What About Thad?

Watching Jerry Beck and Martha Sigall on History Detectives last night prompted me to dig up this photo of Bob Clampett’s unit in 1938 I found on eBay in 2007 (I don’t own the photo, I only have this scan from the auction). I sent it to Jerry back then, and he had Martha ID just about everyone in the photo. I thought I had lost this in one of my many crashes (I’m speaking in terms of both computers and servers), but lo and behold, here it is, with Martha’s IDs reposted.

TOP ROW (L to R): Bob Cannon, Leahdora DaSilva, Ernest Gee, Izzy Ellis, Bob Clampett, George Jordan, Helen Curry, Dick Thomas, Kay Vallejo, Lu Guarnier, Dick Jones (Chuck’s brother, partially hidden), Dorothy Worth, Mary Tebb, Silvia Rogers, Vannie Baker, Virginia Slaughter, Onita _______ (Martha couldn’t recall her last name) and Unknown.

SITTING (L to R): Sid Farren, John Carey, Jack MacLaughlan, Vive Risto and Leon Redman.

As an added supplement, please enjoy an amazing offering from these fine people. This was the last cartoon Chuck Jones did actual animation for on at the studio, handling the scenes with the rooster turning out to be a holy terror and Daffy doing the lion tamer shtick.

YouTube has had Portuguese versions of most of the Paul J. Smith Woody Woodpecker cartoons online for ages, but only recently did someone upload them in English, so you can now see them and experience the garbage in all its glory.

Mark Mayerson ranked Smith as the worst of all the theatrical-era directors eons ago. I’d personally give that title to someone like Al Rose at Columbia, but there’s certainly a case to be made for Smith. Walter Lantz seemed fine with Smith directing, constantly letting more and more talented people walk out his studio doors, something that does not speak well for his taste. But Smith was merely just poor for years. Once Sid Marcus left the studio in 1966, Smith was allowed to take Woody to hell in a hand basket.

The cartoons look almost as poor as their made-for-TV contemporaries (unsurprising as Lantz was the first theatrical studio to do TV style animation in the 1950s), making it odd that theaters actually rented them years after the studio closed its doors. David Gerstein just messaged me as I was writing this that the cartoons “blend together in my head into one big blur of western settings, inconsistent sizes and hatchet-faced harridans.” Perfect summary. The hackwork is at such an all-time high that nobody gave a damn that the remounted Woody opening titles stopped on an ugly inbetween rather than the final pose.

This isn’t one of those endless westerns (which probably stemmed from one Cal Howard springboard reused thirty times), but I had to single it out because it was one that escaped my attempt at acquiring every single Walter Lantz cartoon when I worked on The Walter Lantz Cartune Encyclopedia. The song makes it even more terrifying than you can imagine. And what’s the deal with these not-so-vaguely pornographic titles (never mind the character’s name)? I would have rather seen the cartoon take that sort of direction than this.

This might be a good time to add (and someone can add this to Wikipedia) that Paul J. Smith was more than likely not legally blind during his tenure at the Lantz studio, with his daughter doing his x-sheets, or however that urban legend goes. He was subsequently hired by Ralph Bakshi to work on his Lord of the Rings adaptation as a “key animator”, and it’s utterly ridiculous that he’d be able to work in that capacity if this was true. (Amended see bottom.)

But, just because you’re working at a studio with severe budget limitations and a boss who clearly doesn’t care about your work performance doesn’t mean you have to turn out a complete piece of crap.

One deed that needs doing is the location of a complete print of The Daffy Duckaroo, a 1942 Daffy Duck cartoon by Norm McCabe.

Here’s the scoop:
There are two different versions of the opening song Daffy sings at the beginning of the cartoon. The more widely-seen version, Guild/Sunset B/W prints and the Korean redrawn, is actually in-sync with the animation, but there is a definite splice in the soundtrack. (Click here to see that copy.) The computer colorized version, as aired on Nickelodeon, featured a different half that obviously was incorrectly pasted over the wrong animation.

Put them together, as Larry Tremblay did in the embeded reconstruction (re: “fake”) below, and you get a complete song.

I have no idea as to why the soundtrack was split up like this. If had to guess (and I hate doing this, because it’ll end up on Wikipedia as a fact), there may have been censorship by Guild/Sunset to remove a legible reference to Warner Brothers on Daffy’s trailer (the company verifiably removed WB references in Porky in Wackyland and You Ought to Be in Pictures), which you can kind of make out at the end of the cartoon when it’s in view again. Again, this is only a guess. But then, if that was the case, why does the computer colorized version use the same footage, and the second half the song? The mind boggles.

If you have leads to an answer on this mystery, I and many others would appreciate them.

Now for the actual cartoon…

This is actually a very underrated cartoon for several reasons. It’s one of the earliest cartoons that uses “modern design” successfully, neck-and-neck almost with Chuck Jones’s usage of it. McCabe unfortunately had the handicap of being resigned to wartime propaganda as story material and having his films only available in shoddy condition, but some of his films are worth rediscovering. I wish I knew who McCabe’s layout artist was during this period.

The earliest Art Davis Warner animation is seen in this cartoon (mostly in the scenes with Daffy and Little Beefer in the teepee), marking the beginning of his 20 years of employment, and beginning his reign of terror as the studio’s funniest animator (a title only also held by Rod Scribner).

The classic sexually active Daffy takes center stage, a carryover from some of the last cartoons Bob Clampett did with his unit, but here it’s about as overt as it would get (Frank Tashlin excepted). Some of it borderlines uncomfortable when he seems to genuinely enjoy Beefer’s advances.

On a related note, Jerry Beck has the honor of being the only historian whose writing created an awkward moment between my parents and I. I asked them what the word “bisexual” meant, as Jerry used the word to refer to Daffy’s behavior in his book in the passage on this cartoon. (This had to be when I was seven, reading his Looney Tunes books for book reports. That created even more awkwardness.)

It always astounds me how much stuff was literally trashed at Disney’s throughout its history. Would you believe that they once scrapped a cartoon that was nearly completely animated, simply because of its length?

Plight of the Bumble Bee, a 1951 Jack Kinney directed Mickey Mouse cartoon, featuring the work of Fred Moore, Cliff Nordberg, and others, is the cartoon in question. Kinney offered the following explanation to why it was shelved:

“The best Mickey ever was never finished. It was called The Plight of the Bumble Bee, and it was all finished in animation. It had an awkward length, but Fred and Sib agreed that it could not be cut, so it was shelved.”

Calling this the best Mickey ever is overrating it at best, though I’m sure Kinney and the animators were sore over their hard work being thrown into the Morgue. It’s a standard Kinney cartoon, which means it’s a notch above the hackwork that the Shorts Department had been turning out on a regular basis for years. Certainly not a forerunner to One Froggy Evening in any way as I’ve read some people suggest.

Still, it’s neat to see something the studio never intended the public to see, and “new” work by one of the most highly recognizable animators. You can watch the rough cut below.

Hans Perk offers boards and some great original animation scans here.

There has been a minor furor over the presentation of twenty Warner Bros. cartoons that were released this week on DVD for the first time, on the Looney Tunes Super Stars discs Bugs Bunny: Hare Extraordinaire and Daffy Duck: Frustrated Fowl. The ten cartoons released before 1954 that are included look absolutely gorgeous; among them are Frank Tashlin’s Nasty Quacks, easily one of the top ten cartoons ever made, and Hare Trimmed, which features some of the most beautiful Virgil Ross animation of Bugs Bunny ever done.

What’s soured people on the 1954 and onward cartoons is that they have been presented in “widescreen”. Warner Home Video has peddled the line: “they were matted in theaters, so this is how they were originally seen”. Others have said, “they were making them with widescreen in mind.” These statements are disingenuous at best, ignoring the fact that not all theaters that ran these cartoons matted them.

Matting was also used to cover up gaffs in the production in live-action. When you watch North By Northwest, an expensive MGM thriller, open-matte, you will often see boom-mikes and set-lights. It would have worked the same way for these cartoons; in the full-frame versions we’ve been seeing for years, we would be seeing codes at the bottom of the cels, held feet wouldn’t have been shot, etc. If Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, and Bob McKimson were making these cartoons with widescreen in mind, they weren’t aware of it themselves.

Below are some screenshots, comparing the new releases with older ones.

If that didn’t convince you that these presentations are an abomination, you’re hopeless. Let me add too that a great number of 1946-1953 Warner cartoons were reissued to theaters well into the late 1960s. And those were definitely matted at one time or another too. There was no art or method to this whatsoever. They only formatted the titles to work in widescreen because they needed to have all the copyright and credit information in the picture by law. Why does nobody seem to understand this?

It’s probably not worth getting riled up about. The cartoons were restored full-frame and will likely be presented as such in a future Looney Tunes box set. Most of the affected cartoons are those you probably won’t be watching again even if they were presented correctly. (How many times can you do the same dynamite jokes?) What is bothersome is the distortion of history that’s being done by people defending a move made by a bloated corporation to cater to Blu-Ray/plasma screen whores who stretch the picture on anything horizontally, whether it’s Citizen Kane or All in the Family.

In good conscience, I cannot recommend these DVDs to anyone, unless you’re desperate enough to immediately get the properly restored cartoons, which do look outstanding.

This is one of the more famous Bugs Bunny cartoons by Bob Clampett for two reasons: 1) it’s on basically every public domain tape ever made (the source of my childhood love/hate for this one), and 2) almost all of the drawings and poses from it became the basis for all future modelsheets and licensing guides. This is not the greatest Bugs cartoon (it’s up there), but the animation is probably the best it ever would look.

The ‘loser’ Bugs is easier to take in Falling Hare than it is in others, because he’s not really the loser; at the start and finish, he’s in control of things, and all is well. This makes it actually unique among all the Bugs Bunny cartoons: he’s over-confident and keeps screwing up, but an unseen power rectifies all.

We get the standard near-minute of static footage (no new animation) typical of a Clampett cartoon at the beginning. Some speculate that he did this (and reused footage) so he could spend more time making the new animation better than anyone else’s (ass-kissing sycophants); others say it’s because he was too busy scoring with girls in the Termite Terrace crapper and playing ‘pwanks’ on the Jones unit to have time (too caustic, but more likely); it’s probably somewhere in the middle.

Bob McKimson tends to get all of the glory for this one for doing the mammoth amount of footage at the beginning, and he deserves all the praise he gets. There’s nothing more to say: the drawing, movement, action, lipsync, and acting is perfect. If you notice, Bugs has a [slight] potbelly in these scenes, so the look even predates McKimson’s own films.

Rod Scribner did very little on this cartoon, though he gets the sole animation credit, a typical tradition at Schlesinger’s. Being the most recognizable and funniest of all the Warner animators, his footage is distinct in its ability to capture Bugs’s horror and anger like no other Golden Age artist. [Before anyone comments, no, Bill Melendez did not animate the "these blockbusters..." scene as he says in his audio commentary with John K. While likely Scribner's assistant at the time, he did not become a full-fledged animator until Wagon Heels.]

On the other end of the spectrum, we have Virgil Ross, who never really could draw Bugs with such ’spirit’, only ‘wascally’, which is part of the reason he left the Clampett unit. There’s nothing wrong with his animation here though: the drawing and movement (lots of smears, a Virgil earmark) looks just as good as anyone else’s, and the scenes don’t call for a particularly nasty Bugs. It’s also actually very stylized in its approach, in an almost Tashlin-like fashion (there’s even the scene by Ross of Bugs deflating that would be reused by Art Davis in Tashlin’s Plane Daffy). Clampett was never one to follow the ‘less is more’ rule; occasionally an action in his cartoons could be too full, to the gag’s own detriment. So it’s surprising to see Bugs machine gun from one pose to another, when he attempts to dart off but only fall teeth-first into the ground.

I wish animators like Ross were still around. His work for all the directors is so human and sincere, unlike so much self-concious Disney animation. That’s a quality that he’d probably have lost if he was actually aware of how great he was and didn’t have Clampett and Freleng chastising him and lauding others (only Avery ever gave him compliments and even offered him a job at MGM).

Two other lesser known Warner stalwarts are thrown into the mix of Falling Hare. Phil Monroe flopped around the studio for years: from Freleng to Tashlin to Jones to Freleng to Tashlin to Clampett… before finally settling in with the Jones unit in 1946. I have no explanation for why. Some of Monroe’s drawing and posing looks a bit like Jones’s Bugs here, particularly the pursed lips. The excellent subtlety of Bugs looking under the bolt for the Gremlin is often lost because of crappy transfers, but thankfully those days are long over. There’s a bit of Goofy-influence in the way he tries to smash down the door, settling into a ridiculously cute/stupid pose after each hit.

Tom McKimson did character layout on most of the best Clampett films, but he animated beforehand. It was Larry Tremblay who originally pointed out some of his work in this film to me, and it’s completely identical to his drawing style in the Bugs Bunny stories of the Looney Tunes & Merrie Melodies comic book. There’s more than a few poses in this cartoon that I’m certain showed up in one of the stories he drew. (Coincidentally, the Bugs in the comics matches Clampett’s interpretation of the character more than any other director’s.)

An interesting way to tell the difference between his and his brother Bob’s work is how they draw Bugs’s ears. Bob was always the perfectionist, and one ear almost always matches the other. Tom wasn’t as much of a stickler for that sort of thing and would often draw one ear bent or crooked.

We’ve all seen, read, and heard about this cartoon a hundred times, but I hope this animator breakdown sheds some light on more of its many fine aspects.

For a change of pace (namely positivity), what is sure to be the classic animation release of the year is Steve Stanchfield’s Thunderbean Animation collection of Private Snafu cartoons. Steve has practically moved heaven and earth to make sure that these things look as great as they possibly can, using mostly 35mm negative source material. I bought a copy of the preview disc he offered for sale at the GAC Forums, and I can safely say that these things look as good as the black-and-white restorations on Warner Home Video’s Golden Collections. I believe that the final disc will contain all of the Snafu shorts produced at Schlesinger’s/Warners, minus Secrets of the Caribbean, which remains lost. (Steve, correct me if I’m wrong.)

Along with just looking excellent, this collection will arguably have the most re-watchability out of all the Thunderbean releases because of its sheer entertainment value. These are not second-rate shorts cranked out for the Army, nor are they strictly educational bluster (well, a rare few are). They are hilarious, beautifully animated cartoons by the greatest studio during what was their most innovative period, and are just as successful comedies as anything they were doing for general exhibition.* Ted Geisel, the head writer of the shorts, was a perfect match for the Termite Terrace boys, and we can be grateful Disney was too greedy for its own good in bidding for the Snafu series (they wanted to own the character outright, and any merchandising rights), so history was not denied this pairing.

I’d go as far as to argue that Chuck Jones’s Spies and Bob Clampett’s Fighting Tools rank as some of the studio’s best work ever. Friz Freleng’s Rumors is probably the wildest film he ever did, and Frank Tashlin has the gall to tease even military boys with camera angles to obscure women’s breasts. What I’d really like to see discovered now are more of the Seaman Hook cartoons Warners did for the Navy, as only three (by Jones, Clampett, and McKimson in his directorial debut) are known to exist now. (There has to be at least one Freleng one, and a Tashlin one existing is not unlikely.) Who knows, researchers (okay, who the hell am I kidding, a researcher) have been more successful in finding animation artifacts in the last five years than thirty.

I’m not sure of a final release date, but once Steve gives the say-so, I’ll post it here. Below is an alright copy of the aforementioned Fighting Tools. Top-notch direction from Clampett and his animators at in excellent form. There’s even a gay mouse too (animated by Virgil Ross).

* – Though I can verify at least one Snafu, Tashlin’s The Home Front, was released theatrically, because I had seen a print at one time that was clearly identified as a theatrical print. The word “nuts” in the phrase, “freeze the nuts off a jeep”, was muted.

Via Jaime Weinman, I caught the news announced at Comic-Con (I tend to avoid any and all news associated with the place involuntarily) that Fantagraphics is planning to print the entire run of Floyd Gottfredson’s Mickey Mouse daily continuities. That’s a beautiful thought, but they may be ultimately promising more than they can deliver. (We’re still waiting on those Pogo books.)

There’s a lot of dilemmas in reprinting a library set devoted to Gottfredson, which is why there hasn’t been a steady supply of them reprinted in America since Bruce Hamilton had the Disney license in the 1980s (before he went insane). It wasn’t for a lack of trying, as Gary Groth may be implying with his backhanded dig at Gemstone. Firstly, as addressed by Groth, a complete collection would include some genuinely racist material. There’s no dodging or spinning the issue. Most of the black characters are presented as dumber and uglier than dogshit in Gottfredson’s world, and, for a change, I completely sympathize with Disney’s nervousness about printing the more notorious stories.

Secondly, the sources for the strips will need to be seriously cleaned up for modern printing. Bad printing has ruined many a great Disney story in the past. I sincerely hope they take the necessary time to do justice to Gottfredson’s work.

Thirdly, and yes, objectively, most of the continuities after 1950 are very forgettable, which may be why Groth misremembered that 1955 was the last time a continuing storyline was used in the dailies. That doesn’t mean they will sell bad. On the contrary, they could sell wonderful, as save one 1952 continuity, none of the 1950s stories have been reprinted in the United States. The mileage on these stories will vary depending on the individual’s tolerance of hackneyed writing and drawing.

Fourth, final, and foremost, we’re talking about the Disney Corporation here. There will be guaranteed bottlenecks in the production. Some high-up won’t like how Mickey addresses Minnie in one story, or doesn’t like the brutality of Pete in another, or doesn’t like the cleavage showing on a femme fatale, and ask for changes, even though the number of minors actually buying the books will be in the single digits. Stuff won’t move, more delays will occur, and we might actually see Pogo Volume 1 before Mickey Volume 1.

It would really be wonderful to have all of these things in a nice bound volume (ala Barks, Kurtzman, Martin, etc.), but I wouldn’t hold your breath on anything positive having to do with the Wonderful World of Disney getting accomplished. I would like more than anything to be proven wrong, as Floyd Gottfredson was one of the most gifted of all 20th century storytellers, and a complete collection of his work is badly needed.

I’ve refrained from seriously commenting on the many things wrong with the frenzy-provoking promo material for Cartoon Network’s The Looney Tunes Show, but with the premiere of actual footage, and being a certified Looney Tunes whore, I can’t help myself.

1. The character designs are awful. Not to hurt feelings, but they are. Far worse officially sanctioned renderings of the characters exist (just look at just about any drawing in the 1970s or 1980s or anything Chuck Jones drew past 1980), but saying that they aren’t the worst ever isn’t a compliment. The classics were designed by seasoned professionals who had a grasp on what the animators could handle and use to the funniest effect. (Not to mention knowledge of perspective and anatomy, something lacking completely in these new designs.) I didn’t like The Sylvester & Tweety Mysteries or Duck Dodgers (or know of anyone who actually did) but they at least looked like professionals attempting to get the classic look (but still failing – sincere charm is an underrated element in Warner animation that nobody seems capable of capturing). This kind of stuff should be kept at Deviantart – end of story.

2. The CGI animation in the preview is also awful. Nobody is expecting The Incredibles, but at least make it look good if you actually want these things on the air forever.

3. Korean animation. I have serious problems with the whole overseas game, the major one being the sheer artlessness of it. These are the greatest cartoon characters of all time, and sending them to be animated 6,000 miles away by people who work on a piecemeal basis and don’t even speak English (psst… that’s why there’s no such thing as lip-sync anymore) is only a guarantee of failure.

4. Daffy’s voice. It doesn’t sound anything like him, and it’s definitely not Joe Alaskey or Jeff Bergman, who usually voice the character in new animations. I guess that brings me to my #1 reason why new Looney Tunes cartoons should not be made is the fact that Mel Blanc is dead and he’s not coming back. Blanc was inarguably attached to these characters and responsible for their popularity more than any other artist, and when he died, the characters died with him. It simply wasn’t the same with characters at other studios, except for Daws Butler. Therefore, doing a new Bugs Bunny cartoon makes about as much since as doing a new Chaplin or Laurel & Hardy picture. A voice actor who has done recreations of the voices (but not on this show) told me personally that “those characters should have been buried in the 50s.” So when it’s coming from somebody who gets income out of these rehashes, you know it’s true.

5. It’s not funny. And it won’t be funny. If this is what they’re picking to entice potential viewers, then it’s going to be very bad, face it. The Coyote clip is predictable, and the bit with Bugs and Daffy is just lame. Why would Daffy need to ask Bugs if “What’s Up Doc?” is his “thing” with their extensive history together? Is that their attempt at humor? Why would Daffy Duck be worried about “stepping on any toes” if he doesn’t have a gun to his head at the very least? If you’re going to work with the greatest cartoon characters of all time, be sure you know how to write. Then again, we already knew from the get-go you didn’t have to know how to draw, so I guess anything’s game.

My unseasoned, unprofessional advice: just put the old ones on and give artists money to do new things. To prove a point, here’s a recreated version of The Looney Tunes Show with two completely random classic clips chosen. Not even the best gags or lines. Place yourself as a four year old for just one second – which ad makes you want to actually watch these characters?

I’ll concede that I’m not the best example as I was not a normal child, but I bought all the Warner Consumer Products as a kid because I liked watching the originals on Nickelodeon, ABC, and TNT. If they want to make money off people buying crap based on classic characters again, they should start by showcasing the things that made them classic characters in the first place – not crap.

Here we have a Fox & Crow story drawn by Jim Davis that eerily predates modern dietary methods. This one gets extremely far-out, even for this series, with its gratuitous morbid obesity, cannibalism, and heads naturally made of iron. I’ve spent some time reacquainting myself with these guys lately, and most of the ones from roughly 1948-54 still hold up as the best funny animal comics DC published.

Taken from The Fox and Crow #18 (Aug. 1954).