What About Thad?

The contents of the new April 27th Warner cartoon releases were announced (for real), and it’s not exactly for the “classic” connoisseur. The cartoons range from some ‘A’ cartoons (Foxy By Proxy, Hare Trimmed, Nasty Quacks, Daffy DIlly), some ‘B’ cartoons (Bushy Hare, The Prize Pest, Stork Naked), to some outright abortions from the end of the Warner run (Mad as Mars Hare, Dr. Devil and Mr. Hare, Suppressed Duck, The Iceman Ducketh). But mostly they are ‘C’ grade/filler cartoons of the Bob McKimson variety. These are the ‘talking head’ cartoons you saw on Saturday morning, and even as a kid you knew weren’t very hot. Personally, they are cartoons I can take or leave, and it’s usually leave.

It’s not surprising after over a third of the cartoons had been released that the true classics are slimming down, or that the later cartoons are probably cheaper to restore. But at the cheap price they’ll be (definitely a ‘drop in the cart’ purchase at Target) and the few real classics they contain, I’m not complaining.

In the meantime, here is one of the cartoons you won’t be seeing, A Feather In His Hare, one of the two “Character Versus a Jewish Indian” cartoons of 1948. Maybe that description makes it sound a little overtly prejudiced, but it’s hard to find much wrong with a cartoon where the native actually realizes he forgot to say “ugh”.

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The first series where I could immediately see the difference in animator styles when I first started seeing them was Tom & Jerry (this would be around age nine). At that age, I had no way of knowing the actual name of each animator, but I had them down fairly well: the ‘furrowy/pouty’ guy (Ray Patterson), the ‘perfect’ guy (Ken Muse), the ‘flying shit’ guy (Irv Spence), the ‘pop/bounce to pose’ guy (Pete Burness), and the ’roundish/oval-ly’ guy (Ed Barge).

The earlier cartoons also had two very distinct styles that disappeared as the cartoons started to get faster: the ‘cute, baby-walk’ guy and the ‘rubbery’ guy. For years I thought that the former was Jack Zander and the latter was George Gordon.

Thanks to brilliant historian and animator Mark Kausler, we now know better. He posted IDs from his animator’s draft for The Night Before Christmas (click here and here to see them, and for Mark Mayerson’s mosaic, click here), and apparently it’s the other way around. The scenes in the early Tom & Jerrys we assumed were Zander’s are really Gordon’s, and the scenes we assumed Gordon’s are Zander’s.

So the lesson learned here is:
‘cute, baby-walk’ guy = Gordon;
‘rubbery’ guy = Zander.

But where did this misinformation come from? I don’t have my copy handy (or a scanner – so a scan would be welcome) but there is a drawing from this scene (from The Lonesome Mouse) labeled as “one of Jack Zander’s early expressive drawings of Jerry” in Leonard Maltin’s still-invaluable Of Mice and Magic. I’m not sure if anyone is keeping a list of errors in Maltin’s book, but it would be prudent to take note of this one. (UPDATE: Thanks to reader Oswald Iten for submitting a scan!)

Mark has also ID’ed a few other early T&J animators, Cecil Surry and Bill Littlejohn (who actually received a screen credit on Fine Feathered Friend, but it was omitted in the 1949 reissue). More on them later.