Cucumber Studios and Electric Dreams

In 1984 Rocky Morton and Anabel Jankel of Cucumber Studios - at the time known for their music videos, and later as the creators of Max Headroom - contributed to a spectacularly eighties romcom entitled Electric Dreams. The sequence in question sees a sentient computer dreaming of preventing an earthquake - trust me, it makes sense in context...

Themed around contemporary computer graphics, but made primarily through analogue animation, the sequence is an example of the pseudo-CGI phenomenon that I wrote about here.

Thanks to Chris Sobieniak for bringing this one to my attention.

Marx for Beginners

Marx for Beginners is a 1978 short film made by Cucumber Studios and Bob Godfrey's Movie Emporium. As far as I can tell it was Cucumber's first film, and is very different from the music videos which that studio became known for; the Bob Godfrey influence is stronger. The Readers and Writers Publishing Cooperative produced the short.

Perhaps befitting its theme the film's credits (which include some surprising names - Erica Russel, for one) do not identify a single director; all of the animators are placed in equal standing. However, Denis Gifford names Clive Morton and Kevin Attew - the first two names listed in the credits - as directors.

The short is one of those trip-through-the-ages cartoons (like Bruno Bozzetto's Grasshoppers, and Derek Phillips' A Passing Phase) made from, as its name suggests, a Marxist point of view. the film also contains an implied feminist criticism of Marxism, however: at various points a woman asks "what about me?" only to be put down by a male character. Even after the working class uprising at the end of the short she is still asking the same question, now with no-one answering at all...















R. Crumb's character Mr. Natural puts in a cameo, portraying Leonardo da Vinci, of all people.