Cartoons

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Marvel Productions will produce cartoons for movie theaters that will be shown the theaters just before Twentieth Century Fox Inc. releases, the two companies said. The studio said Monday that the cartoons, to be called "Fox Toons," should be ready for Fox summer movies in 1991. The studio's deal with Marvel follows a similar effort by Walt Disney Co., which has packaged Roger Rabbit cartoons with "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" and "Dick Tracy. " The company did not say how many cartoons Marvel will produce.

Independent television station executives know that the same kids who have to be cajoled into going to bed at a decent hour have no problem waking up at 6 a.m. to watch cartoons. Channel 29 greets the kiddies at 6:30 a.m. with "Fat Albert" and Channel 57 hypnotizes them at the same time with "Inspector Gadget. " Meanwhile, at 7 a.m., Channel 17 airs "Woody Woodpecker. " The stations continue airing cartoons throughout the day - except for a mid-afternoon break for such oldies as "The Munsters" and "Bewitched.

Swarthmore College is always surprising us when it comes to art. This month it's happening at McCabe Library with a 30-item solo exhibit featuring Clay Bennett, the 2002 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning. Bennett produces editorial cartoons five days a week for the Christian Science Monitor, and his consistent ability to turn out very good work is shown by his being a finalist three years in a row before winning the Pulitzer. Born in South Carolina in 1958, the son of a much-traveled career Army officer of rock-ribbed Republican leanings, Clay Bennett had attended 10 schools by the time he graduated from high school in Huntsville, Ala. With his cartooning interests already apparent at the University of North Alabama, where he earned his college degree in art and history in 1980, Bennett was briefly a staff artist at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Fayetteville (N.C.

THE NFL IS TEAMING with Nickelodeon on a series of short cartoons that will air during the season. "Rush Zone: Guardians of the Core" will be televised on Nickelodeon's Nicktoons channel and feature coaches and players from all 32 teams with several of them doing voice-overs as themselves. We can see it now: A roly-poly animated figure dressed entirely in black who looks up from a podium and, in a raspy voice, says, "Times yours. " Actually, we don't know if Andy Reid will be involved, but Giants quarterback Eli Manning and Saints coach Sean Payton already have signed on. The cartoons will be 2 to 5 minutes in length and center around a 10-year-old superhero who has the skills of an NFL player.

Garry Trudeau, who rarely shies from controversy, has withdrawn a series of Doonesbury cartoons about the student protests in China because of last weekend's massacre there. The cartoons, he said, were "predicated on a peaceful resolution" of the protests. But "that was a very bad miscalculation . . . and now obviously (the cartoons are) inappropriate," he said. The cartoons, which were to have run next week, have been withdrawn from all newspapers that carry the strip, including The Inquirer, and will be replaced by a series offering an "obtuse look at the Alaskan oil spill," Trudeau said.

For cartoon collectors, MGM/UA has provided a bonanza with its "Golden Age of Looney Tunes" series issued on videodisc over the span of two years. The four volumes (each containing five discs) preserve a total of 280 cartoons - enough, if watched on consecutive Saturday mornings, to inspire a yearlong adolescence. But that's not all, folks. At last the Walt Disney Co. has taken the cue and decided to flaunt its cartoon heritage in videodisc form. Next month, it will release Mickey Mouse: The Black & White Years, presenting 34 cartoons from 1928 to 1935.

SO MANY WORDS have already been written and spoken about the Danish newspaper's decision to publish cartoons that set off a wave of protests - peaceful and violent - and riots by Muslims who reacted to what they felt was an affront to the Prophet Mohammad. We've heard from the historians, diplomats, chief executives, newspaper editors, social scientists and economists. I can't offer the learned analysis they did, but I can humbly present a way we might avoid these painful and costly cultural collisions.

Jules Feiffer, our nation's most versatile and unconventional pundit, launched his career by giving away cartoons to build a following. The Village Voice gladly received and began publishing these handouts regularly in 1956 when the Bronx-born Feiffer was 27. Suddenly the success of that new cartoon series, Feiffer, skyrocketed to mass circulation. His best-known comic strip, Feiffer is now syndicated in more than 100 newspapers worldwide, including The Inquirer. And for three decades now, he has been one of America's leading satirists.

SPRING IS IN THE AIR! The weather is warmer, the sun is out later, people are starting to become tolerable again and the Phillies are all over your TV screen. Except they aren't playing baseball for real just yet. First up is Phillies shortstop Jimmy Rollins , who will cameo on the Fox cartoon "The Cleveland Show," a "Family Guy" spin-off, next Sunday in an episode titled "California Dreamin' (All the Cleves are Brown). " Rollins isn't the only famous face appearing on the baseball-themed (duh)

U.S. Sen. Bob Casey asked about 600 Philadelphia middle school students Wednesday to raise a hand if they had ever seen a Phillies game. Nearly everyone in the auditorium did. He noted that a packed Citizens Bank Park holds about 44,000 people, then asked the students to imagine an additional 16,000, for 60,000. That, he said, is the number of U.S. students each day who stay out of school because they are being bullied. "Now that's a big crowd," he said. Casey (D., Pa.)

A version of this review appeared in Sunday's Arts + Entertainment section. Neck-deep into Quentin Tarantino's antebellum western Django Unchained , I had this mental image of the über-geek genre filmmaker tapping furiously on his laptop, beaming at the brilliance of every new piece of dialogue he's writ. For all I know, Tarantino works on a typewriter, or longhand on a legal pad (or dictates his copy to a Gal Friday in spike heels), but in any event, as the banter ping-ponged across the dining table in the plantation mansion of slave-master Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio, twirling his mustache)

10 for the Road Connecticut. Catch the Holiday Model Train Display at the Connecticut Cellar Savers Fire Museum. The display is open Saturdays and Sundays through Jan. 13. View antique trains, participate in a museum scavenger hunt, and have a chance to operate some train accessories on seven operating layouts. 634 Main St., Portland. Free. 11 a.m.-4 p.m. www.ctcellarsavers.org Delaware. Family Concert: A Musical Storybook is Jan. 13 at 3 p.m. at Wilmington Music School, 4101 N Washington St., Wilmington.

Ultimate feminist Larry Eichel gives a fairly good, comprehensive review of Backwards in High Heels , with the exception of his opening remarks, in which he asserts that author Thomas J. Carty overestimates Faith Whittlesey when he compares her to Hillary Clinton, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Nancy Pelosi. What Eichel does not acknowledge - and what makes Carty's assertion reasonable and Whittlesey's rise to prominence the more remarkable - is the fact that she did not have a powerful or wealthy husband standing behind her as did Clinton, Roosevelt, and Pelosi.

John Rovick, 93, the beloved host of a children's show in Los Angeles throughout the 1950s and '60s, died Saturday in Boise, Idaho, after a brief illness, his former station, KTTV-TV, told the Associated Press. For nearly two decades, Mr. Rovick appeared on the daily Cartoon Time show that earned him an Emmy Award for outstanding children's program. It was so popular that KTTV said it added another Rovick show, Sheriff John's Lunch Brigade , that stayed on the air until 1970.

If Batman, Thor, and the Avengers have proved anything artistic while raking in box office billions, it's that Hollywood actors can get away with cartoonish acting when playing comic-book characters. Not so on the stage, where even comic thrillers demand credible villainy. Which makes it such a delight that Robert Smythe - who for more than two decades infused humanity into the puppets he created at Mum Puppettheatre - imparts immense gravity and complexity to the murderous lead character in Hedgerow's production of Ira Levin's 1978 thriller, Deathtrap . Here, Smythe plays struggling playwright Sidney Bruhl.

Stereotypes seen in cartoon A cartoon drawn by Rob Tornoe in Sunday's Sports section depicted Phillies pitcher Cliff Lee doing housework while a black/brown player with the word "Offense" written on his T-shirt slept on a couch. The Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists submits that this cartoon is racially insensitive. African American and Latino men are often stereotyped as being lazy and not wanting to work hard. The cartoon may suggest to readers that male athletes of color are lazy.

Cartoons by Tony Auth