Wild poses like this one show that however much Robert McKimson may have wanted to calm down his animators, in the early years he didn't (or perhaps couldn't) restrain them that much. From Gorilla My Dreams (1948)
by Rachel Newstead
Fans and historians alike usually classify Robert McKimson–unfairly, I think–as a superb animator, but a poor director. Granted, his cartoons don’t appear to contain even a fraction of the insanity of those of the man for whom he once animated, Bob Clampett; still, the cartoons of his earliest years as a director (1946-1950)rank as some of the funniest to ever come out of the studio. Easter Yeggs, Daffy Doodles, Boobs In The Woods, Hillbilly Hare–these made me hold my sides with laughter when I first saw them, something even the funniest Bob Clampett cartoons never quite managed to do. (more…)
Well, I’ve actually spent all day, today, listening to Shokus Internet Radio and their new lineup, beginning with what is called The DJ And Hip-Hop Show With Lisa Shostak. Lisa Dorothy Shostak is the daughter of the internet station’s main programmer, Stuart Shostak, and she plays the big tween hits, from Lady Gaga to Snoop Dogg to the Jonas Brothers to…well, even a classic Beatles song gets thrown in the mix, but I smile to myself and think that this is Daddy prodding his daughter to give her audience that history lesson. As much as I enjoyed hearing “Here Comes the Sun” and have hailed the new Beatles remasters even on this weblog, George Harrison’s fun little tune really felt out of place amid the louder, bass-heavy beats of hits by the other younger acts here. As I listened, the music fan in me took over, and, although my crude equipment probably did not allow me to send good copies, I ended up rushing around trying to find certain music that I thought Lisa should hear and even include on her show. (more…)
With Oscar season just behind us (though I imagine some acceptance speeches are STILL going on) now is the perfect time to look back on the animated shorts lucky enough to earn that gold statuette in years past–or better still, one cartoon in particular:
WHEN MAGOO FLEW
Academy Award™ Winner, Best Animated Short Subject, 1954
Director: Pete Burness
Release Date: Jan. 6, 1955
In Short: Magoo goes to the “movies”–and the experience seems strangely…uh, REALISTIC to our nearsighted friend. Of course, being on an airplane wing thousands of feet up will give you that sensation….
My entire life, I’ve had a sort of roller-coaster relationship with the character of Mr. Magoo. As with Fred Flintstone and company, Magoo was a part of my earliest memories; my introduction to the cranky old nearsighted gent came in the form of the numerous G.E. ads featuring him in the ’60s. Then, to my young and easy-to-please mind, he seemed like just a silly old man doing crazy things, and that was enough–for awhile.
But what might have been amusing when I was four or five proved to be painful to watch when I was thirteen or fourteen, and saw my first actual Magoo cartoons (as opposed to commercials, or specials) courtesy of Los Angeles television. The plots were simple: Magoo, because of his nearsightedness and total obliviousness, would mistake X for Y, and mildly crazy things happened.
Problem was, all the plots were “Magoo mistakes X for Y, etc. etc.”, and Magoo seemed more of a menace than a source of humor, creating wanton destruction wherever he went. Then, as now, I failed to find destructiveness funny (whether deliberate or not), and after about the 10th or 15th such cartoon, I’d squirm and look to see what else was on.
As far as I was concerned, that was it between me and Magoo. Until, that is, I happened upon a segment of the wonderful Wonderama…
If you were fortunate enough to receive WNEW in New York–or KTTV in Los Angeles–in the seventies or before, you probably remember Wonderama. For those who weren’t so fortunate, it was a three-hour Sunday kids’ extravaganza (calling it a “kids’ show” seems too limiting) with a little bit of everything–music, games, cartoons, and most importantly of all, interviews, all presided over during the ’70s by the genial Bob McAllister. I happened one Sunday morning to tune in Wonderama just in time for an interview with the inimitable Jim Backus–voice of you-know-who.
Backus spoke about his early work in show business, and of course, his years as the voice of Magoo. He put on the fake rubber nose he always claimed he needed in order to get just the right vocal quality, did a few brief lines, then McAllister cut to a clip of a Magoo cartoon: the very one I’ll be discussing today, the Academy Award-winning When Magoo Flew. (more…)
Is this a frame from the earliest film of a television image? If not, it still looks early enough to be fascinating, for a TV-history fanatic like me...
by Rachel Newstead
One of the first television sets to be available for purchase, when TV was officially introduced to the public at the 1939 World’s Fair, was the RCA TRK-12. It was a large, rather unwieldy affair, its 4-foot-long cathode ray tube mounted vertically so as not to take up most of the space in one’s living room. (It contained a hinged lid with a mirror to allow a person to see the image). Very few people could afford to buy one, as they retailed at $660, a rather hefty price tag for the average Depression-era consumer. One fortunate soul who did buy one, however, ended up making history.
On the night of Aug. 31, 1939, this anonymous fellow aimed his home movie camera at the picture tube of his brand-new TRK-12 and filmed portions of a teleplay called The Streets Of New York, broadcast over NBC’s experimental station, W2XBS. Discovered in an attic in the 1990s, this film is generally considered to be the earliest motion-picture record of a television image.
Or was it?
Before videotape, most programs aired live, their images dissipating in the far reaches of space, never to be seen again. If a person put in a brilliant performance, it existed only in the memories of those fortunate enough to have seen it as it happened.Programs originating on the east coast would have to be performed twice–once for east-coast viewers, and once for those on the west coast. As this was cumbersome and costly, almost from the very beginning TV technicians worked to find a way to reliably record images–not easy considering the difference between film shutter speed and a TV’s scanning rate. Anyone who has ever attempted to photograph a TV image would know what I mean.
Starting in the late 1940s, NBC began to make the first of what came to be called “kinescopes” or “kinnies”. Basically a somewhat more sophisticated version of what that fellow with the home movie camera did in 1939, it captured images right from the television screen and recorded them to film–which is where the subject of today’s post comes in.
The YouTube clip I’ve embedded below is a 1949 NBC promotional film, explaining the workings of its kinescope filming system to TV stations and–I presume–potential sponsors.
Nothing seems particularly extraordinary about it–it’s a rather dry, talking-head presentation–until about a minute and 19 seconds in, when the host shows what he says are early experiments in capturing television images. One is a clip of the second Joe Louis-Billy Conn fight from 1946, complete with the original audio commentary.
The ones preceding it, however, are two brief silent clips from, we’re told, 1938–which would pre-date the Streets of New York film by a year. The footage, like the 1939 film, is sped up, a bit like an old silent movie, but the image of a man talking as a woman knits, and one of couples dancing in a ballroom, is easily discernible.
Are these early scenes in fact from 1938? Hard to say. They certainly look as if they were filmed off one of the primitive receiving tubes of the day, unlike most contemporary newsreel footage concerning early television (filmed footage would be spliced in to make it look as if it were coming from the set). There’s clearly no trickery of that sort here, as the images have the crude, fuzzy (yet still amazing, for the time) quality of the stills shown on this site, which were taken off one of Vladimir Zworykin’s Iconoscope picture tubes. (Even more incredible is that the images in question were taken between 1933 and 1934, which gives one an idea of how far television had already advanced).
Then again, if some of those scenes are from a 1938 television broadcast, why haven’t they received more notice? The answer to that may be as hard to find as information about the clips themselves, but to someone who’s fascinated with what Michael Ritchie calls the “prehistory” of television, they’re still irresistible.
(Note: anyone wishing to see the 1939 footage of Streets Of New York can find it at the Paley Center For Media site here, though you’ll have to download their player to view it).
NOTE FROM RACHEL: There will be no Freeze Frame Friday this week; my illustrious co-blogger Kevin was so inspired by yesterday’s review of Circus Daze that he sent a few words of his own off into the computerized ether. As I felt it to be the perfect companion piece, his post really needs to be right above mine:
Well, as usual, I thank my co-blogger, Rachel Newstead, for doing such a magnificent job of reviewing, in full detail, the HAPPY HARMONIES cartoon, “CIRCUS DAZE”, starring, as she pointed out, the fully humanized Bosko and Honey.
I’d always said that the humanized Bosko, especially in the final three cartoons in the MGM-distributed series, felt more connected to the Hal Roach OUR GANG comedies, moreso than almost all of the other toons under the HAPPY HARMONIES banner, more typically dedicated to bringing to life notable fairy tales or cute little musicals. In some cases, you could actually imagine some of the antics that happen within the first few cartoons in the MGM collection of titles starring BOSKO as having been directly inspired by the antics of the OUR GANG kids. (more…)
A circus elephant battles a swarm of fleas in a startling--and funny--break from Disney-style realism. From CIRCUS DAZE.
by Rachel Newstead
Perfection is an elusive goal, and particularly hard to define in the medium of animation. There are so many factors to consider: character design, the storyboard, the timing, the gags (if the cartoon is meant to be funny), the music, the voice work. It’s an often delicate balancing act, combining all of the aforementioned elements in exactly the right proportions, in order to make something that’s not only enjoyable to watch, but which stands the test of time.
By those criteria, Hugh Harman’s Circus Daze, released near the end of his and Rudy Ising’s stint as independent producers, is as perfect a cartoon as any I’ve seen. (more…)
Both Fred and a poor schlub of a prowler underestimate Wilma's mastery of the art of self-defense in "The Prowler"
by Rachel Newstead
The Prowler
Episode P-3
Original Airdate: Dec. 30, 1960
Writer: Joe Barbera
In short: Fred poses as a prowler to scare Wilma, but doesn’t count on a real one showing up…
Having already utilized the “dueling neighbors” and “battle of the sexes” plots, it’s perhaps inevitable that today’s episode, “The Prowler,” would make use of the next item in the Stock Sitcom Situations Handbook, the “wounded male pride” plot.
That’s not a criticism–every sitcom works its way through these, sooner or later. The good ones burn them off quickly and get them out of the way before moving on to more original material. The great ones take these stock situations and still make a brilliant episode. “The Prowler”‘s use of this particular standard situation reinforces this series’ position as one of the great ones.
“The Prowler” very nearly subverts the standard plot structure it’s placed in. Fred objects to Wilma’s taking up judo to defend herself not so much because he’s the man of the house (or cave), but because he’s too darned cheap to pay for the lessons. Pride matters to him, but not as much as money.
The male characters in this sort of plotline often sulk for days before something happens either to convince them they really are big strong he-men after all, or (more common these days) show them they don’t have to be.
Not Fred–he’s too full of misplaced confidence (and too stubborn) to go the “sulking” route. He takes a unique approach by posing as a prowler himself, to prove first that Wilma really needs him, and second (and most importantly, to Fred) that they don’t need the expense of lessons. But as we’ll soon see, the best-laid plans of Fred Flintstone often turn catastrophic. (more…)
In keeping with this blog’s current Flintstones theme, why not take a smoke break while waiting for the next review in my series to come up? Or at least watch this commercial, if you’re skittish about lung cancer:
I have to be honest. I’m a bit bewildered that so many people today find it so strange to see Fred Flintstone pitching Winstons. The over-the-top outrage and sarcasm I see in the comments every time something like this gets posted to YouTube are growing a bit tiresome.
As someone who grew up in that era (the 1960s, not the Stone Age, smart guys) a cartoon caveman selling cigarettes seemed no more unusual to me than a cartoon tuna selling Starkist (and believe me, the implications of the latter seem far darker to me).
I guess the notion prevalent today that these commercials were some sort of evil plot to hypnotize the kiddies into lighting up is the most confusing thing of all to me; the people who think that, I’m guessing, are those that consider anything animated to be strictly for children. Anyone who’s ever seen a Tex Avery cartoon would surely know otherwise.
The only truly strange thing about this commercial to me, really, is that the pack of Winstons isn’t “Flintstone-ized”; the artists could have, to use a TV term, “goofed it up” a little to make it more Stone Age-like. It just doesn’t seem as though it belongs in the same “universe” as the Flintstones.
And now that I think about it, doesn’t the pack appear huge in relation to Fred and his druggist? I guess they made ‘em a lot bigger back in Fred’s time….
Is this unnamed fellow playing the Stone Age bass a Fred Flintstone that didn't make the cut?
by Rachel Newstead
Researching cartoons can sometimes raise as many questions as answers, and on this edition of Freeze Frame Friday, we have a mystery worthy of Scooby-Doo and the gang. Fitting, really, as part of this week’s entry concerns them–sort of.
If there’s one book that can be considered the authority on all things Flintstone, it’s the one by T.R. Adams–if only for lack of competition. I truly regret getting rid of my copy so many years ago, as a vague memory of something in that book has both intrigued and nagged at me for years.
It states, as I did in my recent review of “The Swimming Pool”, that one can see early, discarded designs of the main characters (Fred especially) in certain scenes. That much is obvious, but I’m almost certain they went further, by mentioning a specific scene: the “pool warming”/birthday party that gets Fred run in for “dunking an officer”. I couldn’t for the life of me imagine at first which anonymous character in the scene they might have been referring to (as the known characters don’t look all that different) until–after about the third or fourth viewing on VHS–I happened across our bass player above. And promptly did a double-take.
He looks for all the world like Fred–granted, a pointier-nosed, relatively chinless version of him, but enough to be a close “relative.” We know that isn’t actually Fred in that scene, but there’s good reason to suspect the design of this character could have been taken from a rejected concept drawing of Fred, fished from the wastebasket and re-purposed as an “extra.” (more…)
Dumb and dumber: "Filligan" and "Artie" from "Hush My Mouse"
by Rachel Newstead
It doesn’t happen very often, but I will occasionally resurrect post ideas I’d once rejected for whatever reason, should I find myself stuck for material. The Avery series was one of those, something I’d knocked around in the back of my mind for two years before committing it to print. What follows is another: an abandoned, unpublished 2007 entry from the old Orphan Toons blog–my review of the 1946 Chuck Jones Looney Tune, Hush My Mouse.
I quit this abruptly after writing the introduction, but exactly why is lost to time. Perhaps I felt there was too much research involved; perhaps another subject began to occupy my time, or I just plain lost interest. Whatever my reasons may have been, after looking at it again a few days ago, it seemed too promising a piece to keep in a dusty corner of the internet any longer.
So for today, I’m temporarily setting aside the Flintstones review series to take you back to Jan. 6, 2007 and my review of Hush My Mouse, complete and slightly revised.
think–as a superb animator, but a poor director. Granted, his cartoons don’t appear to contain even a fraction of the insanity of those of the man for whom he once animated, Bob Clampett; still, the cartoons of his earliest years as a director (1946-1950) rank as some of the funniest to ever come out of the studio. Easter Yeggs, Daffy Doodles, Boobs In The Woods, Hillbilly Hare–these
made me hold my sides with laughter when I first saw them, something even the funniest Bob Clampett cartoons never quite managed to do. (more…)
