So I saw about a hundred feet of animated ‘Clerks’ footage, and let me tell you – it’s quite awesome. The show has a look all its own, thanks to the brilliant Chris Bailey and his team of hardworking, talented animators. Huge kudos to them, and to the folks behind the scenes (like John Bush and Angela Macias, who keep the machine moving), as well as to me and Scott, and of course, the genius of Dave Mandel. It’s only about thirty seconds or so of footage, but Good Lord, is it phenomenal! I’m psyched.

We go out on the road for the show in February to start the press push. There’s this thing called the Television Critics Association (or Conference) that they hold in Pasadena for the fall and mid-season debuts that all of us (me, Scott, Dave, Brian, Jeff, Jay, and Chris) will be paneling at. Should be cool.

But before that, in January, I’ve got this other sweet gig coming up. I’m going to be a judge at Sundance this year. It was something I was supposed to do last year, but had to bow out of due to a) our close friend Bob Hawk having his flick ‘Trick’ in the competition, and b) ‘Dogma’ deadlines. With ‘Dogma’ out of the way and no connection to anyone in the competition, I’ll be pulling jury duty this year (the kind one wants to be called on for.) Should be a blast.

Speaking of ‘Dogma’, it looks like we’ll crawl to a thirty million domestic gross. Very neat. Our highest yet, and more than our other three flicks combined. Would I have liked it to do more. Of course. Am I happy with what we did get to? Absolutely. Thanks again to all of you guys. You got us there.

I’m heading out on Friday to accomplish a longtime dream of mine. For about sixteen years, I’ve always wanted to see Prince (or the Artist) live. Thanks to his art director hearing that interview I did on ‘Fresh Air’ with Terry Gross, I got a call to attend the concert the Artist is taping for a New Year’s Eve pay-per-view event. How fucking sweet is that? The cherry on top? Morris Day is playing as well (I’m a huge ‘Time’ fan.) It’s all being held at Paisley Park, so Jen and I are winging it out to Minnesota this weekend. While I’m there, I want to make a return to the scene of the crime as well: we’re going to stop at the Eden Prairie Mall. I’m bringing the camera, so I’ll take some pix. Haven’t been there since we shot ‘Rats’. Should be interesting, to say the least.

Glad to hear the ‘Dogma’ UK invasion is going nicely. Film Four worked up some sweet posters for the campaign, as well as some nice bus-ads and some awesome billboards. Hopefully, Brad and Chris will post some of those images for you.

On the ‘Dogma’ DVD front: we were all a little taken aback by the announcement here. Yes – we knew April was the target date for the VHS release, but we thought the DVD was going to tail it by about a month. It doesn’t give us much time to put together the disc we want to, but we may be able to squeak it in after all (though that price tag may have to change if we’re going to accomplish everything we’ve been talking about.) More on this as it unfolds.

That’s about it for now. Thanks for sticking with us through what’s been our most memorable year yet…

Though wait’ll you see next year. Oo-boy.