Spike & Mike’s Festival of Animation is handing over its film archive to UC Riverside, bringing it back to its roots.
The university will celebrate by screening highlights from the collection on May 13.
Spike and Mike are Craig “Spike” Decker and the late Mike Gribble, who were students at Riverside City College and began producing evenings of animation on campus in the 1970s.
The festival grew to tour the world, branching to the Sick and Twisted Festival in 1990. Spike and Mike relocated to La Jolla and started producing their own shorts, helping to launch such the careers of such animators as John Lasseter of Disney Pixar and Nick Park, the creator of “Wallace and Gromit.”
Spike and Mike have worked with some of the most successful and influential animators of recent decades, from Will Vinton of the claymation California Raisins to Mike Judge of “Beavis and Butt-head,” Matt Groening of “The Simpsons” and Matt Stone and Trey Parker of “South Park.”
“They really opened up adult audiences to the humor and craziness of animation,” said Bill Plympton, whose pencil drawn works “My Face” and “25 Ways to Quit Smoking” are in the collection.
It is massive. In a press release, the university said it includes hundreds 35mm films, but in a phone interview, Decker said the number is growing.
“To be perfectly accurate, we’re giving them some more, so I can’t put my finger on the exact number yet until we inventory the additional shipments that they’ll be picking up.
“We pretty much wanted to give them the whole collection, everything that was in 35mm, 35 negs, sound prints and even 16mm, 99 percent of everything that we made because everything we have now is digital. And it seemed just like a great home for it.”
Spike and Mike’s collaboration began in the early ’70s when Decker was in a local band called Sterno and the Flames.
“It was a cover band. We did a lot of ’50s kind of doo wop that I guess was sort of greaser music at the time. It was quite an experience,” he said.
“When the band broke up I started doing special events. We’d do these night screenings and horror thons. … We’d show the Max Fleischer pieces, the Betty Boops and Superman and that sort of thing. So it sort of went from music to film and rock and roll shows and then animation exclusively.”
The duo named their production company Mellow Manor after their Bohemian housing near RCC that is now part of local lore.
“Behind Riverside City College at the top of the stairs there was an old three story Victorian. And that was sort of a house right out of ‘Animal House.’ We were young and much crazier than we are now, and it became notorious for all kinds of antics and toga parties. All the stuff that went on there, it was just an endless array of activities and people and parties and characters and all that.”
Bringing the collection inland is a daunting cast.
“There’s a lot there. It’s incredible,” said Decker. “I look at it and it just staggers my imagination to even see that we were able to do that. It cost a lot of money to produce those films, and we were the only people in the world who were stepping up and believing in it, in the power of short animation. And now I look back at all those things that have become iconic franchises like ‘Wallace and Gromit’ or ‘The Simpsons,’ that started with 15 second shorts.”
Contact Fielding Buck at 951-368-9551 or fbuck@pressenterprise.com
