Author Archives: Thad

If you read Adam Abraham’s When Magoo Flew, you’ll walk away from it thinking Rocky Road to Ruin, a 1943 Screen Gems cartoon by directed by Paul Sommer and John Hubley, is a more important film than it really is. It’s creepily similar to Chuck Jones’s The Dover Boys in both design and story due to artist John McLeish doing work (and narration) on both films. I’d have posted this earlier, but I wanted to get a decent transfer of it from my own collection and do some tinkering to the color (this was originally a Kodak safety print on the orange side). It was never remastered by Sony to the best of my knowledge (it was certainly not part of the Totally Tooned In syndication package).

The preeminence of Rocky Road to Ruin over The Dover Boys in Abraham’s text is one of the more annoying parts of his book, as I noted. It introduces an attitude that demands, whether intentionally or not, deference from one film for inspiring another. There may be something to that, if it weren’t for the fact that the earlier Warner cartoon succeeds in every way the later Screen Gems cartoon fails. The Jones cartoon is a masterwork of stylized animation, design, and dry humor. The Columbia cartoon’s animation is blocky and weak, with the filmmakers completely disregarding story, characterization, and comedy. A comparison of the two films doesn’t prove the ‘modern’ intelligentsia’s superiority, but is an apt example of how the leaders at WB knew how to handle their conscious experiments and make them work, whereas those at Coulumbia knew they had interesting ideas but had no idea how to effectively execute them.

It’s difficult to fairly assess the overall output of Paul Terry’s studio. On one hand, they are certainly the foremost reminder that not every “classic cartoon” is a “classic”. Every aspect of a Terrytoon’s production is generally retrograde. Whereas even a blind man could tell the difference between a 1930s and 1940s cartoon at another studio, it’s rather difficult to make the same differentiation with a Terrytoon without looking at the copyright date.

Whereas what I see in the Famous Studios cartoons are guys who probably could’ve done something better under more favorable circumstances (before they all laid down and died because of the studio’s repetitious constitution), the Terry cartoons are largely the work of willful hacks. Willful hacks clearly having a good time making the cartoons, throwing anything at the wall to see what sticks and refusing to learn from their mistakes.

Paul Terry might have at least been as good a producer as Walter Lantz, who managed to produce decent, entertaining time-wasters in spite of having no aesthetic sense, if it weren’t for the studio lacking a solid story department. Cartoonist/historian Charlie Judkins has been working on a history of the Terrytoons for years, and has done some much needed research on what made the studio tick. It’s common knowledge that Paul Terry was the primary reason the cartoons bearing his name are largely weak, but solid fact is preferable to unsubstantiated blanket statements. I asked Charlie to shed some light on the Terrytoon story department’s mode of operation and here’s what he wrote:

John Foster was put in charge of the story department around 1938. The initial other writers working under him were Al Stahl, Don McKee, and Tommy Morrison. Izzy Klein joined around 1940 and stayed for about two years. Not sure how long Stahl and McKee lasted there. Of course, Paul Terry himself was active in the story department well through the 40s (and probably 50s) which is a big part of why the films are so weakly gagged. Terry forced the storymen to keep whatever he came up with, but he threw out lots of their gags. Foster retired around 1949, at which point it seems like Morrison took over leading the department. Howard Beckerman told me that when Foster retired he needed money, so Terry gave him a job transcribing jokes from popular radio shows to steal. Terry also had a man he paid and sent to NYC once a month to go see whatever the latest “A” cartoon (WB, MGM, Lantz etc.) was and write down gags that Terry could steal. So it seems like there was a lot of repurposed material being used at the Terry studio.

The studio hierarchy may have differed greatly from the Hollywood shops at Fleischer/Famous, but authorial touches were still discernible. Watchful eyes can determine who was responsible for tighter direction (Willard Bowsky, Bill Tytla), superior animation (the Dave Tendlar and Tom Johnson units), or sharper stories (Irv Spector) in the Fleischer/Famous product. Comparatively, it’s inscrutable to determine who was responsible for the success or failure of a Terrytoon because the directorial and writing duties were even more haphazard. It’s therefore impossible to determine why the Heckle & Jeckle series was regularly very funny while the other Terrytoons are all over the map, other than they just are. Further research may not make the films any better, but it’s still direly needed.

This little oddity is one of those Terrytoons that begs viewers not to thoroughly dismiss the studio at face value. The Lyin’ Lion is one of the few decently written and staged Terrytoons of the late 1940s. The NY writers were obviously far more enamored with Bert Lahr, and specifically his performance in The Wizard of Oz, than the Hollywood writers were. Looey the Great shows up in many Terrytoons throughout the decade, and Sid Raymond did an approximation of Lahr’s voice for the Wolfie character at Famous.

This was also among the earliest Terrytoons to feature the work of Jim Tyer. He animated almost the entire first minute-and-a-half, and one of his scenes has what is inarguably some of the most intriguing direction in a Terrytoon. It’s the single scene from 1:27-1:43.

There is a lot going on in this scene and Tyer gets it all across perfectly. One thing that makes Tyer’s work compelling is that along with pulling no punches in his craziness, he was able to do it without compromising the acting. Looey is adamant that he’s a brilliant circus performer, conceitedly and clumsily trying to climb the ringmaster’s head for his outrageously asinine act. The ringmaster is thoroughly exasperated that the has-been hasn’t retired and is clearly mortified at being a part of this disaster.

Tyer emphasizes the ringmaster’s frustration in a most wonderfully cartoonish way: by zooming in on his distorted face while Looey is still trying to climb to the top. This shot is actually three different scenes stitched together almost seamlessly to look like one continuous truck-in/truck-out shot. I’ve slowed the scene down to a quarter of its original speed in this video.

Though a landfill the Terrytoon output may be, inspired moments like this are nonexistent in most animated shorts of the last half-century. Their presence at least moves the studio to an echelon a little higher than bottom-of-the-barrel in the whole oeuvre of twentieth century cartooning.

If there’s one good thing about the preponderance of UPA discussions in animation circles, it’s that more and more previously neglected films are beginning to emerge from their hidey-holes in various archives.

The Prelinger Archives have uploaded a decent copy of the seminal UPA cartoon The Brotherhood of Man, directed by Bobe Cannon, written by John Hubley, and featuring animation by WB heavyweights Ken Harris and Ben Washam. I have been an admirer of this film for years for its elegant use of design and progressive story, and this is the first time I’ve seen it in presentable condition.

Cannon and Hubley handled this material with admirable sophistication without resorting to the heavy-handed condescension that sadly plagues a large amount of UPA’s output in the 1950s. I have to wonder, though, if Brotherhood was baffling to the majority of the general public in 1946. Unlike UPA’s later attempts at introducing themes and ideas that were and are universally inaccessible (the condescendingly bourgeois Fudget’s Budget immediately comes to mind), the ideas present in Brotherhood are ones any member of civilized society might take for granted as common sense. They took awhile to become ingrained as such in the average person’s mindset, and the fact that a newspaper (unidentified in Adam Abraham’s book) could call it “as funny as a Bugs Bunny” seems to be evidence that audiences may have been missing the point.

This transfer looks like it’s sourced from a 16mm Kodachrome print or similar early low-fade stock. The quality is not ideal, but it’s certainly leagues ahead of the black-and-white and faded 16s I’ve seen of this title over the years. Until a 35mm low-fade of it emerges, this is probably the best copy we’ll see of the cartoon. You can download it at this link.

On the other end of the spectrum, Jerry Beck tells us that The Sailor and the Seagull, a rare 1949 Navy reenlistment film, was restored by the National Archives and Records Administration.

The majority of commenters swooned over the sheer richness of the color and the appealing designs/animation, most of it owing more to an obvious Chuck Jones influence than to UPA’s own innovation. A commenter on Jerry’s post, only identified as “tak”, was not so easily taken and had this to say: “Man, mundane propaganda films about life in or out of institutions or public service are probably the scariest propaganda films of them all.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself. UPA was one of two major animation studios that heavily specialized in these non-theatrical ‘infotainment’ pictures. The other was of course Disney. Is it any surprise that both were the studios that most frequently went out of their way to please themselves rather than the audience in their theatrical shorts?

The preservationist in me is loudest: there’s no question that every film should be preserved, and that some historical value will always be present (Seagull is one of the first cartoons to feature voice artist Daws Butler). But the critic in me is trying to figure out how to tactfully say, “Most of this stuff went missing for a reason.” It’s the same in all genres of film. You might find a gem like Cockatoos for Two, but most ‘lost’ films tend to be more like Kitty Caddy. Allah praise those with more resolve than me (I’m talkin’ to you, Stathes!)