Category Archives: classic animation

by | May 4, 2018 · 11:03 am

The [Nearly] Complete Famous Popeye

When the streaming Boomerang service launched last year, I immediately subscribed because the idea of $40 a year for anywhere access to some 300+ classic uncensored Warner Bros. cartoons was one worth supporting. Unfortunately, the library of genuine classic cartoons didn’t increase with much frequency during those twelve months. The available Warner cartoons have remained largely the same, with hardly any from the pre-1948 library. The selection of Tom & Jerry cartoons was exhaustive, but limited to the “safe” cartoons (none with the maid); only a few random MGM Tex Avery cartoons (mostly with Droopy); not enough of the better Hanna-Barbera TV cartoons (they’re good background noise); Chuck Jones’ Horton Hears a Who! is presented in a bastardized widescreen version; and no Fleischer Popeye—which I guess is all to the good, lest they provide the horrendous colorized versions Ted Turner had done in the late ’80s.

I should hasten to say, though, that Boomerang certainly did provide more than enough content to justify a year’s subscription… 300+ uncut Warner cartoons is still nothing to sneeze at. Also worth noting is that the majority of the Warner cartoons that were presented in faux widescreen on DVD eight years ago are available in proper Academy ratio on the streaming app.

Alas, as my subscription is about to end, the folks at Boomerang decided to expand the selection of available color Famous Popeye cartoons to, well, just about the entire filmography. It’s quite shocking to see cartoons like The Island Fling (pictured below) and Popeye’s Pappy available completely uncensored with no historic context… so why no Pop-Pie Ala Mode?

Island FlingI enjoyed the opportunity to go through the series again, mostly because my opinion of it remains the same. The Famous Popeye cartoons are generally great through 1947 and remain watchable until 1950. If you’ve wanted the opportunity to revisit the dynamic, unmatchable animation of John Gentilella or see Jim Tyer birthing his iconic style, here’s your chance to do so with ease.

The remaining years, however, are all darkness—the Famous writers and directors showed remarkable skill at taking unfailingly likable Fleischer cartoons and turning them into taxing, ugly experiences. (The aforementioned Popeye’s Pappy is a remake of the immortal Goonland, and it makes the case succinctly enough through some pretty vile racial humor.)

What’s very clear from this rewatching is how badly these cartoons are in need of restoration. Most of the transfers used by Boomerang date back to the late ’80s, sourced from 35mm positive elements that had already faded salmon pink. I’ve seen what the cartoons are supposed to look like in Technicolor, mostly thanks to Steve Stanchfield and Mark Kausler. Once you see them with their full candy-like colors, you’ll understand why the series lasted so long even when it got so bad—Famous color styling was just invigorating when projected on a large screen. While it’s better to have some copy than no copy, and I certainly don’t fault Boomerang for using what was available (especially since they go out of their way to use the restored versions of other Warner and MGM cartoons), it still does a disservice when the color plays such a vital role in the filmmaking, especially in a good cartoon like W’ere on Our Way to Rio. Hopefully the restoration that’s been promised these cartoons for over a decade is just around the corner.

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by | January 23, 2018 · 7:07 pm

Pecking Holes in Poles

woody posterThe oddest feature on the DVD of Woody Woodpecker, the newest live-action/CGI animation hybrid based on a classic cartoon character, is a hidden bonus feature: Niagara Fools, one of the better ’50s Woody Woodpecker cartoons, looking nicer here than it did on the 2008 Woody Woodpecker & Friends Classic Cartoon Collection Vol. 2. And it’s hidden well—no mention of it anywhere and no chapter stop—so I’m at a loss for its inexplicable inclusion. I say “better” because as most cartoon fans know, cartoons in the theatrical era didn’t get much worse than when the credits read “Directed by Paul J. Smith.” He presided over the last two decades of the Walter Lantz studio’s output and while there were occasional bright spots in the first few years, like Niagara Fools, Smith was an auteur of inept cartoon comedy and crude drawing and animation.

In that respect, Woody Woodpecker lives up to its source material very well. It’s no better or worse than what you’d expect by now in a world that’s birthed Looney Tunes: Back in Action, Yogi Bear, Alvin and the Chipmunks, and whatever other “reprisals” I’m forgetting. You have the paint-by-numbers plot (Woody’s forest faces demolition; the new kid is having trouble with his dad; villains kidnap Woody and his new friends); the bland human leads (although one of the film’s villains, a poacher, is a dead-ringer for Dapper Denver Dooley); and the smattering of fart and shit gags. (As the Chipmunks movie established, coprophagia is now an accepted staple of children’s entertainment. In one scene, Woody defecates on a villain’s ice cream cone, which apparently makes it tastier. It’s the second time Woody shits in the movie.)

The CG animation, done by Cinemotion in Bulgaria, is serviceable even if it’s inappropriate for as manic and elastic a character as the woodpecker to be anything but hand-drawn animated. Woody does at least maintain his anarchic/amoral personality for most of the picture, causing everything from construction site mishaps to gas explosions, which does wear thin over some 80 minutes. If there’s anything redeemable about the movie, it’s that voice actor Eric Bauza did an excellent job recreating the circa ’40s Woody. Pity he wasn’t in every minute of it.

The choice of director Alex Zamm (Inspector Gadget 2, Beverly Hills Chihuahua 2) is proof enough that Universal execs had no intention of this being anything more than forgettable cookie-cutter filler for the Wal-Mart and Netflix family sections after it was released in the film’s intended market of Brazil. There, Woody (as “Pica-Pau”) has remained incredibly popular with all ages, and still broadcasts daily, something that obviously can’t be said for the character’s home country. Why intentionally craft a formulaic babysitter movie for a market where the original Woody cartoons are still popular with teens and adults? It’s a missed opportunity, and film reviewers in Brazil have noticed, as exhibited here and here.

Paul Smith fortunately wasn’t the only guy to handle the character. Many fine Woody cartoons came from Shamus Culhane, Dick Lundy, and Don Patterson, as did some great comics from John Stanley, Dan Gormley, and Freddy Milton. Unlike Mighty Mouse or Casper the Friendly Ghost (characters nobody honestly likes but have still been around and known forever), there are real gems to be found in the Woody series and the Lantz cartunes in general (I should know, I co-ran a website devoted to them for many years) and that has inevitably helped the cartoons’ longevity in Brazil. Ergo, a new movie with Woody should celebrate and pay homage to what people liked about the old cartoons—right? Apparently not.

It’s not as though the people that could do the job are hard to reach. Woody Woodpecker gives a “special thanks” credit to David Feiss (Ren & Stimpy, Cow & Chicken, I Am Weasel), whose highly recognizable frenetic style would’ve been a perfect match for the character, but there’s no sign of his influence here. Not that the right people being there would’ve probably made a difference. The last reprisal of the Lantz characters in 1998, The New Woody Woodpecker Show, was headed by Ren & Stimpy‘s Bob Jaques in its first season and staffed with many of the talented and distinctive artists from the Nickelodeon series. Yet it was still as unwatchable as anything else on TV (getting progressively worse in the former R&S artists’ absence, of course). It’s obvious the badness of these reprisals all comes down to control from the top, regardless of who’s making the product. It doesn’t matter who does Woody any more than it matters who does Bugs (see Joe Dante’s interviews regarding Looney Tunes: Back in Action), unless these guys are allowed to do what they do best.

After decades of this behavior, and with our culture immersed in reboots of all shapes and sizes, the time is ripe for improvement—let talented people rebirth these things the way fans want to see them; chances are, they’re fans too, so they’ll know. Disney seems to have struck a chord with its DuckTales revival; Tom and Jerry are reused by Warners so many times a year they’re bound to hit a target occasionally. But that’s about it. With the news that Animaniacs! is being revived with an ex-Seth MacFarlane producer as the showrunner and without a single writer from the original show, it seems most of Hollywood is determined to remain set in its alienating ways. It’s a shame even from a financial perspective; even $21 a day once a month is better than a billion dollar boner.

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by | October 28, 2017 · 6:34 pm

“Inspiration! Imagination! Animation!”

Thanks to Jack Theakston for sending along this article on UPA from the May 1952 issue of Production Design, the magazine put out by the Society of Motion Picture Art Directors. (What other animation studio could such a magazine feature?)

Note the date, when UPA was in its darkest hour and was forced to get a “loyalty oath” from its “Communist” employees or lay them off, otherwise they would lose the Columbia Pictures contract. As we all know, that’s when the studio lost most of its creative core: John Hubley, Bill Scott, and Phil Eastman. The cartoons were never the same (or good) again.

Knowing the time-sensitive nature that’s always been part of the publishing world, I can’t help but be impressed by the prompt hackjob the magazine did with removing any mention of those artists, save of course crediting Hubley for directing Rooty Toot Toot in a caption. Still, it features some interesting photos and drawings I’d never seen before and I can’t help but appreciate the “shop talk” that goes on for paragraphs and likely went over contemporary readers’ heads.

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by | October 12, 2017 · 12:26 pm

Ignorance is B-B-Bliss

My critical post about Warner Archive’s Porky Pig 101 set has sparked considerable hostility in many corners of the Internet, some of it in my own comments section but mostly on Facebook.  Chief among my critics is Ron Hutchinson of the Vitaphone Project, who wasted no time blasting me as “cinewhiner” because simply wanting the cartoons as they were originally presented is “complaining about everything,” and that I’m upset because I wasn’t called in to work on it. (We were once Facebook friends, and then Ron blocked me some time last year for some unknown reason. So I can’t help but see his attacking me in a venue where I can’t directly respond to him, often on the pages of friends and collaborators, as cowardly.) He needs to work on being a less transparent corporate shill, and ponder if he’d be so complacent if his Vitaphone Varieties collections released through Warner Archive had been plagued with the same issues. I’m not sure what that kind of sniping and gossiping buys us, when the work speaks for itself.

Enough. The Porky set had a noble goal—to get all of the cartoons in one place—but was forced to be completed in a timeframe and budget that obviously precluded basic quality control, and resulted in a collection far below basic acceptable standards (never mind those of the wonderful Golden Collections). Since Warners has admitted that they will not be revisiting these cartoons in the future, the set at the very least should have allowed people to pitch their recordings from Cartoon Network, or in my case the homemade copies I compiled with fellow collectors decades ago. With the vandalism done by Warner Archive, they most emphatically cannot.

Without even getting into the directors’ choices, Carl Stalling came up with a unique opening cue and arrangement for every one of his Warner cartoons. Now his creativity has been sabotaged because people who shouldn’t have their jobs  did amateur production work. This is censorship, plain and simple. The copyright holders deserve no praise for following the model they’ve used for years for Hanna-Barbera dreck on material that obviously deserves better: dumping content (black-and-white or not) and putting out a made-on-demand set on the level of one on a dealer’s table at a movie convention. If people would rather have these compromised versions than nothing, that’s fine. I know the feeling of needing some copy, as I myself had to make due with compromised versions of certain films for years. (Although I almost always refused to grant any censored or colorized films shelf space.) But when this is being done in the modern era, when everyone knows better, if some of us choose to not be blackmailed by corporate thugs and say, “Fine, then nothing,” and hold onto our own old copies, we shouldn’t be chastised – particularly when the errors we’re pointing out are absolutely there.

Perhaps this is another side effect of Trump’s America. People seek anything, anything, to escape this nightmare, and for a lot of people, a set of cheery cartoons was just that. Point out the miserable treatment the films were given, on the level of Alpha Video, and what happens? We have our answer.

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