But I did buy a gift for myself, and I think it's pretty neat.
Behold! It's an animation cel, but not from anything mainstream or well-known. Quite the opposite, really.
This is a cel from "Izzy's Quest for Olympic Gold," a TV special starring Izzy the Whatisit, the infamous mascot of the 1996 summer Olympics.
I've talked about Izzy and his mascot brethren before, about a decade ago in fact. He and his species lived in a world inside of the Olympic Torch, and the special was about Izzy needing to earn the five Olympic rings from good sportsmanship to leave his world to go to Earth to participate in the Olympics. This aired a few times during a single weekend on TNT in 1995, and then never seen again. I remember watching it during one of those airings, and I spent the next ten years more or less telling myself that I imagined it.
Like, there were no other reruns, no home video releases, not even any clips of the special are on Youtube or any of the other sketchier streaming sites where you'd find other obscure cartoons from the 90s.
What you do find, however, are clips and playthroughs of video games starring Izzy.
Izzy's Quest For The Olympic Rings was a pretty blatant Sonic ripoff released for the Genesis and SNES.
While Izzy's Adventure was an educational PC game.
Every once in a while, production art and cels from this special surface online. A few weeks back, I was browsing The Cricket Gallery's site (the official distributors for the cels, as they told me), and I came across it by chance. I don't know just how sought after cels from this is, but I knew I couldn't pass it up.
So I paid way more than I think I should have, and voila, I now have concrete evidence of this special's existence! A quick google search shows that only about four or five other cels have been spotted online (usually through ebay), so I'm quite excited to be part of this small club.
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