What About Thad?

I don’t know who committed the above image to the Internet. I don’t want to know. All I know is that this image freaked the shit out of me, and surely anyone else browsing the selection of 16mm film on eBay. Here’s a link to the actual auction.

Scrappy sucks, BTW.

(Thanks, David Gerstein.)

No Mutton fer Nuttin’ is a fairly historic cartoon for numerous reasons. It’s not only the very first entry in the Noveltoon series, the first short featuring Blackie the Lamb (Famous Studios’ first attempt at the wiseguy animal character), but it’s also the first in a long line of “animals being mean to each other” (as one of my more underachieving readers put it) conflict films that became Dave Tendlar and his unit’s trademark. None of these films ever really succeeded in making it an art like Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng did, but they are far more intriguing than they’re given credit for, and create a specifically different vibe. They should not be cast off solely as “interesting failures” (like a lot of Screen Gems and Terrytoons).

There are points of near perfection in this cartoon, with the kinds of gags you wouldn’t see at another studio, like the overlong underwater hotfoot, or my favorite, Blackie using his last smoke to burn down Wolfie’s house. It’s a great scene, because the focus of it is clearly Wolfie’s stupidity, singing and sharpening his knife while his house goes up in smoke and becomes a pile of smoldering ashes (even made more hilarious by the fact that we don’t have any stock “burning building” sound effects on the soundtrack).

I love the animation and drawing style of the films Famous did during WW2. It’s not quite what would become the Famous house-style, because it still has lingering traces of the old, blockier Fleischer drawing style (see the cat in Cheese Burglar for the epitome of this). Like an orphan searching for an identity.

Famous also had some really nice color styling too, something the studio is never given credit for, primarily because nearly all of the copies going around are taken from red/reddening (“menstruavision”) TV prints. Seeing this copy mastered from 35mm was a revelation, and makes me uneasy that few of my copies of other 1940s Famous cartoons look this good.

MUTTON CUM
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(I wonder who among us has made the racial connection that a lamb named “Blackie” is carrying dice…)

Chew-Chew Baby is a cartoon I really want to love more than I do. It has some wonderful bits of characterization in the first three-quarters, something that a lot of Lantz cartoons don’t accomplish. It also has one of the best pieces of smear animation I’ve ever seen.

In the smear, Woody just turns into sets of eyeballs! Hilarious! While smear animation is usually used to imitate the blurring you get when filming live-action motion, here it goes as far away from reality as possible!

Holy fuckballs, that Clampett and Scribner were geniuses! Totally the only ones doing anything worthwhile or original in 1945. Wait, what? They never worked for Walter Lantz? Whoops, pardonnez-moi!

Dick Lundy does a nice finish to his scene, just allowing the rest of Woody’s body to pop back into place with practically no drawings.

There’s also a nice breach of logic in this wonderful scene by Don Williams of Wally Walrus waltzing around his house, where rooms appear and disappear as needed.

Sadly, with a minute or two left to go, the cartoon’s plot becomes curdled, ending in a barrage of inane gags (sloppily animated by Grim Natwick), and that stupid “three woodpeckers” line. Something stinks and what we’ve seen here proves is that it’s not the direction. Cartoons like this support Shamus Culhane’s point in his autobiography that Ben Hardaway was a lame writer. You can see the whole thing for yourself here.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DTDpZnnmnQ&hl=en&fs=1&]

Or better yet, buy the Woody Woodpecker & Friends Vol. 1 DVD if you haven’t by now.