From the Annals Of Animation: Flintstone, Butt-head…Stein?

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Sept 1, 2001 by Joe Hagan

Joel Stein, consummate Gen-X kvetcher and columnist at Time, is taking his print shtick into full, living color: He's angling to be a cartoon character in his own half-hour sitcom on VHl this fall.

The show's gist: Stein plays a version of himself (except as an employee of VH1) who interviews rock and pop stars. In reality, he'll interview them over the phone and weave the resulting exchanges into a pre-written comedic plot. Illustrator Robert Risko, whose work appears regularly in Vanity Fair, handles the animation, while Adam Schlesinger, the pop-rock tune- smith from the band Fountains of Wayne, writes the songs for the videos interspersed throughout the show. Daphne Rubin-Vega, the fishnetted star of the Broadway musical Rent, plays the central female character.

The pilot (for which Stein is doing his "eighth and final rewrite") will feature the eighties bubblegum star formerly known as Debbie Gibson (it's Debra now, thank you) and heavy metal icon Rob Halford, formerly of Judas Priest. In animated form, Stein will chill with Gibson in her imagined apartment and then join the out-ofthe-closet motorcycle-fetishist Hal-ford in a leather bar. Of the latter plot point, Stein says, "You can see where this joke is going."

VH1 hasn't yet given the show the green light--which is just as well, since the creators still haven't settled on a title. "So far we've been calling it 'Joel' because I'm so self-obsessed and there's