About Beetlejuice
About TheNeitherworld.com
About me
About Beetlejuice
Beetlejuice was an animated series produced by Nelvana Ltd that ran from 1989 to 1991.
Obviously, the show was
loosely based on the movie of the same name starring Michael Keaton (a
brilliant performance) as Betelgeuse and Wynona Ryder as Lydia. (See the
full
credits.) I
say loosely based because the series never made any kind of logical
transition from the movie to the situation presented in the cartoon.
In the cartoon, Beetlejuice rents a run-down building, ("BJ's Roadhouse"), which he shares with Jacques (a skeleton obsessed with his weight) and Ginger (a tap-dancing spider). His neighbor is a great big furry beast known only as The Monster Across The Street (who owns a strange-looking dog named Poopsie). Beetlejuice is basically hated by the entire community for various reasons--mostly because he's a scam (excuse me, *scum*) artist.
Beetlejuice's best friend is a young girl from the living world named Lydia Deetz. Lydia lives with her parents Delia and Charles in an artsy-schmartsy modern home (which Delia has decorated in her own bizarre taste), and attends a boring private school. Lydia is also forced to belong to the sickening Happy-Face Girls, of which Delia is a sort of denmother.
Fortunately, Lydia has the ability to teleport to Beetlejuice's dimension--the Neitherworld--where the pair manages to get into some weird but entertaining situations. Unfortunately, Beetlejuice also can teleport to the living world, where he gets everyone into some weird but entertaining situations.
Beetlejuice had a very original look, from its backgrounds to its characters. There was even a CGI bit inserted into (nearly) every episode in the form of an ad starring a character named Barry Me-Not (this was before CGI was rabidly popular).
About TheNeitherworld.com
TheNeitherworld.com started out as a subdirectory on my University of Southern California web account around the middle of April of 1997. I had noticed that there were no Beetlejuice-related sites on the web at all, whether they be based on the movie or the cartoon. I took it upon myself to create a site for each, and about a month later, when I went home for summer vacation, sat down on my brother's computer to create many screen grabs, sound clips, and a few video files for the movie site, which was really destined to be merely an archive of such files. The cartoon site I had creative ideas for: fanfiction, fanart, that sort of thing.
I soon discovered that all those multimedia files I had worked so hard to create were being ripped off all over the Web, and various other Beetlejuice movie sites were cropping up to display them. I was disgusted. Before the summer had ended, however, I was contacted by a young man, asking my permission to use my files in the creation of his own Beetlejuice page. By that time I was engrossed in the development of the cartoon site as well as fed up with the plagerism of my movie clips, and gave him my blessing to take them all off my hands. I recycled my movie site altogether, and my clips lived on at his site, the now-gone Webpage For the Recently Deceased.
In April of 1999, roughly two years after the site's inception, I was proud to purchase the www.theneitherworld.com domain. The Neitherworld averages one to two hundred hits a day, which may be small potatoes to some people, but to me it shows I'm not entirely wasting my time. ;^) I also receive wonderful emails from Beetlejuice fans all over the world.
About me
Although my handle, Sparky, isn't very gender-specific, I can assure you all that I am female. ;^) I have loved animation since I was a little kid and spent my childhood 'improving' on cartoon shows--I would create new characters and stories for them.
The Beetlejuice series started showing while I was in high school, and I thought it was the weirdest, corniest, coolest-looking thing on TV. Although at the time I spent my creative energies 'improving' Disney's Darkwing Duck show, I loved Beetlejuice and even dressed myself and best friend up as BJ and Lydia for Halloween 1992 (we won the costume contest, by the way). Four of my biggest animated heroes are ghosts: Beetlejuice and Casper's uncles the Ghostly Trio.
I'm afraid my time online has waned dramatically over the years, and I no longer keep up any of my websites as actively as I would like to. I simply have too much to do with my time, such as working to earn money for the bills. It's a living.
You can write me at sparky@theneitherworld.com.
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