The Columbia College Chicago School of Theatre and Dance heartily congratulates film and TV writer-producer Dino Stamatopoulos, an alumnus of Columbia College Chicago‘s Theatre Program, whose 2005-2008 stop-motion-animation TV series Moral Orel has been named the best stop-motion animated TV series in history by the online entertainment news-and-reviews site Collider.

Moral Orel, which Stamatopoulos created, wrote, and directed, used stop-motion puppets to tell the story of 12-year-old Orel Puppington, a naively earnest student at Alfred G. Diorama Elementary School in the fictional Bible Belt city of Moralton. The series depicted Orel’s darkly comic efforts to live by the fundamentalist Protestant Christian moral code as articulated by his family and his church. The show originally aired on Cartoon Network’s nighttime programming block Adult Swim from December 2005 to December 2008. Other writers and directors for the show included Stamatopoulos’ fellow Columbia College Theatre alums David Cromer, Jay Johnston, and Scott Adsit. The show’s voice actors included Adsit, Johnston, and Stamatopoulos. In the years following its original run, the series has acquired the status of cult classic.

“Stop-motion animation is a beautiful medium, one whose unique visual style and inimitable rhythm allow artists to craft some of the most creative stories animation can ever convey. But while cinema is the art form that most often recurs to stop-motion, television has also been home to some of the best stories ever told through that unique kind of animation,” notes Collider‘s Diego Pineda Pacheco in his article before zeroing in on Moral Orel: “It may not be Adult Swim’s best-known show, but Moral Orel may just be the network’s most underrated. It’s a parody of religious-geared animations of the past, focused on an optimistic God-fearing young boy living in a world of cynicism. Throughout its three seasons, the show kept getting darker and darker, which eventually led to its cancelation. If a show that was canceled because it was deemed ‘too dark’ by studio executives sounds intriguing, this is a must-see. Moral Orel may be depressing, but it was never depressing just for the sake of it. Brilliantly written and beautifully artistic, it always had an interesting point to make, exploring fascinating themes of abuse, abortion, American suburban life, and religious fanaticism. It’s a cult classic that really deserved to go on for a lot longer than it did; but the three seasons that are already there are simply the peak of stop-motion animation on the small screen.” To read the full article, click here.

Stamatopoulos, who studied acting, improv, voice, and comedy as well as film and TV while attending Columbia in 1983-86, was profiled in the Fall/Winter 2013 edition of Columbia College’s alumni magazine Demo. The article recounted how the Norridge-raised Stamatopoulos bonded with Columbia College Theatre Program faculty member Norm Holly, whom he called his “comedy mentor,” as well as with fellow students including Scott Adsit and Andy Dick, with whom he performed at comedy clubs in the Chicago area as well as on Columbia’s campus in the lower-level theatre of the Getz Theatre Center of Columbia College – a venue now branded as the Sheldon Patinkin Theatre in memory of Columbia College’s longtime Theatre chair. Stamatopoulos’ credits in addition to Moral Orel include writing for TV’s Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Late Show with David Letterman, Mad TV, Mr. Show with Bob and David, and Saturday Night Live as well as Mary Shelley’s Frankenhole, which he also created.