Teeny Little Super Guy
| Teeny Little Super Guy | |
|---|---|
 Teeny Little Super Guy | |
| Directed by | Paul Fierlinger |
| Written by | Dave Thurman Jim Thurman |
| Produced by | Edith Zornow |
| Starring | Ezra Mohawk Stuart Horn |
| Cinematography | Paul Fierlinger Dave Connell |
| Edited by | Tom McMahon |
| Music by | Ezra Mohawk Larry Gold John Avarese Stuart Horn |
| Distributed by | AR&T Sesame Street CTW |
Release dates | January 1, 1982 |
Running time | 15 min. |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $60,000 |
Teeny Little Super Guy was an animated short series on PBS, and has reran on the Nickelodeon cable network. It's about Teeny little super guy who lives in a kitchen. He stays in a cup and he usually helps his best friends, like Robert W. Shipshape; or, known by his friends as R.W. Shipshape, who is a boy who stays in a salt shaker.
Background
Teeny Little Super Guy (TLSG) was created by Paul Fierlinger as a series of 13 installments for PBS' for Sesame Street in 1982. The Teeny Little Super Guy cartoon took two months to create. The segment was shown on Sesame Street frequently for several years. However in the late 1990s the segment was shown periodically (eventually unshown on any episode from 1997-2000). Finally it last appeared on Sesame Street in 2001. However they ran a short clipping (the theme song only) on Sesame Street's 35th Anniversary Special, Sesame Street- The Street We Live On on April 4, 2004. Now it's on the Nickelodeon television series Pinwheel from 2001 to Present.
Famous byline: "You can't tell a hero by his size."
The shorts also aired on Nickelodeon's Sesame Street-esque series, Pinwheel.
Lyrics
(Announced): "Ladies and Gentlemen: The Teeny Little Super Guy."
Teeny Little Super Guy
Pops right up before your eye
He's no bigger than your thumb
"Snap your fingers, here I come
Now stop me if you've heard this one..."
Don't look in the sky
Don't look in the sea
He's inside of you and me
"Did I ever tell you about the time?..."
You can't tell a hero by his size
(Together)
"I'm just a Teeny Little Super Guy"
Just a Teeny Little Super Guy
Oh yea!
Music
- Piano, Vocals, and The Announcer - Paul Fierlinger
- Vocals, Kitchen Cuboard sounds, and The voice of the Teeny Little Superguy - Ezra Mohawk
- Vocals, and Kitchen sounds - Larry Gold
- Vocals, and Feet sounds - John Avarese
- Vocals, and Moving Cup sounds - Stuart Horn
Production
Fierlinger gave details on the production of the series in a LiveJournal posting.
- What started TLSG was my need to secure a series; I craved steady income. I was told by Dave Connell (CTW’s vice president and Program Director) that there is no chance for a freelancer to get a series simply because it is out of the reach of one guy to produce a steady supply of spots every week. This was way before computer graphics technology became sophisticated enough to handle color and huge memory storage requirements, around 1985.
The production for Teeny Little Super Guy started in 1980 with Paul Fierlinger, Larry Gold, Dave Connell, Dave Thurman, Jim Thurman, Stuart Horn, Ezra Mohawk, Tom McMahon and Edith Zornow. In 1981 the production for Teeny Little Super Guy devolped more seriously into filming. In 1982 the cartoon Teeny Little Super Guy premired on the PBS children show called Sesame Street. Rock Star Ezra Mohawk did the theme song and the voice of Teeny Little Super Guy. The production started filming in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at Larry Gold's house on 2nd Street at the time it started. It ran on Sesame Street from 1982 - 2001 and now it runs reruns on the Nickeloden series Pinwheel from 2001 - Present. They started filming his little adventures right before actor Will Lee who played Mr. Hooper on the PBS children's show Sesame Street died in late 1982. The character didn't really have any super powers. The Idea came from little Jimmy Durante playing with kitchen ware and on house hold counter tops. The best memory of Teeny Little Super Guy is helping a little boy on to an egg beater with out little egg beater training wheels for the first time.
- I focused on figuring out a way to prove Dave wrong and came up with a way to draw entire sets of walking, talking, running, jumping cycles of a little man on animation cels (single “l” is correct; it’s short for celluloid) but instead of cycling them as flat sheets on an animation stand, I could roll them up to look like cups and move them around real household objects – just the way kids do when they play with ordinary objects. The advantage was that other props didn’t have to be drawn, neither did backgrounds, nor did the character have to be drawn in many sizes from different angles – all that was needed was to rotate the same cups and shoot the sets from different angles.
- We ended up cutting the character out of the cels and pasting to the inside of Clear Plastic Dixie cups with Scotch spray (it’s transparent) and ran a test, using Larry's house as backgrounds (read “we” as X wife, Helena and two little sons Peter and Philip and little daughter Emily). Dave Thurman and Jim Thurman (Sesame Street writer who became the TLSG writer and V.O.) liked the results and I was given a budget to create 3 spots in 3 weeks (2 minutes each I think, but they might have been longer). I passed that test too so now Dave became really serious about developing the idea into a character.
- It was his idea that the character be a super hero, which made me hate him for that for about a week. I couldn’t understand people who couldn’t come up with anything more original for an animated character than yet another super guy. But Jim Thurman started playing him down and I dropped my resentments. We all followed Sesame Street’s curriculum of topics and I was given a contract to develop the series. I had a couple of months to create the hundreds of cups that were needed to play out any possible scenario and create the sound tracks.
- The composer was Larry Gold. His friend, Stuart Horn; an eccentric, dreamy, sometimes charmingly sleazy and enormously creative gay guy wrote the song’s lyrics. The four-part harmony was sung by a period Rock Star, Singer, Songwriter, and Actor, Ezra Mohawk and John Avarese and recorded on a four-track Teac reel-to-reel machine in Larry’s kitchen on 2nd Street (we are all Philadelphians).
External links
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