Watching Jerry Beck and Martha Sigall on History Detectives last night prompted me to dig up this photo of Bob Clampett’s unit in 1938 I found on eBay in 2007 (I don’t own the photo, I only have this scan from the auction). I sent it to Jerry back then, and he had Martha ID just about everyone in the photo. I thought I had lost this in one of my many crashes (I’m speaking in terms of both computers and servers), but lo and behold, here it is, with Martha’s IDs reposted.
TOP ROW (L to R): Bob Cannon, Leahdora DaSilva, Ernest Gee, Izzy Ellis, Bob Clampett, George Jordan, Helen Curry, Dick Thomas, Kay Vallejo, Lu Guarnier, Dick Jones (Chuck’s brother, partially hidden), Dorothy Worth, Mary Tebb, Silvia Rogers, Vannie Baker, Virginia Slaughter, Onita _______ (Martha couldn’t recall her last name) and Unknown.
SITTING (L to R): Sid Farren, John Carey, Jack MacLaughlan, Vive Risto and Leon Redman.
As an added supplement, please enjoy an amazing offering from these fine people. This was the last cartoon Chuck Jones did actual animation for on at the studio, handling the scenes with the rooster turning out to be a holy terror and Daffy doing the lion tamer shtick.
YouTube has had Portuguese versions of most of the Paul J. Smith Woody Woodpecker cartoons online for ages, but only recently did someone upload them in English, so you can now see them and experience the garbage in all its glory.
Mark Mayerson ranked Smith as the worst of all the theatrical-era directors eons ago. I’d personally give that title to someone like Al Rose at Columbia, but there’s certainly a case to be made for Smith. Walter Lantz seemed fine with Smith directing, constantly letting more and more talented people walk out his studio doors, something that does not speak well for his taste. But Smith was merely just poor for years. Once Sid Marcus left the studio in 1966, Smith was allowed to take Woody to hell in a hand basket.
The cartoons look almost as poor as their made-for-TV contemporaries (unsurprising as Lantz was the first theatrical studio to do TV style animation in the 1950s), making it odd that theaters actually rented them years after the studio closed its doors. David Gerstein just messaged me as I was writing this that the cartoons “blend together in my head into one big blur of western settings, inconsistent sizes and hatchet-faced harridans.” Perfect summary. The hackwork is at such an all-time high that nobody gave a damn that the remounted Woody opening titles stopped on an ugly inbetween rather than the final pose.
This isn’t one of those endless westerns (which probably stemmed from one Cal Howard springboard reused thirty times), but I had to single it out because it was one that escaped my attempt at acquiring every single Walter Lantz cartoon when I worked on The Walter Lantz Cartune Encyclopedia. The song makes it even more terrifying than you can imagine. And what’s the deal with these not-so-vaguely pornographic titles (never mind the character’s name)? I would have rather seen the cartoon take that sort of direction than this.
This might be a good time to add (and someone can add this to Wikipedia) that Paul J. Smith was more than likely not legally blind during his tenure at the Lantz studio, with his daughter doing his x-sheets, or however that urban legend goes. He was subsequently hired by Ralph Bakshi to work on his Lord of the Rings adaptation as a “key animator”, and it’s utterly ridiculous that he’d be able to work in that capacity if this was true. (Amended see bottom.)
But, just because you’re working at a studio with severe budget limitations and a boss who clearly doesn’t care about your work performance doesn’t mean you have to turn out a complete piece of crap.
One deed that needs doing is the location of a complete print of The Daffy Duckaroo, a 1942 Daffy Duck cartoon by Norm McCabe.
Here’s the scoop:
There are two different versions of the opening song Daffy sings at the beginning of the cartoon. The more widely-seen version, Guild/Sunset B/W prints and the Korean redrawn, is actually in-sync with the animation, but there is a definite splice in the soundtrack. (Click here to see that copy.) The computer colorized version, as aired on Nickelodeon, featured a different half that obviously was incorrectly pasted over the wrong animation.
Put them together, as Larry Tremblay did in the embeded reconstruction (re: “fake”) below, and you get a complete song.
I have no idea as to why the soundtrack was split up like this. If had to guess (and I hate doing this, because it’ll end up on Wikipedia as a fact), there may have been censorship by Guild/Sunset to remove a legible reference to Warner Brothers on Daffy’s trailer (the company verifiably removed WB references in Porky in Wackyland and You Ought to Be in Pictures), which you can kind of make out at the end of the cartoon when it’s in view again. Again, this is only a guess. But then, if that was the case, why does the computer colorized version use the same footage, and the second half the song? The mind boggles.
If you have leads to an answer on this mystery, I and many others would appreciate them.
Now for the actual cartoon…
This is actually a very underrated cartoon for several reasons. It’s one of the earliest cartoons that uses “modern design” successfully, neck-and-neck almost with Chuck Jones’s usage of it. McCabe unfortunately had the handicap of being resigned to wartime propaganda as story material and having his films only available in shoddy condition, but some of his films are worth rediscovering. I wish I knew who McCabe’s layout artist was during this period.
The earliest Art Davis Warner animation is seen in this cartoon (mostly in the scenes with Daffy and Little Beefer in the teepee), marking the beginning of his 20 years of employment, and beginning his reign of terror as the studio’s funniest animator (a title only also held by Rod Scribner).
The classic sexually active Daffy takes center stage, a carryover from some of the last cartoons Bob Clampett did with his unit, but here it’s about as overt as it would get (Frank Tashlin excepted). Some of it borderlines uncomfortable when he seems to genuinely enjoy Beefer’s advances.
On a related note, Jerry Beck has the honor of being the only historian whose writing created an awkward moment between my parents and I. I asked them what the word “bisexual” meant, as Jerry used the word to refer to Daffy’s behavior in his book in the passage on this cartoon. (This had to be when I was seven, reading his Looney Tunes books for book reports. That created even more awkwardness.)
It always astounds me how much stuff was literally trashed at Disney’s throughout its history. Would you believe that they once scrapped a cartoon that was nearly completely animated, simply because of its length?
Plight of the Bumble Bee, a 1951 Jack Kinney directed Mickey Mouse cartoon, featuring the work of Fred Moore, Cliff Nordberg, and others, is the cartoon in question. Kinney offered the following explanation to why it was shelved:
“The best Mickey ever was never finished. It was called The Plight of the Bumble Bee, and it was all finished in animation. It had an awkward length, but Fred and Sib agreed that it could not be cut, so it was shelved.”
Calling this the best Mickey ever is overrating it at best, though I’m sure Kinney and the animators were sore over their hard work being thrown into the Morgue. It’s a standard Kinney cartoon, which means it’s a notch above the hackwork that the Shorts Department had been turning out on a regular basis for years. Certainly not a forerunner to One Froggy Evening in any way as I’ve read some people suggest.
Still, it’s neat to see something the studio never intended the public to see, and “new” work by one of the most highly recognizable animators. You can watch the rough cut below.
