The animation was syndicated to TV stations across the country. Noack’s best-known creation is The Weather Man, a triangular cartoon character who appeared on TV weather reports. “We beat (animation studio) Hanna-Barbera by several months,” said Noack, 86, sitting in his Cape Coral living room. Scratch the Caveman, Colonel Bleep and The Weather Man: Fran Noack knew all three of them well.Īn exhibit of Noack’s paintings opens today at The Alliance for the Arts, but the Cape Coral man is best known for the TV cartoon characters he created, designed or otherwise helped bring to the air in the 1950s.Īs art director for Miami’s Soundac TV Film Productions, Noack created TV weather mascot The Weather Man and drew occasional concept art for the ground-breaking “Colonel Bleep” series-the first TV cartoon broadcast in color. They’re cute in their own way and you can find them on video-sharing sites.Ĭape Coral artist created some of TV’s early cartoon characters. He doesn’t take any credit for Bleep, other than he “drew occasional concept art.” What’s interesting is he claims to have been responsible for “The Weather Man,” which employed pose-to-pose animation (if you want to call it that) as some happy tunesters sang a jingle before George Fenneman announced a vague, one-line weather prediction (“Rain, and cooler”). Long after retirement, he was interviewed by the Fort Meyers News-Press. Fran Noack was the art director for Soundac. There may be little animation and the stories may be pretty basic (they were aimed at younger children who loved outer space) but the designs are neat and some of the movement short-cuts were imaginative.īut there was another artist involved. Schleh designed the characters and directed the cartoons. Schleh chatted with historian Jerry Beck. The last listing for the series I could discover was in early 1973. Newspaper TV listings show the half-hours began airing on WGR-TV in Buffalo every Monday evening as of SeptemI can’t find anything earlier. Variety reported on Jthat 78 half-hour episodes (in colour) were being readied for syndication, with Richard Ullman of Buffalo signed to find stations willing to air them. It doesn’t appear the cartoons aired in 1956. The cartoon starred “interplanetary investigator” Colonel Bleep and “space deputies” Squeak (a puppet) and Scratch (a caveman) battling the evil Dr. Buchanan, but the man behind it all was the company’s production manager, a former animator named Jack Schleh. That’s the year a cartoon called “Man Hunt on the Moon” was copyrighted by Soundac’s general manager Robert D. Miami wasn’t near the television capitals of New York City or Hollywood/Los Angeles, but Soundac decided to give it a go in 1956. Crusader Rabbit (also 1950), produced by Alex Anderson and Jay Ward, was a narrated adventure series with humour but very little character animation. The adventure series NBC Comics (1950) was little more than still drawings with an intoning narrator. There weren’t too many examples to follow. Soundac Productions decided to try for something bigger-a cartoon series for television. Once upon a time, there was a company in Florida that made animated commercials.
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