davidfirth

Unreleased bits: Panathinaikos Bear 2

Added 2017-10-03 16:00:21 +0000 UTC

Hello chaps on the tenner and above. This is an exciting exclusive. Anyone who's been with me since 2003ish may remember Panathinaikos Bear.

(pronounced: Panna-thin-eye-koss)

I made a load of episodes between 2003-2005 (not always in numerical order). The first episode was part of Fat-Pie 3: a stupid, probably meant to be eastern European comedy show that was on TV inside the Fat-Pie world. It was a mixture of nonsense and slapstick.

The first complete Flash cartoons I ever made were Panathinaikos Bear #3 to #6. They were just projects to help me learn the software. before this point I had used a variety of other software to animate. I'm not entirely sure why I started with #3, but it might have been because #1 was already in Fat-Pie.

I eventually remade Panathinaikos Bear #1 in Flash and started #2, but I never really finished it. At one stage I went back and made almost the entire thing before losing the project files forever (fact: I have lost the project files for almost all of my early cartoons in various HDD failures)

Or so I thought....

On a recent scour through backup discs and drives I found Panathinaikos Bear #2.fla in an almost completed state! (I don't label discs very well and I have probably about 600-700 discs of random files from 1998-present). I loaded it into flash and found that very little work needed to be done to finish it, so I did. The only new stuff was a bit of animation and some formatting.

So here it is. If you have never seen Panathinaikos Bear, prepare to be confused and probably disappointed. If you're a fan then I hope it lives up.

Additionally I have discovered about 10 unmade Panathinaikos Bear scripts and some of them still made me laugh to read through, so I might make those eventually too. I probably will release them quietly though, because people generally don't like them.