Here's a story from Al Kolhart, a ex-Greeny Phatom crew member who was brought back on recently.
Story[]
A long time ago, after a stint at Fitchburg State, I was in Illinois where I worked as a employee for GreenyWorld Studios. Owned by master dingbat, Robert Stainton.
Frequently when I am visiting my long-distance girlfriend Alissa, I have cause to motor past the old Little Guy Place on 2100 W Main in Marion. It looks like they are trying to put a really low budget spin on this dump, which is now renamed back to the Marion Motel. I am always mentally capsized by a flood of memories of my days at this fleabag building, whose available rooms were usually used more often by sex-starved employees of GreenyWorld Studios as opposed to tourists looking for a neat roadstop on Route 66 on their way to much better locales than Chicago (home of Keyfax, Svengoolie, Nite Owl, and the birthplace of the Grand Prize Game).
And, yes, that was also the site of my first full time job after college.
I had gotten an entry level job as an all-purpose fuckface for the studios. I was known as "send the kid." And that phrase was usually uttered by either Robbie or James Sharp.
Robert used computer 2D animation and used it to it's full extent. The budget for a Greeny Phatom episode was usually $45,000. Hell, I was there when some of the Greenytoons were thought up. Yes, I was present on the payroll for the birth of Catgirl and the Clawed Crusaders---"a sassy gal cat with the attitude of a boy." Obviously, this was one big thing for the very little SJW's back then to masturbate to.
To immerse myself into the Greenytoons, Robert took a vacant Child World in Waukegan and turned it into "Little Guy's School of Being a Dingbat", where he hosted a new employees education program. I drew alot of Little Guy pictures there.
All the people who created new Greenytoons were disgruntled former firemen, former cast members of the Jeff Jones Show, people with intellectual disabilities like autism and downs syndrome that get made fun of by people with half an IQ, or people who were tired of answering to some tyrannical boss. Little did they know.
You would think this merry old Chicagoan would be this larger-than-life storybook character. Wrong. The guy was an absolute pill. He was a crazy, somewhat cheap fuck, whose gates were guarded a tranny named Kristian.
Ultimately, I left for personal reasons. Yet, they pervaded this myth that the place was a palace of wonders. Meanwhile, I worked with the sleaziest of the sleazy. Secretaries were sleeping with bosses. Bosses were sleeping with their bosses.
And Robert was a sick fuck.
One of my regular duties was to drive the company car down into the bowels of Chicagoland and pick up some specially selected Raggedy Ann VHS tapes at the Blockbuster at 1303 N. Milwaukee. Then, I would hand deliver them into a plain brown envelope to Kristiab for messengering to Robbie's Berwyn palace. Another duty of mine was to check on the git's PrimeStar subscription (which had programming supplied by Cablevision).
One very icy day, I got the call from Kristian's home for 1980's pizza restaurant animatronics. PrimeStar had been taken over by DirecTV, and they were phasing out the PrimeStar equipment. I had to go to the nearest DirecTV dealer, buy a DTV LNB, then go to the local Circuit City, buy a coaxial cable and a TiVo, hook the TiVo and the coaxial cable up to the receiver, then help Robert replace the LNB and get the dish to point towards DirecTV-6 at 109.5°W. He was probably needing to watch Playboy badly. When I got to Robbie's house, the cheap bastard hadn't bothered to clean the hilly walkway to his front door. As I walked up the hill carrying a Series 1 TiVo, the LNB, and a coaxial cable, I remember thinking to myself. If there ever was a time in my life that I would endure a broken leg, let this be the moment so I could sue the guy for the Knickerbocker editions of Raggedy Ann & Andy.
I had to help get the Greeny Phatom Live! tour up and running. I had to edit the fucking songs they recorded to please kids who wasted their $12.00 on a magic ticket to see the show.
"God, this is gonna be great..."
For a first job, the experience was not rewarding, but certainly fruitful when it came to comical anecdotes. Once, there was some family of tourists looking to save a few bucks by staying at the motel. There was always one room with clean sheets just in case this ever happened. Well, anyway, one of the family's younger members was carrying a tray of Coke bottles through the lobby. I watched him trip and let one of the glass Coca-Cola bottles smash onto the floor. As luck would have it, Robbie was doing a walkthrough at the time. He promptly told the young boy to clean out his desk because he was fired. Probably the first time ever, a hotel guest was fired from the premises.
There was another time where Robbie had found a cigarette stub on the floor and he promptly carried on a three day investigation to find who the sloppy employee was. I saw him literally going through office ash trays trying to match up the mysterious butt.
Robert Stainton viewed himself as some great philanthropist, despite being the biggest miser since Scrooge. He did have one place he bend over backsward for. Shriners Hospitals for Children. Because he managed to become friends with Didi Conn and that fuck who voiced Raggedy Andy, he obtained licensing from the owners of Raggedy Ann & Andy to make a benefit film for the place. He got them to voice their characters. For the several weeks prior, no one in the company did a blasted thing that involved shit like our fandoms. Our complete focus was this stupid film.
And Robbie had this dream that they would spend the night of the event by sleeping at his beloved rat's nest, Little Guy Place. Finally, the two did indeed stop at the LGP on the night of the show.
So Didi could make a call on the payphone in the lobby to Britt Allcroft about playing Stacy Jones in Thomas & The Magic Railroad.
You might remember Little Guy's shenanigans. Even after I've left, they're still producing the series as usual. Yet it's now a Crossover series with terrible writing and animation.
Then there was the Greeny Phatom Live! commercials.
Once again, the cheap bastard didn't use real cameramen and production people when they made the ads. Instead, he made arrangements to use the AV studios of a nearby high school, which happened to have 35mm professional cameras. We got tons of free studio time and a bunch of annoying teenagers got four credits. The school's principal presided over the AV studios, and he got all sorts of giddy because his was in the presence of this animation prince. Of course, the Raggedy Ann & Andy tapes he had in the back seat of his jalopy were not made available to them.
There was one shoot where the characters dance on a stage, and drink some Choc-Ola to promote said soda, which was sponsoring. The good news was that Iggy Pop (who played Little Guy 5) showed up shirtless (as usual) for the day. The bad news was he brought Courtney Love and Frances Bean Cobain with him.
Thinking that Frances was going to be a distraction during production, they elected me and Alina to sit with her in a classroom and essentially babysit the slut. After about five minutes of girl talk with Alina, they had little more to share with each other. Frances excused herself for the girls room and we promptly lost her for an hour. I know she didn't find the girls room, because, when Courtney found her, she was fingering her pussy in the back of the nearby Pizza Hut.
Meanwhile, Robert and the other guys were dancing on a stage in front of a bunch of kids from the nearby elementary and middle schools. However, Janna's Little Guy 7 body cover was coming off, and in that take, you could see it flapping about, revealing the T-shirt and Lycra leotard underneath.
That's all I have for today. See ya!