What About Thad?

Ever since my online video accounts were completely purged, the Dick Huemer/Art Davis/Sid Marcus masterpiece Halloween has been deprived from the world. But once again you may now view this WTF milestone, hosted right here. Be sure to forward this Halloween treat to all of your friends and family.

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I almost forgot what drawings for an animated cartoon should look like until I started regularly looking at the Chuck Redux blog. I was worried that the site would be a valentine to Jones highlighting mediocre artwork from his later years (when he forgot to draw Bugs Bunny’s neck), but I was happily mistaken. Like the above Broomstick Bunny layout, the blog has been featuring some absolute gems from Jones’s richest period as an artist. And don’t forget to check out Jones’s letters to his daughter Linda!

Yes, the name of the blog changed again, and it’s to cater a new ‘discovery’ that has nothing to do with animation.

I knew of the existence of this educational film thanks to Tom posting images from the title to a film forum, but I never saw it until Jerry Beck sent me a DVD transfer of it. As Jerry wrote on the envelope, “This film explains EVERYTHING!” With the exception of getting shallow comfort from a dog (replace it with a cat), this happened to me about once a week during grade school. The twerp even looks something like me at age seven. Enjoy.

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I have to readily confess to not being a fan of the Van Beuren studio’s cartoons of the 1930s. This is strange, as I love all of those cartoon studios we’re told to stay away from (Lantz, Famous, Terrytoons) for the good of our health. But when Steve Stanchfield announced that he would be selling The Complete Animated Adventures of Van Beuren Studio’s Tom and Jerry, I just couldn’t pass it up. And I’m glad I didn’t.

Do not be expecting cartoons with any kind of skillful writing, animation, or draftsmanship. In fact, it’s best to go into this without expecting anything good. What you can expect is some drunken cartoon fun with no redeeming value whatsoever.

The Van Beuren cartoons essentially are clones of the contemporary Terrytoons; both are fairly indistinguishable from each other (at least in my eyes). There’s even a blatant Farmer Alfalfa knockoff in Barnyard Bunk. Like the Terrytoons, these Van Beuren Tom & Jerrys never show any of the ambition commonly found in the Fleischer studio’s cartoons, nor its advanced animation and draftsmanship. Watching these cartoons makes one really appreciates the strides the Fleischer animators were making in all of those fancy filmmaker terms.

A lot of them are also overtly racist, and that is taking into account that the ‘newest’ ones were made in 1933. There’s no playful caricature like you’d see in a Fleischer short; the gag is just that the character is a black, gay, or Jew, made even more offensive by the lame drawing skills.

So why on earth would you buy this?

Some of them are so bizarre they’re actually good. Absolute “Bowl of WTF” contenders are things like The Magic Mummy and ‘Waffles and Don’ Gypped in Egypt, which give Fleischer entries like Swing You Sinners a run for their money in terms of weird for weirdness sake (though certainly not in artistry). Hook & Ladder Hokum is attributed as Frank Tashlin’s directorial debut, and isn’t half-bad, with gags and timing he’d perfect at Warners in Porky the Fireman. Some like Piano Tooners and Pots and Pans are examples of 1930s cartoons at their generically delightful best.

One upside to this collection is that faux-Disney saccharine (Disney Splenda?) is completely absent, an epidemic that contaminated all of the studios of the 1930s, and almost always resulting in sheer 3-Strip eye rape. With cartoons as random in quality as these ones, it’s nice that you can be reassured you won’t be subjected to seven minutes of bunnies getting ready for Easter.

But the main reason to buy this is because Steve Stanchfield is one of the nicest guys around, and did an amazing job putting all of this rare material together. It is very convenient having all of this series’ cartoons in one place, some of them even mastered from great 35mm prints. Steve has put out several other collections of Van Beuren cartoons, but for my money, this is the best one. In this market, we have to hand it to people like Steve, Ray Pointer, and Tom Stathes for continuing to utilize animation’s vast public domain library, while the big studios sit on their asses leaving everything on the shelves to collect dust.

So if you want to see the Van Beuren studio doing what it did, um, best, pick this set up. But think twice before getting those Rainbow Parades…

The Blu-Ray release of How the Grinch Stole Christmas! presents the special with radically different colors compared to what we’ve been used to over the years. I would like to give Warner Home Video the benefit of the doubt, as the new colors do match the sericels Chuck Jones/Turner put out years ago; but it still doesn’t make the supposed original colors any less jarring after years of viewing the same faded copy ad nauseam.

A user on YouTube is posting various really, really random versions of Tom & Jerry cartoons. Up first is something I hadn’t seen before – the (literally) recolored version of Nit-Witty Kitty that Chuck Jones’s studio handled for television. This is point-for-point identical to the original, except for Mammy being colored white. I’m sure that this is a work-copy, that would later have June Foray’s Irish maid voice dubbed over the original Lillian Randolph soundtrack, but it’s still trippy to watch.

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Of weirder interest is the TV edit of Mouse Cleaning, where they did new footage of Tom getting out of the coal – this time not imitating Stepin Fetchit. Most likely Tom Ray’s animation there. Old habits never die I see. Take a look at the cel color error of Tom’s chest in the new footage. Always a sure sign of a Jones animator.

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(Incidentally, the Stepin Fetchit gag is one of the few times I actually laugh at a blackface gag in a cartoon. Hell, what can I say, it works there, and it’s really, really funny.)

Nothing much here, and that’s the truth. But I know people are out there who, like me, love obscene Famous Studios shorts like Pleased to Eat You just for the sake of it, and it’s worth posting because it’s buy that “soft” director Myron Waldman. He did gratuitously violent cartoons such as Can You Take It, Teacher’s Pest, and Herman the Cat-toonist, or ones that end with characters dying, like this one, Cad and Caddy, Winner by a Hare, and The Oily Bird when he was on a break from directing soft Hunky & Spunky and Casper pictures. (Actually, see There’s Good Boos Tonight for an exception…)

Some of the animation timing/phrasing is truly bizarre in this cartoon; it’s as though Waldman was trying to emulate some of the tricks in the later Tashlin shorts at Warners, though not very successfully. (Similar phrasing tricks are in Teacher’s Pest.) The cleanup here is pretty poor, an unfortunate problem at Famous Studios during this era. Enjoy ?

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