Cartoon Network Rebrands with Tristan Eaton’s Noods

Cartoon Network has recently rebranded their visual identity and look for a more consistent approach across all their characters.  Key to the new branding is Tristan Eaton’s Nood character which was developed for the channel at the request of Kidrobot.  Motion design studio Capacity took Tristan’s character design and prepped the Nood for his digital closeup (see their montage above).  The flexibility of the Nood is highlighted in new ID spots in which numerous Cartoon Network characters come to life on the animated toy platform.

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Now that the ‘official’ news is out of the way (whew), let’s talk about what really interests us 😉  First, The ‘light-bulb’ shaped character does seem ideally designed to morph into humanoid-ish ‘toons. Second, the Nood bears alot of resemblance to a  Munny albeit with a stretched (elongated) neck.    The similarity to Munny, and the character’s lineage begs the question, toys ?

It appears nothing is set in stone yet, but there’s little doubt that there are plans to turn the Nood into a toy platform.  How do we know?  It never ceases to amaze us what can be discovered with a quick Google search.  Turns out two wedding photogs in Atlanta recently shot Nood protos/samples.  They described them as ‘hand-painted’, but they appear to be pad-printed or spray masked.   Not sure when/if these will actually drop, but it would be a pretty significant development.

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