Fellow youthful animation historian Charles Brubaker has been busy at work interviewing the surviving personnel of the DePatie-Freleng studio. The first of the interviews he’s posted is with DePatie himself: part one here and part two here (part three forthcoming). Charles’s research will be a welcome addition given the lack of information available about the studio. Leonard Maltin unwisely chose to write off the whole studio by just stating in Of Mice and Magic that the cartoons got worse every year.
For the record, I love the first few years of DePatie-Freleng cartoons, the Pink Panther series specifically (theatrical animation’s last creative burst). They serve as a reminder that limited animation doesn’t have to be ugly, unfunny, and badly timed. A cartoon like Dial “P” for Pink is as sharp as any of the better Bugs Bunny shorts Freleng directed, only done for a lot less money. Even Bill Lava’s soundtrack is a great exercise in blending the two Mancini themes.
It’s a shame though that Charles didn’t ask DePatie why the Pink Panthers are usually very funny while the Daffy Ducks the studio did were sheer eye rape.
I think in the case of the Panther shorts, Thad, UA allowed DFE a larger budget per film than WB did for post-64 era shorts. Also, the Pink Panther, Inspector and other in-house shorts were probably more priority-one than the WB shorts, so more care was put into creating (within the meager budgets, of course)
I grew up watching all the DFE shorts on NBC Saturday mornings in the late 60s/early 70s (yes, I’m showing my age). They were a staple – I had no idea they were theatrical shorts and not made for TV shorts.
Ah, I wondered why my traffic suddenly went up.
Thanks for the plug, Thad!
Hear, Hear! The Ant and the Aardvaark and the incomparable Jackie Mason are a fundament of the forgotten ability to be humorous in a cartoon. The humor in early HB cartoons is at it’s best a bit dry and obscure, (think Lion Tamer Huck, etc.) but Depatie-Freleng had the heritage of Friz’s marvelous sense of humor which was beyond the clever or parodic humor of Bullwinkle, the only other truly funny contemporary which comes to mind.
Does anyone else find this cartoon unfunny? I can appreciate the challenge of low budgets, but I can’t imagine an audience laughing at any point in this one.
There’s no wonder that one sketch of Bugs Bunny arguing with the Pink Panther exists (Friz Sketch from Cartoonbrew).
How well received is Pink Panther and Pals around here? Or does it suffer from the fate of other series that had been revived?
The cartoon has a good gag structure and good timing, but next to no personality. Imagine how much funnier this cartoon would have been with Yosemite Sam as the burglar and Bugs as the panther.
The thing that separated the WB cartoons from studios like Lantz and Terry was the characters’ personalities. Somehow, as budgets shrank, everybody forgot this.
Thats not so bad, I can’t say too many of the DePatie-Freleng shows were too bad. This episode gets a bit predictable towards the end, though.
I too can’t seem to distinguish this era from television animation, as my comment indicates, above. Sloppy, sloppy, eh? Gotta get it straight. How come, my dear friends, there is so little humor, it seems, amongst cartoon fans themselves, as the blogosphere seems to reflect? Are any of us thus the better judges of humor when opining and facts dominate our comments, something conversationally averse to good humor and improvisation.
“Dial P” has it’s funny moments, but not as funny has they could have been because of the pantomime limitations. Friz’s best cartoon in the past in this style were broad, loud shorts, with broad reaction shots that didn’t fit the evolving D-FE house style. That’s probably why Freleng’s last handful of Panther shorts featured either one or more talking characters or an off-screen narrator, because Friz really wasn’t interested in gong to the subtle facial motions Chuck Jones loved, and could be fit in better to the more limited animation of the 1960s (and just as a hypothetical, a Chuck Jones Pink Panther short would have been interesting to see, as long as he could control his post-Maltese habit toward mega-cuteness and self-satisfaction by the characters that plagued much of his later work).
This is actually a favourite Pink Panther cartoon of mine, second only to his debut in “The Pink Phink”. Yes, the fact that the early entries in the series were all done through pantomime certainly gives them a different flavour than what might have transpired in a Bugs and Yosemite Sam cartoon, but I think the gags work very well in this one. In fact, by some coincidence, Thad has posted the very cartoon I screen in class as one of several examples of clear visual humour through pantomime.
I’m not so sure that I’d even agree with my colleague, Mark, on this cartoon not having “personality”. The Pink Panther was similar to Bugs in many ways, yet there seemed to be more of the debonaire quality in addition to his urbanity. I like the cigarette holder in this one – an apparent nod to animator, Virgil Ross, whom the Pink Panther was supposedly influenced by in those early cartoons, who also smoked his cigarettes in that elegant manner. Of course the “Little Man”, as they called him was a sly caricature of short, big nosed Friz Freleng. Yes, I agree that the cartoons were somewhat derivative of the Bugs and Sam cartoons Friz had perfected at Warners, but I really love the bold, graphic style of characters and backgrounds in the better Depatie-Freleng cartoons.
Sorry, my mistake. I believe it was actually Hawley Pratt, not Virgil Ross, whom the Pink Panther was somewhat inspired by. Because of slips like this is why I don’t write a blog dedicated to animation history. :)
There’s many good exemples of nice timming,nice acting and good layouts in he Pnk Panther series besides this one posted here.I dare to say that the fist 4 or 5 years of the serie hold on verry well.
Nice interview, but I found it a little skimpy on details. I would have loved to hear more about Ted Geizel’s falling out with Chuck Jones. Whatever Chuck’s faults may have been, I always thought his 2 Dr. Suess specials were superior to the blander looking ones from D-F. (with the possible exception of “The Lorax”)
Thanks for the interview, Charles! Always good to get info from the remaining vets while we can.
Re: Daffy and eye rape: I didn’t think they were that bad looking. Certainly the actual animation was a step below the heights of the studio, but at least they had some studio vets working on the shorts, so Daffy still had an appealing design, somewhat (at least in the non-Format cartoons). You want to talk badly drawn, look at the Seven Arts shorts. Too many times Daffy is off-model, simply rendered, and blocky. That’s not even getting into the fact that Speedy’s size fluctuated on a regular basis. If it weren’t for Volus Jones’s animation, those Daffy shorts would be a total wash.
But yes, the Pink Panther shorts are DePatie-Freleng’s best. My personal favorite has to be either “The Hand is Pinker Than the Eye” or “Slink Pink”.
Every once in a while I’ll throw in some compilation and watch it with my son who’s 4. This cartoon I hadn’t seen before, and my kid went nuts. He thought it was hilarious. I think the comic timing is really nice, and what it might lack in LOLs it makes up for in charm…and it’s slow paced enough that little kids can dig it.
Current TV animation should at LEAST be as good as this cartoon – limited animation, okay character design, but well-timed, and interesting BGs full of texture and a charming soundtrack.