Today the spotlight's on Laurel & Hardy, in their earliest comedies as featured players for Hal Roach Studios - and in the animated cartoons they inspired.
After all, this blog's post for 2022 National Silent Movie Day featured a favorite Laurel & Hardy film, Putting Pants On Philip, which was a breakthrough in the direction of the teaming - and chronologically followed by The Second Hundred Years.
As those who read this blog well know, Stan & Babe had lengthy movie careers before joining forces onscreen at Hal Roach Studios and actually appeared together, but not as a team, in Reelcraft Pictures "Sun-Lite Comedy", released in 1921, The Lucky Dog, directed and written by Jess Robbins, formerly of Essanay Studios.
The Lucky Dog is so early in their work together, the signature mannerisms we know and love are not quite there - and Stan and Babe are under a ton of make-up.
In such films as 45 Minutes From Hollywood, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy appeared together often in their first year at Hal Roach Studios, but were not yet a comedy team. L&H support Glenn Tryon and former Fox Films star and uber-vamp Theda Bara in their earliest Roach films, which were part of the All-Star series.
Also among the pre-teaming Hal Roach Studio films in which Laurel & Hardy co-starred: Duck Soup and Why Girls Love Sailors. In moments throughout both 2-reelers, an embryonic form of the distinctive mannerisms L&H would soon employ as a comedy team are evident.
What was the first film to officially or unofficially feature Stan & Babe as a team? That would be The Second Hundred Years, which debuted in theatres just 5 years short of 100 years ago, on October 8, 1927.
It's a hilarious prison break comedy in which the boys break out of the big house only to become staggeringly inept painters.
Without further adieu, here are Stan Laurel & Oliver Hardy in The Second Hundred Years.
The following frame grab from The Second Hundred Years ended up as a graphic promoting Robert Youngson's feature compilation, Laurel & Hardy's Laughing 20's.
Caricatures of Stan & Babe, as well as the Marx Brothers, were all over the animated cartoons of the early 1930's, such as this randy Ub Iwerks Studio opus starring Flip The Frog.
Here are The Boys as "Haurel & Lardy" in the last Looney Tune produced by the Harman-Ising studio for WB and Leon Schlesinger. In addition to the L&H sendup, Bosko's Picture Show is notable for being among the first American animated cartoons to feature a caricature of Adolph Hitler, as well as a very pre-Code bit at 5:51 in which Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising extend an emphatic middle finger to Leon Schlesinger.
The comedy teams, especially L&H and The Marx Brothers, turned up often in Columbia's movie star caricature-centric Scrappy, Krazy Kat and Color Rhapsodies series, produced by the Charles Mintz Studio.
The Walter Lantz Studio featured Laurel & Hardy caricatures in many cartoons, including Oswald The Lucky Rabbit in THE MERRY OLD SOUL (1933).
One of the most memorable Oswald cartoons is the 1934 Christmas season offering TOYLAND PREMIERE.
The Disney staff were definitely enthusiastic Laurel & Hardy fans, if such cartoons as MICKEY'S GALA PREMIER, MICKEY'S POLO TEAM and MOTHER GOOSE GOES HOLLYWOOD are any indication.
In animation, Disney's take on The Boys came the closest to accurately expressing the essence of their unique comedy.
Did anyone make a cartoon actually starring characters based on Laurel & Hardy? Yes - Friz Freleng at Warner Brothers!
Laurel & Hardy even made it into 1960's made-for-TV cartoons, in the era when Cambria Studios made The New 3 Stooges series and Hanna-Barbera produced Abbott & Costello cartoons. Larry Harmon Productions made the L&H cartoon series in 1966.
The dilemma with translating the team to the action-oriented milieu of animation is that the cornerstones of their comedy - the pacing and timing, what happens before and after the joke, the pauses, an extremely frustrated Hardy staring directly into the camera while Laurel does not comprehend the basics about anything - invariably get sacrificed.
For acknowledgements regarding today's post, we extend big time thanks to Laurel & Hardy: The Official Website, Dave Lord Heath's Another Nice Mess and the Laurel & Hardy Project series that The End Of Cinema blog did a few years ago, as well as a bunch of books on classic comedy (and Hal Roach Studios) by film historians Leonard Maltin, Bill Everson, Charles Barr and Steve Massa.
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