#87. A Conversation with Danielle Fishel: Part II

Jason Anders: So what is the most annoying question you are asked on a regular basis?

Danielle Fishel: I don't know, probably if Cory and I ever dated. That's probably the most annoying. It's weirdly personal, and I've said it in every other interview that "no, we never did date". We maybe went on like one half-date to try and figure out if we really did like each other, or if we were just actors- I've said that in every interview, and people continue to ask me that all the time. It's like- wow, the show started seventeen years ago and you're still interested to know if Cory and I ever dated?

JA: If you could be anywhere in the world right now, where would you want to be?

DF: That's a good question- I would probably be in Maui. There's two sides to me right now, part of me feels like I really need a vacation because I've been jumping back and forth to New York and I'm extremely exhausted. The other part of me feels like I really need to be in the Gulf trying to figure out what I can do to help, but I don't really know what I could do. Those would be the two sides of me.

JA: Do you have any phobias?

DF: I'm terrified of spiders!

JA: Me too!

DF: It doesn't matter how big they are, doesn't matter how small they are- I just cannot stand them. Years ago I would wake up screaming in the middle of the night about them. I think I get that from my mom, she has night terrors about spiders... I think it's just one of those things that she passed on to me.

JA: Do you collect anything?

DF: I collect two things: I collect sweatshirts from everywhere I go. I always buy a sweatshirt because I love hoodies! I also collect Starbucks mugs from everywhere I go. I have all kinds of different mugs from all over the world- I have them from London, Switzerland, China... some my dad brought to me, and I also have them from every city I've traveled to in the United States. That's probably my favorite collector's item.

JA: Do you remember your first car?

DF: Yeah, I do. It was a black Toyota 4Runner and I loved it. I thought it was the greatest car ever and I was so excited about it! What I really wanted was a red Celica Convertible, but my parents refused to let me buy it... even though I was paying for it with my own money.

JA: Here's a random question- If you could be the star of any television show in history, which character would you want to take on?

DF: Well that's really hard for me because I feel like I already got to play the one that I would have wanted to do. I don't think I would have chosen to do anything other than Boy Meets World and to play Topanga. That was such a good growth experience for me, and such a fun show. It was such a good show, and people still respect it so much. I don't know if I would have wanted to do anything else. I will say that I do love Law & Order. I think that it's amazing, and I would have loved to have a character on that show. I'd still love to do a show like that right now and really get to test my dramatic acting skills.

JA: So what were your favorite television shows growing up?

DF: I didn't watch a ton of TV when I was growing up, although I did love all the Saturday morning shows like Saved By the Bell and California Dreams. Sesame Street, when I was really little, was the end-all, be-all for me of TV shows. As a teenager, all of my girlfriends were watching Melrose Place and 90210... I just never really got into those.

JA: Do you have a favorite television show that you watch now on a regular basis?

DF: Favorite television show now would be The Office. Also Saturday Night Live- I think as you move along in any sort of career you get goals in mind that are things which make you think, "wow, if I could do that then I would really feel like I have made it." For me, I think the epitome of my career would be if I ever got to host Saturday Night Live. I look forward to seeing it every week. I just think they're all so talented and amazing. I'd love to be a character on the show, but if not that I'd love to just host it.

JA: Do you have a favorite SNL cast member?

DF: I absolutely love Steve Martin, so anytime that he's hosted or done anything for the show is amazing. I think my all-time favorite has become Kristen Wiig, I think she's just incredible and so funny. I love her. She's never been in a skit that I don't think is absolutely hysterical. If she's not my all-time favorite, she's pretty darn close.

JA: What's your favorite movie?

DF: Probably Goodfellas. I love that movie. I love gangster movies! I also love P.S. I Love You, on a totally opposite spectrum (laughs), I don't really know why I love it so much, because I don't typically love 'pull-at-your-heartstring' girl movies, but I just really love that movie. I actually just ran into Hilary Swank this last time I was in New York, and all I could say was "oh my gosh, I love your work!", but what I really wanted to say was, "I watch P.S. I Love You every chance I get!"

JA: Do you have any weird habits?

DF: I don't know. I'm sure my boyfriend would be able to tell you some of them, but I can't really think of any. I don't think this is a weird habit, because I think a lot of people do it, but I have to wake up at least an hour before I start getting ready to go somewhere and just sit on the couch with my dog and have a cup of coffee. If I don't do that, my entire day feels out of whack. I'm often a very early riser so that I'm able to have my 'sit on the couch and drink coffee' time, but I don't know how weird that is. I'm sure I have them, they're just hard to say about yourself, so I don't know.

JA: Do you feel younger or older than your current age?

DF: For the first time in my life I feel like my age. I've always felt older than my age, and it used to drive me crazy. I constantly wanted to be older. When I was a teenager I wanted to be in my twenties, in my early twenties I wanted to be in my thirties. I'm 29 now, and I really feel like I'm right where I'm supposed to be. Sometimes I will forget how old I am and think I am younger, and then sometimes 29 still sounds so incredibly young to me. But for the first time ever, 99% of the time, I feel like I'm right where I'm supposed to be.

JA: What is the best Christmas gift you've ever received?

DF: Taking myself back to when I was a very little girl, my parents got me a fur coat when I was about ten years old. It was before it was politically incorrect to have fur- I didn't know any better, my parents didn't know any better... everybody had one. I just thought it was the greatest gift I'd received in my entire life and loved it so much. I never really even wore it, I think maybe one time? How many opportunities are there to wear a fur coat, you know? Since then I've donated it to somebody else because I would never wear or buy fur anymore. But I do remember that being the most excited I had ever been about receiving a present, and I called my best friend to tell her about it, and she had also received one for that Christmas... we were both just thrilled to death.

JA: What would be a fondest memory you have of being on the set of Boy Meets World that you might not share that often?

DF: I think that some of my favorite moments happened between Ben and I when we were between shooting scenes. Obviously we were all very close after seven years of working together on a show, but I think particularly Ben and I maybe had the closest and most intimate relationship because we had played boyfriend and girlfriend for so many years. We really felt like we had a very unique connection to each other. I think some of my favorite moments with him were just joking around between the scenes, him sharing secrets with me, me sharing secrets with him, and just laughing and giggling. I look back at that time on Boy Meets World as when you're still really naive about the way your life and your job works, and all you know is that you're having a great time and you don't think it's ever going to be anything different from this- I look back to those moments that no one knows about, that I've never shared with anybody, and my fondest would be with Ben.

JA: What are three adjectives you would use to best describe your personality?

DF: If I had to pick three words- I would say kind, empathetic, and hard-working.

JA: And one more question- Did you and Cory ever date in real life?

DF: (laughs) We went on one half-date and then decided we were just going to be friends.

Read Part One of "A Conversation with Danielle Fishel"

#86. A Conversation with Bob Camp: Part II

Jason Anders: I'd like to just start with your thoughts on the current film and television animation being made in comparison with the shows and movies of the 1980s and '90s.

Bob Camp: I'm kind of out of touch because I don't have television. I don't have time to watch it, and the only stuff I see is generally on the web. I'm just not really plugged in to what's happening on the animation scene. I do see some really great stuff coming out in features, Pixar's films are always great. Dreamworks has also been making some pretty good movies lately.

In the '90s there was a lot of junk out there- Of course The Simpsons was great and The Ren & Stimpy Show had its moment in the sun.

JA: To sort of dramatically change the subject- I love the work you did for the movie Twins, specifically the caricatures of the actors you made for the watch.

BC: It's funny, I've never actually seen the watch! I don't even know if they made it. That was really difficult because I had to draw something that would literally shrink down to the size of a centimeter long. It was hard to create something that would read at that size.

JA: How did you get involved with Twins?

BC: I was working for Ivan Reitman and Michael Gross who were both working on the Warner Bros. lot while I was at DiC on The Real Ghostbusters animated series doing character designs. I picked up freelance work from them, development for an animated series and other odds and ends to go along with Twins. Every now and then they would send me something.

JA: Have you seen the new box set that was put together for The Real Ghostbusters?

BC: I haven't seen it, but I've heard about it. It was such a fun show to work on. I sat working with Bruce Timm all the time and I learned a lot watching him draw. Design is just a great job because you don't have to worry about story, directing, or anything like that. All you have to do is just sit and have fun drawing. Such a great way to get into the business. Bruce and I weren't necessarily young, but we were new coming into the business, and we were picking up a lot of tips from each other. We were sitting around drawing monsters and ghosts all day- I mean, how cool is that?

JA: When is the last time you went back and viewed the original episodes?

BC: I haven't seen them since that time, honestly. I liked them okay. They were DiC Saturday morning shows and we were knocking them out as fast as we could. DiC was a huge factory at that time with several hundred employees doing more shows at the same time than any other animation studio in the business. I think since then they have become a studio that farms out 100% of their work, if they still even exist. Last I heard they were doing everything overseas.

JA: Do you have a favorite piece of animation? Not necessarily the best, but one that you always enjoy going back to?

BC: I always go to Tex Avery's Deputy Droopy. I think that's probably the funniest cartoon ever made, I laugh my ass off every time I watch it. I could watch it over and over again and it wouldn't get any less funny. I love Dumbo, it's one of the great features of all time. Of course, I'm partial to Stimpy's Invention. I storyboard it, and it's probably one of the better television cartoons ever made- I'm really proud of that. Also a lot of stuff that Bill Plympton does is just wonderful. I love his stuff, all very original and unique. It's kind of hard to name everything.

JA: What do you think is your best work within The Ren & Stimpy Show?

BC: The best one I directed? I kind of hate them all. I just look at them and think "wow, that could have been better" or "this joke could have been funnier". I do like something about all of them. My favorite again is Stimpy's Invention, which I did not direct but there's a lot of me in there. I love all the shorts like Log.

JA: I really love Out West, I laugh the whole way through every time.

BC: I'm proud of that one too. That was the first digital ink & paint cartoon that we did, and one of the first ones on television that I'm aware of. Jim Smith and I wrote and performed the song at the end which was really great. Even so, I look at that one and see jokes that could have been funnier. There were a couple of things that got cut out for one reason or another and we had to make last-minute substitutions, so it wasn't quite as funny.

JA: Did you have trouble getting the song past the censors, or was it that big of a deal back then?

BC: It was always a big deal, but I was always surprised at the stuff that got through. I felt like the censors were just clueless. We would throw red herrings in just so that they would have something to cut out, since that was their job, in hopes that they would leave other jokes that we really needed in there. Typically, they would cut out the jokes we wanted and leave in the red herrings.

Did you ever see Prehistoric Stimpy? It's the one where Ren and Stimpy go to the natural history museum and Wilbur Cobb gives them the tour and tells them why the dinosaurs became extinct. There's so many off-color jokes in there, it's just dripping with innuendo. I was really proud of how much we got away with in that one.

Another one of my favorites that I didn't direct was I Love Chicken, I think it's one of the funniest ones. Stimpy's making dinner for Ren and he is cooking this chicken, and he falls in love with it. He runs off and elopes with it. Ren has this dilemma that his roommate has fallen in love with a chicken and is ignoring him, and not only that, it's his dinner. A lot of funny crap in there.

JA: Something we just barely touched on in our first interview was your time spent working on Tiny Toon Adventures- Let's talk about the days in and out of that studio and what it was like working on that series.

BC: It was fun. What was so cool about it was it was such a rich talent pool. Chris Reccardi and Jim Smith of Ren & Stimpy were both there. Just a lot of talented people working on that show. Too many to name. It was frustrating because we all felt like we were hired on under false pretenses of re-doing the Warner Bros. Termite Terrace cartoons, but it turned out that we didn't have that much control over stories. We didn't have the kind of freedom that we had hoped. It was very writer-driven and not cartoonist-driven. The frustration of working on that show led to the creation of Spumco and doing The Ren & Stimpy Show.

JA: With the release of The Ren & Stimpy Show on DVD, were you ever asked to come in and do any of the commentary tracks, or is that something you considered?

BC: No. In fact, I was kind of shocked to see them released. I was at the video store and I look down and see these Ren & Stimpy DVDs, and I didn't even know that they were being produced. No one called me or asked me to be involved. That I didn't get to do the commentary on my own cartoons I thought was kind of shitty. I honestly haven't even looked at them. I'm pretty annoyed at the way that turned out.

JA: What advice to you give to artists who ask you about getting into the industry?

BC: Well I personally ended up in animation accidentally. I was working at Marvel Comics and one of my roommates was working on Thundercats, he helped me get in and then I just sort of made my way through the industry over the years. I never received any advice during this time. As far as getting into the industry now... it's really tough. I tell people if they want to get into making cartoons, to just make them themselves. Make your own films. It's a lot easier to do that nowadays because of the software that's available right off the shelf. You don't have to have a big animation camera, paint cels, and all that crap anymore. If you want freedom and control over your vision, just do it yourself.

To go the route of getting into a studio is a very difficult road, if not almost impossible. Just make sure that you have something to fall back on. There's a lot of out-of-work animators who are fresh out of school. The one thing I did was try to work in a lot of different areas- I did comics, illustration, portrait artist, character and design for animation, layout, storyboards, writing, and directing. Learn to be versatile and flexible. Be a sponge and soak up everything you can. Ask people their opinions, be self-critical, and work hard.

JA: What's your favorite thing to do when you're not working?

BC: Hang out with my family. Be with my kids and go to my son's baseball games. I also have a monthly artist brunch at my house. Artists from all over the area come to my home and we just throw ideas around. I just enjoy hanging out with other creative people. I love going to New York City and meeting people at galleries. Just enjoy life and not be so stressed all the time.

JA: And finally, if you could live as any cartoon character for one day, who would you pick and why?

BC: Droopy. He doesn't seem to put out that much effort, and he can be all places at once- in the end he always comes out on top and makes everyone else look like a jerk. I've always enjoyed Droopy, he's my favorite character to draw.

A Conversation with Bob Camp: Part I

#85. A Conversation with Kari Jobe

Jason Anders: So let's start with where you grew up.

Kari Jobe: I was born in Waco, Texas, but three weeks after that I moved to the Dallas area.

JA: Do you remember your first car?

KJ: Yes! There's a story behind my first car- my dad was taking me to school one morning when I was sixteen and he was like, "Do you like that car over there?" It was a red Ford Aspire. I don't know if you remember around '99 when the Ford Aspire came out, but they were overly round hatchbacks. They weren't cool. I was like, "I don't really like that car", and then he picked me up from school in it. He had already bought it! I felt terrible because I had already told him I didn't like it.

JA: What was your first real job?

KJ: I was always a babysitter, but my first real job was Abuelo's. I was a hostess.

JA: Do you have any phobias?

KJ: I don't like people on stilts. I don't know why, but I'm extremely scared of them.

JA: Did you run into a lot of stilt walkers at Disney this weekend?

KJ: Yes I did (laughs), like a whole parade of them. They had that one parade at the Magic Kingdom during the afternoon and there were lots of stilts. I didn't like that.

JA: Do you collect anything?

KJ: I collect birds. I love birds. I love anthropology type stuff.

JA: If you could live in any decade, which would you pick and why?

KJ: I would have to say either the 1920s or the '40s because I like their style and the music.

JA: Do you remember the first album you bought?

KJ: My first CD that I bought was The Cranberries, it was the one with the couch on the front. I don't know if I bought it because I wanted to hear The Cranberries or because I liked the velvet couch on the front, but I actually didn't even like it. I ended up throwing it away.

JA: So what are your favorite records of all time right now? Do you have like a top three?

KJ: Right now my favorites that I always go to are:
1.) Kim Walker, because I love to just get alone and worship with God.
2.) Brooke Fraser, I love her stuff.
3.) It's hard to narrow it down, but I really like Taylor Swift. That's my guilty pleasure. (laughs)

JA: What three adjectives do you feel best describe you?

KJ: Joyful, ditsy (laughs), spontaneous, and charismatic.

JA: What's your favorite virtue?

KJ: I don't know, that's a good question. The first thing that comes to mind is just being realistic. I like to be realistic when it comes to worshiping God, because the reality of it is that we really, truly need Him. Helping people to have that reality when it comes to worship. Not just singing and worshiping out of habit, but out of reality and being fully present.

JA: So why do you do what you do?

KJ: Because I have been so impacted by God's presence in my life, and worship does that. Not just music, because worship is not just music- it's what we do with our hearts, it's giving God everything that we are. I've learned so much by doing that, that He is just so worthy of it. When He comes and ministers to us in return, it says to draw near to God, He will draw near to us, but resist the devil and he must flee. That's what I want, I want to be close to God and I don't want the enemy to have anything in my life. That's why I do what I do. I love for God to minister to people, and to watch their faces in the middle of worship to get this revelation that "God is for me. God is moving on my behalf. God is going to heal me." I love doing what I do.

JA: What if this was your last interview to do? What message would you want to get across to people?

KJ: To live with no regrets, and if you have regrets to let God take those. Just lay those things at His feet, and start living today with the newness of what God wants to do. It says His mercies are new every morning, and He means that for us. We can take Him at His word. I think so many people miss out on everything God wants to do because they're living in the past. They're living in these regrets of yesterday, and you can't... you cannot do it. You can't do it without the Lord. You have to give your heart to the Lord. So live with no regrets, live honestly before God and be fully present, and worship God with everything you've got.

JA: A few fun questions to end on- Do you have a favorite movie?

KJ: Pride & Prejudice.

JA: The new one or the old one?

KJ: I like both of them, but I love the new one with Keira Knightley.

JA: What's the best Christmas gift you've ever received?

KJ: One year my family decided that instead of doing "big" gifts, we were gonna do gifts that meant something for each other. My family all gave each other something that they felt would really minister and bring strength. I received from my parents a bird. It was a symbol to me of my name. They just said "you're pure, and you're strong, and birds have to do with being peaceful and carefree." I think it was a dove. It really impacted my life, more than some kind of present it was something that ministered to and really stuck with me.

JA: And finally, if you had to sum up your life with just one word, which one would you choose?

KJ: Caught up.

Follow Kari on Twitter: @KariJobe