What About Thad?

Bob Jaques has a great series of posts on Dave Tendlar’s animation in the Fleischer Popeyes. Here’s one of the earliest cartoons Tendlar defacto-directed in 1933, Betty Boop’s May Party. I actually discovered this gem by accident going through a few hundred cartoons on film I took in not long ago.

If you’ve been reading Bob’s posts, you can easily recognize Tendlar’s earmarks all over this cartoon, both in the drawing style and direction. Lots of action that the animator loved to dabble in, all at some poor creature’s expense. This is the very beginning of Paramount’s association with violent funny animals taking center stage, a sort of art Tendlar helped perfect during animation’s Golden Age.

What’s ironic is that while this cartoon’s whole final act is devoted to gags about things and characters turning rubbery (there’s even Krazy Kat at 5:05), this was around the time the Fleischer studio started ironing out all of that “bouncy shit” in their cartoons. If you’re going to stop using rubberhose animation, use it all up at once, I guess.

That’s not my first credit in a cartoon-related publication, nor is it the first time my name has been seen next to David Gerstein’s. But it warms the cockles of my heart to see it anyway. I ghostwrote a fair amount of the synopses in The 100 Greatest Looney Tunes Cartoons edited by Jerry Beck. While it’s not a must-have, it’s at least an interesting read, and definitely worth the $16.47 price at Amazon, with its glossy and compact full-color content.

Whenever I see my writing published, it always disappoints, usually because I only see my mistakes. It’s been almost a year since I worked on this thing, and I actually had to go back to my notes to remember which cartoons I wrote on. (I forgot they were mostly Bob Clampett’s.) Some of my writing was definitely sanitized, and in my eyes weakened, so I’m just glad you will never know exactly which ones I wrote about.

A forewarning: there’s some atrocious copyediting in this book that seems to have resulted from copying and pasting templates, so roughly a fifth of the cartoons have incorrect release dates and series assignations. (So now The Stupid Cupid is a 1957 cartoon. Sorry, that’s when Tashlin was turning Jerry Lewis into Daffy Duck, not vice-versa.)

The lion’s share (roughly a third) is of course Chuck Jones cartoons, but even the biggest Jones detractors will have to admit that he’s the most popular of all the directors, so it’s only logical that the most votes would go to his cartoons. (Wisely, the list is presented in alphabetical order, rather than by voting rank. Once you get past the top ten or twenty, only the biggest OCD cases of Looney Tunes fans would find it worthwhile to dissect ranking order.)

The book also shows how times have changed. Tied for second place on the list are Bob Clampett and Friz Freleng, each represented by twenty-one titles. Passionate buffs might try to convince you it’s impossible to love Friz’s cartoons as much as Bob’s, but here’s proof you can have it both ways. Frank Tashlin, Tex Avery, Bob McKimson, and even Art Davis are represented by their best work for the studio too. We really have the advent of cable television and luscious DVD selections to thank for the studio’s talent being fairly recognized today.

Jerry also graciously invited fans of all kinds to vote on Cartoon Brew, and even more graciously credited them, so it’s not just from the usual team of experts. Titles that might have been discriminated against (most likely McKimson’s) are happily present.

There’s some head scratchers for sure. I don’t see what makes Guided Muscle a better Road Runner cartoon than the others, nor what makes Walky Talky Hawky the best Foghorn. Honey’s Money rather than the original His Bitter Half, really? Coal Black, fine, but Tin Pan Alley Cats too? At least one low-rent Speedy Gonzales short made the cut, but nothing with the vastly wittier Pepe Le Pew? But, hey, it’s not my list. And unlike the typical disgraceful lists from AFI, at least 2/3 of this list would be identical to my own, a percentage I’m more than okay with.

No revelations, just fun reading, and another firm reminder of why these staples of cinematic comedy* need to be preserved. I’m sure a general list of just The 100 Greatest Cartoons would reveal as much too. It’ll help keep your mind off this excrement too.

(* No, really. Have you actually tried watching live-action ‘comedy’ of the 1940s? As far as laughs go, other than a couple Stooges and a Sturges flick or two, that decade’s got zip. The cartoons were truly the kings of comedy in that era of film.)

I’ve been spending a lot of time with Disney’s Blame it on the Samba since I recently acquired a nice IB Tech print of it. Watching it on film is seriously the only way to give it justice; the Dailymotion file embeded below mutes the colors something bad. If you have a chance to see Melody Time in a theater, it’s worth the ticket price for this and Pecos Bill alone, which are the only things worth watching the movie for. (I share Milt Kahl’s view of Johnny Appleseed: “What sane man would actually put his money into a piece of shit like that?!”)

It’s a really jovial thing: a great marriage of color, music, and action, featuring the kind of animation that had long been eliminated from Disney cartoons by this point, never mind just the Donald Duck ones. Note how well Hal King, who was the main Duck animator at the studio, holds up against some of the fabled Nine who also animate on it. More proof that there needs to be a serious examination of the other animators who toiled away their whole lives with no recognition.

And dig that trippy live-action/animation hybrid! They never did seem to get it right, as the homosapiens always look like they’re staring into thin air.

I took the animator IDs from J.B. Kaufman’s excellent book, South of the Border With Disney. He’s one of the first authors to utilize the animator drafts to their fullest potential by actually transcribing them in their near entirety. All of J.B.’s books are worth adding to your library, because he always uncovers a ton of stuff that’s never seen print. I hear people often saying things along the lines of, “Do we really need another book on Disney?” Well if J.B. or David Gerstein are pressing ’em out, I say, absolutely!