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The hint of youth past, George Pal’s pioneering 3D animation While I write this, one of my sons is yelling at me to come look at YouTube Poop animation that is yet another. He believes they are hilarious. I can’t endure them! When he demands I watch one… or eight I 've to inquire if they can be a group of unintelligible screaming, screeching comments and scratch repeats of the exact same line twenty times in a row. “Well,” he usually replies, “there’s some,” which means ninety -percent of it is merely sound. Is this the state of animation that is progressive? I was amazed, when Flash animation started popping up. Hell, when the first Tron came out, I was blown away, as was all of nerdom. The first Star Wars film made audiences consider we could fly in space and blast aliens into oblivion. How straightforward and awkward they all appear now with the advances in internet cartoon. Computer animation has become the stuff of dreams. What would someone in the 1970s think of Avatar? By the same token, what would YouTube Poop-loving teenagers think of Davy and Goliath or Art Clokey’s Gumby? While barely Avatar (Clokey used the income from Davy and Goliath to finance his work on Gumby) it was loved by millions for decades, and still is! Most people would think of Ray Harryhausen, as it pertains to animation and special effects in films. His stop rubber, motion and armature figures were frightening and crowds in the 1950s marveled at how “ real” his creatures appeared. Yet, one of the first innovators of stop motion animation was a guy named George Pal (Harryhausen was truly an employee and was mentored by George Pal). Watching among his features, each about six or seven minutes in length, was amazing not only because the move is so easy, but he didn't use clay or armature figures, each figure, each limb, each hand and finger were carved from wood and while arms may have swiveled in their shoulder sockets, to see the amount of movement in these animated features will make a lover out of even my dear YouTube Poop-loving son. Pal’s first feature cartoon, “Ship of Ether” (1934), highlighted his ability to make smooth stop motion animation using wooden puppet forms… George Pal — produced Gy