Care and Feeding of your Whammies

Sometime late last year Greggo asked me to animate some "Whammies" for his Anime Press Your Luck gameshow. I thought, heck yeah. Especially since I'd started doing animation with Toon Boom. Now I could actually create animation instead of sending Greggo drawings of "Whammies." So, I started drawing Whammies on the Averatec. And then somebody kicked in the back door and stole the Averatec with the Whammies on it.

So, I'm back to doing it the old fashioned way: scanning inked drawings.

After spending January putting together a canned OtakuHELL show for OhayoCon I started working on Whammies in February. It's been a few years since I'd drawn a Whammie, but I was working along the lines of this:




But I wasn't too happy with the way these Whammies were turning out. I just wasn't getting a "Whammie" vibe from these. So I went to the internet and looked up the classic Whammie.



I was kind of curious about who designed and animated the original Whammies. Turns out they were made by the team behind EEK! The Cat: Savage Steve Holland and Bill Kopp. Which I can sorta see in the animation. I wanted to go back to the look and feel of the original designs:



Still not quite there, but I was thinking I was on to something...