by Kevin Wollenweber and Rachel Newstead

Foreword from Rachel:

Acting according to the maxim that it’s better to have good content than frequent content, a very burnt-out Kevin and I have stayed away for awhile. But nothing provides quite the motivation to write as new DVD releases, and we have a video bonanza in the coming months. The latest Looney Tunes Golden Collection goes on sale today, with the third volume of Fleischer Popeye DVDs soon to follow. Kevin talks about the new releases in his latest “musings”, written a couple of days ago (and only now posted by procrastinator me–sorry, Kevin).

Jimmy Weldon with "Webster Webfoot"--above him, Tom Hatten poses with a friend who shall remain nameless...

Not that we haven’t been busy during our hiatus. We’ve been spending far too much of our time haunting the best undiscovered treasure on the Internet, namely Stu Shostak’s Shokus Internet Radio. Every Wednesday the esteemed Mr. Shostak interviews a different legendary figure from the world of animation and pop culture. This past week he spoke with two children’s show hosts well-known to generations of former kids in Southern California (and those fortunate few in other parts of the country who had cable): Tom Hatten and Jimmy “Webster Webfoot” Weldon.

I never had the pleasure of seeing Mr. Weldon in his prime, though I have heard him, and very likely you have too (Weldon took his vocal talents to Hanna-Barbera in the early sixties, as the voice of Yakky Doodle). Weldon’s a good old southern boy (Texas, to be exact) who’s enough of a character to fit in with my crazy South Carolina family–he may have made his fortune providing voices for ducks, but he himself is something of a live-action version of a certain, I say, certain animated chicken. Rooster, that is. Interviewing Jimmy Weldon has to be the easiest job in the world for any interviewer–all one need do is sit back and let him do the talking.

Tom Hatten hardly needs an introduction here, as my admiration for the man knows no bounds–and I never miss an opportunity to say so. I’ve written about him extensively in this blog, as he was the catalyst for my own interest in animation and animation history.

If you want to catch Mr. Weldon and Mr. Hatten, you’ll have to hurry, no thanks to me. (Procastination strikes again). Shostak airs repeats of his program all week, meaning the Weldon/Hatten edition will air just one more time: tomorrow at 4 P.M. Pacific time (adjust accordingly for your particular corner of the globe). Just follow the link I’ve provided above. Mr. Hatten and Mr. Weldon will thank you.

If you stick around to the end, you might catch a phone-in comment by a certain humble toonkeeper expressing her heartfelt admiration for Hatten.

What’s that? Oh, yes–Kevin. I haven’t forgotten him. He’s interrupted his Daffy Duck-like vigil at the mailbox to express his boundless enthusiasm for the upcoming and newly-released flood of video headed our way. Pardon me while I go pace for him.

Well, folks, “ah-go-ny, ah-go-ny!!”  I feel like DAFFY DUCK at the opening scene of “DAFFY DOODLES”, as he impatiently paces in front of his mailbox wondering aloud the phrase that I’ve used as the title of this piece.  In the cartoon, a classic by Bob Clampett if there ever was one, Daffy is referring to his morning paper as he eagerly awaits the day’s comic adventures of DICK TRACY.  I use the over-anxious question as my impatient cry for October 28th or eventual due date of the arrival of LOONEY TUNES GOLDEN COLLECTION, VOL. 6!  I cannot wait for this stuff to hit the shelves and I am perhaps as anxious to find out how well it sells in hopes that, like the WALT DISNEY TREASURES collections, we see a sudden revamping of the series and news that it will indeed continue!  Oh, right now, the news is still that the series is halted after this volume, but that Warners cartoons are still on hand for future restorations and collections, delving deeper into the vaults, but this series is just too good to just flop here as the absolute overview.  I don’t say that there are no other interesting in-depth possibilities, but this volume just seems so good that to cut the series off here is like axing an entire fourth of a very good major motion picture!  I still hold out hope that the decision-makers can be convinced that, even in these hard economic times, people are throwing down their cash for this wonderful series and genuinely look forward to its arrival each year in our video collections.

I’m sure that many of you have read on other blogs just what is going to be included here.  It is going to be so nice to finally get a decent print of “CHOW HOUND” and even “PAGE MISS GLORY”, a cartoon that always looked and sounded rather muddy, even in its laserdisk incarnation.  As I dimly recall it (and I seem to recall most things “dimly” these days), “PAGE MISS GLORY” had a comic book appearance about it, something like the later “LOVE AND CURSES”, drawn as if the characters came from a newspaper strip, and this lends itself nicely to the dream sequence had by the bellboy in a rural town about the arrival of this mysterious lady only known as Miss Glory.  Knocked out as the result of a mishap, the boy, Abner, dreams of what it will be like when Miss Glory steps out of that limousine.  In this dream, she is a slinky forerunner of the “RED” characters that Avery would feature in some of his best MGM cartoons.  While there are no wolves around with eyes bulging out, there are Avery-esque gags abounding as the announcement comes across the hotel public address system that Miss Glory has arrived.  Each time the royal name is mentioned, workers in all areas go through their own private fit of anxiety.  I mostly remember the chef, dropping a pie through the floor and jumping down through the hole it left.  We hear a “splash” and even see drops of jelly fly up through the hole and he emerges covered in pie filling, looking like just a glob of the stuff with eagerly blinking eye sockets!

Add to this wonderfully anticipated set the news that the third disk will be yet another all-black-and-white collection, only this will be cartoons produced before all of the major characters that we would immediately recognize as the memorable LOONEY TUNES characters.  These are the cartoons that put LOONEY TUNES and MERRIE MELODIES, the respective series, on the map.  Some of us have seen some of these titles on laserdisk, and others have been seen sporadically on that golden “LOONEY TUNES” show on Nickelodeon, featuring either Bosko, the major player who launched the LOONEY TUNES series, and Foxy, the somewhat similar musical character who launched the MERRIE MELODIES cartoons, to Buddy, an all-American boy who succeeded Bosko when Harmon & Ising left Schlesinger for what they thought would be more fruitful times at MGM.  Bosko was a happy accident, even though some might think of him as a MICKEY MOUSE clone.  He could be as bawdy as Disney’s mouse, even moreso, as we’ve pointed out on this blog before, and we’ll no doubt be talking in more detail about just how this is so once the set is out and we’ve had a major chance to review these cartoons in detail.  Some of the rarest titles chosen here will be “THE BOOS HANGS HIGH” and “CONGO JAZZ”, and I’ve spoken too often about the fascination with “BOSKO’S PICTURE SHOW” and my co-blogger, Rachel, has given a glorious review of “BOSKO IN PERSON”.  While Bosko was a musical character, he was also a bit of a cut-up.  MERRIE MELODIES’ Foxy, though, was an almost entirely musical character, and his initial debut, “SMILE, DARN YA, SMILE” will be seen here, perhaps looking as fresh as it did when it first premiered to theaters…and don’t forget to crank up the volume on your home theater system for this one, because the entries here on this golden black and white disk will sound so great with all the musical numbers.  Other MERRIE MELODIES cartoons will spotlight other big production numbers, even inspired in a way, in their jazziness, by the Busby Berkeley musicals from which they came, like “SHUFFLE OFF TO BUFFALO” set in a hospital of newborn babies who, fresh out of the womb, can sing and vamp around with the best performers of the day!!  These kinds of films don’t even have to have a plot as the song just takes the characters all kinds of interesting places.

The grandest joy, as we have also pointed out, is that there will be more bonus cartoons to this set than any other volume in this series.  If the series were to suddenly be given the go-ahead to continue, it is highly probable that future volumes will also feature this many bonus cartoons, both restored and unrestored.  Hey, I’m just glad to see any of these at all.  One could perhaps tell the restored cartoons because some of these also have their scores included alone as part of the special features jam-packed into this collection.  Even though I’ve been told that they are among the unrestored cartoons, I am excited to get the five CAPTAIN & THE KIDS cartoons, the ones directed by Friz Freleng, some of the best and most inventive of the series.  Even though both Friz Freleng and Mel Blanc have complained about how senseless the production on this series was, they certainly did what they could with the characters, especially in one of the color entries included here, “THE CAPTAIN’S CHRISTMAS”.  We’ve discussed both this one and the black and white classic, “MAMA’S NEW HAT”, and now you’ll be able to see these for yourselves if you’re not already familiar with them.

Another step in the right direction here is the “PATRIOTIC PALS” disk, although that isn’t entirely an apt title for this disk as some of the films involve a world at war.  “THE DUCKTATORS”, for example, is mostly a focus on our enemies at the time, fascism and the three dictators who wanted to rule the world, seen as ducks, although the link to a patriotic pal might be, oddly enough, the dove of peace who, when finally confronted, would not back down from defending himself and his beliefs!  It is a fantastic ending to this cartoon all too often excised from its public domain prints.  It is yet another major reason why this collection is well worth getting!!

I’m also delighted with the oddities included here as special features, like “PUNCH TRUNK”, about a pint-sized elephant that has an entire community wondering if they were losing their minds, as only Chuck Jones could convey this, and “BARTHOLOMEW VS. THE WHEEL”, a cartoon that starts off with a dog’s sudden hatred of wheels because of a near accident, one that carries him back to the stone age, or so it seems.  It is a later Warners cartoon, one that does feature other unusual voices other than Mel Blanc.  The narrator is a little boy, the owner of the dog.

So this is a very healthy way to almost end the year, 2008.  This, along with the third POPEYE THE SAILOR set, will be coming to us within the next few weeks.  Actually, the POPEYE set comes near the end of November as far as I know, pushed back so that further “treatments” to cartoons that unfortunately found their beginnings or endings in almost unrestorable shape can be completed so that we fans will be satisfied.  No matter what it turns out to be, this set will be anticipated as it concludes the Fleischer years and opens the Famous Studios years.  The full list of extras for this have not entirely been revealed as yet, but there is certainly a lot to talk about regarding the changes going on at Paramount’s cartoon studio and how the Fleischers lost the very right to what was originally theirs.  There will always be restoration issues about some of these cartoons, because certainly Paramount never took good care of these films, allowing for the original title cards or end credits to be decayed beyond restorability.  From here on in, all POPEYE sets will be issued in two disk editions, even when it comes to the Famous Studios’ color entries, partially in hopes that the restoration process might even be better than hoped on some titles.  I think, however, that we will be pleasantly surprised at the results.

And what of the MGM cartoons?  Oh, man, I’m drooling!  That’s all I can say for now.  Plans have not entirely been formulated, but we can dream of what could be in the best of all possible worlds, the one we continuously inhabit, beyond news of a failing economy!  Hey, even in the Depression, lavish movies got made.  I would hope that in this recessionary time, the creative aspect for DVD sets takes us through all this in style until we can say that our world is truly back on its capable feet again.  Entertainment gets us through this, and pop culture is perhaps the best cure for all ills.  I don’t want that confused with that taboo subject called “nostalgia”.  Pop culture is perhaps a better term for what we all seem to be curious about these days and would want for our video libraries, with all conscious history and anecdotal information abounding as well.  There is hushed talk of work on restoration of MGM cartoons.  I am hoping that includes not only the TOM & JERRY and Tex Avery cartoons, but also the cartoons too often greeted with less enthusiasm, like the HAPPY HARMONIES and other Harmon/Ising era titles and characters.  Yes, it is true that some Harmon/Ising cartoons are hideously slow and genuinely unfunny.  Think of what a cartoon like “PAPA GETS THE BIRD” might have been like in other hands.  I do have to marvel at the spectacle that these cartoons are in some cases, even one as mild as this aforementioned title, the third of the Hugh Harmon THREE BEARS cartoons, centering around nothing more than yet another family squabble, this time over giving Mama’s canary a bath!  Wilbur usually saves these cartoons, but not even he can save this long and plodding effort.  Its ending is so beautiful to look at, though, as Papa falls down the well for a third or fourth time and the resulting splash is seen behind the end credit, and you’ve got to admit that Papa sure does look ugly covered in sludge from the bottom of the well once pulled up with the water bucket.  By the time this one ends, though, we all feel like Papa who ends up throwing *HIMSELF* down that muddy old well out of frustration!

But all this stuff deserves to be seen and included.  I’ve been to Harmon/Ising festivals, and the audience is so quiet that one could sneeze and end up scaring the crowd, but I’m not entirely sure that the people who had come to such festivals, knowing what they were about to sit through, were entirely yawning.  Sure, a corresponding show that same night was the best of Tex Avery’s MGM titles, but the two shows coupled together show the extremes that were seen throughout the years of theatrical cartoons being made at MGM.  Avery’s cartoons will always be appreciated on their own, and I would applaud a COMPLETE set to compete with the majestic job done on laserdisk, but if the consultants want to keep constant reissues fresh and make it interesting, perhaps programs of MGM cartoons similar to the wonderful WOODY WOODPECKER & FRIENDS sets would be in order.  This would allow our favorite consultants to dip again into the TOM & JERRY cartoons *AND* give us some of that all-important Tex Avery material-and we can possibly see that alternate version of Avery’s Warners cartoon, “THE CRACKPOT QUAIL”, just to hear the soundtrack and sound effects the way they were supposed to have appeared.  Yes, this would be more appropriate for a future LOONEY TUNES set, but I wouldn’t mind the double-dipping in the other direction either, with examples of Warners work by MGM artists!

The beginning of it all was Walt Disney.  We all oddly more remember the other studios, partially because of their existence on television.  I’d seen Harmon/Ising’s “TO SPRING” or “DANCE OF THE WEED” before I ever saw any section of “FANTASIA”.  While some would consider the Harmon/Ising stuff the poor man’s Disney, I felt more comfortable with it all because I’d seen ‘em more often.  Also, let’s face it, the other studios knew how to be funny while still appealing to the kid in all of us.  Even at the cutest times, Warners cartoons were hilarious.  I will always enjoy Chuck Jones’ silent Book Worm character, an idea that Harmon could have learned from.  Each of these artists did, in their own way, want so much to further the artistic integrity of the field of animation and, while that never quite did happen, we fans know animation to be so much more than kid stuff.

So let’s support all these wonderful coming attractions and hope that the proposed ideas for 2009 and beyond do achieve fruition so much sharper than I could ever outline it here.  We have another chance, once Jerry Beck appears on SHOKUS INTERNET RADIO’s “STU’S SHOW” in January, to voice our ideas.  No, neither Jerry nor Stu are looking for such ideas, but we do have ‘em and why not make ‘em known?  There are goodies in the works, and I know that there are other thoughts on our minds about characters and such.  Let’s share our memories and see that they remain pop culture for now and not necessarily just musty old nostalgia.

Kevin Wollenweber

"What the hyeck?" No "Beany and Cecil" here (image from TVAcres.com)

Kevin mentioned it the other day, but now we hear it from the source: the upcoming DVD set from Classic Media will not contain any of the Matty’s Funday Funnies segments featuring Bob Clampett’s Beany and Cecil. Just this morning we received the following e-mail from  John Ruzich at Classic Media:

Dear Sir or Madame:

I am contacting you on behalf of Classic Media, an Entertainment Rights group company. Recently, your website reported on Classic Media’s upcoming August 26th DVD releases of Casper Classic Collection Vol. 1: Trick or Treat and Casper Classic Collection Vol. 2: Casper & Wendy Scare Up Some Fun. Although both releases will contain Casper cartoons that originally aired on television as part of the Matty’s Funday Funnies program, we wanted to clarify that Classic Media does not have any trademark or copyright ownership of Matty’s Funday Funnies including the characters associated with the show such as Beany Boy, Cecil the Sea Sick Sea Serpent, Uncle Captain Huffenpuff and Dishonest John. For the avoidance of doubt, Classic Media is the sole trademark and copyright owner of Casper the Friendly Ghost and Wendy the Witch. If you have any questions and/or require any further clarifications, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Sincerely,

John Ruzich
Vice President of Business & Legal Affairs
Classic Media, Inc.

Thank you, Mr. Ruzich–we, along with countless other Beany and Cecil fans, are crushed. But at least we know.

By Kevin Wollenweber

Okay, just a few things to keep those who care up to date-

I excitedly and prematurely wrote herein a while back about the possibility of Bob Clampett’s “BEANY & CECIL” coming, in greater volume, to DVD from Classic Media. My original alert to this was rather fuzzy, because it came from a website that was confusing “BEANY & CECIL” with anything else involving the old “MATTY MATTEL’S FUNDAY FUNNIES”. Sure enough, I more carefully reread the same alert and it had a link heading to news of two very spare “CASPER THE FRIENDLY GHOST” DVD’s from Classic Media, both featuring only around 12 cartoons and very embarrassingly aimed at the kiddies.

This company has absolutely *NO* clue that kids of today are just *NOT* the ones who are interested in the old Harveytoons (or Famous Studios) characters!! While it is true that the HARVEYTOONS or Harvey Comics characters were also connected with “MATTY MATTEL’S FUNDAY FUNNIES” (thus the link to “BEANY & CECIL” to further confuse those not in the know), one could not get immediately confused between theatrical cartoons from Famous Studios and TV cartoons from Bob Clampett! So what, then, *IS* the correct news on “BEANY & CECIL”?

I sure wish I knew. I did get news that the Clampetts were last heard to be negotiating with Classic Media; so does this mean that the marriage is complete? Not as far as I now know. For those who care, I’m sorry I jumped so prematurely. I really thought I had a major scoop on this one, and, in all honesty, I was jumping to tell folks that felt as close to the series as I do that there are further possibilities. While there are still possibilities, I guess we all have to moan and groan and suffer with our fast-decaying videotapes. I’ve already outlined the reasons why I thoroughly enjoy this series. While, to some just discovering this twisted gem, this might seem like a “you had to be there” type of moment, I continue to say “give it a second or third try!” It really does have the sense of humor of Bob Clampett all over it despite its very limited animation style, along with then popular hipster humor that is as quick-witted as Clampett’s own.

This is one of the few shows in which I like the time capsule caricatures and name-dropping, and that is why the adults, of course, should be the market to which this show is sold, but I do wish the Clampett family much good luck in finding an all-embracing home for this show and just about anything else deemed lost in the history of Bob Clampett.

In other musings, this morning regarding animators and where they came from and where they were going, on YouTube, I checked out a print there of an MGM cartoon credited to Rudolph Ising, called “BATS IN THE BELFRY”. It is, with animation logic and all, a one act play with Three Stooges-like bats singing of their lunacy and demonstrating it with their antics. The cartoon is almost plotless, although the big punchline is that we do find out, at the cartoon’s close, just what makes the bats “crazy” each night at the stroke of twelve!

I’m unsure of the voices in the cartoon, although I do catch Pinto Culvig voicing one of the bats. The third little guy (known as “Brick Bat”) just jiggles his empty head around so we can hear that something is indeed loose, but he remains voiceless throughout.

The cartoon plays out like an old vaudeville routine and does so within real time (something rare in cartoons of this period) which can span any number of years just so we get to the finale or punchline of the on-going joke within the seven-to-ten minute period that we are spending with the cartoon in question.

It is directed, in actuality, by a guy named Jerry Brewer, who also directed another lavish MGM toon of this period, “THE FIRST SWALLOW”. I believe that these two toons were the only ones that he directed. I’d sure be interested to know more about the guy and what else, in the golden age, he had done. I had thought, originally, that he, like George Gordon, had been a Terrytoons transplant, but then again, I’m not entirely sure if Gordon first worked at MGM and then at Terrytoons, but I’m certain that he worked at both studios. In fact, I like Gordon’s work at MGM, and his BARNEY BEAR cartoon, “BARNEY BEAR’S POLAR PEST” almost reminds me of any number of plot elements created for any number of TERRY BEARS cartoons. Perhaps you readers could clue me in on Gordon’s animation work history…or Jerry Brewer’s for that matter.

It is worth noting just what Jerry Brewer’s influences were, here, because others have said, about “BATS IN THE BELFRY”, that the bats, themselves, are oddly designed, with brightly colored decorative clothes or ornamental gear on their bodies. It is a strange little tune in which almost all the dialogue is sung. It reminds me of the earliest Three Stooges shorts in which the cast sang all the dialogue. If I remember clearly, those sing-songy Stooges shorts did not go over well, even with staunch fans, but I can see where animated cartoonists could be inspired to do something with the concept. Those at Warner Brothers had done much better with the idea, but this is an interesting effort and worth better understanding…or at least a second look.

Review-synopsis by Rachel Newstead

L’il Ol’Bosko and the Pirates

Release Date: May 1, 1937

Director: Hugh Harman

In short: Little Bosko’s imagination runs wild, conjuring up a boatload of musical pirate frogs who show him–and us–just what “wild” means…

There is, I admit, an undeniable advantage to watching cartoons in the internet age.

When I was a child, TV programmers ruled. Cartoons came on when the programmers wanted, however often they wanted–and could be yanked off the air just as arbitrarily, for weeks or even months. Or for that matter, forever.

On the one hand, it made cartoon-watching an event, something to be eagerly anticipated. And yet…

I never knew when a favorite cartoon would reappear. Were I to miss it, I’d have to wait until it came up again in the rotation, however long that may be. Consequently, it could take years of repeat viewing to catch all the subtleties, the inside jokes, the individual “fingerprints” of each animator’s style.

Now, armed with DVDs, YouTube and the ability to instantly view nearly anything I desire, as many times as I desire, that same process can take days or even hours.

“L’il Ol’ Bosko and the Pirates” was not one of those cartoons I was fortunate enough to see in my childhood–it and cartoons like it had pretty much faded from TV by the time my interest in animation reached full flower–but the rule still applies.

I first had the privilege of viewing a copy some two years ago. Then, as too often happens, I misplaced it, and much of its wonderful detail faded from my mind.

When finally able to see it again–and again and again–about a week ago, what I found was a revelation.

The Bosko Trilogy (as Kevin and I have come to call it) are so nearly identical as to seem exact copies to the more jaded, less discriminating viewer. Indeed, that’s what I thought at first–those of you who read my earlier writings on this series might remember my attempt to be funny with my “Contractual Obligation Trilogy” remark. I’ve regretted that ever since.

Adorable, isn't he?

L’il Ol’ Bosko and the Pirates, in fact, is no more a “copy” of the other two cartoons than Chuck Jones’ Bugs/Daffy/Elmer trilogy (Rabbit Seasoning, Rabbit Fire and Duck, Rabbit, Duck!) are copies of one another. As with Jones’ films, each stands on its own, with elements that mark it as unique; each has its strengths–and its weaknesses. The purpose of this review, then, is not to discuss its similarities to the others, but the ways in which it stands out–and why those subtle differences make it the best of the three.

“Straight to Grandma’s, here I go!”…but don’t bet on it

The familiar "storybook opening", which tells us we're about to see one of the entries in the "Bosko Trilogy"

The cartoon opens as we’ll soon be accustomed to seeing in the Bosko Trilogy, with a revamped (for the second time in four years) “L’il Ol’ Bosko” receiving instructions from his “mammy” to go “straight to Grandma’s” with a bag of fresh-baked cookies. But Bosko, like most little kids, is disinclined to go “straight to” anywhere without taking a detour through his imagination. And Bosko’s is a bit more… active than most.

His musical promise to go “Straight To Grandma’s” is all too quickly broken within the first few seconds, when he encounters a woodpecker busily tapping at a tree.

Not content to let that go unchallenged, Bosko decides to show he can tap as well as the best of them. Hopping on a hollow log, he tap-dances out a rhythm of his own, matching the woodpecker tap for tap. But as I mentioned at the beginning, it’s the little things that makes this endearing, as when Bosko gives his feathered opponent a cocky nod of the head as if to say, “Beat THAT!” The “duel” is delightful (and my favorite scene). Little Bosko proves to be an even better dancer than his early-30s Schlesinger counterpart–and this scene only hints at what’s coming.

Being weighed down with a bag of cookies doesn't deter Bosko from teaching a woodpecker a lesson or two...

The woodpecker, however, “wins” the match when an over-energetic dance move causes Bosko to fall off the log. He resumes his journey for the moment only to be distracted again by a bucket floating in a nearby river.

To little Bosko’s mind, this is an invitation to adventure. Hopping into his little “boat”, he notices a bottle float by in front of him–it becomes a spyglass, while the wrecked boat he spots among the rushes and weeds transforms into the terror and delight of little boys everywhere: a pirate ship, looming huge in the distance.

Naturally, Bosko gets a bit closer than he would have liked, thanks to a cannonball fired by the pirate captain (a large frog with a Louis Armstrong-like voice, called “Fog Horn” in these cartoons.) The wave created by the cannonball sends Bosko’s little craft high in the air, and before Bosko knows it, the pirate captain snags him with his sword and deposits him on deck. Does he want to shanghai our little friend? Hang him from the highest yardarm?

Nothing as bloodthirsty as that, it turns out. He wants what’s in Bosko’s bag.

Bosko's first encounter with the Pirate Captain--and Bosko looks none too pleased

“Yeah, yeah, whatcha got there, boy, whatcha got there?” the captain says. “I’m going to my Grandma’s!” Bosko yells back, still dangling in midair.

“You wouldn’t happen to have no cookies in that there bag, would you now?” the captain says. When Bosko raises his objections, the captain blusters, “You talk about you got cookies! You got dis, and you got dat! And you got cookies, and your grandma’s waitin’ for ‘em! WELL, WE AIN’T GOT NO COOKIES!”

“You can’t have dese cookies–dese my grandma’s cookies!” Bosko protests. When he turns around he sees the pirate crew, who just happened to overhear the magic word, “cookies.” Soon it’s all over the ship. Frogs from every corner–up in the crow’s nest, up a rope ladder, even hiding inside a cannon–yell “Cookies?!” in succession.

From here the pirate captain launches into the now-familiar (to us) “Grandma’s Cookies” number. A group of four pirate crew sing along in impressive four-part harmony.

The pirate captain becomes a bit more menacing, seeming to fill the scene as he advances toward Bosko. “Now, now, now, you wouldn’t let a l’il ol pirate, who never did anybody any harm or nothin’, go hungry when you got those cookies, now would ya now?”

Look familiar? It should--the famous Bill Robinson staircase dance, in animated form (above) and the genuine article (below). Frankly, the real "Bojangles" did it better...

Bosko runs toward a stairway, where he encounters a Bill Robinson frog, and both do a version of the staircase dance that Robinson did with Shirley Temple in The Little Colonel (1935)–this, at least to my eyes, is a tribute to the great “Bojangles” rather than a mockery, despite the Robinson frog’s ungainly imitation of his human counterpart’s dance steps. Though the consummate performer in Bosko appears to be enjoying the dance, he eyes the Robinson frog a bit skeptically. The dance, unfortunately, is cut short by the ever-looming figure of the pirate captain.

A little more insistent this time, the captain says,”Yeah yeah yeah…now look here! Is you gonna give us dose cookies, or is you ain’t?” Bosko answers merely by tapping in defiance, chest stuck out.

“Then you gonna walk the plank!”, The captain exclaims. “Swing out, now!” From here we get the

The real Bill Robinson, with Shirley Temple in The Little Colonel

backward countdown tap-dance sequence seen in the other two entries in the trilogy, but it’s probably done best here. (Listeners of the Orphan Toons Podcast might recognize this as the leadoff to the opening title of our program.) Bosko’s little routine is graceful beyond his supposed years, and in complex syncopated rhythm–Harman and his animators, it seems, did do their homework by studying black tap-dancers of the period, even if the flat-footed hoofing of their froggy Bill Robinson didn’t exactly reflect that.

So impressed with Bosko’s routine is the crew that they forget why they had him on the plank in the first place–the motley assemblage jumps up and down, cheering and applauding. Our Bosko has won them over, to the chagrin of the captain.

Bosko's motley but enthusiastic audience (above) watches Bosko do his own version of "walking the plank" (below, left)

“Heave the anchor/Hoist the sail/Ring the bell and kick the pail…” the captain shouts as his frustration and the energy of the “Grandma’s Cookies” song increases.

The band of pirates becomes a literal “band,” complete with a pirate Cab Calloway frog, another fixture from the other two films, as well as Swing Wedding and The Old Mill Pond. The Calloway frog is so overcome with ecstasy at the thought of the cookies (it might be even considered sexual in a less innocent medium) he “shoots” himself–though this being a child’s imagination, it’s with a pop-gun pistol–and falls backward into the hold.

Never mind the dancing--look at that ornate background, gorgeous even in this washed-out print. This cries for a restoration...

Now it’s Bosko’s turn to go wild, doing a frenzied tap dance as he conducts this impromptu orchestra, interrupted every so often by a frog drummer who’s a little overenthusiastic, continuing to drum after Bosko has stopped. In one scene, Bosko in a gesture of frustration, stomps off in a corner to wait it out. If the “woodpecker” sequence weren’t sufficient proof that Harman could do personality animation as well as his old mentor Disney, this is.

In what could be considered either musical ecstasy or insanity, one frog musician plucks his bass upside down, finally bringing it down in splinters on his head. This prompts a Fats Waller frog to utter his trademark line, “What’s de matta wid him?” He launches into an extended dialogue as he plays his piano riff, of which the only intelligible dialogue is “Dose cookies, dose cookies, I love dem, I love dem…”

It looks as though Bosko does a better job of imitating Cab Calloway than this cartoon's froggy stand-in (below left)

Bosko’s dancing keeps up with the general level of chaos–he starts skidding, running, jumping and doing cartwheels from one end of the ship to the other. Their playing seems to churn up the very waves, as the ship pitches back and forth with every trumpet note.

The pirate captain screams: “Ooww…those cookies!” Caught up in the rhythm and his single-minded desire, he knocks the heads of two of his crew together in rhythm to the music.

As the excitement reaches its crescendo, we see–among other things–one cross-eyed goof of a fellow sawing off the spar on which he’s sitting. The captain, meanwhile, has dived through the deck into the hold below. The goofball frog who’d been sawing off the spar in the earlier scene hops into the crow’s nest, which drops down to the ground and gets knocked back up in the air, something like those “test your strength” carnival games. He says something as he enters the crow’s nest, but as with the cartoon Waller’s lines, neither Kevin nor I could make out what. Kevin has his ideas, but that will have to wait for another time.

Cab Calloway, or at least Harman's version of him

Bosko’s dancing, meanwhile, is so fast and furious his feet literally glow red-hot, setting the deck on fire underneath him. He falls through into a barrel of gunpowder, with predictable results. The pirate captain, who had fallen into the other barrel earlier, shouts “Oooh, those cookies!” just before the inevitable explosion.

It sends Bosko far up into the air and back into his little bucket. The last we see of the pirates is the captain, who repeats the line of the Fats Waller frog–”Dose cookies, dose cookies, I love dem, I love dem… ” The ship, now not quite so menacing, morphs back into the little boat it really is. Bosko reaches shore and goes on his way, singing the “Straight To Grandma’s” song, kicking off what (at the time) appeared to be the beginning of a revitalized Bosko series. If only that were so.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

When first writing about this trilogy a year ago, I would have been reluctant to compare any cartoon in it to those of the Fleischer studio, except perhaps negatively. While there’s still a lot he could have learned from Max and Dave, in some ways, Harman seems to have captured the dark, hallucinatory quality of Fleischer’s cartoons.

Sometimes Harman could get things right--compare this frame grab of The Old Man Of The Mountain (1933) with a similar scene in Bosko and the Pirates below

In several scenes, as the pirate captain advances toward Bosko, his sheer bulk fills the screen–looking at it I can only think of Fleischer’s The Old Man Of The Mountain (which, incidentally, featured the voice and dance moves of the real Cab Calloway). When Betty Boop first encounters The Old Man, he advances toward her with a hungry expression, appearing to swell to three times her size before he fills the frame entirely. His motives weren’t quite as innocent as the pirate’s, I’ll admit, but from the perspective of a small child such as Bosko, the pirate’s seeming inflation in size was no less terrifying.

Everything about this cartoon seems bigger than life, as would be expected in a child’s worst nightmares. The pirate ship isn’t simply large, it’s enormous; the music isn’t merely chaotic, but literally explosive.

A child's view of impending menace, courtesy of Hugh Harman

Bosko’s dancing is literally “hot”, to the point that it sets the deck ablaze. It is very much the manner in which a child perceives the outside world–incomprehensible and somewhat dangerous, a world in which everything seems gigantic and out of the child’s control. Yet once the nightmare passes, everything becomes familiar and normal once again.

If this cartoon suffers, it’s in the portrayal of the black performers caricatured here, a defect that would carry over to the other cartoons in the trilogy. The Fats Waller caricature and “Fog Horn”, the Louis Armstrong stand-in, are almost interchangeable, shortchanging both performers. No two musicians could be more different: Waller in particular had a vast range of facial expressions and one-liners in his comic reservoir, aided by a mellow baritone in stark contrast to Armstrong’s raspy bass. All of this Harman either overlooks or ignores.

Harman’s version of Cab Calloway, in contrast to the fiery yet urbane individual captured on film by the Fleischers, appears almost psychotic, with little of the finesse of cartoons like Minnie The Moocher. Calloway’s high notes could be piercing, his scat-singing could be rapid-fire, but he did not scream indiscriminately like a madman. As Chuck Jones often said, to satirize something, you must know what you satirize.

As I said in the beginning, repeated viewing can reveal things never noticed before; one scene in Pirates had me puzzled, and may well remain a mystery. At one point as the Fats Waller frog plays his piano, he assumes a pose I’d seen in at least one other cartoon. It would be easy to dismiss this as evidence of Harman’s sometimes irritating reuse of animation–if the other cartoon hadn’t come from Leon Schlesinger.

Imitation is apparently the sincerest form of cartooning, in these examples from "September In The Rain" (above) and "Bosko and the Pirates" (below)

In September in the Rain (released a year before Harman’s cartoon) the Fats Waller caricature–here portrayed as a Gold Dust Twin–lounges casually on one elbow with his feet in the air as he plays. His counterpart in Bosko and the Pirates assumes a near-identical pose, only reversed.

It could not be an instance of re-used animation, as Harman had, of course, vacated Schlesinger’s years before, but the two poses are similar enough to warrant considerable speculation. Animators in the Golden Age were known to blatantly copy one another’s gags–perhaps I’d stumbled onto yet another example. Perhaps it was a characteristic of Waller’s, captured by two different cartoonists.

Or perhaps I, too, am letting my imagination run away with me.

by Kevin Wollenweber

Foreword from Rachel

After more than a year, Kevin and I are making a long-overdue return to the MGM incarnation of our favorite character, Bosko–more specifically, the final three cartoons in the series, which we’ve come to refer to as the “Bosko Trilogy.”

Made toward the end of Hugh and Rudy’s tenure as independent producers, the Trilogy stands as a bittersweet foreshadowing of what they might have done had they continued as such. In few other cartoons do a modern, jazzy sensibility and Disney-like innocence come together so well.

These deceptively similar cartoons appeal on enough levels to inspire a book in themselves; a mere review seems inadequate, but that’s what we’re going to attempt to do. Were we to indulge ourselves, we could talk about these cartoons among ourselves forever, as heretofore-unnoticed details crop up with every viewing, but we’ve kept our dear readers waiting long enough. In today’s essay, Kevin’s offers his perspective on the Trilogy in general, with emphasis on the first cartoon in the series, L’il Ol’ Bosko and the Pirates. Mine will follow in a subsequent post.

We’ve told the story so many times, here and there in our ramblings on this blog, about Hugh Harman and Rudolph Ising leaving their old boss, Walt Disney, for what they hoped would be far greener and more successful pastures, forming their own animation company and getting distributed by Warner Brothers, and then MGM. Those earliest years, experimenting with their own musical series of cartoons, the Looney Tunes and then the Happy Harmonies, spawned cute little wide-eyed and talented characters like Foxy (at Warner Brothers) and their most successful creation, Bosko, that “talk-ink” kid.

I never knew the character’s actual age when the series started at Warner Brothers, but he always seemed to me to be, aside from a kind of more likable clone of Mickey Mouse at Disney, a very young character, full of all the traits of the perpetual child, full of imagination and enthusiasm.

As the character slowly evolved, he took on many tasks and wore many hats, from woodsman to champion boxer to knight in shining armor to somewhat frightened soldier fighting his country’s war. When Hugh and Rudy left Warner Brothers over creative differences, they moved to have their cartoons distributed by MGM which was going to allow them larger budgets and, although the Hays Code had kicked in, more creative freedoms to expand their designs of characters.

Bosko was the only character of that LOONEY TUNES period to travel with them to distribution at MGM. In fact, the first Bosko cartoon to be created at the new home, Bosko’s Parlor Pranks, was a kind of overview of where the character had been for the first three years or so. We could pick out so many bits of reused animation, a nagging shortcut during any of the Harman/Ising series, but we also noticed that he was beginning to look more human with more identifying detail as new and bigger budgets allowed.

He was once again, technically, a young country boy, a dark-skinned stereotype but a rural one, but the MIckey Mouse comparison still remained because the main characters in the first few cartoons were Bosko, his girlfriend, Honey and their hapless dog, Bruno. The HAPPY HARMONIES series, however, only lasted for three-and-a-quarter years or so, again due to creative differences-Harman and Ising wanted a lot of financial backing for these experiments, but MGM wasn’t willing to allow them the large figures they had been allotted thus far, as the movie company was starting their own in-house studio with some of the animators that were working under the Harmon/Ising team.

Yet, with the close of the HAPPY HARMONIES series, Bosko was seeing his final days and, while these occurred without his girlfriend, Honey, or dog, Bruno, we note that Bosko is again a very musical little character, a definite child now voiced by a little boy, and with a very fertile imagination with the same group of jazz-playing amphibious caricatures of entertainers of the period for all three cartoons. The animation in these cartoons is so wonderful to watch.

Right away, we see shades of the imagined childhood years of the Talk-Ink Kid, dancing along a road and tapping out beats in competition to an early morning woodpecker before he hops on a small block of wood that becomes his makeshift raft. He encounters the wreck of a ship that turns out to suddenly take it’s original form again and become the first of three Bosko “adventures” of sorts. But, like the earliest musical LOONEY TUNES or MERRIE MELODIES, this Bosko is never leaving music out of the mix, and even those forces that are going to be Bosko’s dangerous foes are musical ones.

But in order to continue this story, I have to backtrack just a little, to 1935 and the creation of a wonderful animated musical revue of sorts produced and directed by Hugh Harman apart from his reconfigurations of the Bosko character-a film called “THE OLD MILL POND”.

This film is a very tuneful cartoonization of all-black live stage performances of the period, where jazz legends and showpeople get up and perform their numbers during the hot evening hours. Cartoon license reinvented them as musical frogs that leap off their lily pads and onto a nicely lit stage to swing out with songs like “I Heard” and “Tiger Rag” which, in this cartoon, comes with a bit of comic banter in which one of the musicians disguises himself as a tiger to scare one of the other performers, a Stepin Fetchit caricature, and chase him around the stage as the “house” band performs the famous jazz/pop classic.

These “swing” cartoons, as I’ll call them, churn themselves up into a nonstop frenzy that usually has the musicians trashing their own instruments when the rhythmn gets too hot and fast and throwing themselves back into the cooling waters, leaving the scene once again quiet to greet the dewy morning. The second of these cartoons is an even more elaborate revue, Swing Wedding, with the same troupe of jazzy frogs and entertainment and jazz caricatures, performing the story of the wedding of Smokey Joe (the Stepin Fetchit caricature) and a slinky but no-nonsense Minnie the Moocher.

Enter the cool rival, “the man who can swing” (the Cab Calloway caricature) and the contest is on, once an at first reluctant Smokey Joe persuades himself that he will get married and speeds up from an uncertain shuffle to a rocket blast of energy that gets him there in literally a flash of light, just as an impatient Minnie is about to walk down that aisle with the intruder.

The climactic moment is the swing out session that pits the two rivals for Minnie’s affections against each other, turning into the usual wild and loud party that ends up with the frogs giddily forgetting why they congregated there in the first place and tumbling back into that pond, with the master of ceremonies, the Louis Armstrong caricature peering out at the audience as he cools off in the water, whispering the famous last words, “swing…swing” as the iris closes.

Ah, but we’re talking about Bosko, right? So now, the year 1937 is moving by rather fast, and it seems like the most elaborate year of visual splendor for Hugh Harman, especially, as he creates some stunning musical toons, also, with his typically 1930’s wide-eyed innocent characters, but the distributor (MGM) has decided that the very expensive HAPPY HARMONIES will not continue and the two head animators would not see their dream of even attempting feature films, if indeed the HAPPY HARMONIES were leading up to that.

So it seems to this reviewer that Harmon wanted to take Bosko out on a high note, with three somewhat similarly-themed cartoons that we BOSKO fans lovingly call “the Bosko Trilogy”, in which Bosko’s task, dictated by his “Mammy”, is to take a bag of freshly baked cookies to his Grandma’s house.

Being the little bundle of mischief that we know Bosko is, he never quite makes it to Grandma’s and, to spark things up quite a bit, he uses his vivid imagination as he struggles along the marshes and surrounding foliage, to dredge up adventures, re-acquainting us with those jazzy frogs that were nicely introduced in the preceeding two song-filled cartoons.

The caricatures get a bit muddier now that they are merely Bosko’s imagined foes after this bag of cookies. There is an exclusive production number played throughout all three of these cartoons, the “Grandma’s Cookies” song that, as the cartoon progresses, is played faster and faster until the frogs basically end up destroying themselves and Bosko’s nightmare/daydream, abruptly bringing him back to reality.

My favorite of these is the first of the three cartoons, a nicely paced toon called L’il Ol’ Bosko and the Pirates. Each of these elaborate and gorgeous-looking cartoons opens with a brown-skinned hand, slowly opening a beautiful, hard cover storybook with the name of the cartoon on its front, and this starts the story rolling. As I said, Bosko is now voiced by a black child, reminding this reviewer of any of the OUR GANG kids of color like a very young Matthew “Stymie” Beard, and his Mom is instructing him to take “this bag of cookies to your Grandma’s”, warning him to “get along” and don’t dawdle. Bosko is already in high spirits and talk/singin’ a song:

Straight to Grandma’s here I go

To bring de cookies to her front door.

The hen went to cackle, the cock went to crow.

Straight to Grandma’s here I go!

He dances through the rhythms of nature, before leaping onto his raft and becoming curious around the wreck of a ship, the obvious start up for his first “adventure”. But we know this isn’t an adventure a la the action adventure cartoons that we’d be inundated with three decades later. These are adventures that only 1930’s cartoon characters could have: neatly choreographed, full of then- popular cartoonizations of famous entertainment icons, especially entertainer Lincoln Theodore Perry–the man who called himself Stepin Fetchit–who, by this time, was so popular that just about every cartoon studio of the first golden age of talking pictures contained his exaggerated characterization (in two dimensional form) of the “laziest man in the world”.

Cartoon exaggerations of Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway (both of whom actually took part in animated cartoons on the East Coast at Max Fleischer Studios a la their highly successful BETTY BOOP series) and other partially identifiable personalities like Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and Thomas Wright “Fats” Waller were also represented but, sadly, not fully realized.

Yet, the “stride” piano style of “Fats” Waller can be heard throughout all of the cartoons mentioned herein. One wonders whether future cartoons of this type might have been another place for such musicians to find a creative resource and outlet.

The Bosko cartoons were as musical and entertaining as the earliest LOONEY TUNES title, Sinkin’ In The Bathtub, in which everything that Bosko does lends itself nicely to the title tune, played again and again and pulling us along with its charm. While we rather like the older Bosko, this new humanized Bosko reaches a peak in these cartoons merely because he is a fully realized little human boy, a reference, as previously outlined, perhaps to the kid comedies of the age like the afore-mentioned OUR GANG comedies from Hal Roach, also being distributed by MGM.

If the team of Harman and Ising were not going to be dropped by MGM, one wonders just where they would have taken Bosko from there. Would his girlfriend, Honey, return and, perhaps, the two be further influenced by the also very popular Busby Berkeley musicals of the day? These are questions that keep my mind reelin’ as I watch these beautifully animated bits of swingtime dreamland.

There would be two other cartoons to make up this “trilogy”, a second, titled Bosko and the Cannibals, in which Bosko’s trip to Grandma’s takes him through the woods that turns into “a cannibal’s island” (where the tribe threatens to eat him if he doesn’t relinquish his cookies) and the third, Bosko In Baghdad, takes him to “li’l ol’ Baghdad” to meet with the Sultan who, of course, will give him all the riches and food and drink he might crave after his long, long journey (through the night sky on a magic carpet powered by, what else, that swingin’ trumpet) with Bosko having to hand over nothing in payment except that little bag of cookies he nervously and defiantly clutches to his chest.

Man, these cookies sure must be, as Bosko’s Mammy exclaims in the third cartoon, “presumptious” to such a degree that these jazzy figments are so ravenous for them! Ah, but remember, folks, these three cartoons are the daydreams of a little boy, a child at play, when all is said and done!

These subsequent cartoons are equally stunning, marred only by the muck and mire of stereotyping or, as I said, half-realizing the true essence of each caricatured performer, something that was prevalent in the day with cartoons at all studios being somewhat influenced or even inspired by minstrel shows and exaggerating certain easily identifiable traits of the vaudeville banter beyond what the actual performers would have done at the time, but somehow the music remains infectious.

In this case, my only real negative criticism is that it would have helped this series if the actual performers were able to help write the plots of the cartoons and perform their segments. Imagine, if you will, what such a cartoon musical might be today, as homage to the old hoofers and jazz greats of a bygone age. There would be more banter, a la Swing Wedding or Old Mill Pond.

But so much time is wasted with similar situations as Bosko is cornered by the frogs who want nothing more from him than his coveted bag of cookies or he would be in danger of being drowned, boiled alive or force-fed castor oil, the third situation being the most inventive of the three, harkening back, as Rachel and I have said before, to the Fleischer cartoons that incorporated jazz music in surreal, almost hallucinogenic surroundings.

Watching and re-watching these three crazed cartoons not only makes you wonder where the duo would have taken Bosko, it also makes you wish that they would have done their homework, as did the Fleischers, and learn more about all facets of black and tan musicals, even allowing the musicians to co-produce the jests and rhymes and songs. The cartoons are time capsules that could be misunderstood and, therefore, unsettling to some, but they really ought to be acknowledged for what could have been.

And, perhaps someday, collectors and film fans will be treated to all the actual performances captured (some believed to be lost forever) on celluloid, as few as they are, that feature musical moments that are caricatured here, so the full history could be told, and cartoons like this will no longer be “orphans” but would, instead, be blueprints for cartoonizations of jazz from the imagination of a little boy out to wander on a sunny afternoon .

Gone but not entirely forgotten…and for all the right reasons, the earliest Bosko will be given his long-awaited due on LOONEY TUNES GOLDEN COLLECTION, VOL. 6, but the fate of the MGM reconfiguration of the character, including the “Trilogy” is still in limbo. I gladly and gleefully write about them here to inform and, hopefully, enlighten and, as Leonard Maltin is always saying in the disclaimers, “not to sweep the cartoons under the rug” as talented musicians of color had taken part in these films.

Where would Bosko have gone? We’ll never know, but the elaborate and stunning animation on these films tells us that, if the HAPPY HARMONIES series were allowed to continue and bring us more musical fun, Li’l Ol’ Bosko would not have totally been misunderstood. Perhaps, the true personality and fun of the character was better featured in his second MGM cartoon, Hey Hey Fever, a toon whose full review will wait for another day, but in short, he is a very positive figure trying to pull the inhabitants of Mother Goose Land out of the Depression by showing them that they could grow their own food with their own hands, paws and tools on the farm. Now, this particular Bosko is the true throwback to the days of LOONEY TUNES, when Bosko could be a motivator. I’d like to think it was possible that Bosko could have achieved this positive image again, but, as 1937 was rushing by, times were changing and new ways of looking at the animated cartoon were ominously around the corner and already finding the wide-eyed innocent characters of the 1930’s nothing more than corn and hokum. So maybe Bosko had only three more cartoons in him, but all three are interesting and worth a look.

Swing it again, Sally: maybe this time I'll get the lyrics right

by Rachel Newstead

I’ve often joked that Kevin and I make the perfect team, as I hear about as well as he sees; he’ll pick up subtleties in the sound track of a cartoon that I might have misheard (or missed entirely) while I provide the visual information he can’t. There are, however, some instances in which Kevin can’t save me. I give you Exhibit A below…

Since establishing the new blog, Kevin and I haven’t quite made a clean break from the old, which remains intact. Perhaps it’s just as well, since it looks as if we received a comment on the Sally Swing review I posted in May. A fellow who calls himself “ramapith” left the following comment on the old blog recently:

Hey, guys!

After seeing Sally Swing’s modern-day reappearance on Stephen DeStefano’s blog, I did some looking for more on her and bumped into this page.
What a great review (and Sally is a great character, too… pity no more shorts with her ended up being made).

Don’t wanna mosey around with Mozart,
He wrote a symphony; so what?
Don’t want to beat it out with Beethoven;
I want my music and my biscuits hot…

So we’re no longer rhyming “hot” with itself, and the lyrics more accurately show Sally’s tastes.

Well, that’s what comes of rushing to put content up, I suppose. This was a cartoon with which Kevin was unfamiliar–I hadn’t even heard of it until a day or two before posting the review–so he didn’t have the luxury of teasing out those dodgy areas on the somewhat muddy sound track. Thus, I was flying blind–or deaf, as it were.

Perhaps the most mortifying thing for me is in thinking that a musician the caliber of Sammy Timberg would have done something so amateurish as rhyme “hot” with itself. Of course he wouldn’t.

I’d like to thank “ramapith” for commenting, and I encourage any other loyal readers to do the same. My ears will thank you.

Our red-blooded "sea sur-pent" in puppet form (1949, above) and animated (1962, below right)

by Kevin Wollenweber

I was listening to the commentary tracks found on disk four of LOONEY TUNES GOLDEN COLLECTION, VOL. 3, especially John Kricfalusi’s enthusiastic talks
during some of his favorite Bob Clampett cartoons included in that program, like “GRUESOME TWOSOME” and “FALLING HARE”, noting the overall work of Bob
Clampett as a major influence for many facets of his own “REN & STIMPY”series and his ways of approaching characters that are not his own. It must
have, therefore, been a blast for John K. to have had a shot at directing and writing his own “BEANY & CECIL” series as his tribute to the man who was his artistic hero.

In the commentaries, John K. says that Bob Clampett was the king of mischief, of the double entendre, the gag that could mean something other than what you might have thought it meant as a kid viewing it for the first
time, and there are indeed times this is true. There was that gag that apparently was often cut from TV airings of “AN ITCH IN TIME” in which the dog gets bitten by the flea and  goes rolling from one corner of the room to the other, dragging his bitten posterior on the ground and yowling, pausing only for enough time to pant and say, as an aside to the audience, “Hey, I’d better cut this out. I might
get to like it!”

This sophomoric little audience aside–one of many such quirky
little verbal and visual pranks played on the viewer–came directly from Bob
Clampett’s personality and was also a major part of the ever-comic Cecil,
the Seasick Sea Serpent, one of the major players in this terrific little
time capsule of a TV cartoon show aired during the early 1960’s. Unlike the
humor found in theatrical cartoons (which could sometimes go by at an
incredibly fast pace, to where an audience could miss it unless their eyes
and ears were glued intently to the visual and the soundtracks) any sly
innuendo or audience asides, in the age of TV and its more limited budgets,
usually came not from the graphic, but from the dialogue. This is possible
for two reasons.

.The fully animated show, “BEANY & CECIL” was actually the return to these
characters, introduced to TV watchers in the late 1950’s in a live puppet
show that Robert Clampett produced, called “TIME FOR BEANY”. The show
gained a major reputation among older viewers, even moreso than kids, because
the whole show seemed to be improvised as things went along–with some of
the snappiest dialogue and topical or pop cultural references that had ever
been heard in such a program. With voices like Stan Freberg and Daws Butler
on hand, you know that dialogue was going to play a large part in the
success of this show. It certainly added to its warmth and
unpredictability.

So, once the puppet show came to an end and Bob Clampett
returned to the medium of animation, as the art was created for television,
the cartoon reflected the great and seemingly improvised dialogue found in
each of the episodes of “TIME FOR BEANY”.

Also, when Bob Clampett began the task of redesigning his characters and
learning about this new age of TV animation, he realized, as did others like
Bill Scott and Hanna and Barbera before him, that animation done for
television had to be done on a limited budget–not only would networks
not pay the cost of an elaborately animated show, but an
animator and his staff had to produce so many shows a season.

Yet, in producing the “TIME FOR BEANY” show for TV, Bob Clampett learned that he
could get the same unpredictable humor out of a show’s dialogue as he got
out of his full theatrical animation.  To this humble toon fan, the “BEANY & CECIL”
cartoon show, launched as part of the “MATTY MATTEL’S FUNDAY FUNNIES” series
(which, from 1959 until that time, had run old Famous/Paramount/Harvey cartoons) was
as good as that “GRUESOME TWOSOME” and that naked little genius, later
dubbed Tweetie Pie.

What must have delighted animation historians who remember the television work of Mr. Clampett is that the former theatrical animation director–one of many working for Warner Brothers–got in his digs and inside jokes aimed at that past as a theatrical animator and possible newspaper comic strip author, knowing what we’ve known (or think we’ve known) of Clampett’s dealings in the industry. (Some of it truth, some of it legend, but he certainly liked to slip in situations that link back to those golden halceon days back at Warner Brothers.)

In one episode, “THE WILD MAN OF WILDSVILLE”, the protagonist, a kind of manic Tarzan complete with hipster wit (voiced, I believe, by beatnik entertainer Lord Buckley), encounters Cecil who tries to fit him with a straight-jacket. But the Wild Man ends up tying Cecil up in the jacket with the sleeves resembling the long ears of a certain wascally wabbit. Cecil can do nothing but look sheepishly out at his viewing audience and intone a paraphrase of Bugs Bunny’s famous few words when we first meet him, “what’s up, Pops?”

Another rather ghoulish character (dubbed Edgar Allen Poehouse, for some reason) talks with the baby talk affected by Elmer Fudd. But his old creations were not the only thing that Clampett loved to lampoon. Perhaps the most famous bit of humor came in an episode called “BEANYLAND” in which Beany, the
little boy with the small cap on his head with propeller, dreams up his fantasy land/theme park, calling it, of course, Beanyland, as the title implies.

Yet this is not (as is said in the dialogue) “a place made by a mouse”, but a place made *for mice”, on the moon–once the “orange cheese groves” were cleared away, and the rides and spectacles set up, that is. Beany & Cecil’s nemesis, Dishonest John, acts as that often-rumored darker side of the Disney mindset: the entrepreneur, that greedy so-and-so that seemed, in the end, to enjoy nothing more than making sure that he got the best of anyone he encountered. But Beany saves the day when old D.J. succeeds at first in destroying the joy found at Beanyland by just wishing on a star and–poof!–the park returns, to the chagrin of old D.J.

One other episode, “CECIL’S COMICAL STRIP” has Cecil trying to sell all kinds of bizarre comic panels to an underwater newspaper tycoon, with Clampett actually fitting in parodies of just about every then popular  newspaper strip, adding many a quick adult reference to each parody, like “Li’l Arfin’ Fanny (with her pet
cat, Sandy Paper)”, “Perry & the Parrots”, “Dick Crazy, the Defective” (to which the senior editor snarls “that square face can never catch on!”) and Mary Net Worth” (in which her fast-fading elderly mother calls for a shot of cough syrup “on the rocks with a twist!”).

Yes, “THE BEANY & CECIL SHOW” was now as snappy as Bob Clampett’s craziest and more expensive LOONEY TUNES cartoons, but with a hipster wit and pop culture references at such a rate that many perhaps went over the heads of the kids as they watched. I have to admit, however, that I personally did not care and loved every minute of this show.

I hear that it is coming soon on DVD in another volume from Classic Media. I’m hoping that this is not rumor and that there is certainly more to the proposed contents than originally mentioned in the article found on tvshowsondvd.com. So, if you’re as big a fan of this show as I am, please pop up on there and scream its praises, or write Classic Media and tell’em how you feel. Knowing that there are people out there who care enough will certainly insure multiple volumes covering, one more time, the entire run of “BEANY & CECIL”!

So I, too, will report on this as things develop, or do *NOT* develop around this proposal. I was delighted when the VHS tapes had come out, giving us as much as could be found on the fully animated cartoons; then, the one existing DVD came out featuring not only 12 or 13 cartoons from the animated
version of this show, but episodes of the original live puppet show, “TIME FOR BEANY”–with interviews over time with Robert Clampett himself as a special feature, giving us his take on the wonder years, growing up in the glorious age of theatrical animation.

Will this forthcoming disk have many, many extras as found on this one disk already floating around out
there? Who can say. I’d just be glad if this marks the beginning of the outpouring of the entire series that we’d gotten on VHS, perhaps with little bits and pieces that the tapes had missed, like the intros, outtros
and twisted coming attractions to all the half-hours.

Watching the “BEANY & CECIL” cartoon show was perhaps my high point as a kid. I can’t say that I was extremely close to much pop culture out there over the decades, but this is truly something that, along with many, many theatrical cartoons that dated back to the early ages of talking pictures, changed the way I looked at kids’ cartoons! This one, to me, was consistently fun!!

“BEANY & CECIL” had some of the most colorful characters ever assembled for such a TV series, like Pop Gun, a grizzly old curmudgeon inspired by pioneer and mountain characters of legend played by actor Walter Brennan, the Singing Dinah Sor, a rather jazzy prehistoric creature inspired by singer and entertainer Dinah Shore, (long before she went country and had her own daily talk show in the afternoons). Not to mention my favorite, Venus the Meanest and her little menace named Vennis, partially inspired by Hank Ketcham’s famous cartoonized little boy who unintentionally gets into mischief, only now reworked as a space alien robot visiting Earth to have a picnic, bringing her own robot ants and her little boy who seems to like eating anything in sight, at one point belching up a mouthful of nails straight at the camera. When Venus discovers Cecil, playing with the infant Vennis, she happily tells her neighbor with whom she continuously gabs on the interplanetary telephone, “if I play my cards right, I think I’ve found a father for Vennis! He’s a regular Robot Stack!”, to which Cecil replies, “yeah, but I’m totally an UNTOUCHABLE!” (get it? the star of the then popular TV crime action show, “THE UNTOUCHABLES” was Robert Stack.)

What can I say? I love this series, guilty pleasure or not! In fact, with all the old cartoons going to CGI box office motion pictures, it might be fun to bring back the “slerpin’ sea serpent” and his devoted human and his uncle Captain Huffenpuff, the saltiest coward of ‘em all, for another go-round. It certainly can’t hurt things when you think of how successful or unsuccessful other attempts have been. If it had anywhere near the wit that the original two shows, “TIME FOR BEANY” and this fully cartoonized
“BEANY & CECIL” had, I know I’d love the results, even if it went over-budget and longer than any other epic fantasy franchise.

No, I’m not deluding myself into thinking that it would mean immediate success in this cynical world in which animated cartoons have to be family friendly or else but, like the “gullible tall toad” or “armless harmless” as he is semi-affectionately called throughout the series, I’d feel as if the
adventure were worthwhile and could garner new fans for the characters. Hey, c’mon; they did it with “SCOOBY DOO” and, to some, it worked. I ended up liking the movie far more than I could have ever liked the original Hanna-Barbera cartoon show. I’m close to this Bob Clampett cartoon show,
though, so I might be a bit put off if the resulting flick just “didn’t understand” the twisted charm of the original.

It couldn’t completely hurt, either way. At least we’d get the cartoons just in time to promote such a possibility, and I wish all the best to Classic Media, no matter what this disk or disk set turns into. I’d want the whole series and extras. They need consultants, perhaps, even beyond the members of the Clampett family to tell of the show’s history, but I’d sure be up there somewhere in Beanyland should the whole series eventually end up on our video shelves once again.

review by Rachel Newstead

For the animated cartoon, sound arrived not with a bang, or a whimper, but a bark.

The scene: a movie palace of decades ago. The lights go down. On a grainy black-and-white screen, the audience sees a black cartoon dog in an iris shot a la the MGM lion. Several barks issue forth from the screen.

The bark that changed the history of animation: from "My Old Kentucky Home"

A series of mildly amusing gags follow: the dog enters his home, where he removes his coat and hat. Cartoon magic transforms a statue in the corner into a water pump, while the dog’s hat becomes a washbasin. His coat, which he has thrown over a chair, does double duty as a towel, then a tablecloth as he prepares to eat his meal. While sharpening his dentures, the dog pauses to replace a loosened tooth, knocking it back in place with a mallet to the tune of “The Anvil Chorus.”

Disdaining the meat he’s selected for his evening meal for the juicy bone inside, our canine friend doesn’t consume it, but pulls and stretches it like putty, until the soup bone resembles a trombone. (OK, you try coming up with a better pun in the wee hours of the morning.) He plays a few notes of a familiar tune–”My Old Kentucky Home”. Turning to the audience, with a voice not quite in synch with the mouth movements, he says, “Follow the ball, and join in, everybody!”

That audience didn’t know it then, but they’d just witnessed cinema history. The cartoon they saw–with sight and sound gags so typical of the “wide-eyed ’30s”–premiered not in the thirties, but 1926.

What about “Steamboat Willie”, you ask? Oh, yes–we all know the story, as Hollywood (and Walt Disney) had told it for decades:

From the moment Mickey Mouse appeared, and turned every available pot, pan, and farm animal in his reach into a handy musical instrument, the dying animated-cartoon industry was saved. Mickey, so we’re told, was animation’s Al Jolson, the star of the first sound cartoon, proving that sound was here to stay. In his wake, rival studios panicked, tripping over each other trying to acquire and understand a baffling new technology. Each tried to make its own “Steamboat Willie”, with results ranging from “fair” to “atrocious.”

Like all legends, this story has a grain of truth, but only just. It conveniently forgets that not only was “Steamboat Willie”not the first sound cartoon, it wasn’t even the first that year.

Some six weeks before Mickey made his November 18, 1928 debut, Paul Terry entered the running with his cartoon “Dinner Time.” Though to say it posed no threat to Disney’s status as the “first” is a vast overstatement–Disney himself dismissed it as “a lot of racket and nothing else.” Audiences agreed, and it was quickly forgotten.

Rather, the fatal blow to the Disney legend comes from a man who had in fact been making sound cartoons when few people had ever heard of Walt Disney–Max Fleischer.

It’s probably safe to say most people are unaware of Fleischer’s astounding achievement. Animator and historian Ray Pointer, however, isn’t “most people”: he brought six of these groundbreaking cartoons together in a DVD documentary/compilation called Ko-Ko-’s Song Cartoons.

Using Lee DeForest’s Phonofilm system (a sound-on-film method devised by Theodore Case and E. I. Sponable, the future inventors of Fox’s Movietone), Fleischer made about a dozen such cartoons in two years, all part of his Song Car-Tune series. To add sound to such a series was not only logical but irresistible to the technically-minded Fleischer–sound shattered the barrier between film and audience, allowing for a more intimate, interactive experience. Audiences couldn’t help but sing along.

Of course, the whimsical and fluid animation helped; not content to merely have the audience “follow the bouncing ball”, the printed lyrics would grow, stretch and transform into animated representations of the song. In Tramp, Tramp, Tramp The Boys Are Marching, the words on screen transform into three hoboes (“tramps”, get it?). On the line “And beneath our country’s flag,” the word “flag” transforms into a literal flag emblazoned with a pawnbroker’s symbol (another visual joke, as pawnshops are likely to be frequented by tramps). While their first tentative efforts to synchronize speech were less than successful (the brief dialogue spoken by the dog in My Old Kentucky Home is about a half-second off) the “bouncing ball” sequences never missed a beat. The cartoons eventually reached a surprising degree of sophistication–the animators were soon able to move beyond old standards and match their drawings to the syncopated rhythm of Irving Berlin (When The Midnight Choo-Choo Leaves For Alabam).

These frames (above and right) show the Fleischers' off-kilter sense of humor already developing. The way had been paved for Betty Boop

Rough spots aside, those experimental years provided the Fleischers with invaluable experience in working with sound, and what they learn would eventually enable them to produce the offbeat, ad-libbed “post-synch” tracks that characterized their best work in the thirties. Had they waited until everyone else had adopted the new technology, they might have been compelled to do things Disney’s way–and the hilarious sotto-voce muttering of the Popeye sound tracks might never have been.

For an old animation geek like me, with a lifelong fascination with vintage music and early talkies, Pointer’s compilation is the answer to a prayer. That said, I do have some minor complaints: I was disappointed to find that several of the cartoons, such as By The Light Of The Silvery Moon, were not shown in their entirety–that’s a minor quibble, as what I saw was charming enough. The $26.95 price tag is a bit steep for a scant 40 minutes, but considering the wealth of animation history contained within, I’d have gladly paid twice that much.

I was born far too late to be a part of that anonymous 1920’s audience as they saw history being made. But now, I at least have some idea how they felt.

by Kevin Wollenweber

Well, hello, again, folks.

Here I am at last, this being my first contribution here, as we’ve changed domains, finding a new and better home–carrying most of our dialogue to this new spot on the dial, so to speak. Continuously talking about these animated “orphans”, and even supporting their finding a unique place among those who have already found homes numerous times on our video shelves: redressed and restored for much future viewings by those who like and even prefer the history to what is now out there, today, broadcast on airwaves as if history doesn’t matter.

First of all, let me reintroduce myself to you all.

I am a 54-year-old blind man who still retains a fair memory of many of these classic cartoons from watching and rewatching them so often growing up and in butchered, syndicated reruns on local East Coast airwaves in years before I finally lost all vision to glaucoma in 1976 (just before Christmas).

Having noted that the theatrical TOM & JERRY cartoons returned to New York’s Channel 11, then WPIX, just before it became the super station known as “the WB” and, now, CW, I listened again to familiar soundtracks and wanted to keep in touch with these toons. Thankfully, because of the dawn of videotape, laserdisk and now DVD and whatever other format the companies want to throw at us, we’re able to own our favorite titles and view them whenever we please, and this is partially the reason why we talk now, on weblogs, about these favorites and oddities in hopes that all our cravings show up in our video libraries if they can no longer find a place on cartoon-oriented TV, even among the adult swim-type programs!

My colleague, Rachel Newstead, and I are here, therefore, to make sure that the companies that have the video rights to this stuff do not forget that these films languish in the vaults, and we also want moreso to congratulate the powers that be at these companies for having the good sense to finally work hard at restoration, even if the stuff is only used, for art classes to inspire future generations!!

And do we ever have a lot to acknowledge in that area, with not only one, but *TWO* tremendous, although smaller (in number of disks), POPEYE THE SAILOR classic toon rollouts covering, now, the entire Fleischer era. The second volume, POPEYE THE SAILOR 1938-1940 was just released last month and is being enjoyed and scrutinized by many in their own homes as I write this, and now, it is announced, with fanfare, that the third set, POPEYE THE SAILOR 1941-1943 is coming on September 30^th, bringing all the Fleischer cartoons to our hands in the best possible quality!

These two volumes mark a kind of transition, not only from Fleischer to Famous, but within the Fleischer Studios which were, by this time, moving to the sunny climes of Florida. These changes can be felt as the backdrop of the cartoons mirror Max Fleischer’s over-zealous hopes and desires of enlarging the scope of cartoons coming from his studio and making greater waves within the business, wanting to produce cartoons on a par with his 17-title “SUPERMAN” series. These particular POPEYE cartoons were created amid the heat of much turmoil within the studio and its employees. New voices and faces were brought in to animate and give somewhat of a sheen to what was once the beloved and gritty urban texture of the Fleischer landscape.

So the characters went through a kind of redesign, slowly leading up to what they’d look like once taken over by Famous Studios, when the Fleischers were forced to abandon the series. This also included how they would be voiced. While multi-talented Jack Mercer remained the voice of the one-eyed sailor, himself, others took over, temporarily, for the other characters and new characters were added (or should I say rediscovered from the original POPEYE comic strip) to lend their “color” to these black and white classics. Our country suddenly being embroiled in war also added to the many situations in which Popeye found himself, but he never lost his sense of humor or many creative ways of mangling the English language. Olive Oyl was suddenly voiced by Jack Mercer’s wife, Margie Hines (since Mae Questel did not want to move to Florida with the other Fleischer regulars).

Due, unfortunately, to the passing of Gus Wickie, the voice of Bluto had been done, intermittently, by either animator Ted Pierce or Pinto Culvig, former constant voice of Goofy for Disney. All these changes certainly challenged the animators to come up with new ideas for the new locale and redesigns.

Popeye would be on a search for his long lost Poopdeck Pappy in “GOONLAND” and, in one entry in which the Fleischers tried to outwardly compete with Walt Disney in retelling classic tales, Popeye meets up with William Tell and has to pose as his son when the boy had been accidentally shot out from under an apple. At the close of that cartoon, Popeye suffers the embarrassment of being spanked by Papa William for, what else, smoking a pipe!!

We were also introduced, in animated cartoon form, to a regular in the comic strip, Eugene the Jeep, a kind of magical dog-like character who would disappear at intervals when in the mood to make mischief. Yet, no matter how many awkward places Popeye was taken to, he never completely lost that Fleischer edge or snappy dialogue, thanks in most part to Jack Mercer. The animators were not entirely content to slowly sink into a formula just yet.

So, not only are we treated to one two-disk volume called POPEYE THE SAILOR 1938-1940, the second in the series, but we will, on September 30^th, be given the third volume, another two-disk edition, which will finish out the Fleischer years in style and allow us to see the first wave of Famous Studios material on a set called POPEYE THE SAILOR 1941-1943. These are smaller volumes, but certainly as interesting as the premier, four-disk set, POPEYE THE SAILOR 1933-1938, showing all how the series began its run.

Add to these treats given us this year the sixth and final LOONEY TUNES GOLDEN COLLECTION. Yes, this is the grand finale of *THIS* particular LOONEY TUNES series, but word has been given to me from reliable sources that, come 2009, there will be further and, possibly more obsessive collections of various aspects of the very large lists of LOONEY TUNES and MERRIE MELODIES created for nearly four decades to theaters.

And the big news for us rabid fans (cue the “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” theme) is that BOSKO is finally added to the main programs, both on the second and third disks of this set, perhaps even hinting (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) at further sets spotlighting *THIS* particular transitional period in the careers of those who worked at what would soon be laughingly called Termite Terrace.

Those of you who have read this blog (and those of you who know me) are well aware of how much we’ve wanted Bosko acknowledged not only as the true first LOONEY TUNES star, but as a main character who was, genuinely, a bundle of fun in his LOONEY TUNES days. He will be seen in fine form here in such titles as “BOSKO THE DOUGH BOY” (found on the second disk, dubbed PATRIOTIC PALS), “CONGO JAZZ”, “THE BOOS HANGS HIGH”, “BOSKO IN PERSON” and the ever-controversial “BOSKO’S PICTURE SHOW” (in which our hero has a few choice words for the villain of the piece!)

This was the pre-Hays Code era, of course, and Bosko was going to have all the fun he could before it all came to a crashing halt in 1934! After that, although cartoons still remained breathtakingly beautiful experiments to watch, they were more carefully scrutinized, along with all forms of filmmaking, for fear that all cinema was sending us collectively to hell in some kind of lurid handbasket. “BOSKO’S PICTURE SHOW” would also be the last cartoon that the character would be featured in at Warner Brothers. He would then be totally redesigned (or misshapen, depending on who you talk to) and revived for a series of nine gorgeously animated MGM cartoons.

If this set sells as well as we all hope it will, Bosko will at least be known as a major player in the LOONEY TUNES filmographies and, hopefully, collectors and casual viewers might be interested to want to see more of these as well as the musical treats dubbed MERRIE MELODIES that came out of the 1930’s as the animators strove to find a character that would indeed define the studio as greatly as MICKEY MOUSE defined Disney or BETTY BOOP and POPEYE defined the Fleischer Studios.

Now, at last, we will get to see the BOSKO cartoons, along with some well-chosen entries featuring his short-lived successor, BUDDY, as cleanly as they were in the day, and live in that age of animation as new invention and means of filmmaking without boundaries. In fact, in one of the cartoons included in this set, “THE CARTOONIST’S NIGHTMARE” the ability to bring drawings to life goes awry in the sleeping mind of one such artist. We’d seen this cartoon so many times on Nickelodeon’s LOONEY TUNES show, before they seemed to kick Bosko out of the mix with such smug bravado, but without the opening and closing credits. Now, that horrific mistake will be rectified. And, yes, some intriguing BUDDY cartoons are going to be seen intact in this sixth LOONEY TUNES set, including the wonderful “BUDDY’S BEER GARDEN” in which our hero dresses in drag to protect his girl, Cookie, from the usual lust-driven interloper. I dare say that this very well might be the first gender-bending Warners cartoon made, before that wascally wabbit had his day!!

So, believe me, there will be so much to talk about within the coming months, aside from finding rare toons that desperately need the dust blown off them. We will give our usual descriptive reviews or overviews and even criticize (lovingly, I assure you.)

I may see some of the flaws in my favorite toons or toon curiosities, but what I would eventually love to see are volumes and volumes that fully restore whatever source material is left on these cartoons and, maybe, even explain why they existed in our culture to begin with and not sweep any of this film under rugs never to be seen again.

That’s what we’re here for.