TV channel-hoppers who cruised by the Larry King Show on CNN last week were treated to a revolutionary new cartoon presidential "candidate" running for the Reform Party nomination. Cartoonist Gary Trudeau's "Doonesbury" character in live, streaming 3D traded quips and outrageous campaign promises with talking head pundits Evans and Novak, Tucker Carlson, Bill Marr, and Al Franken, which included a "Fat Tax" (instead of a flat tax) and "mandatory gun ownership."

Looking and sounding uncannily like a virtual Hunter Thompson, the character was brought to life by Protozoa.com and DotComix.com "Alive" technology which enables the 'toon to be fully and spontaneously interactive' - and devastatingly satiric. News analysts lamenting a long and tedious campaign season featuring similar and dull party spokesmen need complain no more. What the Democrats and Republicans could not provide, the media itself has - the man on the other end of the Bridge to the 21st Century, Max Headroom come to life!

After checking out the Duke2000 web site we lost no time in ringing up Protozoa to find out how they pulled it off. Damon Danielson, President and CO of Protozoa spun us their yarn:

"Our company has been a pioneer in motion capture technology," he recalled, "and the three founders here have been putting this together over a ten-year period. About a year and a half ago we came to realize we were the perfect dot-com company in that we had this deep, robust proprietary tool that allowed us to create animation in real time. Fast, great quality, and at a very low cost, which are the requirements of the Web. We call ourselves a trans-media company and the Duke2000 campaign is a perfect example of that. We can create literally twenty episodes a day vs. one every two or three weeks in other animation methods, and take the same digital assets and take them to television. In that sense we're a category-killer.

"We approached Gary to do a non-profit for NetAid last fall, and that went well. Then we saw one Sunday he ran in 'Doonesbury' Duke waking up in a hotel room and doing a diatribe on how terrible the candidate selection was this year. Then his long-time sidekick Honey suggested that he could run for President - why couldn't an animated character do that? We saw that, and we called him up and said 'Gary, let's do it!' He took about thirty seconds, and said OK. We put together a very elaborate campaign with a couple million dollar budget through his inauguration speech (we're assuming he gets elected), and what you're seeing now is the beginning of the television part of that. Prior to the Larry King show we did a 35-city tour to major television markets of all their good morning shows. Duke did three minutes on each of their shows, a live interview with the hosts, and a lot of the hosts did not understand that this was real and they didn't understand what his positions were going to be, and it was very funny, dangerous television. Being a Web company, we can take that material and put it right back on the Web very quickly. We get to play off Web and television."