What About Thad?

YouTube has had Portuguese versions of most of the Paul J. Smith Woody Woodpecker cartoons online for ages, but only recently did someone upload them in English, so you can now see them and experience the garbage in all its glory.

Mark Mayerson ranked Smith as the worst of all the theatrical-era directors eons ago. I’d personally give that title to someone like Al Rose at Columbia, but there’s certainly a case to be made for Smith. Walter Lantz seemed fine with Smith directing, constantly letting more and more talented people walk out his studio doors, something that does not speak well for his taste. But Smith was merely just poor for years. Once Sid Marcus left the studio in 1966, Smith was allowed to take Woody to hell in a hand basket.

The cartoons look almost as poor as their made-for-TV contemporaries (unsurprising as Lantz was the first theatrical studio to do TV style animation in the 1950s), making it odd that theaters actually rented them years after the studio closed its doors. David Gerstein just messaged me as I was writing this that the cartoons “blend together in my head into one big blur of western settings, inconsistent sizes and hatchet-faced harridans.” Perfect summary. The hackwork is at such an all-time high that nobody gave a damn that the remounted Woody opening titles stopped on an ugly inbetween rather than the final pose.

This isn’t one of those endless westerns (which probably stemmed from one Cal Howard springboard reused thirty times), but I had to single it out because it was one that escaped my attempt at acquiring every single Walter Lantz cartoon when I worked on The Walter Lantz Cartune Encyclopedia. The song makes it even more terrifying than you can imagine. And what’s the deal with these not-so-vaguely pornographic titles (never mind the character’s name)? I would have rather seen the cartoon take that sort of direction than this.

This might be a good time to add (and someone can add this to Wikipedia) that Paul J. Smith was more than likely not legally blind during his tenure at the Lantz studio, with his daughter doing his x-sheets, or however that urban legend goes. He was subsequently hired by Ralph Bakshi to work on his Lord of the Rings adaptation as a “key animator”, and it’s utterly ridiculous that he’d be able to work in that capacity if this was true. (Amended see bottom.)

But, just because you’re working at a studio with severe budget limitations and a boss who clearly doesn’t care about your work performance doesn’t mean you have to turn out a complete piece of crap.

There has been a minor furor over the presentation of twenty Warner Bros. cartoons that were released this week on DVD for the first time, on the Looney Tunes Super Stars discs Bugs Bunny: Hare Extraordinaire and Daffy Duck: Frustrated Fowl. The ten cartoons released before 1954 that are included look absolutely gorgeous; among them are Frank Tashlin’s Nasty Quacks, easily one of the top ten cartoons ever made, and Hare Trimmed, which features some of the most beautiful Virgil Ross animation of Bugs Bunny ever done.

What’s soured people on the 1954 and onward cartoons is that they have been presented in “widescreen”. Warner Home Video has peddled the line: “they were matted in theaters, so this is how they were originally seen”. Others have said, “they were making them with widescreen in mind.” These statements are disingenuous at best, ignoring the fact that not all theaters that ran these cartoons matted them.

Matting was also used to cover up gaffs in the production in live-action. When you watch North By Northwest, an expensive MGM thriller, open-matte, you will often see boom-mikes and set-lights. It would have worked the same way for these cartoons; in the full-frame versions we’ve been seeing for years, we would be seeing codes at the bottom of the cels, held feet wouldn’t have been shot, etc. If Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, and Bob McKimson were making these cartoons with widescreen in mind, they weren’t aware of it themselves.

Below are some screenshots, comparing the new releases with older ones.

If that didn’t convince you that these presentations are an abomination, you’re hopeless. Let me add too that a great number of 1946-1953 Warner cartoons were reissued to theaters well into the late 1960s. And those were definitely matted at one time or another too. There was no art or method to this whatsoever. They only formatted the titles to work in widescreen because they needed to have all the copyright and credit information in the picture by law. Why does nobody seem to understand this?

It’s probably not worth getting riled up about. The cartoons were restored full-frame and will likely be presented as such in a future Looney Tunes box set. Most of the affected cartoons are those you probably won’t be watching again even if they were presented correctly. (How many times can you do the same dynamite jokes?) What is bothersome is the distortion of history that’s being done by people defending a move made by a bloated corporation to cater to Blu-Ray/plasma screen whores who stretch the picture on anything horizontally, whether it’s Citizen Kane or All in the Family.

In good conscience, I cannot recommend these DVDs to anyone, unless you’re desperate enough to immediately get the properly restored cartoons, which do look outstanding.