Cliffs Notes are supposed to be supplements to the required reading material, but that doesn’t stop many high school and college students from using them as substitutes.  They’re so much shorter, and have all the answers!  Why get the rich language and subtext of Shakespeare, when you can pass the test by memorizing some facts real quick on the bus to school?  Well now, Survivor producer Mark Burnett is taking most of the reading out of Cliffs Notes and turning them into an animated web series, making it easier to not read anything ever again.

Cliffs Notes Animated Web Series

Currently, there are three Shakespeare titles on Cambio TV: Hamlet, Macbeth, and Romeo & Juliet.  Soon, we’ll also have A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello, and Julius Caesar.  The host, of course, is named Cliff.  Each literary work is broken down into an entertaining animated overview and three short lectures (from scholars and the like), so each work is broken down into roughly 8 minutes on your computer.  Getting the bare minimum out of a masterpiece has never been so easy.

Burnett hopes to be able to touch on all the classics, that magical number of 200 specific works that are generally put on every high school and college curriculum.  And it looks like they’ll be able to make some money with well-timed ads: with the Shakespeare series, they have Roland Emmerich’s October 28 film about the existence of Shakespeare, Anonymous, making its presence known all over the site, including a brief animated ad done in an entertaining way on all of the overviews.

I love this.  Why couldn’t I have Cliffs Notes videos when I was in high school?  I had to read the old boring text version of Cliffs Notes.  Those were so loooong.  Anyway, learning is now officially more fun for procrastinators.