At Daniel Caylor’s suggestion, I’m starting up a store page where I’ll be listing things semi-regularly for sale. I’ve gotten so sick of paying eBay’s ransom fees that it’s just not worth the hassle of listing there. (I sold barely $200 worth of stuff the other week, and had to pay $20 – and it goes up and up and up…) I have a sizable amount of classic cartoons on 16mm film for sale presently, take a look and contact me if interested. I’ll make a blog post when new items are available.
Get This Guy a Copy of “Of Mice & Magic”
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.
Filed under classic animation, crap, Ithaca College, modern animation
A Big Job for Littlejohn
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.
Filed under classic animation
Repost: 1938 Clampett Unit Photo
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.
Filed under classic animation
