The gang at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog loves the Cartoon Logic podcast by Thad Komorowski and Bob Jacques almost as much as we love weird, bad, odd B and C-studio cartoons and are thrilled to read great news about further vintage animation restorations.
Steve Stanchfield's Thunderbean Thursday post, An Upcoming ‘Cartoons on Film’ TCM show, Cartoon Logic’s Kickstarter and. . . elaborates.
If ridiculously rare "lost film" silent era comedies starring the likes of Lloyd Hamilton, Max Linder, Marcel Perez, "Musty Suffer" and Alice Howell can get a DVD release, so can early 1920's cartoon rarities! Behold, a Kickstarter for the first Cartoon Logic video release, Aesop's Fables, The 1920's volume 1. Before Walt Disney's crew (Ub Iwerks, Hugh Harman, Rudy Ising, Friz Freleng and Rollin Hamilton) began making cartoons, there were Paul Terry's Fables!
The Cartoon Logic podcast's resident animation historians Thad n' Bob, with musician/historian Charlie Judkins, are branching out into Blu-rays and DVDs. This, as well as the news that Steve, with animation experts David Gerstein and Tommy Stathes, have joined forces for upcoming Cartoons On Film releases on Blu-ray and DVD, is fantastic news for animation and silent movie aficionados! Is there a such thing as too much cartoon fun? No. Again, ladies and gentlemen, link to the Kickstarter here.
At the time when Fleischer Studio's Out Of The Inkwell and Otto Messmer's Felix were just getting going, before the two Walts (Disney and Lantz) starting making cartoons, the Aesop's Fables of Paul Terry were the rage.
While the Paul Terry studio’s Aesop’s Fables are not as sophisticated as the animation of Winsor McCay, Fleischer Studio and Otto Messmer, the cartoons are quite entertaining nonetheless, often extremely funny and quite bizarre. Don't knock Farmer Al Falfa until you've seen at least a few of his starring vehicles!
Unlike later cartoons and the work of Paul Terry's post-WW1 contemporaries, there's blood and gore aplenty in the 1920's Aesop's Fables; Mickey Rat characters brandish and shoot tiny but super-powerful pistols that would kill Clint Eastwood and patented Terry cats and rats even die, sometimes gruesomely!
Imaginative and unorthodox cartooning from the likes of Frank "fastest pencil in the east" Moser, Hugh "Jerry" Shields and Mannie Davis is, 100 years ago and now, fun to watch. 450+ silent Aesop's Fables cartoons were produced in the 1920's.
Read a Cartoon Research post that Jerry Beck penned earlier this month about his numerous efforts to secure some kind of distribution and releases on Blu-ray and DVD for the Terrytoons cartoons.
It is unfortunate that the owners of these cartoons have no interest whatsoever in making even a minimal buck off them; guess the big boys are too occupied by the need to screw actors, writers and directors out of residuals for work distributed on streaming video! Would all of us animation mavens at Way Too Lazy To Write A Blog love to see Terrytoons released on Blu-ray, or at least get included in MeTV’s Toon In With Me show along with the Lantz, Columbia and lesser-known WB cartoons? Heck, yeah. . . and no doubt Jerry will keep trying!
The Power of Thought with Heckle & Jeckle strikes me as an animated cartoon manifesto that still holds in 2023. Not even Tex Avery tried to explain the concept of cartoons to the moviegoing audience as the wiseguy magpies do here.
There are amazing one-shot Terrytoons that did not get airings on TV even way back when the New Rochelle studio's films were all over Saturday morning and weekday cartoon shows, as the Mighty Mouse, Heckle & Jeckle and later series (Tom Terrific, Deputy Dawg - alas, there's only one Terrytoon starring Flebus) did.
Many Terrytoons are up on YouTube and, just as they did way back when, feature the original, unfettered and highly inventive animation of Jim Tyer and Carlo Vinci.
Like the 1920's Aesop's Fables, the Terrytoons can be very funny and very dark. Speaking of the latter, HOW TO RELAX remains a favorite!
2 comments:
The Terrytoons definitely deserve a renaissance, and they'll eventually get one once they enter public domain, which actually isn't all that far off.
It absolutely baffles me that nobody has taken up Jerry on his pitches for a Terrytoons Blu-ray release, especially given the popularity on television of Mighty Mouse, Heckle & Jeckle and Tom Terrific. Also surprises me that the CinemaScope Terrytoons did not end up on a 'Scope films Blu-ray compilation. On TV way back when, Terrytoons - both the 1940's ones and the 1950's Gene Deitch series and 1960's made for TV cartoons - were ubiquitous and quite popular. The films I did not see on TV back in the 1960's and early 1970's were the B&W 1930's titles and the silents.
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