Yeah, I know, it’s been really disheartening coming here day after day and seeing Pervis at the top of the page. I’ve been busy and having computer troubles for awhile. Hopefully this new MacBook Pro will make life right.
No earth-shattering title card discoveries. But here’s a Bob Clampett cartoon I’ve been giving a closer look at lately. This is from his stellar 1938 season of black-and-white Porky Pig cartoons, before things started to go south for him for awhile, when he grew tired of the poor pig.
All of the Clampett trademarks are in place by this point: rubbery animation, great synchronization to music, plain fun, racy/topical jokes (including that incessant one about Eddie Cantor nobody but Clampett found funny), and even some animation reuse from Pettin’ in the Park of some of the animals in the water, but here it at least it matches the drawing style. They may have even been scenes Clampett animated himself in that cartoon (it was his first credit at the studio).
Quite a few Clampett partisans seem to think that his unit of animators were substandard (and therefore responsible for the downturn in the quality of his shorts about halfway through 1939), but a cartoon like this belies that. The animation is of course a far-cry from the later heights he’d achieve with Rod Scribner, but as far as pure funny timing and movement is concerned, most of this cartoon is at least on the same level as the best Fleischer cartoons – by no means a small feat.
Enjoy this trip to the beach as the impending snow approaches.
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Few corrections, one the “Cantor” joke (at least a variation on it) was used by in “Circus Today” (by Avery) so someone else found it funny (unless Clampett demanded it be in there for permission to have a caricature of himself shot out of a cannon) and you left out what I think to be another Clampett trademark, nonsensical backgrounds (since when do pines grow by the beach). Also, wasn’t the shower gag used in a different cartoon as well.
I say a great cartoon overall, Pinky is a real monster (both cute and nasty at the same time and enjoying the fact), perhaps the greatest of the cartoon nephews, but I’m glad he wasn’t used again. He would probably wear out his charm if he was used as much as Donald’s or Popeye’s. Race is a little long though.
1938 seemed to be a good year for cartoons in some places; Clampett was doing great, Tashlin was doing great, the Flesicher’s Popeye was doing great, and Disney was doing great.
Radio comedians were big on Cantor/boy jokes when Cantor guested. In the ’40s, even Cantor told them on his own show.
I think Clampett’s tired of the pig at this point. Porky doesn’t show up for the first minute and then vanishes for more than a minute and a half of the cartoon while others are involved in sight gags.
This is a fun cartoon. There’s the standard Clampett cross-eyed character and a surreal bit with a duck playing his bill like a cornet. And Daffy’s design gets some use.
His animators were substandard to whom? Hardaway and Dalton’s? I don’t think so. He had Cannon, Carey and McCabe at this time didn’t he?
I was hoping the shark would have a ham dinner out of the little cretin.
And, Thad, my cousins have a house by a sandy beach and there are hills and evergreens not far away. So Porky’s somewhere in the Pacific Northwest or southwest British Columbia.
“Quite a few Clampett partisans seem to think that his unit of animators were substandard (and therefore responsible for the downturn in the quality of his shorts about halfway through 1939), but a cartoon like this belies that.”
Well, that judgement came from Clampett’s animators themselves. In “Hollywood Cartoons” Norm McCabe said that Clampett wanted them to exaggerate more, but that they weren’t capable of pulling that off yet. Or something to that effect.
Interesting – can you cite the page # and quote? Not calling you out, I just don’t have a copy of the book handy. McCabe is being too hard on himself; he did lots of great animation in these cartoons, as did Ellis, Cannon, and Carey. Seems more to me that Clampett was just sick of the pig and wanted to branch out (eventually just using Porky as a framing device).
Thad, the one quote I was thinking of from Barrier’s book is as follows:
“Norm McCabe, probably Clampett’s best animator after Jones left, said of his director: ‘He always liked to force things — go a little farther, a little farther — and I probably didn’t go as far in that direction as he would have liked. A lot of the guys had the same problem.'” — Page 349
Here are some other quotes from the book, some of them are Barrier’s opinion, and not quotes from the animators themselves, however:
“There was a rapid falling off in the draftsmanship of Clampett’s cartoons after (Chuck) Jones left…” — Page 346
“Life on the bottom rung did have it compensations. As John Carey, one of Clampett’s animators, pointed out, if an animator worked on the Looney Tunes, that meant he probably was not as good as the animators on the Merrie Melodies, but it also meant that ‘you didn’t have to be as good, either.'” — Page 347, top paragraph
“Occasionally, though, Clampett pushed well past the boundaries of what was feasible in his Looney Tunes, given the limitations of his animators.” — Page 348, bottom of page
“…Clampett in effect asked his animators to go some distance beyond the animation he had done for Porky’s Duck Hunt… Clampett’s animators were, however, still struggling to produce reasonable facsimiles of human and animal movement; they could not exaggerate movement even as well as Clampett had, years earlier.” — Page 349, middle paragraph
“‘Since we couldn’t depend on animation,’ Clampett said, ‘we were depending upon surefire gags; like the sign gags, or something blowing up and coming down as something else…'” — Page 349
Thanks, man! I don’t agree with that hierarchy stuff at all. As I said, look at this cartoon! Back then maybe, but in retrospect, how can anyone today consider that bottomfeeding animation? And they definitely went further than Clampett’s own animation, which was wacky, but crude and not very well animated at that; I’m wondering how Barrier came to that opinion. Glad you’re bored on Thanksgiving too.
I was trying to convince Stathes to do some posts along these lines about silent cartoons. For someone that values silent animation over golden age stuff so much, he hasn’t really publicly verbalized his reasons why in detail the way you do. This is still one of my favorite blogs to read, and I hope now that your computer issues are better you’ll post some more.
As Warren Oates said, “Thank God you got through!” Thanks fer this one. Real nice. I ‘spose that feller above never visited the beaches of Maine, (where pines and cabins abound the beachfront) yet his thinking is in keeping with cartoon cliche.
I imagine Stathes love of silents can be chalked up to that aesthetic symptom of the ineffable. As if an explanation explains anything.
A MacBook Pro? Is it easier to get wireless Internet acess on those POSs?
Sorry to go off-topic. I just really hate my MacBook.
If you look at the designs here, there’s still some lingering Jonesism in the character designs that would vanish a short time later. When Chuck was in the unit, even when you’d have an oddball-looking character (and you can’t get much more oddball than Goosey from “Porky’s Party”), there was still a certain solidness and uniformity to the characters (Clampett’s 1938 Daffy with Jones’ hand behind the layouts looks way better than 1939-40 Daffy that came out of Bob’s unit. It was up to Friz to get the character’s design back on-track with “You Ought to Be in Pictures”)
If Clampett’s overall unit wasn’t as good as the others, Jones’ strong designs kept them in line in 1938, which coninued for a few cartoons after Chuck left. It was when Bob started doing crazy-looking less-solid characters combined with added exaggeration in the 1939-40 period that his cartoons started looking sloppier compared to the other units (plus the fact that the 1939-40 Clampett loved craziness for craziness’s sake — a character who starts in the looney bin doesn’t have anywhere near the flexibility as the 1942-45 characters, where the craziness came out of the personality and the plot line).
This cartoon is okay, not fantastic, but good. I guess Clampett was inspired by the introduction of Huey, Dewey, and Louie at Disney. Thank god Pinky went home and was never heard from again.
Pinky didn’t disappear completely. Clampett used him again in “Porky’s Picnic”, and the Dell Comics crew later borrowed the design (Though, sadly, not the personality) and turned him into the bland Cicero.
Actually, Cicero retained a lot of Pinky’s mannerisms in the 40s comics…