Butch Berry Bio

Butch Berry




Butch Berry is a cartoonist-writer-producer with Kid Positive Productions, which produces the award winning "Tell Me Who I Am" animated children's series. 


Butch was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, where he attended Baltimore Polytechnic High School. 



Graduation - Bowie State 

He earned a Bachelor of Arts in Literature from Bowie State University. 

While studying at Bowie State, Butch rode a skateboard to class every day and never fell once. 

He was one of the founders of Bowie State's Freak Enterprises, a student organization of creative non-conformists, who helped foster Butch's filmmaking and comedy writing on the campus.



Butch is also creative director for the Dangerman Education Foundation in Los Angeles and illustrates the Dangerman: Urban Superhero books for Roger Tinsley, alias the Dangerman: Urban Superhero, a motivational speaker and participant in the series "Stan Lee's Real Life Superheroes."

At the age of fourteen, Butch developed an interest in filmmaking when he borrowed a neighbor's (Mr. Lester Wright) movie camera and started making super 8 mm films with friends in the neighborhood. Later while shooting a film, Butch was picked up by a white cop who thought for certain that "this black kid stole a movie camera and tripod" but was released when his mom explained she bought her son the equipment for Christmas! 


Rickey Brown , Kevin Harris in "Sabbath"

Dwaine, Reggie, Jarvis, etc from film shot in Original Northwood.  
l to r, Deb Berry, Bruce Berry, Bobby Brown,
Carl Wellborn, Steve Berry, Mellie from the first
super 8mm film Butch shot on Springfield Ave,
Baltimore MD, Summer 1970




















Later Butch continued in the media and produced animation for the Emmy award-winning children's television series "The Kinderman Show" which aired on WMAR TV2 in Baltimore, MD. 


The Kinderman and his Emmy












Butch has also won several awards (The "Telly Award," the "Prized Pieces" Award from the Black Programming Consortium, Best Children's Film from the Black Filmmaker's Hall of Fame) as writer-producer for the children's animated film "Tell Me Who I Am: The Journey Begins" from Kid Positive Productions (www.kidpositive.com), a popular film that is also distinguished as the only non-Disney children's film being bootlegged in South Central Los Angeles barbershops. 




His cartoon blog, "Butch Berry Stuff" ([www.butchberry.blogspot.com]) received a "Best Art" Award from the 2008 Black Web Awards, mainly for his single panel cartoons. 





 

 

Mr. Berry was featured as one of the top ten online cartoonists by "Animation World" Magazine in July 2000.




The character "Raunchy Roach" began as an enhanced puppet found in a Baltimore thrift store and became a smart mouthed roach on his own local television show "Backstage Rock" on the Diamond in the Ruff Channel. 

But after the production studio Butch helped start in 1995 burned to the ground, Butch created "The Raunchy Roach Show" a daily online strip that ran on the Art Comics website from 1996 through 2001. The strip featured the same angry, egotistical cockroach and his adventures which ranged from Raunchy organizing the first "almost" televised execution to Satan wanting to change his image to adventures with the Rat Pack in Vegas. The Raunchy Roach comic strip was also mentioned in the book "Designing Interactive Digital Media" by Nicholas V. Iuppa (publisher: Butterworth-Heinemann) for early use of Internet animation. 

Other strips produced by Butch Berry include:

- "The Element" a comic strip about a boy who accidently gains the power to manipulate the Elements of the Periodic Chart, once he learns what they are! 


- "Wack Tales," a weekly strip distributed by Victory Comics syndicate in 1990 and featured in the Los Angeles news publication the LA Herald Dispatch from 1988-1990. 

- "Chuck's Crowd," a college strip published in the University of Maryland's Diamondback newspaper in 1979 (Yeah, he told a white lie about attending U of MD!) and also in Baltimore's African American News and World Report in 1980. The weekly strip later appeared in the Washington Afro American newspaper from 1981 to 1983. 

- "The Adventures of Freak Enterprises" about a group of non-conformist students on a black college campus in 1975 that are endowed with peculiar powers in a series of adventures that deal with the future and the past at the same time. Most of the characters are semi-based on members of an actual campus organization (he helped co-found) of creative non-conformists on the campus of Bowie State University during the seventies called "Freak Enterprises." 



Currently residing in the historic Wilson Park neighborhood of Baltimore, MD, Butch is founder of the "Friends of the Springfield Woods," a community group dedicated to preserving the urban forest and restoring its long neglected fresh water stream.  
The Springfield Woods Garden













Candassaie and Dad  circa 2003


He has one daughter, Candassaie, a professi
Daughter Candassaie
onal actress, who regularly performs on the British stage and television.














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