Category Archives: classic animation

I haven’t put together one of these reels in a long time, so here’s one highlighting the work of Irv Spence, easily one of the Golden Age’s most distinctive and recognizable animators. While this features highlights from the epic saga of Tom & Jerry (the series Spence spent most of his career on), this also features his work for Tex Avery (at Schlesinger’s and MGM) and for that odd curio studio of Ub Iwerks’s. I’d like to actually have copies of his work at Jam Handy (roughly ’45-’47) one day too.

It’s probably hard for us all to remember the time when Duck Amuck actually thrilled us on every level… Overexposure (WB49, the old Buffalo WB network affiliate, played this at least once a week) and academic slobber easily destroys the enjoyment of any film, and this milestone definitely has suffered for it. I can’t tell you how many people have told me, “Yeah, it’s brilliant, but I have to go another ten years without seeing it again to appreciate it.” Fortunately, this doesn’t ruin the fact that there will always be kids green to this cartoon, and love it, for years to come… Wouldn’t it be cool to have that innocence again?

I posted about my discovery of the special opening to How to Play Football a few months ago, but now you can see it here as it actually plays out.

The contents of the new April 27th Warner cartoon releases were announced (for real), and it’s not exactly for the “classic” connoisseur. The cartoons range from some ‘A’ cartoons (Foxy By Proxy, Hare Trimmed, Nasty Quacks, Daffy DIlly), some ‘B’ cartoons (Bushy Hare, The Prize Pest, Stork Naked), to some outright abortions from the end of the Warner run (Mad as Mars Hare, Dr. Devil and Mr. Hare, Suppressed Duck, The Iceman Ducketh). But mostly they are ‘C’ grade/filler cartoons of the Bob McKimson variety. These are the ‘talking head’ cartoons you saw on Saturday morning, and even as a kid you knew weren’t very hot. Personally, they are cartoons I can take or leave, and it’s usually leave.

It’s not surprising after over a third of the cartoons had been released that the true classics are slimming down, or that the later cartoons are probably cheaper to restore. But at the cheap price they’ll be (definitely a ‘drop in the cart’ purchase at Target) and the few real classics they contain, I’m not complaining.

In the meantime, here is one of the cartoons you won’t be seeing, A Feather In His Hare, one of the two “Character Versus a Jewish Indian” cartoons of 1948. Maybe that description makes it sound a little overtly prejudiced, but it’s hard to find much wrong with a cartoon where the native actually realizes he forgot to say “ugh”.

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