The Home For Orphan Toons

We're Moving--Lock, Stock, and Bosko

2008-07-11T18:10:00.002-05:00

When I wrote about making changes to The Home For Orphan Toons in this post, I hadn't yet planned to go quite this far.

My struggles with Blogger have been numerous over the past two years, but I patiently stuck with it, with the justification "better the devil you know..."

Well, the devil can go where he belongs, to "you-know-where." Kevin and I are moving on, to Wordpress and http://orphantoons.wordpress.com. (Note the lack of a hyphen in the new URL). This site will remain, both as a record of what we've done, and to help our few loyal readers find us.

A constant irritation for both Kevin and me for as long as we've been using Blogger is his inability to directly post and comment on the blog, which put a crimp in our ability to keep a steady discussion going of the rare cartoons we love. Well, no more. Wordpress allows Kevin full co-administrator privileges, meaning he now can post when the mood strikes, as I do. And from what I've seen of Wordpress so far, it looks a good deal easier to use. That'll certainly enable us to post more often, which I'm sure you readers will appreciate.

For those of you who subscribe via RSS feed, I'll have a brand-new feed up and running in the new location shortly. I apologize for the inconvenience, but this is better for everybody concerned.

Bye, bye, Blogger. I wish I could say it's been fun.

Tags: moving, Wordpress

Orphan Toon Musings 6: "Beware Of Animated People"

2008-07-08T23:06:00.001-05:00

ANIMATED PEOPLE AND THOSE FRISKY PUPS

By Kevin Wollenweber

Upon reading and re-reading Rachel’s addendum(?) to my review from mere memory of Hugh Harmon’s “THE ALLEY CAT” (nice, job, Rachel, and thanks for going through the trouble of pointing out all those quick bits of visual that I had missed!), I was thinking of how else that both the HAPPY HARMONIES series and the cartoons that Hugh and Rudy had done for MGM upon their return had, at times, focused upon gags and visual instead of just making a “video” of a then popular song. While the best of anything done by Harmon and Ising had come from the first Warner Brothers animated series, LOONEY TUNES or MERRIE MELODIES, specifically because the cartoons were great musical fun, there were HAPPY HARMONIES efforts, aside from Hugh Harmon’s BOSKO, that had almost nonstop action sequences that went far beyond the musical element that the series title would suggest. Okay, we’re not talking action of Tex Avery or Robert Clampett proportions, but it is action, nonetheless, and, to my mind, these bits and pieces made their respective cartoons watchable and enjoyable and, yes, even exciting.

How often have I ruminated on how a cartoon like “CIRCUS DAZE” would be still shown today if Ising’s Two Pups (who were never given names) were the stars instead of Bosko? Oh, I’m still as big a fan of the MGM Bosko cartoons--as we’ve both said we are--but there are times when one cannot help but wonder why Hugh took an agreeable character like Bosko and turned him into a black stereotype. He did give li’l ol’ Bosko an appealing kid’s voice for the grand finale, the much beloved Bosko “trilogy” (and we’ll both talk further about the remaining entries in that series within a series soon enough) but it was a perfect addition given to the characterization of Bosko, done too late. It was unfortunately part of Bosko’s swan song!

In each of their cartoons, “TWO LITTLE PUPS”, “PUPS’ PICNIC”, “PUPS’ CHRISTMAS” and “WAYWARD PUPS”, we follow these pups as they are lured away, by their own mischievous curiosities, from their human owner, usually a long-legged woman who also remained nameless and characterless (except that she was a stunning bit of animation to watch) and into some sort of pseudo-adventure. In one of my favorites, the pups, on an outing with the human family, oddly dressed to the nines instead of dressed down to go on a picnic as we’d do today, wander away from the picnic grounds after the female human admonishes one of the pups for sniffing around the food before lunchtime. As she pats the one considered such an angel, the cute little innocent sneaks a whole sandwich in one loud gulp before they both scamper away, only to hear the distant barking of hounds and rushing horses, carrying a band of fox hunters who come crashing through the scene. Forgive my naiveté, but I’m not aware of any picnic area so close to spots were hunting is freely allowed. This family must love to live dangerously!!

The remainder of the cartoon is taken up with the pups getting embroiled in the chase. The hounds chase after the fox, the fox enjoys terrorizing the two pups and the battle of wits is on as some of the dogs clearly don’t like the two pups spoiling their fun. There are nice uses of music throughout this toon here, although I’d need a good music historian to identify some of the more familiar bits of music that appear on occasion throughout this cartoon. While I like the debut cartoon in the TWO PUPS series, the self-titled one created in 1935--in which the thin premise of the cartoon is just following the pups as they decide to stop their tug of war with a sock that they stole from a clothesline long enough to go chasing and scaring the feathers off a hen--I like “PUPS’ PICNIC” because there is more of a nicely padded lead-in to the action, and a nice end gag. One that actually ended up in a Hanna-Barbera cartoon, a very early YOGI BEAR in which a picnicking family end up with Yogi riding in the trunk--unbeknownst to the family, whose kid has become attached to the bear playing cowboy and continuously shouting nothing more than “bang bang bang bang bang!”

In “PUPS’ PICNIC”, though, the pups, angrily called to get in the car as the cartoon closes, sit barking at something hanging off the back of the vehicle and, as the camera lets us know, the fox had escaped the bullets and left the hunting and camping grounds for more “civilized” surroundings, lounging on the rear of the car as the family drives off back home.

Another favorite from this series is “WAYWARD PUPS”, perhaps the first cartoon that introduces us to a cat with a scratchy voice similar to that of the protagonist in the cartoon we both reviewed previously. It opens with the pups, playing with a balloon they had found, until they annoy the cat who begins berating the pups: “Hey, what’s goin’ on here?...Little hoodlums!” (NOTE: the rest of this dialogue, where I left the ellipsis, is unfortunately sooo garbled by this squawking voice that I can’t make it out, but the cat is mad!) As the cat says his last bit of dialogue, he backs up too far and into the balloon which bursts, scaring him into leaping into the air and rushing through the rooms of the house, breaking dishes and other valuables and finally crashing in a heap in the middle of the mess. He then hears the voice of his mistress “Hey, what’s going on in here? If there’s anything broken in here, I’ll…” The cat hears this and runs off, but the curious pups start sniffing around the kitchen and, sure enough, the door to the kitchen opens up and guess who Madam finds amid the broken relics?

The pups are put out angrily by the woman for the night for doing what she thinks they did, as the cat gleams out the window at them, snickering “Well, tough guys, eh? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!” As if the cat’s smug laughter prompts all things evil in the night, the wind starts blowing and the pups are suddenly aware that they are out in the cold and, while still remaining curious, they also realize how alone they suddenly are, sniffing around the neighborhood to see where they can crawl in for the night. This search brings them to the junkyard and a truly ugly bulldog, mud caked to his jowls and chewing on a bone. Not letting anything stop the curious pups, though, one of them starts a tug of war with the dog and his bone until the bulldog pulls himself up on his four legs, revealing that he’s chained to his house. He suddenly begins roaring with a growl that is actually the roar of the then current MGM lion, and the battle of wits and chase that lasts throughout the rest of the cartoon is underway!! I must say that, in this cartoon, there are some nice moments that show how ominous the night and urban setting must seem to these little creatures.

As the bulldog starts chasing the pups through the streets, doghouse bouncing and bumping along beside them, all go rushing out into oncoming traffic and it really looks as out of control as one might have seen in an older Max Fleischer BETTY BOOP cartoon called “MORE PEP”. Pudgy gets this adrenalin-inducing formula that sends him rushing about and performing more acrobatic tricks per second than any of us could do in a day! The Substance somehow gets away from the safety of its laboratory and wafts out over all of Manhattan, where every living creature throughout the city landscape starts rushing around at top speed!! What Harman and Ising had tried to do at times was lend a sense of realism to their cartoons, occasionally letting their animators run wild despite some or many inconsistencies. But there were always some nice hints of regular cartoon fun amid the impressions of life that seemed alarmingly real, sometimes, as Rachel and I have pointed out in the past, at the expense of what could have been some wilder comedy. Yes, this is one of those Harman/Ising efforts in which the accurate realism is jarringly put in with the more rubbery and strictly toon-oriented; note the running gag in which a clown-like dog-catcher tries to scoop the little pups up with a very small net. The only thing that truly makes him as ominous as the night into which the pups are thrown is his somewhat evil laughter, kind of like these imagined specters that would be scaring the OUR GANG kids just for the fun of it in some of the more outlandish Hal Roach shorts of the early-to-mid 1930’s.

Imagine, for example, if Harman & Ising did use some live action footage to augment the escalating comedy in any of the cartoons that seemed to squeeze as much out of one gag as it could, like “CIRCUS DAZE” in which real stunt folks and comedians could have been featured to show that the fleas perhaps invaded the surrounding community?

This brings me to animated people. Yes, these beings did permeate some live action films between the mid-1930’s through the 1960’s (think of some of the OUR GANG comedies to which I’m always giving honorable mention, or the live action comedies of Frank Tashlin who was said to direct his cartoons like live action and his live action like cartoons). Yet, as I was suddenly made aware of a new or forthcoming series of DVD compilations of old classic TV commercials, I was reminded of how many “animated people” lept about, jumped and rushed through these.

“What”, you may ask, “are animated people?” Well, they are those who are either filmed in stop motion or whose images are air-brushed so that they seem so unreal and cartoon-like. The term was coined from an old GUMBY short by Art Clokey in which Mr. Clokey and, perhaps, a female companion were seen out on a picnic with odd things happening to them as they tried to enjoy their meal, like a lawn mower run amuck and nearly flattening Mr. Clokey…or at least that is how I remember it, with Pokey looking at the audience at the close of the film and warning “beware of animated people.”

But these silly little beings were numerous and, at times, intentionally or unintentionally very, very funny! They were their funniest when in commercials of the early-to-mid 1960’s and even beyond.

Some of my favorites of these “lost” bits of either stop motion animation or “altered photography”, the earliest special effect brought to my attention, utilizing the “talents” of live action people almost coming frighteningly close to imitating the antics of cartoon characters, included an ad for Mazola Corn Oil in which the “point” (ouch) to be made was “what if you, yourself, had to gather up all the good ingredients in this product? You’d be really tired!” We follow one woman as she walks briskly, with the “help” of what was once known as “undercranked” photography down street after street after street, seen mostly from the waist down, as the announcer asks the all-important question posed above. Even the props in this thing are wackily large, like ears of corn neatly standing in rows as if the woman were instead edging her shopping cart down supermarket aisles.

In perfect cartoonish timing, she scoops up the very large stalks and tosses them into her basket and continues, after a gesture that lets us know this was quite an effort, on and on gathering whatever else from the trees and surrounding areas, with the speed and accuracy of a lawn mower buzzing off row after row of overgrown grass. She gets back home, kicks off her high heels and falls in a heep on the living room recliner as if that is all the energy she’ll expend today. So when do we see the product? Well, I think it appeared in the corner of the screen as our shopper is seen finally whiping her brow with that perfectly comical look of exaggerated relief that only a great cartoon character can give to display exhaustion. That was the ad, nonstop rushing here and there at top speed and very little time at all focusing upon the actual product and just what it has that would save this poor woman so much time.

Another favorite was the Scope ad of the early 1970’s, or so it seemed, in which a very tired-looking woman is slowly going to her bathroom cabinet to freshen her breath. She opens the bottle of this product, takes a sip to gargle and, WOW!! Her eyes begin to flash, her hair stands up on her head and she’s suddenly transformed for the day…into what? Who cares? The ad made Scope seem like this sudden wonder drug that picks you up as it freshens your breath!! I always thought this was the funniest ad I’ve ever seen, and I’m so sorry that no one in the history of Saturday morning or classic filmmaking would create a series that did a lot of this kind of wild visual stuff.

Oh, there have been films, as I pointed out, from Frank Tashlin, and some of the screwball comedies, that had cartoonish humor. I seem to remember films like “WHO’S MINDING THE STORE” with Jerry Lewis and bits and pieces of “WHAT A WAY TO GO”. I’m sure there were other such titles, but maybe a full-length motion picture is a bit much to use this sort of cartoonishness invading the live action world without the intrusion of that live action world; yes, I’m talking an actual physical live action cartoon! One could attempt to do this more as a series of short subjects. I’m dimly recalling one such short film that was part of a larger program in which two neighbors start a fight, with one trying to stomp the other into the ground—yes, one of the actors really looks as if he is being stomped into the ground until nothing of him is left visible but his head with an astonished look on its middle American face!!

Oh, I know about CGI films like the “UNDERDOG” movie and all that, but I’m looking for surrealism, not necessarily just kid-friendly stuff, and the only place I’d really seen this kind of strange stuff is on commercials. And, yes, I do recall Hanna-Barbera’s “BANANA SPLITS” live segments, but these don’t really count since the “animated people” were just disguised as cartoon characters, not really literally timing their comedy as if they WERE cartoon characters.

Well, the point of this “rant” is that I might pick up those disks with classic commercials. I’d already bought the Thunderbean disk that featured some of the great classic animated commercials, some of these being the Jay Ward variety. I just wanted to point out that there are ads, perhaps done around the same time and even inspired by those animated cartoons or comedies of old that are like live action “comic strips” featuring some of the wildest animated people on earth. I don’t think any of them went on to become celebrities in their own movies or TV series, but the ads will always make their faces and/or legs or any other part of their anatomy memorable to us all.

Tags: orphan+toon+musings, Harman-Ising

Rachel's Turn On The Fence: Another Look At THE ALLEY CAT (1941)

2008-07-02T03:52:00.033-05:00

Review-Synopsis by Rachel Newstead

The Alley Cat
Release Date: July 5, 1941
Director: Hugh Harman
In short: An unlikely romance ensures between a scraggly alley cat and a Park Avenue Persian--much to the regret of a certain bulldog and a butler...

(Edited 7/08/08 to correct minor errors and to add further comments).

Foreword: Getting sick is probably the worst thing that can happen to a blogger on a hot streak, but that's precisely what happened to me.

For most of June, I not only had to struggle with a cold, but a cold in the middle of allergy season, making it doubly potent--and twice as hard to get rid of. By the time I was ready to work on the promised Landing Stripling review, I was too busy sneezing to do much writing--when I wasn't flat on my back in bed.

While I recuperated, Kevin provided some wonderful content, the most intriguing of which was his review of a Hugh Harman cartoon, The Alley Cat--a cartoon I admit to having given only scant notice before. As usual I was astounded by his memory for detail, and drawn in by his enthusiasm. His instincts are rarely wrong--after seeing this cartoon again, I knew I had to add my own observations.

The Landing Stripling review will come, of course. For now, I beg your indulgence as I give you my own take on the wonderful The Alley Cat.

Just looking at the names "Harman" and "Ising", one can be forgiven for thinking they were meant to be together--a coupling of names ordained by the animation gods.

That unlikely, unintentionally punning combination--belonging to two men noted for their skill in combining music with animated images--is a most incredible accident of fate, to be sure. We've become so accustomed to seeing those names together, it's easy to think of the two of them as a single unit, joined from birth by their drawing hands.

It's a mistake even I have been known to make, speaking of the two as if they were interchangeable. Yet Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising, ironically, were linked only in name. They never once co-directed a cartoon--and probably couldn't have, had they bothered to try. Each had his own respective crew, and their demeanors--and attitude toward filmmaking--couldn't have been more different.

Harman was the fiery one, the one who went head-to-head with producers, distributors, and just about everyone else in an effort to improve his product. The words "good enough" were not in his vocabulary--it had to be better, and to Hugh Harman, "better" usually meant a bigger budget. Ising was the phlegmatic one, a man who very quickly earned the nickname "The Sleepy Bear"; the lethargic Barney Bear was Rudy Ising in fur.

Harman created characters--Bosko The Talk-Ink Kid might have showed Ising at the drawing board, but Bosko sprang from Harman's pen. Action meant as much to Harman as personality, perhaps more--Bosko rarely stood still, always ready to entertain, bouncing along to a steady rhythm. Ising created stories, in which the characters were often secondary to the lush backgrounds or the music. Harman aspired to be Disney, yet Ising was the most Disney-like, being most at home in the realm of the fairy tale, Walt's stock in trade. It was Ising, not Harman, who broke Disney's Academy Award winning streak with the uncannily Disney-like The Milky Way.

(Note: Kevin, of course, just couldn't resist reminding me about Ising's Two Pups. I'll concede certain points: yes, the settings were contemporary, and the timing fast--one cartoon in particular has scenes similar to The Alley Cat--but even these come across as more cute and storybookish than what Harman was doing at the same time, on the order of the early Chuck Jones. The pup's owner even had what sounds to me like a nursery-school teacher way of speaking, in the manner of one reciting a story to children--R.)

In my review of Romeo In Rhythm, I put forward the theory that Harman's style was energized by the influx of New York talent. Now, looking at Harman and Ising's contributions separately, I realize this is only partly true. Harman's cartoons, thanks largely to Bill Hanna's often-discussed timing, were always energetic--one need only look at Circus Daze, The Old House, and even the early Schlesinger Bosko musicals to see that. What the New York animators did do, however, is take Harman's cartoons out of the farmyard.

Romeo In Rhythm, as we've already seen, opens in a cornfield, but that's the only glimpse of a rural setting we'll see in that cartoon. The play-within-the-cartoon is aggressively urban, its Romeo a contemporary hipster serenading his Juliet in a mock-up back alley to the sound of swing.

Today's highlighted cartoon also takes place in an urban alley (a "real" one this time) its contemporary music sung by an audacious alley cat. While the mangy "star" of the story may lack the musical finesse of the crows in Romeo In Rhythm, he more than makes up for it in enthusiasm and pure chutzpah--an attitude that's pure New York.

The cartoon opens with a view of an "uptown" skyscraper from the perspective of a back alley, the cartoon's title superimposed over the scene. The copy I'm working from for this review has the "letterboxed" opening titles Turner was infamous for, and it does this cartoon a disservice, as it's difficult to see the painstaking detail in the backgrounds. The opening shot is still impressive, however: the camera tracks upward as it travels up the exterior of a posh Park Avenue apartment building toward the penthouse.

The scene dissolves to the interior of a luxury apartment; a butler, shown only from the neck down for the moment, knocks on a bedroom door carrying a tray of food. He walks though the lushly-appointed room and places the tray on a table, in close-up. He removes the tureen to reveal a plate of fish, and clears his throat as he says, "Dinner is served," m'lady!"

"M'lady", whom we expect to a be a wealthy socialite, is actually a white persian cat. She appears to sniff the fish and give it a slightly disdainful look as the butler clears his throat again and says, "Will there be anything else, m'lady?" The cat purrs "Nooo...." in a Mae West-like voice. As the butler leaves, she gives her meal another slightly disdainful glance, jumps off the sofa and walks away. The butler, meanwhile, can be seen slowly closing the door behind him--but before he does, he can't resist giving the audience a contemptuous sniff. He's clearly not happy with having to wait on a cat.

The socialite persian, meanwhile, walks over to the window and jumps on the sill--a full moon shines through. She lets out a soft purr--she's clearly bored, and is looking for a little fun.

Cut to a view of the alley, where we get the first view of our alleged hero, who dances into the scene much in the same manner as Bob Clampett's "Gorgeous Hunk Of Man" in his The Hep Cat (and even looks as if he could be a close relative to Clampett's cat). He jumps onto a crate, then onto a fence as he rummages through a nearby trash can. He prepares to eat the remains of a fish when he spies the uptown persian walking back and forth on the balcony of her luxury apartment. She idly sniffs the flowers planted along the edge.

Cut to the alley cat, who's clearly impressed. "Oh, boy! Hi, baby!!" he yells at her in a voice vaguely reminiscent of Clarence "Ducky" Nash (though it's not, despite what the IMDB says--more on that later.)

The persian turns her back to the alley cat--for the briefest instant, we're led to believe she's going to snub him, as befits a cat of her position, but as we cut to a close-up, she looks over her shoulder and enticingly says "Hello...."

Scott Bradley's music swells and the alley cat starts to "sing" (if you want to call it that) the 1937 musical number "That Old Feeling":

I saw you last night and got that old feeling....

Cut to an aerial shot of the high-class feline on her balcony, who's suddenly more humanized--she meows her response to the alley cat's song as she paces back and forth along the balcony on two legs. As she half-meows, half-sings, she clutches her paws to her chest in a slightly exaggerated "romantic" gesture. Cut to the alley cat who sings the next line while his lady love continues to meow along from off-camera--he's clearly singing words, but at least on this copy of the cartoon, they're no more understandable than the female cat's meowing.

The alley cat's joined on the fence by three of his buddies, who meow and purr along in close harmony. They clearly have the talent our hero lacks, since this is perhaps the most entertaining scene in the picture.

The butler, however, doesn't seem to think so, since he comes out on the balcony and shouts at the cats to "Stop that bloomin' noise!", clamping his hands over his ears. Naturally, he's ignored--the butler yanks the curtain shut, making us think for a moment he's resigned to the racket.

Not quite--as we cut to the interior, we see the butler turn and shout as he stalks down the corridor, "Rover! Rover! Wake up, Rover! Cats!" It's actually quite a nice shot, as the figure of the butler moves closer to the camera as he walks down the corridor, to the point that only his legs are revealed. It's almost like a SteadiCam shot.

"Rover", whom we see for the first time in the next scene, is awakened from his nap by the butler's off-camera shouting. He groggily rises, the jumps up as if hit by an ember from the nearby fireplace. He runs toward the door at full speed, but neglects to notice it's still closed, and rams straight into it. The butler comes into view, if only from the waist down, and opens the door yelling "Rover! Get him!!" What follows is a rather impressive "speed" shot of the dog barreling down the stairs so quickly, the momentum causes him to run down the side of the bannister. This scene looks vaguely familiar, and given Harman's penchant for re-using animation, it's quite possible this scene was cribbed from a Bosko cartoon. (If memory serves, there's a similar scene involving Bruno in The Old House).

Cut to exterior view--we next see the bulldog as he bursts through the front door and toward the camera. The alley cat's three backup singers scatter as the dog approaches, but our hero isn't afraid of him. In fact, the dog's more afraid than anyone, as he skids to a halt and freezes with his hindquarters in an arched position when the alley cat slashes his claws at him.

Suddenly remembering what he's there to do, the bulldog tries to assume a more threatening pose and scare the cat away. Ah, but pampered pooch that he is, he's a bit out of practice: the sound that comes from his mouth is more like that of a toy poodle than a big, bad bulldog. (The more observant may remember that barking sound as the sound the trout make in the Barney Bear cartoon THE FISHING BEAR. Barking fish? Well...you'd have to see it to understand...)

The embarrassed bulldog tries to clear his throat as the alley cat, now standing on two legs, laughs at him from offscreen. "Tough guy, eh?" the cat remarks.

The bulldog makes a leap at the alley cat from the bottom of the frame. Having recovered his voice, he makes a rather menacing growl as he snaps at the cat and misses. There's something familiar about that sound, too, but I'd rather not get too far ahead of myself at this point. The cat merely hisses at him and jumps down on the other side of the fence.

The bulldog sniffs around until he comes to a knothole in the fence. Peering through it, he fails to see another knothole right by his rear end--you can pretty much guess what's going to happen here, since our friend the alley cat's on the other side. Sure enough, we see the cat standing on the other side of the fence, preparing to menace the poor unsuspecting bulldog. He grabs an old eggbeater from the trash and proceeds to aim it through the knothole right at the dog's behind. He gooses the dog with it--as the dog flips around, he shoves the eggbeater through the other knothole and gooses the dog again--this action gets repeated several times until the dog gets dizzy--a closeup shows his eyes rattling around in his head.

Once the bulldog regains his senses, he thinks he's figured out the situation and puts one paw over the knothole on the right, then another paw on the left one. But the camera pans back to reveal the alley cat merely lounging on top of the fence, eyeing the bulldog with an amused expression. He grabs an old light bulb from the trash can in front of him and drops it on the dog's head. The dog is startled as the bulb shatters, sending him running to the safety of his doghouse. Returning his attention to the classy girl cat, the alley cat remarks, "You ain't seen nothin' yet, baby!!"

Grabbing a bottle of ammonia from the trash, he pours the bottle into a spray gun (called a "Flit" gun, since spray guns of that type were once used to dispense an insecticide called "Flit."). We see a long shot of the cat from one corner of t he doghouse as he marches toward it, Flit gun in hand. He knocks on the doghoouse and says to the still-covering dog, "Well, well, does little Rover want to come out and play??" The cat then pulls on the dog's nose and jabs him in the eyes Three Stooges-style--but it looks a good deal more painful here than it does when Moe does it to Curly.

The cat marches out into the middle of the yard shouldering his Flit gun like a rifle, and tests it while he waits for the dog's inevitable attack. He doesn't have to wait long--the dog lunges at him, but in mid-air, he gets a snootful of atomized ammonia, sending him dropping to the ground like a rock.

This only momentarily dazes him, though; he lunges again and gets a much stronger dose. Now it takes a little bit longer to come to his senses--his ears flutter like wings in a very cartoony fashion as he exhibits a stupefied grin. He doesn't get a chance to make a third lunge, as the cat hits him with another facefull before he can jump. The third time proves to be the charm, freezing the poor dog like a statue--all the cat needs to do is tap him to send him toppling over.

The cat does a little self-congratulatory victory dance as we cut to the object of his affection admiring him from above. This is clearly her kind of guy--she meows "Come up and see me sometime..."

Strangely, while she cops Mae West's tagline, she's lost the Mae West-like voice she had in the first two minutes of so of the cartoon. She now sounds, for no apparent reason, like an exact duplicate of the alley cat, which to me seemed a bit strange. Is this her way of expressing admiration (or as Kevin half-jokingly put it in his review, an indication that she's in heat?) It prompted quite a bit of discussion between Kevin and me; I'm forced to conclude that while Harmon may have indeed wanted to indicate a change in the cat's mood, but it seems more likely he was rushed, and couldn't get the original voice artist when he needed her--so he relied on the fellow with the Donald Duck-imitation voice for that one brief scene, thinking it might come across as funny. As Harman is no longer alive to ask, I suspect that'll remain a mystery.

Meanwhile, our alley-cat protagonist goes wild over the classy female's invitation--he too undergoes a temporary voice change, yelling "Yahoo!" in a voice similar to Tom's whenever Tom was excited or in pain. As I recall from the Tom and Jerry Spotlight Collection sets, that voice was provided by Bill Hanna--an effect which makes this seem at times more Hanna-Barbera and less Harman-Ising. But the Harman touches are still there, as in the sudden, out-of nowhere burst of speed the alley cat exhibits in his excitement. He hops on a fence, zips up a telephone pole, and speeds along a telephone wire toward the luxury townhouse where his love awaits, all to the sound of sirens--not all that different from Harman's Swing Wedding (the Stepin Fetchit frog exhibits a similar and all too temporary burst of speed, also to the sound of sirens).

Cut to a shot of the female cat as a black blur zooms by her, leaving her to stare at the audience with a stunned expression. In the following scene we see the alley cat, in the same cozy living room the bulldog had been, lounging on the floor brazenly smoking a cigar. Exhibiting even further gall, he calls to the female cat as she passes by him, "Say, what's cookin', sister?" Since love is apparently not only blind but deaf, the female cat ignores this rather crude come-on and walks over to the radio. As Latin music comes over the airwaves, the alley cat decides to get in the spirit of things by taking the lampshade from a nearby lamp and converting it to a nifty blue sombrero. He dances toward the camera, then the scene changes to reveal both him and the female cat in medium shot as they dance together.

The alley cat dances toward the fireplace, but gets a bit too close--his tail catches on fire, in a couple of quick cuts, he zips out of frame, past the female cat, and toward a fishbowl, in which he extinguishes the flaming appendage. The bowl's stuck to his rear, though--a fish swims by and gives him a confused look. The cat yowls and jumps out of frame, landing next to the female cat and going through all manner of samba-like gyrations as he tries to remove the bowl--without missing a beat of the music.

In the meantime, the bulldog, only now aroused from his ammonia-induced stupor, hears the commotion going on from inside. With a rumbling growl he scrambles out of the frame toward the entrance.

Cut back to inside: the alley cat's still trying to get the bowl off himself, pounding on the floor in frustration, then leaping into the air. The bulldog appears just as the alley cat is about to land, and the dog ends up having the fish bowl broken over his head as the cat drops right on top of him. The alley cat stands there for a moment as the dog, sprawled on the floor, starts to growl--the cat pokes his head in like a lion tamer sticking his head into a lion's mouth. When he stares at the razor-sharp teeth and realizes his nemesis is back, the cat says "Uh-oh!" and speeds off to the left of the screen. We briefly cut to a view of him zipping around the corner with the bulldog in close pursuit. The momentum causes books from the bookshelves to whirl around in their wake.

They come to a corner, but instead of going around it, they go through it, knocking out a good portion of the wall. We cut to a long shot of them in the library--the cat jumps up onto a conveniently-placed lamp, while the dog runs so fast the momentum sends him up the wall and onto the ceiling (and that, students, is an example of centrifugal force).

The confused dog, of course, stops while upside-down on the ceiling and after remaining suspended there for a second or so, drops to the floor--the chase continues. The dog, who has for the moment lost track of the alley cat, stops in front of a suit of armor, which the alley cat just happens to be hiding in. He sends the right arm, which is holding a mace, down on the dog's head, followed closely by another hit and a poke in the rear with a sword. The dog of course attacks the suit, sending a shower of metal parts toward the camera. As anyone who's seen The Old House knows, this is a classic Harman "money shot"--a bolt flies so close to the viewer that it takes up the entire frame (much as the skull in The Old House had done).

The smoke clears to reveal the dog wearing the remnants of the armor. The cat merely goes to the fireplace in the living room and...you guessed it. He opens the helmet, which is stuck on the dog's rear, and dumps in a shovel of hot coals. The pain from the dog's glowing red posterior sends him leaping through the ceiling. The butler, meanwhile, yells "Rover! Rover!" looking around frantically. He soon learns where the dog is, as the dog lands right on his head. The bulldog merely proceeds to run--still on top of the poor butler--and gets caught in the butler's clothing, in the process revealing the servant's very un-butler-like red flannel underwear.

The chase goes on, up over walls and around corners--hunks of plaster get gouged out of the walls as the speed past. The dog, running up to a mirror, crashes through both it and the wall behind it. In the meantime, the alley cat has found the laundry chute--he opens it, sending the bulldog sliding down into the laundry room below. The cat then rushes down the stairs toward the basement (in a repeat of the "running down the stairs" footage from earlier in the cartoon) to meet the dog as he hits the bottom.

The alley cat pushes the washing machine in front of the laundry chute as the dog comes through. While the poor dog is being pummeled by the plungers inside the washer (it's a slightly more advanced version of the one Cap used in Blue Monday) the butler runs past the camera and chases the cat with a broom, yelling "Why you...just let me get me 'ands on you..."

Speaking of Blue Monday, the scene following looks as if it were taken directly from that cartoon, if a little faster than that version. The butler chases the alley cat in one doorway and out another in an endless circle, fast enough to create what looks like a swirling vortex. The butler finally wises up and stops between the two doors, waiting with broom in hand for the cat to emerge. The cat does, but the butler is a little too slow, missing every attempt to bash the cat with his broom.

The cat runs into what looks like a music room, skids and doubles back toward the butler. The dog, who by now has been released from the dreaded washing machine, now chases the cat around and around between the two doorways, rendering the poor butler dizzy as he tries vainly to swat the cat. (The scene is a repeat of the earlier one with the bulldog--we see the butler in closeup as his eyes spin around and around in his head). The butler, trying to make sense of the swirling mass around his feet, brings his broom down on the first thing he can--and it turns out to be the wrong thing. He hits the poor bulldog square on the head.

The dazed dog shakes his head as he comes to, and gives the off-camera butler a menacing look--he's had about all he can stand. We cut to a head-and-shoulders shot of the butler as he appears increasingly nervous, stammering "Oh, dear...sorry Rover..." and other inanities. We cut again to the growling bulldog's point of view as he chomps the butler's rear end, ripping a sizable chunk out of the seat of the butler's pants. He chases the butler with a crash through a large window and out into the night. We can assume the butler will be submitting his resignation from somewhere in the next state, if his employers don't fire him first.

Dissolve to the persian's now-devastated boudoir--all the furniture is destroyed, while huge hunks of plaster are missing from the walls. The once-beautiful apartment is a ruin, looking worse now than the grimiest rat-infested tenement. The alley cat sits on the windowsill, saying "Well, so long, baby!" Lapsing into song, he sings "Thank you/For a lovely evening...." to which the persian, seated on her destroyed sofa, musically meows in response. We dissolve from there to the alley cat's three companions as they meow the final notes of the song to the iris out.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

This review proved highly difficult to write--I'd been working on it intermittently since the second of this month-- the amount of detail in the cartoon is so overwhelming, my eyes were spinning faster than the poor butler's. Every observation from me prompted a counter-observation from Kevin, which prompted a counter-counter observation from me. In the interest of time I won't go into all of them, but I would like to address Kevin's speculation that Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera were involved in this cartoon, and were in fact the uncredited directors.

It is certainly possible. Like so many MGM cartoons of this period, this is a transitional work, anticipating the later Tom and Jerrys in its wanton destruction, high-speed chases and slapstick takes. The alley cat, in appearance and manner, looks much like a forerunner of Butch, the black alley cat nemesis/sometime friend of Tom in later years. The scene of the alley cat nonchalantly and boorishly smoking a cigar reminded of one of several cartoons in which Tom and Butch were romantic rivals: Puss and Toots comes to mind.

Unlike the Tom and Jerrys, however, this cartoon makes me cringe, as it did when I first saw it some thirty years ago. Not that it's badly done--far from it. It's certainly one of the fastest and most slapstick cartoons Harman ever attempted, with its quick cuts and generous use of "smear" animation. But it suffers from a common fault of Harman's cartoons, the jarring juxtaposition of Disney-like realism with out-of-nowhere cartooniness.

In the beginning of The Alley Cat, the two principal characters move and behave very much like "real" cats, albeit slightly humanized, much in the same manner as Disney's The Aristocats. No sooner do the two cats meet, however, than they become more and more anthropomorphic, to the point of standing on two legs. The scene in which the pretty society cat pines for the alley cat on the balcony is comically out of place, as she shifts from very cat-like movements to very human gestures in a split-second. It prompted the same sort of nails-on-the-chalkboard feeling I had when I first saw Harman's Circus Daze; the realistically-rendered elephant, under attack by the fleas, suddenly looks as if it should be in a different cartoon, becoming very human-like as it stands on its hind legs and scratches with its front paws. Harman would set down certain "rules" for the behavior of his characters at the beginning of every cartoon, then gleefully (or carelessly) ignore them to suit the scene or the gag. Done right, the contrast between realism and cartooniness in Harman's work led to brilliance, as with Peace On Earth; more often, however, it led to laughable contradictions, as with the realistically rendered deer and the "rubber hose" fawn of Tales Of The Vienna Woods.

It seems as though Harman were in crisis at this point in his career, uncertain of which direction he wanted his cartoons to go. Wanting to be artistic, but feeling compelled to do slapstick, he opts for a little of both, and the results were both confusing and fascinating.

In The Alley Cat, this "one foot in reality" approach undercuts the cartoon a bit. Even though the characters are humanized and somewhat exaggerated, the cartoon nonetheless takes place in a world which seems to operate according to the normal rules of physics, as in the scene with the bulldog on the ceiling I wrote of earlier. The momentum could conceivably propel someone that high were they to move fast enough. Take a look at Donald O'Connor's "Make 'Em Laugh" sequence in Singin' In The Rain if you have any doubt--at one point the momentum of his leap enables him to walk halfway up the wall before he backflips down to earth again.

It unfortunately makes the alley cat's boorishness and destruction more intolerable (and difficult to watch) than they would have been in a less realistic cartoon--we know in a Tom and Jerry cartoon that no matter what damage they do to themselves and everything around them, things will be all right again in the next scene. Not here--one can't look at the destruction without imagining the thousands of dollars worth of repairs the place would need. (Hundreds of thousands in 2007 dollars). It's enough to give Donald Trump nightmares.

Interviews later in his life provide some insight into why Harman worked this way. Talking to Michael Barrier in the '70s, Harman lamented having to work solely on funny-animal cartoons, wishing he could have taken the medium further. His dream, he tells Barrier, would have been to get Orson Welles involved in the animation industry, which in his view would have elevated the animated film to a level of artistry that would have surpassed even the great Disney. (He could well have been right). Long after Harman's career was over, and Walt Disney had passed on, Harman dreamed of ways to upstage his old rival.

Certainly the best thing about this cartoon is the music, and Scott Bradley doesn't disappoint. The signature song here, That Old Feeling, is taken from an obscure musical, Vogues of 1938; for those who might be curious about the lyrics (since they're barely comprehensible when "sung" by the alley cat) Kevin has graciously provided them:

I saw you last night and got that old feeling
When you came in sight I got that old feeling

The moment you came by I felt a thrill

And when you caught my eye

My heart stood still

Once again I seemed to have that old yearning

And I knew the spark of love was still burning

There'll be no new romance for me

It's foolish to start

For that old feeling is still in my heart

(repeat)

One of its composers seems to have had a penchant for obscure musicals. He'd already co-written Hold Everything, which by a coincidence possible only in Hollywood, provided the inspiration for one of Hugh Harman's earlier cartoons, Hold Anything: yes, none other than Lew Brown of DeSilva/Brown/Henderson fame. (Though he partnered with Sammy Fain for this particular number).

It's in the music, in fact, that this cartoon distinguishes itself from the majority of Harman's efforts; like Romeo In Rhythm the year before, this is an aggressively MGM cartoon, a companion piece of sorts to Romeo. The number is so good, and suits the cartoon so well, one can forgive its highly burlesqued rendition.

And the voice that warbled the number? As I said, it's not Clarence Nash, and if my memory and my ears had been functioning properly when I first heard it, it would have been apparent to me immediately. It's closer to the sound of the cat in Tex Avery's Ventriloquist Cat than anything even vaguely resembling Donald Duck. Jerry Beck settled the question once and for all, saying in a letter to Kevin:

It is not Clarence Nash in the MGM cartoon. That is for sure. Nash never did cartoons for anyone else except Disney. The voice in THE ALLEY CAT is radio actor Harry E. Lang who did Donald Duck like voices in several cartoons for MGM and Columbia.

It's probably just as well. Actually hiring Nash would only have reinforced the erroneous belief that Harman was a mere Disney imitator--and as I said in the beginning, he was very much his own man.

Tags: review/synopsis, The+Alley+Cat, Hugh+Harman, MGM

Sufferin' Cats! Kevin's Review of Hugh Harman's THE ALLEY CAT

2008-06-30T17:12:00.001-05:00

Getting "That Ol' Feelin'"?: THE ALLEY CAT (1941)

Review by Kevin Wollenweber

I have always been a cat-lover. Even though I do not presently own one, cats I’ve “met” at others’ homes have neatly gravitated to me and we seem to have an immediate “communication” or rapport. So it is certainly understandable that I’d like the 1941 classic cartoon from MGM directed by Hugh Harman called “THE ALLEY CAT”.

At the time of this cartoon’s regularly being shown in heavy rotation on early morning kids’ TV, a la “THE EARLY BIRD CARTOON SHOW”, a local staple of our ABC-TV affiliate here in New York, just before the all-important morning newscast at approximately 9:00 a.m., our family had a cat, and we were kept awake at times throughout the nights with many a musical offering by amorous alley cats, so I took to this cartoon immediately, even though there is really nothing to like about the cartoon’s title character. You really can’t figure out just why the beautiful and pampered female cat likes him so much. He can’t even seem to carry a tune all that well and he spends most of the cartoon nastily taunting the snarling bulldog or tearing apart the house by accidentally lighting his tail ablaze when getting too close to the fireplace and then getting the fishbowl caught on his rump and leaping to the ceiling trying to shake it off…

…But I’m getting ahead of the story, as Jay Ward would probably tell me if I were narrating this thing.

The cartoon opens inside a spacious townhouse where the only human that we meet is a bored and ver-ry British butler (or should I say, “but-lah”?), carrying in a bowl of food for someone, namely the equally bored and sleek and white kitty cat who, when asked “will there be anything else, M’lady?”, slowly picks herself up to only purr “nooo!” The butler moves to leave the room, but not without showing his hint of anger over having to wait, hand and foot, on a cat by giving out with a disdainful snort before slamming the door behind him. Miss Kitty turns away from that scene as well and goes to check something outside. Can we guess what that is?

It is so obvious as Scott Bradley’s score gets brassier and jazzier and we see our “hero” (dubbed Butch by the animators, although not called at all by that name anywhere in the cartoon) emerge from the alleyway, checking garbage cans for food that the neighbors have tossed out, even bopping around to the music if I remember correctly. He is the most unlikely of heroes, though, because, when he notices the Persian cat glaring out at him from the balcony, he tosses away the fish he was about to devour and yowls, in what has to be the coarsest catcall I’ve ever heard, “Boy oh boy! Hi, baby!” She purrs back her “helloooo” which launches old Butch into his signature song…if you want to call this singing:

“I saw you last night and got that oooool’ feelin’…”

With his female companion singing along on key with “meow meow meow meow”, he continues to garble the words so bad that one needs an original version of this song to actually find the correct lyrics. I would go on record as saying that, perhaps, DONALD DUCK or YACKIE DOODLE could have vocalized this better!! This rouses the butler angrily to the window, just as a covey of the alley cat’s feline buddies begin to harmonize quite nicely, too, and he shoes the lot of them away with yells like “Fssst, I say, you cats, stop making all this noise!” When this fails to startle them, he sends out his secret weapon, the very large bulldog. “Rover…Rover…I say…cats!!” The dog hears these excited monosyllables and it takes time to register, but he tears off after the cats who, en masse, go flying away from the fence and the chase and battle of wits begins. The dogs stops in front of the alley cat and attempts a roaring bark which comes out as mere yelps of a dog you would think is much smaller than this, sending Butch into gails of gravelly laughter “tough guy, eh?” he taunts and swipes his claws at the dog’s head as the dog leaps up trying to snap at the cat.

Butch doesn’t just let it go at that. Surely, he has to play a couple of really painful tricks on the dog, at one point taking a hot light fixture from one of the poles in front of the house and dropping it on the dog’s head. The explosion sends the dog running for cover back into his house, sending the cat into further hysterics, calling up to his girl on the balcony, “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet, baby!!” He goes to a nearby pail and grabs a perfume bottle, filling it with a heavy and pungent dose of ammonia or some such smelly vapor and proceeds to leap onto the doghouse roof, knocking on the roof and calling “Well, does little Rover wanna come out and play?” He pulls the bulldog up by his snout, claws bared…ooh, does that hurt! The dog is now angry again and ready for some sort of attack, but not for long. As the dog rushes up to mere inches in front of the cat, he gets a face full of something so powerful that it nearly knocks him out or makes him reel dizzily, almost dangling in midair before Butch sprays him again and, with his paw, pushes him lightly down on the ground over on his back, fast asleep! “Awww” the alley cat mocks, seeing the dog totally comatose on the lawn.

His attentions are turned back to his kitty love above, who now throatily yowls, in a barely recognizable Mae West impression, “come up and see me sometime”, sounding, instead, more like her aroused boyfriend. She’s definitely in heat!! Butch howls, leaps into the air and, in the space of a few frames and seconds, blasts off through the front door of the house and straight up to the upstairs area where Kitty is waiting with the door opened. Butch sails past and, as the camera moves toward the couch, he is sitting there comfortably smoking an expensive cigar. Wow, this guy wastes *NO* time! “Well”, he says, “what’s cookin’ sister?”

Geez, I wonder which animator’s alter-ego *THIS* is!

He then decides to clumsily entertain his ladylove by dancing to a great Latin rhythm of the usual song, “La Cucaracha”, but he dances too close to the fireplace, setting his tail on fire. This is good for the audio of the cartoon because the action starts up now, even with Bradley’s score percolatin’ as well underneath. Butch yowls and leaps into the air looking for something to put out his flaming behind. He wedges himself into the fishbowl, but is again driven mad trying to release himself from it. He again leaps into the air, this time hanging from the ceiling and ripping it to shreds as he hangs on and tries to shake the bowl loose. While all this is happening, out in the darkness, the bulldog is coming to and hearing the commotion. He groggily makes his way into the house just as Butch rips his way across the ceiling to where the bulldog is unfortunately right under him…and this is where the claws lose their grip on the ceiling and the cat and fishbowl come tumbling down on top of the dog with the fishbowl breaking over the dog’s hard head! I dimly recall the intercutting of inside and outside scenes here as being quite good, climaxing in the afore-mentioned crash as the cat falls from the ceiling.

The chase is on…and forgive me if some of the finer details are forgotten here, but the cat seems to evade the dog’s attacks, sending the dog crashing into a wall or tumbling into a suit of armor that Butch fills with hot coals that send the dog flying up into the air. As this occurs, the butler (geez, I wondered where he was all this time) is now aware of the commotion and is calling for his dog, who crashes down in a heap on top of him. The dog is not done chasing the cat, though, and the beast tries to leap forward, not realizing that he is caught in the butler’s suspenders. Once ripping free, the dog continues the chase, knocking over pictures and vases or whatever is in his way up and down the stairs!

The butler, meanwhile decides to grab his pick ax and get rid of this intruder himself. The chase had gone through the wash cycle in the nearby tub and now escalates through the rooms as the butler enters swinging the ax and trying to hit the cat as the cat and dog go running in circles around where the butler is nervously standing, but can you kids guess what happens next?

Yup, the ol' faithful bulldog gets it in the head, but as is the case with cartoon characters, he is merely stunned for a few seconds and ends up turning on the evil butler with the ax in his hand, snapping angrily at his pants and ripping them to shreds and sending the two crashing through the plate glass window and off down the street as the alley cat continues singing to his ladylove, inviting his pals in for a last chorus as the iris closes. Aw gee!

There are so many elements of this cartoon that smack of Hanna-Barbera intrusion. Didn’t we see an envious butler and his dog in a much later “TOP CAT” episode in which Benny the Ball is mistaken for some rich cat and those alley cats invade the good life for a while? Also, that hormonal howl of the alley cat taking up his lover’s invite sounds mysteriously like those yowls that Joe Barbera is said to have produced as vocalizing for Tom getting pinned on any part of his body by Jerry in their usual battles of wits. Just listen to a cartoon called “THE MILKY WAIF” and you’ll see what I mean. As far as I know, this is the first time we hear this howl in an MGM cartoon, so it is possible that Joe Barbera (or was it Bill Hanna) premiered it here? It has also been a running gag in some Hanna-Barbera cartoons that the lead character is not always what he or she seems. So it might be an H/B-ism for the alley cat to be such a loud-mouthed, gravelly-voiced and almost unappealing boorish young male instead of the usual golden-throated romeo that we’ve come to expect in animated vehicles like this.

My only other comment is that the four-part barber shop quartetting covey of alley cats reminds me of a similar scene in Disney’s much later “LADY AND THE TRAMP” in which a covey of dogs serenades the two lovers (or friends). Maybe, if we get another fantastic Scott Bradley double-CD set of scores similar to the fantastic TOM & JERRY AND TEX AVERY, TOO set, the consultants can find that bit of singing and include it in its entirety. It is fantastic and I’m sorry that the action is taking place while the cats are in good harmonics, here.

What can I say, I love cat cartoons! “Meow meow meow meeeooooow!” Check it out yourselves on YouTube. It is posted there, and let’s hope that a complete HAPPY HARMONIES set comes out real soon.

Tags: Kevin+Wollenweber, The+Alley+Cat, Hugh+Harman, orphan+toon

Orphan Toon Musings 5: Those Wonderful Local Cartoon Shows

2008-06-18T03:34:00.002-05:00

"Skipper" Tom Hatten of KTLA-Los Angeles and
friend, who inspired many a young viewer to
become interested in animation (like
this blog's Humble Toonkeeper, Rachel)
--image from LATVLegends.com

The very best of the very worst: Sam Singer's
Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse
(Image from ToonTracker.com )

(Note to readers: The review of "Landing Stripling" I'd originally intended to post is temporarily grounded, while I recover from an allergy attack brought on by the miserable Wisconsin weather. Kevin, meanwhile, has stepped in with this wonderful look at local cartoon shows of the past--Rachel)

“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN…AND CHILDREN OF ALL AGES”: CARTOONS, YOUR BEST ENTERTAINMENT!

By Kevin Wollenweber

Well, apparently, last weekend, there was this lengthy celebration of WPIX-TV, once our local Channel 11 and now a CW super station. I missed most of the hoopla, but I do have my memories of it and a lot of kids’ television back in what I still consider the heyday. If it wasn’t for the short-sightedness of TV executives, thinking that anything cartoon is automatically for the little ones, most of us would probably never have seen most of the cartoons we talk about on our blogs.

What I wouldn’t give, now, to see a program that devotes itself solely to the earliest LOONEY TUNES and Paul Terry cartoons, along with guilty pleasures like “COURAGEOUS CAT & MINUTE MOUSE”, “Q. T. HUSH” and even “SPUNKY & TADPOLE”, perhaps the strangest of these cheaply knocked-off chapter-type adventure cartoons, this time about a boy and his clueless teddy bear who, for some reason, is given the name Tadpole. Of course, that is not the only question mark that one has when watching the series, but hey, one has to have grown up watching local kids’ TV to know how much fun seeing even these strange little cartoons is again.

Checking out the last half hour of the special retrospective on the programming over the years of the former WPIX-TV, I was reminded, even if I didn’t see the representations throughout that finale, that it was on Channel 11 here in New York/Long Island, that I’d seen “THE WOODY WOODPECKER SHOW”, hosted by his creator in the theatrical age, Walter Lantz. The animator must have wanted to have a kind of rapport with kids that the other Uncle Walt had and, so, guided his viewers through the inner workings of an animation studio with dialogue that seemed so over-rehearsed and contrived, but hey, for those of us who had never visited such a place, this was a good way of learning how cartoons were made. I’m sure that this kind of background might have caused the mor artistic among us to start attempting our own drawing style and even creating flip books. I know that I had tried, with limited vision, to create a moving character in the flip book style, but this never worked out. I guess it was easier on see-through cells, but it sure was fun trying.

I was also reminded that WPIX-TV was possibly the home for the direct-to-syndication cartoons like WALLY GATOR, TOUCHE TURTLE and LIPPY THE LION. Gee, whatever happened to the proposed DVD volume that was due to come out earlier this year on those three characters? While I wouldn’t count these three as large a priority as “QUICK DRAW MCGRAW”, I still would have welcomed that set.

Television was wonderful when it was local. I was a choosey TV watcher, although I did spend way too many hours in front of that old black and white box. My day began, as those of you have heard from me too many times now, with “THE EARLY BIRD CARTOON SHOW”, on our local WABC-TV affiliate, the stellar cartoon lineup that featured a hodgepodge of MGM and Van Buren cartoons wedged in between episodes of “COURAGEOUS CAT & MINUTE MOUSE” or “Q. T. HUSH”, TV cartoons created by Sam Singer, one now dubbed the Ed Wood of the cartoon industry for very good reasons. These toons were created with the credo that “kids will believe anything”. Courageous Cat, a kind of “BATMAN” parody, could do anything with his trick gun *EXCEPT* shoot bullets. It’s a hip idea, but it really was an over-the-top use of cartoon license, perhaps to avoid outcries of too much senseless violence in animation due to gunfire and other implements of destruction, but throughout the series, there were many, many incidents of senseless violence without gunfire, as well as all sorts of strange impressions of the world in turmoil, very few of them now deemed politically correct!!

Dal McKennon, the one time voice of young Gumby for Art Clokey Productions, did almost all the voices. I wish I knew who the other voices were as I always enjoyed the voices of the gangster called the Frog and his extremely dopey assistant, Harry (“Duh, I like ba-nan-as”) Ape. I’ve been told that WPIX-TV did pick up “COURAGEOUS CAT” for afternoon broadcasting, but I somehow missed this, thinking that they left WABC-TV for that big cartoon data base in the sky that we’re all waiting to see come back down to earth, someday, in the form of DVD releases. Actually, the entire “COURAGEOUS CAT” series is put on DVD, in four volumes, from A&E Home Entertainment, if anybody cares, but for a rather hefty price…and not even restored. One wonders, though, whether these prints featured on this set make up the only existing source material that remains. Some opening credits look as if they were horribly spliced together from previous stories. Everything about these productions smacks of shortcutting, although I’d sure like to know where they got all the stock music used for this series. Surely, the opening theme should have been found for a CD released years ago called TOON TUNES—50 GREATEST CARTOON THEMES. Play the theme for anyone, and you’ll perk up even the biggest negative critic of the Sam Singer cartoons. It is considered his Citizen Kane.

But the big deal about that “EARLY BIRD CARTOON SHOW” was the inclusion of just about every MGM cartoon ever made, including the MGM version of BOSKO. Yes, they even regularly aired “HALF-PINT PYGMY”, a Tex Avery cartoon in which his GEORGE & JUNIOR characters, inspired by Steinbeck’s George and Lenny from the novel, OF MICE AND MEN, go on a “hunt” for pygmies, seeking out the littlest one. This was back when TV used to air old film, not even videotape or kinnies. I remember the afore-mentioned cartoon breaking right in the middle, and I recall another time when someone accidentally ran a cartoon in reverse. I don’t recall its title, but it was a ROBIN HOOD sendup; might have been a Van Buren?

In the afternoon, for me, I began at the stroke of 12:00, with “POW-WOW THE INDIAN BOY” which I believe was on WPIX, also featuring some post-Code Max Fleischer cartoons featuring BETTY BOOP. I recall having to wait until 3:00 for anything further that I liked. Among these were some shows on our local WNEW-TV, Metromedia channel 5, with creative hosts like Soupy Sales and Sandy Becker, who would go on to voice Mr. Wizard the Lizard for Total Television’s TUTOR (or TOOTER) TURTLE, which was part of the “KING LEONARDO’S SHORT SUBJECTS” cartoon series. Later, we’d gotten some interesting new imports in the form of anime like “ASTRO BOY”, “KIMBA THE WHITE LION”, “GIGANTOR” and “SPEED RACER”. The first appeared on WNEW-TV and the last three all were part of WPIX as far as I can recall!

So, as we celebrate, in our own way, the memories of the existence of WPIX-TV and local TV in general, we should recall the joys we got out of twisting that dial and know that television was such a great place to find old films of all kinds.

Tags: Courageous+Cat, Sam+Singer, WPIX

Two Unscheduled Flights of LANDING STRIPLING (1962): Part One--Kevin's Review

2008-06-15T12:48:00.008-05:00

Foreword from Rachel

We here at the Home For Orphan Toons can't resist a challenge, and today, Thad Komorowski provided us with one. Any cartoon Thad hates that much is definitely worth a second look.

Kevin and I would be the first to admit that the Gene Deitch Tom and Jerry's are animation's equivalent of the crazy relative the family won't talk about--and it's not hard to see why. The animation is odd, the character designs and sound track even odder: Tom and Jerry on a heavy dose of hallucinogens.

But in a few of those thirteen cartoons, those very qualities are what make them worth watching. Today's spotlight cartoon, Landing Stripling, is one of them.

Despite the title, Kevin's review is less that of Landing Stripling than of the Gene Deitch approach to Tom and Jerry in general, but I will follow tomorrow with my own thoughts on Gene Dietch, and a more comprehensive look at Landing Stripling.

“BOING BOING BOING BOING BOING…” GIVING TOM & JERRY THE BIRD!:
A REVIEW OF “LANDING STRIPLING”

By Kevin Wollenweber

I like cartoons, almost any cartoons, especially all or most of these made during the first golden age, that of the very inventive and sometimes iconoclastic theatrical period, when animators indulged their artistic sense and ran with at while the major studios paid the sometimes exorbitant bills.

They created most of these cartoons, perhaps, in hopes that they’d be seen as legitimate filmmakers--as we all know that they should be truly seen.

There are times when an animator from another studio would “visit” the home of a specific character or animator and take charge of that animator’s work or character’s flagging series and attempt to breathe life into it. I continuously wonder why Gene Deitch took over the TOM & JERRY series. The resulting short-lived reincarnation that happened really wasn’t at all about the series as we had come to know it through the eyes and ears of the duo’s original creators, Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.

There were reasons why those who even liked the H/B versions of the 1940’s can grouse about how the series did fall into such a formula, a formula that would be somewhat reworked for the PIXIE & DIXIE series for television’s “HUCKLEBERRY HOUND SHOW”--the only difference being that the characters talked. I am so delighted that the theatrical Tom & Jerry did *NOT* talk. This is what made the cartoons interesting to me as a kid. I’d seen some of the earliest Hanna-Barbera talking animal characters *BEFORE* I had ever seen my first TOM & JERRY cartoon; so what a refreshing change to see the actual characters for the first time in a theater!!

The Hanna-Barbera creations were so fantastic to look at and could even be funny at times and, yes, they did occasionally jump out of formula and come up with a handful of titles that were strange as well as funny, like “PART-TIME PAL”, “SLEEPY-TIME TOM”, “BUSY BUDDIES”, “MOUSE IN MANHATTAN” and even “LONESOME MOUSE” in which they *DO* exchange words for a short portion of the title.

Gene Deitch had approached the cartoons with absolutely *NO* regard for the original and, while such an attitude would normally put me off, I think it is a welcome twist. So Deitch’s attitude is one of “anything goes”!

Hey, he began his short series with a title like “THE TOM & JERRY CARTOON KIT”. This is something that I truly wish that Hanna-Barbera themselves had attempted, but then, I guess that the duo wanted to market the characters to kids and, so, could not make any of the cartoons look as if the series was out to promote violent toys manufactured to its intended audience.

But this is why I like the Deitch title. This cartoon alone must have inspired NATIONAL LAMPOON to come up with a truly grotesque and bloody TOM & JERRY parody of their own called “KIT ‘N’ KABOODLE”, in which the two characters attack each other with dangerous implements of destruction and we actually *SEE* the end result as the anatomically correct characters chop each other to bits amid the panels. While the Gene Deitch cartoons are not as violent and contain as much actual blood-letting as the Hanna-Barbera originals, he and his Czechoslovakian animators almost poke fun at two characters being aimed at kids (with all the violence inherent in the original creations) almost as if to make a statement that theatrical cartoons were not just for kids anyway, even if they seem to be aimed directly at that audience!

So Deitch imagined a world where you would sell the most surrealistically violent toys to kids with all the zeal of the cartoons, like the way Disney created theme parks around his cartoon characters—and we all know how questionable that kind of marketing could be at times!

This essay of sorts is not really aimed at any one of the cartoons in Deitch’s series or version of the characters, but instead, this is my cry or open letter to those at Warner Brothers, who now own the series as part of the classic MGM library, to listen to those of us who want to see a disk collecting *ALL* of the titles created during this period with even some background about the Gene Deitch years, if indeed there is anything worth telling about it. I just think the cartoons are strange enough to stand on their own, and I would go so far as to say that I think that Deitch had meant for them to clash loudly with the originals--even at their final stages, before Hanna-Barbera found themselves without a studio and turned to television for a home.

If you look at those earliest TV efforts, you might see animation nearly as bad at times. Of course, though, Hanna-Barbera still had that impeccable sense of timing when it came to a gag; oh, they would miss the timing on occasion due mostly to the limited budget, but the voice actors would pick up the slack there. Deitch just didn’t care and, so, decided to make cartoons that said that animation needs to take some new chances. The era of Deitch came on as abruptly as that of Tex Avery, but he was saying more that animation should not stay in one place. He did what his own budgets would allow and these things are worth taking a longer look at. Sure, I sometimes wish that Deitch had created some one shot cartoons, just as Chuck Jones would create other cartoons outside of the TOM & JERRY series that *HE* had done, so we could see what he was really capable of.

As Thad Komorowski points out, Deitch did do some quality work at the Paul Terry Studios; we know that he is capable of better, but he never saw his time spent at MGM as being some sort of opportunity, unfortunately. Perhaps, if he had taken the reigns and saw in-roads to do with animation as he always may have wanted at a studio that might have allowed for a bigger budget if the cartoons, themselves, had quality to them, the TOM & JERRY series might have been given its due.

Instead, I like their senselessness and most absurd uses of cartoon license ever to be put to film, predating the Sam Singer “COURAGEOUS CAT” series for TV. Worst cartoons ever? Well, not always, but the Gene Deitch TOM & JERRY series is a jarring parody of the accepted norm.

Tags:

Tom+and+Jerry, Gene+Deitch

It's Only The Beginning, Folks: The First Looney Tunes, Part 2

2008-06-14T00:59:00.002-05:00

What Do We Do For An Ending?: RIDE HIM, BOSKO (1932)

Review-Synopsis by Rachel Newstead

Ride Him, Bosko
Release Date: Sept. 17, 1932
Animators: Isadore (Friz) Freleng, Norm Blackburn
In Short: In a typical Western town, typical Western villains endanger Honey. Will Bosko pull off a typical Western rescue? Maybe...maybe not...

The Looney Tunes series had come a long way in two years, and the only thing keeping it from going any further--as far as Hugh Harman was concerned--was money.

As far as Leon Schlesinger was concerned, he'd given them more than enough. Indeed, the cartoons had been quite successful as they were, enough to launch a second series (Merrie Melodies) the year before. One is tempted to think of Schlesinger's reluctance to give them more as an indication of his legendary cheapness, but in fact by 1932 Warner Bros had been hit especially hard by the Depression--as a result, Schlesinger's per-cartoon budget became ever more meager. As Michael Barrier says:

As Warner Bros. and most of the big Hollywood studios sank in deep financial trouble in the early thirties, Schlesinger and Warner's amended their contract twice to reduce the amount Schlesinger got per cartoon in the 1932-33 season of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies. He wound up getting $7300 per cartoon instead of $10,000, and when he signed a new contract with Warner's on 1 March 1933, he took another cut, to $6000 per cartoon. Had he continued with Harman and Ising and raised their payments, he would actually have lost money on each cartoon...

The easy-going Ising had been more accepting of the financial arrangements they'd made with Schlesinger. The more irascible Harman, who had by this time assumed sole control of the Looney Tunes series, was not--which usually resulted in loud and frequent arguments with Leon. This would, of course, eventually lead to their departure from the studio; one can almost see the tension between Harman and Schlesinger play out in those last few cartoons. With the Merrie Melodies now assuming the role once held by the Looney Tunes as Warner's musical "showpiece" series, the Looney Tunes could now be more gag-oriented--and Harman grew ever more ambitious. Three cartoons from that tense final year (Bosko In Person, Bosko's Picture Show, and Ride Him, Bosko) show a marked, at times astounding, improvement over the series' output to date: Bosko, no longer the carefree, whistling little character bouncing his way through nonsensical, plotless cartoons, was now either cast as a stage entertainer, or as the central figure in an actual story. We see the first faint signs of the Looney Tunes we'll come to know, such as celebrity caricatures: in Bosko In Person, Bosko imitates both Jimmy Durante and Maurice Chevalier; in Bosko's Picture Show, a newsreel segment shows an animated Durante being chased by none other than an ax-wielding Adolf Hitler! Even Ising's Merrie Melodies occasionally used what would become familiar conventions: I Like Mountain Music not only contains a rare caricature of Will Rogers, it makes use of the "magazine covers come to life" motif seen in Bob Clampett's ingenious Book Revue.

Even more familiar (and startling) is a technique which not only looks backward to Bosko The Talk-Ink Kid, but forward to cartoons like You Ought To Be In Pictures: the use of live-action footage, as we'll see in today's cartoon.

"Where men are men...nine times out of ten."

The cartoon opens with a coyote howling atop a mesa with the moon looming in the background; in true classic "rubber hose" fashion, the coyote's chest swells up like a child's balloon when it inhales. We see Our Hero Bosko riding his horse across the cartoon desert, playing his guitar and singing a popular song from the previous year (Nat Johnson and Fred Howard Wright's "When The Bloom Is On The Sage"). His noble steed doesn't seem all that co-operative--in fact, he looks half-asleep--so Bosko dismounts and gives the horse a little shove over a small hill before resuming his song.

While Bosko makes like Gene Autry, we cut to a title card that reads, "RED GULCH--Where Men Are Men, Nine Times Out Of Ten..." (For some reason I find that unbelievably funny, though I'm not quite sure what it means--and I'm afraid to ask.) It's way off-kilter for a Harman-Ising cartoon of this period, a line more suited to Mel Brooks than Hugh and Rudy--which of course makes it all the funnier.

We get our first look at the little town of Red Gulch in long shot; it's clear from the first moment this isn't exactly the safest place to be. We see a fellow in a sombrero chased out of an alley and past the saloon by an outlaw; a pig cowboy stupid enough to pass by the same saloon gets hit on the head by a bottle-wielding arm emerging from the door. The pig staggers a bit and falls unconscious in the alley. A long, tall dachshund cowboy also unfortunate enough to pass by gets hit with a hail of bullets, but rather than drop dead, he merely loses his midsection--and several feet in height. The now literally cut-down-to-size cowboy finally wises up and flees in terror.

The above scene strikes me as a milder version of the typical Lawless Western Town in Freleng's Bugs Bunny Rides Again--there, the gunplay was so frequent that bullets stopped at a traffic light to let other bullets fly past, and even innocent clothing-store mannequins had their hands in the air. But this is a 1930's cartoon, and while it could do the impossible as well as anything Avery, Clampett, or Jones did later, animation hadn't yet learned how to be absurdist. A very important difference, and one that would rocket Schlesinger's studio to the top of the heap in another ten years.

Enter Bosko and his horse--the horse exhales with relief and deflates like a balloon. Rather than tie him up, Bosko simply leaves the flattened-out remains lying there in the street (though it's not as if the horse were going to go anywhere--a horse thief would need a bicycle pump and some No-Doz to make off with him.)

Bosko meanwhile, enters the saloon in typical Western style (legs bowed out) and yells inside, "Howdy, fellas!" He's greeted by a stream of bullets from inside--if his friends treat him like that, his enemies might make him look worse than his horse. "Howdy, Bosko!" they yell back.

Bosko merely picks up the bullet-riddled hat that had been shot off his head (had this been an Avery cartoon, that ten-gallon hat would have been shot down to a pint and a half) laughs nervously, and steps through the saloon doors. Me, I'd have been in the next county after the second bullet.

As the scene cuts to the inside, we see a piano player, a fiddler and a banjo player providing the musical entertainment. Bosko, consummate performer he is, slides into frame in the next scene and does a nifty little tap routine. The piano player, meanwhile, performs some deft keyboard wizardry--slamming down on the keys, he flips the mug of beer beside him into the air and catches the contents in his mouth. This is some pretty potent stuff, though, and burns away most of the fellow's clothes. What remains looks a bit like frilly bloomers, which for Harman and Ising is an opportunity to do something they loved to do in those pre-Code days--a "sissy" gag. The piano player instantly sprouts rouge and mascara and strikes an effeminate pose, crying out "Whoopsie!" as he swishes off-screen. (With a propaganda message like that, Prohibition should have succeeded).

Bosko now takes over for the piano player, energetically shouting "Come on, boys" and giving the stool a bit of a spin before he sits down. He starts into a jazz number so lively the cards in the gamblers' hands start scatting along with him, as we see in close-up. The "joker" in the card hand adds his own throaty bit of singing before a pistol does him in.

Harman and Ising, as is well known by now, made generous use of recycled animation, and the scene that follows would be used in no less than two cartoons--one in a whole other studio. The crowd of people dancing to Bosko's rhythmic piano-playing will be retraced exactly in both Moonlight For Two (Schlesinger) and The Old Pioneer (MGM), one of at least two instances of such cross-studio reuse. (Harman and Ising would also use old Schlesinger animation in their first MGM release, Bosko's Parlor Pranks--a simple matter, considering those sequences belonged to them, not Schlesinger. He was simply the middleman, and wouldn't form his own studio until after their departure).

Cut to a title reading THE DEADWOOD STAGE (Free Wheeling). There had to be a stagecoach at some point--this is a Western, right?

As for the "free-wheeling" gag, your guess is as good as mine. I've never been able to trace the exact origin of it, though it's obvious it comes from a series of early '30s auto or tire ads. Anyway, it's "free-wheeling," all right--the wheels wobble around as if they're barely connected to the coach. (I wonder if that stagecoach company ended up designing grocery carts a couple of generations later?) Inside, Honey bounces around uncontrollably, but doesn't seem too bothered by it at first, but after a couple more serious bumps, she squeaks out, "Please! Be careful!" (I don't think I would have been nearly as polite after a few hundred miles of that).

And since this is a Western, you can't have a stagecoach without stagecoach robbers, which is exactly what we see in the next scene. They skid to a stop--the lead bandit and his horse sneak along the ground toward the stage. This scene and those that follow (a front view of the bandits in pursuit) will also be reused--not by Harman and Ising, oddly, but Schlesinger--in My Little Buckaroo a few years later.

The bandit stops at the edge of a cliff as we see the stagecoach pass by in the distance. He and his men gallop off in the other direction, presumably to "head 'em off at the pass" (I'm with Harvey Korrman--I hate that cliché!) Reaching the mouth of the canyon, heading 'em off is exactly what the bandit does--he pulls up right in front of the passing stagecoach and draws his pistols. The stagecoach driver merely takes the other path in the fork in the road where the bandit is standing, causing him and his horse to twist like a corkscrew as the stage goes by (one of many gags in this cartoon that could have been improved with a little more speed.). The horse and bandit lie there reeling for a moment--too long a moment--before taking off in pursuit, followed by the rest of his gang.

Cut to the stagecoach--the driver, being shot at from off-camera, keeps getting his hat shot off his head, only to catch it and put it back on. This too would be reused in My Little Buckaroo, but with a funnier twist: the Andy Devine pig character would replace his hat with a new one each time it gets shot off his head--a derby, a straw hat, and so on. (Yet another indication of how much funnier this could have been).

In mid-pursuit, the trunk
that's been bouncing along on top of the stage for the last couple of minutes gets knocked off onto the ground--amid the bullets, the trunk opens and all the clothing inside gets up and heads for the hills. A corset flaps around and flies out of the scene (nice touch, guys). We then cut quickly to the second repeat of the front-view "bandits in pursuit" footage in only a ten seconds, then to a view of the stage in long shot traveling along a narrow path at the edge of a cliff.

The square dance sequence dances over to another studio: from Warner's (above left) to MGM (above right).

Through all this, poor Honey is still bouncing along inside, oblivious to what's happening. We cut to the exterior again--this time the stage driver hits a bump and gets thrown free--he hits a tree and slides down the narrow trunk (ouch!) and onto a pile of cacti (double ouch!). He lands on top of a steer skeleton--the sort of skeleton you see lying in the desert in every Western--which causes it to spring to life and head off into town with the stage driver astride it. Every couple of seconds, the steer skeleton lets out a "MOO" as it runs along--a cycle that runs about five or six seconds longer than it should. Harman's attempt to pad the picture is pretty obvious here.

Meanwhile, back at the saloon (I would have loved to say "ranch" at this point) Bosko's still playing and everybody's still dancing, until the stage driver runs in and yells "Hey!", pointing outside. Panting, the exhausted driver gasps as Bosko enters the scene, "The stage is robbed!" He finally collapses--or at least the upper half of him does--into his pants, which continue to stand there. As Bosko rushes out of the scene, the stage driver's arm emerges from the pants and grabs a mug of beer from the bar. Rather than come up out of his pants to take a drink, he simply pours the contents of the mug into them (another not-too-bad bit).

Cut to a long-shot view from the perspective of the alley outside--Bosko runs toward his horse (now miraculously inflated again) but ends up putting the saddle on the steer carcass the stage driver rode in on. (I never thought I'd type that sentence in a review). The steer gallops around a few times with Bosko aboard (another painfully obvious instance of padding) before tossing Bosko in the air--Bosko's horse merely comes up underneath him and catches him.

Now the chase is on, with another long cycle of Bosko and his horse jumping over the same rock twice. The scene cuts again to the "bandits in pursuit" bit of animation for a few seconds. Meanwhile, the stage is now going on driverless, and Honey finally gets clued in--her head emerges from a window as she cries "Help! Help! Bosko, save me!" We cut back to the cycle of Bosko chasing after the stage: just as we think he's going to catch up with it, however....

...the camera backs away to reveal three animators gathered around a drawing board watching the action: the one on the far left (Walker Harman) stands smoking a pipe. Norm Blackburn is on the other side of the table, while Rudy Ising sits nearer the camera, providing the "galloping" sound effects by slapping his thighs.

"Say, how's Bosko gonna save the girl?" Ising says.
"I dunno," Harman replies.
"Well, we gotta do something," says Ising.
"Let's go home," Blackburn pipes up.

"OK," everybody agrees. All three grab their coats and leave, while a confused Bosko stops and stares helplessly at the audience as we iris out. Since "How Dry I Am" is playing on the sound track at this point, one can surmise "home" is the last place these three guys are going. Poor Bosko, meanwhile, can only spend all night in a dark, empty studio wondering "Now what do I do??"

(My thanks once again to Jerry Beck, who provided me with the identity of the three men).

Concluding Thoughts

In Of Mice and Magic, Leonard Maltin sarcastically suggests this "out of left field" ending reflected Harman and Ising's true attitude toward Bosko and their work in general. A cop-out? Maybe--but it's a great one. In that final minute, a routine Bosko story skyrockets into the realm of the "classic."

Perhaps it's for the best that the rest of the cartoon is a routine Bosko story, since audience expectations get completely thrown out of whack. Ride Him, Bosko has imagination, a quality only occasionally seen in early Looney Tunes. Maltin is at least partially right: one can sense Harman and Ising's growing boredom and frustration with doing the same old thing. The gags, though mild and a bit slow, are more frequent, with some scoring a direct hit (the "where men are men, nine times out of ten" line is just strange enough to provoke sudden laughter). It's as if they're desperate to be funny at times, throwing out everything they have in their arsenal to see what takes. This is their message to Leon Schlesinger, to show what they can do on a limited budget--and hint at what they might do with a little more.

They wouldn't get that chance, obviously, but they leave Schlesinger with a bang. The delightful Bosko In Person would follow in a few months, with a Bosko and Honey we'd never seen before, due to the expressive personality animation of the young Bob McKimson. Both it and Bosko's Picture Show will feature Bosko in his now-familiar role as an entertainer; the latter's alleged unprintable dirty word will leave audiences wondering and arguing for decades--which, no doubt, is precisely what Hugh and Rudy hoped

But true greatness would elude them while making cartoons for Warner Bros.; they would find it thanks to the lavish budgets of MGM and the music of Scott Bradley, culminating in the astonishing, Academy Award-nominated Peace On Earth. The cartoons made in that last contentious release season of 1932-33, however, show that their brief time at Schlesinger's wasn't a total loss.

Tags:

Harman-Ising, Warner's, Bosko, orphan+toon

Orphan Toons 2.0

2008-06-12T06:56:00.006-05:00

Those repeat visitors to the blog who have been perusing the older posts will no doubt notice a few changes.

When Kevin and I first started The Home For Orphan Toons back in October 2006, I didn't yet have the capability to add graphics to my reviews--that wouldn't happen for another few months, when I finally found a way to make screen captures. Later on, I discovered to my dismay that some of my earlier, pictureless reviews--like ROMEO IN RHYTHM--were getting a surprising number of hits. Since I want to make this blog visually attractive as well as informative, I'm remedying that situation: I've added images to the ROMEO IN RHYTHM review, and will do so with the other all-text reviews as time permits.

As for more current entries, patience. I have plenty of reviews forthcoming, such as a look at another great early Looney Tune, RIDE HIM, BOSKO. As always, stay "tooned"...

Tags:

new+look, Romeo+In+Rhythm

Orphan Toon Musings 4: Happy Birthday, Mom--I'll Bring The Gravy

2008-06-10T23:03:00.010-05:00

Today is my mom's birthday, and in the time-honored birthday tradition handed down through the generations, I'm going to embarrass the hell out of her. (I told her I'd get her one day for having the entire wait staff of that Chili's sing "Happy Birthday" to me, and I meant it). As this blog is devoted to animation, I can think of no better place to tell the world how--incredibly--the Termite Terrace crew brought Mom and me closer together.

My mother hates cartoons--or so she claims.

I think it would be more accurate to say she dislikes most of them, and certainly didn't understand my love of them. Given that like most kids of my generation, I spent my Saturday mornings gaping at such forgettable schlock as Speed Buggy, Goober and the Ghost Chasers and Baggy Pants & The Nitwits, perhaps she had a point.

It's ironic, then, that so many of the best moments we spent together were spent around the TV, watching Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies.

I don't think Mom could ever bring herself to fully hate the Warner's cartoons--how could any self-respecting Southern lady openly dislike Foghorn Leghorn, after all? My Grandaddy, who loved that rooster with a passion and was so doggedly Southern he bled Confederate gray, would probably have disowned her.

She's always had a wicked, warped sense of humor, which she passed on to my brothers and me. I'd like to think that Bugs, Daffy, Porky--and yes, Foggy, had a hand (or paw, or wing) in shaping it.

Once in a while, she'd do something that never failed to send us three kids into spasmodic fits of laughter: at the slightest provocation, she'd put one finger on her head, stick out her tongue and close one eye. She'd accompany this odd expression with an even odder sound, which I'm sure she stole from a Warner Bros. cartoon: "FREEP!" ("Fearless Freep," after all, was the fellow Yosemite Sam forced Bugs to sub for in High Diving Hare). The finger-to-the head move comes from none other than Friz Freleng's Pigs In A Polka--remember the inane dance the two "frivolous" pigs did constantly? Growing up, my mom and her sister derived a great deal of enjoyment from doing the same dance.

The greatest irony of all, I suppose, would be that some of the fondest memories Mom and I would share would derive from one of the only two cartoons ever to make me feel uneasy. The first, of course, is Finnegan's Flea; the second is a cartoon which these days is almost as obscure: Chuck Jones' Chow Hound.

Chuck's most effective cartoons were parables of greed: it proved the downfall of the nameless construction worker in One Froggy Evening, who sacrifices his job, his life, his savings and his sanity for the sake of a temperamental singing frog. Jones' cartoons could also be profoundly psychologically disturbing--witness the slow, tortuous breakdown of poor Claude Cat at the hands of mice Hubie and Bertie in Mouse Wreckers. (The upside-down room was a stroke of brilliance--never was loss of sanity so funny). Chow Hound is both; a gluttonous dog passes off a poor hapless cat as the pet of several humans (and in one case, the rare "Saber-Toothed Alley Cattus" at the local zoo) and collecting the delicious meat the cat's inevitably lavished with. Though the cat dutifully turns over every single morsel to the dog (it's unclear whether the cat ever eats at all) the only things he gets for his trouble are a smack to the head, and the admonition, "What?? No "gwavy?"

A pretty neat arragement--for the dog. But the big oaf isn't satisfied. "Day in, day out, the same thing--it's too slow! I've gotta get some food!" he whines. Throwing the scam into Phase Two, he pretends to "kidnap" the cat from all its supposed owners, then "rescuing" it, collecting the reward and the praise.

Also a neat arrangement, if it stopped there. But it snowballs when the dog takes his windfall and buys his own meat market--and one doesn't have to see the cartoon to know what happens next.
The sight of the hideously gorged, bloated dog is nauseating enough--but Jones isn't through with him. The cat--and a mouse companion who up to now was also the dog's unfortunate stooge--utter that ominous (and universally known) final line. The terrified dog can only whimper in terror as gallons of gravy get funneled down his gullet--and we're left to ponder the unspeakable consequences at the iris out. A handy moral--signed, sealed and delivered--courtesy of Chuck. And a twist ending worthy of any Twilight Zone.

It's only natural the phrase would enter the lexicon of every middle-class family in the country, particularly mine and animator Eric Goldberg's. As in Goldberg's family, we couldn't have gravy served to us again without Mom intoning the fateful line, "This time we didn't forget the gravy...."

And I can't think of Mom without thinking of this cartoon. With that in mind, it's only appropriate that I, as my birthday present to her, give her the opportunity to see Chow Hound again for the first time in years.

One of these days, Mom, I'll be able to see you again. And when I do, I won't forget the gravy.

Tags:

Warner+Bros., Chow+Hound, Chuck+Jones

(Note: Mom's birthday is actually the 11th, but a Blogger time-stamping glitch put it under the previous day--I assure you, Mom, my memory hasn't deteriorated that much over the years..)

It's Only The Beginning Folks: The First Looney Tunes

2008-06-08T20:36:00.001-05:00

Bosko The "Mus-Ink-Al" Kid: HOLD ANYTHING (1930)

Review-Synopsis by Rachel Newstead

Foreword: In the podcast Kevin and I recorded last October, we discussed the musical versatility of our favorite 1930's animated character--the one and only Bosko. Certain cartoons didn't quite get the attention we feel they deserved, while others had to be eliminated in the interest of time; therefore, as a supplement of sorts to our podcast discussion, I'll be devoting the next few entries what I feel are the best of those early musical cartoons. Enjoy...

(Edited 6/9/08 to correct minor typos and change text size--R.)

Hold Anything
A Vitaphone Release
Release Date: Sept. 1930
Animators: Isadore (Friz) Freleng, Norm Blackburn
In Short: Construction worker Bosko meets secretary Honey and they make beautiful music together--out of everything they find...

There's a good reason the first "talkies"--whether live-action or animated--were musicals.

The movie Singin' In The Rain didn't exaggerate much--the "talking picture" at the dawn of the sound era was a clumsy endeavor, to say the least. The clichés we've all heard about this period of history pretty much hold up--the camera, once free to go just about anywhere, found itself locked in one position and isolated in a soundproof booth to muffle the whirring of the camera's gears. The primitive microphones had limited range: should a person move even a foot too far away, the sound engineer could miss a word or an entire line. Hence, like little wooden soldiers, cast members would cluster around the mike (clumsily concealed in a prop like a phone or a vase of flowers) and recite their lines. A few scenes like that in a row, and the novelty of actors speaking on the screen evaporated quickly.

Musicals, on the other hand, could be filmed like a stage play, with the microphones strategically placed for the best possible pickup--while giving the performers at least a little more freedom of movement. There were still severe limitations, but the audience at least had something interesting to look at--and listen to.

Animation wasn't bound by these restrictions, obviously--as in the silent era, a cartoon character could go anywhere and do anything. Early sound cartoons, nevertheless, had their own problems with dialogue--matching a cartoon character's mouth movements to the words on the sound track proved a challenge even for leaders in the field like Disney and Fleischer. In Fleischer's experimental sound cartoon MY OLD KENTUCKY HOME (1926) an animated dog tells the audience to "Follow the ball and join in, everybody..." Though these were the first words ever uttered in an animated cartoon, the impact of that historic moment was nowhere near what it should have been: the synchronization was so poor as to be nonexistent.

When making his third Mickey Mouse cartoon, STEAMBOAT WILLIE, Walt Disney chose to sidestep the issue as much as possible, instead concentrating on the things an animated cartoon could do that a live-action film couldn't. (An attitude toward animation he'd eventually shun, to the detriment of his cartoons--and for awhile, the industry in general). Thus, music would be the centerpiece, the main point of the cartoon--a musical score could be broken down into a series of beats (x frames per second) far more easily than speech. (There is speech in the cartoon, but brief--a parrot, voiced by Disney himself, taunts Mickey. All other "dialogue" is in squeaks or squawks). In STEAMBOAT WILLIE, therefore, music was everywhere, and could be produced by anything Mickey hit, prodded, poked, pulled or touched, be it a cow's teeth, a cat's tail, or even a sow's udders. The novelty of sound, combined with the "anything can happen" spirit of animation, became the recipe for a surefire hit.

Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising made considerable progress in solving the problems posed by synchronized speech--and marketed BOSKO THE TALK-INK KID as a showcase for it--but the subsequent Looney Tunes series would revolve around popular songs of the day (specifically, music owned by the Warners, in Warner Bros. films). What worked for Mickey Mouse would work equally well for Bosko: cartoons light on plot and heavy on music. And that music could, and would come from anywhere--or anything.

For this reason, the third Looney Tune ever released, HOLD ANYTHING, is perhaps the best of these early mini-musicals: a perfect combination of a catchy pop-music score and the total disregard for reality, anatomy and logic that made the cartoons of this era so much fun. Much about the cartoon hearkens back to STEAMBOAT WILLIE two years earlier: Bosko's regard for animals isn't much better than Mickey's (a goat serves as a handy musical instrument in both cartoons) but Harman and Ising take the idea out of the farmyard. This is the "Steamboat Willie" of the modern, urban age--a rivet gun provides a steady drumbeat, winches and pulleys become harps, and Honey's typewriter instantly becomes a piano when Bosko inserts some sheet music--which he just happens to be carrying. (It's a bit unusual for a construction worker to be carrying sheet music with him to work, to be sure--though in a cartoon in which literally everything is musical, it makes perfect sense).

It acknowledges the influence of Mickey in other ways as well--though it would be saying too much at this point to mention exactly how.

Bouncing, Decapitated Mice?

The cartoon opens with our little Bosko perched atop a high beam of a skyscraper under construction, characteristically whistling a merry little tune as he goes; his rivet gun provides a drumbeat accompaniment. (In this era, the line between music and sound effects was still quite blurred; musicians would provide the earliest effects, as musicians for studios like Terrytoons would continue to do as far forward as the late 1940's). Bosko pauses in his riveting just long enough to pound out some xylophone notes on a chain above him.

Meanwhile, a group of mice are busy putting up a brick wall--as with Bosko's riveting, it's perfectly in time with the music. The bricklayer mice plop the bricks down in 2/4 time as a group of hod-carrier mice climb the scaffold to supply the mortar, also without missing a beat. It's already apparent there's something awfully familiar about those mice....

Back to Bosko--he's resumed his riveting, this time accompanying the tune with a few plucks on the ropes of the winch that supports him. After that, his riveting takes on a military drum sound, to which the hod-carrier mice march along a a yet-to-be-completed brick wall like soldiers in formation. Again, they look uncomfortably familiar, and it's especially obvious when they turn to the side--they could easily be smaller cousins of Mickey. Close enough to make Walt turn purple with rage, no doubt. This scene would be retraced in Rudy Ising's 1932 Merrie Melodie IT'S GOT ME AGAIN--which ironically competed against Disney's FLOWERS AND TREES for the Oscar (and lost--maybe Walt got his revenge after all).

There are minor differences in the "marching Mickey clones" scene in this cartoon and the one in the Oscar contender--Harman and Ising, who must have incurred Disney's wrath for the scene in HOLD ANYTHING, made the ears of the mice larger in the later cartoon in the hope it would keep Walt off their backs. It's uncertain if they succeeded--the mice still look identical to Mickey from the side. They also differ in the end gag--in the first, one straggler mouse continues marching without realizing the others have left, and scrambles hurriedly after them. In the second, the straggler mouse loses his footing and falls into a spittoon (a common gag in the pre-Code era).

Other minor bits of business worth noting: first, as the Mickey clones march along the wall, their legs lengthen when they come to a section not fully built, and retract again when they hit a completed section of wall. It's a gag that would be used with some changes in THE MAGIC PENCIL at Terrytoons, and countless Tex Avery cartoons at both Warner's and MGM. If Harman and Ising were the first to do this bit, their influence on animation is greater than most people realize.

Second, at one point the mice march in place as the mouse on the left side of the column bumps the mouse next to him with his rump; the next does the same to the one next to him, and so on. Honey will do a variation on this gag, as we'll see in a moment.

Back to the straggler mouse for a moment--remember him? After the scene in which he runs after his fellow mice, he trips, which sends him plummeting downward. He lands on a saw Bosko's holding; Bosko just sees this as another opportunity to play some more music, and bends the tool like a musical saw--while the mouse bounces helplessly on top of it.

But that's only the beginning of the poor mouse's indignities--at one point, Bosko holds the saw sideways, sharp end up--the mouse lands on it and is momentarily decapitated. Now both head and body are at the mercy of Bosko's saw-playing, bouncing separately up and down, back and forth. The mouse's body makes a futile effort to catch up with its head, but Bosko bends the saw before body and head can be reunited. The headless body merely struggles pathetically like a mountain climber on an icy slope.

Finally, through sheer luck, the mouse's head gets flipped through the air and is reunited with its body; but Bosko, still unconcerned, continues to toy with him. It's a good thing this is only a cartoon--I don't think Workmen's Comp covers situations like this...

We take a break from this animated sadism to see a goat pop several handfuls of rivets into his mouth--for no reason we can immediately discern, because we're immediately taken back to Bosko with the mouse. Once Bosko lets the mouse go, the reason for the scene with the goat becomes evident: the mouse drops into the goat's open mouth just as the goat is about to gulp down a few more rivets. No matter. The mouse merely opens a "door" that suddenly appears on the goat's stomach, steps out to freedom, and "tips" his ears like a hat to the bewildered animal, no more concerned for the goat's welfare than Bosko had been for his.

In the meantime, Bosko up above yells to the two of them: "Hey! Bring up that beam!" Spying a nearby rope, the mouse gets an idea and looks toward the goat. The goat, having already been through enough with said mouse, wants no part of it and tries to sneak away. The mouse simply runs after him and drags the poor creature back into the frame. Tying the rope around the goat's midsection, the goat is converted--for the moment--into a handy winch. With a few cranks of the goat's tail, the mouse winds the rope around the goat's body, handily sending the beam up.

Bosko then hops from where he's been standing onto the rising beam, whistling once again. He accompanies his tune with a few plucked notes on the pulley ropes, as he had in the beginning of the cartoon.

But he's distracted from his little concert when he passes the window of a nearby office building, where secretary Honey happens to be typing a letter. "Hello, baby! What d'ya say?" (Quite the ladies' man, isn't he?) He then does a little dance for her on the beam.

Rather than take this as an unwelcome intrusion from a creep, as one would today, Honey instead giggles and applauds Bosko's dancing. Turning to the typewriter, she starts typing again--it's a little mash note, reading "GEE, YOU'RE SWELL!" (On company time, no less).

That's all the invitation Bosko needs--he does a little tap routine on the beam as it teeters precariously like an aerial seesaw. He plucks a few musical notes, which materialize in mid-air as literal, written notes, providing him a handy staircase with which to enter Honey's window (shades of Felix the Cat, who often turned such abstract symbols as exclamation points into useful implements, such as a baseball bat).

Hopping down from the window ledge, Bosko picks Honey up and seats her on the window sill, while he takes over her typewriter (I wonder what her boss thinks of all this?) Bosko gives the typewriter keys a few tentative pokes, then inserts a large sheet of paper into the machine. Sheet music, it turns out--when he presses the keys, the typewriter slowly plays the notes of the cartoon's highlight number, while Bosko types the song's lyrics, which replace the notes on the sheet-music page as he types.

When he hits the carriage return, the number begins in earnest--Bosko's able to play a full piano score on the machine, thanks to '30s cartoon magic. Honey dances along, swaying her hips. She bounces her hips off one side of the window, then the other as the full orchestra (from who knows where) joins in.

The scene changes to a shot of her on the ledge outside the window as she makes vocal sounds to Bosko's typewriter-piano accompaniment. Bosko joins in with some vocalizing of his own.

Down below, the goat--the pulley ropes still wound around him--decides he's had enough and blows a "raspberry" to the lot of them. Wriggling free of the ropes, he finds a pull cord which controls the release valve to a boiler. When he pulls on it, the three whistles on top of the valve blow in unison. He swallows the cord; liking how that tastes, he decides to go after the entire boiler.

Not a good idea, Mr. Goat--when he grabs the metal release valve, he's immediately filled with steam, expands and floats upward like a balloon. He climbs ever higher until he passes Bosko in Honey's office, still playing a hot number on her typewriter. Abandoning that, he reaches out for the goat's udders and floats out through the window. Landing back on his girder, he turns the steam-filled goat into a bagpipe-like instrument by squeezing the animal like a bellows, which produces a steam calliope-sounding rendition of the title tune. He punctuates that with brief little pokes on the goat's navel (a scene which makes me a bit woozy, I must admit--I cringe at the thought of anyone even threatening to poke my navel). I've personally never understood Hugh and Rudy's obsession with "navel" gags to begin with.

We return to Honey, who's obviously enjoying all this, dancing along and really getting into the spirit of the thing (even if the goat isn't). Her anatomy is so pliable her torso can separate from the rest of her body when she swings out her hips, and reunite itself when the hips swing in the other direction--a bit like those old-fashioned kids' toys with a ball, cup and string.

Bosko continues to play the poor steam-filled goat until disaster strikes--the valve pops out of the goat's mouth, naturally releasing all the steam. The force of the steam escaping carries Bosko up in the air along with the goat, who bleats several times as it continues to expel the steam (I think I would, too).

Bosko, who had been on the goat's back, slips off but manages to grab its udders again--but this time is met with a shower of milk in the face (a gag used by Harman and Ising since their days with Disney--Ub Iwerks used it as well, in the first Mickey cartoon, PLANE CRAZY.) Momentarily startled, Bosko lets go and tumbles earthward; he hits a brick wall, but instead of being seriously injured, he merely shatters into tiny multiple versions of himself. (Another gag which dates back to Harman and Ising's "Oswald" days, and one which they would continue to use, incredibly, into the late thirties. One of the "Jazz Frogs" in BOSKO AND THE PIRATES has this happen to him).

Bosko's multiple selves jump up and down on the brick wall, causing it to play a tinkly piano version of the title tune. He reassembles himself and gives his lady love Honey a little wave as the cartoon ends.

Concluding Thoughts

Audiences seeing this cartoon today, conditioned by decades of Disney-inspired "personality" animation in which we're meant to care about the characters, may find certain gags unsettling--even gruesome, as with the mouse's temporary decapitation. To audiences--and animators--of the time, however, these were merely pleasant little drawings in motion, a chance to revel in the unlimited impossibility of animation. Indeed, Disney himself once did, as in the aforementioned STEAMBOAT WILLIE, and other early Mickeys such as THE BARN DANCE. Or to be more accurate, his onetime right-hand man Ub Iwerks did; Mickey as Ub Iwerks envisioned him was more like a bratty, destructive little boy than the genial creature we've come to know. In that context, Bosko's seeming callousness is understandable--his fellow creatures are no more "real" to him than they are to us--if they're harmed, they resume their shape before long, so Bosko can go on his merry way. The artists had not yet forgotten they were making a cartoon, in which rules of propriety were meaningless. Tex Avery, then, was a throwback of sorts to those earlier days--his detached attitude toward his creations meant he could do anything to them, no matter how horrible (even "kill them off", as with Screwy Squirrel). And because we, too, felt no more for his creations than he, we let him do it--and laughed hysterically while he did it.

As already mentioned, the earliest Looney Tunes were promotional materials, in a manner of speaking--the product being the Warner Bros. music catalogue. HOLD ANYTHING in particular has a rather interesting history--its signature song is a lesser-known piece by the songwriting trio of Buddy DeSilva, Lew Brown, and Ray Henderson, from their 1928 Broadway musical Hold Everything. Those three men, one could say, provided the musical accompaniment for the 1920s, as so many songs we now associate with the period are theirs: "Varsity Drag", "Button Up Your Overcoat", and even the unbearably maudlin (though still popular in its day) Al Jolson tune "Sonny Boy."

Conceived as a vehicle for future "Cowardly Lion" Bert Lahr, the stage musical from which this cartoon takes at least part of its inspiration is perhaps better known for the song "You're The Cream In My Coffee." It became a Vitaphone feature in 1930 with Joe E. Brown replacing Lahr (much to Lahr's anger--he particularly criticized Brown for allegedly aping his trademark mannerisms.) Only the sound elements (the original Vitaphone disks) survive today, though the film was said to have been shot in an early form of Technicolor. The cartoon that sprang from it, then, stands as the only surviving record of what could be done with that musical score.

Why Harman and Ising chose a minor song from the musical (which wasn't even used in the live-action film) as their cartoon's central theme is anybody's guess; perhaps the head office wanted the song promoted precisely because it hadn't been in the movie version. Whatever the reason, it was a perfect choice--the bouncy rhythm and cheery melody reflect the optimistic spirit the studios were trying to convey as the country sank deeper into the Great Depression. Despite the seeming gruesomeness already mentioned, there's a certain innocence (that "wide-eyed" quality Kevin and I have talked about before) that the music only enhances. It holds its own with Fleischer cartoons of the time, which were quirky in their own right--with the same cheerful disregard for logic.

The 24-year-old Friz Freleng would cut his teeth on cartoons like this--music and action are as perfectly integrated as anything he would do in years to come. In a sense, it looks forward to such Freleng cartoons as RHAPSODY IN RIVETS, in which the construction of a skyscraper proceeds in perfect sync with the score of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody. (There's even a brick-laying scene, though involving a single octopus rather than an army of tiny mice). Even in this freeform, plotless little cartoon, the Freleng sense of discipline is already evident.

Not a bad way to start off a fifty-year career.

Tags:

Bosko, Looney+Tunes, Harman-Ising, orphan+toon

Orphan Toon Musings #3: Jeepers Creepers! It's...Mel??

2008-06-07T05:00:00.001-05:00

Foreword from Your Humble Toonkeeper, Rachel Newstead:

Will Rogers said it better than I ever could: "It ain't what we don't know that hurts us--it's what we think we know that ain't so..."

The power of suggestion is an amazing thing--if we're told the same thing long enough, we begin to believe it, no matter how unlikely or implausible it is. And until just a short time ago, I'd have sworn before a Senate subcommittee that Pinto Colvig voiced the practical-joking ghost in the 1939 Bob Clampett Looney Tune JEEPERS CREEPERS. That's common knowledge, isn't it? Isn't it? I mean, who am I to disagree with every film and animation resource in the known universe?

So convinced was I that when Kevin wrote to me at 1:00 this morning suggesting otherwise, I attributed it to sleep deprivation on his part.

But now....I'm not so sure. He could be right.

Or is the power of suggestion merely pulling my mind the other way?

My communications professor in college had a term for this feeling: "cognitive dissonance." Or it could just be the cold medicine I took a few hours ago...

I won't try to make up your mind for you. Read what Kevin has to say and decide for yourself. Just don't blame the cognitive dissonance on me.

He's Not There!

By Kevin Wollenweber

Well, perhaps in the future, we should put up a full review for this cartoon, but there has always been a misconception about the ghost’s voice in the classic LOONEY TUNES cartoon, “JEEPERS CREEPERS”, starring PORKY PIG.

I’d read a post from a while back on a blog called RANDOM SEMICONSCIOUS MUSINGS (a fairly interesting blog, by the way) with all kinds of uncut classic cartoons to enjoy. The blogger, a fellow named Larry, emphatically states that the voice of the ghost in JEEPERS CREEPERS is Pinto Colvig.

While Colvig did do the occasional voice for the studio during this period, the voice of the ghost (especially when singing) is Mel Blanc, stealing Colvig’s thunder for the moment and doing the voice almost spot on.

I will go on record and say that Colvig might have been more entertaining as the voice of this ghost and would have added his own usual muttering inflections, even adding his own sound effects. Yes, you know that Pinto is on when you get that farting car noise when a character is taking off in some sort of rickety vehicle—you can hear this sound in so many of the cartoons that he took part in from his tenures with Disney and MGM as well. You know it is him doing this noise because you can hear him cough as the “voice” of the motor being choked. If you want to hear a tour de force performance by Mr. Colvig, seek out the performance as Old Doc Stork in one of my favorite MGM wartime cartoons, THE STORK’S HOLIDAY. You will hear this noise I’m referring to as well.

That Mel can almost ape a Colvig performance is truly a testament to his voice talents, but, as the saying goes, “close enough but no cigar!” If you’re in doubt, please, sit down sometime with both voices, Mel’s ghost in this cartoon and, perhaps, the voice that Colvig *DID* do for the lead character in that cartoon that featured The Hobo Jugtown Gadget Band or the voice of the lovelorn dog in another Warners toon—I’m sorry; it’s late and I forget its title right now. Only Pinto could neatly do Pinto, and I hate to see him misrepresented.

Don’t get me wrong; JEEPERS CREEPERS is a brilliant cartoon, and I like its often excised (on TV airings, anyway) ending gag as the iris closes. Hopefully, we will see it and other missing Porky cartoons on DVD real soon.

Postscript: So, is Kevin right? Well, I can only say this: I've always been able to tell when Mel does a "dumb" or "goofy" (with a small "g") voice, as it often tends toward the "Barney Rubble"-ish. To my ears, the ghost sounds closer to "Red Hot Ryder" in BUCKAROO BUGS--a classic "dumb" voice that's indisputably Mel's--than Colvig's Goofy. Indeed, as Kevin said, it's especially evident when the ghost is singing.

Judging from the comments on Larry's blog, it appears Kevin isn't the only one who disputes the accepted "facts." That's a great relief to me--I never liked suffering cognitive dissonance alone.

Tags: Jeepers+Creepers, Mel+Blanc, Pinto+Colvig, cartoon+voices

Orphan Toon Musings #2: The Restorations and the Flames

2008-06-05T22:21:00.009-05:00

By Kevin Wollenweber

Well, what I’m about to say is opinion and, partially, fact as told to us on “STU’S SHOW”-- from Shokus Internet Radio--with guest animation historian Jerry Beck, who is constantly and delightfully full of mostly good news; as he was regarding the forthcoming *TWO* POPEYE THE SAILOR DVD sets and LOONEY TUNES GOLDEN COLLECTION, VOL. 6, all from Warner Brothers Home Video. Yes, we shall have *ALL* the beautifully restored black and white cartoons from the true golden age of the spinach-eating sailor man by Christmastime, so “Season’s Greetinks to yous all!!” To supplement this release of all or mostly black and white cartoons, for you POPEYE completists, there will be an all-color “POPEYE & SONS” set of the more recent reinvention of the more kid-friendly version of the character, but as usual, I digress…

The LOONEY TUNES GOLDEN COLLECTION 6 set boasts (and I do mean proudly boasts) some amazing goodies, not the least is which that there will be *MORE* cartoons per disk, 19 to be exact!! Oh boy!! And we’re even getting some wartime shorts, including “RUSSIAN RHAPSODY”, but that was the only title that was leaked out at this particular time on this particular broadcast. Just the fact that there will be four packed disks with 19 cartoons on each is leaving me speechless!!

Now, unfortunately, for the bad news leaking from Hollywood around the Universal Studios fire. Up front, of course, we’re sorry to hear of the injured people in this blaze. I’ve no record of the human casualties and all I can say is that I hope they were few and that there were no deaths.

However, we are talking about damage done to the classic vaults here. Outside of what jerry had mentioned, a friend of mine had told me that he heard from a reliable source that the original old master recordings of Bing Crosby were completely destroyed. All Universal has left, now, are the digital transfers that were made of the stuff, and these appeared on a four-CD box set that I’m lucky enough to own. If you are fans of the earliest swooner crooner recordings, you should seek a copy of this box on Ebay. Sadly enough, now, one will never, ever be able to go back into the vaults and do further restoration on the muddier recordings.

Regarding other old films and cartoons, well, I’ve no real news except that it is possible that digital recordings, like those found on the first two WOODY WOODPECKER & FRIENDS cartoon collections were indeed destroyed. “So,” you might be saying, “just go back in and find the negatives and do the recording all over again!” That’s easier said than done. While some folks at Universal were generous with their time and effort to get the finest possible prints and even clean up what looked a little rough around the edges, such recording and smoothing out cost big bucks, and such spending, again, to do the same job and make sure that there could be a WOODY WOODPECKER VOL. 3 is just not a high priority. Work had already been done to restore some of the stuff in the vaults, and it is now thought that some or most of that work had been incinerated. Jerry’s overall comments about the damage had its question marks, but he was outlining just how the video arm of Universal could look at projects like this with the cost of restoration of the overall buildings and other working areas and whatever other damage was done staring them in their pocketbooks. It has also been found that Universal has been lax in protecting from such fires. There were very few extinguishers and other problems that I don’t quite recall now, so all we now have are the already available video volumes of very early camp classics and old films that were neatly restored before this tragedy happened.

Let’s hope that Jerry Beck, on his Cartoonbrew.com blog sets me and everyone else in the news media straight on any inaccuracies here, but it is truly a shame that any entertainment company’s highest priorities do *NOT* include the vaults. Jerry had praised the company for being so daring as to let him do whatever he pleased with the WOODY WOODPECKER & FRIENDS sets. He did slyly remark that he wished that Warners’ people had the same attitude about *THEIR* animation vaults, but one thing you *CAN* say about Warners (and that Jerry Beck did indeed say) is that, regardless of how insensitive the films can be from our distant past, Warners protected and nearly restored it all, or they are allowing for restoration at some point, if they can be convinced of its profitability!! Universal is willing to let collectors have what they want, but they don’t really do much in the way of protecting their properties, and the fact of this fire proves my point—and, again, these are my opinions, not necessarily fact!! Those who want the whole story should check out “STU’S SHOW” on www.shokusradio.com. The show itself was enjoyable. I only wish I heard the whole show upon its first live run because I certainly was aching to call in as I listened to the rerun!!

Have a listen, and let’s hope that we can “never say never” regarding a third set and future volumes of WOODY WOODPECKER AND FRIENDS. It’s too soon to stop now!!

Tags: Universal+Studos, fire, Looney+Tunes+Golden+Collection, restoration

The Lion In Black and White, Part Two

2008-06-04T13:25:00.001-05:00

Ach! Der Captain Is Having A BLUE MONDAY (1938)

Review-Synopsis by Rachel Newstead

Blue Monday
Release Date: April 2, 1938
Director: Bill Hanna
In Short: Cap's having a bad day--but when he faces off against household appliances, he learns things can be far worse...

In his entire career Bill Hanna never once put pencil to animation paper, yet for years he was considered one of the top animation directors in the business. The shelf full of Oscars in Fred Quimby's office would attest to that--he and his collaborator Joe Barbera would bring in seven of them, a total exceeded only by Walt Disney.

Yet long before he met Barbera, he'd already come close to perfecting his skills. Others may have drawn better than he, but Bill Hanna was the master of the exposure sheet, that graph-like piece of paper that times every action, every syllable of every word of dialogue, down to the single frame. As any comedian will tell you, timing is the difference between a good gag and a gut-bustingly funny one, and Hanna knew that instinctively. It did help, however, that he had two of the best teachers he could possibly ask for.

Hanna drifted into the Harman-Ising studio around 1932 as "basically a cel washer", according to an account in Michael Barrier's Hollywood Cartoons. It was anything but easy work, but in the depths of the Depression, better than anything else available--and there wasn't much available. Eager to learn, it didn't take him long to move into other aspects of the business. As he recalled, "....I used to get in there early and sweep and wash cels. That didn't keep me busy, so I painted cels...." (Barrier 289).

He soon became the head of the inking and painting department, gradually moving from there into timing the cartoons. Hugh and Rudy had been among the first (if not the first) to use exposure sheets to synchronize sound, using a rudimentary version of them while making BOSKO THE TALK-INK KID. Hanna, who had some background in music, merely adapted that knowledge to the timing of animation (as had colleague Friz Freleng). Hanna later said:

"...and I used to get [the songs] down on bar sheets and do the timing....they had
exposure sheets, but they didn't know how to put the notes down and get the values,
like a sixteenth note, an eighth note, a quarter note...all of that, which I understood....
(Barrier, 289).

As Harman and Ising's schedule became more hectic, they gradually transferred more and more control over the timing of the cartoons over to Hanna. By the time he followed them to MGM, he was accomplished enough to direct an entire cartoon (he was the uncredited director of the 1936 Happy Harmony To Spring).

Though initially loyal to his bosses after they'd parted with Leon Schlesinger, Hanna nonetheless jumped at an opportunity to direct at the new MGM cartoon studio in 1937--along with fellow employees Carmen "Max" Maxwell and Bob Allen--while still technically in the employ of Harman and Ising. According to Barrier, he merely followed the example set by his employers: Hugh and Rudy had done the same thing while working for Disney. They were, in part, responsible for Disney's loss of his Oswald the Rabbit character to Charles Mintz; while still working for Walt, they helped Mintz set up a studio where they could make Oswald cartoons without Disney's involvement.

As a new director in a new studio, Hanna was charged with the CAPTAIN AND THE KIDS series; he was as enthusiastic about it as Freleng had been, but as we'll see, Hanna did far better than expected at that disagreeable task, giving what otherwise would have been "one-note" characters a sense of life. The characters--and even some inanimate objects--do more than move. They breathe. They think.

This is "Cap's" cartoon, all about his frustrations with the ordinary--such mundane things as putting on pants and shoes, or dealing with balky household appliances with a mind of their own. Both fate and machinery conspire against poor Cap in this cartoon--with the usual cataclysmic results. Thanks to Bill Hanna's timing, we can not only take delight in seeing it coming, but feel Cap's pain as everything--literally--comes crashing down around him.

"No buttons on der ding-busted pants!!"

As the scene opens, the Captain is engaged in his favorite pastime: sleeping. He's lying in bed, covers down and long underwear exposed, snoring away. Ah, but it's too good to last: the alarm goes off--rather loudly and violently, in fact--and for a second or two the scene shifts to Mama downstairs yelling, "Captain! It's time to get up!"

As expected, this has little effect on Cap. When the alarm rings again, he's barely aware of it, mistaking it for a telephone ("hello, hello--yah, dis is der Captain...."). He's roused out of his stupor only on the third ring--and he's not pleased. He flings the alarm clock on the floor, but (unknown to him, naturally) it lands in his pants, which are hanging on the bedpost at the foot of the bed.

Grabbing the pants and still not fully conscious, Cap methodically puts them on--one leg, then another--and pulls them up around him, only to hear the ringing of the clock from behind him. He jumps slightly and turns to his right--nothing. It rings again; this time he looks to his left--nothing. When he sits down, he jumps back up when he feels the still-ringing clock rattling around in the seat of his pants. He stumbles around with one leg in the air trying to twist the pants around and succeeds in shaking the clock out through the pant leg. Heaving a frustrated sigh, he puts on one shoe, then another, only to find that the clock has now taken residence in his left shoe. Juggling both shoe and clock in the air for a moment as the clock continues to ring, he throws the clock off-camera--or thinks he has. With an annoyed expression as we hear an off-camera crash, he goes to put his shoe on again, only to discover he's trying to put the clock on the bottom of his foot.

Above: In this series of stills, we can see how Bill Hanna's timing mines humor from the "simple" act of putting on a pair of pants--simple for anyone but Cap, that is...

Cap disgustedly tosses the clock to the floor; this time it doesn't land inside any other articles of clothing, fortunately. Since putting on his shoes didn't prove very successful, he decides to forgo that for a moment and button his suspenders. He tries once, only to have it snap back in his face; the same thing happens when it tries it again.

He quickly discovers why--the button on the waistband has fallen off. "So," he says, his temper gradually rising from "dormant volcano" to "nuclear meltdown": "no buttons on der pants!! Dot's it! Dot's all der troubles! Dot's der whole troubles! No buttons on der pants! VOT KIND OF A HOUSE IS DIS ANYVAY?! MAMA!"

As he screams, he holds up his buttonless, suspenderless pants with both hands, storming out of the room. Cut to a shot of him heading down the hallway toward the stairs, still bellowing "Mama!" At this point, he's pretty much forgotten he also has only one shoe on. (Heaven and Hanna only know where he threw the other one). He's also quite unaware that the alarm clock he threw away is right in his path--he tumbles down the stairs, creating a rising cloud of dust when he lands.

Cut to Mama at the stove in the kitchen as Cap tumbles through the kitchen door. Turning toward the half-dressed, apoplectic figure on the floor, she says, "Hmmm...good morning, Captain? Vot's der trouble?"

"'Vot's der trouble?'" he thunders back. Vot's der trouble--der WHOLE DOD-GASTED HOUSE IS DER TROUBLE! No buttons on der pants..." (he grabs a handful of buttonless pants to emphasize his point). He's so beside himself he sputters almost incomprehensibly, gesturing in the air: "Der clock...and den...NO BUTTONS ON DER PANTS! Der window and der... and de..de..NO BUTTONS ON DER DING-BUSTED PANTS!"

Slamming his fists down on the table (only slightly disturbing the pancakes Hans is absorbed in eating) Cap says, "Vot kind of a house is you running anyvay? Slamming his fist down again--which deposits Hans' pancakes on top of Cap's head--he screams, "Vot kind of a housekeeper is you? I-I-I was...the clock...d-d-d-...he babbles as Hans merely continues to eat his pancakes from the top of Cap's head. (Obviously a child for whom these morning tirades are as much a part of the morning routine as brushing his teeth).

Hans stuffs several of the pancakes in Cap's mouth, but that doesn't silence him--it doesn't even slow him down: he continues to unintelligibly mutter and fume as he raises his fists in the air (which, of course, sends his pants down to his ankles).

Cut to the front doorway as Mama hands the kids their school books and shoos them out the door: "Come, come, kiddies, qvick, qvick, off to der school...and remember, good mit divisions!" (I've played this line three times and that's what it sounds like to me...maybe Kevin can come to the rescue again). She swells her chest as she prepares to really let Cap have it.

But Cap isn't ready to listen to anything. "Dot's der last straw!" he rages. "No buttons on der pants...." <he pauses only a moment to pull his buttonless pants back up> "Vot kind of a housekeeper is you? Vot kind of a house is you running anyvay?"

For Mama, them's fightin' words. Cut to Mama standing face-to-face with Cap as she jabs him in the chest. "Well, 'Mr. Wisenheimer', if YOU don't like der way I'm running the house, den YOU run it!" she yells back, jabbing his bulbous nose for emphasis. She then shoves a broom into his hands, plops a dusting cap on his head, and throws her apron on top of that before she stalks out of the room.

To the sound of military music on the sound track, the Captain stalks after her, broom in hand; marching to the front door, he yells after her, "Vell all right! I VILL run it!!" Slamming the door, he shatters the window, sending shards of glass everywhere (that should give you an idea of the catastrophe to come).

Cut to a view of Mama on the sidewalk through the broken window: "And remember, vise guy...dis is der vash day!" Cap merely pulls the shade down and growls. "By Jiminy, I show her how to run der dod-spotted house!" he remarks as he marches toward the staircase. Calling upstairs, he yells, "Inspector! Inspector!"

We hear Cap speaking as we fade in to a shot of him and the Inspector standing in the upstairs hallway. He's handing the Inspector a number of cleaning implements. "Yah, dot's vot I said!" Cap tells him. "Today I'm running der house! So get busy!" (Well, he knows how to "delegate", that's for sure). Cap snaps into a stiff military pose and leaves the poor Inspector to his task, heading back downstairs. (Note: the vacuum cleaner in the background near the railing already looks as if it has a human face--anyone care to wager on the likelihood of its devouring the poor little Inspector? I'm laying even money.)

The Inspector timidly inspects the vacuum cord--as if he's not quite sure what to do with it--and plugs it into the wall. The machine, easily twice his size, immediately starts up and creeps toward him, sucking up every object in its path (including a feather duster lying in front of it, and a good portion of the rug). Cut to a medium side view of the Inspector and the demon machine as it edges toward him--he nervously kicks it, hoping that'll stop it. No such luck. He backs away slowly, then breaks into a run as the vacuum goes on the loose. Unfortunately, his avenue of escape is blocked by a wall.

Now the insane machine tries to suck the beard off the Inspector's face, followed by his shoe. Cut to a shot from the vacuum's point of view as the Inspector continues to stand with his back toward the wall. Everywhere he tries to go, the homicidal vacuum follows. It grabs ahold of his beard again: the Inspector frees that, only to lose both his shoes. Thinking a peace offering might help, he presents the vacuum with a bouquet of flowers from a nearby vase (I love this bit, incidentally--it shows just how simple-minded the Inspector is). It does no good--it merely sucks that up along with everything else--and almost takes the Inspector's arm with it. The same goes for the vase the little guy desperately offers--and the umbrella. (Do I sense a pattern developing?) Not content with those mere trifles, it next goes after the Inspector's coat--the Inspector runs frantically in place trying to get out of its grasp. He pulls free--for the moment--and stands in the corner panting heavily as we fade to...

...the washing machine downstairs, putting away to the "Irish Washer Woman's Jig" (it looks like one of the earliest electric models popular at the time, essentially an open tub with a wringer). Quite obviously Cap's handiwork, since various articles of clothing are spilling out from underneath the closed lid. (It wouldn't surprise me if he sat on it to get it closed, as with an overstuffed suitcase.)

Speaking of "overstuffed," our self-satisfied Captain stands proudly with his hands on his hips, remarking "By Golly! Dot's what I call 'housecleaning'!" (I had a few words in mind, too, but not that). Cut to a shot of Cap walking over to the sink. There are enough dishes for two families in the sink, and Cap's going to stack every single one of them in one neat little pile--tower, really--while he turns on the water. It's not quite so easy, though, as the massive stack stubbornly refuses to stay put, threatening to topple over at any second. Keeping one hand on the quivering, ceiling-high stack of plates, he quickly turns on the water with the other. Once accomplished, that hand zips back to add reinforcement to the Leaning Tower Of Dishes. There's only one tiny little matter Cap forgot, though--the soap.

Steadying the dishes with one hand again, Cap slowly inches along the counter toward the soap flakes, never once letting go of the tottering stack. He's actually successful, grabbing the box with one quick swiping motion. He shakes the box to see how full it is, for a split second letting go of the pile; his hand zips back in place just as the dishes are about to fall on his head. He's neglected to shut off the still-running water, though, and as he shakes the box a second time, the sink overflows onto the floor.

Before he can stem the rushing tide, though, we hear a pounding at the door and briefly cut to a hand knocking from the outside. Cut back to Cap, one hand still on the dishes, and spilling enough water on the floor to float the Ark. "Vait a minute!" he yells.

As if there weren't enough calamities already, we cut to a shot of the wall phone ringing. The pounding at the door continues--and Cap still hasn't shut off the water. "Vait...hold der...vait!" the now very flustered Captain yells again. Shaking the box of soap (which only succeeds in getting flakes all over the floor--there's so much water anyway, he might as well wash the dishes there) he absently moves his other hand off the dishes so he can better struggle with the box. Unfortunately, he happens to stick his foot in a nearby mousetrap. Naturally, when he grabs his foot in pain, he lets go of the dishes, and every single dish breaks over Cap's head--except one. Throwing aside the trap in frustration, he grabs for the one unbroken dish left in the house and angrily decides to smash it, too. But there's a reason it won't break--it's metal. When he throws it down, it simply bounces off the floor and hits him in the face.

Figuring that throwing it might produce better results, he flings it in the air; but like a proto-Frisbee, it does a U-turn near the ceiling and hits poor Cap in the head before he can get up from the waterlogged floor. Picking it up, he throws it toward the one place he figures it won't come back--through the kitchen window. Of course, he smashes even more glass in the process.

That proved no more successful than the first effort, as it comes back again to hit him in the head. As he lies on his stomach on the floor, he fails to notice his loose suspenders are getting caught in the washing machine's wringer. As he watches the stubborn plate clatter on the floor in front of him, he realizes his clothes are snagged. He tries to make a run for it, but once the suspenders stretch to their absolute limit, he can only helplessly run in place on a throw rug before being dragged back to the continually chugging machine.

He makes a break for it again, thinking he can get some leverage this time. He lunges for a nearby china cabinet, grabbing every available drawer. Every single one gets pulled out as he frantically grabs for them. Next trying the cupboard portion of the cabinet, he grabs ahold of the very bottom shelf, but only manages to bring the contents (as well as the entire cupboard) down on him.

His suspenders snap back, slamming into the washing machine and spilling out its contents--pants, socks, and unmentionables fall on him like rain. The machine then decides to exact its revenge on Cap for abusing it, and grabs him with the plunger mechanisms (used to beat the dirt out of the clothes). With both plungers stuck to the top of his head, he gets bounced up and down several times and knocked around before freeing himself from the machine's clutches. But it's not quite through with him--one of the plungers grabs ahold of his massive rear end and flings him around, upside down, like a rag doll. "Inspector! Inspector!" he screams.

Ah, yes, the Inspector--we forgot about him, didn't we? He's still upstairs, tussling with the vacuum. And by all appearances, losing: he's down to his underwear by now, and the infernal thing won't quit. He's still struggling to keep his beard from being sucked in. He fails--not only does his beard get sucked in, so does the rest of him (I'd like to know who manufactured that thing--it sort of makes the Oreck vacuum look pathetic).

Cut to a view of the vacuum "looking" down on the poor Captain in the kitchen through a grate in the upper floor. It's apparently no more pleased with him than the washing machine was, since it starts sucking up every item of clothing the washing machine had scattered about--then eventually Cap as the suction attracts his suspenders. Fortunately, the ceiling acts as a barrier. But Cap, not willing to leave "bad enough" alone, pushes on on the ceiling to free the suspenders, which have been sucked up through the grate--and pulls down not only the vacuum, but most of the second floor.

Wait, it gets worse. (As impossible as it may seem). The vacuum--which like any demonic being, is apparently immortal--still runs, and it's landed right smack into the tub of the washing machine. With, of course, the predictable result--it sucks up every drop of the water, its bag expanding to the size of a weather balloon before it bursts.

Pieces of clothing and what used to be furniture drop down right in front of the camera. The finally-expired vacuum hangs suspended from some undetermined object up above that miraculously escaped the damage. When the hail of debris clears, the camera pans around the perimeter of what used to be the kitchen--it now looks like it could qualify for Federal disaster aid. And in the doorway, hands on hips, is Mama.

"Vell, Captain," she says. "Just vot kind of a house is YOU running?" Cap, who'd been blown by the explosion into the oven (his head poking up through the range top) can only blubber "No buttons on der ding-busted pants..." The Inspector, sitting on top of the stove next to him, dabs Cap's eyes with his beard--but when Cap tries to blow his nose on it, he quickly yanks it away as we gratefully exit this pathetic scene.

I suppose they can look on the bright side--they'll get maid service at the hotel they're going to have to stay in until the house gets rebuilt. And if Mama is smart, she'll insist the Captain buy a belt before she lets him back in the place.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

As we've already seen, for most of the animators, the first two years of the MGM animation studio were an insecure, uncertain, tense period best left forgotten. Shakeups in management and conflict between contentious New York and California factions (each with their own vision of what the studio's creative direction should be) threatened to bring down the fledgling studio before it had a chance to really begin.

For Bill Hanna, on the other hand, it was a training period, a chance for him to learn how to make truly funny cartoons. His mentors Harman and Ising had never been laugh-out-loud funny, but he would make good use of what he learned from them--and his work would reach stellar heights once teamed with a born gag man like Joe Barbera.

Where Milt Gross got laughs out of things larger--and sillier--than life, Hanna (much like Chuck Jones at Warner's) would glean them from the subtle and the seemingly insignificant. Certain segments in this cartoon take an unusually long amount of time. The opening scenes in which Cap fumbles with his alarm clock, then finds himself fighting with it as he tries to put on his pants, then his shoes, then his suspenders, take well over two minutes. It didn't seem that long to me, since I was too engrossed in this poor fellow's plight. We've all had days we wish we could live over, days which, despite all efforts, just go completely wrong. The sequence works because it's just exaggerated enough to be funny, and just real enough for us to relate to it. Just watching the contortions Cap puts his enormous body through is funny enough.

It takes a skilled comedian to get laughs from a mute character, and Hanna did an extraordinary job with the Inspector, normally a very nondescript personality. He seems childlike here (though his size certainly contributes to that) almost a Laurel to the Captain's Hardy. (I could easily imagine Stan Laurel doing something along the lines of the "flower" routine with the runaway vacuum cleaner). Here, one can easily see the genesis of the sort of gags we normally associate with two other characters (also mute) that would later gain Bill Hanna fame--Tom and Jerry.

When the great Tex Avery finally arrived, and the direction of the studio veered back toward the larger and the more outrageous, Hanna was able to adjust to the new sensibility, yet retain the subtlety of timing in certain scenes that made you believe his characters were able to think. HEAVENLY PUSS comes to mind--the scene in which Tom is desperately trying to secure Jerry's forgiveness at the last minute is classic because it's almost Avery-like in its exaggeration, but subtle enough for genuine emotion to show through. Done too fast, the emotions in the facial expressions wouldn't have read; too slow, and the sense of "cartoony" exaggeration would have been lost.

Viewed from the perspective of one who's seen more than 50 years' worth of TV sitcoms, the "men take over the housecleaning chores" plot really seems like the most overused, contrived situation imaginable--and it was probably hackneyed even in 1938. But Hanna takes that old plot into new areas of absurdity; the damage Cap does to Mama's house makes what Ricky Ricardo and Fred Mertz do to Lucy's kitchen (burying it in a virtual tidal wave of rice) seem almost almost normal. Yet as absurd as it is, it comes across as the logical consequence of the Captain's windy pomposity, because we got to "know" him at the beginning. And we got to know him because Bill Hanna gave us just the right amount of time to do it.

Tags:

Captain+and+the+Kids, MGM, Bill+Hanna

Orphan Toon Musings: The Two Harveys

2008-06-02T00:17:00.001-05:00

Gazoo image from Topthat.net; Little Dot image

from The Harveyville Fun Times

Korman and Comics: Remembering Two Harveys

by Rachel Newstead

So long, Gazoo....

In reflecting on the recent passing of Harvey Korman, I couldn't help but think how much I took his work for granted--particularly in animation. He was simply there, playing a stock Hanna-Barbera villain (whether comic or serious). Or more notably, The Great Gazoo, the tiny exiled alien from the planet Zatox, charged with "helping" those two Stone Age "dums dums" Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble. And I didn't even appreciate that at first.

In so many of the sitcoms I saw when I was growing up, it seemed the main character continually harbored a Big Secret. Wilbur Post had a horse that could talk, but he couldn't tell anybody. Darrin Stephens was married to a witch, but couldn't tell anybody. Astronaut Tony Nelson had a sexy genie living with him, whom he kept in a bottle in his living room and...well, you get the idea. At times I felt like yelling at the screen, "Just tell them already and get it over with!"

Inevitably, The Flintstones would succumb to that irritating trend: now Fred and Barney were saddled with a Big Secret--and they couldn't tell anyone if they tried. Gazoo, you see, was invisible to everyone but the two "dum dums" he served (and yes, children and pets--but Dino, Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm, conveniently unable to talk, weren't liable to spill the beans either). This of course set up the kind of awkward situation I had a hard time sitting through, whatever the show: something weird would happen that would cause Fred and Barney to hem and haw nervously to the wives, forcing them to improvise a weak and implausible explanation. It happened so often I came to hate it--but I couldn't completely hate Gazoo, thanks in no small measure to Harvey Korman.

As I've come to discover on numerous occasions, the passage of time can do strange things. Not very long ago I viewed the "dreaded" sixth season of The Flintstones for the first time in years, and discovered it was nowhere near as bad as I remembered. Fred, in the earliest episodes of the series, was a malcontent: grouchy often for no discernible reason, seldom learning from his mistakes. Wilma was caustic and nagging, always ready with a put-down--it makes one wonder why two such people would be attracted to each other in the first place. The sixth season changed all that--now, Fred could be as childish and ill-tempered as ever, but usually would come to realize he was wrong.

Gazoo was often instrumental in helping him realize that: in "Boss For A Day," he gives Fred a chance to live life as his boss does--and discovers after an exhausting, humiliating day that it's nowhere near as cushy as he'd dreamed. Gazoo "helped" not by granting every wish, but by making Fred and Barney reaalize what they really want.

It would have been nowhere near as effective if anyone other than the inimitable Harvey Korman had voiced the character. Korman as Gazoo could, in the course of a single sentence, could be alternately peevish (as in the innumerable times he's awakened from his nap by the "dum dums,") silly (there's a slight giggle to his voice when he tells Fred and Barney, "I'm not only unreliable, but I'm a bit of a kook...") and pompous (you could feel the disgust when he's berating Fred especially.) Gazoo could be sympathetic as well, his normal stuffy-English-butler cadence softening when he somehow manages to do a good deed.

Typically self-effacing, Korman never considered himself much of a voice artist, as he says in a 2004 interview for the Archive of American Television (he starts talking about his work for Hanna-Barbera some 18 minutes in) . But the fact he could do so much with one characterization puts him in the same rank as Daws Butler, Mel Blanc, and June Foray--and the world of animation will be much poorer without him.

Wendy, Little Dot and the Gang

The other "Harvey" about which I have fond memories is Harvey Comics, prompted by an innocent e-mail question from Kevin. He asked me if I'd ever read them, and got back far more than he bargained for.

I definitely read them. Voraciously, in fact. At the age of ten, I had a rather extensive collection of them: Little Dot, Little Lotta (a character that could never appear in comics today), Richie Rich, Wendy, even Sad Sack. (Hey, that's what comes of being a military brat).

Strange as it may seem, I've always had a certain fondness for Little Dot. Often dismissed as a "one-note character" for her single-minded obsession with dots, she was quite real to me; I could relate to people with quirky obsessions, as I had (and still have) a few of my own. At age ten, it was typewriters--anything that printed letters, really: label makers, stamp pads, stencils, mimeograph machines, you name it. I loved the smell of typewriters: that subtle mixture of machine oil and ribbon ink. I loved the clacking of the keys, the ratchet noise of the carriage. I'm quite sure I started writing so I'd have an excuse to use one. Thanks to Little Dot, I felt a little less weird about it--if she could love something as silly as dots, why couldn't I love typewriters?

The Harvey comics celebrated "diversity" before the term was coined--a pretty, "good" witch could live with three evil aunts and the variety of supernatural creatures around her; a "friendly" ghost could live with three, shall we say, more "traditional" ones. A kid who's ridiculously rich could have friends who liked him for himself, not his money.

Yet they could still be disturbingly backward: one Little Dot story made me furious when I first read it nearly forty years ago. One of Little Dot's aunts (she had a surprising number of aunts and uncles, enough to warrant their own comic) was apparently quite the intellectual, and it was interfering with her social life--any potential boyfriend was intimidated by her, as he'd no sooner get two words out before she'd start spouting all sorts of arcane information. Dot showed her she had to "play dumb" to get a man: when she started feigning ignorance, guys started to notice her. In the last panel, Dot winks to the readers, saying that was the truly "smart" thing to do.

Even though this story was dated even then--it must have been written in the fifties and reprinted in the early seventies--it angered me. The whole idea of a woman having to "play dumb" to soothe the male ego was abhorrent to me even at age ten. A little girl who loved dots was perfectly acceptable, but not a grown woman with a mind? That's not a great lesson to teach young girls, and even worse, it gives them the idea they have to manipulate males to get what they want.

Such antiquated thinking, however, was the exception and not the rule--in the Harvey world, the "odd" had a home. In another Little Dot "aunt and uncle" story, she goes to visit an uncle who's a Tarzan type--he lives in the woods, wears an animal skin, and swings through the trees. The folks outside the forest think he's some sort of "wild man", a menace; even Dot has her doubts about him. But when Dot visits his treehouse home, she discovers he's actually a writer, who lives as he does because it helps him write adventure stories. In a Harvey comic book, appearances were deceiving.

They could be adventurous, too. While the "Richie Rich" stories fulfilled my childish fantasy of being able to buy whatever I desired, I also found that his money could take him anywhere. He could fly off to distant lands on a moment's notice in his private plane; more often, though, he found excitement closer to home.

In one story I still vividly remember, Richie and his friend Gloria went exploring in the basement of his mansion, and discover a strange, long-forgoten vehicle--something like a mining car, that ran on rails. They soon learn that it can take them to parts of the mansion they'd never seen before--in different parts of the world. In the end, they discover it was all a dream--or was it? In the last panel, as they're remarking how such a thing couldn't really be possible, we see the long-abandoned mining car, covered in cobwebs, off in a corner.

As with the first Harvey discussed here, Harvey Comics is, sadly, no more. Sales began to lag in the seventies--ironically, at about the time I first became interested in them--and issues were quietly dropped. Occasional digest issues would appear through the eighties, only to completely disappear by 1994.

But just as Harvey Korman will live on in countless movies and cartoons--not to mention segments of the unforgettable Carol Burnett Show--so too will the other Harvey: classic Harvey comics stories are available in bound volumes on Amazon.com. May future generations be entertained as much by both Harveys as I was.

Tags:

Harvey+Korman, Gazoo, Little+Dot, Harvey+Comics

The Lion In Black and White

2008-05-31T20:44:00.001-05:00

It's Der Ding-Busted Captain and The Kids In MAMA'S NEW HAT (1939)

Review-Synopsis by Rachel Newstead

Mama's New Hat
Release Date: Feb. 11, 1939
Director: none credited (see Concluding Thoughts)
In Short: When the kids' gift for Mama gets destroyed, they "borrow" another. But the rightful owner won't give it up so easily...

It was the first comic strip worthy of the name, creating a visual shorthand for "the funnies" that's still used today. Born at the end of the 19th century, it's still in newspapers--if not nearly as many as in its heyday. For more than sixty years, it appeared in two different versions--distributed by two rival syndicates--thanks to one of the strangest legal loopholes in history. It made the transition to theatrical animation not once, but twice--neither of them successfully.

The Captain and the Kids--or to use its proper title, The Katzenjammer Kids--was the creation of 20-year-old German-American cartoonist Rudolf Dirks, first appearing on Dec. 12, 1897 in William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal. Loosely based on a series of children's stories Dirks remembered from his childhood (Wilhelm Busch's Max und Moritz) Dirks' Americanized version was nowhere near as stern, violent or moralistic as Busch's stories--but filled with the sort rough, vaudevillian slapstick that was almost as bad. Ron Goulart in The Funnies suggests it was heavily influenced by the eye-poking antics of Weber and Fields (who apparently inspired The Three Stooges as well). As a strip with German characters created by someone of German extraction, it proved quite popular among immigrants, many of whom were already familiar with the original Busch stories. The name "Katzenjammer", meaning literally "the yowling of cats" perfectly described the chaos occurring within the strip. Objects were continually hurled through the air, and figures were constantly in mid-run: the strip was "animated" long before it ever reached the screen, thanks to Dirks' loose, quick drawing.

From the beginning, the strip featured the little hellions Hans (the dark-haired one) and Fritz (the blond one), along with Mama Katzenjammer, who more often than not was seen spanking them at the end of every strip. (There was also a Papa Katzenjammer originally, but he disappeared after the arrival of the Captain.)

The Captain arrived--having been shipwrecked--around 1905 as a boarder, followed closely by the Inspector (originally a truant officer sent to rein in the kids, but who for some reason stayed.) It would be these two characters who would bear the brunt of Hans and Fritz's constant pranks from then on.

Why it came to be known as The Captain and the Kids is a rather strange, complicated story. According to the "official" account given by United Feature Syndicate years after the fact, around 1914 Dirks decided he wanted to take a year off to travel and paint. The Journal agreed on the condition that he create a backlog of strips to cover his absence; this Dirks attempted and found impossible, and embarked on his vacation without official approval:

....Cablegrams and Journal correspondence followed me all over the continent requesting
that I send in more drawings. I mailed in Sunday pages for about six months. Then I
accepted an offer from the New York World on the condition that I would not begin until
my contract was cleared with the Journal. Meanwhile, the latter paper sought to
secure a restraining injunction against my working for the Pulitzer interests. When the
case was heard, I was declared the loser. My appeal, however, brought a reversal of
that decision, allowing me to work for the World but leaving the title of The Katzenjamer
Kids with the Journal. (Goulart, pg. 53)

A much simpler--and more likely--explanation would be that the World offered Dirks substantially more money. Deserting a Hearst paper for a Pulitzer one was an unusual move, as the traffic of cartoonists usually went the other way. Dirks would not have jumped ship, surely, unless he were to be well-compensated.

The injunction and court decision were certainly true, leading to an odd compromise: the Journal would hire a new artist, Harold Knerr, to draw his own version of the strip as The Original Katzenjammer Kids (to let readers know theirs was the "real deal", when in fact the opposite was the case). When Dirks' version of the Kids first appeared in the World, it contained no title (Dirks originally identified them by the German-inflected "Here Dey Iss!") In early 1915, he began calling the strip Hans and Fritz; during World War I, in response to the rabid anti-German mood of the time, the name was changed to The Captain and the Kids. (Goulart suggests it may have been

because it sounds like "The Katzenjammer Kids", if one says it fast enough). That name stuck, and under that name, it would make it to the screen in the early days of the MGM cartoon studio.

The Hearst version had already done so--in 1916, Hearst created the International Film Service, through which he would commission animated versions of his strips--such as Krazy Kat and Bringing Up Father--in addition to The Katzenjammer Kids. (Animated by Earl Hurd, under the supervision of J.R. Bray). They did not prove profitable, however, and the IFS quickly folded.

No one held out much hope for the attempt to adapt Dirks' version to animation some twenty years later--least of all Friz Freleng, lured from Schlesinger by Fred Quimby to direct the series. (As I recounted in my review of ROMEO IN RHYTHM some time back). Joe Barbera would later refer to them as "animated Huns"; in interviews late in his life, he would say it was the worst possible timing to debut a series with characters speaking in mock-German dialect just as Germany was about to lead Europe into another war.

A good point, certainly--audiences gave the series a cold reception, and the series was stopped after just 13 cartoons (two of which, PETUNIA NATURAL PARK and THE CAPTAIN'S CHRISTMAS, were filmed in Technicolor--the rest were originally released in sepiatone to cut costs). The strip, however, was still widely popular during this period, due to the inexhaustible imagination of Dirks. In the years since the move from Hearst, the family found a new home in the "Squeegie Islands" (with the expected stereotypical island natives) and a new recurring menace in the form of one Long John Silver. He would, in fact, figure prominently in the animated series (perhaps best of all in THE CAPTAIN'S CHRISTMAS) even though the island locale was not a feature of the MGM cartoons.

MAMA'S NEW HAT was the last of the series, and quite possibly the best. As was typical in the MGM version of Cap and family, the kids' demeanor has been softened here. Far gentler than the feral brats of the early comic strip, they create havoc not out of meanness or spite, but because they simply wanted to do something nice--buy their Mama a new hat for Mother's Day. Of course, what happens is a perfect illustration of the saying, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions..."

"My little angels..."

We open with a view of a sign in a store window: MOTHER'S DAY--BUY HER A GIFT. This fades to a display window showing various household items: pots, pans, a washboard, dishes and so on (ve-e-e-ry funny, guys--my mom would kill me if I gave her something like that). The camera tracks past another display window showing various hats for sale; we see Hans and Fritz emerge from the store with a gift-wrapped package, presumably one of the hats. (If they know what's good for them). Hans skips along ahead of Fritz with the package, but fails to see the brick on the sidewalk in front of him. He trips and....falls right into a huge mud puddle in the street. He juggles the package in the air to try to keep it from falling in, but at that moment Fritz falls right on top of him--and the package. They emerge covered in mud, and the package is a soggy, ruined mess.

As the boys don't have the money for a replacement, they're stuck for an alternative--until they hear the whinnying of a horse off-camera. They see an old nag admiring herself in a mirror, wearing a hat which--by a lucky coincidence--just happens to be identical to the one the boys intended to give Mama. The horse bats her eyes and adjusts the hat here and there, picking up the hat with her ears and moving it to a new position. Cut to the boys, still in the mud puddle: Fritz starts whispering to Hans, and it doesn't take a genius to figure out what they're planning. They sneak up over to the horse, trying to appear nonchalant; Hans points off-camera to try to divert the horse's attention and makes a grab for the hat. The horse notices, and the boys return to their nonchalant pose. They back up slowly, then zip around the corner, so fast the letters from the store sign fall off the window.

The horse eyes them skeptically and resumes admiring herself in the mirror. The flower on the hat droops--turns out the boys switched hats, giving her the ruined one they bought for Mama. becoming angry, the horse throws the hat down, stomps on it, and goes off in pursuit of the boys at full speed. She pursues them around a corner....

....and we cut to a shot of the horse charging down the middle of the street at full gallop. But the camera pans over to a sign saying THIS IS NOT A THROUGH STREET, so we know that disaster's ahead for the horse. Avoiding one potential disaster, she gallops furiously off in the other direction (a slight corner-cutting move here: it's just a "flipped" image of the previous running sequence). Skidding to a stop, she starts sniffing the ground like a bloodhound.
Fade to the boys and Mama at home: "Aaaah, ain't dot sweet--buy Mama a new hat for Mama's Day!" she says. "My little angels!" As she says this, little halos appear over the boys' heads as they bashfully stand there. In a nice little "impossible" cartoon gag, she lifts up the halos and kisses each boy on the head.

Mama turns and admires herself in the mirror: "Mmmmm....not so bad," she says. She imagines herself as glamorous; for a moment her reflection in the mirror transforms to an image of Greta Garbo.

"Vait until I show Mrs. Hamburger my new hat--vill I burn her up!" she says to the boys, grabbing her parasol.

We wipe-dissolve to the outside as Mama comes down the stairs, then cut to the horse, still sniffing around in pursuit of the stolen hat. (She even sniffs a fire hydrant, like a dog, only to be scared off by the sound of a yelping dog from off-camera). She skids to a stop and continues sniffing along the ground--at that moment, Mama happens to pass by in the distance. Cut to a closeup shot of Mama--the camera tracks in closer on the hat. The horse sees it, and happily gallops off after it. She follows closely behind Mama, trying to grab the hat with her teeth; but before she can snag it, Mama disappears down an open manhole. Strangely, Mama doesn't even notice. The camera tracks over to a loading platform coming up from underground, from which Mama emerges.

The horse then appears in front of Mama, and the two of them go into a sort of dance-like routine as the horse tries to grab the hat and Mama ducks. (To the tune of "The Mexican Hat Dance" on the sound track). Mama goes underneath the horse to escape her, only to have the horse move in front of her again, snapping at the hat. They whirl around in a brief tussle; the horse ends up with the hat on her head--for the moment. They whirl around again, and this time Mama has the hat. Mama runs off camera....

...and we dissolve to a shot of the horse running after her at full speed, then to a long shot of Mama and the horse running along the road beside a picket fence, back toward Mama's house. (Fairly fast timing for this era). We cut again to a view of the open doorway from inside as Mama runs toward it. She slams the door just as the horse hits it. Cut to the horse outside--her head vibrates with a "boing" sound from the impact with the door.

The horse pounds on the door with her hoof, then runs off to prepare to run inside. Mama opens the door as the horse barrels through the living room, up the stairs and out of of one of the upstairs windows (a gag used in more Warner's, and later MGM cartoons, than I can count. Tex Avery would use a similar gag in SWING SHIFT CINDERELLA--only a good deal faster). We don't see the horse do this--the camera follows from outside, and we hear the galloping and racket on the sound track.

The horse lands on the roof of the neighboring house and slides slowly downward, kicking up roofing tiles as she goes. We cut to a shot of Mama's open cellar door--the horse falls through, landing in the basement. Various pots and other junk fly up through the door as the horse lands.

Dissolve to a shot of the horse creeping up the basement steps as she heads into the kitchen, accidentally hitting an empty milk bottle in the doorway in the process. The milk bottle bounces down the stairs--as we cut to a shot of the doorway from the kitchen, the horse cringes in anticipation of the inevitable impact--it doesn't crash right away, so she stands listening with her ear pointed toward the doorway. When it finally does crash, the startled horse jumps through the air onto a cabinet. Sighing in relief, she climbs down and continues her pursuit as the scene fades.

The next scene shows the horse sneaking toward the kitchen door as Mama comes through wearing the hat--quickly, the horse hides with her back to the wall. She again snaps at the hat, but the surprised Mama ducks. The chase is on--but the horse is having a bit of difficulty, as her hooves get caught in the area rug in front of the door. She rolls up more and more of the rug as she scrambles to get free, pulling Mama with her. Once freed, the two of them start off after one another again.

Cut to a scene of the horse chasing Mama through the living room and up the stairs, with Mama scrambling on all fours. When she reaches the top just ahead of the horse, she slides down the bannister. She sails through the air and into the hallway, where she and the horse pursue each other around and around a set of two doorways (also similar to a gag Avery would later use). They continue this routine several times until Hans and Fritz emerge from a center door with a cane to trip the horse. The horse trips and falls, but Mama's still going, running right over her. The boys quickly snatch the horse and pull her inside the room.

The boys, taking the pose of a fashion designer, then are seen trying to bribe the horse with alternative hats (the dialogue, which is speeded up, is almost indecipherable on this copy, so I'm not going to attempt to transcribe it here). The horse stares in the mirror as the boys put a variety of hats on her head, all of them more ridiculous than the last. (One bit of animation, in which the horse lifts an overly-large hat from her eyes with her hoof, looks like it was retraced in GALLOPIN' GALS). One of the samples is a Napoleon-style hat; the horse strikes a goofy Napoleonic pose while "La Marsellaise" plays on the sound track. (Mama owns that? Must really belong to the Captain, I'm guessing). It's quickly snatched form her head and replaced with a cowboy hat as the music switches to Western-style, then by a football helmet as "fight song" music plays (if that's Mama's, she has an interesting past). One of the boys waves a pennant over the horse's head.

Note: Kevin, ever helpful, with ears far better than your humble toonkeeper's, says the dialogue Hans and Fritz say as they're trying hats on the horse goes as follows:

“Would Madam care for the latest from Pah-ree?”

…And then another hat…

“Or maybe you would prefer a Suzanne Pah-poo cree-a-shun (creation)”

…And another…

“a Napoleonne…”

…And another…

“…Buck Benny?”

…And another…

“…Or should you ever go to college,…”

Thanks, Kevin. Because I missed that particular bit of dialogue, I failed to make note of the "Buck Benny" line (a reference to Jack Benny's then-current movie Buck Benny Rides Again).

We then fade to a montage of the various hats being tried on and rejected--pretty ambitious and Harman-Ising-like for cartoons supposedly done on the cheap. The scene then dissolves to a shot of the horse looking like an equine Mae West, with a large plumed hat, a corset, and boots (on all four feet). She exits through the wrong door, however, and we hear an off-camera splash. Cut to a shot of the horse in the bathtub with a confused Captain. Cap swats at the horse and misses; the horse goes underwater and re-remerges behind him as he looks down into the water; she pushes him down and a stream of bubbles come up as the Captain gasps for air. He comes up again with the bath brush on his head--he takes it and scares the horse out of the tub, waving the brush at her.

The horse scrambles to keep her footing on the wet floor and crashes through the closed door, landing in the hallway. Meanwhile, Mama is still running around and around in circles, in one room and out another, as she was when the horse was chasing her. The horse stands just outside the second door as Mama comes through, snapping at the hat--this time she manages to grab it, flipping it onto her head. As Mama comes through the second door and notices what's happened, the horse gallops off-screen, and the scene cuts to the living room.

The horse quickly ducks into the coal chute, followed closely by Cap in his bathrobe--Cap tries to follow, but is a little too hefty, getting himself stuck. Cut to the basement--the horse slides down the coal chute and through the air toward a nearby wall, where she crashes. She knocks loose a can of glue which empties on her rear end. She doesn't notice, because she's too busy trying to get the coal bucket off her nose. We cut quickly to the still-stuck Cap, then back to the horse, still trying to remove the bucket. In doing so, she kicks the wall behind her, which dislodges an old electric fan from the shelf, which attaches itself to her glue-covered rear. She manages to get the bucket loose, but the momentum propels her into the coal bin, fan still attached. The horse, now covered in coal, blindly reaches up and turns on the main electrical switch, which immediately starts the fan. This creates a black whirlwind which sends coal everywhere, including through the coal chute where Cap is still struggling to free himself. Coal shoots through the living room as an astonished Mama looks on.

She tries to free Cap herself, pulling on his legs as coal continues to fly around. Meanwhile, down below, the force of the fan has made the horse rise in the air, lifting her out of the coal pile. She gets propelled through the coal-chute opening and backward toward a living-room table. The combination of the fan and table resemble an airplane (recalling a gag involving Bruno in THE OLD HOUSE) and zooms just over Mama and Cap's heads. We then cut to a quick shot of the horse zooming through the air past the stairs--backwards--and another of Mama and Cap quickly trying to get out of the way. But rather than swoop over their heads, the horse comes up underneath them--they end up sitting on top of the soaring table as it zooms out of control.

They turn and head the opposite direction as we cut to the boys, who turn tail and head into the next room. Cut to an exterior window, which the horse crashes through--now Mama, Cap and the kids are along for the ride as the horse gains altitude.

Of course, the cord is still attached, and as they go further and higher, they pull the electrical wiring off the side of the house and nearby utility poles. The wires are pulled from the poles in rapid succession, which eventually causes a generator from the local power station to get pulled with them. The building is destroyed, while the generator gets stuck between two branches of a tree. The force frees it, and now the combination of horse, table, fan, and family has a generator trailing behind it. As the wire gets pulled taut, everyone falls to earth to the sound of an airplane in a crash dive. Mama, the kids, Cap, and the horse land in a circular clothesline, while the horse's hat lands on a tree branch just out of everyone's reach. The wire lands on the remaining intact power lines and starts to make sparks; this starts the fan again and propels them around and around in circles. They each try to grab the hat from the tree--like merry-go-round riders reaching for the brass ring--as the cartoon irises out. Maybe Hans and Fritz should consider getting Mama candy or flowers next Mother's Day...

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

Kevin speculated, in his response to my review of JITTERBUG FOLLIES, that Milt Gross was the uncredited director of MAMA'S NEW HAT. Given the way the cartoon builds to such a riotous, anarchic climax, this may well be true. If Gross did direct this cartoon, he succeeded in portraying utter chaos and destruction more effectively here than in JITTERBUG FOLLIES: it's more like an Avery cartoon than any MGM effort would be before the arrival of Avery. As with Tex's cartoons, it builds slowly until it reaches a level of all-out mayhem.

But it seems to me there are other influences at work. Friz Freleng was also at MGM at the time, and could easily have had input--the pacing throughout most of the cartoon is reminiscent of Warner's cartoons of the same period. It also not only looks forward to the era of Tom and Jerry (particularly the scenes of destruction inside the house) but backward to the era of Harman and Ising. (There are obvious parallels with Hugh and Rudy's MGM Boskos, as I've already mentioned). Those seeking a "missing link" between the old MGM and the new will find it here.

Thus ended the early, shakedown era of the MGM cartoon studio. It's a bit sad, really, as the CAPTAIN AND THE KIDS animators were really starting to hit their stride. In THE CAPTAIN'S CHRISTMAS, they start portraying characters with real dimension--we discover in that cartoon that stock villain John Silver has a human side. He creates presents, Grampy-style, for the heartbroken Hans and Fritz when he thoughtlessly ruins the kids' Christmas after destroying their Christmas gifts in a childish rampage. As we've already seen, the kids aren't one-dimensional brats, either--the disastrous events of this cartoon are only indirectly their fault. They had no way of knowing how obsessed the horse would be in getting her purloined hat back, and they did have altruistic motives. While this seems a dramatic departure from the comic strip, by the thirties Dirks had started to make them less destructive and more philosophical--though still incurable pranksters. According to Ron Goulart, dialogue became more extensive--perhaps even too much so--as the kids would prattle on and on about their views of the world around them. At the same time, the action in this cartoon seems a pretty faithful translation of wild, early years of the comic strip--it's filled with the sort of action I always imagined the strips to have, and once it gets going, it doesn't stop.

As with KATNIP KOLLEGE, the CAPTAIN AND THE KIDS cartoons were an acquired taste for me: my first experience of them came courtesy of the LATE NIGHT BLACK AND WHITE series on Cartoon Network in the nineties, and at the time I was less than impressed. They seemed, for one thing, too slow, too deliberate--but then, I hadn't yet seen them all. As I began to see more of them, however (particularly such wonderful efforts as THE WINNING TICKET, with its running gag of a woodpecker trying to attack John Silver's wooden leg) I began to appreciate them more. The voice work from the likes of Billy Bletcher as the Captain and Mel Blanc as John Silver, elevated the cartoons beyond the ordinary and made them a pleasure to watch.

Michael Barrier, unfortunately, wasn't similarly impressed. In his book HOLLYWOOD CARTOONS, he had this to say about the MGM cartoons of this period:

...[Director Bob] Allen in particular wanted Disney-style animation, but the animation
in the Captain and the Kids cartoons evokes Terrytoons instead: it is active, amiable
and utterly superficial, the sort of animation that speaks of haste and a
low tolerance for revisions. (288-89).

"Active" and "amiable" they are, but to compare them with Terrytoons is an unforgivable cheap shot--to both studios. Terrytoons, as we've seen in THE MAGIC PENCIL, was capable of imagination, and the animation of Jim Tyer made the cartoons far funnier than they would be in the hands of someone more "traditional." If the CAPTAIN AND THE KIDS cartoons need be compared with any New York studio at all, I'd compare it with the Fleischer cartoons of this period, with their fluid animation, rich gray tones, detailed backgrounds, and their "anything can happen" approach. MAMA'S NEW HAT certainly has the best mechanical gag of any cartoon outside the Fleischer studio at the time, as we saw with the homemade "airplane" bit. Bill Hanna, Joe Barbera and Tex Avery would surpass this level of work in time, but these cartoons compare favorably with any of their era.

After this cartoon, Harman and Ising would return to the studio, gleefully jettisoning several works in progress by Milt Gross. But things wouldn't be quite the same--there was a new crew, and a new attitude toward cartoons which crept into Hugh and Rudy's work (as we've seen in ROMEO IN RHYTHM, released about a year and a half later). The CAPTAIN AND THE KIDS series was a noble experiment, clearing the path for Tom and Jerry, Droopy, and company--and the accolades MGM would receive because of those characters.

Though its time on screen was brief, The Captain and the Kids' run on the comic pages certainly wasn't--Dirks would continue to draw it until his retirement in 1958. It would be continued by his son John until United Feature Syndicate discontinued it in 1979. Ironically, it was the version begun by Knerr that proved the more durable--like The Captain and the Kids, it suffered through a couple of name changes: for a brief time during the First World War, Knerr's verison of the Kids briefly became Dutch, with Irish names! From 1918 to 1920, Hans and Fritz were Mike and Aleck Shenanigan, and the strip was known as the The Shenanigan Kids. After 1920 it would revert to simply The Katzenjammer Kids--its original title under Dirks--and is known by that title to this day. Since 1986, "The Katzies" have been drawn by Hy Eisman, a veteran of the King Features "bullpen". Though nowhere near what it once was (the slapstick has been toned down considerably) it endures, syndicated in 50 newspapers (and online). To last from the horse-and buggy era to the age of the internet is a pretty remarkable achievement for any cartoon; may the animated version live on in the hearts of new generations as well.

The Katzenjammer Kids today, as drawn by Hy Eisman (excerpt © King Features Syndicate)

Tags:

The+Captain+and+the+Kids, Rudolf+Dirks, MGM, Milt+Gross

"Wearin' Off The Green," Indeed

2008-05-29T01:28:00.001-05:00

By Kevin Wollenweber

The burst of energy seemed to come from nowhere, but it did.

Perhaps far too soon for MGM, which seemed to make its mark up ‘til that point with Disney-like cartoons: beautiful, fluid pieces of animation, but Disney-like, nonetheless. When Milt Gross happened on the scene, perhaps it should have been at Max Fleischer’s studio, not slicker, aristocratic MGM. Judging from this previous review, it seemed as if the pacing and character design were not exactly what MGM was looking for, although the cartoons themselves were great ideas.

The second one, “WANTED: NO MASTER” is especially good, even though it really doesn’t feature all the elements of the original comic strip. It is true that, if all elements of that previous comic strip-as outlined in Rachel’s earlier review--were all retained, I really think that a success could have been made of this proposed series. Even the usually versatile Mel Blanc couldn’t haul this out of the dumper with a variety of wacky voices; but then again, perhaps Mel’s natural ability to turn vocal comedy in cartoons on its ear was also being stifled by those at the studio who just didn’t understand why cartoons should be created at all!

As duly noted, the singing of the hippo dubbed Madame Lizzie Swish hits one like fingers scraping along a chalkboard. Yet, you are stunned by the grotesqueness of the character designs throughout, a sign that wilder times were ahead for MGM studios. If all had just cooperated with Gross (despite his supposed overbearing demeanor) Gross’ material could have easily been that incredible missing link between the slick style of the West Coast and that grittier, welcome antidote of East Coast animation a la the Fleischer or Van Buren studios, that sometimes incorporated the talents of true jazz legends to score their cartoons.

Oh, Scott Bradley did what he could to add as much brass that was needed, but Simple Simon, in NO way, sounded like Benny Goodman OR any member of his band. But then he is, after all, Simple Simon, right?

Oh, there I go again, over-analyzing, but you get the idea. This is actually the first truly unsettling, "non-musical musical" to come from MGM studios. Yet, they weren’t always good at making lack of talent really, really funny, even in their live action films. MGM films were slick and stunning. Even the cartoons made the viewer gasp with awe, even if the stories for some were almost non-existent in favor of spectacle.

You’d almost think that Milt Gross would be a welcome addition to the staff, but, again as outlined previously, none of the animation staff could really stand his single-vision attitude. It is true that, amid the long history of live action major motion pictures, one single-minded vision, uncompromised, ended up catapulting a film to major top drawer status, no matter how much feelings got hurt in the process; yet, the animated cartoon has almost never risen to that level and, at that period, the template was still unfortunately Walt Disney. Milt Gross was fighting against the odds on the West Coast, and in animation in general.

Even the Fleischers were starting to lose that edge, partially due to the Hays Code’s diminishing the power of their one truly lovable little vamp, Betty Boop. Disney had secured his hold on the industry and artists were consistently forced to emulate the man--even if they wanted to be more influential, and saw the art form as producing far more than cute little fuzzy animals. Why Milt Gross did not instead head over to Warner Brothers--where Carl W. Stalling would take hold and truly show that he and his orchestra could keep up with the increasing speed and zaniness of the cartoons as the 1940’s dawned, and a whole new age took hold and eventually eclipsed Mr. Disney and gave him pause for thought about use of true cartoon logic and comedy--is anybody’s guess.

Perhaps Milt Gross had apparently alienated enough people? I don’t know--and not wanting to just assume here, I’ll leave this for historians more knowledgeable than I to fill in the blanks. Those who succeeded him at the studio, just as color came back to the lavish MGM cartoons, weren’t nearly as wacky until Tex came aboard; and, with his amiable nature, made people change their outlook on the future of animated cartoons--even eventually influencing Mr. Bradley into speeding up those scores a bit to follow the quicker pace and scene-changes throughout each subsequent animated project.

Milt Gross is not to be forgotten, though. It is unfortunate that actual credits are too vague around the cartoons of this period, because some believe that Gross also had a hand in some of the CAPTAIN & THE KIDS cartoons of the time. I would guess that, perhaps, Milt Gross might have directed titles like “MAMA’S NEW HAT” and “THE CAPTAIN’S CHRISTMAS” (previously reviewed on our podcast over the Holiday Season) the first being the final black and white cartoon for the CAPTAIN & THE KIDS series, and the second being the first color title, and second-to-last cartoon in which we’d ever see these characters--with MGM having by then considered the series a failure. It might have been Gross who allowed the comic strip characters to go out with a bang, and that is worth something.

“JITTERBUG FOLLIES” is available on the set of MGM films starring the Marx Brothers, but we have yet to see the cartoon fully restored and we have yet to see “WANTED: NO MASTER” anywhere at all. Both are truly worth a look and listen as ours are only critical reviews--we're not trying to be the final word! These are worthy bits of the wonderful tapestry and colorful characters that produced and starred in the world of animation. The stories need to be told! Let’s get the stuff on DVD real, real soon! I think that MGM celebrates some sort of anniversary this year; I know that Warner Brothers is also doing some celebration as well. Let’s give all this stuff at least one last hoorah!!

Rachel is very much correct in that the rougher humor of folks like Milt Gross was an attempted turning point, but perhaps a bit too soon. His co-workers, Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera would quickly rise above him, and retain a slight hint of the elements that Gross brought to the table.

.But the pace seemed slower, and easier for the staff to take in going forward, until the way was more easily paved for the flamboyant entrance of the easy-going--but sometimes almost as harried--Mr. Fred “Tex” Avery well into the return to color. I just wish that Milt Gross had found a home by this time, too.

Tags:

Kevin+Wollenweber, Milt+Gross, MGM

Toons In Swing Time: Part Three

2008-05-28T19:39:00.001-05:00

From The Sublime To The...Gross (Milt Gross, That Is): JITTERBUG FOLLIES (1939)

The original Count Screwloose (above left) and the
animated version (above right). (Images from Don
Markstein's Toonopedia and YouTube, respectively)

(Edited 6/9/08 to correct a mind-numbingly dumb error--R.)

Jitterbug Follies
Release Date: Feb. 25, 1939
Director: none credited (though possibly Milt Gross himself)
In Short: Count Screwloose tries to con the yokels with a phony jitterbug contest--which he's forced to actually put on. Now we know what killed vaudeville...

To paraphrase a saying I've used once before, some cartoonists draw funny things; others draw things funny. Milt Gross did both.

His influence reaches across decades, most notably in the work of Mel Brooks. (The former Melvin Kaminsky no doubt read Milt's strips as a boy in the Bronx). Bob Clampett and John K. were inspired by him.

He could do anything--comic books, strips, animation, humor columns, radio scripts. He even pioneered what would later be known as the "graphic novel": She Done Him Wrong, which he describes as "The Great American Novel, And Not A Word In It--No Music, Too..."

The Yiddish-inflected dialogue of such Milt Gross creations as Nize Baby might confuse some young folks these days, but a person need not understand Gross to appreciate him. Every stroke of his pen radiated humor--you'll find yourself laughing even if you're not sure why. His characters looked funny, eyes perpetually crossed. Gross' loose, scribbly drawing style seemed to reflect the out-of-control nature of the strips themselves.

He created comic strips at an astonishing rate: And Then The Fun Began, Dave's Delicatessen, Looey Dot Dope, Phool Phan Phables, Nize Baby, Otto and Blotto, and one that would earn him a kind of cult status in comic-strip and animation history, Count Screwloose of Tooloose. It would be the good "Count" who'd prove to be his most lasting character, appearing in one form or another until 1948.

Created as a Sunday strip in 1929 for the New York World, its premise was simple: "Count" Screwloose, the ever-resourceful inmate of the Nuttycrest lunatic asylum, would regularly bid goodbye to his Napoleon hat-wearing dog Iggy

These panels from He Done Her Wrong (1922) only give us a glimpse of the craziness and bawdiness the young Milt Gross was capable of. (Images from Amazon.com)

(not J.R. the Wonder Dog, which was created for the animated cartoons) and escape over the wall--only to discover that the world outside the asylum was even crazier. Inevitably, he'd jump back over the wall to the relative safety of the "nut house," telling his dog, "Keep an eye on me, Iggy..."

Count Screwloose escapes again, in a comic-book
story from the late '40s. (From John K.'s blog)

The Count's methods of escape were typical Milt Gross: once, he hopped onto a fellow inmate who believed himself to be a window shade; when the human "window shade" popped up, he propelled the Count over the wall on another adventure.

Animation was the next logical step for the character; indeed, when Gross replaced the "blink and you'll miss him" Harry Hirschfeld as supervisor of MGM's new animation department in early 1938, he'd already had past animation experience. Not with Count Screwloose, but with "Mr. Phool Phan", one of his earliest creations. As a 20-year-old assistant to Thomas A. "Tad" Dorgan (the cartoonist who, according to legend, gave us the term "hot dog") Gross created the strip about an insanely obsessed sports fan for Hearst's New York Journal in 1915. It appeared in animated form two years later, produced by John Randolph Bray. Gross wrote and directed the cartoon; it didn't materialize into a series, however, and today is almost completely forgotten.

With Gross now at the helm of the MGM cartoon department, a series of cartoons featuring Count Screwloose was a foregone conclusion. Much to the consternation of producer Fred Quimby, who despised Gross and his style of humor. Still, Gross represented a new and promising change in direction for MGM's cartoons, and Quimby knew it. Milt's nutty style was 180 degrees removed from the storybook, Disneyesque approach of Harman and Ising.

But the Count wouldn't reach the screen without a few changes. The drawing is slicker, lacking the scribbly spontaneity of the strips, yet still capturing the essence of Gross' style. The lunatic-asylum premise was dropped, as was Screwloose's canine companion Iggy. (Why is uncertain, but it could have been at Quimby's insistence.) The animated Screwloose would be less of a clueless innocent and more of a cynical con artist. In JITTERBUG FOLLIES, his first outing, he's a tramp who hits on the idea of bilking the locals out of their money, in the form of a bogus jitterbug contest. To match his new demeanor, Screwloose received the requisite wiseguy Brookynese voice, courtesy of an uncredited Mel Blanc. (I'd always pictured the strip version as sounding more like Ed Wynn).

His new sidekick, J.R. The Wonder Dog, would carry the burden as the "zany" one of the pair. Cross-eyed and loose-limbed, with seemingly no bones at all, J.R. most closely embodied the style and spirit of Gross' comic strips. J.R.'s high point would come when the panicky Count substitutes him for a contestant in serious danger of winning Screwloose's stolen proceeds--a fan-dancing ostrich. These scenes would prove frustrating for the animators; as related in Maltin's Of Mice And Magic, animator Bill Littlejohn--tired of hearing complaints that J.R. was not animatable--did 100 feet entirely by himself to prove it could be done. He outdid himself, as it's by far the funniest scene in the picture.

Unlike the first two cartoons discussed here, JITTERBUG FOLLIES is less a tribute to swing than a wholesale dismantling of it. With the exception of one rousing showpiece number, there isn't a note of swing to be found--but in this case it hardly matters, since it's merely an excuse for Gross to unleash his insanity. And we don't have to break out of--or into--the loony bin to look.

"The Citizen's Committee On FAIRRRR PLAY...."

"Come on you jitterbugs--get in and swing! Count Screwloose and J.R. The Wonder Dog present the $10,000 swing talent contest! Get in line, you 'gators!' Come on you rug-cutters! Get the $10,000 prize for the winner of this big contest!!" a breathless narrator says, while the camera first zooms in on a close-up of a theater marquee with our heroes' pictures--and names--in lights. We then dissolve to a long tracking shot of a rather motley assemblage of contestants that only the mind of Milt Gross could put together: a goofy-looking man and woman (the man, for reasons known only to him and Gross, has his entry fee in his mouth); a trained seal; three identical-looking, but different-sized fellows with mustaches and sports caps; two circus acrobats; a store dummy with a $9.95 price tag; a tuba player; a "trucking" Indian squaw complete with papoose on her back (her husband, meanwhile, is in a baby carriage in front of her) and one fellow with a bristly mustache and a derby hat. (The man and woman at the back of the line are actually the most normal-looking of this bunch).

The derby-wearing fellow at the front of the line approaches the ticket window, where the good Count is waiting to take his money. Take it he does, but the guy gets no ticket--Screwloose instantly slams down the SOLD OUT sign. But not, of course, before J.R. emerges to relieve the poor goon of his hard-earned buck--and a few dozen more from his pockets.

When the box-office door slams down again, the unfortunate victim of this larceny yells "HEY!" and angrily pounds on the door. His protests are to no avail, though, fading to muffled yells as the camera cuts to the interior, where Screwloose and J.R. are gathering up their ill-gotten loot. (We see J.R. kicking the money into a large carpetbag-type valise). "C'mon, c'mon," Screwloose impatiently says, "we gotta get outta town before the cops gets wise!" Coins are flying everywhere as the Count hurriedly catches them--only to be interrupted by a pounding on the door.

Quickly hiding the huge bag under his vest, Screwloose says, "Whozzat?" Cut to the door, in danger of being knocked off its hinges by whoever's outside. The door bursts open to reveal a hulking thug of a guy with a very official-looking badge. He's apparently been in quite a few battles, as he has a hook for a right hand. He also would have dwarfed Disney's Peg Leg Pete.

"This is the Citizen's Committee on FAIRRRR PLAY!!" he bellows. He takes three huge strides toward the camera until his badge entirely fills the screen: the words "Fair Play" on the badge enlarge and quiver as he says them.

Cut to a medium shot showing Screwloose, J.R. and the official; J.R. cringes, with his paws over his head. The brute lets go of his suspender, on which his badge is pinned, with a SNAP!

"Dis contest is on da level," the official says, taking his hook and lifting the runty Screwloose up by the collar. "Ain't it?" When the big lug lifts Screwloose in the air, the bagful of money hidden underneath Screwloose's vest spills out all over the floor.

"Why sure...sure...this is an honest contest, boss, why would ya think it isn't? It's on the up and up, absolutely, 100%...." Screwloose babbles as J. R. crawls between the official's legs and tries to make a getaway. "It's on the level," Screwloose nervously continues.

"Sure, it's on the level," another brute with a stocking cap says. He's just come through the doorway, holding J.R. by the tail with an enormous pair of tongs. "Nobody's skippin'!" The bag with the money drops on the ground; the big goon, meanwhile, flings J.R. through the doorway with the tongs.

"Well, den..." the "Fair Play" official says. "On with da contest!" The stocking-capped goon grabs Screwloose with the tongs this time and carries him through the doorway and onto the stage, depositing him underneath the spotlight. Resigned to M.C.ing, Screwloose tries to sound upbeat:

"Ladies and gentlemen," he begins. "The foist entry in the ten thousand-dollar swing contest..."

We don't hear the rest of what he has to say, as the camera cuts to the two goons in the balcony, their impossibly huge guns trained on poor Screwloose. We cut to a couple of goony-looking penguins: one with a straw hat, the other with a cigar (Otto and Blotto, two other Milt Gross comic-strip creations) as they walk over the heads of the annoyed audience, step on their faces, and hop onto the edge of the stage to immediately heckle Screwloose. (Muttering "gangway, gangway, outta the way" all the while). In an Avery-quick cut to an alley outside, we see them get tossed out the rear exit. They hit a light pole and land in the trash can underneath. Trash scatters around everywhere.

Cut back to Screwloose onstage: "As I was saying, introducing that lovely little songstress, Madame Lizzie Swish!!" The camera follows the spotlight over to the wings.

"Lovely" and "little" Lizzie Swish definitely isn't. She's a hippo--hideously large even by hippo standards--with a mouth that would put Martha Raye to shame, and a falsetto singing voice that could peel paint. She's wearing a gown with a ridiculously long train--and minces out on stage to mercilessly assault our eardrums. The higher--and louder--her screechy notes get, the worse she sounds--she tries to walk across the stage with a seductive wiggle, and fails miserably. Turns out, she's walking that way because her dress is stuck. Otto--or is it Blotto, I have no idea who's who--comes on stage and helpfully frees her with a pair of garden shears, which sends her recoiling out of frame camera left.

After Lizzie's inevitable off-camera crash into the orchestra pit, Otto/Blotto throws the shears over his shoulder like a rifle, and marches across the stage as military music plays on the sound track. The remains of Lizzie's dress resemble a tent; the other of the insane pair of penguins emerges from the "tent" to join the first one on stage. They decide to do a little performance of their own, a parody of a maudlin old Victorian-era ballad ("Bingen On The Rhine"):

A soldier of the legion,
Lay dyin' in Algiers,
<offstage gunshot--one of the penguins falls to the ground>
Beneath the spreadin' chestnut tree,
He had too many beers....

To illustrate the last line, the penguin still standing removes his hat, which conceals a mug of beer, which he smashes on the prostrate penguin's head. The other penguin rises to assume a fighting pose, hopping up and down.

The breaking waves dashed high upon,
The stern and rockbound sand,
The "muskles" of his brawny arms,
Played "Alexander's Ragtime Band".....

On the next-to-last line, the penguins do a bodybuilder pose--their tiny biceps rise with a "pop."

In mid-song, however, Lizzie decides she's going to give her act one more go, and drowns them out from offstage with her screeching. The two penguins scream at each other over the racket:

"HEEEEY!"
"WHAAAAT!"
"CAN YA HEAR ME?"
"NOOOOO!"

The penguin on the right marches off toward the right of the screen; he enters the "tent"--from it, inexplicably, emerges an anti-aircraft gun. As the other penguin lies on the floor holding his ears, the gun fires off a huge shell, presumably silencing poor Lizzie permanently. They try to resume their song, only to be booted from the stage again, in a repeat of the earlier "alley scene." (Even MGM felt it had to cut corners during this period).

Cut back to Screwloose on stage: "Presenting Mother Goose, the senstion of the show woild, in "Mother Goose Goes To Town"...."

A matronly woman in Mother Goose garb starts singing "Sing A Song Of Sixpence"--we're led to believe we're going to get a standard nursery number. But this is Milt Gross we're talking about, not Walt Disney--so instead, on the line "four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie", we see the huge prop pie behind her open up to reveal the "blackbirds". In the only inarguably politically-incorrect scene in the entire picture, they turn out to be black musicians rendered in minstrel-show caricature. "Mother Goose" continues singing:

When the pie was opened,
They all began to sing <musicians: "Mi, mi, mi...">
And then they got the jitterbug,
And all began to swing....

Oh, well--at least this is a legitimate swing number. The musicians start their brassy riff as "Mother Goose" sings:

And the bug flew on 'cause they turned him loose,
Bit yours truly, Mother Goose...

Again, because this is Milt Gross we're talking about, we discover "Mother Goose" is no kindly old lady: she strips off her costume to reveal herself as a buxom chanteuse worthy of Tex Avery's "Red."

On the lines "Ask the sheep and cow and corn/Big Boy Blue come blow your horn," she pulls a pair of legs out from under a haystack, which belong to our "Big Boy Blue." He starts playing a trumpet riff--or appears to. It's quickly revealed his horn has a phonograph record attached. He replaces the needle when the record briefly skips, looking at the audience with a goofy self-satisfied expression.

Our red-hot Mother Goose continues to sing:

Tommy Tucker got bit too,
Singin' for his bowl of stew...

She points off camera--it follows to reveal a little fellow in a Buster Brown getup. But this is no adorable tyke: he growls in a raspy bass voice "Darling, I am growing hungry...!" The audience obliges, throwing all manner of food items at him from offstage, which completely buries him. He takes a pair of chicken legs and drums a Gene Krupa style beat.

Cut to a skinny, Olive Oyl-ish woman "trucking" along as we hear the lines, "Mother Hubbard's doodlin' now/jitterbug just told her how..." But when she goes to her cupboard, instead of finding it empty she stumbles upon our friends Otto and Blotto, who try to resume their number for the umpteenth time. But before they can finish, they're given "the hook" and are pulled off stage right. (At least the animators didn't use the alley scene a third time).

Next we see a house-sized shoe bopping to the rhythm...I don't have to tell you all who that is...

The woman in the shoe got bit,
Now she's razzmatazzin' it....

Cut to a plump woman at a piano, pounding out a jazz rhythm with the aid of her endless brood of kids.

Simple Simon got bit and,
Thinks he's Benny Goodman's band....

Our "with it" Simple Simon is a one-man band, actually, playing like he's hopped up on amphetamines. He's destroying the instruments more than playing them.

For the conclusion of the number, we cut quickly to various shots of the black musicians from different angles, then a long shot of "Mother Goose" strutting her stuff.

The curtain comes down to riotous applause, pleasing just about everyone--except for Screwloose and J.R., of course, who boo her from the wings. They interrupted by a ganglier-than-usual ostrich, who demurely says, "I'm next--aren't I?"

The fit-to-be-tied Screwloose stalks out on stage and disgustedly introduces the next act: "Zaza <at least that's what it sounds like> the fan-dancin' ostrich! Nyahh!"

The ostrich does her ballet-style number to a surprisingly positive reaction--we cut to reaction shots of audience members jumping up and down in the balcony. Hats and confetti fly through the air; the two goons we saw earlier in the cartoon fire off their enormous machine guns, whistling and cheering wildly.

Meanwhile, the Count nervously paces: "An ostrich, an ostrich--a fan-dancin' ostrich is gonna win da contest! AN OSTRICH IS GONNA WIN DA CONTEST!!" But his hopes haven't completely died: he looks over at J.R., who's doing a handstand, and gets an idea he hopes will save his illicit fortune. "Ostrich??" he says, as J.R. is replaced by a fantasy image of J.R. in ostrich get-up. "Hey!" he says. "Maybe an ostrich is gonna win the contest! Yeah, I got it--an ostrich is gonna win dis contest!!" Running over to a trunk full of theatrical props and costumes, he assembles an ostrich costume for J.R. out of a ceramic ostrich head (which covers his rear) and some bits of cotton (which cover his head).

Cut to just offstage: as the real ostrich takes her bows, Screwloose cuts some sandbags loose, which land on her and send her plummeting through the stage floor. Pushing the disguised J.R. toward the stage, he says, "Get out there, Zaza!!"

It's easier said than done, as the phony Zaza has a little trouble maintaining his balance; he stumbles across the stage upside down--or downside up--poking his head out from underneath the cotton fluff to give the audience a few furtive glances. He stumbles in the direction of the curtain: one of the two penguins happens to be there, and trips him with well-placed cane. J.R. crashes stage right, only to re-emerge doing a hoochy-coochy move with his "rear"--or is it his front? He clumsily dances off stage to the right--emerging yet again, he again dances right in the path of one of the penguins, who again trips him.

This time, J.R. stumbles off the stage and into the audience, where he gives a snooty-looking society matron a deranged wink from underneath his cotton fluff. He stumbles over the heads of the musicians in the orchestra pit and finds himself caught between a drum and a set of cymbals. Propelled back on stage by the momentum, he momentarily loses his disguise--it reassembles itself, but not quickly enough to fool Otto and Blotto, who appear with a basket full of hot dogs. J.R. naturally pursues them, leading the two penguins to yell "FAKE! FAKE!" J.R. is too engrossed in eating the hot dogs to care about the boos coming from the audiences--he sucks them out of the basket like spaghetti, dragging a cat along which somehow got tangled in them (don't expect logic in a cartoon like this, folks). J.R. and the cat do what cats and dogs inevitably do--they get into a knock-down, drag-out brawl right there on stage, dissolving into a tiny whirlwind. Into which, naturally, our two goons up in the balcony fire a stream of bullets.

J.R. briefly emerges from the mini-tornado and declares himself the victor, paws hoisted above his head in self-congratulation. He's a bit premature in his celebration, though, as he ends up being sucked back into the vortex by the cat. (A gag very similar to this one appeared in Hugh Harman's ABDUL THE BULBUL AMEER a few years later: Gross did leave a legacy of sorts, despite what the histories say).

Meanwhile, Screwloose struggles his way through the hail of junk being hurled at him by the audience to try to retrieve his dog; he sticks his cane into the vortex hoping to snag J.R. by the collar. Which, naturally, only succeeds in his being sucked in as well.

The cat hurls Screwloose from the whirlwind out into the alley, followed closely by J.R. They're seen hastily struggling to climb the alley fence; the scene dissolves to the two of them trying to hop a freight car out of town. Where, it so happens, they run across our friends Otto and Blotto, who reprise their number one final time before the iris out (forgive me if I misheard any of the lyrics):

His comrade bent to listen,
He softly whispered, "Dean,"
Don't sit on the billiard table 'cause,
You're wearing off the green....

As the two of them dance an Irish jig inspired by that awful pun, we bid goodbye to Milt Gross' twisted universe. Audiences of the time didn't know it, but they'd only have one more opportunity to visit that funhouse-mirror world before Gross himself was shown the door.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

In analyzing Gross' brief but glorious tenure at MGM, the one question that continually comes to mind is "What happened?" He had everything going for him--several newspaper comic strips running simultaneously, a writing stint for radio (an adaptation of one of his "family" strips, That's My Pop) and an opportunity to produce animation for a studio considered by those both in and out of Hollywood to be the Tiffany's of movie-making. Hiring Gross should have been a tremendous creative and public-relations coup for Fred Quimby--the equivalent of bringing in The Far Side's Gary Larson to run an animation studio.

The time was certainly right--in the late thirties, thanks to a fellow named Avery over at the Schlesinger studio, theater audiences began to see a whole new "screwball" style of animation. Daffy Duck had already hopped and "hoo hoo-ed" his way through PORKY'S DUCK HUNT; a primitive and insane version of what would become Bugs Bunny would follow soon after. In other words, the very sort of characters and humor Milt Gross had been known for on the comic pages for some twenty years--they just hadn't been seen in animation before. What could make more sense than to bring in the one who started it all?

Things, however, were not as perfect as they seemed; Gross, far from being at the peak of his talents, was actually in a creative tailspin by 1938. His comic-strip work, while still prolific, was becoming unimaginative, and he began to farm it out to other artists (such as Bob Dunn, who would later take over Jimmy Hatlo's They'll Do It Every Time). As Ron Goulart says in his book The Funnies:

He left the New York World in 1930, having already abandoned the use of dialect
in his comic strip work, to draw a new version of the Count Screwloose Sunday page
for King Features. In addition, he drew a comic strip that alternated three uninspired
single-gag premises: Draw Your Own Conclusions, I Did It And I'm Glad, and The Meanest
Man In Town.

The comic-strip version of Count Screwloose, in truth, was a similar "single-gag" character (the premise never varied in the slightest over almost two decades) and the transfer to animation actually did a great deal to flesh him out and put him in more varied situations. Unlike the confining premise of the comic strip, the animated Count Screwloose could have been adapted to every conceivable situation. In the last of the two Screwloose cartoons, WANTED: NO MASTER the Count is neither a lunatic nor a tramp, but a dim suburban bachelor whom J.R. tries to get out of the way by marrying him off. He'd made the transition from a mere prop for Gross' jokes to an "everyman" character.

Yet, as with Gross' other work of this period, JITTERBUG FOLLIES suffers a bit. There's almost too many things going on at one time--looking at a Gross cartoon is comparable to looking at the Airplane! and Naked Gun movies. (Just imagine the impossible position I'm in, trying to describe it all). One has to see them several times to catch everything (I've seen it at least a dozen times, and had never noticed the store mannequin in the line of prospective "contestants" before--nor, for that matter, the grown Indian in the baby carriage). He gives us a visual feast, but doesn't do quite enough with it--I can't help but feel the action should be going on even faster. But as I've said about other cartoons from this period, that revolution in timing was still a few years away--and the man responsible for it was, at the time, still working for Warner Bros.

Still, it's a perfect debut story for the character, and one can see elements later used by Mel Brooks. Consider the plot--a con man puts on a horrible, token stage performance in the hope of skipping off with the proceeds. Not all that different, really, from Brooks' The Producers.

Looking back, there was no way Milt Gross could realistically be expected to succeed--the job of pulling together a disparate, squabbling group of New York and California animators was too much for just about anyone, roughly akin to herding cats. Gross was just not temperamentally suited for it: while the "official" version of Gross' firing is that the staid Fred Quimby found Gross' work "beneath the dignity of MGM", the truth is a bit more complicated. Gross' story is the standard cautionary tale of what happens when creative people spread themselves too thin--when they try to do everything, they succeed at nothing. (A lesson Tex Avery would eventually learn as well).

According to Joe Barbera in his autobiography My Life In Toons, Gross was a micromanager--when critiquing an animator's drawing, rather than offer suggestions, he'd have the animator stand and watch while he redrew the drawings himself. Several months of this, in addition to loud, frequent battles with Quimby, naturally took its toll--and manifested itself in increasingly bizarre behavior. Barbera wrote:

[He was] becoming increasingly paranoid with each passing day. His office was
located directly above Fred Quimby's, and Milt soon discovered a grillwork heat register
against which he would put his ear in a struggling effort to make out what (if
anything) was going on in Quimby's office.

Milt started spending more and more of each day listening at the register. We all
knew when he'd come out of an especially protracted spell of eavesdropping because
the criss-cross pattern of the register would be engraved on the side of his face from
jaw to temple. From time to time, he would emerge from his office, thus imprinted,
loudly muttering over and over: "Can't hear the cocksucker. Can't hear what he's
saying. Can't hear the cocksucker...." (Barbera, 68-69).

This by itself sounds almost like a scene from one of Gross' cartoons, and could almost be dismissed as a humorous eccentricity, if not for what happened next. As Barbera said:

I returned from a rare vacation one evening to a frantic phone call from Dan Gordon,
who told me that Milt had finally popped his cork and was going through the studio firing
everybody. In context, that really wasn't a crazy thing to do, although he should
have started at the top...

Though Count Screwloose's time on the screen lasted only two cartoons, the character would live on in yet another medium--comic books. Though Gross' output slowed considerably following a 1945 heart attack (he had a lifelong heart condition) he would contribute Count Screwloose stories to several comic book companies in the late forties. A second heart attack would take his life in 1953, at the age of 58.

Of his precarious life, Gross once said, "Yeah, someday a waiter will find my head in the soup. Pick my head up by the hair and say, 'he's had enough.'" That would have been an appropriate, twisted end for someone like Milt Gross, but he did die doing what he loved--drawing. I personally can't think of any better way to go.

Tags:

Milt+Gross, Jitterbug+Follies, MGM, racial+stereotypes, orphan+toon

Lights...Camera....

2008-05-27T14:00:00.001-05:00

By Kevin Wollenweber

Warner Brothers celebrates its 90^th birthday this year!!

This is certainly cause to celebrate, most notably because this could mean stunning releases this year. We here at Orphan Toons sure hope this means cartoons, cartoons and *MORE* cartoons!! Oh, of course we know that there will be a LOONEY TUNES GOLDEN COLLECTION SIX, and I ponder, constantly, just what will be on same. Yet, as per usual, even the speculations have been kept under wraps for now. After all, the consultants and coordinators of such a package don’t want to promise titles that, although slated for the set, are never given the green light until even mere months before the physical product reaches shelves.

I do know, thanks to someone hinting at forthcoming releases on Amazon.com, and a pre-order representation there, that there will be a second BUSBY BERKELEY COLLECTION set: four disks to be precise. The first one is one of those rare sets that I bought for the musicals themselves, as well as the animated cartoons so generously tacked on to a few of the disks. This is nearly a perfect set, and does give the viewer/listener an idea of what inspired so many of those fun little 1930’s cartoons coming out of Warner's around the time of the creation of these musicals. Wikipedia.org has a full list of Busby Berkeley productions, but some are not represented with detailed synopsis and full credits, so I’m not sure of just which ones are Warner Brothers and which are MGM. But I think we can kind of figure it out, since the bio gives details as to which periods in film history Berkeley was connected with Warner Brothers and which with MGM, perhaps the two biggest and most creative periods in the man’s history. Of course, I’m not leaving out his work with 20^th Century Fox, the resulting product of which will be issued as part of THE CARMEN MIRANDA COLLECTION. The musicals are worthwhile even without cartoons, but let’s face it, so many cartoon ideas came from these musicals that it is made twice as nice when the musicals are given some animation as extra feature.

I know, I know, I should dream on. This is about cartoons, though, and so, I hope that MGM and Warner's do celebrate their anniversaries with cartoons galore, especially since Warner Brothers owns the complete video rights to the golden age of both cartoon studios. TOM & JERRY has been well-represented, although not what we rabid fans would call “fully restored”. You can get impressions of what examples of a fully restored set of TOM & JERRY cartoons would look like if you see the titles from the series included in the ACADEMY AWARDS ANIMATION—15 WINNERS, 26 NOMINEES collection issued earlier this year. It all truly made me salivate for more!! There are HAPPY HARMONIES cartoons floating around out there as special features on various movie packs, including the recently released CLASSIC MUSICALS FROM THE DREAM FACTORY, VOL. 3 set, but these are not restored--just included. So the full and complete overhaul of the MGM classic cartoon has a long, long way to go before we can truly say that MGM cartoons are widely available as beautiful restorations with all kinds of background, etc.

It still is, however, the vast Warner Brothers classic cartoons library that I always hope keeps seeing the light of day: both as extras on movies and, most importantly, on the forthcoming sets of LOONEY TUNES cartoons. We animation fans have “won the day"--or have “taken back the night"--regarding these films in many ways, since the GOLDEN COLLECTION volumes are now looking at these films from an adult perspective, with all kinds of extras that show that the animators of these films were not aiming the stuff primarily at kids!!

So Happy Anniversary, Warner Brothers, and wear your badge proudly! I hope that the whole LOONEY TUNES rollout doesn’t reach its end real soon. It is at its high point now, and we’re starting to see the exhausting of all those titles that end up on these collections over and over again. This means that there are going to be titles that may see their first time on any video format--and isn’t that what all this hoopla is all about? I know that I can’t just stick to one decade for favorites, although I do hope that more attention is paid to the 1930’s and the exhaustive search for restorible elements to the titles as we’ve seen these far too many times as “blue ribbon” prints, often meaning that there will unfortunately be times when original title cards cannot even be simulated. As bland as some might think the character of Bosko to be, or Buddy (his successor, after Harman & Ising took Bosko to MGM) they have not really been represented in the main programs of the GOLDEN COLLECTION sets. The history seems to “begin” with the earliest incarnation of PORKY PIG.

That’s fine, but there were some elaborate entries in the BUDDY series that should be given a new lease on life since they were inspired by those afore-mentioned lavish musicals that came from the mind of Busby Berkeley. Although you cannot call them “production numbers” exactly, it seemed as if every BUDDY cartoon had its musical number, and these also spun off into the MERRIE MELODIES series that were almost entirely musicals up to the early 1940’s.

So it is my eternal hope that some of this great stuff, like “BUDDY’S BEER GARDEN”, “BUDDY’S THEATER”, “BUDDY’S BEAR CATS”, “BUDDY’S ADVENTURES”, “BUDDY OF THE APES” or surreal moments like “BUDDY’S BUG HUNT” (an elusive cartoon if ever there was one), or some of the MERRIE MELODIES of the period like “HOW DO I KNOW IT’S SUNDAY?”, “WHY DO I DREAM THESE DREAMS?”, “RHYTHM IN THE BOWL”, “THE GIRL AT THE IRONING BOARD”, “SITTIN’ ON A BACKYARD FENCE” and so many others--notable because of their interesting musical numbers inspired by Warners-owned pop tunes of the age--are finally given the chance to shine, shine, shine in the last real hoorah around the cartoon studio’s terrific run of success!!

Let’s all hope for the best and Warner Brothers Entertainment should be wearing all this stuff proudly to the point where *NONE* of it should any longer be in the public domain. Fully restored, these shorts are far more interesting, because you can see and hear things that were missed upon seeing it through all that dust of age from the prints of some of these that have been circulating out there for too long from other sources.

Tags:

Buddy, Bosko, Kevin Wollenweber, Warner Bros., anniversary

Happy Memorial Day

2008-05-26T14:26:00.003-05:00

Like everyone else here in the good old U. S. of A., Kevin and I are taking Memorial Day off. I'll be back tomorrow with another installment of "Toons In Swing Time," this time highlighting Milt Gross and his lunatic JITTERBUG FOLLIES. See you folks then, and I hope you have a wonderful day.

Tags: Memorial+Day

Eyes A-Poppin'

2008-05-25T15:29:00.001-05:00

By Kevin Wollenweber

I just read, with glee, the latest post in Thad Komorowski’s THADBLOG, about his locating, in a student library, the first book of complete filmography and individual shorts examinations of LOONEY TUNES and MERRY MELODIES, from Scarecrow Press, called, what else, THE WARNER BROTHERS CARTOONS. In fact, I own both copies of the book, and my hard cover copy is pretty worn out because I had to use a screen-reading device that had to scan the pages and read them back to me. So, I had to push the book flat upon the device unfortunately. But the work it took to read each page was worthwhile, because, yes, that true fan enthusiasm comes out in a book like this. I really wish that Warner Brothers would allow Jerry Beck to be Jerry Beck and let him talk about things like, well, what he originally *THOUGHT* Bosko was saying to the audience when pointing out the villain in “BOSKO’S PICTURE SHOW”. I, personally, don’t doubt that Bosko’s creator, Hugh Harmon, was without this kind of sly humor when it came to cartoons, having said that he would rather do more with the art of animation than make commercials or little stories about fuzzy, cute little characters, not that there’s something entirely wrong with that, mind you. I will always enjoy the HAPPY HARMONIES, primarily because of the curious and amazing amount of detail in films that seemed almost to have a bottomless budget.

Originally, I had always thought that the books, WARNER BROTHERS CARTOONS (from Scarecrow Press) or the one later given the blessing of the studio, LOONEY TUNES AND MERRY MELODIES, were supposed to be critiques of the cartoons and, so, could be as biting as they wanted to be. Although I understand why the viewpoints had to be softened for the second book (and I ultimately applaud this, because now we have Jerry Beck and company creating some of the best DVD compilations of these wonderful cartoons), I miss the sense of humor inherent in books like the Scarecrow Press book which really does show a real sense of wonder and delight in these cartoons. There are times I remember even disagreeing with the overall viewpoint to a cartoon or two since I’m not always quite as cynical at times, but that is the process of criticism, the ability to get one’s point across and even stun the reader. Certainly, that review of “BOSKO’S PICTURE SHOW”, I believe, has made this short a minor classic! Only those who knew Hugh Harmon could tell me whether or not Hugh, himself, would have been appalled to hear that anyone thought that a four-letter expletive was used prominently in a scene in one of his cartoons, but for now, I’m with the writer of that particular plot synopsis as he excitedly wonders just how far the animator was willing to break the common rules to astound his audience into wondering “what did he say?”

Animation was really no different in those days from the live action films, except that live action pre-Code full-length motion pictures were sometimes trying to tackle taboo subjects that needed to be discussed instead of just feared, about political theories that were shunned merely because folks had sometimes false interpretations of them or false interpretations of the times in which *ALL* people were living, no matter what the race and creed, while cartoons were just being…cartoons, with all the barnyard or outhouse humor that one would think would be there, almost the kind of humor omnipresent in “underground” cartoons of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s that were circulated in alternative publications. That kind of humor was hinted at and sometimes realized in pre-Code cartoons. After all, as far as I know, cartoons were not yet used as kids-only entertainment, even though they did all somehow get ignorantly shunted over to Saturday mornings on television. Most of us got our first glimpse of BETTY BOOP on afternoon TV, if we were able to get to our sets around noontime to catch the half hour of Fleischer cartoons!

But at least some of us can still consult the Scarecrow Press edition of THE WARNER BROTHERS CARTOONS to read all the criticisms therein from folks who watched these cartoons for pleasure.

So what could be wrong with this book that is right with the second attempt, the LOONEY TUNES AND MERRY MELODIES book? Well, the first book is full of many inaccuracies, too numerous for me to mention here and I’ll leave this up to others of you who might respond to this with more detail. Since the second book was done with the blessing and assistance of those at Warner Brothers, yes, the spikier viewpoints had to be excised in favor of friendlier speech so that this would be more a celebration of what the studio has done with the art of animation. Yeah (sigh), we fans know that the Warner Brothers cartoons were done with adults in mind, that Warner Brothers cartoons especially were not fond of doing those cute and cuddly characters and keeping to a cloying formula. They were not Walt Disney and couldn’t conceive of creating theme parks with the LOONEY TUNES characters walking around and greeting customers; and, so, the first book, THE WARNER BROTHERS CARTOONS, was more a celebration of this fact and not trying to denegrade the Warner Brothers trademark for their production. It was a keen and clear-headed overview of each and every title in the library or in those vaults and what they meant to us former kids and what they eventually came to mean as we grew up and re-examined the cartoons years later into our adult lives.

. The animators would have been happy enough becoming acknowledged as bona fied filmmakers of the stature of any one of the major motion picture directors of the day. They truly were pioneers and we, now, realize this far too late, but as I’ve said so many times, the problem here is that you’re battling decades of marketing and manufacturing products with these cute little LOONEY characters all over them. Never will you see T-shirts with that pink “naked” Tweetie Pie on it with that funny, wide-eyed expression on his face as he utters the key line: “Ooh, de poor puddy tat. He faw down, go *BOOM*!”

Even as kids, we liked these cartoons because they were violent, and they weren’t afraid to go over the top with that violence. The unabashed humor of these cartoons were what made it easy for the military to adopt them as “mascots” for the war effort. They were equal opportunity offenders and were not afraid to poke fun at just about anything, including military life. The same goes with the Fleischer Studios and, well, any studio that wasn’t Walt Disney Productions, whose characters seemed so out of place in wartime cartoons, save of course for DONALD DUCK who had some of the best of these shorts. Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, among others, humanized animal instincts and were seen as protective of their domains, and isn’t that partially what the American experience is all about? Just about every character showed this genuine impression of Americana and, while doing this, also poked merciless fun at the over-the-top bravado of wartime propaganda, so, people of all ages could embrace what they were about so much easier than those of Disney. Oh, I don’t say that Disney films didn’t grab me and take me to that other place with equal amusement, but Warner Brothers cartoons made it all so funny! Somehow, you would so easily get offended if Disney characters attempted to act, in any way, like those brassier characters at Warner Brothers. Caricatures and stereotypes would really seem insensitive if it came from the kitchi-koo cute characters of a Disney cartoon, but LOONEY TUNES and MERRY MELODIES were always poking light fun at accepted norms and, so, you had to know that there were no boundaries when it came to the gag content in any of these cartoons, not that there weren’t attempts to tell some kind of story or convey a view of life from a creature smaller than adult-sized humans. Yet these were cartoons, and the creators made no bones about telling us this through the bizarre gags of a Tex Avery or Bob Clampett cartoon or those rare Chuck Jones cartoons that took jabs at the art form itself, like “DUCK AMUCK”. It was their job to be funny, and they did so for at least three decades with varying results.

Kevin Wollenweber

Tags:

Kevin+Wollenweber, Kevin's+View

Kevin's View: KATNIP KOLLEGE Gets an "A Plus"

2008-05-23T14:34:00.003-05:00

by Kevin Wollenweber

This is one of those rare moments where the music speaks for itself, much like the Fleischer films of the earlier ‘30’s had done, almost to the point where the music could be easily the sole inspiration and star of the cartoon and absolutely *NO* story would be needed, but there *IS* one, perhaps so indicative of the times and almost similar to, perhaps, some little-known rock ‘n’ roll movies of a later age that would basically state, to its audience, the same credo, that anything that harkens back to a time earlier is pure “corn”.

It is a cartoon that clearly illustrates what I’ve been saying about Warner Brothers cartoons in general--that, even when, on the surface, they seem cuddly and cute, there is always an edge, a more worldly air about the cartoon that someone like Walt Disney would not dare tackle because he would end up alienating his audience. Yet, this is clearly the kind of cartoon that Hugh Harmon should have been aiming for if he was truly trying to create something more with animation than just cute fuzzy little characters, and Miss Kitty Bright certainly is cute, as I dimly recall her, with full lips and those wide eyes, somewhat reminiscent of Miss Betty Boop of six years ago, only with slightly less vamp and more genuine connection to the music. Makes me wish that I’d actually seen any live action film with Mabel Todd, just to know whether the image of high-heeled Miss Kitty Bright is actually a Todd caricature!

This cartoon could have certainly benefited from the original opening, because the cartoon opens, after its existing blue ribbon print substitute title card, making me think that I’m visiting the snappy music midway through, but that’s a minor gripe I have with the unfortunate loss of many of these original master negatives.

Again and again, I insist that those reading this look up a tremendous Warner Brothers double-CD set called HOLLYWOOD JAZZ which features another version of the opening number about the rise and fall of Christopher Columbus. I’m sorry that I cannot read the long list of credits, but it is highly probable that this afore-mentioned number might also come from this imfamous “OVER THE GOAL” movie, something that should surface on DVD one day, if only as a special feature (hint hint—we sorely *NEED* those lesser-known, jazzier musicals!). Musical cartoons like this should arouse public interest in the music that inspired this, as Rachel neatly points out. There are times when I think that cartoons like these were what introduced some kids like me to swing music of a bygone era, music that I am just now catching up with and one can hear remnants of on a show called “THE BIG BROADCAST”, heard every Sunday night on WFUV-FM or online at wfuv.org, where you can probably download mass quantities of this delicious stuff or the music that preceeded it. The host likes to remain within the framework of the 1930’s and, in so doing, certainly shows us that there was indeed a diversity and vast history to be appreciated there.

Tags: Katnip+Kollege, Kevin+Wollenweber

Toons In Swing Time: Part Two

2008-05-23T10:50:00.003-05:00

"As Easy As Rolling Off A Log": Loving KATNIP KOLLEGE (1938)

Katnip Kollege
Release Date: June 11, 1938
Directors: Cal Dalton, Cal Howard
Music: Carl Stalling, Johnnie "Scat" Davis, Mabel Todd
In short: An awkward "square" gets "the rhythm bug"--and the girl

In part two of an ongoing series of swing-themed cartoons, we again prowl the halls of another unusual college, this time courtesy of the boys of Termite Terrace.

Funny thing about good cartoons. Some I love instantly; others stealthily work their way into my heart, wearing down my resistance until I love them in spite of myself.

The Harman-Ising cartoons fall into that rare latter category, as any regular reader of this blog should know. So too does today's cartoon, which took close to three decades to work its charms on me.

As a typical dumb twelve-year-old, I didn't know much about cartoons (yet), but I knew what I liked. Humor, and lots of it, preferably coming at me at a thousand gags a minute. But wide-eyed, happy 1930s cartoon animals staging mini-musicals? Feh. Give me Tex Avery, and save the singing cats, mice, dogs and squirrels for the kids.

Not that I didn't like "old" music--I, as that same dumb twelve-year-old, grew enchanted with ragtime the moment I heard Eubie Blake play Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag." Cartoon music, however, was something I took for granted; something that settled nicely into the background, complementing the flickering images onscreen. It should not--I so smugly believed--be the sole reason for the cartoon, if it was going to keep me from flipping that dial.

So it was with KATNIP KOLLEGE--at first. It carried too much of the taint of "late '30s Merrie Melodie" for my taste, that awkward transitional period before the Warner Bros. cartoons really started to get funny. When music was pervasive and relentless, not melting unnoticed into the subconscious as it "should" have done. The involvement of Cal Dalton, one of my least favorite Warner's directors, certainly didn't earn it any points in my book, either.

It's perhaps the ultimate irony, then, that KATNIP KOLLEGE would eventually become one of my all-time favorite cartoons, as it's practically an allegory of my own experiences (and frustrations) with it over the years. Like the cartoon's little Harold Lloyd-ish protagonist, I didn't "get it" for the longest time, only to be bitten by the "rhythm bug" in the form of the driving beat of Gene Krupa.

Sometime in my thirties--I'm not sure precisely when--I first heard an old recording of the Benny Goodman orchestra's "Sing, Sing Sing", a key feature of which is the throbbing rhythm of drummer Krupa. It had life, it had energy, it made me want to move, a feeling I hadn't experienced since the day I heard Eubie Blake so many years earlier. I would be hopelessly enamored of swing, any "big band" music, from then on.

It's only natural my newfound love would force me to re-evaluate the cartoons I had scorned for so long. I had for many years been fascinated by the hallucinatory visuals of the Fleischer cartoons (even if I didn't quite understand them); now I began to notice the music as well, and to my surprise found it far better than I'd remembered. People, animals, even buildings bounced along to the incessant rhythm, giving the cartoons a brightness that belied the gray, smoky backgrounds. Objects would, more often that not, sprout legs and dance along. Even Fleischer's Popeye fell under the influence, often humming the background music as he went.

KATNIP KOLLEGE is the Leon Schlesinger studio's tribute of sorts to those musical Fleischer cartoons of old--perhaps more so than Fleischer's own SALLY SWING. SALLY SWING is energetic in isolated bursts; KATNIP KOLLEGE grabs the viewer from practically the first frame and doesn't loosen its grip until the very end. At the same time it's very much a departure from Fleischer; at times it seems as if they're saying, "You folks in New York did some pretty good stuff in your time, but now it's our turn. Look what we can do!"

The cartoon even seems to poke fun, in a gentle way, at the bygone era of Betty Boop--as when our little hero, when pressed to come up with his "lesson" for the day, responds with every Jazz-Age musical cliche he can muster: "Uh, Charleston....razzmatazz, um, vo-de-o-doh, and boop-boop...a-doop..." Intentional or not, the folks at Termite Terrace were making it known that Fleischer's time in the spotlight was over.

There's a certain sweetness here one doesn't normally see in Warner's cartoons of this era--save for the early directorial output of Chuck Jones--but without being cloying, as was unfortunately the case in some of Jones' first efforts. Sweetness done right makes us care about the characters--by the end, we're cheering for the little guy as he finally becomes the hit of the campus.

How? Well, for the answer to that, you'll need to enroll for a musical refresher course at KATNIP KOLLEGE. Don't be surprised if the "rhythm bug" bites you, too.

"Boy, is that corny!"

We open on a shot of the exterior of the venerable institution, apparently made to feline proportions: it consists of a large wooden barrel, with "columns" made of discarded tin cans. Two cats, supposedly students, arrive in their jalopy. They emerge from it with the car still in motion, rushing inside the building. One of the two cats pauses to hold his hands over his ears to await the inevitable off-screen crash.

I'm working from a "Blue Ribbon" reissue print for this review--my memory of the restored version on the Looney Tunes Golden Collection is spotty, but I believe it originally started with a tracking shot of the students as they drive up to the entrance.

(Dissolve to interior, hallway). The camera tracks down a long corridor past various classrooms, labeled "Psychology," "Biology", and so on. One particularly lively one has loud swing music issuing from it, loud enough to make the door flap open and closed: we've found the "Swing-ology" class. The door flaps in rhythm, as if made of rubber.

(Dissolve to interior of class). The students inside are seated at old-fashioned school desks (made of sardine cans), but there's nothing old fashioned about anything else: the students are clapping along in time to the jazzy music on the sound track. Everyone, that is, except one little fellow with a porkpie hat and Harold Lloyd glasses--he's struggling with the rhythm, consistently off the beat. This, as you might have guessed by now, is our hero.

With the sound of a few notes of "Shave And A Haircut," and a couple rings of a bell, our professor appears--class is in session.

(Cut to front of class). We see a blackboard with a few random musical notes on it and a stick-figure representation of our teacher, among other things. Our "hep" professor, in cap and gown, rises on a platform coming from underneath the floor, like Paul Whiteman. He does a "pecking" move in time to the music as our students respond with a scat-sung greeting:

Good morning to you, dear teacher, <scat>
Good morning to you (we really mean it)
Good morning to you (don't mean your sister)
Cuckoo from nearby clock: I mean you're really in the groove...<book comes from off-camera to hit bird>

During the song, the professor lifts up his robes and dances--even his stick-figure representation on the blackboard joins in. During the "don't mean your sister" line, a book is lowered to reveal it's being sung by two boy cats and a girl, apparently engaged in something other than studying.

The professor, with a voice patterned after Bing Crosby, addresses the students in rhyme: "OK, Mr. Jones, you may/recite your history for today..."

"Mr. Jones" complies, launching into a rendition of "Let That Be A Lesson To You:"

Oh, Columbus was the discoverer of America,
Who set asea in 1492...

As he sings, the scene cuts to several students acting out the song by pretending to be sailors rowing a boat--one is perched atop a desk like a lookout, while several others are "rowing" with rulers.

But the good queen Isabella, found a more attractive fella...

Cut to a scene of a large, bully-type cat, who dumps a wire wastebasket on a smaller cat's head. The smaller cat looks a bit as if he's in a cage, so he ends the song in a raspy bass voice, with the line "and Columbus wound up in the juggeroo"...

The professor finishes off the number by banging on a series of pots and pans like drums, remarking, "That's a killer, son, that's a killer." Next, in rhyme, he says, "Next comes Miss Kitty Bright/Let's see if you did your homework right..." and gives her a drum-beat "vamp" as she starts her number.

"Miss Kitty Bright" (Mabel Todd), a feline co-ed with letter sweater and beret, is certainly up to the challenge, belting out the next stanza of the song, hips swaying in time. She's something of a kitty Betty Boop, you might say, making the Fleischer connection even stronger:

Oh, Napoleon was the fightin'-est man you ever saw,
Everybody that he fought with he subdued,
But the king-a and the queen-a,
Sent him off to St. Helena,
Just because they didn't like his attitude...

As she sings, the student in front of her gets up and "trucks" along, puts his hand in his coat and gives us a cross-eyed goofy expression (He looks a bit like the stereotypical "loony" with a Napoleonic complex.) We get a quick cut as she's singing to the professor, so engrossed in the music he doesn't see the tack someone placed on his chair. He sits and yells "OHHHHHH!," which acts as the cue for the chorus as we cut back to the clapping students:

Let that be a lesson to you,
Everybody meets his Waterloo,
He wasn't too big to end up behind the eight ball,
And remember, buddy, there's still a lot of room for you!

On the last two lines the scene cuts to a shy little cat in the corner of the room (not our hero) who timidly trucks along with the music until he's noticed by the professor, who urges him to come forward. His attitude immediately changes, and he immediately dances over to the head of the class.

(Hidden gag alert: on the wall next to the student is a picture of a fellow in bell-bottom pants, but the picture is cut off at the shoulders, indicating it's a guide to what the "in" student wears. Yes, folks, kids wore bell-bottoms long before the '60s).

(Cut to medium shot of classroom, from the back. We see our hero in the center). Addressing our protagonist with the Harold Lloyd glasses, the professor chants:

Now, Johnny, let's hear your sonnets,
And make them sound like Kastelanetz...

(Note: Andre Kastelanetz, incidentally, was a Russian-born musician, composer and bandleader who pioneered "easy listening" music for the radio. He had a regular show on CBS at the time this cartoon was made. Since Kastelanetz was indirectly responsible for such later musical atrocities as Muzak, one would assume our professor would have higher expectations of Johnny).

Johnny, momentarily startled, nervously stands up and goes into the mumbled, outdated routine mentioned in the introduction. His awkwardness is obvious, as we see him looking down at the floor and shifting uncomfortably. Droplets of sweat fall from his forehead to the floor.

Cut to the professor, who shows his disgust with Johnny's "performance" by impatiently tapping his foot and slowly shaking his head. "Boy, is that corny!", he tells the audience. Growling, he yells to Johnny, "COME UP HERE!"

(Note: the song Stalling plays during Johnny's routine is called "You're An Education", a staple of Warner's cartoons of this era, even spawning a Merrie Melodie of the same name).

Growling again, the professor points to a spot off camera as Johnny shuffles off-screen. Johnny goes to a corner with a stool; when he sits down he presses a button, which raises the stool several feet and places Johnny's head underneath a waiting dunce cap. He's apparently done this so many times he knows the drill by now.

Ringing the bell, the still-annoyed professor says, "Class dismissed!" The students make fun of poor Johnny as they file out of class: "Boy, you swing like a rusty gate!" one girl remarks. "You ain't got rhythm!" another student says.

Kitty Bright, presumably Johnny's girl, tells him, "Here's your old frat pin! You can look me up when you learn how to swing!" She then goes into the cartoon's signature number, "Why, it's easy, as rollin' off a log..." as she leaves. Truer words were never spoken, as we'll soon find out.

(Fade to a late-night jam session. The title reads "That Night...") The cats start off their little musical soiree with a kettle-drum beat, which causes the moon to pop up in the sky. This cues their swinging little number, sung by three cat vocalists--one tall, one medium-sized, and one short--in front of a ladle acting as a microphone:

It was on the college campus that the kiddies ("kitties"?) had a session,
All the cats were there, 'twas a swingin' congregation,
Some had took to truckin' while the cats beat out a rhythm,
And others picked on peckin' 'cause the rhythm bug had bit 'em.

We get two quick cuts on the last two lines: first, a long shot of the students clapping along, and then another group lined up as they do a "pecking" move. It's an impressive scene, in which we see their cast shadows on the fence behind them.

They never had a lesson in their lives,
But rhythm's what they're keepin'...

We notice now that the two larger cats have hogged the microphone; the smallest of the three singers follows along off to one side with a disgruntled expression, his hands in his pockets. (This is one of the subtler personality touches that I found charming).

But when it comes to swingin' that thing,
It's as natural to them as sleepin' or eatin'....

We get a tracking shot of the musicians and dancers now--a boy and girl peck alternately back and forth.

(Hidden gag alert #2: As the camera pans past the musicians and dancers, we see a statue in the background: on the pedestal it reads "Professor Dalton, 1908"--a reference to the cartoon's co-director. One of the students is wrapped around the statue, pretending to dance with it.)

"The rhythm bug bit me! La de ah!"

The camera continues to track past the dancers to the exterior of the school; it moves in closer and the scene dissolves to the "Swing-ology" classroom. Poor Johnny is still there on the stool, alone, the only sounds being the ticking pendulum clock and the faint music from outside.

The clock, which irritates Johnny at first, becomes his salvation as he realizes it ticks in the same rhythm as the music outside. He pats his hands on his thighs as he finally gets the beat. More confident now, he starts "pecking"--by George, I think he's got it! Or as he says, "The rhythm bug bit me--la de ah!"

The ecstatic Johnny jumps off the stool and discards his dunce cap. He "pecks" a bit more as a bit of insurance and rushes out the door at full speed. The camera rejoins him outside as he speeds through the landscape, crashing the other students' party. Skidding into the scene, he hops on a hollow log where Miss Kitty Bright just happens to be sitting. To the absolute stunned silence of everyone present (including Kitty Bright), he pushes his porkpie hat forward on his head and starts to belt out the cartoon's signature number--suddenly, he's a swing virtuoso, with the voice of Johnnie "Scat" Davis:

As easy as rollin' off a log,
I found it easy, baby,
To fall in love with you....

We get a series of reaction shots as students from all over stop their, uh, "extracurricular activities," craning their necks and emerging from trees to see where this new voice is coming from.

For instance, let's cuddle,
I love to cuddle,
Get in a huddle,
It's easy with you....

As Johnny sings this, he does a dance move on the log which I believe is called "the yam"--it's similar to the step that Elmer Fudd would do a few years later in ANY BONDS TODAY. Soon, Kitty Bright herself stands atop the log and joins Johnny in the song as he sways with her (her expression of astonishment at Johnny's newfound ability is priceless, by the way):

I know that it's as easy,
As rollin' off a log,
It's awful easy, baby,
Doin' that the way you do....

It's easy, as rollin' off a log,
It's awful easy, baby, to make me think that,
You make me--you make me--think that it's true...

On the last line, she slips on the log as she sings and scrambles to keep her balance, all without missing a beat. Johnny may be good, but he still has a lot to learn from her. She continues,

'Cause I heard a few things, the things that you say...

Cut to a closeup of Johnny as he responds, "And if I do say/I love you I do, so help me it's true!"

On Kitty Bright's next few lines, "This love stuff has got me in a fog, the boys all say they love me/I wonder why they do..." her head, as if on cue, is shrouded in fog. Johnny sings the concluding line and grabs a trumpet from one of the other cats, giving us one heck of a solo--so energetic at one point Johnny's glasses come off his face and spin around.

The other cats, meanwhile, are really taken with Johnny and begin dancing to his trumpet riffs. He concludes, at a slower tempo:

Now what else could I do,
It's so easy, to fall in love with you!

On the closing strains, both he and Kitty Bright slip off the log. His glasses knocked askew, Kitty Bright smothers the unconscious Johnny in kisses as the cartoon fades out. We can safely assume she'll want his frat pin back.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
The late 1930's were a time of experimentation for the Schlesinger crew, and this cartoon is a perfect example, having one of the most unusual histories of any they'd ever done. KATNIP KOLLEGE had its origins in a live-action Warner's short from 1935 called OVER THE GOAL--a somewhat pedestrian campus musical comedy of the time (or so I've read--the film is next to impossible to find). The musical numbers, to my utter amazement, were taken directly from OVER THE GOAL'S sound track. In essence, then, this cartoon is a "cheater" of sorts, but one of the most clever "cheaters" ever made--certainly above the usual quality of Dalton's work. He proved himself more than capable of picking up the mantle left by Friz Freleng when Freleng moved to MGM. In fact, he may have done a better job than even Freleng could have accomplished, and made a cartoon worthy of comparison to such Freleng masterpieces as RHAPSODY IN RIVETS and RHAPSODY RABBIT.

Kevin likes to refer to this period in animation as "the wide-eyed '30s". Nowhere is that expression more appropriate--literally and figuratively--than in KATNIP KOLLEGE. All the characters have large, expressive, goggle-like eyes in keeping with the fondness for rounded forms common to that era (a style that Frank Tashlin would perfect during this period.) It's an ideal blend of period, Art Deco-like drawing and the popular music of the day, with an optimism comparable to that of Frank Capra films. It seems naive and even--to use the professor's expression--"corny" now, but as with the most blatantly sentimental of the Capra films, we find ourselves rooting for the underdog. Or in this case, "under-cat."

Johnny's professor was wrong. Sometimes "corn" can be a great thing.

Tags: Warner+Bros., swing+music, musical, Katnip+Kollege, Johnnie+Davis

Toons In Swing Time: Part One

2008-05-16T17:59:00.004-05:00

Reet! Lookit Little SALLY SWING (1938)

A Betty Boop Cartoon Featuring Sally Swing
Release Date: Oct. 14, 1938
Animators: Willard Bowsky, Gordon Sheehan
In Short: Betty Boop passes the musical torch to a new generation

Animation blogging can be a thankless job--especially if, like Kevin and me, you don't get paid for it.

Yet once in a while comes that unexpected discovery, that priceless artifact that makes it all worthwhile--often in the place we least expect. The find that makes us gape in astonishment as we wonder aloud, "Why hadn't I noticed this before?" I can think of no better way to describe our newest addition, an "orphan toon" in the truest sense.

In the early '30s, no one did cartoon music quite like the Fleischer studio. Rejecting the public-domain tunes, pseudo-classical pieces and merry little jingles common to Disney and other studios of the day, Fleischer cartoons were jazzy, brassy, contemporary, and brimming with sexual energy.

And no single Fleischer character embodied those traits more completely than their greatest original creation, Betty Boop. Sex and vitality were her reasons for being, and jazz was her language. Until, that is, moral crusaders did the one thing her endless lecherous pursuers couldn't--they took her "boop-boop-a-doop" away.

Betty survived the 1934 Hays Office crackdown, but she was never quite the same. Whereas she once sang such risque little numbers as "You'll Be Surprised", she was now relegated to syrupy little ditties like "Be Human", "Little Pal," and "We'll Have A Bushel Of Fun." Creeping Disney-itis had set in--as if Mae West had suddenly been possessed by the soul of a kindergarten teacher.

By 1938, she was clearly marking time, becoming the almost-incidental star of her own pictures. The Fleischers, once at the forefront of the animated-music scene with sound tracks courtesy of Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong and the Mills Brothers, were in danger of losing their position as musical innovators to up-and-comers like Warner's and MGM. Swing was now the music of the day, and needed its own spokesperson. The Fleischers, eager to move with the times, made a valiant attempt to provide one in the person of "Sally Swing."

Yes, I know--"Sally WHO?" Not many people know of Sally, and small wonder: she was to appear in only one cartoon--but what a cartoon. It may have had Betty Boop's name on it, but this was Sally's show from the moment she stepped onscreen. Read on and you'll quickly discover why.

Go To Concluding Thoughts

"You should be cleaning up!"

We open with a patented Fleischer long tracking shot through the ivy-covered halls of a university. It appears to be a rather staid institution, with signs throughout the science hall proclaiming "SCIENCE IS GOLDEN." But once we enter the double doors of the examination room of this center for higher learning, we find this is no typical college, for our own Betty Boop sits behind a desk with two students, deep in thought. Are they pondering how to split the atom? Not exactly....

"Shall we try an acrobat?" Betty asks. The two students murmur "No, no..."

"
"Maybe a dancer??" The students again respond in the negative.

"A song? That's it--let's try a song!" Betty says. The students enthusiastically agree--"I think you got something there, Betty!"--and one of them rushes immediately to a piano in the corner, pounding out a hot swing melody. As Betty moves to the rhythm, the other student joins in with his own brand of "singing," bellowing out "Good Night, Ladies." The sound, however, is closer to that of a moose with a toothache than anything resembling swing.

Betty growls in frustration and pulls a lever, activating a mechanism that can only exist in a Fleischer cartoon (or maybe a "Jetsons" episode): the floor underneath the tone-deaf frat boy starts moving, propelling him toward the exit.

Cut to a shot of a disheveled--but still pretty--cleaning woman, on her knees scrubbing the hallway outside. She's in a black dress with a patched apron, her stringy blonde hair pulled into a bun. Anyone who knows the "Cinderella" story will suspect this is our heroine...but more about her shortly. (Our cleaning lady, not Cinderella...)

As she scrubs, we can hear the muffled complaints of Betty and our ejected frat boy from inside: "You're fired!" "Yeah? Well, I quit!" Bumping into the girl (which sends her head right into a bucket of soapy water) the student goes "Humph!" Before he can stride contemptuously past her, he steps on her bar of soap, sending him skidding off-screen to a deafening crash. (Those were the best sounds he'd produced so far). We don't see his reaction, but we see the girl's: she cringes with her arms over her face as our unlucky student collides with God knows what. The girl chuckles to herself.

"I guess I'll have to audition some more people," Betty says, heading out the door. She goes out into the waiting area, hands on hips: I wonder if I can find some here to lead a swing band..." Little does she know that "someone" is closer than she thinks.

"How about you, can you swing it?" she asks to someone just off camera left.

The fellow, a fat, balding gentleman seated on a bench, points to himself and says, "Who, me??" He produces a duck from his pocket, which quacks "Ya wanna buy a duck?" (Which, as any fan of '30s pop culture should know, was comedian Joe Penner's catchphrase). When Betty turns them down, the duck quacks its displeasure in the manner of a better-known cartoon duck, who shall remain nameless.

The camera pans left to a gawky-looking ventriloquist with a dummy (or maybe that's one large dummy and one smaller one, in this case). "How about you??" Betty asks from off-camera. "My father's a dummy and I'm a chip off the old block," the dummy says as the ventriloquist's adam's apple moves up and down. Yeesh. I knew there was a reason I hate ventriloquist acts...

"No, that won't do..." Betty says. The simpleton of a ventriloquist can only respond, "Huh?" She means you stink, idiot...

Above and right: With "competition" like this, how can Sally lose?

Cut to Betty, who thinks for a moment. She asks, "Can you boys lead a band?" The camera cuts again to two vaudevillians in identical derby hats and suits. They identify themselves as "Riley" and "Kelly" before launching into a Russian "kicking dance". They conclude their act with a nasally, "Good evening, friends....

Betty dejectedly shakes her head, hands on hips again. "No, no, no!! I'm sorry, I need someone who can lead a swing band for the dance tonight!" Betty turns and starts to head back to her office. We cut to the interior, as we see her pacing while muttering, "Oh, what a predicament...what can I do for the jitterbugs tonight?...this is their big night and they expect great things...oh, can't I concentrate....isn't there someone I can get to swing??"

As soon as she finishes saying this, we hear the solution to her problem from just outside the door--a girl scat singing. The camera pans to her silhouette in the window--from our perspective, she looks as if she's "conducting" an unseen orchestra. Betty peers over the transom of her office door to discover...yes, it's our mystery cleaning lady, scatting as she dusts the doorframe. Cut back to Betty's office--Betty cries out in astonishment, opens the door and pulls the girl inside.

"Come in here! What have you been doing scrubbing? You should be cleaning up!" Betty exclaims, pulling the stunned girl over to the desk so quickly, she can barely keep up. "Oh, hurry, hurry. come here!" Betty says as she picks up the phone. "Let me speak to the president of the class...hello, Prez? This is Betty--I've got just the girl to lead our swing band at the dance tonight...yes, yes..." While Betty's talking, the girl dances along to some internal melody.

The scene dissolves to the two of them in the ballroom, as Betty continues speaking: "I know you're going to love this little swingster and singer of songs--introducing for your enjoyment, the lovely, delightful and talented Sally Swing!"

Sally Swing before....and after

"Delightful" is just the word--Sally's been transformed. In the transition from office to ballroom, we can see the change unfold--she goes from her former dowdy self, swinging a feather duster in the air, to a raving beauty holding a conductor's baton. She now sports coiffed hair and a new outfit: a small, brimless hat perched on her blonde head, tight blouse, and a skirt that reaches to about mid-thigh, along with the requisite bobby sox and saddle shoes. She's far more realistically rendered than Betty, in every way possible (for one thing, she has a neck). One anonymous poster on this cartoon's YouTube page noted a strong resemblance to the Fleischers' version of Lois Lane--she's a little more cartoony than that, but not by much.

Betty gives her a bit of competition, though--her own seemingly conservative floor-length gown turns out to be translucent. The light shines through to reveal her famous legs. It's a detail I must admit I missed when first viewing this cartoon--she hadn't quite lost her sexiness after all. But the moment, sadly, is all too brief.

"Hit it Sally!" Betty says before exiting to camera left. "Hit it" Sally does, launching into her theme number:

"Ooooh, bring along that jam, and lookit little Sally Swing,
<sax, trombone and trumpet riffs as Sally points to band members in succession>
Oh Sally, Oh Sally, oh swing,
You wanna mosey around with Mozart..."

As she sings, the camera cuts to a medium shot as she moves her hips back and forth in time to the music, "trucking" all the while (moving her finger back and forth in the air in time to the music, for those not "hep to the jive"). She gives a wink to the camera on the words, "He wrote a symphony so hot.." She's a red-hot mama, belting out the number with an energy even Betty in her prime never managed--as Sally says in song, "I want my music and my biscuits hot..."

The camera cuts briefly to a rather sour-looking professor in gown and mortarboard, who looks none too pleased with Miss Sally; we them move to a shot from the audience's POV (and slightly to the back of her) as she continues singing and strutting across the stage:

"When I'm in that groove, I wanna lead a band and sing.." <cut to a drummer who's so enthusiastic, he hits himself in the head with his own sticks>
"Oh dilly, oh dally, oh Sally, oh Sally, oh swing it, swing it..."

Crouching down while raising her arms in the air, she and the musical notes ascend higher simultaneously...she concludes her number to thunderous applause. The camera cuts quickly to Betty cheering her on. Everybody loves little Sally--except, that is, for the sourpuss professor. He sits with arms folded, still scowling.

Cut to Sally again, who reprises her number at a faster tempo...this time, we get three quick "bird's eye view" cuts of the various band members as they accompany her. The Fleischers were at their best when it came to unusual camera angles.

Cut again to a trumpet player, who takes the mortarboard off the head of a marble bust and uses it as a "mute." Then again to a clarinet player whose playing is so "hot" his instrument literally spews flames. (Somewhat reminiscent of little Bosko in BOSKO AND THE PIRATES--his "hot" dancing burns the entire ship). He extinguishes the flaming clarinet in a nearby vase.

Sally, meanwhile, scats and trucks on over to the piano player, who dances with her on stage. She repeats the opening line of her song a third time as the camera cuts to a bespectacled fellow who accompanies her in "one-man band" fashion: trumpet in one hand, trombone in another, moving the slide with his feet. The scene shifts to a fellow on fiddle and one on tuba...the tuba player's playing is so energetic he blows the toupee off the fiddle player's head. We cut yet again, this time to a short little fellow who's keeping time with his nose...he gets up and plays a riff on flute. As Sally repeats the line "Oh dilly, oh dally, oh Sally, oh Sally, oh swing!" the fellow runs over and plucks on a bass fiddle twice his size.

Sally continues to dance and scat as the scene cuts to a bit of dialogue between an elderly woman and a waiter. "Waiter, my soup is cold!" she says. "I like it HOT!" she adds as she too gets in the groove.

Meanwhile, Sally's dancing is really getting frenetic. Too much so for the old professor, who has clearly had enough. "STOP! Students, do you hear me? Stop--I can't stand it! Stop!!" He prepares to storm the stage, but Sally is unaware of any of this: dancing left, then right, then going into a "pecking" move (moving the head back and forth, like a rooster). Meanwhile, we see the killjoy professor rushing toward the stage, bellowing "Stop--I'm the principal here--stop! This is entirely against my principles!" (The voice sounds like it belongs to Jack Mercer, and this seems like a typical Mercer ad-libbed pun).

"I'm going to have you in jail!" the professor bellows as he climbs on stage. "Listen, young lady..." But Sally isn't listening--she just keeps dancing. "You're going to get yourself in an awful jam...oh jam and jive, jam and jive.." Before long, the professor too is "in the groove." The music and Sally have won him over. He turns to putty as she tickles his chin.

The scenes changes to a low shot of Sally, in silhouette, from behind facing the audience. It looks as if the camera is nearly between Sally's legs. Remember what I said about the Fleischers and camera angles? Cut to our now "with it" professor, who scats "ya-de-a-de-ah, yeah, man!"

The professor joins Sally in her dance, matching her move-for-move in a scene that must have been rotoscoped--unusual for this era, as this technique was used less often by this time. Betty emerges from the left of the screen and dances with them, as the cartoon reaches its rollicking conclusion. A cap and gown fall on Sally from above as we iris out. She's moved to the head of the class.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

This cartoon seems to have come from out of nowhere--it's an anomaly for the Fleischer studio, circa 1938, and definitely an anomaly for a Betty Boop cartoon of the time. We're treated to one last bit of the old--Betty, if only for a moment, reverts to her former sexy self--while being bombarded with the wild, flashy new. The late thirties were a time of transition for the Fleischers--their animation began to lose the "rough edges" that characterized it earlier in the decade, the very thing that had made it so much fun. Here, however, the studio makes that newfound polish work for them, and this can be seen most clearly in the design and animation of Sally. Her movements are fluid, bouncy, caricatured without being overly "cartoony"--an animated dynamo. The animators had learned a bit in learning how to draw--and animate--a female figure, and use their knowledge to full advantage here, making Sally do things Betty could never have done. Betty at her best was still a product of the "rubber hose" era, and by comparison could appear rather stiff. (It's especially evident when one sees the two characters side-by-side in this cartoon). Sally showed just how far the Fleischers had come--and gave a hint of where they were about to go (namely, the SUPERMAN series).

I have to admit my preconceptions of late-thirties Betty Boop cartoons colored my opinion of this at first. I remarked to Kevin in an e-mail how Betty had become "matronly"--indeed, a newspaper article of the time agreed, likening Miss Boop to the "grandma that sits on the end of the sofa during a date." I think the Fleischers knew this, and strove to give the folks a reminder of just what she--and her cartoons--had been. The music and action here are lively enough to fit in well with any entry from six to eight years before.

Sally proved to be a worthy successor, making one wonder what a series of cartoons featuring her would have been like. Possibly much like BETTY CO-ED--the cartoon from 1931 that gave Betty Boop her name--in which she was the red-hot mama that drove the boys crazy. One could easily see Sally picking up where Betty left off. Sadly, the torch had been passed, only to be extinguished.

She's such a charming little character, one can forgive the cornball Cinderella-like storyline (I'd have made her a mousy bookworm, myself). It takes some time for her to make her entrance, but once she does, look out.

The Fleischers clearly hadn't yet lost their touch, either visually or musically. Unlike some Harman-Ising entries, the mayhem created by the "hot" music seems just barely under control. Harman-Ising cartoons dealing with swing usually ended in total destruction, as with SWING WEDDING or BOSKO AND THE PIRATES. The Fleischers knew better, having befriended and worked closely with jazz figures in the past, and knew that world far better than midwesterners Hugh and Rudy.

This, by rights, should have been Betty's swan song. Had the series ended here, it would have gone out on a high note--in more ways than one. However, the studio seemed to have forgotten everything they had done right, for Betty would limp along for another year in such undistinguished fare as MUSICAL MOUNTAINEERS, and her final cartoon, YIP YIP YIPPEE. A cartoon studio, as with anything else, should know to quit when ahead.

Betty deserved better. And so, for that matter, did Sally.

Labels: Betty Boop, review-synopsis, orphan toon

Tags: Betty+Boop, Max+Fleischer, orphan+toon, swing+music

Size Matters

2008-05-11T00:34:00.009-05:00

A MESSAGE FROM YOUR HUMBLE TOONKEEPER, RACHEL

Before YouTube, before MySpace, when the internet was young and Bill Gates had barely made his first billion, there was Cartoon Over-Analyzations.

"Analy-whoozit?" I hear you ask. Then I call the police, because if I can actually hear any of you, it means you've broken into my apartment and are at this moment making off with my "Roger Ramjet" tapes. But I digress.

Have you ever read a ponderous, polysyllabic tome purporting to be an in-depth history of animation, only to discover it's little more than 200 pages of "word salad" on the phallic symbolism of Bugs Bunny's ears? We here at the Home For Orphan Toons have. Well, maybe not about that particular subject (though I did once hear one young lady in a coffee shop espouse that theory--with a perfectly straight face, too) but you get the idea.

And they drive us nuts.

They did one other fellow, too--and Cartoon Over-Analyzations was born. For those would-be "scholars" back in '96 with their own crackpot...I mean, insightful theories about the hidden meanings in our favorite cartoons, it was the place to go. It was all purely tongue-in-cheek, of course--unless you seriously believed "The Smurfs" was a plot to ram Communism down innocent children's throats. (I always figured they were evil, just not for that reason....)

Dear old "CO-A" died abruptly one day in 2002, the victim of a server crash--but toon geeks take heart. It's risen from the ashes in the form of a blog, which can be seen here . Thank you, Cartoon Brew, for once again brightening our day.

But then, we asked ourselves, why should that site have all the fun? Kevin and I are as badly in need of psychological counseling as anyone you're liable to find there. With that in mind, I present to you an essay by our own "Professor" Kevin Wollenweber:

Perhaps the one unnerving thing about some cartoons, primarily those of the accepted characters from Disney Studios during the reign of Uncle Walt, is that the main characters are merely humanoids dressed in animal costumes. If Mickey were really a mouse, he would have been the actual size of a mouse and Pluto would be so much bigger and Mickey, as master, a lot less menacing.

But it was no wonder that, when the theme parks were devised, it was easy enough for humans of various sizes to don costumes to look like the character walking around, perhaps the most surreal aspect of any cartoon theme park. While our favorite classic cartoons are amazing partially because we believe in these carefully fleshed-out characters, we *KNOW* that they are cartoons merely because of all the amazing (and sometimes painful) stretch-and-squash used. We knew they were cartoons, also, by the fact that, when characters were blown up or decapitated or even crushed flat, they easily bounced back with angry snarls on their faces, ready to meet the challenge of the next bit of neatly-designed violence about to occur.

Disney’s theme parks and others like it had solidified in some kids the feeling that these characters really exist in some alternate universe and, of course, That also means that you could walk up to them and tweak tails or do some sort of manic violence, because, hey, they’re cartoon characters and they can obviously snap back, right?

So allowing cartoon characters to actually walk around the place in whatever kind of form was truly the most dangerous thing Disney could have perpetrated upon the planet where television reality constantly clashes with or, more accurately, fuses with the blandest reality we all have to face every day!!

It seemed okay at, say, Warner Brothers or MGM or Fleischer/Famous or Walter Lantz or any of the other minor studios *NOT* connected with their own happy alternate theme park universe because, in many ways, the cartoons that came out of these studios had an adult bent to them. You had the feeling that, to a certain extent, the animators were doing this just for the fun of mocking all that Disney was taking seriously and, so, their cartoons were screaming “hey, we’re not real; don’t try this at home!!” So here’s Disney with his TV show talking about this amazing new world that kids can visit where Mickey and all the cartoon gang walk around and greet you happily, as if we kids were able to actually inhabit that cartoon world! What a strangely warped message!! How many times in my life have I truly wanted to be able to stretch and squash and morph into something other than myself, like a bizarre Fleischer-esque nightmare that could keep any little kid up at night.

We sure never saw an alternate theme park that gave us the opportunity to do that! Of course, some who dabbled in mind-altering drugs might have felt, within the six hours or so trapped within their own entangled subconscious, that they actually *COULD* stretch and squash and morph and all that fun stuff, but the truth is, well, like Boris Badanov had once exclaimed (and I’m paraphrasing, here), when a cartoon safe falls on a cartoon character…it hurts!!

Yet, remember, they lived through it and came out without even a small blemish! ‘Tain’t so in that drab old real world!! Maybe it would take a Tex Avery theme park to prove my point, a merry little place where, around every corner, huge objects from anvils to even the tallest building in the world could drop from the sky and people have to run this way or that to dodge the falling objects. Almost sounds like that terrific NATIONAL LAMPOON recording called “Catch it and you Keep It” where, at the close of the show, there were objects as big as buildings being tossed at the greedy audience!

It’s a small world, after all!! Ouch! Watch out for that tree!!

Kevin Wollenweber

Tags: Cartoon+Overanalyzations, parody, Kevin+Wollenweber