Spike and Mike's Festival of Animation

Spike and Mike's Festival of Animation is a collection ("festival") of short animated films which annually tours theaters, film festivals, and college campuses in North America. It was founded in 1977 by Craig "Spike" Decker and Mike Gribble.

The festival is presented annually in La Jolla and then tours to theatres, film festivals, and college campuses in about a dozen North American cities.

Mellow Manor Productions, Inc. was founded by Craig ‘Spike’ Decker and Mike Gribble, popularly known as “Spike & Mike". Mellow Manor is named after the famed Victorian house in Riverside where Spike, Mike and many others lived in a communal setting. Although Mike Gribble died from cancer in August 1994, Spike continues to produce touring theatrical festivals of animated short film collections.

Decker and Gribble began by founding Mellow Manor Productions, Inc. in Riverside, California in the 1970s as a means of promoting rock bands and special screenings of horror films as well as movie classics. After spending the summer of 1977 giving out flyers for the Fantastic Animation Festival, they decided to focus on presenting packages of animated films themselves, known as the Festival of Animation (now called "Classic Festival of Animation") in venues across the country.

The Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation began in 1990 at Wheeler Auditorium at UC Berkeley. This is an unrated, adult version of the regular program mainly featuring gross-out cartoons. In the Festival's early days, Spike and Mike would take the stage and introduce the films. Frequently Spike’s dog "Scottie" would take the stage and be driven to shred just about anything (up to the size of a two-man inflatable raft) by the audience cheers and applause.

In the 1990s, Spike and Mike produced two annual tours - both Classic and Sick and Twisted - but by the early 2000s, the Classic Festival of Animation was entirely phased out by Sick and Twisted Festival.

Before the "Festival of Animation" it was difficult to see independent, experimental, and foreign animation. Spike and Mike went on yearly worldwide film hunting expeditions. They signed-on animation from the National Film Board of Canada, Cal Arts, Sheridan, Royal College of Art, Annecy, and select studios active amongst the art-house scene that did not have a public venue. This Festival has come to be known as destination avant garde. In the 1990s Spike & Mike screened early films from such animators as Nick Park, Marv Newland, Tim Burton, Barry Purves, John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Will Vinton, and more.

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