Disney Heard You Liked Cars, Board Games, and Video Games

Disney heard you liked Cars, board games, and video games. Therefore, they put Cars in a board game that they put in a video game.

In an attempt to redeem themselves from Cars 2, Disney is going to release a line of Cars Appmates toys.

Appmates are toys that interact with tablet computer apps and games as if they were avatars within the apps themselves. You move the toy around the screen, and the tablet reacts accordingly.

According to Bart Decrem, head of Disney Mobile, Disney is using these toys to get ready for the day when kids come home from school and play with their tablets and smartphones, rather than turn on the TV.

The toy is the first to transform the Apple iPad into a virtual play mat for kids. And the app turns ordinary toys into a part of an immersive game world for kids, full of sounds, narration, and music. That transforms a static and boring toy into an interactive experience.

In other words, tablet computers will become virtual board game boards and holodecks for these toys and for the people that use them.

The toys and apps will come out on Oct. 1 via a free iTunes download for both the iPad and iPad 2, but Disney will charge $20 for sets of two cars. The toys will be available in Disney Stores and on DisneyStore.com. No mention of other tablets in this VentureBeat article, but I expect Droid versions of the apps will be released shortly after the iPad versions, especially if this takes off.

The characters included initial launch will include Lightning McQueen, Tow Mater, Finn McMissile, and Holley Shiftwell while Francesco Bernoulli and Shu Todoroki will launch in November.

Disney has said they plan on expanding to other franchises if the Cars toys take off.

Their YouTube video of the apps and toys  has been included below, which seems to be showing some kind of racing game.
It is good to see PC games returning to prominence, even if they are coming in the form of tablet apps. Too long has the console dominated gaming. It's time for the real gaming platform take its rightful place.

What are your favorite pizza toppings?

Pepperoni sausage, and mushroms

Ask me anything

First Autumn 2011 Updates to Toon Radio Cartoon Music Library

My quest to fix the Toon Radio Carrtoon Music Library is proceeding nicely. I am almost completely done with phase 2 with the 1960s television series.

The more recent decades have a lot more releases than the early years. I think that, for phase 3, I will split the library down to year. My folder for the last decade still contains over 1000 songs, and I know I still don't have everything.

I am going to hunt down all the score tracks that are still in the library, and remove them. This will be a good business move. Toon Radio needs to concentrate on singles, instead of just playing entire soundtracks. This is a philosophy that I started a year ago, but I have procrastinating lately. Some cartoons only come with scores, and it is a bit time consuming to select which track should be kept and which ones should be removed. For instance, I have the Akira soundtrack, but I don't have it currently in the library. The soundtrack is nothing but score. These tracks were great in the film, but have no place on a radio stream. Of course, the right thing to do is to keep only the main theme, usually the opening piece. The problem I am facing is that, these opening credit themes are often the shortest tracks in these cartoons. On top of that, most movies, don't have openings these days.

I should rename the library to library, instead of playlist as it is now, but that's cosmetic at this point.

What ever the finial product will be, you can be certain that Toon Radio, and your listening pleasure, will only get better.

Sabrina The Teenage Witch Returns

Sabrina fans will probably rejoice. Sabrina the Teenage Witch is being revived. That's right, popular late 1990s live-action show starring Melissa Joan Hart and its animated adaptation, Sabrina, The Animated Series, are returning to TV. Archie Comicshas contracted Moonscoop Animation to “reimagine [Sabrina] in the vein of Harry Potter, Twilight, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer,”  as a brand new CGI series.

In recent years, Sabrina was given a manga-style makeover complete with continuing storylines and love triangles.

Right now, Archie Comics and Moonscoop are currently searching for cable/network home for the new series.

I was never a fan of the original 90s series. Let's see if this new series does better.

Why Can’t I Hum the Score?

Chris Ledesma over at the Simpsons Music 500 posted an interesting article a few days ago where he discusses a problem I have noted here many times before: the lack luster music in today's films and television shows.  He also talks about how this is all affecting the industry as a whole.

Since this is a film music streaming site, I have mentioned my distaste for the way things are in film music today many times. This trend affects me negatively both business wise and as a film music fan. This is a part of the reason I had to scrap the Star Wars: Clone Wars review I was writing.  The Star Wars movie scores were great. The television score not so much. There was nothing their for me to write about.

Ledsema's post expands the trend to live-action films. The problem is all over Hollywood. Every movie fan is affected by this. My addition to this is the problem is not just the score, but the songs as well. Theme songs have been disappearing a long with the score, and no one seems to notice.

Now, it is true that film music should not take away from the visuals. It is called background music for a reason, but Hollywood's love affair with cost cutting has gone a bit too far here.

We can all reverse this trend by giving Hollywood a reason to change. Support the works of guys like Chris Ledsema in legal ways such as buying their music, and listen to legal music outlets such as Toon Radio!

Server Maintenance Sept 24

GoDaddy sent me the following message today:

We will be performing maintenance in the data center that hosts your server "Subaru". This maintenance will occur between 09/24/2011 at 10:00pm AZ time and 09/25/2011 at 04:00am AZ time.

Your hosting services may experience up to 15 minutes of intermittent availability while we perform this maintenance. We appreciate your understanding and apologize for any inconvenience.

Suburu is our main server. It hosts the ToonRadio.net website, the audio servers, the Kool Kids Klub epsidoes, and our mail sever. If these services go offline, this maintenance is probably the reason. If Toon Radio does go offline, I will try to bring everything back up as soon as GoDaddy lets me.

I should probably set up my other server (Tsukasa) as a backup, but I doubt I will have time. Tsukasa hosts our database, music player, and music library.

Toon Radio - Ten Years And Counting

On September 21, 2001, I open an account on Live365.com to create an animation soundtrack based radio stream. I did this under the inspiration of the now long defunct Toonami Radio produced by Toon Zone and the Toonami Digital Arsenal. This account would come what we know today as Toon Radio. Two years later, I would file the paper work with the State of New York to christen the station Toon Radio LLC.

Wow, it has been ten years already.

All I can say is that is has been an adventure. Looking back at the past decade, things changed so fast, I don't even remember a lot of what happened.

I was definitely a much different person 10 years ago. I have done things I am not proud of, and I have done things I would love to relive again. And then, there are things that make me think WTF was I thinking back then.

All I can do now is learn from the mistakes, and live for the future, and the future looks beautiful! Toon Radio has been, is, and will be one great animation soundtrack radio station!

The first thing I must do is keep the KISS strategy. Keep things simple. Focus on the core services, and features that I need to run the site. I am one man. I can't perform miracles.

To accomplish this, I am removing the forums. All discussions will be moved to the Toon Radio Facebook page. All you need to do to post is to like the page, and you're in!

I will also use the Facebook page more often. Any feature that I can move to the page will be a great time saver, and reduce the load on the main website. I hope, in time, the Toon Radio Facebook page will come a community hub for animation and soundtrack fans from around the world.

In spite of being an media site, I am not going to bring back the video stream, at least not full time. I still have the Livestream account (which I haven't updated in years), but I will only use it for live events, such as conventions, concerts, and other Toon Radio sponsored animation and music events. I need to clean it out, and remove the AMVs that now run on it. The Toon Radio YouTube channel will be used for Toon Radio produced shows, hosted content, and archived video content. The TRMeson channel will be used as a personal blog, and will not be directly related to Toon Radio.

Since it's taking me too long to write reviews, so I am going to concentrate my efforts to what I can do, and post them on air during my live shows instead, as well as tweets and Facebook updates. These updates will include all reviews including cartoon series, films, and soundtracks. This will leave the blog for site updates, comments on the animation and music industries, news, and the Kool Kids Klub.

All this means I will be concentrating Toon Radio's efforts on the audio stream. The cartoon soundtrack audio stream is the core of what we do here at Toon Radio. I have been doing too much other stuff, and not doing enough work on the TOON RADIO, aspect of this website.

Concentrating on the music stream will keep me focus and motivated, which will be good for everyone. That means improvements to the music library, playlist, and sound quality of the streams. Toon Radio will stay with the current three streams, as well as their current bitrates. There is no real need to change the bitrates, and most music players can do mp3 and windows media. I will add other formats as those come more mainstream, but for now, thigns are the way they need to be.

Some of the changes that will occur include:

• Server Upgrades - Including upgrading the Shoutcast servers from the current version 1.98 to the latest 2.0.
• Creation of phone apps - I can make Android and Windows Phone apps myself, but I am going to need help with the iPhone.
• New featured programming as they are either created or acquired.
• Live shows - I am currently Djing live most week days starting at noon eastern. I may split up the show or give it to others as I hire more help.
• Hourly and weekend features. The new playlist script format I am using now lets me to do specialty shows like 80s night, all 90s weekends, Disney hours, and much, much more. If you have suggestions, fell free to send them to me by email or as a comment.
• The return of daily news updates. I will be doing these live as a part of my live show. Animation news doesn't happen every day, so there will be no formal time for news. However, when news breaks I may say it on air or tweet it. This will be how Toon Radio will do news until I get a news service partner. If you run an animation, music, or comics news site, and would like to help me out here, feel free to contact me. I can give you as much air time you need.
• New music. This goes without saying. I will keep adding new cartoon and animated movie soundtracks as I find them.

As I continue on my quest to properly categorize the animation music library, I will make several improvements. For starters, the Library page will allow you to search by the category, making it easier to for you to find the song you want. The other is better audio flow. There will be no clash of moods between various genres of music, once everything is done. I will also allow you guys to rate the songs as they play.

As for Kool Kids Klub, the guys are still committed to making episodes. Therefore, I will keep hosting and broadcasting the animation podcast. Right now, I am working with them on plans to handle the volume of episodes we have. ToonRadio.net can host about a year's worth of hour-long episodes, so we need a way to deal with this as we go forward. The current working plan is to split the show into seasons, and move the older seasons to a subscription-based service on a new server. The details are still being worked on, and nothing will be ready until we need them in January.

In the meantime, Toon Radio lives on. Here's to the next 10 years. You, my listeners, are the reason why I do this. You are the reasons I put up with all the issues and hardships, and I and Toon Radio will never go away. Let's all make the next decade much better than the last!

Until next time, thank you.

The Simpsons Television Network

All Simpsons all the time!?!

With over 500 episodes and no cancellation in sight, News Corp. COO Chase Carey has proclaimed that the Simpsons could  hold an entire television network itself, and that Fox is seriously considering such a network. Designed as a digital TV channel, the Simpsons Television Network would be devoted to airing The Simpsons and only The Simpsons.

According to the Los Angeles Times:

Noting that The Simpsons shows no sign of slowing down as it prepares to start its 23rd season on News Corp.'s Fox network, Carey said the company is starting to have internal discussions about how to create additional revenue streams for the animated hit that goes beyond reruns on TV stations and DVD sales.

I don't really like this idea, but I am with Cartoon Brew if Fox does it right. Why stop with the Simpsons? How about channels devoted solely to South Park, Looney Tunes, Spongebob Squarepants, Family Guy, Futurama, and many others?

Cars 2 is Top Dog

With three months left, Cars 2 is now the highestearning animated feature of the year. With an already $548-million, domestic and international, box office take, The film is the 16th highest-grossing animated film in global cinematic history.

The holiday releases may change this, but for now Disney and Pixar should be proud.

I have never seen Cars 2. The trailers never wowed me. I will probably never see this film, in spite having seen the original Cars film.

For the record Cars 2 opened on June 24 with a $189-million domestic box office.

Internet is back, The 50s are complete.

My Internet is back, but this is no time to slack off on my blogging. It's time to blog more, in fact. Once I get over my backorder of activities, I have to start making review and news updates, but for now service updates will do. That was the original purpose of this blog, so it works!

I have finished sorting out the 1940s and 1950s televises animated series. I can now move on to the 1960s. I have been splitting the Toon Radio music library into decade-based categories for the past few weeks. Trying to find the best categorization and schedules. With nearly 3000 songs to through, this can be a daunting task, since I have to check each track individually, but as I have mentioned, I am making progress. The categories I have so far are 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, Disney, Christmas, and general holiday. These categories seem to be the best way to do that since the animation soundtracks from a particular decade tend to be similar to each.

I got plans for these new categories. I may not set them as the basic for our playlist, but I got cool things in the works. These things include 80s and 90s weekends, all Disney hours, and much, much more. Stay tooned to this website for more information.

Until next time, laters

How to Create a PlayList

Most people already know that we use a computer program and its extension scripts to run this radio station. The SAM Broadcaster application is a great and powerful radio content management system, and we wouldn't be able to do this without it. SAM controls everything. It plays music. It manages our music library. It creates the playlist that we use. Just about everything we use and display on this website is managed by and through SAM, which leads me to the topic of this post: playlist management.

SAM offers four different way to manage the music we play.

1. Web Script - a script processed and ran on our website
2. Category Clock Wheel - a listing of library categories and the logic that describes when and how many songs to choose from each category.
3. Weighted Playlist - Songs are selected by an percent weight number, and some internal formula
4. Manual Clock Wheel - add songs by hand or individually by filename.

We at Toon Radio run with the weighted playlist option, and we will probably stay with it for most of our shows. It is the only option of the four that lets you, the listeners, modify our playlist.

A weighted playlist is a playlist where songs are selected based on the percent probability of that song appearing within any three-hour block (as required by law). A song with a weight of 100 will always play once every three hours. A weight of 1 means the songs may never play. All newly added songs are preset with a weight of 65.

This weighted playlist method has two configurable variables:

1. What happens whena song gets played? - We have it set to subtract 1 weight point.
2. What happens when a song gets a request? - We have it set to increase the song's weight by 5.

We fell this is the best option to run Toon Radio, because, as you see, once we get enough requests, we will only run theme songs you actually want to hear. The 5's will eventually add up.

Now, don't get me wrong. The other two methods have their place.

We use clock wheel scripts to play our featured podcasts on time, as well as our station IDs, promos, jingles, et cetera.

Clock wheels make specialty shows easier too. We have plans to have 80s and 90s hours and weekends. Having a clock wheel to select the music during these events will be very helpful, but I need the music to be in categories first.

Over the past few months, I have been splitting our soundtrack library into decade-based categories. The initial sorting has been done. I did it about a week before the latest downtime. Right now, I have to go back through each category, and look for errors, which will take time. I am making sure that each cartoon has its theme song placed in its proper category, as denoted by their initial relase dates.

While I am at it, I will also add music. Doing both tasks at the same time is more efficient, and is a much better use of my time. It also give me time to do other things, like blog, promote Toon Radio across the Internet, and actually watch cartoons for once.

Toon Radio is an experiment. I have always said this. A commercial-supported animation soundtrack radio station is not something that sounds plausible on paper, but here it is. Being ad-supported was the way I chose to pay the expensive costs of running a radio station, especially a niche market one. To this end, I have to at least entertain you guys, and to do that I have to plays the theme songs you are searching for. By allowing you, our listeners, the chance to modify what we play, and when we play, will go a long to achieving that goal. While not perfect, I feel it is the best option for this soundtrack radio station, and that how I will run it for at least the foreseeable future. Thank you for listening.

P.S. By law, we have to delay all requests by an hour. Please be patient, the song you selected will play. We just can't tell you when.

Toon Radio Returns

My internet and the Toon Radio audio stream is now back online. Tune in now, and enjoy the music.

Update For September 7

Still no internet, and therefore Toon Radio will remain offline. I am going to upload Episodes 20 and 21 of Kool Kids Klub tomorrow so you guys can at least have them.

I have asked my [a lot more successful] brother if he can help, but I have yet to hear back from him. I won't know if he will help until the weekend. So, this will take time.

In the meantime, I have been writing blog updates. Most of them you guys will never see, but I will post a lot of them when I get Internet back at home. I have a few reviews in the set that I would love you guys to read, and this blog is not going anywhere soon. It's hosted by Google's Blogger service, and not on my own webserver or computer.As for ToonRadio.net, I have to pay rent with GoDaddy next week for it. I'm not sure if I can do it in time. Might have to find a new location to store the Kool Kids episodes until I can get my life fixed.

Until next time, I have to leave. My laptop battery is running out.

Kool Kids Klub Podkast Episode 21

While Toon Radio is down, feel free to listen to Episode 21 of the Kool Kids Klub Podkast!



This episode covers episodes 3 and 4 of Mad Bull 34.

No Internet For Toon Radio

I am currently without intenret access, and thus Toon Radio will be offline until I fix this. In the meantime, I will try to add stuff to the blog.

You can always help me out by donating, but I feel that that things should be back up and running in a week.

Kool Kids Klub Podkast Episode 20

Episode 20 of the Kool Kids Klub Podkast is now available for download.

This episode is about the history of Sega.