What About Thad?

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.

(or more “Mysteries Involving the Walter Lantz Cartunes”)

I truly know nothing about the history of stock music cues used in vintage television cartoons. I’d leave that mostly to the experts like Yowp, and so on. But the topic of today’s post started because I may be needing some vintage cues for a project I’m working on, and was curious about the royalties involved using one particular cartoon musical director’s: Darrell Calker.

Calker was certainly one of the most underrated of his contemporaries, providing music primarily for the Walter Lantz studio in the 1940s. They are well-done bearing in mind their low budgets and the little access he had to pop music. In its own way, Calker’s music is as pleasant to listen to as Carl Stalling’s, and was never as overbearing as Scott Bradley’s. (Though in some instances, as in his brief stint doing music for the ill-fated Screen Gems cartoon studio, his score is the real star of an other wise incoherent and eye-glazing misfire.)

Calker, like Winston Sharples and Walter Greene, was a theatrical cartoon composer who did cues that were reused in low-budget animation (and sometimes live-action) productions. It’s common knowledge that the third-rate Famous Studios Popeye short Child Sockology was the source for a lot of the Sharples cues, but it’s the only instance I’m aware of where cues had been cut up from a specific cartoon’s score.

All of Calker’s scores for Walter Lantz were registered for copyright by Universal, as was the standard procedure at most cartoon studios. I had never heard of the scores for Lantz’s, or anyone else’s, theatrical cartoons being cut up for use as cues, save the Famous cartoon mentioned above.

The second element of the puzzle… If you enter “beany” into the ASCAP ACE search engine, you’ll find some of the names of Beany & Cecil‘s composers. Melvyn Lenard, Eddie Brandt, Freddy Morgan… and Bob and Sody Clampett. But you won’t find Calker.

So our mystery is… how did music from a 1945 Woody Woodpecker cartoon end up in a 1962 Beany & Cecil cartoon?

Note, too, that in the original cartoon, Shamus Culhane’s pseudo-classic Chew Chew Baby, there is extensive dialog and sound effects over the music. This means Clampett had access to the original isolated music track to use for Cecil Meets Cecilia.

This isn’t the only instance of Calker’s music turning up in the Clampett TV cartoons, but it may be the most extensive. But how did it end up there? I can find no reference whatsoever of Universal making the Lantz tracks available, nor can think of any other production that used them. (Perhaps Clampett absconded with the recordings from Universal’s garbage, as he did so often at Warners’ with artwork. Mental image accompaniment: Bob humming through the garbage cans ala Sylvester.)

This mystery was posed to Daniel Goldmark, the world’s classic cartoon music expert, and even he doesn’t know what’s going on with these direct Calker ripoffs showing up in Beany & Cecil. Any help would be appreciated.

UPDATE: TV cartoon historian Yowp has the definite answer!

Calker’s film music was among piles of music repackaged by David Chudnow for the Mutel library music service (Mutel = Music for Television). Chudnow did this with a bunch of ’40s B-movie film cues and listed himself as the publisher under BMI as Byron Music to collect royalties. Clampett must have simply bought the Mutel library and used it.

Thanks, Yowp, you’re man’s best friend.

A gorgeous treat: Hawley Pratt drawings for Friz Freleng’s Peck Up Your Troubles. Could be yours for $1,000, but I’m not dignifying the seller with a link.

(Thanks, Jon.)