designer of the Peter Gabriel video "Big Time."

Re-creating the 'Buzz'

David Daniels revisits his groundbreaking '80s clay-animation video at the annual short-film festival

By Chris Garcia, american-statesman film writer
Friday, September 16, 2005

David Daniels lives in the cold, scratchy nether-zone of a grand and awful irony, and it troubles him to no end. This is how he sees it: As a young man, he was an artist whose first major work, the clay-animation video "Buzz Box," put him on the fast track to stardom in the mid-1980s. The 15-minute video — a throbbing, dazzling miasma of imagistic excess — was hailed as a savage, funny and groundbreaking blast at modern media run amok.

Daniels went on to animate four seasons of "Pee-Wee's Playhouse" and design the Peter Gabriel video "Big Time." But he decided to forfeit the sacrifice, the shmoozing and the struggle of the artist's myth for a traditional path, that of husband, father and creator of talking M&Ms.

Daniels indeed created the "M&Ms Guys," that famous pair of humanoid candy drops who wear sneakers and gloves and pitch their namesake edibles in animated M&Ms ads. He and his Portland, Ore.-based production company Bent Image Lab have also produced memorable commercials for Kellogg's, NBC, Nabisco, Pepsi and H-P...