Dig This Crazy Web Page: Our blog…as art

by Rachel Newstead

This has nothing to do with animation or TV, except perhaps in the most tangential way. But you really should see this…

Have you ever seen a “wordle?”

For those of you whose eyes just glazed over, a “wordle” is sort of part tag cloud, part abstract art. On this site, you can take any block of text, or the URL of any blog, and you’ll see the most frequently used words arranged in wild, colorful shapes. I created the image you see above by entering the URL for (what else?) this blog. Not bad, if I do say so myself.

My, but we’ve mentioned Tex Avery a lot, haven’t we?

What do you do with a wordle? Well, just about anything: print it, use it on T-shirts, or even post it to the online gallery (I haven’t been quite brave enough to do that just yet).

Now if only I could make a wordle in the shape of Daffy Duck…

Before He Was “Tex”: Avery at Lantz (1930-35) Part One

Tex Avery's first fairy-tale "Grandma," from GRANDMA'S PET (1932)

Every Avery fan knows this gag. But this was the first time Tex used it. From THE SINGING SAP (1930)

by Rachel Newstead

I’ve always been fond of essay-style posts, where I can discuss a cartoonist’s body of work, or even a single cartoon, in-depth. This one had been germinating for quite some time;  originally intended for the old Orphan Toons blog back in 2008, this series will take a look at a period of Tex Avery’s career that’s often overlooked or glossed over by historians, the period from which the ideas that won him fame originally sprang. It’s my pleasure to bring the first part to you now.

It’s ironic, I suppose, that a man who disdained established, continuing characters as much as Tex Avery would be so inextricably linked to so many of them: the lecherous Wolf, the red-hot Red. The addlepated Egghead. The deceptively languid Droopy. George and Junior and Screwy Squirrel. Then, of course, there’s his long association with a certain rabbit.

No, not that rabbit.

If they bothered to take enough time to glance at the credits, theater audiences on Sept. 8, 1930 watching a fairly typical early sound cartoon called The Singing Sap might have noticed the name “Fred Avery”. And just as quickly forgotten it. Yet unknown to those unsuspecting theater-goers, a revolution was brewing, and young Frederick Bean Avery would one day be its standard-bearer.

To understand the Tex Avery of King Size Canary, Dumb Hounded, A Wild Hare and Red Hot Riding Hood requires us to carefully sift through the archaeological layers, back to a time when the studio he worked for was run by a fellow named Walter Lantz, and the rabbit he worked with was named “Oswald.” A time before he was “Tex.”

Tex Avery makes his mark on the world of animation--but not quite like this guy. From TOWNE HALL FOLLIES (1935)

Animation historians, with more than a hint of romanticism, often look for the source of Tex Avery’s humor in the tall tales of his Texas upbringing, and the backwoods hyperbole of his ancestor, Daniel Boone. It makes for good copy, all right. But those wishing to find the real source of his humor need look no further than his earliest days at the Walter Lantz studio.

Freeze Frame Friday 2/5/10: The “Muse” Of Animation

by Rachel Newstead

Even in the most factory-like of animation studios, good animation will tell. In the better ones, it can soar.

In the mid-forties, other than the Disney studio, no animation house could boast a more talented roster of animators than MGM’s.   Then again, many of  them had, in fact, come from Disney: Preston Blair, Michael Lah, Ray Patterson, Ed Love, Grant Simmons. And that’s only a partial list.

Yet even among this distinguished group, one animator stood out–the subject of this week’s Freeze Frame Friday, Ken Muse.

There’s probably a bit of truth to the bad pun in my post title: the frames shown at left will no doubt inspire any young would-be

animator.  In this series of stills from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Mouse (1948),  Tom has just swallowed the home-brewed “super strength” potion Jerry had concocted for himself. Tom appears to swell to gargantuan size, and the evil emotions churning within seem to increase in proportion. Little does he know that it will all soon backfire, as he finds himself reduced to flyspeck size.

As the formula takes effect, Tom looks as if he’s being taken apart molecule by molecule, his form dissolving into an explosion of abstract color reminiscent of–appropriately enough–the “Pink Elephants On Parade” sequence of Disney’s Dumbo.

Muse, if my less-than-perfect memory can be relied upon, was used for the more expressive scenes, and just why can be easily seen in these few frames.  Muse  exaggerates Tom’s malevolent grin, of course, but at the same time it’s frighteningly real, enough to rival any horror-movie monster.

Muse would later join his MGM colleagues Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera at their newly-formed independent studio in 1959; he would animate most, if not all, of the debut Flintstones episode “The Swimming Pool.” His expressions, despite the much simpler drawing style, went a long way toward establishing the characters and their personality traits. The Flintstones was by necessity a dialogue-heavy series, but in “The Swimming Pool,” one didn’t need words to know in an instant what kind of person Fred Flintstone was. You knew just by looking at him.

I’ve often, when I sit and look at what passes for animation these days, felt something was missing; these few images remind me what that “something” is. In a word, expressiveness. The animators on Family Guy and The Simpsons make characters move. Muse made them think.

Now more than ever the animation industry could use a “muse” like him.

Love Business As Usual, Or Blinded By The Pixel Light

Ex-Disney artist Louis Schmitt's cute crooner skunk causes a rabbit audience to experience some very un-Disneylike feelings in L'IL TINKER (1948)

by Kevin Wollenweber

I hate this time of year!

I disregard it the way some folks have been known to disregard Christmas or the onset of summer and its weekly fun beach parties.  I smile when I hear Dishonest John sneer “I hate love!”  No, I wouldn’t quite put it like that; I don’t “hate love”, I just hate not being in it!

However, animation over the years has glorified love, predominately from the male point of view, so that is what I pick up on when I watch the classic impressions.  There are the love triangles so often seen in classic cartoons.  We’ve seen Tom, the cat in the TOM & JERRY cartoons constantly finding himself there, especially in the cinemascope classic, “BLUE CAT BLUES” in which both Tom and Jerry commit suicide over a love so hopelessly lost despite all the material presents they lavish on their intendeds.  There’s the

BLUE CAT BLUES (1958)

love unwanted, as in the POPEYE cartoon in which he’s hounded by extremely handsome women who just won’t take “no” for an answer (one time in a gymnasium and the other, in the Famous Studio days, while vacationing in the mountains), and there are the regrettable marriages so often outlined in Warner Brothers cartoons, from Daffy Duck in “HIS BITTER HALF” to Foghorn Leghorn’s feeling that he’s demeaning himself by sitting on the egg while his own bitter half is out with the hens of the barnyard.  One could almost guess that the animators were venting against their own romantic and marital “bliss” situations, but I won’t over-analyze, here.

“Take Two…Hi, Kids!”: Or, “How Did I Get In THIS Mess??”

The many moods of blog co-contributor Kevin Wollenweber in his stint as host for a day on Cartoon Network, 1995

by Kevin Wollenweber

Ever find yourself disgusted with the sound of your own voice?  No, I’m not just pontificating about spending way too much time with myself in my own self-imposed hermitage or being out of work and having to face reinventing myself for the next horrible 50 years.  I’m referring to my one and only opportunity to learn how the broadcast medium of television works and be part of it for a day on a then fledgling network.

Yes (sigh), I was again viewing the recorded results of “KEVIN WOLLENWEBER DAY”, the albatross around my neck, the embarrassment and realization that I don’t have talent!!  If I’ve ruminated about this in the past, please forgive me, but I threw one of the disks on my player this morning and relived the day in flashbacks.  Oh, those flashbacks!

To recap, at some point, in mid-1995, while working at my boring day job, I got a call from someone connected with Cartoon Network, back when they still aired animation of the distant and beloved first golden age.  The pleasant woman’s voice on the other end of the phone asked me if I wouldn’t like to be “host” of a day on the network.

A Celebration of Life–And Hope: George Pal and TULIPS SHALL GROW (1942)

When searching for the best way to celebrate the birthday of George Pal, I could think of none better than to discuss a work of his that is itself a celebration–of triumph over adversity, of hope over despair: his 1942 Oscar-nominated Puppetoon, “Tulips Shall Grow.” May you find the cartoon as inspirational as I did.

by Rachel Newstead

Animation at its best has tremendous persuasive power:  the power to evoke laughter or, as we’ve seen as recently as Pixar’s “Up,” tears. It can make us forget our plight, or see ourselves in pen-and-ink drawings, lumps of clay or blocks of wood. At no time, however, is that power more evident than in times of war.

The animators who worked on the home front during World War II to entertain and inform the public instinctively understood this. The war years represented a creative blossoming of the medium of animation; this was the era of Tex Avery’s Blitz Wolf, of Walt Disney’s Der Fuehrer’s Face; when the animated denizens of the Walter Lantz studio moved to a swing beat. Bugs Bunny would find his comedic voice in these years, and set the pattern for other studios to follow.

Yet ironically, the man who most understood the persuasive and emotional power of animation is perhaps, today, the least talked-about. It’s that man whose birthday, whose life we celebrate today, the stop-motion animator and filmmaker George Pal.

To call Pal’s work “stop-motion animation” almost seems to disparage it somehow; it falls into a category all its own. It always fascinated me how Pal could bring his characters to life. Using interchangeable parts with varying degrees of distortion, he could simulate the “squash and stretch” of hand-drawn animation.

Not only did this enable him to avoid the jerky movement so typical of stop-motion, but it bestowed on his characters that same “illusion of life” Disney so fervently strove for. One could “believe” Pal’s characters were living, breathing creatures, and audiences cared for them as if they were. This ability proved invaluable in what is perhaps Pal’s greatest animated film, Tulips Shall Grow.

It’s All About Him: Duck Dodgers In ATTACK OF THE DRONES

Daffy as "Duck Dodgers" addresses his...uh, "troops" in ATTACK OF THE DRONES

After a brief hiatus to accommodate the Freeze Frame Friday feature (and to give your tired blogger a badly needed rest) we resume our look at Larry Doyle’s 2003 Looney Tunes.

Review by Rachel Newstead

DUCK DODGERS IN ATTACK OF THE DRONES
Copyright year 2003 (unreleased)

Director: Rich Moore
In short: What’s worse than one Duck Dodgers? Try 100….with lasers

Like just about any other fan in the known universe, I love Duck Dodgers In The 24th 1/2 Century. I love it from the first scene to the last, from the wonderfully wonky “1930s space opera meets Salvador Dali” designs of Maurice Noble, to Marvin Martian’s Acme ray guns, to the “disintegrating pistol” gag (“Well, whaddaya know, it disintegrated….”). Nothing could come close to it, and indeed, nothing ever has. Even the men behind the original, Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese, couldn’t re-ignite the spark, though they certainly tried. I’ve spent much of the last thirty years trying to wipe Duck Dodgers and the Return Of The 24th 1/2 Century from my memory.

The Duck Dodgers TV series was…adequate, most of the time. If one pretended the classic 1953 “Duck Dodgers” never existed and judged the latter version on its own merits, it could be quite entertaining. That, essentially, is the attitude I had to take when it came time to review Larry Doyle’s take on the “Dodgers” universe, Attack Of The Drones. With the proper mindset in place, I found myself enjoying it more than I ever thought I would.

Freeze Frame Friday 1/29/10: A Plethora of Porkys–And Chock Full Of Charlies

by Rachel Newstead

When I was first introduced to the cartoons of Chuck Jones as an impressionable pre-adolescent,  I knew him mainly for two things: the measured, Disneyesque cartoons of his early years, and the stylized, mannered-nearly-to-the-point-of abstraction work of his later years.  Little did I know then of the riches that lay in the middle.

In that shakedown middle period, running more or less from the release of the groundbreaking Dover Boys in 1942 to the first of the Bugs/Daffy/Elmer trilogy (Rabbit Fire) in 1951, Jones was perhaps at his freest and most innovative:  when Eugene Fleury, then Robert Gribbroek,  were his background designers, when he was reading up on the filmmaking techniques of Eisenstein, and when the stranglehold he’d one day have on his animators hadn’t quite taken effect.

This week’s freakish Freeze Frame comes from Often An Orphan, the second in Jones’ series of cartoons featuring Charlie Dog. Released in 1949, it would come toward the end of Jones’ “middle period”, but the relative liveliness of  that time was still in evidence.

In this scene, con man–er, dog Charlie is trying to sucker gullible Farmer Porky into adopting him as a pet, tearfully relating the horrors that await him should Porky send him back to…the city!! As he loudly and histrionically imitates the raucous taxi horns and cringes at imaginary towers,  he momentarily becomes a blur, splitting into multiple images of himself–and throwing Porky into the maelstrom with him.

This scene, the work of the ever-versatile Ken Harris, is a masterful use of the smear animation, the best since Dover Boys, and the best  use of a multiple-image flurry since Dave Tendlar’s distinctive sequences in Fleischer’s Popeye and “Grampy” cartoons. It perfectly plays out the overwrought melodramatics Charlie is going through as he attempts to reel in his “pigeon.”

It goes to prove that left to their own devices and freed of Jones’ restraining hand, his artists could produce a bit of animation every bit as wild as Clampett’s.

A Magic Book “Spells” Trouble For Wile E. in THE WHIZZARD OF OW

The Whizzard Of Ow

copyright year 2003 (unreleased)

Director: Bret Haaland

In short: Don’t tamper with sinister forces you don’t understand–especially if you’re Wile E. Coyote…

Review by Rachel Newstead

In this installment of my ongoing series on the Larry Doyle Looney Tunes, I take a look at the one of the six that perhaps comes closest to the spirit of the original: the Road Runner cartoon The Whizzard Of Ow. As you’ll see as we work our way down the list, however, it turns out to be faint praise…

After using such varied–yet unsuccessful–means as a dehydrated boulders, Burmese tiger traps, an Acme Batman suit, and even performance-enhancing drugs (leg-muscle vitamins, to be exact) through the years,  it makes perfect sense that in the era of Harry Potter, Wile E. Coyote would resort to the one thing he hasn’t tried in his quest to catch the elusive Road Runner.

Namely, magic.

Therein lies the premise of the first–and best–cartoon of our Unseen Six, The Whizzard Of Ow.

Two things become apparent immediately. Well, make that three. First is the background design: it lacks Maurice Noble’s elegant stylization, and Robert Gribbroek’s varied color palette, but it’s certainly better-looking visually than the McKimson and Larriva shorts had been. The various cacti and mesas are rendered with highlights, and have some dimension. The background artists were obviously going for an early-fifties look here, but as this was done at Rough Draft Studios, I couldn’t help but think this landscape could double as an alien planet for Fry, Bender and Leela. (Rough Draft worked on Futurama, as well as The Simpsons Movie).

Because Somebody Had To Do It: The Larry Doyle Looney Tunes

Duck Dodgers is back (again?) in "Attack Of The Drones" (yes, that's a Klingon behind him)

by Rachel Newstead

My ol’ southern granddaddy had a saying: expect the worst. Then, when it doesn’t happen, you’re pleasantly surprised….

So when I took on the unenviable task of reviewing the reviled, unreleased 2003 Larry Doyle Looney Tunes, my expectations couldn’t be much lower. Steeling myself for exposure to the alleged blood-congealing, stomach-liquefying animated plague produced by Mr. Doyle, I was not only surprised, but almost disappointed to find that most of them were at least watchable. [Note:  "Almost disappointed" because I revel in true, Ed Wood-level badness. It's practically a Zen experience.--R.] Some, dare I say, even approached “good”. (I can almost see the lynch mobs forming as I write this–just try defending these within 500 miles of the nearest Looney Tunes geek. You’ll really need Obama’s health plan).

I admit my obsession with these “Unseen Six”, as I’ve come to call the cartoons, might seem a little strange to most of you, but it shouldn’t be surprising to those who know me. Of all the creative endeavors ever conceived, nothing intrigues me as much as those that might have been. I like the Larry Doyle Looney Tunes for the same reason I’m fascinated with Scott Joplin’s lost musical scores, Walt Disney’s aborted feature projects, and the first two pilots for “All In The Family.” They’re a glimpse into what might have happened had the creative process taken a slight detour, producing an “alternate-universe” version of the movies, TV shows and music we know.