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Yowza Digital & Kavaleer Productions Hook Up for Hi & Lois

December 13, 2009 at 12:42 pm by Gary Timpson

Press Release: Yowza Digital & Kavaleer Productions hook up to bring Hi & Lois to the small screen

Kavaleer Productions are delighted to announce that they have recently signed a co-development agreement with Yowza Digital for world famous and much loved comic strip, Hi & Lois.

Yowza, the well-established, highly respected animation & visual effects house based in Toronto, and Kavaleer Productions, one of Ireland’s top animation studios, will be working closely together in the coming months. With such a large body of work, fifty years in fact, featuring in over 1,100 daily newspapers there’s plenty to draw inspiration from.

“Kavaleer are very keen to get started in the New Year on such an engaging property and certainly look forward to working with the team at Yowza”, says Gary Timpson, Kavaleer’s Managing Director.

Yowza Animation Executive Producer, Pete Denomme says, “Hi & Lois is a great property with strong family values directly in-line with Yowza’s ongoing mandate to provide quality family friendly entertainment. Yowza is very excited to work with a studio of Kavaleer’s caliber and know this will be an important and creative collaboration.”

Mort Walker

Mort Walker started drawing cartoons at an early age, selling hundreds of his cartoons to national magazines at the age of 12. At 14 he was doing a regular comic strip called “The Limejuicers” for a Kansas City newspaper. He was an editor for his high school newspaper and, in college, was editor of the M.U. magazine, “The Showme.” After four years of military service where he was an Intelligence Officer in Italy during the war, he went to New York where he was editor of four magazines for Dell Publishing Co. On the side he sold gag cartoons to all the major publications and became the top selling cartoonist in the country. In 1950 he created the Beetle Bailey comic strip and Hi and Lois in 1954, both of which are among the top strips in the history of comics. He also created 7 other strips including Boner’s Ark. With the help of 3 of his sons, Greg, Brian and Neal he manages to stay at the top. He has written 3 children’s books, 4 non-fiction books, over 200 Beetle collections, and a stage musical. There have been 50 short animated films of Beetle and a CBS special. Mort has been President of the National Cartoonists Society and has won dozens of awards around the world.

Hi and Lois: A Brief Comic History

There are very few continuing comic strips in the world that have reached the fifty year mark. Two of them are still being created by their originator, the prolific Mort Walker!

Hi and Lois began in 1954 as a spin off from Mort’s other iconic comic strip, Beetle Bailey.  Over the next few years, Hi and Lois slowly but steadily grew in popularity, and is now read by over 100,000,000 people in over 50 countries worldwide. The strip has outlasted Pogo, L’il Abner, Hagar the Horrible and many, many others. With such extraordinary numbers, longevity and worldwide loyalty, the time has come for Hi & Lois to step into the small screen.

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