Science Court | |
---|---|
Also known as | Squigglevision |
Genre | animation/nontraditional court show |
Created by | Tom Snyder |
Developed by | Tom Snyder |
Written by | Bill Braudis David Dockterman Tom Snyder |
Directed by | Loren Bouchard Tom Snyder |
Voices of | Bill Braudis Paula Plum H. Jon Benjamin Paula Poundstone Fred Stoller |
Original language | English |
No. of seasons | 3 |
No. of episodes | 29 |
Production | |
Executive producers | Bonnie Burns Tom Snyder |
Producers | Loren Bouchard Tom Snyder |
Cinematography | Ivan Rhudick (post-production director) |
Running time | 30 minutes |
Production companies | Burns & Burns Productions Tom Snyder Productions |
Original release | |
Network | ABC (Disney's One Saturday Morning) |
Release | September 13, 1997 – January 22, 2000 |
Science Court (retitled Squigglevision in 1998) [1] is an educational entertainment, animation/non-traditional court show from Tom Snyder Productions, which was aired on ABC's Disney's One Saturday Morning block from 1997 to 2000. The cartoon was animated in Squigglevision. [2]
Science Court utilized the limited-animation Squigglevision as its style of animation. [3] In 1998, Science Court was renamed to Squigglevision in its second to third seasons. Tom Snyder Productions has released twelve of the episodes into a series of educational CD-ROMs with accompanying workbooks and experiment kits for schools. [4] On December 2, 2004, Snyder, founder and former CEO of Tom Snyder Productions, was inducted into the Association of Educational Publishers Hall of Fame to honor his extraordinary contribution to educational publishing. [5]
The half-hour program mixed courtroom drama, science experiments, and humor to teach fundamental concepts in elementary and middle school science such as the water cycle, work, matter, gravity, flight, and energy. As each case unfolded, the characters in the trial used humor to highlight scientific misconceptions and model good scientific practice. [6] In a typical episode, a lawsuit or criminal action would take place based around some scientific point. Humor and musical numbers were used to break down scientific concepts. [7]
The primary characters of Science Court were the trial lawyers Alison Krempel and Doug Savage. Alison Krempel, voiced by Paula Plum, was modest, intelligent and kind. Her logical and articulate arguments always lead to the explanations of the scientific points. Doug Savage, voiced by Bill Braudis, was ignorant, arrogant and unscrupulous.
Both Doug and Allison called on a variety of expert witnesses to prove their case. Doug, often to his detriment, called upon child academics Dr. Julie Bean and Dr. Henry Fullerghast to testify. Their scientific testimony usually disproved Doug’s case. Professor Nick Parsons, voiced by H. Jon Benjamin served as an expert for Alison Krempel. He used science to successfully refute Doug Savage's usually ludicrous and ill-informed claims. Often Micaela and Tim, Miss Krempel's assistant, helped to break down scientific concepts. Comedians Paula Poundstone and Fred Stoller rounded out the cast playing Judge Stone and court stenographer Fred respectively.
This section needs a plot summary.(October 2015) |
No. overall | No. in season | Title | Original air date |
---|---|---|---|
1 | 1 | "Water Cycle" | September 13, 1997 |
2 | 2 | "Work and Simple Machines" | September 20, 1997 |
3 | 3 | "Gravity" | September 27, 1997 |
4 | 4 | "Inertia" | October 4, 1997 |
5 | 5 | "Sound" | October 11, 1997 |
6 | 6 | "Data & Statistics" | October 18, 1997 |
7 | 7 | "Particles" | October 25, 1997 |
8 | 8 | "Heat Absorption" | November 1, 1997 |
9 | 9 | "Electric Current" | November 8, 1997 |
10 | 10 | "Soil" | December 13, 1997 |
11 | 11 | "Living Things" | December 27, 1997 |
12 | 12 | "Seasons" | January 10, 1998 |
13 | 13 | "Fossils" | January 17, 1998 |
No. overall | No. in season | Title | Original air date |
---|---|---|---|
14 | 1 | "Rockets" | September 12, 1998 |
15 | 2 | "Pendulums" | September 19, 1998 |
16 | 3 | "Lightning" | September 26, 1998 |
17 | 4 | "Friction" | October 3, 1998 |
18 | 5 | "Flight" | October 10, 1998 |
19 | 6 | "Planets" | October 17, 1998 |
20 | 7 | "Reflection" | January 2, 1999 |
21 | 8 | "Magnets" | January 16, 1999 |
No. overall | No. in season | Title | Original air date |
---|---|---|---|
22 | 1 | "Acid Rain" | September 11, 1999 |
23 | 2 | "Barn Fire" | September 18, 1999 |
24 | 3 | "Hang Time" | September 25, 1999 |
25 | 4 | "Siphon" | October 2, 1999 |
26 | 5 | "Rocks" | October 30, 1999 |
27 | 6 | "Depth Perception" | November 6, 1999 |
28 | 7 | "Compass" | January 15, 2000 |
29 | 8 | "Density" | January 22, 2000 |
Science Court earned top television awards for Tom Snyder. [5]
Variety thought that the TV series tried too hard to make science entertaining, and that it would come across as too complicated for its target audience. [8]
Frederick Aaron Savage is an American actor and director. He is best known for his role as Kevin Arnold in the American television series The Wonder Years (1988–1993). He has earned several awards and nominations, such as People's Choice Awards and Young Artist Awards. He is also known for playing the Grandson in The Princess Bride, and voiced the title protagonist in Oswald. Savage has worked as a director, and in 2005 later starred in the television sitcom Crumbs. Savage returned to acting in the television series The Grinder, as well as the Netflix series Friends from College.
Alice in Wonderland is a 1933 American pre-Code fantasy film adapted from the novels by Lewis Carroll. The film was produced by Paramount Pictures, featuring an all-star cast. It is all live action, except for the Walrus and The Carpenter sequence, which was animated by Harman-Ising Studio.
Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! is an hour-long weekly news radio panel show produced by WBEZ and National Public Radio (NPR) in Chicago, Illinois. On the program, panelists and contestants are quizzed in humorous ways about that week's news. It is distributed by NPR in the United States, internationally on NPR Worldwide and on the Internet via podcast, and typically broadcast on weekends by member stations. The show averages about six million weekly listeners on air and via podcast.
Home Movies is an American animated sitcom created by Brendon Small and Loren Bouchard. The show centers on an eight-year-old aspiring filmmaker, also named Brendon Small, who makes homemade film productions in his spare time with his friends Melissa Robbins and Jason Penopolis. He lives with his divorced mother Paula and his adopted baby sister Josie. He develops a skewed father-son-like relationship with his alcoholic, short-tempered soccer coach, John McGuirk.
Paula Poundstone is an American stand-up comedian, author, actress, interviewer, and commentator. Beginning in the late 1980s, she performed a series of one-hour HBO comedy specials. She provided backstage commentary during the 1992 presidential election on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. She is the host of the podcast Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone, which is the successor to the National Public Radio program Live from the Poundstone Institute. She was a frequent panelist on NPR's weekly news quiz show Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me, and a recurring guest on the network's A Prairie Home Companion variety program during Garrison Keillor's years as host.
The Weird Al Show is an American television show hosted by "Weird Al" Yankovic. Produced in association with Dick Clark Productions and taped at NBC Studios, it aired on Saturday mornings on CBS. The show ran for one season, from September to December 1997. The show was released on DVD on August 15, 2006.
Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist is an American adult animated sitcom created by Jonathan Katz and Tom Snyder for Comedy Central. It originally ran from May 28, 1995, to February 13, 2002. The series starred the voice talents of Jonathan Katz, H. Jon Benjamin, and Laura Silverman. The show was produced by Popular Arts Entertainment, HBO Downtown Productions, and Tom Snyder Productions. The series won a Peabody Award in 1998.
Squigglevision is a method of computer animation in which the outlines of shapes are made to wiggle and undulate, emulating the effect of sketchily hand-drawn animation. Tom Snyder of Tom Snyder Productions invented the technique, which his animation studio Soup2Nuts subsequently used in Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist in 1995, and in Dick and Paula Celebrity Special, Home Movies, O'Grady, and Science Court.
The Animal is a 2001 American science fiction comedy film directed by Luke Greenfield, written by Tom Brady and Rob Schneider from a story conceived by Brady, and produced by Barry Bernardi, Carr D'Angelo, and Todd Garner. It stars Schneider in the lead role, alongside Colleen Haskell, John C. McGinley, Guy Torry, and Edward Asner with supporting roles by Michael Caton and Louis Lombardi. The film depicts a police station evidence clerk who is critically injured and is put back together by a mad scientist who transplants animal parts, resulting in strange animalistic changes to his behavior.
The Dick and Paula Celebrity Special is an adult animated series that aired on FX in 1999. The premise of the show was that Dick and Paula hosted a talk show where famous individuals, usually deceased, talked about their work or what made them widely known. The guest list included Charles Darwin, Marquis de Sade, Oedipus Rex, and Lewis and Clark, among many others. Accompanying the two hosts was a Paul Shaffer-esque keyboard player. This premise bears similarities with that of Steve Allen's Meeting of Minds.
Soup2Nuts was an American animation studio founded by Tom Snyder. The studio is known for its animated comedy series, its use of Squigglevision, a technique of animation that reuses frames to make the animation look more kinetic, and for its style of improvisation in voice acting. In the Tom Snyder Productions logo, it was depicted as a pirate ship in space. In the Soup2Nuts logo, it was depicted as a rattling soup can with the company name.
The Funny Company is an American animated cartoon produced in 1963 and seen in syndication. Ken Snyder and Charles Koren produced 260 six-minute-long episodes. The Mattel Corporation provided financial backing. Snyder conceived the program in response to then-Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman Newton N. Minow's call for more educational children's programs.
O'Grady is an American animated comedy television series created by Tom Snyder, Carl W. Adams, and Holly Schlesinger for Noggin's teen programming block, The N. The show features the voices of H. Jon Benjamin, Melissa Bardin Galsky, Patrice O'Neal, and Holly Schlesinger playing a group of four teenagers living in the town of O'Grady. In each episode, the characters experience a different supernatural phenomenon while also facing ordinary high school challenges. The show was animated at Snyder's Soup2Nuts studio.
Quantum Quest: A Cassini Space Odyssey is a 2010 animated educational documentary science fiction adventure film, written by Harry 'Doc' Kloor and directed by Kloor and Dan St. Pierre, that takes the viewer on an atomic adventure in space.
Tom Snyder is an American animator, writer and producer known for the Squigglevision animation technique. His first success with this method was Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist, starring Jonathan Katz.
The Bell System Science Series consists of nine television specials made for the AT&T Corporation that were originally broadcast in color between 1956 and 1964. Marcel LaFollette has described them as "specials that combined clever story lines, sophisticated animation, veteran character actors, films of natural phenomena, interviews with scientists, and precise explanation of scientific and technical concepts—all in the pursuit of better public understanding of science." Geoff Alexander and Rick Prelinger have described the films as "among the best known and remembered educational films ever made, and enthroning Dr. Frank Baxter, professor at the University of Southern California, as something of a legend as the omniscient king of academic science films hosts."
"Get Away From My Mom" is the pilot episode of the American animated sitcom Home Movies. It originally aired on the UPN network in the United States on April 26, 1999. In the episode, eight-year-old Brendon Small discovers that his mother, Paula, is set to have a date with Brendon's soccer coach, the lazy, profane alcoholic John McGuirk. Brendon resents McGuirk for this and expresses his outrage throughout the episode. The date goes terribly and McGuirk and Paula decide to not pursue a relationship. Meanwhile, Brendon and his friends Melissa and Jason film a new movie about a rogue police officer.
The first season of the animated sitcom Home Movies originally began airing in the United States on the television network UPN from April 26 to May 24, 1999, and on Cartoon Network from September 2 to October 7, 2001. The pilot episode was titled, "Get Away From My Mom." Co-creators Brendon Small and Loren Bouchard, along with Tom Sydner, served as writers, executive producers, and directors for the season. The season utilized Sydner's signature "squigglevision" animation style, though it would change to a more "conventional" flash-animated style for the subsequent three seasons.
The second season of the animated sitcom Home Movies aired in the United States on Cartoon Network’s programming block Adult Swim from January 6 to March 31, 2002.Every Sunday and Thursday night at 9:00 p.m. Central time and 10:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Co-creators Brendon Small and Loren Bouchard, along with Tom Snyder, served as the executive producers for the season. Small and Bill Braudis acted as writers for the season, while Bouchard was director for each episode.
Events in 1959 in animation.
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