The day has finally come when my early teen fantasy has been made a reality – a genuine Herman & Katnip DVD set containing all of the Harvey/Classic Media owned titles. Sadly, it’s not all it could be, but even I couldn’t delude myself into thinking it ever would.
The single disc is crammed with 33 cartoons, all of them taken from the 1998 Harveytoons Show masters. Alas, there are no credits, no end titles, fake irises, time compression, and censorship in the case of Drinks on the Mouse. Worst of all: no “Skiddle Diddle Dee, Skiddle Diddle Dey”! Yet it’s amazing that Classic Media even went out of its way to include all of the H&K titles, and included shorts that weren’t available in their entirety or at all on the “Complete” Harveytoons set from years back.
For the most part, the original source, before they screwed around with them back in the day, were the archaic Worldvision syndication masters. In 2011, mastering from such second-generation transfers makes Classic Media look like an even bigger joke than they already are. Anyone who thought they’d be any better at $5.99 a copy is insane, and I can’t imagine anyone buying a restored set of these cartoons outside of us the faithful, but going the easy route isn’t advisable in the long-run of classic animation’s survival.
We do have, incidentally, a glimpse on this disc of what a real Famous Studios restoration project could look like with two innocuous entries: Rail-Rodents and Hide and Peak. These, along with a few others (Baby Huey’s Swab the Duck) were in such bad shape that Harvey actually went and had new transfers struck from Paramount’s material. (The Harvey package survives in pristine condition in the studio’s vault, as Paramount still retains theatrical rights all these years later.) Since they were done so long ago, they’re not great transfers, but they give a hint at the absolute eye candy Famous’s cartoons have to offer in their original Technicolor.
There’s a strong urge to passionately love a cartoon series from the Golden Age that’s completely centered on inane cat-and-mouse violence, but just like the contemporary Tom & Jerry, Herman & Katnip just get taxing. It’s fair to say that everyone would agree that the MGM team’s best moments were behind them when H&K broke free from the Noveltoons and got their own series in 1952.
The problem with H&K is that there were never any best moments, or at least an instance where one cartoon was discernibly better than another. They’re just what T&J became at that point: cat-and-mouse pictures with no personality. In the Famous writers’ defense, they did step up their game eventually by having Herman and his cousins take the “Hubie & Bertie” route by using psychological warfare against Katnip in later cartoons like From Mad to Worse and Will Do Mouse-work, but the animation was getting so meritless at that point that the better writing didn’t matter. The approach did end up working very well in the comic book series however.
Parts of the cartoons are often brilliantly staged and animated when there’s no reason to expect such high quality, as in the opening of Drinks on the Mouse by Marty Taras (embedded below in its entirety uncensored). Many of the Famous Studios animators were truly great, but Taras and John Gentilella were clearly on a playing field above the rest. Their mere posing and drawing have a vigor not present in other Famous animators’ scenes, and the actual movement and timing is vastly superior to a lot of other studios’s animators. (And I’m definitely including 1950s Disney here. Sorry, haters.) The problem is, both of them were rarely given any real acting or anything truly funny to do.
Of the long-running Famous series, though, I have always liked H&K best, even bearing in mind the many shortcomings. Dave Tendlar (the main director of the series) may be regarded as inept, but I’d argue the continuous brutal slapstick is more admirable than what happened to Tom & Jerry, rank heresy it be to say so. Famous wasn’t trying to hide anything with these cartoons: they’re brazenly contentless. Hanna and Barbera showed many times in the best T&Js that they were capable of endearing and truly funny work but settled for shit-formula and grating side characters soon enough. That’s a worse decline than anything at Famous Studios because it was willful.
Arnold Stang is also one of my favorite character actors, whose uniquely charismatic voice gives the cartoons he stars in a life of their own. I did manage to get Mr. Stang on the phone once before he passed away and you’ll be delighted to know there was still bit of Cousin Hoiman in his natural speaking voice. Stang was the titular character in Top Cat, which is probably the best of all the Hanna-Barbera primetime shows.
With a price tag of six bucks, you should seriously buy it without hesitation. Sid Raymond is also featured prominently, as are the eerily catchy tunes of Winston Sharples. It obviously won’t be the most played title in your collection, but what’ve you got to lose if you love cartoon mayhem?
As an added bonus, here is a brilliant novelty record featuring Stang that has to be heard to believe.
Nobody ever makes a big deal about the Fleischer/Famous story department of the 1940s, other than Otto Messmer’s brief visit, but the departures of Bill Turner and Larry Riley at the end of the 1940s really did have a negative impact, and Seymour Kneitel’s decision that having the animation be fluid and on-model was more important than having the animation be funny within the tighter budgets of the early 1950s. If you can’t alter the pacing or timing and the head guy wants to use stock walks and reaction shots to make sure the shorts look good (or, look better than Terrytoons), you better have some really strong story people. And Irv Spector was still in the animation department at this time.
All of Famous’ continuing characters in the 1950s started off as strong one-shots. The problem was in the 1951-55 period, the studio’s attitude was let’s just take the same story from the original one-shot and rework it 3-4 times a year. So we get the plot of “Naughty But Mice”, “The Stupidsticious Cat”, “The Friendly Ghost” and “Quack-A-Doodle-Doo” over and over again (Audrey’s kind of a different boat, since they basically grafted the Little Lulu “dream” stories onto a new character who they had to make into an annoying 8-year-old loudmouth/Fran Drescher wanna-be, to contrast her with the quiet Lulu avoid any copyright infringement lawsuit from Ms Buell).
If Famous could have just taken their 1956-59 stories and grafted them onto their 1951-55 animation, then they really would have had something.
“The problem was in the 1951-55 period, the studio’s attitude was let’s just take the same story from the original one-shot and rework it 3-4 times a year.”
Cartoon fans forget that these cartoons were made for the theater and not TV. The cartoons were never intended to be viewed one after another – with the exceptions of a kiddie’s cartoon matinee or screened via 16mm projection at a birthday party. The odds were high of seeing a cartoon with the same story so the studio could get away with repeating them. In defense of Famous – all the studios did remakes and made cartoons flopping and re-using stories, some more successful than others.
From a business standpoint it was probably considered a good decision to re-cycle stories and save money.
In defense of Famous – all the studios did remakes and made cartoons flopping and re-using stories, some more successful than others.
When Art Davis died, some of his correspondence while at Warner Bros. was later posted on the internet, including a 1952 letter from Izzy Sparber to Davis (Jerry Beck borrowed the letterhead for his Paramount opening titles page). Izzy wrote Art asking if he knew the whereabouts of Sid Marcus so he could offer him a job in Famous’ story department.
That’s about the time that Irv Spector was shifted into the story pen, to go along with Jack Mercer, Carl Meyer, Izzy Klein and Larz Bourne, so to reach out 3,000 miles to try and find either a fifth or sixth person for the department was sign that there was some concern on the story front, either internally or externally, even if people didn’t watch the cartoons back-to-back as they would by the end of the decade.
Myron Waldman was right when he said kids love “Ohh Ahh” cartoons, and that the repetitious nature of the Caspers (specifically) wouldn’t hurt the marketing, because kids crave repetition. But having the more adult-geared continuing series do the same thing may have finally become a problem, and you can definitely see from the end of 1955 onward a concerted effort by Famous not to just cookie-cutter the same stories, which really was a saving grace in the Harveytoons syndication package. The low-budget animation in place by the end of 1957 is offset somewhat by the more interesting and original stories, so that the early Caspers, or the Herman and Katnips are almost two different series from what they became by the 1957-59 period (and on the H&Ks the cheaper animation actually served to make the violent gags less painful; you could cut Katnip in half by 1958 and not have the audience grimacing in pain because the animation was now cheap enough to be detached from reality).
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz—ugh, koff,koff, hrm…zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz….
I actually think this is really interesting, Kirk. Thanks for weighing in…
I bought this set, just got it, gonna start with the ones recommended in the post.
I noticed some shift in the Caspar bits on Harveytoons. Wondered what happened, other than the advent of TV. Thanks for the postulation, J Lee…
No room for levity in this cartoon crowd, (that’s irony, kids) – Now back to our conversation!
I definitely wouldn’t call H&K as good as T&J. They never team up w/ each other. Katnip’s always trying to get Herman. He never triumphs over Herman. They talk all the time & T&J only talk on rare occasions. Katnip’s almost always trying to eat Herman. T&J’s cuter & has better animation. It’s funnier.
Besides all that there’s no version of H&K where they’re friends.
Are you six years old?
ha, now we’re getting somewhere…