Claymation was a dominant force in American popular culture during the late 1980s, which characters such as the California Raisins and the Noid achieving a sort of pre-Internet media ubiquity. The creative force behind Claymation was Will Vinton Studios, a Portland, Oregon production house that first rose to fame with the hallucinatory 1975 short Closed Mondays which won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short. Despite a fair amount of critical and commercial success, though, Will Vinton Studios only made a single feature film, The Adventures of Mark Twain, and in the 1990s Claymation ceased to be the powerhouse that it once was.
The live event featured in this episode was put on by Stumptown Stories, a local Portland history collective dedicated to popularizing weird and overlooked episodes in Pacific Northwest history.
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