Won't Somebody Think of the Children?

It was just a few months ago that we were celebrating the announcement of the opening of Orpahange Animation Studios, a new SF-based animation house that had roped Genndy Tartakovsky (of Samurai Jack and Clone Wars) into making some features. Since then, OAS has attached Genndy to direct an Astro Boy movie, as well as the OMG-It's-Gonna-Be-Awesome sequel to The Dark Crystal. We can only assume that they've just been SO hard at work on these projects ... and that's why they failed to notice that their studio's doman has expired. Whoops.

Visitors to OrphanageAnimation.com are, as of Sunday, welcomed by a junk-page, hosted by DomainDirect.com. "This account has expired. Domain owner, please click here to renew your account, or contact support," the page says, before urging us to examine some robotically-selected advertisements. But hold your horses, domain squatters; DomainDirect isn't ready to sell off the URL just yet -- it's offering the owner a chance to login and renew it. Somewhat stupidly, a failed attempt to login as the owner causes the site to reveal the true owner's email address, which led us to the resume of the original registrar, a gentleman named Jim Robinson who was a contract SysOp at The Orphanage ... and has since moved on to other employment. Uh oh. For Astro Boy's sake, we hope he left on friendly terms.