I’m breaking my long hiatus just to express some outrage. The following garbage is a scan from John Vivian’s The Media of Mass Communication (pg. 155, Tenth Edition), a textbook costing $100+, used at Ithaca College (the school I attend) and elsewhere.
The whole book has that condescending tone, but the misinformation in this passage here is so abominable and inexcusable that the accuracy of anything else Vivian has written is suspect. IC’s faculty should think twice before including any of Vivian’s textbooks as part of their courses in the future.
I can’t say much about the recently deceased Bill Littlejohn, other than the fact that I love what I’ve seen and can identify as his work, and that I wish I actually got to know him. Whenever any animation veteran passes, we’re all painfully reminded about how little we actually know about the bygone Golden Age and how we all still had the opportunity to speak to these people if we made the effort.
Littlejohn’s late 30s, early 40s studio work was at MGM, where he was part of a high-profile team of animators like Jack Zander, Irv Spence, and Pete Burness. His greatest triumph in those days can be found in Hugh Harman’s A Rainy Day with the Bear Family (1940). Mike Kazaleh tells me that Littlejohn was the guy who had to animate Papa Bear on the roof fleeing from the tidal wave of shingles, work equal to any feature-level animation Disney was doing the same year. Littlejohn actually earned one screen credit at MGM, on the Tom & Jerry Fine Feathered Friend (1942); the copyright synopsis tells us as much. It was actually dropped from the 1949 reissue, while the credits of other animators no longer at the studio remained intact, so it makes me wonder if someone at Metro was spiteful of Littlejohn’s stance as a union leader.
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.
