LEAVING IT TO THE ANIMATOR: Remembering The Best Work of Bill Melendez

Charlie Brown fails again, from the Bill Melendez-directed "Charlie Brown All Stars" (1966). Below, a frame from Melendez' work on "Baby Bottleneck" (1946)

By Kevin Wollenweber

I was saddened to hear of the death, on Tuesday, of Bill Melendez. He is most remembered for his excellent production work on the adaption of the Peanuts (Charlie Brown) comic strip to the medium of the animated cartoon and with good reason. Those earliest Peanuts specials were exactly what I expected an animated cartoon of this particular newspaper strip to be! It was so perfectly suited to the “limited” or stylized animation of the age of TV, where animation production had to be done in a timely fashion yet still be appealing to an audience on the small screen. So Melendez did indeed deliver a very likable and inspired version of the popular comic strip and actually won an Emmy his first time out with the first special, “A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS”, a Holiday tale in which Charlie Brown believes he’s lost the spirit of Christmas due to its horrific commercialization, an emotion that I’m sure we, religious or not, have all had around the holiday season.

Each special neatly adapted actual strips, complete with original images and poses from the respective four panels that appeared in newspapers and, later, in paperback books that reprinted the weekday and Sunday strips, many of which I was, at that time, long before the specials, avidly collecting!

Animated Mix Tapes In The Age Of Digital

By Kevin Wollenweber

Well, actually, that title is rather misleading.  The format I now use, when I can, for “mixing” favorite cartoons from all studios together is DVD, but as some of you collectors and swappers know, this is extremely limited because each and every professional release made today is copy protected.  While I totally understand why this has to be so, it is disheartening, because there are so many great matches I’d like to make, being a kind of “toonhead” of sorts, but I cannot do so because the copy police are watching at all times!

I treat cartoons in much the same way as I treat music.  In fact, when the station was truly thriving or trying to be something more than what it has become (in other words, when it truly had a focus), Cartoon Network had inspired me to start mixing and matching favorite cartoons with a running theme that would morph and twist into sub-themes as the compilation continued.  In fact, I sent the station one or two such compilations, perhaps in mild support of them just being around with programs like Late Night Black and White or Toon Heads.

The Best Thing Since Trash Day: The Flintstones and “The Hot Piano” (1961)

Review by Rachel Newstead

The Flintstones: “The Hot Piano”

Season 1, Episode 19

Original Airdate Feb. 3, 1961

Directors: Bill Hanna, Joe Barbera

Writer: Mike Maltese

In Short: Stuck for an anniversary present for Wilma, Fred learns a valuable lesson in economics–don’t buy a piano out of the back of a van. Especially if the seller is a guy named “88 Fingers Louie…”

With any great TV show–even some that weren’t so great–one episode is often enough to make a viewer into a fan forever.

For Trekkies, it’s “City On The Edge Of Forever”–or perhaps “Space Seed” (the episode that introduced us to Khan, Captain Kirk’s greatest nemesis.) For “I Love Lucy” fans, it might be the “Vitameatavegamin” episode, or the one in which she finds herself submerged in a vat of grapes.

For fans of Hanna-Barbera’s The Flintstones, however, it’s usually this episode: “The Hot Piano,” from the show’s often brilliant (though critically panned) first season. It certainly was for me.

Looking at the show’s 166 episodes today can seem a bit like watching two different series. There’s the caustic adult sitcom of its first couple of seasons, “inspired” by The Honeymooners but more a sendup of every TV comedy ever known–I Love Lucy, Donna Reed and Ozzie and Harriet turned sideways and transported to the Stone Age.

My Travels With Chuck

Foreword from Rachel:

Welcome, one and all, to our new “sister site” to the Orphan Toons blog, the title of which comes from Kevin. (And inspired by that coolest of cool “cats”, Cecil The Sea Sick Serpent’s beatnik friend Go Man Van Gogh). We’ll be launching this new venture, however, with a look at a cat of the more literal kind, the unnamed feline of Chuck Jones’ Fin ‘N’ Catty (1943). My editorial comments will be interspersed throughout.

By Kevin Wollenweber

Well, while sitting back and checking out a VHS sampler of favorite cartoons I had created from my laserdisk collection, I was reminded of how much I liked some of the earliest Chuck Jones directions at Warner Brothers, when his “style” started to take hold and his inspiration began to be felt by other animators in his unit–especially the one shots that did not feature any specific characters.

Chuck Jones’ cats are especially funny, as evidenced by the inclusion of “THE ARISTO-CAT” on the fourth LOONEY TUNES GOLDEN COLLECTION set on DVD. A title that was omitted, no doubt, for inclusion in a later volume of LOONEY TUNES and MERRIE MELODIES under a different banner in later years, is a toon called “FIN ‘N’ CATTY”.