What About Thad?

I love a lot of comics from the 1940s and 1950s, and own about a thousand of them, but they simply don’t hold up well for rereading. The art can be great to look at (and help ID certain animators’ styles in many cases), but the stories are mostly junk, and repetitive junk at that. Carl Barks, John Stanley, and Walt Kelly are the transgressive artists at Western Publishing, period.

I think this story from WDC&S 173 (Feb. 1955) is probably in my top five favorites; of course I say that about every Barks story I reread and laugh out loud at. At around this time, people were not fond of Barks’s depiction of Donald, writing to him, saying that his behavior upset their children. I don’t have a copy of the letter, but I think Barks responded to one of them saying something to the extent of “tell your kid he’s a nose pickin’ crybaby.”

My apologies for those who hate modern coloring, it’s all I have of the story on file.

I haven’t put together one of these reels in a long time, so here’s one highlighting the work of Irv Spence, easily one of the Golden Age’s most distinctive and recognizable animators. While this features highlights from the epic saga of Tom & Jerry (the series Spence spent most of his career on), this also features his work for Tex Avery (at Schlesinger’s and MGM) and for that odd curio studio of Ub Iwerks’s. I’d like to actually have copies of his work at Jam Handy (roughly ‘45-’47) one day too.

It’s probably hard for us all to remember the time when Duck Amuck actually thrilled us on every level… Overexposure (WB49, the old Buffalo WB network affiliate, played this at least once a week) and academic slobber easily destroys the enjoyment of any film, and this milestone definitely has suffered for it. I can’t tell you how many people have told me, “Yeah, it’s brilliant, but I have to go another ten years without seeing it again to appreciate it.” Fortunately, this doesn’t ruin the fact that there will always be kids green to this cartoon, and love it, for years to come… Wouldn’t it be cool to have that innocence again?

GO HOME.

Not really.  Having some REAL FUN with a server move.

Someone posted the complete version of Professor Small and Mr. Tall on YouTube (the version for the syndicated Totally Tooned In! package removed the foreboding scene of the gay ghost as Hitler shooting himself).

The short has a lot going for it as far as laughs (more than what Leonard Maltin says anyway, whose panning of it has been burnt into everyone’s memory for thirty years), but at the same time, when you look at it from a technical standpoint, the short is sort of a mess. For starters, the animation is pretty bad. Obviously, John Hubley and his crew were excited over the stylized animation that Jones was establishing in his 1942 shorts at Schlesinger’s, but it looks like they either didn’t have the time or money to perfect doing it themselves. The animation tries to pop/settle from pose to pose, but it just ends up looking stiff. It also looks as though the characters were designed without much thought of how they’d play out in animation.

That’s par for the course with the 1940s Columbia cartoon output though. Some of the animation can be on the level of the average Warner short (when Emery Hawkins, Don Williams, Ray Patterson, Grant Simmons, or NY import Morey Reden are behind it); a lot of it is as bad as the average Terrytoon or worse. A very schizophrenic studio for sure.

You can see a much funnier and better animated UPA cartoon that tries this style, The Miner’s Daughter at Kevin’s site.

I posted about my discovery of the special opening to How to Play Football a few months ago, but now you can see it here as it actually plays out.

The contents of the new April 27th Warner cartoon releases were announced (for real), and it’s not exactly for the “classic” connoisseur. The cartoons range from some ‘A’ cartoons (Foxy By Proxy, Hare Trimmed, Nasty Quacks, Daffy DIlly), some ‘B’ cartoons (Bushy Hare, The Prize Pest, Stork Naked), to some outright abortions from the end of the Warner run (Mad as Mars Hare, Dr. Devil and Mr. Hare, Suppressed Duck, The Iceman Ducketh). But mostly they are ‘C’ grade/filler cartoons of the Bob McKimson variety. These are the ‘talking head’ cartoons you saw on Saturday morning, and even as a kid you knew weren’t very hot. Personally, they are cartoons I can take or leave, and it’s usually leave.

It’s not surprising after over a third of the cartoons had been released that the true classics are slimming down, or that the later cartoons are probably cheaper to restore. But at the cheap price they’ll be (definitely a ‘drop in the cart’ purchase at Target) and the few real classics they contain, I’m not complaining.

In the meantime, here is one of the cartoons you won’t be seeing, A Feather In His Hare, one of the two “Character Versus a Jewish Indian” cartoons of 1948. Maybe that description makes it sound a little overtly prejudiced, but it’s hard to find much wrong with a cartoon where the native actually realizes he forgot to say “ugh”.

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The first series where I could immediately see the difference in animator styles when I first started seeing them was Tom & Jerry (this would be around age nine). At that age, I had no way of knowing the actual name of each animator, but I had them down fairly well: the ‘furrowy/pouty’ guy (Ray Patterson), the ‘perfect’ guy (Ken Muse), the ‘flying shit’ guy (Irv Spence), the ‘pop/bounce to pose’ guy (Pete Burness), and the ’roundish/oval-ly’ guy (Ed Barge).

The earlier cartoons also had two very distinct styles that disappeared as the cartoons started to get faster: the ‘cute, baby-walk’ guy and the ‘rubbery’ guy. For years I thought that the former was Jack Zander and the latter was George Gordon.

Thanks to brilliant historian and animator Mark Kausler, we now know better. He posted IDs from his animator’s draft for The Night Before Christmas (click here and here to see them, and for Mark Mayerson’s mosaic, click here), and apparently it’s the other way around. The scenes in the early Tom & Jerrys we assumed were Zander’s are really Gordon’s, and the scenes we assumed Gordon’s are Zander’s.

So the lesson learned here is:
‘cute, baby-walk’ guy = Gordon;
‘rubbery’ guy = Zander.

But where did this misinformation come from? I don’t have my copy handy (or a scanner – so a scan would be welcome) but there is a drawing from this scene (from The Lonesome Mouse) labeled as “one of Jack Zander’s early expressive drawings of Jerry” in Leonard Maltin’s still-invaluable Of Mice and Magic. I’m not sure if anyone is keeping a list of errors in Maltin’s book, but it would be prudent to take note of this one. (UPDATE: Thanks to reader Oswald Iten for submitting a scan!)

Mark has also ID’ed a few other early T&J animators, Cecil Surry and Bill Littlejohn (who actually received a screen credit on Fine Feathered Friend, but it was omitted in the 1949 reissue). More on them later.