A few years ago, Andrew Gesler and his wife Jeanine adopted a rescue dog and named him Bernie. I remember every time I was over the dog was causing some sort mischief — from running away on the beach to eating weird objects outside: regular puppy mayhem. The funny part about the dog being out of control in his early years was hearing the “BERNIE!!!!” or “BERNIE, NOOO!!!” screams from the proud new owners. I would sit back and laugh my ass off on how nuts he was. And his name is classic. Long story short, I thought it would be fun if our production company produced an animated cartoon about Ges and his dog.
For the first episode of Bernie and Ges, we hit up our friend Drew Toonz. We wrote the first one based off of the Jersey shore guidos, and made them into zombies. We were fortunate to get actor/comedian Mike Anthony on board, who would play the voice of Bernie, and Toonz introduced us to Mike Spahr who does most of the voices. We pretty much called some friends over to do v.o. here and there. And that was basically it.
After we made the episode, we were introduced to a couple producers who wanted to take it to a few networks. But after some time and brainstorming, we thought it would be cool to just throw it on iTunes and donate a portion of proceeds to an animal rescue, similar to the one that Bernie had come from.
We hope to produce more episodes in the near future, including surfers from around the globe. The creative process is really fun and comedy is one of the greatest gifts you can bring to people in this life, along with rescuing dogs! Enjoy.
Get the movie on iTunes.
