What got this scribe through the too-many months of COVID related lockdown in 2020-2021 and the unending years of pure awfulness that followed? Standup comedy and our pets (a.k.a. official mascots)! One standup comic we like a lot is Patton Oswalt, who links to National Fried Chicken Day as follows.
When it comes to the topics of fried chicken and fast food in general, can't think of anyone funnier than Jim Gaffigan.
Jim is in frequent rotation here, as is Mr. Oswalt.
Just realized that fried chicken is just about the only food that's NOT in the Saturday Night Live Taco Town sketch, which features Jason Sudeikis, Bill Hader and Andy Samberg.
Shifting from comedy to food, the skilled and frequently very funny chefs at Babish Culinary Universe have tried to replicate the epic Taco Town mega-taco-gordita-crepe-pizza, etc.
Tops in the category of the funniest, most informative and most scientific of cooking show hosts? Hands and measuring devices down, that would be Alton Brown of "Good Eats."
How to we top Alton? Chicken-centric tunes from long, long ago.
The British blues band Chicken Shack didn't play Chicken Strut or ChIcken Scratch as part of their repertoire, but there is a familiar face here - singer/songwriter/keyboardist Christine McVie, a year or so prior to her joining Fleetwood Mac to counter the departure of guitarist Peter Green and a few years before the band's pop juggernaut years in the latter 1970's.
So, the official post for National Fried Chicken Day 2024 ends as many Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog posts do, with cartoons from long long ago.
RE: Sudden Fried Chicken (1946), a Famous Studios cartoon directed by the great Bill Tytla, the animation by such talented Fleischer veterans as Orestes Calpini is invariably quite good and the voice work by Sid Raymond, Jack Mercer, Arnold Stang and others is also terrific.
On one hand, the premise of marital abuse as yuk-yuk comedy falls as flat as a poorly cooked pancake. On the other hand, the cartoon becomes quite funny about 4 minutes in, starting with Herman the Mouse smoking cigarettes.
How storymen Jack Mercer and Carl Meyer missed the opportunity for a hilarious topper gag in which horrific Henrietta Hen, after seeing Henry as an hard drinking ultra-macho tough guy, instantaneously becomes a sex-crazed love machine a la horny hot-to-trot hillbilly Possum Pearl (the star of a very enjoyable Noveltoon cartoon Jack Mercer wrote the story for a decade later), we'll never know. Blame the Hays Office!
Viewing the Noveltoons' Herman & Henry series makes one wonder if someone on the Famous Studios staff in the mid-1940's was stuck in a hideously awful hell on earth marriage. Readers, if you find yourself in a similar situation, GET OUT IMMEDIATELY AND RUN! RUN FAST AND FAR! DON'T TURN BACK!
Closing this National Fried Chicken Day tribute: the Jay Ward Studio's Super Chicken.
Today's cornucopia of WAY TOO MANY CLIPS, inspired by viewing Jack Kinney's excellent noir-toon Duck Pimples and that "sleuth in training" tested by a Richard Haydn type in the way out Columbia Phantasy cartoon The Vitamin G-Man yet again, involves detectives in animation. That means the gang at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog has been. . . Watching The Detectives.
Chuck Jones' Deduce, You Say (1956) strikes me as the best Sherlock Holmes spoof among the hundreds in cartoondom. The usual suspects - Ken Harris, Abe Levitow, Ben Washam, Michael Maltese, Maurice Noble, Mel Blanc and June Foray among others - shine brightly as usual. Did not find a complete version of this online, but the three minutes of Daffy Duck as an utterly inept Sherlock here conveys the Bleeker Street flavor - and the likelihood that Chuck Jones was an A. Conan Doyle fan.
We now segue to 1960, plunging into the TV-toon era with the following. . . Q.T. Hush, produced by Animation Associates. Have had a soft spot for this series since it ran on TV way back when.
This, along with the 1949-1950 version of Crusader Rabbit by Alex Anderson and Gene Deitch's Tom Terrific are among my favorite animated cliffhangers and I love the opening theme that reminds me of Hammond B-3 ace Jimmy Smith. Find the character designs frequently very clever. Here's one of the "capers."
From 20+ years later, there was Inspector Gadget, a TV series with a heckuva theme song and a good premise. Go go gadget femur!
The satiric stop-motion of Robot Chicken took on Inspector Gadget with its usual cutting edge.
Those of us of a certain age, much older than the Inspector Gadget and Robot Chicken audiences, just think of GET SMART and The Bill Dana Show!
On to the topic of terrible theatrical cartoons produced between 1930-1960, here's Buddy a.k.a. Mr. Excitement in Buddy the Detective.
There are two viewpoints here. . . One is that there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to ever watch any Warner Brothers cartoon from the period that commenced when Leon Schlesinger established an in-house animation studio in 1933 (beginning with the infamous - and infamously unfunny - Buddy's Day Out) and ending with the 1935 arrival, not a moment too soon, of Fred "Tex" Avery.
There's something to this; many 1933-1935 Warners cartoons are indeed, unlike the features starring Jimmy Cagney, Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, etc. pretty lousy.
Among the turkeys: arguably the single worst cartoon ever released by Warner Brothers, the Merrie Melodie GOIN' TO HEAVEN ON A MULE, made in 1934.
The other viewpoint is that most of these are not all that bad and both entertaining and enjoyable when viewed through the right lens, provided the point of comparison is not Pinocchio, Fantasia, the Fleischer Supermans and the best of the best from 1940's Warner Brothers and MGM.
Infinitely less terrible - actually quite good - is the following 1954 opus from Famous Studios, Private Eye Popeye. It's an international adventure framework, quite entertaining and indicates what the crew at Famous could have done with the right storyline. Formidable voice talents Jack Mercer, Mae Questel and Jackson Beck are in top form. Beck plays a jewel thief and does his usual excellent job.
Famous Studios could still succeed when avoiding formula, which is the case with Popeye cartoons from late in the run such as this one and Insect To Injury (1956). There’s no Bluto, eliminating the tired Popeye vs. Bluto over Olive scenario, which Famous Studios beat like the horse in the 1935 Fleischer misfire Be Kind To 'Aminals’. Screen credits note Famous/Fleischer veterans Seymour Kneitel, Tom Johnson and Frank Endres.
Screen Gems, of course, contributed a unique and uniquely strange Sherlock Holmes sendup, The Case Of The Screaming Bishop, to the mix. Along with Deduce, You Say, this is by far the most British of the sleuthing lot and both the stellar voice work and original gag mind of John McLeish are evident throughout.
The running gag about "the best bones of all go to symphony hall" refers to a radio commercial - "the best bones of all go to Carnegie Hall" - from Your Hit Parade.
Tex Avery made a cartoon for MGM featuring a detective based on character actor Fred Kelsey. It is more in the whodunit school than the gumshoe school and, as is Tex' custom, loaded with gags, many extremely funny.
Never to be undone, Bob Clampett at Warner Brothers created the masterpiece THE GREAT PIGGY BANK ROBBERY, starring Daffy Duck as "Duck Twacy." Is this the greatest of all WB toons? It's certainly way up there on the short list. Clampett's crew clearly had a field day bringing to life Chester Gould style bad guys. Rod Scribner's super-rubbery animation alone is worth the price of admission.
In closing, noting that there were at least 500 sleuthing cartoons that could have been included, again, here's Watching The Detectives.
Yes, indeedy, I am thankful for lots of things, especially the miracle of still drawing breath on Thanksgiving Day of 2012 . . . and yet, unquestionably, no matter how you shake it, I Positively Loathe A Parade.
Now one thing Mr. Blogmeister does like very much is bad cartoons - and nobody, not Terrytoons, not Columbia, not Van Beuren, made more singularly crap-tastic cartoons than Famous Studios (A.K.A. the zombie-like remnants of the great Fleischer Studio).
So today's guilty Thanksgiving pleasure is this 1950 Paramount Noveltoon featuring a turkey with the voice of Herman The Mouse and a farmer voiced by Sid Raymond (Katnip The Cat).
Post-1946 Famous Studios cartoons astound with an unparalleled ability to totally screw up every single joke from first frame to last - and this one, alas, directed by the great Disney animator Vladimir "Bill" Tytla, is no exception. They even blow the "running off the film sprockets" gag stolen directly from Tex Avery! HOW DO THEY DO IT?
Now just why Tytla, the ace animator of ace animators, a draftsman of draftsmen who actually taught young artists how to animate, was hired by Famous to direct Popeye cartoons. . . hoo boy, that we'll never know!
Even given all the smack talk I have just done about Famous, animation buffs can see pre-1947 Noveltoons - the good, the bad, the ugly, the merely pedestrian and (thankfully) the cartoons that carry on the unique Fleischer style - on an excellent DVD set by Steve Stanchfield and Thunderbean Video.
