Tomorrow is Halloween of what has been a horror show year - and a very tough time for all of us at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write To Blog, with the sudden loss of a beloved, esteemed and wonderful mascot to a blood clot earlier this week.
The best this blogger can do is confirm that he, unlike our lovable mascot, is not dead, here to write the Halloween 2020 blog post - and that he and Madame Blogmeister have long since mailed our ballots.
We will start Halloween as we do every year with a viewing of the Cartoon Roots series' Halloween Haunts, a ghost, goblin, ghoul and animation rarity-filled DVD/Blu-Ray set from Cartoons On Film which gets the official Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog Red Seal of approval.
The 15 film set is an exceptional compilation of spooky cartoons representing a slew of studios and animation techniques. Here are low-res examples of two gems from the Halloween Haunts set.
All the studios - from Lantz to Mintz to Iwerks - produced Halloween-themed cartoons, in response to the success of Disney's The Skeleton Dance.
The Fleischer studio made more Halloween-themed cartoons than anyone.
Wish there was a post on Vimeo, YouTube or DailyMotion of the complete version of Boo Boo Theme Song, an exceptionally creepy Halloween "Screen Song" cartoon from Fleischer Studios. Here's the one bit from this Screen Song which is up on YouTube: the Funnyboners singing Boo, Boo Theme Song - and spoofing Mr. Showbiz of 1933, Bing Crosby.
Oddly, the 16mm film prints of Fleischer Screen Songs cartoons struck for television distribution by UM&M/NTA often do not feature the live-action song sequences. Frequently, the song segments were cut from the 16mm negatives. One hopes 35mm materials on complete Fleischer Screen Songs are still intact and sitting in an archive (UCLA? LoC? Eastman House? Eye?) or a cold, dark cave somewhere.
We'll follow that up with, rather amazingly, a couple of Walt Disney cartoons. Yes, Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog, believe it or not, has a couple of favorite Disney cartoons, after "Pink Elephants On Parade" and Goofy in "Hockey Homicide" (and, at #3, the attempted Diz-Dali collaboration, unfinished back in 1946 but completed in 2003).
A few Disney films are actually apropo for Halloween. The following classic, The Mad Doctor, is right up there with Mickey's Garden and Through The Mirror as one of the truly great cartoons from this series - and, for who knows what reason, passed into the public domain. Don't know why - there were many Copyright Catalog errors regarding Fleischer, Famous Studios and especially Van Beuren Studio titles going public domain, but very, very few mistakes involving Disney cartoons.
Another film we love is the Silly Symphony Egyptian Melodies.
Alas, Walt, no doubt planning the move to full-length animated features, put the kibbosh on the surreal and dark imagery seen in the first two seasons of Silly Symphonies. The Mad Doctor could be considered the last gasp of this at Disney, very odd moments involving ducks eating chicken in Donald Duck cartoons notwithstanding.
In Disney's extremely ambitious animated features, the memorable Night On Bald Mountain segment in Fantasia, may have, to some degree, been inspired by an incredible film made seven years earlier by pinscreen animators Alexandre Alexandrovitch Alexeieff and Claire Parker. Have not seen a quote from Walt Disney confirming that he was aware of this, but it would come as no great surprise that he did, and that it was one of the inspirations for Fantasia.
The Alexeieff and Parker films were created using a technique even more intensely painstaking and detail-oriented than the animation Disney made showcasing the multiplane camera: the pinscreen.
In closing, here's Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker's 1963 homage to that lighthearted partying guy and literary visionary, Nikolai Gogol, Le Nez. It's even better than Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart and will haunt your dreams.
Happy Halloween from Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog, where Don & Waffles, Mutt & Jeff and Alexeieff and Parker all co-exist on the same psychic plane!
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