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Earwig

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Re: Arthur @ NY Comic Con 2013
« on: October 15, 2013, 07:47:49 pm »
Since I can't afford to travel cross-country on a school weekend, I'll just list my questions now, in case someone living in New York sees this topic.
  • According to a Press Release from 2009, Lydia is planned to be in two additional future episodes. What's the status on those?
  • Steve's design was taken from a character in the book Arthur's Teacher Trouble. How many others were like this, and which ones were freshly designed for the show?
  • What are the names of the Lakewood kids who are not in Ratburn's class?
  • Who's Dewey?
  • Are the books and the cartoon considered to be part of the same canon? If so, which takes priority in conflicting accounts?

You know Magne, Arthur is on Twitter. If you do have the chance you could potentially ask that question days before the event takes place, which is next Sunday.

I will try to answer because these don't seem so mysterious.
I didn't know there were 2 more Lydia shows but I do know that one more is being planned for season 18 but there are no details yet.

Steve is taken from the book like you mentionned. I think Maria is also. Sue Ellen is but looks very different in the book. George was origionally done as a new incidental kid and his name initially was moose boy as far as animation was concerened.
There are lots of known other kids at Lakewood that are not in Arthur's class. Such as Prunella, the tough customers, There are also some little kids first graders. There is also the Sweetwater class which is another 3 rd grade class. I could try to find the models and tell you the names but these names may even change if they ever become a speaking part. They currently all have names so that they can be identified as something on the model sheets that are available for storyboard artists.
Often they are named after the designer or people that worked in Cinar studios at the time. I know there is a Richard named after Richard Morris the designer for one example . I will need to look into this further.

Basically you need to remember that the series began in 1994 after about 15 books were done. So only the characters in those books were taken from the books. Arthur in many of the books looked very different than what you see in the series. I would hope that people now recognize Arthur and his friends as the ones that exist in the animated series rather than the books.
In illustration the character can change proportion and detail and size from picture to picture but in animation the model needs to be 3 dimensional and consistant as it moves from image to image  to create animation . If it changes each drawing then it would flicker and distort in some bizarre manner.
To note that Marc Brown's books that came out after the series began in 1995 are stories and designs that were taken from the artists at Cinar and the writers that wrote the scripts in the US.

The series facts and continuity are now the bible and overule anything in the books at this point.

I'm not sure about Dewey. Can you send me more info on him?