Category Archives: classic animation

Someone uploaded a letter-boxed Cinemascope copy of Sick Sick Sidney, so not only can you see all that beautiful Jim Tyer animation proper (or at least as proper as 30 dpi will allow), but you can now hear Sidney’s neurotic theme song at the beginning too.

I’ll take this over that other Deitch animated [sic] cartoon everyone was fawning over at Cartoon Brew recently. Hell, I’d take Dicky Moe over that.

Mark Mayerson’s posting of some rarely seen Mickey Mouse footage got me watching a few more of the Mickeys from this period, and I’m really stymied by how slowly everything is timed and moves in the studio’s cartoons even at this early in the game. I only selected The Karnival Kid (below) because that was the last one I watched, and it embodies a lot of the problems. There’s nice fluidity and appeal to the drawings and animation (and a certain amount of showing off perspective at the beginning), but every action and gag feels like it was timed like it had to read for viewers a few hundred yards away from the screen.

It’s not a problem exclusive to any particular era of Disney shorts either. I’ve already pointed out how Carl Barks’s first ever gag for a finished cartoon Modern Inventions reads great as a board and on paper but totally falls flat animated. It’s probably too late in history to find out why molasses timing was so contagious at the Disney studio, but who knows… With all the stuff David Gerstein is coming up with, I’m sure we’ll find some 1934 Maple Syrup Memorandum from the place shortly.

It’s fitting that the curtain on Paramount’s fifty-plus year association with animated shorts was brought down by Ralph Bakshi, who would usher in a wave of animated works the old-timers he apprenticed under never dreamed of. More fitting that it escalates the studio’s timeless (?) association with cat-and-mouse cartoons to astronomic proportions, serving as a commentary on the shifting political climates in the late 1960s. A bumpkin who enjoys being a tyrant is taken to a foreign land where he is pitted against a scourge beyond his control. He is given accolades for his failures. He finally seals his own doom with a nuclear quasi-holocaust. Is it any wonder this made during Nam?

The very bizarre Hare Ribbin’ was one of the very first cartoons I posted a complete animator breakdown for (thanks to Mike Kazaleh), but it’s been a few years, so I’m rerunning it here.

3/16 – Yes, I know DailyMotion purged the video. I will put it up online again later this week when I have a steadier connection.

(Yes, I know I misspelled Will Hays’s name in the video, but I don’t think he or Joseph Breen are entitled to the honor (or respect) of having their names spelled correctly anyway.)

There are numerous changes between the released version and the ‘director’s cut’ that emerged in Mark Kausler’s collection (and others). I edited them in to the video for your enjoyment (not very well admittedly, as I haven’t gotten the hang of iMovie). The most notorious is the gun-down-the-throat ending being replaced with the dog being duped into committing suicide. (“Dog can’t be shot by rabbit, but dog can shoot self.” – J. Breen to L. Schlesinger, Jan. 1944). As to why the other pieces of animation were cut, we can only guess. Certainly not because of running time, as other shorts from the same season ran around 8.5 minutes. Perhaps the extended game of ‘tag’ between Bugs and the dog was considered “too gay”, even by Bugs-in-drag standards.

Excessive reuse from earlier Bugs cartoons is in the first half of this cartoon, to the point where it gets sloppy at times (Bugs’s hopping underwater, the omitted scene of the dog panting), though The Heckling Hare footage is at least facelifted well in Manny Gould’s drawing style. All of which is to say, you can’t say enough about the perfection of the original animation in this cartoon. (Jack Bradbury’s footage is the exception.)

Manny Gould is a mystery to me. He spent years at the helm on Columbia’s Krazy Kat, one of the worst theatrical series of all time, and yet his footage in the Clampett shorts rivals that of McKimson and Scribner. I pity that we don’t have any on-record insight from Gould, as he died literally the day (or two) before historian Milt Gray was supposed to interview him.

I often see this short scorned and I’ve never understood why. Personally, I think it’s one of the funniest of all the Bugs cartoons (and probably my favorite of Clampett’s). People say Clampett’s Bugs is an “arrogant bully”, but how? Buckaroo Bugs is taxing, true, but far more for the sloppy cycling of footage and the fact that Red Hot Ryder is not funny. But everything Bugs does in Hare Ribbin’ is in response to a dog that’s trying to bite his legs off – how is this “off the rails”? It’s certainly more sophomoric than any other Bugs cartoon ever made with the off-color body odor and sniffing of privates jokes, but if the jokes are funny, why should they be a mark against it?

I will guarantee though that if you see this short with an audience, you’ll always hear, “why are they still underwater?” Perhaps that’s where the hate comes from – Clampett challenges even cartoon physics.