Why is Jeff Lenburg's Encyclopedia of Animated Cartoons so terrible?

Y

Yuupp!

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I bought this book last year and dear lord, there are so many careless mistakes, examples being characters with the wrong names, wrong airdates, the wrong channel the show was on.

How come this encyclopedia is so awful? Does he just guess who starred in what show or what channel a show was on. He lists the incorrect years for movies and series. Is this guy even an animation fan or did someone force him to write it?
 
I was actually wondering about this a while ago. Some of it looks like a honest mistake such as Susie from Rugrats being listed twice in the cast list and saying that Foster's premired in 2005, but still a proof reader should have caught that. Then on the other end of the spectrum there are so obscenly wrong, there is just no excuses for it. Some of the ones that stand out in my mind is the absence of Courage the Cowardly Dog, saying that Sheep in the Big City was on AS, and this line from Ed Edd n Eddy's entry:
 
It actually makes me really mad that someone could put together such an extensive encyclopedia that actually makes it to be published and be full of such glaring errors. This guy is obviously no animation buff, what upsets me too is that only true animation buffs would notice these mistakes. To the untrained person who is just reading this book, they won't see anything wrong with it.
 
*raises hand*

Who's Jeff Lenburg, how'd/why'd he write an encyclopedia of Animated Cartoons, and where can I see a copy of this misguided piece of work?
 
All I know is that he's an author, he's written several other so called "encyclopedia", I got mine at the local Barnes & Noble. I don't know why he wrote this book because he clearly doesn't know much about animation.
 
I had this book at one point. Ye gads, the amount of misinformation was amazing.

I don't have it anymore, but among the mistakes I remember:


  • The Aardvark in "Ant & Aardvark" was listed as being purple (he's actually blue)
  • Ralph Bakshi was listed as a director on all 17 "James Hound" shorts (he only directed two; in the rest he was credited as a "supervising director")
  • Braniff was listed as a production company for "South Park" (actually a joke credit)
  • In the first edition, the plot to "Snoopy Come Home" made it seem that it was about Snoopy contemplating suicide (eventually corrected in future editions, thankfully)
  • Several 1954-55 Tom and Jerry cartoons were listed as CinemaScope (didn't happen until later)
  • Hoot Kloot's horse was identified as "Confederate" (actually Fester)
And I'm pretty sure there are chock full of others.

EDIT: Here's what Lenburg originally wrote about "Snoopy Come Home"
 
I kind of have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, the first eition was published at a time when very little was being written about TV animation, so I have to give him props for that. On the other hand... yeah, a bit sloppy in places.

A few more to add to the pile:

- Danger Mouse originally appeared as a minor character in Count Duckula (other way round)
- The hero of Legend of Zelda is named Nick.
- Mighty Max is an "11-year old teenager" (?) with a skull-shaped cap (actually, his cap looks like an ordinary baseball cap - other than the main villain being named Skullmaster, I don't know where Lenburg got the skull-shaped thing from)

All in all, it's a good place to start if you want to research TV animation, but take it with a grain of salt.
Sort of like Wikipedia. If Wikipedia was put together by drunk people.
 
The really annoying thing for me, is that some of these things can't even be explained by "He's not an animation buff." They're things that should be obvious to the most casual of viewers while they're watching the friggin cartoon! I mean, show me the scene where Snoopy tries to commit suicide in "Snoopy Come Home". I can't help but wonder if he even watched half of the stuff he writes about :(.

It sucks that the only published attempt we have so far at a database of info for all types of animation is so poorly written.
 
It's nice that someone actually tried putting together an extensive book full of the history of animation covering everything, but if it's going to be such a piss poor attempt of him seemingly assuming what plots were and giving improper information, why even publish it?
 
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