Ellen Peck

Ellen Peck (born Ellen Peckingham; later Ellen Peckingham-Yamamoto; May 25, 1961) is an American animator, artist, film and television producer, retired voice actress, and former newspaper cartoonist. She is the current head of Argosy Media's animation unit, and CEO of ArgosyMTM Group, and created hit series such as The Aaron Show (1993-2006) and its reboot, The New Aaron Show (2013-present). Before that, she created the character Adriana Pendleton in 1985, in an attempt to start a multimedia franchise, which, despite the television show lasting from 1985 to 1989, did not do very well with critics, and was forgotten about once The Aaron Show started. She has citizenships for the US, the UK, Canada, and Japan.

Biography
Peck was born on May 25, 1961 in Seattle, WA, as Ellen Peckingham, to a British father and an American mother. She acquired dual US and UK citizenship when born.

When Ellen was 2 years old, her mother was killed by a burglar; when she was 5, her father married a Japanese expat. This caused her last name to become Peckingham-Yamamoto. Her stepmother helped her acquire Japanese citizenship, and taught her the Japanese language.

In 1980, when she was 19 years old, she started an indie zine, called “Katz!!”. This influenced her later work at Argosy Media; she also adopted the pseudonym “Ellen Peck” around this time.

Katz!! ended in 1983, when Ellen was noticed by Argosy Media, a local production company that was looking for an animator for Saturday Morning Cartoons. She created the character Aaron around this time. In 1985, she legally changed her name from Ellen Peckingham-Yamamoto to Ellen Peck.

Peck can speak 6 natural languages: English, Latin American Spanish, Japanese, Quebec French, Russian, and Polish: as well as the constructed languages, Toki Pona and Lojban. She learned English and Spanish in school, and Japanese from her stepfamily. She learned Quebec French in a hurry in 1996 (along with acquiring Canadian citizenship) when she found that International Family Entertainment, Argosy’s parent company at the time, was being sold to the Canadian conglomerate, Shaw Communications. She learned Russian and Polish during the late-1990s/early-2000s to communicate with more fans of her shows, as Argosy Media content is extremely popular in Slavic countries for some reason. During the 2010s, she developed an interest in conlangs, and learned Toki Pona and Lojban (since, in her own words, “Esperanto is overrated”).

Personal views
Peck is a avowed centrist who doesn’t support either major US political party. Peck has been an atheist since 2004, having been a more progressive Christian before then.

Peck is extremely pro-transgender, and has called TERFs “another form of SJWs”. She is the creator of Centrist Action, a “centrist version of the GamerGate movement and ANTIFA”. She has called Dave Chapelle “a token black actor”, an “Uncle Tom”, and “past his prime” in response to his controversial 2021 Netflix special, and allegedly “never really liked the Harry Potter series”, also calling J.K. Rowling a “clown”. She has also accused controversial sexologist Ray Blanchard of being a pedophile.

She has supported tightly regulating police departments in response to the George Floyd incident, and wants to “make all cops wear 24/7 bodycams”, and fire officers who have a history of racial incidents. She has not voted in any US elections since at least the late-1980s, and has led movements to “Boycott the Vote”. She says she will not vote in any election until a third, centrist, major party emerges and manages to gain enough support to not only elect state governors, senators, and representatives, but flip states “yellow” (not “red” or “blue”) on the electoral map.

Peck is also against all cryptocurrency, calling Bitcoin “Monopoly money” in a 2013 interview, and is especially against the NFT (Non-Fungible Token) fad of 2021, calling its supporters “either greedy c*nts, bandwagon-jumpers, or giant scammers”, mentioning the environmental impact of most blockchain technology, and comparing it to a Ponzi scheme. A DMCA request sent by ArgosyMTM Group to several NFT sites, including OpenSea and Rarible, in 2021, over Aaron Show fan-art sold as NFTs, was rumoured to be ordered by Peck herself. Her most popular tweet, “I guess Hatsune Miku created the Internet…”, was a response to Tim Berners-Lee selling the original source code of the first WWW server as an NFT, and is a reference to a Twitter meme where the works of problematic creators are attributed to Vocaloid character Hatsune Miku.

Peck is also against the PRC (People’s Republic of China) government, and has called John Cena a “pussy” for apologizing in Mandarin for calling Taiwan a country. It was announced in 2021 that ArgosyMTM Group would cease all operations in China until they started treating Uyghur Muslims properly. She has called China “capitalists disguised as communists”, and thinks that most “tankies” such as the users of r/GenZedong are just “kids trying to be edgy, but too scared to talk about the Nazis or Soviets”.

Peck supports Palestine, and refuses to do business in Israel, but has called the BDS movement “basically doing nothing”, and that “screaming online about boycotting anything tangentially connected to Israel is a symptom of being too lazy to donate to charities or support actual Palestinian people’s GoFundMes”.

Peck is against the use of the term “Latinx”, and has compared it to a racial slur, saying that “if you want to be gender-neutral in English, just use the word Hispanic”. She accuses the word of being “linguistic imperialism” and a symptom of a “Anglocentric mentality”.

Peck is also against Scientology, and has called it a cult. She has also compared the John Birch Society and QAnon to cults. More recently, she has compared the “stans” of Minecraft YouTuber Dream to a cult, and has called Dream himself a groomer. She has requested that Twitter fix their trending topics algorithm to “prevent Dream stans from making stupid shit trend over actual news”.

Ellen Peck has a rivalry with Elon Musk, where Peck has accused Musk of being overrated, taking credit for other people’s work, and using child labour. Peck became an atheist in 2004, though she has been against fundamentalist Christianity long before then, and has called One Million Moms “whiners”. She has also called Sovereign Citizen views “nonsense”.

Peck also thinks that “GME is overhyped”, and has compared GameStop stock subreddits to a cult. She has noted GameStop’s poor business practices, and has called “GME apes” “nostalgia-blinded fuckwits”. She also criticized Netflix for releasing the controversial French film, Cuties.

Peck is a gamer, and has extreme brand loyalty to Steam and GOG.com. She is massively against Epic Games’ timed exclusive practices, and refuses to sell Argosy-licensed games on the Epic Store. She also wants to ban pit bulls (a category of dog breeds), due to most dog attacks being caused by these breeds.

She has also called anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers “whiny little bitches who are so used to complaining about ‘the new normal’ that they refuse all attempts to get back to the old normal”. She also thinks that Johnny Depp and Amber Heard both abused each other, and neither of them should be in Hollywood or the film industry “until they both get therapy for their behaviour, instead of just suing each other constantly”.

Peck is also a fervent supporter of light rail and other mass transit projects, and has started a charity known as Trains for People to lobby local politicians, especially in the Pacific Northwest, to “fast-track” rail expansions. She often claims responsibility for the rapid expansion of the Link Light Rail system in Seattle, and has said that fares from a light rail system could be used to support municipal governments, allowing further rail expansions and other transit and transport expansions (such as additional bus routes and highways).

Her political views, known as Peckism, have inspired several supporters, including popular subreddits r/The_Ellen, r/enoughterfspam, and r/enoughnftspam.

Personal life
Peck married Greg Garfield in 1995, but chose to keep her maiden name. All of her children with Garfield; Valerie (born 1997), Cynthia (born 2002), Adam (born 2007), and Lilah (born 2011); bear the Peck last name: Peck has jokingly said “we named them Peck because we didn’t want Jim Davis suing our pants off”. Garfield never became involved with the Argosy company, and died in 2012 in a water-ski accident. However, Peck’s children have been involved with the company.

Peck came out as bisexual in 2014. She does not plan to re-marry, as she currently prefers being single.

Peck’s favourite drink is Dr. Pepper (or, when that isn’t available, root beer or Cherry Coke), and her favourite sport is NASCAR racing. Her favourite genre of TV show (that isn’t NASCAR-related) is game shows, especially Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy. She has several accounts on social media, as she wants to reach as many fans of her work as possible; Ellen was an early adopter of the Internet, starting in 1994 when she accidentally signed up for a dial-up ISP while drunk.

Peck used to have a drinking problem, but has been sober since 2008. She admitted that she “came up with good ideas when drunk”, but stopped drinking to ensure her health and a long life. Ironically, the reason she started drinking in 1992 was to replace her old habit of huffing paint thinner fumes, which was an infamous trait of hers in the pre-Aaron-Show era of Argosy, to the point of her bringing multiple jugs of paint thinner to the Argosy studio.

Peck prefers to hire a chauffeur, which is why she, unlike former colleague Paul Lopez, has never been arrested for drunk driving.

Ellen Peck is also a Wikipedia and Wikimedia editor in her spare time, and was an admin on English Wikiquote at one point. She has said that “(Wikipedia’s) sister projects need more love”.

In popular culture

 * Since 1987, in a corporate tradition of sorts, various Argosy animators have made a series of “ashcan-copy”, “limited-animation” black-and-white short film cartoons with caricatures of their higher-ups, known variously as Life at the Studio, Life at the Seattle Studios, Life at the Argosy Studios, Life at the Animation Studio, and Life at Argosy. The series was unknown to the public, serving as a sort of internal in-joke, until 1995, when it was decided to show a few episodes at CatCon ‘95, the first instalment in the long-running series of official Aaron fan conventions known as CatCon; they have been shown at every CatCon, and as Easter Eggs on several DVD and USB Video releases, since then. In the series, Peck is depicted as an alcoholic who also has an addiction to inhalants, and has an arsenal of weapons to “dispose of” animators she disagrees with.

Trivia

 * She has trained apprentices under Argosy. Her current apprentices are Kathy Nelson and Greta Eleanor Edwards.
 * Her personal favourite Aaron character is Koko (aka Aaron’s younger stepsister). Ironically, Koko didn’t exist in the form “catlovers” know and love when Ellen came up with the idea for the show, and was a synthesis of two rejected characters: Kiara (meant to be Aaron’s younger adopted sister, and created by Ellen herself) and Tomiko (created by Argosy Japan head Kenji Yukimura circa 1986 as an unofficial mascot for the Japanese unit, and adopted by Ellen as one of Salli’s friends in the January 1992 concept), who then-Argosy head Phil Stacker (who was fired the day before the first episode aired in 1993, and is now in prison for tax fraud) wanted Ellen to combine into one character circa mid-1992, because “they were both calico cats”. Ellen regrets listening to Stacker, but notes that fans (and herself) have became attached to Koko, and that “we got representation of step-families, which ironically reflects my own step-mother being Japanese, and we got a great character out of it”.
 * In fan conventions, Ellen is known for two things: signing (almost) anything that she is given by fans, and showing up at conventions for things she has nothing to do with (such as furry, brony, and anime conventions) in the off-chance Argosy fans might be at these conventions as well.

Social media

 * Twitter: @EllenPeck
 * Reddit: u/ellenpeck