by Rachel Newstead

Abandoned blogs annoy me–if they’re good blogs, it saddens me. So much potential wasted, be it from lack of interest, lack of focus, the demands of real life, or all three.

And I’m annoyed especially at myself, for having been one of the worst offenders. For all of the above reasons, in addition to simple exhaustion from trying to keep up a steady flow of posts. Many good bloggers don’t post daily, or even weekly, but I was damned and determined to. And of course, given what I do (lengthy reviews with as much inside information as I can cull from sources I can find) it’s simply impossible.

I’m sorry to say simple ego also played a part.

Back in 2010, I posted a Freeze Frame Friday entry detailing a sequence from “Service With A Guile” that I assumed to be by Jim Tyer. “Assumed”, as it turns out, is very much the operative word here: shortly thereafter, I happened upon Bob Jaques’ “Popeye Animators” blog. Specifically, this post in which he takes wannabe historians like me to task for spreading misinformation about cartoons, in particular attributing scenes to animators which they did not do.

I had no desire to contribute to the problem, so I sent off an e-mail to Mr. Jacques to try to confirm that the sequence I posted was indeed by Tyer. To my mortification, it wasn’t.

I was indeed one of those spreading information, and about Tyer, no less, an animator I can usually easily spot (let’s face it, Stevie Wonder could spot Tyer’s work). Therefore, my credibility was zero–or so I felt. Never mind that it was just one mistake. I had blown something simple, a mistake I knew better than to make. So in trying to earn the respect of my fellow animation enthusiasts (a hard thing to do when you’re a girl trying to get into the boys’ club) I was back to square one.

Now, I don’t blame Mr. Jacques. He simply corrected a bit of misinformation, for which I’m grateful. But my pride had been wounded.

My original plan was to lay low for a few weeks, so I could regroup, dust myself off, and pick up where I left off, with a renewed pledge to be more careful about what I said in future. But weeks turned into months, which turned into “maybe someday I’ll start again.” And all because of one thing, something which has lurked in the background of my life since I was ten years old–depression.

It’s not a subject I particularly enjoy talking about, as I open myself to judgmental comments from others, who feel I’m merely a “whiner” and need to “snap out of it already.” But depression is persistent, and it’s a lifelong battle–not something you can “snap out of” (any more than you can “snap out of” a severe flu). You can blunt it with drugs, you can stuff it down under a faux cheery demeanor and fake smiles, you can relegate it to the background. But you can’t–I repeat, can’t–cure it.

And when you have it, it’s all you can do to get the basic tasks of daily life accomplished. Doing anything creative is too much to hope for.

Right now I’m in a remission of sorts, following a bout which began about eight months ago, one complicated by the loss of my mother to cancer in March. It has made writing all the more difficult, as my sounding board has gone. Mom and I exchanged frequent letters via e-mail, particularly in the last three years of her life. She had a wickedly barbed sense of humor, and you had to be on your toes to spar with her verbally. In writing to her, I challenged myself to be as funny as I could, writing about my misadventures in northern Wisconsin. I could vent, I could laugh, I could cry, and know I would get reassuring words back.

Now those words have been silenced, and my creative energies have to be directed elsewhere. And I could think of no better place to which I can direct them than this blog.

You see, when I gave this blog up, I noticed an odd thing happening. People kept coming, and at a rate faster than when the blog was active.

Now, I will be the first to admit I’m no Jerry Beck, or Mark Kausler, or Mark Evanier. There are other blogs that do what I do, and do it far better, such as the fascinating, informative Yowp Yowp and Tralfaz blogs. I am just a middle-aged, disabled fangirl in front of a computer terminal in a tiny living room in Wisconsin. But this blog has something people like, and I won’t question it.

I cannot guarantee I’ll post every day, or even every week. I have no long-range plans for the future of this blog, but I have a few ideas I’d like to put to you readers. Please respond if there is something among them you wish to see here, and by all means, give me suggestions of your own.

Freeze Frame Friday will be gone, as it was one of the causes of this blog being abandoned. The feature required that I identify who did each scene, and that’s not something one can leave to educated guesses, as my debacle showed.

I want to do “theme” days, perhaps a “Flintstones” Friday, in which I review one of the 166 episodes, as well as the movies and specials that came after. I intend to do the same with shows such as “The Jetsons” (especially the “classic 24″ from ’62-63).

I’d like to add a separate Essays page, in which I write in depth about about an animator, director, or series, along the lines of the “Before He Was Tex” essay posted here. Fortunately, WordPress makes that rather easy.

My original intent in starting this blog was to go beyond the subject of animated cartoons, and I hope to do that in months to come, talking about comic books, comic strips, and live-action TV shows.

As to the Facebook page, I have no plans as yet. My hope is to do video podcasts in which I review an individual cartoon. As I do not have the quality of video equipment I feel I need, however, that might have to wait.

Beyond that, I have only one other thing to say to the blogosphere, and my fellow geeks out there.

I’m still here.

Need there be any better example of why "updated", live-action versions of our favorite cartoons don't work? From http://www.filmschoolrejects.com....

by Kevin Wollenweber

There has been talk on so many cartoon or classic movie-related websites coming from disgruntled fans of older animated characters who justifiably wince at these beloved older characters being reinvented as live action figures, in some way believable by a more sophisticated movie-going audience.  I know I cringe at the possibilities on the table of yet another reincarnation and reinvention of Tom & Jerry, now as CGI figures, along with Yogi Bear, with Booboo being rumored to receive the voice talents of Justin Timberlake!!  Huh?

Now, look, I’m not going to sit here and spew at the talents of Justin Timberlake.  Believe it or not, I know very little of his music, having not readily been exposed to it or, more accurately, purposely not exposing myself to it.  To my ears, his fame came at a time when I thought that most of the pop talent on the charts sounded way too much alike to the point where a clueless individual like me wouldn’t know whether or not I’m listening to one major artist or the other, and this seemed so incredibly true, especially, of the female talent that seemed to lend so much lip service to emphasizing individuality as a major creative goal!!

However, it is not really my place or intention to spit venom at the talent of younger generations, not only because I don’t regularly listen to it, but also because mine is obviously not the generation that the music is aimed at;  and, well, I remember growing up surrounded by albums of my favorite artists, some of which are no longer in my collection, having unfortunately been replaced by passable compact disk versions as the only representation of having once cherished the albums in question.  Yet, I think even I, as hip as I thought I was at the time, would cringe if, say, Neil Young was suddenly voicing an old favorite cartoon character like a Ranger Smith or even Jet Screamer, that blink-of-an-eye phenomenon that won the heart of Judy Jetson on the second episode of the popular “JETSONS” TV show from Hanna-Barbera Studios!!

Why would anyone, young or old, think that someone like Justin Timberlake could become Booboo Bear?  Why would Timberlake, himself, want that on his acting resume?  Ooh, and I’ll bet that Britney Spears will become Cindy, and Yogi and Booboo would, thus, face off in a ninja battle for her affections?  Ugh, there I go, doing what I just insisted I didn’t want to do.  Forgive me, but the whole reinvention thing seems so incredibly silly to me and, many times, a violation of what I’d always held dear about favorite cartoons of my youth.

I’ve realized that the real joy of attempting a live action version of a classic cartoon character would have to include the actual look and feel of that cartoon.  I smile to think of, say, what a live action version of Roger Ramjet would look like.  It wouldn’t be Ramjet unless you had actual recreations, using physical and visual camera tricks, of the 20-second fight sequences in all its dated silliness, complete with shaking cameras and bizarre bits of violence (Ramjet biting someone’s toe or merely pinching someone in a battle—twice the silliness of the 1960’s “BATMAN” television show or something like that, for example), completely bloodless and comic book-like.  The first thing that such an endeavor would seek out is all the sexual innuendo that this series really did have.  You carefully listen to the dialogue of a classic Ramjet short, and you’ll be able to pick out bits of phrasing that make you snicker in wonderment as to why the censors didn’t scream and yell about that bit of phrasing like they do now about a strategically placed gunshot in an old LOONEY TUNES cartoon in which the gun violence seemed to automatically show us kids that guns could hurt you in the hands of idiots (like Elmer Fudd or Yosemite Sam).

It is hard for me to talk about the subliminal messages in some ROGER RAMJET cartoons without sounding like some snarky individual on You Tube tacking on an expletive where it doesn’t belong; so I will only tell fans of the series to listen again to the cartoons and you’ll definitely see what I mean.  I think a well-written ROGER RAMJET movie would be quite successful, but if all that anyone today ever gets out of the series is that there are double meanings within the dialogue, then you’ve already missed the point.  The wacky slapstick has to be there, almost outdoing that of the Three Stooges, because that is what a real golden age cartoon was all about!!

This is why I enjoy discussing my dimming memories of old celluloid movie tricks, like under-cranking and hand-held camera effects.  In the mid-1960’s, there were live action commercials that were as wacky as an animated cartoon.  I’d often hoped that these would someday be found again, as I’ve pointed out in earlier posts, so filmmakers could see just what would actually make a brilliant adaptation from animated cartoon to live action.  It is the look and the timing of a gag, and it was always a marvel to me that the actors subjecting themselves to the slapstick torture really knew what timing was all about and what would “read” at top speed if that particular technique were used and what wouldn’t.

But, alas, not only is it incredibly expensive to make these live action retreads of classic animated cartoons or animated movie figures, but most of them turn out to have little to do with the actual cartoon, as if the producer and director are finally acknowledging, with a wink, that the cartoon isn’t relevant to them at all.  Okay, I can understand this feeling of no real connection, but then why are you doing this to begin with if you haven’t the enthusiasm or compassion or just plain passion for it?  And, when trying to come up with a type of character that you *THINK* would be appealing to general audiences, why do you pick a character that cannot really be done well?

Look at what was done to “UNDERDOG”.  Okay, I did find it mildly amusing that, in this particular adaptation, the character’s alter-ego got his name because he regularly went around licking and nipping at the ankles of the bumbling humans within his universe, but, as the film progresses, my interest wanes and  I ultimately nod off because this Disney-like adventure film totally missed the point of the original series, a total spoof of the super hero adventure cliffhanger, either animated or live action.  The Underdog character is a bumbling super hero who destroys as much real estate in fighting crime as he saves the lives of those within the big city, and the character of Shoeshine Boy is the ultimate spoof of that mighty superhero adopting a mild-mannered persona.

And how can one beat the voice talents of Wally Cox, someone whom I’d come to enjoy on his “HOLLYWOOD SQUARE” appearances for his deadpan, mild-mannered delivery with that smirk on his face?  I don’t think we have the likes of Wally Cox around anymore!

And I guess that all the observations of “ALVIN & THE CHIPMUNKS” have already been expressed far too many times and, to many of these observers, the new incarnations are really strange, *ESPECIALLY* if you’re approaching this from a literal point of view, as if all that was formerly animated now has to be given some sort of convoluted logic and we now, for instance, have to ponder the relationship between Dave Seville as guardian/parent (?) and his “charges”, these three woodland creatures who are now the world’s singing sensation a la the Backstreet Boys or whatever boy band is the flavor of the moment! (John K. and Ralph Bakshi were probably the first to ponder the creepy implications of such an arrangement–and they did it 20 years ago. Apparently the producers of “Alvin and the Chipmunks” never saw that particular “Mighty Mouse” episode, or they have no more a sense of irony than the producers of “Underdog”–Rachel).

Knowing of the excesses of the music industry, you would think that the ALVIN & THE CHIPMUNKS franchise would be the perfect comedy antidote; well not when the idea is making something just as obnoxious that little kids can latch onto!  “THE ALVIN SHOW” featuring the voice talents of Ross Bagdasarian, creator of the Chipmunk phenomenon and its leader, the rambunctious Alvin, includes, as part of its dialogue and songs, so many pokes at the music business that you could almost say that the live action “MONKEES” had its link to the cartoon since both featured music recorded and released to intentionally promote the shows in question and both never took themselves seriously!

But I’ve seen reinventions of ALVIN & THE CHIPMUNKS and it really bothers me that most of these, with a heavy hand, end up doing exactly the opposite of what the original novelty records set out to do!  Recreating novelties like this and making them kid-friendly is once again making the same mistake of misunderstanding, perhaps, why someone like Stan Freberg got into television commercials.  Freberg was a special talent because he approached television commercials as someone who couldn’t understand why anyone would take the average hard sell of anything seriously!!  He was given the chore of doing a commercial for a candy bar with a bizarre name; so does he go on and give us a song and dance about how good it tastes?  No!  He does a whole commercial around how ridiculous the name of the candy is!  We’re left holding our sides with laughter and, well, I’d go out and buy me a few of those candy bars *BECAUSE* someone as intelligent and hip as Stan Freberg was hired to pump up the volume with an ad as wacky as this!!  Somebody get me a crate of Zagnut Candy Bars, please!!

Likewise, I want my live action cartoons to be absolutely as wacky.  Even if you’re out to make a lewd and disgusting live action film with the constant dizzying pace of a Frank Tashlin or Bob Clampett cartoon, please make it funny, and understand that the humor of the original cartoon character isn’t somehow forgotten in favor of something that is family friendly!  I beg you to sit through the “PRIVATE SNAFU” series if you think that Warner Brothers cartoons were made specifically to babysit your child.  These were the same minds that gave us Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny and twisted cartoons that date back to the age when we were striving to get far enough away from the cute Walt Disney template and give animation its own place in creative history, not entirely because we loathed anything Disney.  Why shouldn’t Disney be honored for what he’s tried to do, how he tried to uniquely tell a story that would be embraced by people of many languages?  He’s done something remarkable, here, but there have been cartoons made on a smaller scale and budget that are also beloved for entirely different reasons.

I would go so far as to say that there has never been a kid-friendly character created during the years I watched and enjoyed such things on TV that didn’t have sly adult references that allowed our parents to laugh as well, knowing that the cartoon in question was not talking down to us.

(That approach even applied to shows like “Sesame Street”:

KERMIT THE FROG: (to fairytale princess): Are you a damsel in distress?

PRINCESS: (points to outfit): What do you think this is, a pantsuit?–Rachel)

I will be interested to see how the former kids of the 1980’s, going forward, will remember their childhood favorites as broadcast on TV.  Yeah, I guess that, ten years down the road, someone will want to tackle something like, say, a POWER PUFF GIRLS movie and, hey, something like that might fly because there would still be those alive who fondly recall the characters and would want to retain the look and feel of the original series as homage to it.

In the first place, the series even became popular with older cartoon-watchers, because it also had some sly light topical references and I’d heard that this series helped bring back the animated visual gag which is something that has been lost in the age of talking head or animated radio type cartoons in which the character often yelled out to the audience what another character might have been doing offscreen so the artists involved would be able to shortcut the production and not have to actually animate such antics, a technique that, to me, slowed down the pace of an otherwise great cartoon!

We have to realize that the marketing of classic cartoons is something that the various video companies have yet to really determine.  These wacky little personalities of a bygone era cannot be reinvented, because the audience you’re trying to reach is already well aware of the shortcomings and successes of the cartoon in question and, so, the live action adaptation would  have no real link, in the minds of that audience, beyond its clumsy attempt at imitation of an atmosphere and antic that the filmmaker of the present age, in his or her apathy,fails to understand.  In this way, the studio trying this experiment has already alienated both the kids and the adults who adored the 2-D antics of the original cartoon character on its own naïve level.  I don’t expect, for example, a reinvention of something like the HAPPY HARMONIES series of cartoons that not only launched the animation which would be done at MGM studios for nearly four decades, but also, in their own way, celebrated bits of music of various genres found mainly in the public domain or legally owned by the studio, mainly because the cartoons are incredibly dated and, save for oddball action romps like “CIRCUS DAZE”, previously discussed by both of us here, really aim themselves at the same audience that enjoys the similar SILLY SYMPHONIES series from the man, Walt Disney, and his mouse named Mickey and duck named Donald and various other barnyard babies.

If something like a reinvention of a HAPPY HARMONIES series were to be done, I would instead make the music the key factor, utilizing bits of jazz, from big band to bebop in a wave of atmospheric choreographed celebrations of the ages in which the music was popular, perhaps somewhat similar to the live action swing and big band shorts recently released among the Warner Archives collections.  I would dabble in black and white as the scheme or look of the film in much the same way as the animators of the day had done and only use the analogue equipment to “age” the film as celebration of music’s unique past, more like an extension of what Uncle Walt had started with “FANTASIA” and some of the more musical cartoons from the SILLY SYMPHONIES.  The Max Fleischer and Walter Lantz studios did this quite well at times in their short cartoons of the 1930’s and 1940’s, but caricatures abound and some of these would be perceived as insensitive slaps in the faces of those who made their names as being genuinely talented.

If animation is to be honored for its versatility, then it has to be approached as a flexible art form and understood throughout all the years it was alive and well.  It is still alive and well today, but it flounders and remains in its usual safe corners all too often, and this causes me to stay in my safe little corner with the old films, totally uncensored for those who understand and appreciate them for what they are, even as cruel as they can be.  Yes, they show our blemishes and missteps as much as they celebrate our triumphs, similar to the live action films they accompanied in theaters or the TV shows they played alongside on our airwaves.

All I’m asking for is that we be allowed the unmarred originals to enjoy again and again.  Sure, it is possible that the quantities to be sold will be far less than, say, the next installment or chapter in a current popular animated series.  That’s to be fully realized because future generations want something to call their own just as we enjoyed our Beatles, Stones, Dylan, Sinatra, Rooney & Garland, Astaire & Rogers, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tom & Jerry, Popeye, Betty Boop, etc., not necessarily in that order!  It all has its place and time *AND* it still can be appreciated as something phenomenal if the proper history lesson is attached.  Those history lessons can now be applied to video releases.  It is the reason why we thoroughly enjoyed the many movie boxes that Warner Brothers was releasing, often giving the purchaser a taste of what it was like to attend a theatrical showing of the film in question.  How sad that other video companies have never taken the hint of what Warner Brothers had started and run amuck with it, and how sad that Warner Brothers has seemingly discontinued such carefully researched packages.  It was delightful to sit through the FORBIDDEN HOLLYWOOD or BUSBY BERKELEY collections, for example, and listen to the wealth of music and animated mayhem, sometimes even seeing the performers who were all too often only remembered for their caricatures in the classic cartoons.  Those are the monumental projects that I know I’d always hoped for…at least one more time!!

Fantastic effects: A cantankerous old mouse swims desperately against literal "amber waves" of grain, the highlight of the occasionally confusing THE FIELD MOUSE (above); meanwhile, the Wallace Beery-inspired Papa Bear holds his own against a similar "tide" in A RAINY DAY ( below, right)

by Rachel Newstead

If ever there were an argument for the full restoration of the Harman-Ising MGM cartoons, it can be found not only in that favorite of  Kevin and mine, Circus Daze, but in the two cartoons we’ll be discussing this week: The Field Mouse (1941) and A Rainy Day (1940). The grainy images I’ve included here hardly  do them justice; I can’t begin to image how they must have appeared on movie-theater screens.

The cartoons are not without their problems; The Field Mouse, for instance,  forgets its story after the first two minutes. It opens by focusing on the one little field mouse, Herman, who’s not as diligent as the other mice. He’s spanked and scolded by his mama for sleeping while his brothers are out in the fields working. He resolves to run away, but is persuaded otherwise by his lovable but cantankerous old grandpa, who reminds him of the cookies he’d be missing out on. (Grandpa himself doesn’t seem to be a devotee of hard work, despite his song “Can’t get cheese from trees, you know/ so sow what you reap and reap what you sow….”)

If The Field Mouse is a cautionary tale on the virtues of hard work, that message isn’t clear, and gets cast aside rather quickly as we’re thrown into the cartoon’s second plotline: Herman and Grandpa’s valiant fight to escape the blades of a menacing thresher.

Herman does continue to disobey his mother by trying to catch a nap on a nearby flower,  but the thresher interrupts his efforts. It would have come anyway–and placed him in every bit as much danger–even if he had been working. So what’s the moral?

Problems with logic aside, it’s the thresher scenes that make this cartoon memorable.  Animated by Paul Sommer and former Disney animator Leonard Sebring (thanks to Mark Kausler for the information) this sequence is an eye-popping example of animation at its best.

A Rainy Day has a more coherent, and far simpler, storyline: grumpy, lethargic Papa Bear attempts to fix a tiny hole in his roof, which thanks to his bumbling and a sudden violent storm, becomes series of cavernous ones, then a virtual maelstrom of shingles; like Herman and his grandpa, poor Papa Bear has to struggle against an ever-rising tide which laps against the edge of the little house like waves on the shore. (And looks, at certain points, about twice as large as it logically should have been). It manages to be both funny and immensely frightening, not an easy trick with such a realistically-animated cartoon. (Kausler tells me the roofing-tile scenes were the work of Bill Littlejohn, a man as capable of stylized, UPA-like design and animation as of the traditional Disney style).

I liked these scenes long before I liked Harman and Ising in general; at the age of twelve, when the sight of a Harman-Ising cartoon would normally drive me from the room, I’d stay put when I heard the opening music for A Rainy Day. I would endure Mama Bear’s syrupy song (I’m guessing, but Mama Bear’s fluttery, scatterbrained mannerisms must have been inspired by the equally fluttery, scatterbrained Billie Burke) and what I then felt to be the dead-slow timing of the first few minutes to see Papa Bear swim against the tiles just one more time; my attention would perk up the moment the thresher in The Field Mouse approached (would that I had a VCR in 1974….)

Finding information on Leonard Sebring proved as challenging as Papa Bear’s struggle with the roof: his career in animation was surprisingly brief. Tiring of life in California, he would leave MGM shortly after the release of The Field Mouse to return to his native Gardner, Kansas. There he’d work on advertising projects for local companies and regale the locals with stories of his days at Disney. From all indications, he was every bit as much of a character in his later years as Grandpa Mouse had been; according to this article, one of his more eccentric accomplishments was the remodeling of his late mother’s house to resemble Snow White’s cottage. (The link is to a PDF file, so a reader like Adobe Acrobat is required in order to view it).

Paul Sommer’s career is far more extensive; on viewing his resumé, it’s obvious he had a long and varied career (ranging from the aforementioned The Field Mouse to Tom and Jerry Kids, if the IMDB is to be believed) but at times he seems better known for who he worked with than for what he’d done. He was at Columbia-Screen Gems during its “mini-renaissance” of the early forties (the period under Frank Tashlin and Dave Fleischer). The cartoons he co-directed with Tashlin, such as Professor Small and Mr. Tall (1942), resemble an embryonic form of  the UPA style. Though the cartoons themselves are uneven (Professor Small and Mr. Tall, however, is just strange enough for “cult classic” status) he and Tashlin deserve credit for trying to take the art of animation in a new direction.

I’ve included here a little surprise, generously provided by Mark Kausler: the original assignment sheets–or “drafts”–from The Field Mouse, indicating which animator was to handle a given scene (though I’m told this wasn’t  strictly followed). As luck would have it, I’m also able to supplement it with a scene-by-scene animator breakdown courtesy of YouTube.  Enjoy–I certainly did. (The scene shown at the top of this post–animated by Sebring–is mentioned on the third page).

Houston, we have a domain.

Because we wish to attract more traffic–and because the old URL was so devilishly hard to type–the Test Pattern has moved to a pricier neighborhood, so to speak. As of midnight last night, the address is http://digthiscrazytestpattern.com. Fortunately, those of you who have our old address bookmarked (if there are any out there) will still be able to use it–you’ll be rerouted here.

You may already have noticed the blog has a different look. This is a new WordPress template called “ChaoticSoul”, and not only is it sleeker than the one we were using, it’s the only new template that didn’t require us to put our “Cecil as test pattern” header up all over again.

We’re planning a few more “tweaks” as finances permit–like the ability to embed our own video and audio–but for now, make yourself comfortable in the new surroundings.

If Bugs knew what he was in for, he'd be even more skeptical than he is in this scene from EASTER YEGGS (1947).

by Rachel Newstead

Easter Yeggs

Release Date: June 28, 1947

Director: Bob McKimson

Writer: Warren Foster

In Short: If you sub for the Easter Bunny, make sure you have a good hospital plan and a bullet-proof vest….

Every Easter, I have a tradition.

I do my hair, put on my makeup, select my best outfit and go to the local Radisson for brunch. Then I come home and watch today’s cartoon.

Like most traditions, the roots for this one are long and deep; decades ago, long before I knew enough about animation to dislike Bob McKimson, Easter Yeggs would make me hold my sides with laughter. For me, such a reaction happens rarely enough that I make note of  it when it does;  if a cartoon makes me laugh repeatedly, I mentally enshrine it among the Classics, to be viewed and viewed again. Easter Yeggs has never failed to raise a laugh from me, not even after thirty-five years of viewing.

EASTER YEGGS not only has funny dialogue, it LOOKS funny: exaggerated perspective--as in the scenes above and below--heighten the humor. It's also a rather clever and original way to vary the scaled-down, two-character shots that were becoming commonplace after the war.

Most Warner cartoons have at least one memorable line. Easter Yeggs has so many, it’s hard to keep track:

• “It’s the suspense that gets me!”
• “I’m waiting for the Easter wabbit. When he comes in looking so fwuffy and cute with his wittle basket of Easter eggs–BANG!! Easter wabbit stew!!  Hahahahaha!”
• ” I can’t miss with my Dick Twacy hat!”
• “But you can’t quit! You’ll give the Easter rabbit a bad name!”…”I already have a bad name for the Easter rabbit!”
• “I wanna Easter egg! I wanna Easter egg!”
• And of course, “And remember, keeeeep smiling!”

Thanks to Chuck Jones, we tend to think of Bugs as a calm, confident character who easily adapts to any situation, so it’s easy to forget that it wasn’t always a hallmark of his character. Warren Foster’s treatment of him was more in the Clampett vein, typically putting him in oddball “fish out of water” situations. Bugs’ eventual victory, though likely, was not absolutely assured–the attraction of a Foster-written Bugs cartoon is not in seeing how Bugs wins, but in discovering if he does in spite of everything Foster throws at him.

...."The happy Easter Rabbit, hooray!" Thought it was impossible to stomp and skip at the same time? Not in this cartoon....

Bugs does have more than his share of hurdles in this cartoon. Not only is he conned into subbing for a sad-sack Easter bunny (based on Mel Blanc’s “Happy Postman”, an equally forlorn Burns and Allen character), he has to contend with a pint-size Dead End Kid as well as the usual nuisance of Elmer Fudd. (Here a little more hot-headed than usual, almost to the level of Yosemite Sam).

(For the younger folks, the term “Dead End Kid” originally referred to the juvenile stars of the 1935 play Dead End–about New York street kids–as well as the subsequent 1937 movie. The play and movie spawned a film series known by various names, but which is generally known as The Bowery Boys.  The play, and the movie series, launched the show-business careers of Leo Gorcey and  Huntz Hall, among others).

So many interwoven plot threads in a mere seven-minute cartoon is a risky move, but Foster manages to accomplish it without causing the entire story to collapse. Mainly, of course, because he doesn’t let us forget about them–the depressive Easter Bunny appears throughout, often in the oddest places (like right in the middle of Bugs’ “magic act”) while the Dead End Kid makes a reappearance at the end, to torment Elmer this time. And of course, Bugs has one final score to settle with Mr. Easter Rabbit.

Easter Yeggs also scores points for recycling a little tune from the 1939 Hare-Um Scare-Um, but with new lyrics more cynical than demented:

“I must be gettin’ looney-tuney, touched in the head,

Dis whole t’ing is gooney, I shoulda stood in bed…“

Together, all these elements combine to make a cartoon even more manic than Hare-Um Scare-Um–without requiring Bugs to bounce all over the scenery.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

Poses and expressions like this could still get laughs, but more and more, the dialogue started to carry the burden...

It’s interesting–when I think of Warner Bros. cartoons made prior to 1945, I think of the wonderful animation and sight gags. For anything after 1945, I think of the wonderful dialogue. Even professional animation historians will gush over the unconventional, proto-UPA animation style of Chuck Jones’ The Dover Boys (1942), but are more likely to talk about the memorable lines of the “Bugs-Daffy-Elmer” trilogy, such as “Pronoun trouble!” (Even though the trilogy is every bit as meticulously animated).

I suppose this can partly be explained by the budget cutbacks the various studios were forced to endure in the late forties: lower budgets mean sparser animation. But the period immediately after the war seems to be an era in which the writers of the Warner Bros. finally came into their own. New talent like Bill Scott and Lloyd Turner was coming in; those who had been there for years, like Foster and Maltese, were close to perfecting their craft. Consequently, the characters created in 1945 and beyond, like Foghorn Leghorn and Yosemite Sam, are tailor-made for talk. (In the case of  Foghorn, a great deal of talk).

Whatever the reasons, the age of what Chuck Jones would eventually call “illustrated radio” was dawning, and far sooner than most people might think. Long before, in fact, the upstart medium of television would make it a necessity.

However, when  great writing makes as much of an impact on a person’s life as this cartoon’s has made on mine, being remembered solely for the dialogue is no vice.  A well-animated short, such as Disney’s, may be admired for its beauty. But how many become an annual tradition?

(Added picture and caption, 4/4/10).

Agent Buddy examines his clever undercover disguise in BUDDY THE GEE MAN

by Rachel Newstead

Buddy The Gee Man

Release Date: Aug. 24, 1935

Director: Jack King

In Short: In his very last appearance, Buddy’s one of the Feds, and investigates a prison warden who hates music. An act, of course, unforgivable in a Buddy cartoon….

Say the name “Buddy” and “Looney Tunes” in the same sentence to an animation fan–try it. I dare you.

But before you do it, I highly recommend a good, solid industrial headset to drown the resulting eardrum-liquefying screech of outrage.

Let’s face it, of all the Looney Tunes characters, Buddy is not only the last one we’re likely to remember, but the one we most want to forget.

But how fair is that, really? It’s something I never really gave much thought, until this recent e-mail question from Kevin:

…do you really think that Buddy is a wholly uninteresting character? I guess I’m getting more out of the soundtracks than you are out of the visuals….

Such a simple question, yet so difficult to answer. Kevin has an annoying way of doing that with his questions, making me ask myself why I like what I like. I mean, there are Buddy cartoons I actually enjoy, but the character….

I suppose the best answer would be “yes”–with qualifications.  I do think Buddy is completely uninteresting, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I dislike the cartoons that feature him. They can be quite enjoyable, almost despite themselves. But they would be just as enjoyable, I think, if Buddy weren’t there.

Characters like Buddy, the products of an escapist era Kevin likes to call the “wide-eyed ’30s,” were only the nominal stars of the cartoons in which they appeared. The real star, the cartoons’ reason for being in the early sound era, was the music.

And what music! The Fleischers’ soundtracks alone, aided by the New York studio’s easy access to the top jazz artists of the day, hardly need mentioning. The Disney Silly Symphonies were created as experiments in combining music and images, and elevated both to new heights. The cartoons Harman and Ising released through Leon Schlesinger–particularly the Silly Symphony-knockoff “Merrie Melodies”– were meant to promote the vast Warner Bros. music catalogue. And they made good use of it.

The early Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies might never have reached the heights of Disney or Fleischer, but the scores could sweep the audience along on a wild musical roller coaster. Witness the drunken, hallucinatory joyride two characters take through town in You Don’t Know What You’re Doing (1932), in which both sight and sound seem to get knocked completely askew as we experience the whole thing from their inebriated point of view.

So it was only natural after the departure of Harman and Ising that the newest Looney Tunes star, Buddy, would be a song-and-dance man, as had Bosko before him. Buddy and his girlfriend Cookie sang and danced their way through such early efforts as Buddy’s Beer Garden, Buddy’s Day Out, and Buddy’s Circus–bouncy little musicals meant to capitalize more on the novelty of sound than on what the characters are actually doing.

But just as live-action films began to shift away from plotless musicals, so too did animated cartoons. Cartoon characters became less of an animated entertainer and more the participant in an actual story. Over at Disney, Mickey finds himself fighting (however humorously) pirate Peg Leg Pete in order to protect Minnie in Shanghaied (1934); at Fleischer, Popeye would begin a long series of battles with Bluto for the hand of Olive Oyl.

Meanwhile, at the Schlesinger studio, the Buddy cartoons–under the direction of former Disney animator Jack King–began to take on an air of adventure. He’d save a little Chinese girl from being sacrificed in Buddy The Gob, encounter a friendly dinosaur in Buddy’s Lost World, and rescue his girlfriend Cookie from the clutches of a Svengali-like mad musician in Buddy The Detective. Music still figures prominently, but it’s merely part of the plot, not the plot in itself.

Yet even though Buddy takes a more active role in King’s cartoons than in the cartoons of other directors, he’s still little more than a prop–it’s the supporting characters that steal the show, even in what is inarguably the best of the Buddys, Buddy The Gee Man.

It’s a strange little hybrid of a cartoon, combining the mini-musicals of a couple of years earlier with the mini-adventures King did so well. For that reason, it’s easily my favorite of the series. But as was the case with my favorite Bosko cartoon, Bosko In Person, the best unfortunately turned out to be the last.

Our hero, here perhaps the country’s shortest Federal agent, is assigned to sneak into “Sing Song” prison and investigate conditions there. Ah, but there’s no singing at Sing Song–warden Otto B. Kinder (yuk yuk!) has banned it from the premises, not even allowing four prisoners to indulge in a nice little close-harmony rendition of  Al Dubin and Harry Warren’s “Lulu’s Back In Town.” (The old meanie!)

Buddy and his pipe-smoking detective dog “Gee Man” sneak into the prison just as the police deliver “Machine Gun Mike”, a tough bulldog. (It’s odd how Buddy seems to be the lone human among humanized animals, isn’t it? Maybe he should have worn a dog suit instead of a false mustache.)

What they see is about as bad as they expected: the warden’s motto, printed on a poster on his office wall, is “ALL WORK AND NO PLAY!” (In a prison?

Our warden, a real barrel of laughs....

Imagine!)

While Buddy furiously scribbles notes, we look in on a few of the prisoners:

Machine Gun Mike gets a letter from what he thinks is his girl, but it turns out to be a chain letter (not too different here from a present-day pyramid scheme). Such schemes proved quite popular in the cash-strapped Depression, reaching the height of their popularity at about the time this cartoon was released. They were decidedly less popular with the overtaxed postal workers who had to deliver them….

When the prisoner in the next cell laughs at him, the warden overhears and bellows: “Quiet!! No laughing around here!”

The gravelly voice of the inmates sounded strangely familiar; on investigation, I found it belonged to a fellow named Danny Webb, who I’m quite certain did a similar voice in several Walter Lantz cartoons (the sergeant in Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy Of Company B, for one). The voice of the character in the Lantz cartoon sounds identical to the one heard here. The warden, of course, is perennial bad guy Billy Bletcher.

The guy on the left is definitely my role model...

Cut to a prisoner in the yard, catching a nap while lightly tapping the rocks he’s supposed to be breaking, with a ridiculously tiny hammer. The warden hands him a normal sledgehammer and bellows for him to “get to work!” The not-too-bright prisoner almost succeeds in cracking the warden over the head with it, and somehow manages to smash it on the rocks. The warden’s none too pleased, and forces the prisoner to chip away with the tiny hammer again.

In the meantime, Machine Gun Mike decides to find better accommodations, so he tries to send himself over the wall by shooting himself out of a cannon. The cannon simply backfires, causing the irritable warden to hand him a pick and growl “Get to work!” During all this, Buddy and “Gee-Man” happen to be watching.

Buddy types up his recommendations to the head of the department, and we next see a screaming headline:

BUDDY MADE WARDEN!

The next thing we see is Buddy yelling “Is everybody happy?” to a cheering crowd of prisoners. (I’m almost certain this crowd scene would be used in a later cartoon, but I couldn’t determine which one). New warden Buddy has transformed the prison into something resembling a resort, serving ice cream to the convicts; prisoners get their shoes shined while their nails are cared for by a pretty manicurist. The place is so much fun now, even tough Machine Gun Mike burns up his pardon papers to stay there.

The four gentleman silenced by the former warden sing Buddy’s praises to the tune of the earlier song, “Lulu’s Back In Town”; once word gets out that “Buddy’s warden now!”, criminals are actually clamoring to get in. The last we see of this cartoon–and of Buddy–is a scene of him holding up a “NO VACANCY” sign.

Oh, and the old warden? Well, instead of hammering rocks, the convicts hammer him.

I hate to be the pessimist here, but I have a feeling Buddy’s new career as warden lasted about as long as his career in cartoons….

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

When the year 1935 began, I doubt any animator on the tiny Leon Schlesinger studio staff had an inkling they would soon turn the world of animation inside-out: revolutions are often hard to recognize when one is part of them. But that’s precisely what they would do–by the end of that pivotal year, they would have a new star character (Porky Pig), a new animation director (Tex Avery) and the first glimmers of a newer, crazier approach to humor. The studio that began 1935 imitating Disney would, by the end of that year, be well on its way to its future position as the studio that others imitated.

Revolutions, however, are not without their casualties; Buddy would unfortunately be one of them, and the innocence of the “wide-eyed” era would not be long behind. Audiences would no longer be satisfied with characters bouncing to a cheery little song–they wanted to laugh, and they wanted characters that did more than give them something to look at on screen while the music played.

More’s the pity, because this is a terrific cartoon. One comes away wishing there had been more musical numbers in the cartoon, as the “Lulu” number was quite entertaining. There aren’t many gags to speak of, though I did like one near the beginning: Buddy spits on a horseshoe for luck, tosses it away, and shatters a mirror, a situation liable to give the superstitious brain cramps. If a lucky horsehoe breaks a mirror, do they cancel each other out? That’s almost like a Stephen Wright joke (he’s the comedian who once said, “I bought some powdered water, but I didn’t know what to add…”)

I can’t say I’m clamoring for the return of Buddy. But I do wish today’s cartoons had the vitality of the cartoons of the “wide-eyed” age.

by Rachel Newstead

If I have one flaw, it’s this: one little comment is often enough to send me into a depressive tailspin.

I didn’t react well to Bob Jaques’ recent comments on my recent Freeze Frame Friday post. Though I know, intellectually, that he was only trying to be helpful, I became so self-conscious over the last week or so that it has become difficult, if not impossible, to write anything without second-guessing myself. Consequently, I haven’t been around much lately.

Fortunately, the bout was temporary and my confidence has returned. It has not, however, returned quickly enough to do a Freeze Frame Friday this week. That feature will, however, return on April 9, with a look at a cartoon that is perhaps Hugh Harman’s single finest work, The Field Mouse. There’ll also be a bit of a surprise. What that will be, I’d rather not say–you’ll have to, as they used to say on TV, tune in next week.

I can, however, give you an idea of what’s in store over the next few days:

• Buddy has to be the “Rodney Dangerfield” of cartoon characters, but is that reputation deserved? You’ll find out what I think tomorrow when I talk about the last–and possibly the best–Buddy cartoon, Buddy The Gee Man.
• As you might have already guessed, I love early television as much as I do cartoons, and have a little piece for your consideration about the man who invented the home video recorder–in 1928.
• If you ever needed proof that Pinto Colvig was as much an actor as a voice man, you need look no further than the 1942 Ding Dog Daddy, which I’m going to review.

The time I’ve spent away hasn’t been entirely unproductive–in addition to enjoying some unseasonably warm spring weather for Wisconsin, I’ve been haunting Stu Shostak’s Shokus Internet Radio site. I have to tell you, this is one of the net’s little undiscovered treasures, especially Shostak’s own Stu’s Show. This week our friend Mr. Shostak has as his guest the king of oddball radio, Dr. Demento–a man who introduced me to the novelty records of a fellow named Benny Bell.  It’s been airing since Wednesday, but repeats will run for the next few days.  I strongly urge you to catch Stu and The Demented One tomorrow at 7 PM Eastern Daylight Time. You were warned….

The wooden sodiers come alive, in Hal Roach's 1934 film BABES IN TOYLAND (a.k.a. MARCH OF THE WOODEN SOLDIERS)

by Kevin Wollenweber
Well, obsessing as I often have far too much time to do over comments I’ve made about memories of visual effects in movies or cartoons, I think I figured out what is so surreally humorous or interesting about “under-cranked” or time-lapsed photography used in comedy or to enhance action.  First of all, the best such photography occurs when the subjects can be taught to play along with the effect.  If, for example, you’re trying to convey unbridled chaos in a crowd situation, you could slow the camera down and have the actors in the crowd move at regular speed, but they should do so as if oblivious to their surroundings.  In so doing, if, say, the situation is for crowds of frantic shoppers to move along tightly populated  aisles of merchandise, grabbing at things over and around other shoppers also grabbing at things, they should do so as if they were “programmed” to do what they are doing, like the wooden soldiers in the Stan & Ollie version of “BABES IN TOYLAND/MARCH OF THE WOODEN SOLDIERS”.

What I’ve found so amusing about the effect of sped-up action like this is that the participants all look like toy figurines run amuck.  This is true of that whole sequence in the BETTY BOOP cartoon, “MORE PEP”, as the energy-inducing substance wafts over the streets of New York and automatically begins speeding up everything, including drivers and people just casually out for a stroll on their lunch hour.  Somehow, the stimulating antidote to lethargy begins seeping out like a white vapor over the live action surroundings and all hell breaks loose, as is usually the case in a strange and wonderous Fleischer cartoon of this type.

This is also true in that Mazola corn oil commercial I referred to in an earlier posting, even though it is only one woman and her shopping cart.  She speedily rushes through scenery as if she were electrically charged, grabbing at anything she needs with stiff, exaggerated body language to accent how tired she’s getting until you feel her relief as she falls limply into the recliner, kicks off her high heels and plops her tired feet on the footrest with that almost cartoonish emphasis of weariness on her face.  You can almost see the lines of over exertion around her mouth and eyes.  The actress could have been a cartoon, but it is the fact that this is a live actress turned into an animated cartoon by a mere photographic effect that allows us to believe that a person is really moving this fast through her daily activities.  On film, you’re not even totally aware that this is actually being sped up, whereas, I’m told that the effect isn’t quite the same using digital technology, but I’ll leave that to a professional to correct me if my assumption here is wrong.

If the under-cranked choreography is done correctly, a chaotic crowd scene of similar shoppers, rushing about and bumping into each other or bouncing off each other while in the process would look as if they were all mannequins, blindly moving about on their programmed duties, temporarily bouncing off each other’s bodies while doing it, but not missing a beat after stumbling and continuing to rush about as originally “programmed”.  After all, the point of the image is that the shoppers are after that bargain, even if they have to step on others to get there.  Or, if an actor in a time lapse scene falls stiffly to the floor after an altercation or collision, he can almost look like a cardboard cut-out that falls backwards.

We saw incidents like this on filmed visuals on shows like “ROWAN & MARTIN’S LAUGH-IN”, but mostly these were used to good effect in commercials, and that is why I liked the wackier commercials of the latter 1960’s, some of which, like this one, almost made no sense and, ultimately, would not keep us remembering the product as much as the silly situation.

On an unrelated note, I was playing the contents of one of those volumes from Columbia House in the “WOODY WOODPECKER SHOW” series of disks, and I can’t say enough about the earliest incarnation of Andy Panda, especially when it comes to the character’s voice.  No one, absolutely *NO

Andy Panda, as he appeared when Sara Berner voiced him. From LIFE BEGINS FOR ANDY PANDA (1939)

ONE* can do that baby doll voice for comic effect like Sarah Berner.  She is, of course, also noted for doing the voice of Toots in the LOONEY TUNES cartoon “QUENTIN QUAIL”, about a father bird and his petulant daughter who so likes to be by Daddy’s side as he goes out to catch his morning worm.  Miss Berner is funny but a little abrasive in that Warner Brothers classic, but in the early Lantz cartoon which introduces us to the inquiring little panda boy, Sarah plays the role so perfectly that you almost wish that the character were instead based on a little girl.  When Andy asks pressing questions to a somewhat childish Papa Panda about nature and he irritatedly answers him with some convoluted summation answer to his questions of “whyyyyyeeee?”, with a similarly innocent half-understanding “ooooohhh”, every mother and father can relate to the tone in that little voice.  I know, because I’ve a little grand niece who is now at the age where she needs to know, constantly, the reason “whyyyyeeee!”

Sarah Berner never loses the little child in her voice, even when Andy has to tangle with the poacher tribesmen who wait outside the forest habitat, waiting for game.  Andy manages to escape danger every time, just by being a kid and teasing the hunter/gatherers out of their game with the same glee as he would in playing games with his exasperated Papa.  In subsequent ANDY PANDA cartoons, the voice chores would be given to Walter Tetley who, of course, was later immortalized as Sherman, Mr. Peabody’s “pet boy” in the Jay Ward series of cartoons about the canine genius, but we lose that infant glee that the character seemed to have and only Sarah Berner could show us.  Miss Berner was one of the last to show such talent, coming out of the 1930’s where we had not only Sarah Berner, but also Berneice Hansen, most remembered for her voice of Little Cheezer and countless cherubic rodents and birds in earlier 1930’s cartoons and Mae Questel who gave that cute baby talk to her BETTY BOOP takeoff on the voice talents of Helen Kane.

I’d go so far as to say that I long to see more Lantz cartoons come out on DVD just so I can get the remainder of the earliest ANDY PANDA cartoons, even though most of these were included as uncut film prints throughout the Columbia House Lantz series.  There is an ANDY PANDA cartoon that was produced soon after the debut, “LIFE BEGINS FOR ANDY PANDA” that was nothing more than a battle of wits between baby Andy and the tribal hunters that is fantastically well timed in most of its comedy, and I hope to see that in any subsequent volumes, in full and complete restoration.  (Note: LIFE BEGINS FOR ANDY PANDA was the debut Andy Panda cartoon–I believe Kevin is referring to 100 PYGMIES AND ANDY PANDA here–Rachel).

With news of such future releases looking rather slim right now, I am not expecting this to be so anytime real soon, but I do hold out hope that this cartoon, whatever its title, will be one of the next in the series to be chosen for inclusion therein.

Even though cherubic and even cloying characters were the norm in the 1930’s, various studios approached this cuteness from a different angle.  Walt Disney Productions embraced it whole-heartedly as Disney wanted to stress the passion he had for childhood tales told without a single drop of cynicism, but you always felt the underlying disenchantment that other studios had for that sort of tale-telling, and it is noteworthy that some voices who took part in the serious efforts of Walt Disney to tell the innocent morality tales *ALSO* took part in the other studios’ mockeries of this passion Disney had for such tales.

When Sarah Berner plays the guile of a child to the hilt, she is clearly poking fun at the way Disney looked at the tiniest little creatures, sometimes even voiced in Disney cartoons by children, and on that level it works.  Yet, there is still an innocence retained in her performance of it.  She brings a sweetness to performances that might be sneered at as being overtly insensitive today, as she does in a JASPER cartoon from George Pal’s PUPPETTOONS series in which the little black boy is seen gently playing a sad little tune on his fiddle to soothe an old Southern racehorse, put out to pasture.  Jasper finds out about the horse’s racing past when he begins playing a jig and reel that excites the horse into racing wildly around the barnyard, and this gets Jasper interested in entering the old horse for one more victory in the Kentucky Derby.  Miss Berner plays the little boy Jasper in the same way she plays the little boy talking to Uncle Tom in the MGM Tex Avery classic, “UNCLE TOM’S CABANA” and, because Sarah does the voice so well, you’re drawn into the story, as only George Pal, the Walt Disney of his native land, could tell it.  Likewise, Sarah Berner could lend her voice to the speed-talking little Agnes in the DAFFY DUCK cartoon, “NASTY QUACKS” from Frank Tashlin, that skinny little dark-haired girl with the bow in her hair who comes between her Dad and Daffy in one beautifully timed scene just as Dad is ready to brutally clobber Daffy, explaining in a breathlessly long sentence how teacher said we should be kind to animals and that she loves the little duck enough to protect him.

In “DING DOG DADDY”, another Warner Brothers cartoon that features, prominently, the voice of Pinto Colvig as the lovesick dog, Sarah has a brilliant bit part as a white longhair female with whom the male dog becomes smitten.  When Pinto gives out with that country bumpkin laugh as only Mr. Culvig can do, Sara reels back her head and snootily mocks every

Sara puts a dead-on, yet mean-spirited imitation of the Pinto Colvig dog into the mouth of this snooty girl dog in DING DOG DADDY (1942)

nuance of that laugh and answers his advances with a negative that is as funny as it is sad to see the Colvig character scoffed.

And, lastly, I do want to elaborate on Pinto Colvig’s voice work on this cartoon from Warner Brothers, called “DING DOG DADDY”.  While Mel Blanc is given voice credit for his work on Warner Brothers cartoons, there were a few that did not feature Blanc’s talents at all.  This is not to take away from the genius of Blanc, but it does seem that, no matter who did voice work for the studio, the cartoons always brought out the best in the voice talent.  I would go so far as to say that Pinto Colvig, most notable as the voice of Goofy at Walt Disney Studios, also known as The lovable Goof, gave all his best performances at Termite Terrace, and “DING DOG DADDY” is no exception.  When the Sarah Berner longhair aristo-dog spurns his advances, he sadly wanders around to the tune of “St. Louis Blues” until he falls literally head over heels in love with a statue in the park.  He rushes up to this gorgeous fixture of a dog and fumbles for the words, even burying his head in the sand and rolling giddily around in a flower bed before kissing the dog which is struck by a bolt of lightning at the same moment, making him think that this otherwise lifeless beautiful dog is the greatest kisser he has ever encountered.  Colvig’s performance is so good here that, even though we laugh at how utterly dopey he is for believing this creature of a statue to be real, we genuinely feel for him when he follows the truck that takes the statue to be disassembled at a munitions plant.  We hear his forlorn cries as he searches for his Daisy among rows and rows of potential ammunition.  He’s sitting there, surrounded by huge bullets and calling his potential girlfriend’s name and crying “I guess I’ve lost ya, Daisy.  I’ll never see you again!”  Only Bugs

In DING DOG DADDY, Pinto Colvig gives us a goofy (as opposed to Goofy) character with real dimension, one we can truly feel for....

Bunny would give a better dramatic performance after Elmer Fudd blasts a bullet in his direction.

This proves that the voices in classic cartoons were incredible, so believable in their simplicity.  If only the big budget talent hired to play parts in animated cartoon movies of the present age were able to approach their characters with the same zeal as Sarah Berner and Pinto Colvig, I think that animation still has a lot to say, even if funny animals.  What the age of CGI doesn’t quite understand is that funny animals were funny because they were cartoons and cartoons allowed us, through voice talents, to believe in the utterly ridiculous for even the amount of time it takes to sit through a classic animated short subject.

Though these particular frame grabs are Abner Kneitel’s work, the gag was Tyer’s: the first instance of a Tyer “shrink take.” (Thanks to Bob Jaques for the information). Click to enlarge.

by Rachel Newstead

Well, I learned two things today. One, my powers of observation are not quite as sharp as I thought they were, and two, when I’m wrong, I’m spectacularly wrong.

After reading this post on animator Bob Jaques’ blog last night, I began to worry about the accuracy of my “Freeze Frame Friday” post from last week on Jim Tyer. After writing Jaques for confirmation, it seems my fears were justified:

Hi Rachel,

The frame grabs you posted from Anvil Chorus Girl and Service With A Guile are not Tyer’s work. The examples from Service With A Guile are the work of Ben Solomon. Tyer’s work doesn’t show up until later in the cartoon.

He followed that up with another note adding:

BTW, Tyer did not have Clampett-like nervous energy–it was his own style, completely different and as far as I can tell pre-dated Scribner’s energetic work at WB.

I’ve always prided myself on being as accurate as I can–if at all possible, I back up my statements with a quote from a well-respected animation author/blogger. I could not find any definitive information on which scenes Tyer did in which cartoons, and therefore had to rely on my best guess.

Unfortunately, I didn’t say it was my best guess. Jaques is rightly critical of such people, those who make an outright statement of fact without checking, thereby spreading misinformation like a virus.

I’m shocked and embarrassed to find that I, in this case, was actually part of the problem. I can assure you such incidents will not be repeated.

The stills I posted will remain, as they are indeed an example of why I love the Popeye cartoons of that period, the early Famous period. The poses and expressions, misattributed though they were, are priceless.

That said, a true example of Tyer’s work–or at least, work under his direction–can be seen above. Bluto reacts to the sight of Popeye in drag with a trademark Tyer “shrink take”–the first use of such a gag, according to  (appropriately enough) Bob Jaques, in his commentary track for the cartoon Too Weak To Work. (It can be found on the DVD set Popeye The Sailor, Vol. 3, 1941-43).

The misinformation ends here and now, at least on this blog.

(Information added attributing frames to Abner Kneitel, 3/26/10)

by Rachel Newstead

(Update 3/26/10): I’ve discovered, to my humiliation, that the information in this post is actually incorrect, according to animator Bob Jaques.  More details in the correction here. )

Famous Studios never quite reached the same level of artistry and innovation as its predecessor Fleischer, but it did achieve a sort of “mini-Golden Age” in the period between 1942 and 1947.

I’ve always had a particular liking for the Famous cartoons of this period, the Popeyes especially, without understanding why. But I understand now.

Those years–from You’re a Sap, Mr. Jap in 1942 to The Royal Four Flusher in 1947–correspond to one Jim Tyer’s tenure at Famous Studios. Though often criticized for his “off-model” animation poses, Popeye and company never looked handsomer than in the years Tyer was animating them. There was a certain solidity, a dimension in Popeye, Bluto and Olive then than in any cartoon made after Tyer’s departure.

At the same time, these cartoons were some of the

funniest Famous ever made, funny on an almost subliminal level.  Tyer’s wildly distorted poses imprinted themselves on some remote, inaccessible region of my brain and made me smile, without knowing just what I was smiling at.

Through the magic of freeze frame, we can lift the veil, so to speak: in the poses above, taken from The Island Fling (1946), we can not only see, but almost feel Bluto’s frustration as he puts the moves on Olive, only to have her notice the plate of liverwurst more than she notices him. His face grimaces, contorts, and snaps back again; his eyes cross and uncross. His fingers seem to dislocate themselves as he reaches out for her, becoming more like lobster claws. There’s no mistaking what’s on this guy’s mind–those few frames are packed with more personality animation than in ninety minutes of any Disney film.

As with Rod Scribner’s work under McKimson, it seems as though Tyer is being forcibly held back, as if a volcano were bubbling just beneath the surface. Tyer, unfortunately, never had the benefit of a Bob Clampett to allow him to let the full power of his drawings loose. All the more tragic when one considers how much they have in common.

Clampett loved the comic strips of Milt Gross; by all appearances, so did

Gross and Gross-er: our gobsmacked gobs do their best Count Screwloose impression in this frame from The Anvil Chorus Girl (1945)

Tyer. As we can see in the still at right, Popeye and Bluto are rendered insensible by the sight of blacksmith Olive’s “beauty.” Their stupefied faces wouldn’t look out of place in a Count Screwloose strip.

Tyer’s Clampett-like nervous energy would come to full fruition in the most unlikely place–the bottom-of-the-ladder Terrytoons, but certain “signature” techniques would become apparent as early as the Famous years. Take, for instance, the “shrink take.” At Terrytoons, his characters, when surprised, would seem to collapse into themselves for just an instant before expanding again. We see a more primitive example of it in this series of stills from Service With A Guile (1946): note how Popeye’s head, when reacting to the rapidly-expanding tire, narrows for a few frames before assuming its proper shape. It isn’t long enough to be perceptible at normal speed, but somehow we sense Popeye’s distress.

It’s no surprise that the Famous cartoons started their formulaic downhill slide upon his departure–of all the animators, he was the most adaptable, not one to be locked into a set mode of thinking for decades, as his colleagues at Famous and Terrytoons did. When Gene Deitch took control of the Terrytoons animation department in 1956, it was Tyer who most eagerly adopted the new, minimalist UPA-like style Deitch introduced. It was as if he had to wait for the world of

animation to catch up to him.