What About Thad?

Bobe Cannon was one of the all-time great animators from the Golden Age. He did excellent and unique work for Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, John Hubley, and Chuck Jones; not too many other animators can boast a resume like that. For some reason, I rarely see him mentioned by anyone. It probably had to do with his death in 1964 than anything else.

That he kept his unique style in drawing, posing, and timing under such individualistic directors is even more amazing. I’ve long thought that that fact alone sort of exposed the misconception [lie] that all the Jones animators did was in-between his poses. Cannon’s animation of Daffy Duck for both Jones and Clampett gives the character a bit of naive mischievousness – the pigeon-toed walks really help put this across.

In the Jones cartoons, Cannon didn’t really have much of a grasp on ‘normal’ lip sync. This isn’t a dig, it’s just really obvious compared to the animation of Ken Harris or Ben Washam, who paid extreme attention to every tooth shown and every tongue flap. Cannon seemed more interested in how many ways he could get animate dialog without doing this.

I don’t think it’d be wise to attribute ’smear’ animation solely to Cannon unless there are some on-record statements stating something to that effect from some of the other animators; several of them picked up on the technique during that time period (Harris, Virgil Ross, and Rod Scribner in particular). Given Cannon’s stylized approach to his work, it could be possible though.

This 17-minute reel is made up of his work from the 1930s and 1940s at Schlesinger’s/Warners, MGM, and UPA, following the trials and tribulations of mid-20th century superstars Bugs, Daffy, and Porky (and lesser-lights like Droopy, Spike, and the Fox and Crow).

Cannon had a fairly successful career directing shorts at UPA, the most popular of them being Gerald McBoing Boing. His shorts primarily had children as the central theme and characters, and they ranged from great (Wonder Gloves, Willie the Kid) to not-so-great (Christopher Crumpet, Madeline). Michael Sporn has shared some wonderful work of Cannon’s from Hubley’s Moonbird and I hope he has more to share from that period.

Clips taken from:
Hold the Lion Please (1942), Porky and Daffy (1938), The Magic Fluke (1949), Tom Turk and Daffy (1944), Rover’s Rival (1937), Out-Foxed (1949), Porky in Wackyland (1938), Hare Tonic (1945), The Dover Boys (1942), Senor Droopy (1949), The Daffy Doc (1938), Hare Conditioned (1945), Robin Hoodlum (1948), Super-Rabbit (1943), To Duck or Not to Duck (1943), Doggone Tired (1949), Odor-Able Kitty (1945), Wags to Riches (1949), Coming Home (1945)

… because it’s impossible to get a good transfer out of it. Believe me, I tried. What follows is the third attempt made at transferring my fairly ancient 16mm print of Doggone Cats, and it’s the best looking. It actually looks much nicer (and less blue) projected. The only cartoons that usually turn up on blue-track Cinecolor stock in 16mm are Iwerks and Van Beuren shorts from the mid-1930s. Finding a late 1940s Warner title is considerably harder.

By the way, in case you’re not a longtime reader of this blog, Doggone Cats is, irrefutably, the greatest Warner cartoon ever made.

Kevin posted Fuddy Duddy Buddy, arguably the best of the Mister Magoo cartoons. I posted a clip from another great one, Spellbound Hound, a few years ago, but this is the first time I’m aware of the whole cartoon being available online. I really wish I had a better copy to share, but this is the only one I have ever seen.

Magoo was actually a really funny character in the UPA studio’s golden years (1948-53); not the lovable, bland old coot of later years, but a real grouch that has gone (at least in this short) senile. When I posted the clip, it was of my favorite scene – where Magoo mistakes the phonograph for his motor. He knows something is wrong from the start, but still goes with it anyway. Not to mention the ‘breeze’ he receives while remaining stationary, and then mistaking what he thought was the motor a few seconds earlier for the anchor. It’s a well-acted piece of animation, and I wish I knew who did it.

Two other great Magoos all should seek out are Ragtime Bear and Trouble Indemnity. Isn’t it about time that at least the really great UPA cartoons were put out on DVD?

I love a lot of comics from the 1940s and 1950s, and own about a thousand of them, but they simply don’t hold up well for rereading. The art can be great to look at (and help ID certain animators’ styles in many cases), but the stories are mostly junk, and repetitive junk at that. Carl Barks, John Stanley, and Walt Kelly are the transgressive artists at Western Publishing, period.

I think this story from WDC&S 173 (Feb. 1955) is probably in my top five favorites; of course I say that about every Barks story I reread and laugh out loud at. At around this time, people were not fond of Barks’s depiction of Donald, writing to him, saying that his behavior upset their children. I don’t have a copy of the letter, but I think Barks responded to one of them saying something to the extent of “tell your kid he’s a nose pickin’ crybaby.”

My apologies for those who hate modern coloring, it’s all I have of the story on file.

I haven’t put together one of these reels in a long time, so here’s one highlighting the work of Irv Spence, easily one of the Golden Age’s most distinctive and recognizable animators. While this features highlights from the epic saga of Tom & Jerry (the series Spence spent most of his career on), this also features his work for Tex Avery (at Schlesinger’s and MGM) and for that odd curio studio of Ub Iwerks’s. I’d like to actually have copies of his work at Jam Handy (roughly ‘45-’47) one day too.

It’s probably hard for us all to remember the time when Duck Amuck actually thrilled us on every level… Overexposure (WB49, the old Buffalo WB network affiliate, played this at least once a week) and academic slobber easily destroys the enjoyment of any film, and this milestone definitely has suffered for it. I can’t tell you how many people have told me, “Yeah, it’s brilliant, but I have to go another ten years without seeing it again to appreciate it.” Fortunately, this doesn’t ruin the fact that there will always be kids green to this cartoon, and love it, for years to come… Wouldn’t it be cool to have that innocence again?

GO HOME.

Not really.  Having some REAL FUN with a server move.

Someone posted the complete version of Professor Small and Mr. Tall on YouTube (the version for the syndicated Totally Tooned In! package removed the foreboding scene of the gay ghost as Hitler shooting himself).

The short has a lot going for it as far as laughs (more than what Leonard Maltin says anyway, whose panning of it has been burnt into everyone’s memory for thirty years), but at the same time, when you look at it from a technical standpoint, the short is sort of a mess. For starters, the animation is pretty bad. Obviously, John Hubley and his crew were excited over the stylized animation that Jones was establishing in his 1942 shorts at Schlesinger’s, but it looks like they either didn’t have the time or money to perfect doing it themselves. The animation tries to pop/settle from pose to pose, but it just ends up looking stiff. It also looks as though the characters were designed without much thought of how they’d play out in animation.

That’s par for the course with the 1940s Columbia cartoon output though. Some of the animation can be on the level of the average Warner short (when Emery Hawkins, Don Williams, Ray Patterson, Grant Simmons, or NY import Morey Reden are behind it); a lot of it is as bad as the average Terrytoon or worse. A very schizophrenic studio for sure.

You can see a much funnier and better animated UPA cartoon that tries this style, The Miner’s Daughter at Kevin’s site.

I posted about my discovery of the special opening to How to Play Football a few months ago, but now you can see it here as it actually plays out.

The contents of the new April 27th Warner cartoon releases were announced (for real), and it’s not exactly for the “classic” connoisseur. The cartoons range from some ‘A’ cartoons (Foxy By Proxy, Hare Trimmed, Nasty Quacks, Daffy DIlly), some ‘B’ cartoons (Bushy Hare, The Prize Pest, Stork Naked), to some outright abortions from the end of the Warner run (Mad as Mars Hare, Dr. Devil and Mr. Hare, Suppressed Duck, The Iceman Ducketh). But mostly they are ‘C’ grade/filler cartoons of the Bob McKimson variety. These are the ‘talking head’ cartoons you saw on Saturday morning, and even as a kid you knew weren’t very hot. Personally, they are cartoons I can take or leave, and it’s usually leave.

It’s not surprising after over a third of the cartoons had been released that the true classics are slimming down, or that the later cartoons are probably cheaper to restore. But at the cheap price they’ll be (definitely a ‘drop in the cart’ purchase at Target) and the few real classics they contain, I’m not complaining.

In the meantime, here is one of the cartoons you won’t be seeing, A Feather In His Hare, one of the two “Character Versus a Jewish Indian” cartoons of 1948. Maybe that description makes it sound a little overtly prejudiced, but it’s hard to find much wrong with a cartoon where the native actually realizes he forgot to say “ugh”.

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