Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist is an American
animated series that originally ran on
Comedy Central from May 28, 1995 to December 24, 1999,–with a final set of three shelved episodes airing in 2002–starring
Jonathan Katz,
Jon Benjamin, and
Laura Silverman. The show was created by a Burbank, California production company Popular Arts Entertainment (executive producers: Tim Braine, Kevin Meagher, and David Pritchard), with Jonathan Katz and
Tom Snyder, developed and first made by Popular Arts for
HBO Downtown Productions. Boston based
Tom Snyder Productions became the hands-on production company, and the episodes were usually produced by Katz and
Loren Bouchard.
The show was
computer animated in a crude, easily recognizable style called
Squigglevision (a device Snyder had employed in his educational animation business) in which all persons and animate objects are colored and have constantly squiggling outlines, while most other inanimate objects are static and usually gray in color.The original challenge Popular Arts faced was how to re-purpose recorded
stand-up comedy material. To do so they based Dr. Katz's patients on stand-up comics for the first several episodes, simply having them reciting their stand-up act. The secondary challenge was how to afford to animate on cable TV at the time. Snyder (a boyhood friend of Braine's) had Squigglevision, an inexpensive means of getting animation on cable, which could not afford...
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