.
Morton is developing several concepts that he plans to pitch to networks as animated series. ‘I think there’s a place for late-night animation on network, so I’m going to take a shot on a couple of ideas and see what happens. Hopefully what I’m doing here at Mad TV will give me a good reel and give them the idea that it does have a place in late-night television.’
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