Kicking butt and taking names with style, Whirlgirl is still coming on strong in her weekly episodes. © Visionary Media LLC.

At the same time, Shockwave is allying themselves with Stan Lee Media for future material, thereby accelerating the construction of their site into a desired destination place-to-be. . . .stanleemedia.com sounds like it's getting primed to jump into just about everything net related, promising a new set of super heroes revolving around his 7th Portal creation. . . .Mondo Media, a San Francisco digital production company founded in 1988, just expanded its major net presence by adding Netscape to the syndication roster of its two original series Thugs On Films and Like, News to play under the banner "Mondo Media Minishows." (To give you an example of how broad the distribution can be for original net creations, the other six sites now carrying the Mondo Minishows are Shockwave, Snap, international distributor Canoe, web host Alta Vista, teen site Ugo and the Washingtonpost.com) Mondo Media's big new year's splash has come by way of their co-production of The God and Devil Show, now running exclusively on the newly launched Entertaindom channel. . . .iFILMS, a company originally structured for netcasting existing short films, recently coaxed Spike Decker onto its board of advisors while acquiring library material from his festival organizing Mellow Manor Productions' Spike & Mike's Classical Festival of Animation and Spike & Mike's Sick & Twisted Festival of Animation. Decker will soon oversee iFilm.com's selection of both library films and outside original animated content in that company's efforts to become a greater destination venue. . . .Nickelodeon Online, in the process of converging several existing Nick sites under the direction of senior vice president Taran Swan, will also create new opportunities for original animated works in that NETwork's quest to develop a large interactive online community for kids. . . .Showtime's whirlgirl.com is still going very strong, expanding its scope, interactivity and convergence ideas. WhirlGirl producers Visionary Media are sure to announce new creations shortly . . . .and, the deals go on and on and on as the ideas of today fly into tomorrow's realities.

For now, let's take a closer look at five companies who are journeying at quicksilver speeds in giving shape to the net's animation evolution.

© Cartoon Network, Inc.

Cartoons, Cartoons, Cartoons
Cartoon Network Online would seem to be the most straight-forward to explain (a successful cable company debuts some of their stuff on the Internet and "web-a-vizes" it, right?) Hardly. With Sam Register heading the online family as vice president and creative director, TCN's Internet line-up is anything but simple web screening or easy re-purposing of their branded programming. The original Web Premiere Toons is unquestionably one of the forefathers of animated content on the Internet and is now the primo spot inside cartoonnetwork.com. They currently run five original-to-the-web series (Pink Donkey & The Fly, Coot's Country, B. Happy, Germtown and Marshmellow Honey) and beginning this year, Pink Donkey and Coot's Country will increase production to weekly webisodes of shorter length 2-3 minute toons. This should keep Funny Garbage, Register's premiere production studio in New York, extremely busy since they are also in production on a future Web Premiere Toon based on the Banana Splits. The excitement is high on this latter project as Register explains, "It will blend newly shot action segments of the Banana characters who will then turn into cartoon versions of themselves" during the webisode's play. "Really cool stuff," he believes.