"Bill Plympton is God!" (Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons and Futurama)

Matt's not the only one who thinks that way. Troma's Lloyd Kaufman has the same opinion, and who am I to argue? If I do, they may send Groundskeeper Willie and Toxie to whoop my ass, so I better shut up and nod. But then again, Plympton may not be THE God of catholic credo. Maybe's he's one of the cooler gods like Bacchus, Svarog or Clapton. And just like any bonafide God, Bill Plympton is everywhere. You may not put a face, no matter how everchanging, to the name, but you certainly saw his work. Bill's a cartoonist who made gajillions of caricatures for big papers and magazines (including The New York Times, Vogue, The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, Screw, Vanity Fair, Penthouse, Playboy, National Lampoon etc); he also created the wackiest cel animations from the 80's and beyond. Tex Avery would have a tought time imagining such warped scenarios if he had unlimited acess to David Crosby's private pharmacy, and out-Texing Tex is not an easy task!

Now thanks to IndieDVD (www.indiedvd.com), the best Plymptoonisms are available on this supa-dupa special edition. What do we get here? Well, for starters there's the complete content of the inaccurately titled "Plymptoons: The Complete Works of Bill Plympton" Laserdisc released years ago. And SO much more. The fun starts with an intro by Troma's main man Lloyd Kaufman, who storms Bill's studio for a gonzo interview. We learn how drugs shaped Plympton's style (so drugs aren't really that bad, mmkay?), we see Bill drawing, we watch as Kaufman steals rare Plymptorabilia to sell on Ebay, and we get a first view of Bill's next project, the horror feature "Hair High". I wanna watch it!

Then comes the shorts. Apart from two early Plympton shorts from 1968 ("The Turn On" and the boring "Lucas, The Ear of Corn") and the so-so music video "245 Days" by Peter Himmelman (animation's o-tay, song is 80's blah), everything contained inside this silver disk is pure, undiluted gold. First there's "Boomtown", a cynic vision of America's belic paranoia written by cartoonist Jules Feiffer and sung by the Android Sisters. Then comes "Drawing Lesson #2", about the doomed love between a drawing line and a real girl; this short mixes on-camera animation, some stop motion and live action. The Oscar-nominated "Your Face" is the next, and you can sing along with adorable lyrics like "You made me a happy fella / no more singing a capella". Then we see portions of a rejected project for a T.V. sitcom called "Love in the Fast Lane", made in HB's minimalist style of animation. It's not Bill's best work and that's all I have to say about it. But then we're treated to the wondrous "One of Those Days", a day in the life of an out-of-luck guy who should never get up the bed in the first place. Told entirely in the P.O.V. of the character, it's one of the funniest things ever commited on animation.

And there's more, much much more! There's the absolutely hilarious series of shorts "25 Ways to Quit Smoking" and "How to Kiss", some MTV interstitials, TV ads for Trivial Pursuit and Nutrasweet's Sugar Delight (this one re-uses a couple of gags from "25 Ways") and seven minutes of quick "Plymptoons" that range from clever to hysterically funny. Just don't laugh too much, or your face may break up in two just like a Plympton character!

There are some stuff left out, like the "Push Comes to Shove" and "The Wiseman" series from MTV, and, most notably, "Nosehair" (maybe on a volume 2?). Snippets from those series, and the also absent "How To Make Love to A Woman", can be seen on the two interviews included on the DVD - one with pornmeinster Al Goldstein for Screw TV (5 min), the other for the fantastic Nickelodeon show SPLAT! (9 min). This special edition also includes two home movies: an unnamed Super-8 short about a gory homecoming party (1 min) and the S.O.V. "House of Weirdness", where a Home Humiliation System is sold on a Shoptime parody style. Oh, yeah: every short is accompanied by a commentary track by The Plympster himself, and the package includes a poster will lots of interesting text info.

Caveat emptor: there's also a cheaper barebones edition available thru Slingshot. If you had the chance to see the (imagine big David Spade-like "air-quote marks" now) outstanding work Slingshot/Lumivision does on their DVDs, you know what to choose. The IndieDVD SE is the ONLY way to go if you're a real animation buff, so stop being cheap, dammit!