What About Thad?

I wanted an excuse to talk about Walter Lantz cartoons so I could coincide with Michael Sporn’s tribute to the studio, and I finally have one. Someone’s uploaded a lot of great animation and layout drawings from the 1940s Lantz cartoons here, and there’s a few consecutive drawings from Alex Lovy’s Ace in the Hole, the cartoon highlighted in Michael’s post. I’ve reproduced them here.

I’m really not confident enough to give the scene a positive ID, but if I had to make an educated guess, it’s probably Laverne Harding, one of Lantz’s most important (and long-standing) animators. She tended to always have a better handling of lipsync than the other animators, and usually was able to give even the dullest character designs (and the Lantz cartoons had lots of them!) an appealing vigor.

This isn’t a very good cartoon overall (it comes off as unoriginal when placed aside the Donald Duck cartoons with him in the army dealing with Sergeant Black Pete), but like Michael, I have fond memories of seeing this one very young, albeit in a very different way. (I do love his comments about watching and studying these things on film, but I’d rather wait until I can actually scan my prints to talk about my own film experiences.)

This was one of only four (!) cartoons on a $14.95 VHS tape released to commemorate Woody’s 50th “birthday” in 1990. Generally speaking, hunting down these VHS tapes was one of the only ways to see any good Lantz cartoons for years in the United States. The Program Exchange had their syndicated Woody package, but these shows consisted almost entirely of those eye-twitching Paul J. Smith cartoons. (For some reason, though, whenever I saw a Lantz cartoon on TV, it was a really good one. As in, the only Chilly Willys I ever managed to catch were Tex Avery’s.)

I’m not sure what Universal was trying to accomplish, although logic less cynical than that behind Warners’ plans to kill their own characters is probably the villain here. My high school biology teacher made a remark that Woody was probably as extinct as the ivory-billed woodpecker he was modeled after. Things sure have changed when you can buy 75 Lantz cartoons on DVD for less than $30 now and they’re posted all over YouTube.

Another addition to the treasures piling up on Mike Barrier’s site is his and Milt Gray’s 1976 interview with Milt Kahl. Be forewarned that this is not for those who like dwelling in the land of softness, where everybody working in animation were friends and liked each others’ work. (I’d personally like to hear more substantiation of what I heard on the scuttlebutt level of Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston always tattling to Walt, “Well you know what Milt just said,” resulting in Kahl getting stuck with all those lame, formulaic assignments. But all of the books are so sold on the Nine Old Men myth that they wouldn’t dare suggest that there was backstabbing going on amongst them.)

As I wrote on Mike’s site, there’s a certain irony to Kahl’s criticism of the exaggeration and caricature in the work of Ward Kimball (“a Chuck Jones with talent”) – Kahl’s own richest and most underrated work tends to fall in the same category. Song of the South (he rightfully takes credit for the animated segments’ success) is one of the few Disney works that’s equal to the best of Warner animation, his work in Pecos Bills and Ichabod is the ‘real’ human animation style done right, and he did do the best animation of Alice in the woefully underrated Alice in Wonderland (the animated film equivalent of pot-flavored frosting), as showcased in Michael Sporn’s postings here and here. There’s nothing inherently wrong with Kahl’s “Illusion of Life” work. Certainly it works extremely well in Pinocchio and Bambi, but the style overtook the whole studio and the price paid is about 60 years worth of Disney films that can’t be taken seriously. (Not that the fans and students have a problem with it, as Tangled‘s gargantuan success proves.)

Tiger Trouble, one of the “feature guys” shorts of the 40s, is another example of Kahl at his best. The opening with Goofy eating his pipe is just as successful a scene as any: Goofy’s fear is extremely caricatured but believable, the act of the pipe eating is not just hilarious but comes off as something natural, and every drawing is unique and funny. What more could you ask for? This also gets my vote for the best tiger in a cartoon ever. (Kinney and Jack Hannah reused the character with relative success in later Goofy and Donald Duck cartoons.) Certainly better than Shere Khan in every way.

That name’s been in countless Terrytoons and was actually spelt out in one of the last of the “classic” studio’s shorts. Every studio did a parody of the TV series “Dragnet”, and Police Dogged was Terry’s CinemaScope, Jim Tyer-filled answer to the craze. This is a transfer of a Technicolor Scope print I have of the title, so the original aspect ratio is preserved. (Note that since Fox distributed the Terrytoons, the actual CinemaScope logo is used.)

When viewing the CinemaScope cartoons of this period, it becomes pretty obvious most of the studios (MGM and Terry in particular) didn’t really embrace the widescreen format. There’s no discernible changes or improvements to the animated cinematography – things just get a little more spread out. (See Ranger Woodlore’s comment in Grand Canyonscope for a shockingly self-aware comment on this, for a Charle Nichols cartoon anyway.)

(Special thanks to Tom Stathes for transferring, and to Jerry Beck for giving the coolest bonus I ever received on a job.)