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.

Bob Jaques has a great series of posts on Dave Tendlar’s animation in the Fleischer Popeyes. Here’s one of the earliest cartoons Tendlar defacto-directed in 1933, Betty Boop’s May Party. I actually discovered this gem by accident going through a few hundred cartoons on film I took in not long ago.

If you’ve been reading Bob’s posts, you can easily recognize Tendlar’s earmarks all over this cartoon, both in the drawing style and direction. Lots of action that the animator loved to dabble in, all at some poor creature’s expense. This is the very beginning of Paramount’s association with violent funny animals taking center stage, a sort of art Tendlar helped perfect during animation’s Golden Age.

What’s ironic is that while this cartoon’s whole final act is devoted to gags about things and characters turning rubbery (there’s even Krazy Kat at 5:05), this was around the time the Fleischer studio started ironing out all of that “bouncy shit” in their cartoons. If you’re going to stop using rubberhose animation, use it all up at once, I guess.

That’s not my first credit in a cartoon-related publication, nor is it the first time my name has been seen next to David Gerstein’s. But it warms the cockles of my heart to see it anyway. I ghostwrote a fair amount of the synopses in The 100 Greatest Looney Tunes Cartoons edited by Jerry Beck. While it’s not a must-have, it’s at least an interesting read, and definitely worth the $16.47 price at Amazon, with its glossy and compact full-color content.

Whenever I see my writing published, it always disappoints, usually because I only see my mistakes. It’s been almost a year since I worked on this thing, and I actually had to go back to my notes to remember which cartoons I wrote on. (I forgot they were mostly Bob Clampett’s.) Some of my writing was definitely sanitized, and in my eyes weakened, so I’m just glad you will never know exactly which ones I wrote about.

A forewarning: there’s some atrocious copyediting in this book that seems to have resulted from copying and pasting templates, so roughly a fifth of the cartoons have incorrect release dates and series assignations. (So now The Stupid Cupid is a 1957 cartoon. Sorry, that’s when Tashlin was turning Jerry Lewis into Daffy Duck, not vice-versa.)

The lion’s share (roughly a third) is of course Chuck Jones cartoons, but even the biggest Jones detractors will have to admit that he’s the most popular of all the directors, so it’s only logical that the most votes would go to his cartoons. (Wisely, the list is presented in alphabetical order, rather than by voting rank. Once you get past the top ten or twenty, only the biggest OCD cases of Looney Tunes fans would find it worthwhile to dissect ranking order.)

The book also shows how times have changed. Tied for second place on the list are Bob Clampett and Friz Freleng, each represented by twenty-one titles. Passionate buffs might try to convince you it’s impossible to love Friz’s cartoons as much as Bob’s, but here’s proof you can have it both ways. Frank Tashlin, Tex Avery, Bob McKimson, and even Art Davis are represented by their best work for the studio too. We really have the advent of cable television and luscious DVD selections to thank for the studio’s talent being fairly recognized today.

Jerry also graciously invited fans of all kinds to vote on Cartoon Brew, and even more graciously credited them, so it’s not just from the usual team of experts. Titles that might have been discriminated against (most likely McKimson’s) are happily present.

There’s some head scratchers for sure. I don’t see what makes Guided Muscle a better Road Runner cartoon than the others, nor what makes Walky Talky Hawky the best Foghorn. Honey’s Money rather than the original His Bitter Half, really? Coal Black, fine, but Tin Pan Alley Cats too? At least one low-rent Speedy Gonzales short made the cut, but nothing with the vastly wittier Pepe Le Pew? But, hey, it’s not my list. And unlike the typical disgraceful lists from AFI, at least 2/3 of this list would be identical to my own, a percentage I’m more than okay with.

No revelations, just fun reading, and another firm reminder of why these staples of cinematic comedy* need to be preserved. I’m sure a general list of just The 100 Greatest Cartoons would reveal as much too. It’ll help keep your mind off this excrement too.

(* No, really. Have you actually tried watching live-action ‘comedy’ of the 1940s? As far as laughs go, other than a couple Stooges and a Sturges flick or two, that decade’s got zip. The cartoons were truly the kings of comedy in that era of film.)

I’ve been spending a lot of time with Disney’s Blame it on the Samba since I recently acquired a nice IB Tech print of it. Watching it on film is seriously the only way to give it justice; the Dailymotion file embeded below mutes the colors something bad. If you have a chance to see Melody Time in a theater, it’s worth the ticket price for this and Pecos Bill alone, which are the only things worth watching the movie for. (I share Milt Kahl’s view of Johnny Appleseed: “What sane man would actually put his money into a piece of shit like that?!”)

It’s a really jovial thing: a great marriage of color, music, and action, featuring the kind of animation that had long been eliminated from Disney cartoons by this point, never mind just the Donald Duck ones. Note how well Hal King, who was the main Duck animator at the studio, holds up against some of the fabled Nine who also animate on it. More proof that there needs to be a serious examination of the other animators who toiled away their whole lives with no recognition.

And dig that trippy live-action/animation hybrid! They never did seem to get it right, as the homosapiens always look like they’re staring into thin air.

I took the animator IDs from J.B. Kaufman’s excellent book, South of the Border With Disney. He’s one of the first authors to utilize the animator drafts to their fullest potential by actually transcribing them in their near entirety. All of J.B.’s books are worth adding to your library, because he always uncovers a ton of stuff that’s never seen print. I hear people often saying things along the lines of, “Do we really need another book on Disney?” Well if J.B. or David Gerstein are pressing ‘em out, I say, absolutely!