The Swisher boys and I are giant fans of “Annoying Orange,” the YouTube video sensation that stars a very irksome citrus fruit (not to be confused with a bitter, teensy one).

That’s why I was thrilled that the meme finally penned a long-expected deal with the Cartoon Network to produce a regular animated 30-minute cable television series for 2012.

Apparently, the toothy Orange and his long-suffering fruit and vegetable friends will travel through time in a “magical fruit car” and have adventures.

I am in — and, presumably, Apple, even after the knife incident.

You can see that below, along with my favorite Webisode, “Sandy Claus”:

One of the best lines I ever heard from Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg — who has been very vocal about casting light on women’s challenges in the workplace — was about her service on the Disney board.

Discussing the depiction of its happy-ending female animated characters, she joked to me that what she always pushed for at meetings were “princesses with jobs.”

Sandberg seems to have gotten her wish now, with this upcoming movie from Disney unit Pixar, “Brave.”

Incredibly, it’s the first time in its dozen films that Pixar has a female hero at its center.

It’s about a red-headed Scottish princess named Merida, who insists on being a warrior — complete with rocking bow and arrow.

Finally.

Zynga is poised to file for its initial public offering, according to sources close to the situation.

The filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission could come as early as this week, or next week at the latest.

The move is not entirely unexpected, given how well the recent IPOs of several Internet companies have done recently, including business networking site LinkedIn last week and Russian search giant Yandex today.

Their strong performances show the huge investor appetite for fast-growing and high-profile Web 2.0 firms. Wall Street is also prepping for eventual public offerings from social buying site Groupon and, the big fish, Facebook.

Zynga’s valuation in its last round of funding was $10 billion, but it is likely to price itself higher in an offering.

After all, LinkedIn now has a market valuation of $9 billion, double its pre-IPO price.

Whatever the price, a Zynga IPO is a major coup, especially given how quickly it has morphed into one of the most important forces in online gaming, largely via distribution on the Facebook platform.

The company claims that it has 250 million people actively playing its games every month. Its largest game currently is CityVille, which attracts 90 million monthly users, reports AppData. Its original Poker game still manages to attract 35 million monthly users.

Its early titles, such as FarmVille and Mafia Wars, first vaulted the San Francisco-based company into consumer prominence, and it has recently struck a number of high-profile branding deals with Lady Gaga and the makers of the upcoming animated movie “Kung Fu Panda 2,” among others.

That’s also meant a solid business. Zynga reportedly generated about $400 million in profit last year on about $850 million in revenue, although sources said the filing will reveal much more robust numbers.

The company has also grown its work force quickly. Last year, Zynga hired more than 800 people and today has more than 1,500 full-time employees in 13 offices, spanning six countries.

Recently, at the opening of its new Seattle office, its founder and CEO Mark Pincus–who has tried to hit the start-up jackpot many times before–said he had Amazon-sized ambitions for Zynga, referring to that city’s online retail giant.

Depending on how the offering goes, he might want to think bigger.

Sources said Goldman Sachs will be among the lead bankers in the Zynga offering.

Zynga declined to comment on its IPO plans.

The hit YouTube video series “The Annoying Orange” is apparently going to become an animated television series.

According to a report in Deadline Hollywood:

“Management/production company The Collective has teamed with Dane Boedigheimer, creator of the popular YouTube series The Annoying Orange, to produce The Annoying Orange animated TV comedy series.”

The Orange in question essentially heckles other fruits and veggies, using a freaky human mouth. After only a half-dozen episodes, the series has garnered tens of millions of views each.

Here’s two of them, which are pretty funny:

Here’s a trailer for the next movie that Jesse Eisenberg–the actor who played Mark Zuckerberg in the Oscar-nominated film “The Social Network”–stars in.

It’s actually animated and about a Minnesota macaw who heads for Rio. In fact, it’s called “Rio.”

There is apparently no drunken coding into the night or stock cramdowns or lifting of really good ideas from the muscled elite.

Still, try to enjoy:

Nickelodeon has ordered up another season of its popular animated television series “SpongeBob SquarePants” for a ninth season.

Yay!

No, really–it is the only kids’ show I have been able to endure so far.

Krabby Patties for all!

Here is the good video of its theme song:

Here’s a kid’s film that BoomTown–who is force-marched to see these until approximately 2018–is actually looking forward to: The sequel to the delightful animated movie “Kung Fu Panda.”

This one, as everything in Hollywood must be these days, is in 3-D and subtitled “The Kaboom of Doom.”

Enjoy:

Charlie Sheen’s life should always be animated.

Enjoy:

Hearst is the latest publisher to show up on the iPad, with a tabletized version of Esquire.* As always, you’re better off checking it out yourself then reading about it.

Still here? Okay:

• As promised, Hearst is selling the app at the same price as the paper-and-ink version: $4.99. Squawk all you want, but “we have to reshape expectations” for digital pricing, says Esquire publisher Kevin O’Malley.
• Hearst has talked about offering subscriptions to its iPad titles, but you can’t get one right now. And O’Malley doesn’t sound hopeful that he’ll be offering one through Apple’s (AAPL) store anytime soon. Join the club.
• Like every one of its peers, Esquire on the iPad looks like the print magazine, with some multimedia bells and whistles. Unlike many apps, Esquire doesn’t provide a literal translation of the print copy. So it can’t count app sales as newsstand sales, but O’Malley seems fine with that. The upside for the reader is that Esquire doesn’t need to include every ad from the print edition, and instead features just two ads from a single sponsor–Lexus.
• Many of the multimedia features are low-key grace notes, but that’s okay: You buy Esquire on the iPad because you want to read Esquire on the iPad, right?
• But there are plenty of clever touches, like animated illustrations and a clip of Javier Bardem reciting poetry in Spanish. And, pretty much for giggles, a copy of Ivan Turgenev’s “First Love,” a 76,000-word novella published in 1860 (I didn’t know, either).
• Some apps let you read their magazine in horizontal and vertical modes, while Time Warner’s (TWX) Sports Illustrated only works in horizontal mode (for now). But Esquire only works in vertical mode, and that feels just fine.

*This is Hearst’s first full-fledged iPad magazine, but if you want to be a stickler you can: The publisher has some of its titles available through Zinio’s PDF-reader service, and earlier this year it put out a partial version of a Popular Mechanics issue.

One of the most popular shows online, too, after 14 seasons, the Comedy Central television series will air the 200th episode tonight, in which all the celebrities ever mocked on it join in a class-action lawsuit.

Tom Cruise, beware!

Here’s the short video:

All of the new commercials are Christmas-themed and all feature Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone, though they are careful to leave it unscathed by Verizon’s criticism of AT&T (T). The standout among the three, this re-creation of the “Island of Misfit Toys” scene from the 1964 Rankin/Bass stop-motion animated Christmas television special, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Note that the conceit of the ad is that iPhone has been banished to the Island of Misfit Toys not because of its quality but because of of AT&T’s 3G network.

A pretty brilliant escalation of Verizon’s marketing battle with AT&T and one that suggests through its deference to the iPhone that there may be more to these Verizon iPhone rumors than previously thought.

Below, Verizon’s other two ads.

Next up on the Macworld agenda: iMovie. This Apple (AAPL) software has been given not just a refresh, but a full rewrite. We’ve added so much to iMovie this year, says Phil Schiller, that iMovie will be the consumer video editing software to have. And that may turn out to be so. Precision editing, drag and drop. Dynamic themes. Automatic stabilization. Animated travel maps. Randy Ubillos, Apple’s chief architect of video, takes the stage to demo the product.

He quickly demonstrates the optimization of a video clip, adjusting its audio, the angle of the video. It’s a very complex edit and he does it very, very simply. The video stabilization tool is, and I hate to sound like a fanboy here, mind-blowing at first look. It’s accurate and fast, and appears to be professional or near-professional in quality. Furthermore, these enhancements are for the most part being done in real time.

A set of new built-in animations, transitions and themes rounds out the application. All very slick.

“Google is now officially our best friend.”

Oh no.

Instantly, an image popped into my brain– that of the slithery Kaa singing “Trust in Me (The Python Song)” to Mowgli from the Disney classic animated film, “The Jungle Book.”

“Trust in me, just in me
Shut your eyes and trust in me
You can sleep safe and sound
Knowing I am around

Trust in me, just in me
Shut your eyes and trust in me.”

You know what happens next, of course. A big squeeze, but not the good kind.

While Yahoo (YHOO) might not have wanted to be acquired by Microsoft (MSFT), its alternative to goose its revenues by relying on Google (GOOG) in an outsourced online search-ad deal is one it might regret even more if struck.

Why? Aside from the potential antitrust issues, which are distracting at the very least, it fundamentally puts one of Yahoo’s main businesses–search advertising–directly into the hands of the very company that killed off Yahoo’s chances of ever succeeding in the arena in the first place.

By its inability to innovate search–not exactly Google’s strong suit–and also not moving quickly enough after acquiring the once-superior technology from its Overture acquisition, Yahoo had perhaps already nailed itself into its own coffin.

But by now signing an outsourcing deal with Google, it will be saying that it cannot compete at all in the key arena of the Internet going forward.

AOL (TWX) did this kind of deal with Google and saw its search share dwindle, even though it collected Google’s payoffs. Now it is essentially a vassal state of Google, as its display businesses has weakened with the economy and its access business is to be cleaved off.

Speaking of pythons, Infectious Greed blogger Paul Kedrosky compared Yahoo to the crack suicide squad in Monty Python’s hysterical “Life of Brian.”

Still, Yahoo is putting lipstick on the pig.

In a statement today after news of the Microsoft pullout was revealed, Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock asserted that Yahoo was “steadfast in our belief that Microsoft’s offer undervalued the company and we are pleased that so many of our shareholders joined us in expressing that view.”

Those supposedly pleased shareholders will be hard to find Monday after the market opens and Yahoo shares hurtle downward.

Whether Yahoo’s management has the talent to pull the stock out of the basement remains to be seen, although Bostock added that Yahoo is “profitable, growing, and executing well on its strategic plan to capture the large opportunities in the relatively young online advertising market.”

Actually, it is Google that is executing well and that has always been Yahoo’s problem. Now it must apparently turn that disadvantage into a virtue, while it is under enormous scrutiny from everyone and everywhere to perform.

And that kind of pressure could crush just about anything.

For a more amusing take on being squeezed, here’s a video–courtesy of Google’s copyright-infringing YouTube–of Kaa singing to Mowgli (which might soon seem very familiar to Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang):

And here is the video of the crack suicide squad from “Life of Brian”:

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.