Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog: Cartoon Carnival Tomorrow and Much Ado About B-Studio Cartoons

Saturday, October 23, 2021

Cartoon Carnival Tomorrow and Much Ado About B-Studio Cartoons

When the topic is animated cartoons from 1920-1960, this blog gets exponentially more views, so today's topics, the merry mannequin heads sing harmoniously, will be the return of vintage silent and early sound era animation on glorious 16mm to NYC in the Cartoon Carnival series and, inevitably as death and taxes, B-studio cartoons of 1930-1933.

Cartoon Carnival 98: Scary Town shall hail forth with plenty of Halloween-themed animated goodness at Rubulad in Bushwick, Brooklyn, tomorrow, Sunday 10/24/21, at 3pm and 6pm.

Act quickly, as both shows are close to selling out. Go here for tickets and info.

Wanted to write a post for today titled Much Ado About B-Studio Cartoons and then realized . . . "hey wait a minute, I wrote that post already - it was titled The Cartoons Nobody Loved."

Cartoons by Ub Iwerks, Charles Mintz-Screen Gems /Columbia, Lantz/Universal, Van Beuren/RKO, Terrytoons and Ted Eshbaugh were all represented. Come to think of it, we have posted ALL the Ted Eshbaugh studio cartoons! Didn't get to the comics artist turned independent animator who made the indescribable Simon the Monk in Monkeydoodle and The Hobo Hero, but Steve Stanchfield did in his 2013 article The Genius Of Les Elton, and Charlie Judkins wrote a post about Les Elton for his Early NY Animators blog.

Are there ANY B-studio cartoons of 1930-1933 we haven't posted on Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog before? Well, not many, but here are a few. . .

Wrote about OSWALD THE LUCKY RABBIT - THE HASH SHOP in one of the very first posts on this blog back in 2006. Read about it but had never seen it then. Since that day 15 years and four or five lifetimes ago, somebody posted THE HASH SHOP among a slew of wonderfully weird Ozzie cartoons on YouTube. This is great because THE HASH SHOP is not on the new Walter Lantz Woody Woodpecker Screwball Collection Blu-ray.

Representing our favorite, the Fleischer Studios, is a Talkartoon penned by none other than the great Ted Sears, THE MALE MAN

Van Beuren’s Tom & Jerry have been a staple of Thunderbean Thursdays, with Rabid Hunters and Polar Pals particularly funny posts. Here’s a Van Beuren studio Tom & Jerry opus, JOINT WIPERS, that cracks me up. Lo and behold, it has not been posted on Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog before!

Forgot if the following Sentinel Louey cartoons was ever posted here. Looks like the distinctive work of Jim Tyer!

Sentinel Louey is the stylistic predecessor of Van Beuren's Little King cartoons.

And then there is the Charles Mintz Studio. . .

At the dawn of the sound era, the Mintz Krazy Kat series was already up and running, aided somewhat by the winding down of Otto Messmer's Felix The Cat series as personal problems and years of hard partying overtook Felix producer-marketer Pat Sullivan.

Some titles from that first season of talkie Krazy Kat cartoons are routine and primitive, but others are quite amazing and as good as anything emerging from Disney and Fleischer at that time.

In such cartoons as the gangster flick sendup TAKEN FOR A RIDE, the wildness of ideas and unfettered imagination reign supreme (note: this print is fuzzy and incomplete, but gives a taste of how delirious "rubber hose" animation can be nonetheless).

In 1931, the Dick Huemer, Sid Marcus and Art Davis production unit at the Mintz Studio began the Scrappy series, the closest thing to a West Coast version of Fleischer-style cartooning, and created quite a few very funny and inspired cartoons through 1933.

We are glad that a print exists of the "goodbye and good riddance, Prohibition" epic THE BEER PARADE.

Another great classic cartoon by the Huemer-Marcus-Davis crew on flaunting Prohibition is FARE PLAY, which is also a quintessential example of the "medicine shows gone wrong, very wrong" genre, along with such cartoons as the Fleischer masterpiece BETTY BOOP, M.D.

Enjoy - and if you happen to be at Rubulad tomorrow attending Cartoon Carnival - have a blast! And, to support future Cartoon Carnivals, there is a 16mm Cartoon Carnival Recovery Fund. We close by thanking Jerry Beck of Cartoon Research and Steve Stanchfield for much of the animated goodness on today's post, and keeping the interest in these imaginative films alive.