New York Magazine

“Video has become a much larger part of our online strategy in the past year or so,” Mr. Karlan said, for reasons that include the chance to achieve “wide audience reach” with some programs while aiming others at audience segments like teenagers.

Examples of online video programming include “The Burg,” about the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg, which can be watched at theburg.tv; “Meth Minute 39,” a cartoon series, found on channelfrederator.com, a Web site that is part of Next New Networks; and “Roommates,” the first original Web series on MySpace, which is owned by the News Corporation.

New York Magazine

In one episode of Dan Meth’s surreal series on odd subcultures, a young Mike Tyson joins the Sunday brunch crowd; in another, two geeks argue over who’s the biggest Led Zeppelin fan, until the winner gets abducted in a lead zeppelin. The first series, Internet People, a tour through the world of Web stardom, became a viral phenomenon itself.


New York Daily News

Plenty of Life in Local Animation Biz
"...From independent to savvy commercials, the city seems to find a way to stay afloat in the rough times, like the news last fall that MTV would shut down its New York animation studio and outsource most of its work. Still, New York studios like Spontaneous combustion, Eyeball, and Dan Meth are among those known for their snazzy, animated ads...
The vibe in New York now is things are good and there is a lot of potential," said Curious' executive producer Richard Winkler. "The talent base here is fantastic, with artists at every single level. A lot of us in town are doing what we can to keep the industry as much here as possible."
- Barbara Kollmeyer


New York Post

Most Downloaded Video of the Week:
5.Internet People!



Entertainment Weekly Magazine

Hi, I'm Ty Burr of Entertainment Weekly. Websites like The Onion and modernhumorist.com provide online laughs on a national basis, but why isn't there a decent humor site specific to NYC? God knows you need a sense of humor to live here, as anyone who has tried to make heads or tails of the recent subway changes knows.

That's why I had high hopes when I stumbled across cartoonist Dan Meth's "Smart-Ass Guide to NYC". The site presents you with a map of the greater metropolitan area. Click on a neighborhood and you get a brief animated cartoon that makes hay with the stereotypical denizens of that area. The gags, unfortunately, are of the wheeziest bad Jay Leno monologue variety: upper Westside, Woody Allen on a shrink's couch, ha ha; SoHo, black dressing art slime, Time Square, drunks tossing their cookies on New Year's Eve? You get the idea. The "Smart-Ass Guide to New York" does net a few brief laughs. Click on Long Island and see the LIE jammed Eastbound, empty westbound. The Upper East Side shows two singles bar 20-something professions reverting to the fraternity letter sweaters. The Harlem link brings up the stage of the Apollo with Bill Clinton playing sax. Compare that with the lone Bronx cartoon: a couple of homeboys break-dancing in front a wall filled with graffiti; when the hell did Dan Meth last go to the Bronx? 1985?


Blender Magazine

"Our favorite new music-themed online cartoon series, The Meth Minute 39, returns with a promo for Ultra and the Lazer Hearts, a pop trio that combines Rainbow Brite's flamboyant style with Josie and the Pussycats' sparkling pop hooks."


Vh1's Best Week Ever

Considering The Internet as we know it hasn’t even reached its terrible teens yet, and mainstream Viral Video is still stumbling around in its “Chocolate Rain”-soaked diapers, a video retrospective of the most notorious wacky “Internet People” seems sort of premature and unnecessary. But that being said, this little clip is well done and comprehensive enough for it to be amusing all the same. Though unfortunately, it might have been able to achieve True Greatness had they given us what we REALLY wanted: to see four shirtless cartoon characters humping an animated ottoman.


Time Out New york

Toonz N the Hood The New Yorker's hoity-toity "New Yorker's view of the world" poster aint got nothin' on the Smart-Ass Guide to New York City from Dan Meth. Clicking on the different neighborhoods and surrounding areas brings up some amusing caricatures of stereotypical denizens. We've never seen the Upper East Side captured so realistically.

Candid Camera Illustrator Dan Meth's got a seriously jaundiced view of NYC. He's pleased to show it off to the world in his Smart-Ass Guide to new York City, a collection of webcam-style animations spotlighting what makes our fair metropolis great, or at least greatly silly.


Juxtapoz Magazine

Featured "Nite Fite" on website.


Deadspin

It's a lazy Friday morning, so here's a clever little riff from animator Dan Meth -- a former Black Tabler -- about Mike Tyson's Brunch Out. We played this game so much as a kid that it still shows up in our dreams.


Guardian Unlimited

Most Downloaded Videos of the Week:
3. "Internet People!" by Dan Meth


Drawn!

My Frederator peeps are hooking us up with Dan Meth’s next installment of The Meth Minute 39 twenty-four hours before it’s officially released (sorry, I’m a little late in posting…). Titled, “Sex Machine” — how Dan combines James Brown with The Matrix is, well, hilarious. Looking forward to the next 37.
Adrants

Kosher Food Offering Explained Clearly With Web Cartoon
Kosher.com has launched a little promotional cartoon, created by Dan Meth, which does a great job clearly explaining the Kosher.com offering. From mentioning the foods they carry by name and showing them to explaining where they came from to telling you how can buy them, Kosher.com makes it clear they are they place to go to when Kosher food is what's for dinner. It's not rocket science but, unfortunately, too many commercials try to be and fail. This one doesn't and, pleasantly, succeeds.

Book Promoted With Sheep And One Hit Wonder
Seems book publishers are increasingly experimenting with new means to promote new titles. A book by Sam Apple, called Schlepping Through The Alps is being promoted with a comical "Who Let The Jews Out" Flash video crafted to the tune of Baha Men's "Who Let The Dogs Out."


Cold Hard Flash

Viral animation alert! Dan Meth, a New York-based independent animator, has released Internet People!, the latest episode of The Meth Minute 39, a collection of 39 cartoons. The short celebrates web video phenomenon like All Your Base, Homestar Runner and JibJab, blazing through the brief history of internet memes. Meth has now added himself to this list, as the views for his short are well over a million web-wide, with no end in sight.

The latest Meth Minute features an animated version of Mike Tyson that will be familiar to Nintendo gamers from the 80s and 90s. Mike Tyson's Punch-Out was a successful cartidge game for the the original Nintendo platform, but he sure didn't talk like this (NSFW). Pull up ringside for Mike Tyson's Brunch Out.

I actually sat down with Dan Meth (the creator of The Meth Minute 39), earlier this week during a brief visit to Next New Networks, and I got an eyeful of his process.

Dan typically records 3 or 4 episodes of this weekly series at once. His voice direction is loose, and while he arrives at the studio with an outline of where the dialog should go, he relies on improv surprises to deliver the funny. Home Movies and Dr. Katz were both inspirations for the series and for his process. During a record, the actors typically riff for about 45 minutes, then Meth will edit it down to his minute-long episode.

His team is fairly small. Dan has some help with the music, but he writes the lyrics himself, and he has animation interns from Pratt and The School of Visual Arts who come in 2 days a week. By the time he's done, each production takes about 10 working days to complete, so it shouldn't surprise you that they banked 17 episodes of this weekly series before they launched the viral hit, first episodeInternet People.

It surprised me to hear that pop-culture junkie Meth is the equivalent of a Luddite in his apartment. While he's equipped with the latest technology at work, once he gets home, he eschews cable TV and the internet for books.

Long Island Business News

Kosher.com answers to an Internet authority
By Ken Schachter
Kosher.com is hoping two animated hip-hop song-and-dance men can spread the word about its products, ranging from brisket to babaganoush. The five-year-old Inwood company plans to roll out its second animated cartoon on the Web within days.
...Jeff Janock, Kosher.com’s chief technology officer, said the Web animation has been viewed more than a million times in less than three months. The cartoon was created by Dan Meth, who also made the Smart-Ass Guide to NYC (http://www.danmeth.com/ smartassnyc.htm). His clients include Warner Bros., Court TV and the National Football League.
“One of the things people respond to is humor,” said Janock, who noted that the Web site invites viewers to e-mail the cartoon in an attempt at “viral” marketing.
How well viral marketing is working may be difficult to measure. The Web site has 100,000 registered members, Janock said. The 18-person company does not disclose its sales, but its Web site said that it has served about 4,000 customers in the past six months and has shipped to countries including Korea, Iraq, Israel, Brazil, Thailand, China, France, England and Italy.

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