Between the early 1970s and the early 2000s, Spike and Mike’s Festival of Animation was something truly unique: A touring roadshow, featuring unique animated shorts, of the type that the pre-YouTube world had no way of seeing at the time.
In 1990, the festival added the “Sick and Twisted” section, featuring more risque and violent fare, including such offbeat classics as The Dirty Birdy, No Neck Joe, and Dreamboy. Celebrities like “Weird Al” Yankovic and Seth Green frequented the shows, while many of the animators went on to create popular mainstream shows, working everywhere from Pixar to Adult Swim.
The touring road show petered out eventually, although it’s continued to have one-off revivals, at Comic-cons and other such events. Animation Outlaws, a documentary about the scene, came out in 2020 and I wrote about it here.
In 2023, Skybound Entertainment acquired the festival, and on Halloween weekend, it’s launching a new version of the festival at Regal Cinemas around the country. We talked to Chelsea Harfoush, the producer of the revived festival, about what brought it back and what to expect.
LLF: So let me just tell you, first of all, I was really big into Spike and Mike’s back in the 90s. I was living in Boston then and I would go see it. I think the Coolidge Corner Theater is where it would come in. And so I’ve kind of followed the careers of some of the animators who have all gone on to a lot of things. And about five years ago, I wrote a piece when that Animation Outlaws documentary came out. So, and I heard about the revival when it was happening. I think when it was first announced probably two years ago and so I’ve kind of been following it. So I’m really glad to hear that it’s on the way. I wanna first hear the story of how you got involved with this and how this revival came about.
CH: I got involved in 2023 through the company I work for, Skybound Entertainment which was putting on the event. At Skybound, I handle… my team calls ourselves the redheaded stepchildren of the linear film and TV team because we handle all of the kind of like weird projects that don’t always fit into a really obvious film or television bucket
And so you know when this came to me I was immediately like ‘I want this, give this to me, we can make this something so cool’ and the reason I felt that way is because and I’m sure you know this from your personal experience and from the amazing work that Kat Alioshin did on Animation Outlaws. But when Spike and Mike’s started in the late ‘70s early ‘80s and then, especially, when Sick and Twisted started in the ’90s, this was in many ways the only place at the time that you could really find consistent adult-oriented animation. Animation was so dominated by the children’s content market and this is what these really talented animators were doing after hours.
Their day job was making stuff for the Mouse, and after hours, they were making Sick and Twisted stuff for Spike and Mike. So now, in 2023, adult animation is the fastest-growing genre. We at Skybound make Invincible, which is one of the number one adult animation series worldwide. So I really want to figure out what is the 2020s version of being right on the forefront, of pushing this medium forward. And to me it is representation, it is opportunity, and it is lifting up underrepresented voices in the animation community.
It’s been a minute since I saw this stat so I’m hoping that you know a journalist will vet me on this, but I believe something around like 30 percent of animators who are in the Animation Guild — so people who have already been successful enough to join the guild — are currently out of work. It’s a industry-wide problem but it’s especially hitting animators hard so we want Spike and Mike to be a place where you know the animation community thrives, they’re supported, we are creating more opportunities for them. We have an IP development pipeline that we’re setting up through Spike and Mike.
We already acquired several of the shorts that are going to be in this program with the hopes of developing them the same way that we develop our you know comics IP like Invincible in-house. So we just want to show animation that you’ve never seen before so I feel like this collection of 24 shorts that’s going into the program this Halloween you know it’s everything from like a stop motion, to traditional, to hand to paper animation to computer animatio. One is made entirely of balloons like we’re just really trying to showcase just like the beautiful bounty of what these like cutting edge young animators can do.
LLF: Is Skybound a distributor? Is it a production company? What exactly is it?
CH: In some ways, it’s all of the above. I think the term that the suits kick around is a ‘transmedia company.’ The company was formed based on the success of our founder, Robert Kirkman’s comics, the two most famous being The Walking Dead and Invincible.
Robert and his partner, David Alpert, who’s now our CEO, took The Walking Dead out in the 2000s, and they went to every studio to try to get a TV adaptation made. But the one thing they said was, we’ll give you the right for television, but we’re keeping everything else.
We’re keeping comics, we’re keeping merchandise, we’re keeping everything. And they got laughed out of every room until it came to AMC and then the rest is history. And so it was off the success of that deal. One that the company was formed, but to that, the ethos of the company was formed, which is creator first, creator driven, treat creators the way that Robert had to fight to be treated.
So we take an IP, like I said, we have an entire comics division, we have an entire video games division, we have film and television. Like I said, my team, we do everything from, as you see, animated festivals, to audio dramas, podcasts, YouTube, that kind of stuff.
But we take a creator with an idea or an IP that we think is great and we say, ‘what’s everything this could be? Could this be merch? Could this be a video game? Could this be a movie?’ And that’s why we’re uniquely positioned for Spike and Mike to kind of nurture these indie animators, this new IP, one to get it out in the theaters, which is the first thing that we’re doing to try to sort of like revive the brand and get people excited. But then eventually the goal is to have an IP pipeline where we can develop these ideas and either put them out direct to consumer via YouTube or Kickstarter or something like that, or in traditional film or television.
LLF: So what is your background personally? Have you been with Skybound for a long time?
CH: I’ve been with Skybound for about four years. My career has been primarily in YouTube and podcast. Prior to Skybound, I’ve worked with several influencer-based brands, Rooster Teeth here in Austin, Texas. I’m based in Austin. And then Three Percent Chance, which was like another influencer podcast network, so I’ve always wanted to be creating content but directly for audiences as opposed to you know, the kind of four or five steps removed that come from being in the studio system.
LLF: Back in the day, they had the regular Spike and Mike’s and they had Sick and Twisted. Which one is the new one? Is it R-rated, or something else?
CH: So I would say, first and foremost, it is not for kids. I can’t tell other people what to do with their content and their families, but I would say that I would exercise extreme caution before bringing young folks to see it. We do have a hard content warning kind of right in the middle or towards the back third, where things get really, really nasty. But I would say even before that, it is not content that is geared towards children or young folks.
LLF: Are you targeting this towards older people who remember the original Spike and Mike’s, or maybe younger people who missed that era but are animation enthusiasts?
CH: It’s all of the above. When we talk about it internally, because we have a real broad swath of generations on the team, is we talk about like yeah like you know Gen X and older millennials who remember Spike and Mike, for younger millennials like myself this is like, really to me, it’s nostalgic for when we used to all sit in somebody’s dorm room and watch YouTube and everybody would load up a YouTube video.
It really has that feeling, and then for Gen Z, like older teens and then like college age, I think that this is something really new [and] cutting edge, it’s because it’s shorts, it has that same feel of like internet-based content.
[We also wanted to partner with people] known in the animation community and who had street cred, honestly, in that space and that’s why we partnered with Jaiden Animations and River Ross from the Green Game Grumps to MC the show throughout.
LLF: And it’s exclusive to Regal, is that correct?
CH: Yes, it’s an exclusive partner.
LLF: And it’s just the one weekend?
CH: It is just one weekend for now, but the hope right is that if it is successful, we could have more weekends either with this program or that we could do more programs in the future.
LLF: And will there be any streaming afterlife for this?
CH: It’s something that we are open to but there are no concrete plans.
LLF: And is it all new stuff or is there some older stuff mixed in?
CH: I would say it is about 85/15. [It’s] 85 percent new things that we have acquired and curated, and 15 percent some real classics, like No Neck Joe, for example.
LLF: Ah, I love No Neck Joe
CH: A real Spike and Mike classic, so yes, we’ve got that in there.
LLF: I know, Mike passed away, and Spike is still with us, is that correct?
CH: Yes.
LLF: Is he involved in this at all? I think I saw him share it on Facebook, but I haven’t heard anything else about that.
CH: Spike and Mike was acquired by Skybound via Spike, that partnership that we came into. So Spike is, looking for who’s going to basically steward the brand now that he is getting older. So he is still, he is not officially involved in the production of this. But obviously, he’s a very close and personal friend to Skybound and to me, and we’re so happy to have him out there, kind of like evangelizing for it. I know he’s going to be at some of the screenings in Southern California. And he’s still obviously very much like a sort of voice online for the brand.
LLF: Um, what’s your favorite film in the festival? Do you have one?
CH: That’s like picking a favorite child. My team and I curated the show out of, like, when we first opened submissions, when we announced that we were reviving it, we got over 200 submissions from all over. So bringing it down to the 24, I feel like I’ve seen these 24 shorts probably at least a dozen times, if not more.
I do love the one that is made of balloons. It’s called Baloney Beacon. I think it is so special. There’s another one called Debt and Misgivings that again, as a younger millennial, it just brings me back to like that liminal space when you wake up on the couch and Adult Swim has been playing, and you kind of are disoriented and you don’t know what’s happening. That is Debt and Misgivings. It’s so good. I shouldn’t do this cause I’ll just have something to say about them, but those two are very special.
LLF: Anything else you’d like to add about the festival?
CH: If folks are interested in learning more about Spike and Mike, about the history and about what we’re planning to do with it. They can come to our website, www.spikeandmikefest.com.
We are going to open submissions again, and we are going to start taking new content. We want to create more, like I said, opportunities, events, special contests, festivals, all of the above for the indie animation community. If you send an email through spikeandmikefest.com, I or somebody on my team is the one who reads it.
LLF: The way it was before was kind of a road show. Is there any thought of doing it that way again? Or is it just going to be all at once, like it is next weekend?
CH: I would never say never, but like, as I said, coming from the sort of like YouTube influencer space, I know how much fun a roadshow or kind of like a mini tour can be. I think the reason that we were so excited about the theater partnership is because for the first time, everyone around the country could watch it at the same time, whereas what I’ve heard from a lot of people is like, if you weren’t in one of those sort of major cities on the West Coast, or I think you’ve mentioned Boston, you probably didn’t get to see the show. So I would never want to lose the opportunity to broaden this and make it more accessible for more people, but that doesn’t mean that we couldn’t have an “and.”
Spike and Mike’s Animation Extravaganza is showing only in theaters from 10/31-11/2, you can find times and locations on regmovies.com.
