What About Thad?

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!

There was a lot of talk about Milt Gross press not too long ago with the release of Craig Yoe’s The Complete[sic] Milt Gross. I didn’t pay much attention because I’m not the biggest fan of Gross. His writing is leagues ahead of his comic contemporaries, but the art makes me feel claustrophobic if I look at it too long.

All the talk though reminded me that Gross designed the titles for Roxie Hart, Fox’s tacky 1942 remake of Chicago with Ginger Rogers, and that I actually had a copy of the movie. So here are those titles for your enjoyment. Gross was an inspired choice to do them because he sums up the tone of the film nicely.

Haven’t had time to screw around with a website for some time now and still really don’t. I promise to post something cool soon. I just wanted to pop out of the woodwork to say how I find it surprising that none of the animation websites I regularly read covered the announcement that Brad Bird is directing Mission: Impossible IV for Paramount. You’d think that the fact that America’s leading animated feature director is moving to live-action franchises, and that it’s confirmed, without a doubt, that Pixar will never make a movie worth watching again, would be headline news and serve as fodder for the discussion of whether or not it’s impossible for a director with real ambition to be a success in mainstream animation. Oh well.

Someone uploaded a letter-boxed Cinemascope copy of Sick Sick Sidney, so not only can you see all that beautiful Jim Tyer animation proper (or at least as proper as 30 dpi will allow), but you can now hear Sidney’s neurotic theme song at the beginning too.

I’ll take this over that other Deitch animated [sic] cartoon everyone was fawning over at Cartoon Brew recently. Hell, I’d take Dicky Moe over that.

This has been going on for awhile, so it isn’t really news, but Barnes & Noble has taken a temporary leave of sanity and is blowing out the The Completely MAD Don Martin at $22.48. This is not a joke… None of this “members only” business either… I know because this deal is how I got mine. Additionally, it’s available at a special “Buy 2, Get 3rd Free” deal, so you can take care of all your holiday shopping done at once.

I had heard of this parody from Dark Horse’s Hellboy Jr. #2 (Nov. 1999) in passing but have never seen it until now. Story and color by Bill Wray, art by Stephen DeStefano. It’s a little hardcore (as well as outrageously funny), so don’t say I didn’t warn you.

(Thanks, Kevin!)

Mark Mayerson’s posting of some rarely seen Mickey Mouse footage got me watching a few more of the Mickeys from this period, and I’m really stymied by how slowly everything is timed and moves in the studio’s cartoons even at this early in the game. I only selected The Karnival Kid (below) because that was the last one I watched, and it embodies a lot of the problems. There’s nice fluidity and appeal to the drawings and animation (and a certain amount of showing off perspective at the beginning), but every action and gag feels like it was timed like it had to read for viewers a few hundred yards away from the screen.

It’s not a problem exclusive to any particular era of Disney shorts either. I’ve already pointed out how Carl Barks’s first ever gag for a finished cartoon Modern Inventions reads great as a board and on paper but totally falls flat animated. It’s probably too late in history to find out why molasses timing was so contagious at the Disney studio, but who knows… With all the stuff David Gerstein is coming up with, I’m sure we’ll find some 1934 Maple Syrup Memorandum from the place shortly.

There are reams of documentation covering abandoned shorts from Disney, MGM, Fleischer, and other Golden Age studios, but coverage of TV cartoons that met the same or a similar fate is sparser. An example of one with an interesting history: a rejected Tiny Toon Adventures story became one for Ren & Stimpy. No April foolin’!

Jim Smith [mostly] storyboarded Hi, Spirits, a planned segment for one of the Acme Acres Zone half-hours, when he was in the newly formed Warner Bros. Animation unit in 1989. [UPDATE: See Kent Butterworth's comment for the correct date and place, as well as some more info.] He and Bob Camp lasted a whopping six months on the show before becoming fed up with the industry altogether and joined partners John Kricfalusi and Lynne Naylor in forming Spumco, the haven for animation’s malcontents.

What follows is the entire storyboard Smith did. (They’re littered with great unrelated duck sketches of his too.) There are discrepancies in the page numbers, but the board is complete. It’s criminal the final shows never retained the sort of liveliness found in this board.

Fast-forward two years later when The Ren & Stimpy Show began its second season of production. The show had risen the bar for what TV animation was capable of far more than any of its contemporaries in the fabled ‘animation renaissance.’ Hi, Spirits was flip-flopped into a story premise with Ren and Stimpy in the roles of Hampton and Gogo. (The Paul Tsongas ghost and yak remained present. A fat naked black man was added.) It was one of the “C” cartoons that John K. handed over to layout supervisor/timing director Ron Hughart to see through production as director in mid-1992.

For your enjoyment, here is the uncut version of the episode, unavailable on the “UNCUT” box set. See what remained the same from the Tiny Toons board – and what got changed!

Contrary to ‘facts’ circulating the Internet, the scene with the bloody-head fairy (here Doug Funnie instead of Elmer Fudd) was not added by Games Animation. The finished animation from Taiwan’s Color Key Studio arrived a week before the transition from Spumco to Games commenced.