What About Thad?

I don’t think whoever put this together missed many Leghornisms. It’s sort of depressing to watch them all jumbled together like this because you see random flashes of McKimson’s director rot.

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Actually, whoever made it did… No scenes from the seldom-talked of classic from Bob McKimson’s later days, Banty Raids. Though most of its enjoyment comes from the poon-crazed beatnik’s antics than anything Foggy does. (Not to mention a Bill Lava score that actually (surprisingly) works well in a Warner cartoon.)

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I’ve been having some trouble in my life lately and I wanted to turn my blog off (because it really is too much work for free), but after all the pleas for its return, I guess I shouldn’t be so “selfish”.

Tom & Jerry Tales Volume 6, completing the entire run of the Kids’ WB series, was released earlier this month. As with the earlier episodes, none of them turned out very good. Out of the batch here, noteworthy are: Kitty Cat Blues, haphazard attempt to follow up The Zoot Cat, featuring a rather long gag of Jerry tricking Tom into chasing a laser pointer (like a real cat) that comes out of nowhere; Kangadoofus, with Jerry posing a joey in Australia (and you thought Hippety Hopper had “artistic license”); Game of Mouse and Cat, which bizarrely uses the “Jasper” model of Tom (and he walks on all fours through the thing!); and (not joking) D.J. Jerry, with Tom owned by a joint smoking Jamaican music store owner, and Jerry running a pahty howse in the back (cameo by a street-talkin’ Tuffy: “Yo, Tom dawg, don’t be hatin’ on mah homies.”)

Story and characterization problems aside, the music in these things leaves no synthesizer effect unused. The classic T&Js tend to get whatever vitality they have from the soundtrack, and less so from Bill Hanna’s timing or Joe Barbera’s (expressive, but limited) rough sketches. A brassy musical score and destructive sound effects were more or less the foundation of those cartoons, and if you can’t at least get that, the shorts are going to flounder. (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Scott Bradley really functioned as a third director on the T&J shorts of the 1940s and 1950s. Whether it was Mouse Trouble or Downhearted Duckling, the guy clearly wanted to hog the spotlight and tell the world that the film was his.)

If you just un-glossed whatever character layouts survived from overseas (Warren Leonheardt, who boarded on the episode Kitty Cat Blues, seen to the left, isn’t too convinced anything of his survived), you’d basically get what Hanna-Barbera would be doing with the characters if they were alive today: shallow, “modernized” reincarnations. And I honestly don’t think either of them would have a problem with that. It’s a shame that corporate agenda is the heart of these new cartoons, because the people working on the show really studied everything about the classic shorts (see the motion chart sketch below), and may have come up with a more reasonable facsimile in a better environment.

But all I can come up with after watching this DVD is “leave well enough alone.” I don’t want to see new Tom & Jerry cartoons anymore than I would want to see new Bugs Bunny or Popeye cartoons. They were films done in a different era, under different circumstances, and by people with a different world perspective than our own. But unfortunately, the standard thinking of the average joe in animation can’t fit that in his or her head: whatever worked once can and will work again. It’s why every cartoon on TV today looks like anime or Dexter’s Lab. A student I knew, who dropped out of the animation program at art school, summed it up bluntly: “Animation is too repetitive.”

Tom Stathes sends over a pic of a sculpt he made of Pervis the Goat from Halloween.

A brilliant comic by Wilfred Haughton from the UK’s Mickey Mouse Annual 6, 1935 (for 1936).

I’m really at odds over praising Sid Marcus as an underrated talent of the Golden Age. He wrote and directed a nice assortment of classics at Warners (Bye Bye Bluebeard, A Ham in a Role, The Hole Idea) and Columbia (Mr. Moocher, Swiss Tease, Up n’ Atom), but on the other hand, he was involved in two abominations: he helped helm Scrappy in the 1930s, and his biggest contribution to the Warner legacy was the Tasmanian Devil (I’d consider him less of a human tragedy if he invented a machine that makes IEDs out of aborted fetuses).

Marcus left his mark for his love of the weird and just senseless at the Lantz studio, where he directed about two dozen shorts in 1963-66, teamed with long-time friend Art Davis as his ace animator (who had just jumped ship at the Warner studio after twenty years). Creakiness had taken its toll on the Lantz studio, so by this point, getting a character that doesn’t look soulless in the shorts was beyond a miracle. Greedy Gabby Gator was the first short Marcus directed, and it’s just chock-full of WTF-ness: Woody getting violently ill, the huge finger BG superimposed on Gabby, the needlessly long shot after Gabby bites his tail, the croc the size of a BMW, et. al. Sorry for the crummy copy; I’m sure Universal will put all of these on DVD eventually.

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My cold dead heart will always be warmed by the antics of the Fox and the Crow, the character team the Columbia cartoon studio accidentally got right. About half of them are forgettable, but ones like Mysto Fox (unfortunately I’ve only ever seen B/W prints of this one circulating; I’m sure a splicey Kodachrome or Tech print is out there in some OCD case’s basement) are in the other half that are either just good or great. Frank Graham’s voice work plays a huge part in these characters’ appeal, and they are probably the most under-appreciated performances in cartoon history. Columbia cartoons can be called lots of things, but derivative isn’t one of them. How many other cartoons ended like this?

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And yeah, that totally kicked Presto’s derivative ass.

Just got a disc of transfers of a few films in my collection that I loaned Tom Stathes to transfer at his Vintage Film Archive (aka his mom’s house).

Lady Play Your Mandolin never looked that good wherever I’ve seen it (including the one Warner movie DVD it was included as an extra with), so I had to get this awesome print transferred. I have to say that anyone who doesn’t love that drunk horse at the end (Mark Kausler’s educated guess is that ‘Ham’ Hamilton animated those scenes) obviously hates freedom and justice.

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Cow Cow Boogie isn’t that good of a short, but it’s rare. It has some funny animation and gags (the udder warmer, the one steer getting shot in the face) and a great soundtrack though. Pull out your DVDs to see how much Shamus Culhane brought to the table (and rose the bar) with his own “darkies is hepper than honkeys” cartoon Boogie Woogie Man.

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Finally, some I.B. Tech footage from The Bugs Bunny Show. It’s obviously the work of the Jones unit (looks like Dick Thompson’s animation). I like how the sheepdog’s ass morphs into his face inexplicably (cartoondom really owes a lot to Lou Chaney Jr.’s performance in Of Mice and Men). It’s not the complete show (I really want to know how Daffy got out of that one), though it should give you an idea of how bright Technicolor is supposed to look (and everyone complaining about the DVDs being too bright are talking out of their asses).

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… or why the Annies are a joke.

Here’s the list of this year’s Annie Award winners.

I love how unashamedly Dreamworks is listed as a “Gold Sponsor” right next to the studio’s clean sweep of the ceremony. Guess Katzenberg stuffed those ballots with cold, hard cash huh?

Christ-on-a-stick, no wonder nobody takes this industry seriously. Even the Academy isn’t that brazen of the fact they can be bought off.