The Body Electric (Atkinson Film-Arts, 1985)

Recently I discovered an interesting animated special produced up in Canada I never saw before, but only recall the name simply because of some model sheets a kind fellow had sent me years ago.  The special was titled "The Body Electric" and involved a race against time for two inhabitants of an enclosed city trying to escape being killed by the robotic forces that took over their civilization (a la The Matrix I suppose).  It was produced by Ottawa-based Atkinson Film-Arts, who had produced many other notable works in the 80's including the earliest featuring Kevin Gillis' "The Raccoons", "Babar & Father Christmas", several Care Bears specials, the Teddy Ruxpin series and even a Xmas special based on Lynn Johnston's "For Better or For Worse".  The copy was later bought out by another studio and eventually went bankrupt by the end of the decade.

Here's one TV report on the studio from 1986...

Here's the model sheets from The Body Electric for anyone curious into checking them out!

Here's an animated .gif I prepared of one scene where Woody slingshots a security camera.  This shot was animated by Graham Falk and cleaned-up by Gerard de Souza, who supplied me with copies of the drawings/model sheets from this production so big thanks to him!

And last, the special itself!  It was lucky someone up there managed to record it though I suppose the fact that the music along was by the rock group Rush is the reason for it at all.

The International Book of Comics (Denis Gifford, 1984)

Back in the 1980's my mom picked up this little title (though a rather giant book for an 9-10 year old to have) from some book shop she went to (or maybe it was a garage sale, I dunno).  All I know was that it was about comics but not what I had thought of at all as the comics I would get at the local drug store a few blocks from home.  This was a rather interesting book chronicle up to that point in time, comics of all sorts, genres and periods, though mostly UK-centric given it's author but also does quite a good job on the North American side too.  Not so much for those of other countries though they do try to get in a blurb or two.  Japan apparently gets lumped into a section on horror and a copy of the initial US release of "Barefoot Gen" is seen in the opening pages (not a whole log on manga at all but to alleviate that, I'd recommend Frederik Schodt's "Manga! Manga!: The World of Japanese Comics").

The following are some random pages from the book, which was published both in the UK and US...