in business since 2000. I started the business in a converted laundry room off a railroad kitchen with an ancient computer, a microphone the size of my pinkie, and the hope that this budding form of entertainment and communication had something to say to people.
In order to create Rubber Chicken Cards, I wanted to be able to work with another human being and split up the duties. Never very good at the business side of things, I began to work with an old friend, Richard Zobel, terrific actor and singer/musician, in order to get things up and rolling. Richard, though not Warren Buffet by any stretch of the imagination, turned out was good at finding inexpensive ways to do things. He was one of those people who would spend 13 days trying to save 3 bucks.
Both of our families were used to living with insane artists, so everyone was on board. And... we began.
The first animations I produced were pretty simple. It was a man in the center of a greeting card with flowered borders, saying a little something like, "You're looking really good!" If you rolled your curser around the sides, flowers would pop out and say hello. Not bad, but not real good either. Then I did a version of "Stinky Dog," created the illustrated character, put some mouth movements over the soundtrack, and I had my first Rubber Chicken Cards card-toon. I showed it to a bunch of folks, looked around the web to see if anyone else was doing the same thing, and Voila... I had an idea that I thought might actually do well in a marketplace filled with cats dancing to tinkly music and sappy sentiments that had no relationship to real living.
I wanted to create a place where people all over the world could communicate with each other on special days and every day events through a series of characters. And so instead of using gags to make people laugh, I thought that the same characters in different situations would be great. I also figured that these characters might live outside of Rubber Chicken Cards, in the future, as in a Cartoon show and as business applications. With that in mind we started with a character, Stinky Dog, doing both "Happy Birthday" and "Thinking of You."
We did "the Flashback Boys," the two stoners that have a really hard time stringing cogent thoughts together in many situations, trying to explain this inexplicable Universe. And on and onward to the current crop of over 60 characters.
In addition to Richard, I had some terrific voice over actors to work with. Richard and I handled all the male voices and some of the female. I did all the drawing and most of the animation, and Richard handled much of the business side of things, setting up the web site and attempting to pay the small bills we had. At the time we had two crummy computers cobbled together from spare parts, a cheap internet service and server, and a merchant solution that was inexpensive and easy for us to figure out. Everything we did took quite a while as all of business was a giant learning curve for me. I was operating on the time old premise of one foot in front of the other and keep having fun.
We worked hard, staying up late, waking up early. We also had a wonderful USC grad student, now a teacher in Oregon, to help us with the web design and programming. She was great fun and worked well with our seat-of-the-pants style. In addition to running our budding business, both Richard and I worked at other jobs to pay the rent, etc. I was teaching at Cal State LA, and working at a desk job in a Productions office in Hollywood.
In the beginning in early 2000 something very odd happened. I went to Washington DC to be part of a study on kidney disease, as my father had died of kidney cancer, and his siblings, three of them, had this rare form of cancers or died of the same. They did not find anything wrong with my kidneys, but they found a tumor the size of a melon in my chest. So right at the beginning of our business I was in the hospital for a 12 hour operation that almost killed me and a recovery that lasted months. When I got home from the hospital in immense pain, hardly able to move, I still kept rolling in RC Cards. Richard would pick me up, if I could handle it that day, and drive me to our little office, take me up stairs, and we would work. Some days I couldn't sit up and we would record the cards with me laying down, hardly able to speak. Though it was painful, it sure beat sitting around feeling sorry for myself. After recording, I would hobble to the computer and draw the budding characters. I felt like John Wayne. It was a real bootstrap beginning. We laughed, cried, and kept going.
The first year was pretty amazing as we earned enough money to cover some expenses.... and we have been growing strong ever since. We now have thousands of Rubber Chicken Card family members from all over the world. I am looking at our statistics right now and I see that during the last week we have had tens of thousands of visitors from Canada, the US, Brazil, England, Australia, Thailand, and China, to name a few countries.
Time passes, we grew, and then tragedy struck. Sadly, in Oct, 2005, Richard passed away. I lost a great friend and dedicated partner.
With sadness, I pressed onward, adding more voice over folks to fill in may of the roles Richard played. I also met with great people who loved what I was trying to do with Rubber Chicken Cards and they helped me look at the next step forward. In addition, we added some great, fresh animators to improve the cards, so now there is this really fun, funny, and upbeat group trading ideas on how to make every card-toon better and funnier. If you look closely (or not so closely), you can see the improvement in the new material. I also hired a buddy of mine, a great musician, to compose the mini Broadway tunes.
On the horizon are some great projects. Besides the web site redesign, which you are experiencing right now, we have a SONNET project, taking the words of Billy Shakespeare and setting them to music and animation. This is a serious, not grim, venture that should add another dimension to what we are doing. In that way we will have some "Sweet Chicken" cards to balance out the funny.
In closing for now, I want to thank every one of you for taking this ride with me and my fine troupe of performers, writers, musicians, animators, and programmers. We are all aware that the reason we exist is so that you can send some fun to your friends, family, and co-workers to affect the quality of their day. The response that we get from you by letter and email is so heartwarming and beautiful that it makes every moment of this effort rewarding. This business, for all of us involved, is a miracle of fun and love.
Steven Rotblatt
Chief Chicken