Boondocks, Black Dynamite producer Carl Jones discusses NFT project, New Animation Studio
You may not know it, but you have seen Carl Jones’ names scroll over the end credits of some of the most popular shows of the past decade.
In addition to Adult Swim’s The Boondocks and Black dynamiteJones has also worked at TBS’ The last OG. However, he is branching out with his NFT project BUBBLE BALLSwhich has been a big hit, sells 10,000 digital generative artworks on the first day.
Jones, born and raised in Fayetteville, North Carolina, told BLACK ENTERPRISE he’s been drawing since the day he could hold a pencil, and Bubblegoose Ballers is a concept that’s been with him from the start.
“It’s based on a character I designed when I was a kid growing up in North Carolina during the crack epidemic,” Jones said. “There were a lot of drug dealers in my neighborhood wearing bubble goose coats. I was always drawing these characters in bubble goose down coats in my sketchbook, and then one day I had this idea to draw a goose in a bubble goose down coat.”
Jones added that he continued to draw the concept in his sketchbook as he got older and eventually began worked with Adult Swim to create an animated pilot, but creative differences led Jones to walk away from the idea.
“So I basically shelved it until this opportunity came along to launch it as an NFT,” Jones added.
Jones has also started his own animation studio, MartianBlueberry, with his partner Love Barnett, which has produced animated projects at Jones’ side for recording artists Trippie Redd and Megan Thee stallion.
Jones and Barnett plan to use theirs a wealth of experience, production knowledge and industry resources to tell stories that speak to diverse communities in ways that larger animation studios may not understand. Something Jones experienced while working on The Boondocks.
“It definitely helped me understand the importance of doing something honest and specific to your own experience,” Jones told Black Enterprise. “Writing from a real place and telling stories that matter to you and representing us in many different perspectives as well.
“The Boondocks was the show that had a lot of different entry points into that world, so you had characters like Uncle Ruckus and Huey and Riley and they were all representative of an aspect of our culture versus a monolithic way of approaching black people and how we’re represented on television , so it’s something I use in everything I do since then.”
MartianBlueberry already has several different projects in development, including an animated project featuring Major League Baseball and a second animated project featuring Meg The Stallion.
“I’ve always felt that there wasn’t enough representation on the production side of animation, and we’ve always run into this problem of producing shows for studios that don’t understand the culture and don’t understand the nuances and specificity of the culture,” Jones told Black Enterprise.” So I’ve always wanted to start a company that specializes in that area so that we can get the true representation that we want.”
