For the past few months I have been working on a pretty cool project, redesigning the official website for the relaunch of the classic Odd Rods® trading card series of crazy, funny cartoon hot rod monsters & creatures - big eyes bugging out, goofy smiles with teeth bared & tongues wagging. The proud new owners of the Odd Rods® trademarks and copyrights got in touch with the original cartoonist/illustrator/artist extraordinaire Bob “B.K.” Taylor to bring these awesome cartoon characters back into the popular culture where they belong.
As you can read on the website, the new owners are working on securing new licensing deals for these characters, and have more plans in the works, but I can’t talk much more about anything right now.
The site as it is now is primarily the redesign, with the basic info. We’ll be expanding things very soon to include more trading card galleries & more merchandise from Zazzle among other goodies. Really we needed to get the new site up to replace the previous version, as the owners were not happy with how the first iteration came out and have been holding off on talking with potential businesses due to wanting to put their best foot forward with the Odd Rods website.
I was, to say the least, thrilled when I was contacted to develop the new Odd Rods website, as I have not only been a huge fan of those characters since I was a young cartoonist, and have been influenced by the styler and humor of the artwork of BK, but as you can see on my website I have worked up a few of my own Odd Rods inspired hot rod cartoon characters myself. I even have some fun new ones in the work, I need to make time to get those done, they are going to be very, very cool.
The Odd Rods owners have been great to work with, as has artist/illustrator B.K. Taylor, and they have been very patient during some hiccups in the progress over the course of development. And speaking of development, kudos to my good friend, web developer (& virtuoso guitarist) John “CJ” Wallace for helping me finish off the programming side of things to get this website live. We are both looking forward to creating more and more fun stuff for the Odd Rods website, and I am sure as things progress you’ll be seeing my design (and hopefully illustration work!) in the Odd Rods web & print materials.
by George Coghill -
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Tags: art, artist, cartoon, cartooning, creature, design, humorous, Illustration, illustrator, monster, Odd Rods
If you’re “SMART” you’ll do the following.
1. Re-print & sell those old trading cards again.
Not only would guy’s like me who bought them by them back in the 70’s buy them, but a whole “new” generation of young kids will get a kick out them just like I did when I was a kid. I have 7 grand-children and I would love to turn them on to Odd Rods material.
2. Take the original artwork (or computer image) and print & sell t-shirts of the odd rods as well.
3. Sell full size wall posters ( like the kind you find in Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Target, etc.) Don’t limit yourself to trading cards.
Don’t just put the artwork on the website. That’s fine & dandy.
I would love to buy Odd-Rods trading cards, t-shirts & posters.
You really should sell all 3 of those. Cards, t-shirts, posters & even lunch boxes. You’re sitting on a gold mine & don’t even know it.
Wade
Just to clarify, I am only working with the Odd Rods folks on this, but I know they are working on many licensing avenues for a full-blown Odd Rodsâ„¢ revival. Not sure exactly what the details are just yet, but the website redesign is just the beginning.