Screening classic animation from my 16mm collection is a continual learning experience for me. At this year’s Mid-Atlantic Nostalgia Convention in Hunt Valley, MD, I thought it would be interesting to put together a few reels highlighting that very bizarre world of 1940s Screen Gems cartoons. After about an hour and ten minutes of cartoons like these…
… the silence became absolutely deafening. As I switched the projector off and the event room was in near darkness, one of the brave under-ten girls there to see what she thought would be funny cartoons shouted: “Is it over?!”
Lesson learned: general audiences often do have it right. The next day’s ‘variety’ show that I assembled, which kicked off with the restored Popeye Meets Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves and included What’s Buzzin’ Buzzard?, I Taw a Putty Tat, House Busters, Rabbit’s Feat, and Half-Baked Alaska, was more warmly received.
By comparison, the Screen Gems cartoons can only be fully appreciated with a group of animatophiles and a supply of alcohol. Don’t make the same mistake I did.
Speaking of alcohol, we also took a side-trip into Baltimore to visit the home of Edgar Allen Poe. The surrounding area is described as “urban” by the foundation’s website, and visitors are advised to not leave any valuables in their cars, in spite of a security guard present on the streets at all times. (I wish I had gotten a photo of the Baltimore cop straight out of a crime drama patrolling and swinging his billy club.) Fortunately, the home is well-preserved and it’s certainly worth the paltry four-dollar admission to see a piece of literary history. (That’s Poe’s bedroom pictured here.)
What an endlessly fascinating figure Poe was, a shining example of the best American culture has to offer. It’d be fitting if his extraordinary life story was appropriately adapted to film. Michael Sporn tried raising some money earlier this year to get his production of an animated Poe biography going, and I only hope he one day finishes it. Certainly no other living filmmaker could do Poe the justice he deserves.
That Rabbit’s Feat would get a better reaction then the Screen Gems says a lot.
I know we both shared a hatred of it for awhile, Craig, but Rabbit’s Feat has actually grown on me in recent years. >Gulp!<
Yikes!
Yikes, those Screen Gems shorts are awful.
It really makes you appreciate how much Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng made the “animals chase” genre into an art form, and how competent and well-made the 40’s Famous and Lantz shorts are.
I want to go on record here: I love GIDDY YAPPING! As I’ve said before, Columbia was onto something that they were too dense to properly utilize in several cartoons from this period. Low-key, conversation-driven scenes that have no stakes, per se, but fascinate with their idle chit-chat. MASS MOUSE MEETING has several scenes to this effect. PROF. SMALL AND MR. TALL is the most successful example of this approach.
If only they’d had the inspiration to take this further, to somehow refine it and control it, their cartoons might have achieved a hip blase quality long before it was fashionable (UPA, “Rocky & Bullwinkle”). But they didn’t. That’s the sad part. The vehicle fell to pieces, slowly and painfully. And then we have the likes of BOSTON BEANIE and WACKY QUACKY–Technicolor train-wrecks best viewed with a slack jaw.
I can top that by mentioning an animation show I saw decades ago at the Columbus Museum of Art dedicated to the Fleischer Studio. When I showed up I discovered, to my horror, that it was made up completely of the “Color Classics” (half-right) series. That’s right. The audience expecting Popeye and Betty Boop were subjected to over an hour of “Hawaiian Birds”, “Greedy Humpty Dumpty”, “Song of the Birds”, “Somewhere in Dreamland”, and “Play Safe” until the kids fell asleep and some of the adults were walking out. undoubtedly muttering “That’s all I can stands, cause I can’t stands no more!”
I’ll trade those for the Columbias any day. In fact, some of those Screen Gems probably would have faired just fine at Cinevent.
My bad. I mispelled “fared”.
Screen Gems seems to be quite strange a place, to make such cartoons as they did with the talent available to them.
(Some cartoons have such unbelievable layouts and animation – unique would be a better word – that you just overlook the absolute stupidity of the cartoon itself. ‘Way Down Yonder in the Corn’ raises the question of ‘how the hell does the gossip reporter know that’, but my friends I showed it to once were awestruck by the layout in the underground scenes.
But there’s one animator who I absolutely love – whose name I don’t know save for his loose limbs and strange way of drawing the Crow’s head. I’ve identified the style in, say, the diagnosis scene in ‘Be Patient, Patient’ and ‘Mysto Fox’s first appearance of the Crow in the rabbit outfit…
But yeah. Columbia had decent budgets, lots of talent working for it and tried on purpose to make good films, but nobody seemed to be paying attention to it and fix things that didn’t fly quite right. It’s almost the opposite of Lantz in that regard…
To this date I wonder what “more warmly received” means exactly. I’ve always been fascinated by the average Joe’s reactions to classic cartoons, so I’d greatly appreciate if you elaborated (if you even recall almost a decade later). In turn, what’s been some of the best reception you’ve personally witnessed to classics you’ve played to an audience?