What About Thad?

A great Bo Bunny and Skinny Fox story from Funny Stuff No. 64. It’s a great example of how everybody in Mayer’s funny animal world are complete irredeemable bastards, yet you still find them interesting to read. “Dog eat dog”, “bunny kill fox”, “duck maim frog”; the combinations are endless in the Mayer universe. It’s amazing how well they hold up for repeated readings when you’re not supposed to like anybody.

Thanks to Frank for the scans. You should go to his blog and see some of the great early Lantz character stories by John Stanley he’s put up.

Since all the cartoon geek rage is over lost footage from a Ben Hardaway-Cal Dalton cartoon, I’ll have to be your friendly neighborhood curmudgeon: that unit’s cartoons, on the whole, are pretty bad. I’ll give them that Hare-Um Scare-Um is pretty fun for its artless execution, and that it was basically retooled (rephrase that; overhauled) for A Wild Hare by Tex Avery. But the rest of their cartoons fit the mold of the 1939 season of Warner shorts: auto-pilot. With a few exceptions (Thugs with Dirty Mugs and Porky’s Tire Trouble are the only two that come to mind), it was a very weak year for the studio. It’d be interesting to find out why there was a studio-wide string of mediocrity that year, but it’s probably too late in history to find out (if you need a memory refresher, see how many classics are listed here). It’s very, very telling that Leon Schlesinger immediately gave Friz Freleng his job (and the same exact unit) back after his foray at MGM.

Here is one of those Hardaway-Daltons that was a bane of my youth. Porky the Giant Killer must have been played at least once a week on Nickelodeon (or at least it was on every time I watched it). It’s fairly meandering and unfunny, lacking the charm and fun that even Bob Clampett’s worst Porkys have (and around this time, a few of Clampett’s worst were indeed made). I sent a disc of this and other cartoons to Mike Kazaleh awhile ago, and he tells me that Rod Scribner animated the scene with the bottle nipple.

No Brave Little Tailor this be, says I.

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Starts at around 5:31. I’m ashamed of myself (and everyone else) for not thinking of putting up framegrabs of Mama Bear shooting aimlessly at Papa Bear with the moose-head during the election. I love how her and Junyer’s first instinct is to kill the moose. This cartoon is the medium at its best. There’s no need to elaborate because it speaks for itself. It makes me cry that cartoons will never be this good again.

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That’s me with David Gerstein (both of us sporting sexy t-shirts of cartoon characters nobody gives a shit about). David has a blog. Go visit it. NOW. One of his first posts is about a Warner cartoon ending I told him probably didn’t exist. I’ve been proven wrong. One of the nicest things about being proven wrong by David Gerstein is that you’ll hear about it once, but that’s the end of it.

David is one of the most generous animation/comics guys out there and his blog will be a reflection of it. David’s own non-cartoon shenanigans in real life are just as interesting as anything he’ll post, but as Lou Jacobi says in Irma La Douce, “that’s another story.”

The Fox and Crow: the characters the Columbia studio accidentally got right (but only a few times).

This is probably the best of the post-Tashlin shorts, the underrated Bob Wickersham’s Mr. Moocher. The characters here are fully-realized, with interesting, discernible traits. We want to learn more about who these guys are and see them in more cartoons, which is not a feeling we get in other F&C cartoons. The animation and drawings are solid and funny. Frank Graham does a brilliant job with the milquetoast Fauntleroy, and uses his beloved conman voice heard in several MGM and Disney cartoons for Crawford. It also has a coherent story that actually builds up to a satisfying conclusion (this is not a trait one finds in many Columbia cartoons). The whole mooching/’chiseler’ concept would be cribbed for the wonderful comic books with these guys (and eventually for just about every DC funny animal comic too).

This is from a time coded VHS that originated from Jerry Beck and circulated almost eight years ago amongst collectors. Those were fun times when people actually sought out this stuff with their own time and money, and not just sit on their ass and wait for stuff to be handed to them on YouTube.

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From Looney Tunes #41 (Mar. 1945). Art by Tom McKimson. I think kid Bugs having only one buck tooth is adorable.

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I thought it’d be fun if the blogs started an ABC meme of their favorite Bugs Bunny cartoons. Because what’s more constructive than making a list of favorite films without offering any kind of reasoning behind their inclusion? I’ll go first.

A-Lad-for-Elmer
Bugs Bunny Shoots Japs in the Head
Captain Hareblower in the Back-alley
Duck! Rabbi, Duck!
Elmer’s Hidden Dorm Camera
French-Kissing Rarebit Sores
Gorilla My Wetdreams
Hare-ing AIDs
Invasion of the Bunny Snatchers
Jack-Wabbit the Ripper
Knighty Knight Klu Klux Klan Bugs
Long-Hared Hippie Fuck
Martin Luther King Jr. Day Yeggs
Now Hare This Motha-Fucka
Operation: Rabbit Genocide
Pubic Hare
Queer Duck
Ramadan Rabbit
Suck My Ass on Main Street (a personal favorite of mine and all of the men on my mom’s side of the family)
Touch of Elmer
The U.N. Versus Daffy Duck
Viva La Resistance! (banned in France and Quebec)
The Wabbit Who Came
Xenophobic Bunny
Yank My Doodle Bugs
Zulu Follies

Who wants to go next? Hmmm? What? No one? Fuck you all then.

Jerry Beck has posted on an issue very dear to me — the issue of film projection versus digital projection. (I know its main focus is the non-issue of whether 3-D is a faddish gimmick or not (FYI, it is), but this part was more interesting to me.)

Quite honestly, the only people who see this as a non-issue have never actually threaded a projector themselves. They don’t understand the beauty of being able to see and hold each frame of film; nor do they understand what an event it is to see a print projected.

Technology will march on. Give it a decade and, wow, you won’t believe the “film-like brilliance” of the latest digital projector. But if you’re into cinema history, and you’re a collector of classic films, who gives a shit? The films in question are not made to be shown on video. They are not digital. They are of the resolution they were created in (or close enough for us small-timers via 16mm).

Over and over I have the wonderful ability to blow people away by showing them the REAL THING, that’s right, the REAL THING, not a video replica (all video is is a replica). There is aesthetic (and cultural) value to presenting films in their original film format – period! (Which is why I’ve been weeding the Eastman stock out of my collection, because I can’t justify screening things that unquestionably have better color on DVD.) This “neato old stuff I still have” part is insignificant in the, well, big picture for many of us.

One more thing to think about: film may deteriorate in bad storage conditions, but in all but the absolute worst cases is the film not un-runnable, and I’ve been able to project horribly cared for films dating back to the 1910s. I’m lucky if a DVD I leave on my dorm room floor over night will actually work the next day.

A final thought: thousands of movies, thousands of hard drives, thousands of man-hours necessary to repeatedly back up/migrate/inventory these constantly-needed backups.

Unlike a 35mm neg. Which you put on the shelf and walk away from for 100 years.

“Excuse me, we need to shoot animation reference for a big, fat hippopotamus. You look like a big, fat hippopotamus who could stand some degrading, will you take the job?”