I really love Wind In The Willows. Mind you, I spend more time watching kid’s shows than anything else. If you don’t know it, it’s a series of children’s stories written by an Englishman way back in the early 1900s. Since then it’s been made into radioplays, cartoons and apparently even a live action movie with much of the cast of Monty Python?!? The version I love is the stop motion animated series that was done in the 80s.

When I got my hands on the complete DVD collection (what a day that was!), I watched the entire thing in about 2 weeks. I spent much of that time explaining to my girlfriend just how much of a dick Mr. Toad is. To be honest, I don’t think the story was ever part of my childhood, but it does a scary good job of capturing that feeling of being a kid at grandma’s house. And it’s real nice to look at with your eyeballs…

So, if you are looking for some old stop-motion inspiration with really nice sets, find it & watch an episode or two. There is an episode called “The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn” that gets pretty weird, but in a good way that makes your brain feel funny. I can’t recommend watching all 5 seasons in a row, after Season 1 I think the writer’s just stopped trying and Mr. Toad’s constant screwing up becomes obnoxious…. But! The general look and feel is amazing and has definitely inspired what we want to achieve with our next stop-motion, People Who Live Under Rocks. Just check out this clip (you can skip to around 1:00 in) of Mole End and look at all the tiny details…

P.S. This clip also has a good moral about how high society is a bunch of tiresome phonies, and drinking beer while playing skittles with your family is what it’s really all about… 

Next week is Colleen’s birthday. She doesn’t really like people to know about it. You can’t find the date online (until now). She’s not really big on celebrations…

So, I thought it would be cool to have a big contest for everyone on the internet and give away a bunch of awesome free stuff to celebrate! She’ll be pissed! From now until the big day (March 24th), everyone who signs up to our mailing list will be automatically entered to win 3 free zines from We Ain’t Friends. We’ll ship you hard copies of EZ Grocery & Video, House Hats & Carpalapse! We’ll also publish any sort of Happy Birthday message you might like to share here on the website and on our Twitter. (I’m available to help make this the maximum amount of embarrassing for Colleen).

All you have to do is visit our mailing list, enter your email address and you’re all set! You can also enter by simply commenting on this blog post below. For those of you who join the new mailing list, we’ll be sending out bi-weekly comics, animations and clever little pieces of the internet.  You’ll get to see exclusive behind-the-scenes stuff that we don’t release to the world, we’ll check out your stuff, you’ll check out ours, it’ll be a good time!

Sign up now for your chance, we will announce the big winner on March 24th!

Winner Announced!

I went out looking for locations to shoot a few scenes of our next stop-motion project, “People Who Live Under Rocks”. Without giving away too much, here is a taste of where we’ll be shooting. Colleen is hard at work on the mannequins and I’ve got some more script editing to do, but we’ll fill you in on some more details about the project soon!