Eric Schwartz | Code Like It's 198x

In 1991 a cartoon about lemmings went round the Amiga’s public-domain libraries, user groups and bulletin boards on both sides of the Atlantic. Eric Schwartz, an American teenager, had taken the hapless characters of Psygnosis’s Lemmings and made a cartoon of his own about them. His Anti-Lemmin’ demo was hand-drawn animation with sound, and it needed three megabytes of memory to run. Amiga Format put it first in its list of classic demos and called him “the king of PD animations”. He was not a demo-scene coder. He drew cartoons, frame by frame, in Deluxe Paint, and gave them away.

Fast facts

Full name: Eric W. Schwartz.
Born: in 1971 or 1972; he gave his age as 25 in mid-1997.
First Amiga: an Amiga 500, at the end of 1988.
Tools: Deluxe Paint for the drawings, Disney Animation Studio for rough animation, and MovieSetter to put scenes and sound together.
Characters: Amy the Squirrel, Flip the Frog, Clarissa the cat, and the planes of his “Aerotoons”.
Best-known works: Anti-Lemmin’ (1991), The Dating Game (1991), A Day at the Beach (1992).
Distribution: public-domain libraries such as 17-Bit and PD Soft, bulletin boards and online services; later on video and CD-ROM.
Since 1996: the web comic Sabrina Online.

From cut paper to MovieSetter

Schwartz had been “heavily into animation” long before he had the tools for it, he told CU Amiga in 1997. He made “crude early attempts with cut paper in a Terry Gilliam-ish fashion” and clay models, and on his Commodore 64 he even tried some very primitive animation software, on which every drawing for an animation had to fit on one screen. The Amiga had interested him since the magazines began covering it in 1985 and 1986 as the “graphics” computer, and his parents bought him an Amiga 500 at the very end of 1988. His first animation, Stealthy Manoeuvre, followed soon after, made with a new program called MovieSetter.

By 1992 he was working on an Amiga 2000 with 3MB of memory and a 45MB hard drive. He described his method to CU Amiga that year. He started with sketches and a storyboard, roughed out the movement in Disney Animation Studio, coloured it in Deluxe Paint and drew the backgrounds, then assembled everything in MovieSetter, which he called “the best animation tool on the market, even if it is getting a bit long in the tooth”. It worked only in hi-res with 32 colours and was slow, so for anything faster than ten frames a second he turned to Deluxe Paint IV. Syncing sound to the pictures was “the real difficulty”. He did many of the voices himself, and his parents did others. Because most people did not have 3MB, he cut his demos down to run in as little as 1MB.

Amy, Flip and the Aerotoons

Amy the Squirrel was his own character. In The Story of Amy the Squirrel (1991) he gave her a mock history in cartoons, each frame drawn in the style of a different studio or era, “from early Disney to recent Japanese animation”, as .info described it. She came back in other demos, including one in which she dressed as a skunk to fend off the advances of the woodland animals.

Flip the Frog came from a 1930s cartoon Schwartz had caught on a rerun: “I loved the frog’s adventures and thought it would be great to introduce him to a new generation.” The Dating Game (1991) starred Flip, and it won a prize at the Amiga Centre Scotland animation competition at that year’s Edinburgh Festival. A Day at the Beach (1992), with Flip, his girlfriend Clarissa and a muscle-bound lifeguard, ran for more than two and a half minutes and took him four or five weeks of one to five hours a day.

The Aerotoons were quick jokes about aircraft: Shuttlecock, Vietnam Conflict, Gulf Conflict, Unsporting. He said one of them took only five hours. When Amiga Format taught character animation in 1992, its first example was “an Eric Schwartz aeroplane”. When CU Amiga named “the man of the moment” in Amiga animation in 1992, it was Schwartz, and it put the difference down to his characters and scripts: “they feature strong characters and are well scripted, which sets them apart from many currently available animations.”

Getting noticed

The demos brought commercial interest. Psygnosis’s American office paid him to use a Lemmings animation he had made for a show, and he told CU Amiga in 1992 that Team17 had him working first on “a Super Mario-type game called Super Frog and Friends”, then on a racing game, Joyride. His work came out on video, from ProDisc and from his own E.S. Productions in Kettering, Ohio, which sold tapes such as The Amy the Squirrel Video Special. By the end of 1995 he had collected almost everything on the Eric Schwartz Productions CD Archive, with unreleased animations, pictures and the 3D objects he had built in Imagine and LightWave. CU Amiga, reviewing it in 1997, noted that his Pogo and Road Runner animations had been left out for copyright reasons.

Sabrina Online

By 1997 Schwartz was still working on Amigas, and planned to “remain with the Amiga until my needs outgrow what it can provide”. In September 1996 he started Sabrina Online, a comic strip about a skunk called Sabrina, published on the web; it became one of the first furry web comics. Thirty years later it is still running, at between two and five strips a month, and its site is still made on Amiga and MorphOS computers. In 2016 two fans released an unofficial CD32 collection of more than 80 of his works, “from the late 1980s through to the early 2010s”.

Sources

Interview with Eric Schwartz, CU Amiga, July 1997, pp. 34–35: interest in the Amiga from 1985–86; the Amiga 500 at the end of 1988; Stealthy Manoeuvre and MovieSetter; cut paper, clay and Commodore 64 animation; his favourites, including the Flip cartoons, Anti-Lemmings and the Aerotoons; his plan to stay with the Amiga; age 25.
“Schwartz up doc?”, CU Amiga Graphics and Animation Special supplement, May 1992, pp. 8–9: A Day at the Beach; Flip the Frog’s origin; his equipment and method; Disney Animation Studio, Deluxe Paint and MovieSetter; the voices; Psygnosis and Team17; the Aerotoons.
“PD Animation: Leaders of the pack”, CU Amiga Amiga Guide supplement, November 1992, pp. 26–28: “the man of the moment”, “an American college student”; his A2000 and 1MB versions; the ProDisc video; Amy as a skunk.
.info issue 40, June 1991, p. 47: The Story of Amy the Squirrel. Issue 41, July 1991, p. 46: Anti-Lemmin’ (“three megs RAM required”).
Amiga Format issue 30, January 1992, p. 260: “Classic Demos” (Anti-Lemmin’ first, “the king of PD animations”; The Dating Game). Issue 33, April 1992, p. 34: animation tutorial (“an Eric Schwartz aeroplane”).
Amiga Computing issue 42, November 1991, p. 14: the Amiga Centre Scotland 1991 animation competition and The Dating Game.
Amazing Computing vol. 10 no. 12, December 1995, p. 11: the E.S. Productions CD Archive. Vol. 12 no. 1, January 1997, p. 47: E.S. Productions’ videos and address.
CU Amiga, July 1997, p. 70: review of the Eric Schwartz Productions Archive CD (the Pogo and Road Runner animations left out).
Fred Patten, review of Sabrina Online: The Tail of Two Decades, Dogpatch Press, 20 October 2017 (web, secondary): Amy as his first popular character; the strip from September 1996; one of the first furry web comics. https://dogpatch.press/2017/10/20/sabrina-online-the-tail-of-two-decades/
Sabrina Online home page (accessed October 2026) (web, secondary): the strip’s thirty years and its pace; made on Amiga and MorphOS. https://www.sabrina-online.com/
“The Eric Schwartz Collection”, Indie Retro News, 25 December 2016 (web, secondary): the unofficial CD32 collection. https://www.indieretronews.com/2016/12/the-eric-schwartz-collection-finest.html