What About Thad?

As I’ve written in the past, I love Walter Lantz cartoons, from the best ones to every ugly, badly animated frame of film the studio ever put out. It led to me getting involved in creating The Walter Lantz Cartune Encyclopedia. Not to toot my own horn, but it’s a site more useful than anything in print media about the studio. (Though for some reason the site’s current maintainer has removed almost any trace of my involvement, at one point even expunging me from the list of the site’s creators.)

The site was born out of a frustration over how useless all of the books were on Lantz. Joe Adamson wrote The Walter Lantz Story with Lantz leaning over his shoulder, so unfortunately the best has yet to be told about the inner-workings of the place. Michael Barrier spends hardly any time at all in Hollywood Cartoons talking about Lantz cartoons, but one passage where he did baffled me, when he talks about Knock Knock, the first cartoon with Woody Woodpecker. From page 376:

The Lantz studio’s records listed Lantz as the director of Knock Knock, but the actual director was almost certainly Alex Lovy (who has screen credit as one of two artists; no one is credited as director).

Like others, I had always assumed Lantz did indeed direct many cartoons himself for budgetary reasons, bearing in mind that he had to close down the studio and reopen. (This also seems to have happened again when Lantz reopened in 1950, with him directing that awkward clump of silent Woody Woodpeckers.) It would also be unusual for Lovy to be denied director’s credit, because he and others were given screen credit in the past. Lovy did a lot of animation during this period (in the cartoon in question, the scenes with the decoy), which led me to believe he wasn’t directing if he was animating a lot of footage.

So naturally, being a Lantz nut, I had to write to Mike and ask what he was basing his conclusion about Knock Knock on. An interview with Lovy himself perhaps? That was indeed it. Here’s what Lovy told Milt Gray back on Jan. 24, 1978:

Lovy: Walt did come up with the idea—“How about a woodpecker?”—and he told us the story about just what you’re saying there [the woodpecker pecking holes in Walter’s mountain cabin’s roof]. I designed Woody Woodpecker, and I made the first cartoon, Knock Knock, I directed the first one.

Gray: Mike talked with Lantz back in 1971, and Lantz seemed to say that he was also directing during this period.

Lovy: I can’t recall Walter actually directing and timing any pictures, but if he says he did, he probably did. I just don’t remember. I know I constantly was directing, all the time. He may have directed several of them, or one or two of them, but I don’t remember it.

Gray: But you did direct Knock Knock.

Lovy: Yes, I remember that one very well. I directed almost all of the Woodys from that point on, for several years.

There is an endnote in that paragraph that Mike said was intended to refer back to all the preceding references to Lovy, but it’s still unclear where the information is coming from. This was probably a case where it would have been prudent just to flat out say in the main text that Lovy had said himself who really directed the woodpecker’s debut.

I have no problem believing Lovy, given that the accuracy of Lantz’s own recollections were unreliable at best. The trouble is, it raises even more questions. Why did Lovy not receive screen credit for directing during this period? Was Lantz even really directing himself? And if he was, which pictures were really his and not Lovy’s? And what about that period in 1951-52 – was Lantz really directing then, or was it another animator, perhaps Don Patterson? The Lantz-o-Pedia is one of the best databases of its kind, but we really need a good, proper oral history of the studio.

If RHI wasn’t putting out a box set of the Hal Roach Laurel & Hardy sound films, I would say that the collection of Famous Studios Noveltoons Steve Stanchfield is releasing this October would be the DVD I’m looking forward to most this year. Remastered from the best accessible 35mm material, this collection will finally make some of the most unique examples of 1940s animated cartooning available in the best quality possible.

The DVD will feature twenty cartoons from 1943-50, stopping around the time things started to go south for awhile at Famous. What happened there, with its once well-polished and funny product quickly becoming a repetitive mess, is a sobering reminder of how easily the Warner studio could have suffered the same fate had the management structure been different, and how thankful we should be that those shorts were as great for as long as they were.

Steve told me he’s gotten requests to do a Famous release more than any other, so I urge you: if you’ve only read about or seen the work of artists like John Gentilella, Marty Taras, Dave Tendlar, Steve Muffati, and even Jim Tyer through this blog or others, buy this DVD to see their cartoons in the best way possible. It’s just another in the long line of immaculate collections Steve has put out and will continue to put out in the future.

The stupidest thing done on TCM last night should have been accidentally playing a Dogville Comedy (a series “as funny as AIDs and nuclear war”) rather than a Popeye cartoon. But in actuality, it was the piece they played, above, that was supposed to introduce it. Jack Shaheen has obviously never seen Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves or is legally blind.

For some reason, Fleischer opted to use “Ali Baba” for the title, even though Bluto is called “Abu Hassan” repeatedly throughout the film, possibly because the former had more name recognition. (Sort of the opposite reason for why Bob Clampett had to call his short Coal Black rather than the more appropriate So White.) So in spite of the title, it’s clearly only using the story as a basis for an adventure story, not bastardizing it as Shaheen suggests.

There are many cartoons that exemplify poor Arab images in film, but this isn’t the one. One beautiful thing about the Fleischer cartoons is how they succeeded where the other Hollywood and New York studios always failed: not adhering to formulaic portrayals of specific races or genders. Everyone and everything should look as exaggerated and different as possible. And how could it do “more to denigrate Arabs than any cartoon ever” if Popeye is going out of his way to save a community of Arabs?

Popeye Meets Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves is one of the most atmospheric, thrilling, and funniest animated films ever made. Shaheen seems to be another dime a dozen ‘film scholar’ who obviously hasn’t done the least of his obligations by seeking out as many films as possible to draw such a conclusion. At least he’s in good company.

(Via Cartoon Brew)

Addendum: I read that Sahara Hare (which starts out brilliantly and sort of fizzles out by the four minute mark) was another cartoon that was supposed to be presented with an introduction but was dropped. Good thing too, because it would’ve been an embarrassment trying to explain the negative social values therein and convincing anyone that this isn’t just Freleng doing a normal Bugs/Sam picture with a costume and scenery change. I’m all for encouraging better enlightenment and tolerance in fan communities when it comes to racial imagery, but there’s a right way and an asinine way to do it, and it’s just weird to see TCM doing so much in the latter. But hey, right, they’re just cartoons.

I hope this doesn’t become a monthly-post blog of links to other sites, but it just may well become that.

While he hasn’t announced it on his own site, Amid Amidi will have an illustrated biography on Ward Kimball published next year. He says, “I hope the book will offer a portrait of Ward that goes beyond his stereotypical image as animation’s goofy madman,” and I certainly hope so too. Contrary to the marginalization of Kimball in most texts that are part of what Mike Barrier calls “The Approved Narrative” (really “Accepted”, but he told me he could care less about a differentiation), Kimball is probably the only Disney artist where a full-scale biography is truly needed. Whenever you read something like John Canemaker’s Nine Old Men (an “Approved Narrative” if there ever was one) and see these animators lined up as if they were all equals, all it reveals is that (for the most part) these artists were more or less facsimiles of each other in their work, with Kimball as the only individual.

The access to Kimball’s private library is enticing, but it worries me that it might compromise some of Amidi’s critical writing style, the problem his beautiful Cartoon Modern suffered. (In exchange for lavish illustrations, he doesn’t tell you that most of the films the book is about, as films, really are hollow, wallpaper.) “Thorough celebration” tends to be a red flag for “everything this man touched is worth something”, but fortunately Kimball’s life and career was so eclectic that it’d be quite easy to avoid the pratfall of giving the lesser film works the same importance as the best ones and just give them the brushoff they deserve.

To supplement the post, here’s an example: Kimball’s 1968 anti-Vietnam short Escalation, the sort of underwhelming satirical filmmaking that dominated his later period, highlighting political bromides presented in a faux-arty manner. The “Johnson” joke is lame too.

I was thrilled to read that my favorite Famous Studios series is getting its own DVD release, but I thought the cover art was a little bland, classic Harvey Comics cover it may be. I did some asking around, and I not only managed to get the real cover art, but the back cover too! Contents are subject to change, but I sure hope not, this sounds like the release of a lifetime as is.

I’ve written about what makes Floyd Gottfredson’s Mickey Mouse sublime and unquestionably superior to the animated counterpart several times in the past, so I won’t repeat myself. But it bears constant reiteration that Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse: “Race to Death Valley” (Vol. 1) by Fantagraphics, a collection people have been waiting decades for, is a must for your comics/animation library.

This is the start of the reprinting of Gottfredson’s entire run of the Mickey Mouse daily strips, something comic fans thought they’d never live to see. The restoration of the Walt Disney-Gottfredson written story, Death Valley, has been something of a project of David Gerstein’s for at least half the time I’ve known him, and it’s easily the best version you’ll ever see of this historic story, not to mention every single other strip presented. (For completeness’s sake, the Disney/Ub Iwerks/Win Smith collaboration and first Mouse serial Lost on a Desert Island is also featured.)

Gottfredson hadn’t quite come into his own in the period covered in this tome (April 1930-January 1932), but you can see the art evolve from slightly crude beginnings to something that isn’t quite the classic Gottfredson Mickey look. By the end of the book, colorful costars like Clarabelle Cow and Horace Horsecollar (rarely ever more than just incidentals in the animated cartoons) are just as refined and well-developed as the main mouse is.

My hat’s off to David and his chums at Fantagraphics. I’d pre-order Vol. 2, due out in October, had I not bought this at full price today (worth every cent though). That second volume should feature stories like Treasure Island and Blaggard Castle, where Gottfredson begins his period as the single most accomplished comic strip storyteller. And still, the best is yet to come.

(Incidentally, I see I am thanked in the book by David for support and inspiration. Making all those jokes about Walt Disney’s Sylvester Shyster the Crooked Jew has finally paid off.)

In his posting of John Stanley’s comics with the Famous Studios characters, Frank lamented that Cilly Goose, one of the studio’s “most accomplished and atmospheric one-shot” cartoons, isn’t available online anymore. So I’m reposting it.

This was one of the last Famous cartoons done in Miami, the credit for Abner Kneitel being indicative of this, since he didn’t return to New York. (I believe some of Kneitel’s animation can be seen when Cilly is showing her egg to the sow, and when she’s being tortured by the mob. The style is very similar to the animation Bob Jaques identified as Kneitel’s in the Jim Tyer-directed Popeye classic Too Weak to Work.) Though it’s obvious the boys were prepping for the move back, with the riff on NYC’s luxurious mayoral tours.

Cilly Goose is a cartoon that tries a lot of different stylistic approaches at once. The Fleischer studio perfected the idea of “appropriate length” with their Popeye two-reelers, in which they learned how long the characters and stories could be before the audience became disengaged. (Rank heresy it may be to say, the list of animated cartoons that warrant a length greater than thirty minutes is miniscule.) That quality is also present in this short. It’s certainly not worthy of a true two-reeler length, but it’s still material that can go on a bit longer than the average six minutes.

The Fleischer drawing style still hadn’t been discarded at this point, the bunny who looks like he stepped out of a 1930 Talkartoon being the prime example. There’s also a Chuck Jones influence here, with an emphasis on pantomime and strong, held character poses for acting. The staging and set-up is especially brilliant when Cilly enters the Square Garden to meet her fate, where she becomes a living, breathing being with her dreams about to be shattered and her fears realized. Ditto for the angry mob at the end, a nightmarish depiction of human greed and the shameless exploitation of animals.

The result is a cartoon that is as good as anybody’s, but it ended up swept under the rug due to years of guilt-by-association and garbage film prints.

There’s a nice two-part interview with animation layout giant Bob Givens at the TAG Blog. Click here and here.

I’ve been meaning to post some of my own various conversations with New York animation superstar Howard Beckerman, but it’ll take some time to make them audible (due mainly to recording ineptness). If there’s any immediate interest, let me know.

The above item is pictured in the Profiles in History Hollywood Auction booklet, available here. Aside from obviously being paired with an unrelated background, Mike Kazaleh tells me he suspects it was done by one of the MGM assistant animators rather than one of the regular suspects (Harvey Eisenberg, Ken Muse, Dick Bickenbach) for personal amusement. It is doubtful the word “boob” would be used in 1940s publicity material, regardless of where the booklet states it’s from.

There’s lots of great artwork pictured from most of the classic studios, so grab the PDF while you can. I was planning a self-righteous rant about how the practice of animation art dealing is little more than shysters ransacking widows to make obscene profits on artwork they don’t even know the origins of, save the occasional upstanding practitioner (the excellent Howard Lowery comes to mind immediately), but thought better of it.

(Via Mark Mayerson).

Here is another prime Dave Tendlar cartoon with Blackie the Lamb and Wolfie, the perverse Sheep Shape (1946). This is before Marty Taras joined Tendlar’s crew, but Johnny Gent more than adequately fills those shoes with some beautiful animation in this one. Unfortunately, all of my copies of this cartoon have faded to what Tom Stathes and I call “menstruavision”, so you can’t enjoy the eye candy that is Famous Studios color styling.

This has a lot in common with that very bizarre, but very wonderful, Bob Clampett Bugs Bunny cartoon, Hare Ribbin’ (1944). In both, the protagonist’s cross-dressing works so well, and they get so into it, that it gets a little uncomfortable to watch. Much more so in the Famous cartoon, where Blackie seems to have either shaved his wool or donned a flesh-colored body suit. Laughs are laughs, though, and this one has plenty of them. The adoption of suburban (or maybe rural?) rivalry over the prey-predator formula in this cartoon also gives this a unique Fleischer-like vibe to it.

I want to call your attention to a bit of animation by Gent from 2:17 to 2:37. This is a perfect instance of how great some of these guys were: that they’d do amazing work even if the material didn’t require it. Rather than just have him walk in and place the board in the door, Gent actually has Blackie stagger and struggle with the board, emphasizing its weight and what a struggle it is for a squirt like him to lift it. When Wolfie rams the revolver in the lamb’s face, every syllable of his dialog is reflected in the gun being jammed that many times in Blackie’s forehead. The scurry-in when Wolfie digs his way into the house is beautiful. In short, “that is some good shit.”

Also, enjoy a less disturbing (?) model of Blackie in drag by Tendlar.