Attn. NYC animation fans: there will be a Cartoon Carnival matinee, Saturday Afternoon Cartoons: Getting Warmer on June 3 at The Metrograph on 7 Ludlow Street. Showtime is noon.
Cartoon Carnival producer Tommy Stathes elaborates: It's officially the beginning of June with Getting Warmer, a selection of vintage cartoon films that take place during spring and summer. Come enjoy outdoorsy frolics at the beach, shenanigans in the park, dust-ups at the picnic, and other assorted gallavants under the sun.
Spanning the 1920s through the ’40s, this assortment showcases classic characters such as Farmer Al Falfa, Cubby Bear, Van Beuren’s human Tom and Jerry, Molly Moo-Cow, Porky Pig, and others.
The 60 minute film program will be followed by a live Q&A session.
Shall follow this with a generous compendium of classic cartoons and ask whether we can find forgotten cartoons we love but have not posted here before in 1200+ posts. Good question. We'll start with one we definitely have posted, featuring the non-forgotten Betty Boop as a mermaid.
Did a double take after seeing a copy of Ted Eshbaugh's Goofy Goat Antics IN COLOR, both on Archive.org and YouTube. Have a soft spot for Ted's animation due to his very enjoyable cartoons The Wizard Of Oz, Sunshine Makers and Japanese Lanterns
This "color" version of Goofy Goat Antics is a fake but a nice try and appears to be the product of someone scanning the B&W version and running it through color filters in Adobe Premiere Pro or Apple Final Cut Pro.
The following is an example of what a Ted Eshbaugh cartoon that was actually produced in color looks like.
We're also big fans of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, especially the bizarre and weirdly imaginative early talkies produced by Walter Lantz.
We note Tex Avery's name in the credits of the following 1933 Ozzie cartoon.
Then there's Binko The Bear Cub. produced by the short-lived studio of Romer Gray. Supposedly four Binko cartoons were produced before the studio closed in 1931. This one, HOT TOE MOLLIE, is the only Binko opus I've seen. Who worked on Binko for Romer Gray's studio? Among others two of the McKimson brothers, Bob and Tom, both of whom would end up at Warner Brothers animation.
The Charles Mintz Studio, like it or not, is responsible for Scrappy, the king of forgotten misbegotten cartoons, frequently posted here at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog.
Am I as much a fan of pre-Code Scrappy cartoons, loaded with the rubbery, way-out animation of Dick Huemer, as I was when I first started writing about them a gazillion years ago? Yes.
One of the best of the numerous Charles Mintz Studio/Columbia cartoons in the 1930's to spotlight movie star caricatures is Scrappy's Party.
Preceding Scrappy at Mintz: Krazy Kat.
Animator and historian Milton Knight has posted several very good entries from the series on his YouTube Channel.
Closing today's post: a few classic cartoons by the Van Beuren studio!
Are the New York studio's Aesop's Fables and Tom & Jerry/Dick & Larry/Cubby Bear cartoons crude, primitive, goofy, in bad taste and often hilarious? Yes.
3 comments:
The one "forgotten" series I thought you might have mentioned was Toby the Pup. I'm happy several cartoons are out there for viewing.
Good to hear from you, Yowp - your blogs are great! Got a couple of Tobys into my first post of 2020, "The Cartoons Nobody Loved."
https://psychotronicpaul.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-cartoons-nobody-loved.html
Binko the Bear Cub and Toby the Pup would definitely be in that forgotten category. The Mintz/Columbia and Van Beuren cartoons, both of which got television exposure via kidvid (up to the mid-1960's), not so much. I do not recall seeing the Ozzies and other B&W Lantz cartoons on TV, but there were 16mm prints that Guild Films struck - and eventually found their way into animation retrospective screenings decades later. Ted Eshbaugh's GOOFY GOAT ABTICS is another "opus de rubber hose" I never saw on TV that, like the Van Beuren "Dick & Larry" and "Little King" cartoons, had a second life thanks to home movie 16mm prints by Official Films.
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