From the history of animation, one of the luminaries who intrigues the dyed-in-the-wool cartoonologists at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog most of all is gagman, story sketch artist, writer, animator, sometimes director, voice actor, comic books artist and recipient of an Annie Award for Lifetime Achievement in animation Cal Howard (March 24, 1911 – September 10, 1993).
Did anyone else in the history of animation work on a writing team with Allan My Son The Folksinger Sherman and ridiculously prolific TV comedy writer Stan Burns (who, with Mike Marmer, wrote many Get Smart episodes and countless sketches for The Carol Burnett Show)? Did anyone else work on idiosyncratic mid-1940's animated cartoons AND wacky mid-1960's sitcoms (Camp Runamuck) for Screen Gems? Well, none that I can think of, offhand.
From reading about Cal, derive an emphatic impression that he was a fun guy to be around and must have been a blast to interview. IIRC, Mike Barrier and Milt Gray got the opportunity to do just that when researching the comprehensive and epic HOLLYWOOD CARTOONS book.
Arguably best known today for his work as a storyman and co-director of Merrie Melodies at Leon Schlesinger's Studio, Cal was a buddy of Tex Avery's at the Walter Lantz Studio who followed him to Termite Terrace.
Prof. Klein's article adds: "And the Universal animator who most shared Tex’s love of provocation was Cal Howard, who—a bit shorter in stature and more slight-of-frame—might have seemed like an Avery sidekick. These two men were a prankster duo who prowled for victims, offering daily hijinks in the midst of the work at Universal. They were both gag-initiators. They punked their colleagues and they were in equal measure considered among the best gag contributors to the Oswald cartoons.”
Cal collaborated off-hours with Tex (while working days at the Walter Lantz Studio) on the storyboard for GOLD DIGGERS OF ’49, the first Schlesinger Studio cartoon that Avery directed - and a Looney tune on which Tex, Chuck Jones and Bob Clampett receive screen credit.
How many Tex Avery WB cartoons did Cal write gags and sketch storyboards for?
It's a good question, since, IIRC, Tex drew his own boards and hired such storymen as Cal, Rich Hogan, Heck Allen and others as sounding boards to talk sight gags with. Whatever the case is, Cal spent a significant chunk of his career working with Tex at both Lantz and Schlesinger's.
Cal got screen credit for writing Tex Avery's Merrie Melodies cartoons "Little Red Walking Hood" and "The Sneezing Weasel."
A major claim to fame for Cal Howard at Warner Brothers would be the three cartoons he co-directed in 1938 with prolific animator Cal Dalton.
RE: A-Lad-In-Bagdad, there is something about Egghead's Joe Penner voice and goofy sensibility that gets me ROFL, only every time.
Here, from the Archive.org Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies archive (which quite literally starts with the 1929 pilot for the Looney Tunes series), is ths writer's personal favorite cartoon of these cartoons credited to Cal Howard, the oddly charming collegiate musical KATNIP KOLLEGE, featuring stellar singing by swing band leader Johnny "Scat" Davis and comedienne Mabel Todd.
After leaving Schlesinger's, there was a pit stop at Lantz (1938), followed by a stretch, along with fellow artist/voice actor Tedd Pierce, at the Fleischer Studio in Miami (1938-1942), where he was a storyman and voice actor on GULLIVER'S TRAVELS.
There at Fleischer's, he got to play his second shrill character named Gabby, as Howard was the voice of the equally unmemorable and soon abandoned Looney Tunes co-star Gabby Goat at Warner Brothers.
Then it was on to MGM (1942-1945) and Screen Gems (1945-1946). Several articles and sources, including the MGM cartoon wiki, have named Cal as one of the storymen on Tom & Jerry, a series that did not credit writers.
Would need studio drafts to determine once and for all whether Cal wrote stories and gags for the Bill Hanna & Joe Barbera crew.
And then, inevitably, there's the hated Screen Gems Studio, where Cal Howard wrote a bunch of cartoons in the Phantasies and Color Rhapsodies series and contributed voice work to many of them.
This scribe may be the only person who has ever written pieces about animation who actually likes them! IMO, it has become fashionable to trash the Columbias and make sure everyone knows how much you hate them.
The cartoons Cal wrote stories for Screen Gems include some that this writer finds both enjoyably bent and hilarious, others that don't quite work and others (Lo The Poor Buffal) that really, really don't work but at least have periodic moments that are extremely funny.
While well aware that Leonard Maltin and other historians describe the Screen Gems product as "pale carbons of WB cartoons" (and some titles indeed are, especially those attempting to emulate Friz Freleng's "cat chases bird/mouse" cartoons), for the most part, I don't agree with that assessment. The Phantasies and Color Rhapsodies from the mid-1940's are frequently downright WEIRD and completely unlike Warner Brothers cartoons, especially those directed by Robert McKimson and Friz Freleng.
This writer regards the mid-1940's Screen Gems cartoons less as copycats but more as unconventional, very odd, oddly constructed and even more oddly timed fever dreams which start on a premise of producing something vaguely in the vein of Warner Brothers and MGM cartoons. Granted, while one finds no masterpieces a la the Bob Clampett crew's THE GREAT PIGGY BANK ROBBERY or BOOK REVUE in the group and none of the Phantasies and Color Rhapsodies are in the same league as mid-1940's Avery, Jones, Tash and Friz at their best, this animation aficionado will still take the off-kilter Columbias over the substantially less odd and more sensical contemporaneous cartoons from Terrytoons and Famous Studios.
Even the Screen Gems cartoons that feature Howard and Dave Monahan's truly head-scratching stories and try crazy ideas, but clearly fall short, still make this animation buff laugh. . . and that is even after conceding that offbeat comic timing and characterization (or lack of it) are recurring problems.
Bob Clampett was there at Screen Gems ever so briefly in 1945 and found an alarming absence of esprit d' corps, but also (in a conversation a gazillion years ago with the writer of this blog) praised director Sid Marcus for his originality.
Don't know if Mike Barrier and Milt Gray asked Bob specifically about working with Cal Howard at Screen Gems.
The following Color Rhapsody cartoon bears the mark of director/gagman Sid Marcus and, like UP N' ATOM, features specific gags and extremely wacky ideas seen in Marcus' other Columbia cartoons. This is a partial remake of A HELPING PAW, a particularly aggressively bizarre Color Rhapsody cartoon involving a hallucinating drunken dog. Is it funny? Yes, definitely, provided one is not losing a battle with alcoholism/drug addiction and suffering with delirium tremens!
Such Screen Gems cartoons with stories by Cal Howard as Mother Hubba-Hubba Hubbard definitely made a strong effort to emulate the ultra-zany style of Cal's friend Tex Avery's MGM cartoons, not so much the Warners approach.
Phantasies with stories by Cal Howard include Snap Happy Traps (1946) and The Schooner The Better (1946), the last black & white cartoons produced by a Hollywood or New York cartoon studio. They are atmospheric, Gothic, unusual and, as was the house style for the pre-UPA Columbia cartoons, unapologetically bizarre.
The most disliked of all the last B&W cartoons from Screen Gems remains the Columbia Phantasy (in more ways than one) Kongo Roo, set in the outback with main characters including a pygmy and a kangaroo. It's in very, very bad taste even by 1946 standards. Generally, even the historians and 1940's animation buffs hate, loathe AND detest this cartoon, but, for this writer, there's something about the "what the hell - let's try this and see what happens - it's a freakin' cartoon for cryin' out loud, not WAR & PEACE" modus operandi that appeals to this Monty Python's Flying Circus fan.
Cal Howard was among the very few, along with Bob Clampett, to leave cartoons and go directly to working in television as far back as the 1940's. Warner Brothers Wiki elaborates: "In 1949, Howard moved from California to New York City, to work on NBC's Broadway Open House and Your Show of Shows. When Broadway Open House ended he was hired by Pat Weaver to be an associate producer and writer for the development of NBC's Today show. He left NBC early in 1952 to return to California and work with Ralph Edwards."
Is there anything we can offer in this post not seen in the afirementioned historians? Yes, thanks to film collector/curator/historian Ira Gallen of TV DAYS, a complete episode of Broadway Open House! Co-starring comic Jerry Lester and blonde bombshell comedienne Dagmar, it was THE first late-night show, years before Steve Allen, quite funny and offered a mix of early TV and vaudeville. The spiritual descendents of Broadway Open House are less the 1950's and 1960's late-night gurus Steve Allen, Jack Parr and Johnny Carson, or wannabees Joey Bishop and Jerry Lewis, than the much more freewheeling comedy sensibilities of David Letterman and Conan O' Brien, decades later.
Howard subsequently worked at NBC as a gag writer for "The Johnny Dugan Show" and then became an early associate producer and writer for the "Today Show". At the end of the 1950's, he resumed working on cartoons as a freelancer,beginning with Format Films. Thus, Cal ended up working on the last gasps of both the Warner Brothers and Lantz studios, before returning to Disney in the 1970's. Alas, the budgets and production schedules were tight on these 1960's WB (produced by Bill Hendricks) and last Woody Woodpecker cartoons, but not nearly as tight as a certain unsold pilot for a TV show among numerous films in the Cal Howard Archive. . .
And with that psychotronic moment from the unsold pilot The Adventures Of Superpup, we close and tip our fedora once worn by Tex Avery to Cal Howard and realize we barely scratched the surface of his five decade career in show business. Again, mucho thanks for your stellar research Devon, Tom and Don!
Note - And This Blog, For Inexplicable Reasons, Loves The Charles Mintz Studio: Part 1 posted awhile back, in September.
Continuing the tale of the misbegotten and much maligned Charles Mintz Studio, a.k.a. the Screen Gems cartoon studio, today's post commences with changes that shook the animation industry to its foundations in the mid-1930's.
For the first half of the decade, the Mintz studio had been producing wonderfully weird and oddly inventive cartoons, released in two series, Scrappy (created by Dick Huemer, Sid Marcus and Art Davis) and Krazy Kat (made by Ben Harrison and Manny Gould).
To some degree that would all change. Must begin with the events that led up to what would happen not just at the Mintz Studio, but throughout the business.
This started in 1932, when the Walt Disney Studio, celebrated for Mickey Mouse cartoons, began producing Silly Symphony cartoons in glorious 3-strip Technicolor. The Silly Symphonies had taken the moviegoing public by storm as the country was getting hammered by the ultimate storm - the Great Depression.
The Silly Symphonies are lively, action-packed, musical, dramatic and exceptionally beautiful in Technicolor.
The following short clip from the second color Silly Symphony, Babes In the Woods, indicates how advanced the animation, design and overall concept was. At this early stage, there's still a touch of that foreboding Grimm's Fairy Tales quality. A few years later, with more musicality and Chaplin-esque humor based in nuanced personality animation, this would be a cornerstone of the studio's epic Snow White & The Seven Dwarfs as well.
With the release of Flowers & Trees in 1932, the series was something of a sensation.
How successful were Disney's Silly Symphonies and the specific cartoon The Three Little Pigs in cheering up a Great Depression-devastated country?
Comic Leon Errol's drunken philandering skirt-chaser character (seen here with future co-star Lupe Velez) starred in a Paramount short subject titled Three Little Swigs!
What these Disney box-office successes meant to the rest of the cartoon biz was straightforward: emulate these runaway hits as much as possible.
Soon, EVERYBODY was making them - especially after Disney's hit version of The Tortoise & The Hare - and attempting to succeed within the Silly Symphony formula. So when the entire animation biz transitioned to making color cartoons to compete with Disney's Silly Symphonies, it was not a positive development in general for Cartoonland. This was fantastic for the Disney studio, at that point well on the fast track leading to the production of Snow White & The Seven Dwarfs, and eventually to produce the epic Silly Symphony cartoon The Old Mill - but not so great for the competition. Disney could pull it off; the competition could only play catch up. Look no further than writer Devon Baxter's detailed breakdown of the 1935 Silly Symphony Music Land as an illustration of why, no matter how hard everyone else in the cartoon business tried, the Disney studio remained several steps ahead of them.
While there's the occasional entry from MGM's "Happy Harmonies" (specifically, those starring Hugh Harman's frog sendups of African-American entertainers) and the = Fleischer Studio's "Color Classics" series which hold on to what was original and wonderful about these studios' cartoons, but it tended to mean surrender for everyone and a plethora of low-rent (or in the case of Harman-Ising high-rent) Disney knockoffs - as many genuinely talented artists as these studios employed.
The Van Beuren cartoon studio, New York based producers of the low-budget but funny and saucy Aesop's Fables, Tom & Jerry, Little King and Cubby Bear series, went as far as to hire the guy who directed Three Little Pigs, Burt Gillett, away from Disney to little avail - after all, Burt didn't bring directors Wilfred Jackson and David Hand, plus All-Star animators Fred Moore, Norm Ferguson, Bill Tytla, Ham Luske, and most of all, the always driven Walt, along with him.
The Fleischer Studio produced Color Classics.
The Walter Lantz studio started making Cartune Classics.
There were the often lavish, budget-busting Happy Harmonies cartoons by former Disney cohorts turned independent producers (first for Warner Brothers, then for MGM) Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising. While New Rochelle's Terrytoons studio opted not to transition to color until later in the decade, the Charles Mintz/Screen Gems began making color cartoons in 1934; its contribution to the faux-Silly Symphony genre was the Color Rhapsodies.
The Columbia Color Rhapsodies series debuted with a toned-down and boyish version of the usually misanthropic Scrappy in Holiday Land.
The animation and background art in Holiday Land and other 1934-1935 Columbia Color Rhapsodies are often quite good, even if one wishes - as is also the case, to a lesser extent, with the Max Fleischer Color Classics - that just a touch of the Mintz studio's trademark weirdness would show up and enliven the proceedings.
In the "let's ape Disney" sweepstakes, the Color Rhapsodies continue through the 1930's with a slew of cartoons starring little boy characters - alas, not Scrappy or his sassy little brother Oopy, A.K.A. Vontzy.
Unlike both Scrappy and Oopy (star of the hilarious 1932 "spiked lemonade" cartoon FARE PLAY), the cherubic headliners of Columbia Color Rhapsody cartoons make the Leon Schlesinger studio's less-than-scintillating Looney Tunes star Buddy look like Mr. Excitement.
The series continues through the 1930's and, while quite hit-or-miss overall, the artwork and layout/color design are often quite pleasing. While there is no virtuoso personality animation a la Disney, the Color Rhapsodies can feature creative shot-to-shot transitions, framing and some nifty Z-axis movement.
The Color Rhapsodies tended to do three things: parades and remakes of both Disney's Silly Symphony The Cookie Carnival and the Rudy Ising Merrie Melodie The Shanty Where Santa Claus Lives. In such cartoons as The Bon Bon Parade and Gifts From The Air they would combine both, and throw in some Hollywood caricatures for good measure.
The Harrison & Gould crew did contribute one of the very best Columbia Color Rhapsodies, Let's Go, to that 1930's sub-genre of "let's beat that Great Depression, gosh darn it, with sheer American can-do spirit" . . . which leads, you guessed it, to a parade. Effective in delivering its message, it's right there with the Walter Lantz Studio's Confidence, in which Oswald The Lucky Rabbit defeats the Depression and Harman-Ising's MGM Happy Harmonies cartoon, Hey Hey Fever, in which Bosko solves poverty, destitution, hunger and misery in Mother Goose Land with happy, peppy and bursting with love music and golly gosh gee whiz spunk.
These cartoons offer endearing and upbeat entertainment with the power to cheer flagging spirits even today, all these decades later, provided one can let go of just a little of that snarky post-modernist 21st century wise-ass cynicism.
Now how did the attempted Disney-ization of the Columbia Color Rhapsodies affect The Mintz Studio and its flagship black & white series?
Well, for at least a little while, not terribly, In the mid-1930's, there were still some pretty remarkable cartoons emerging from both the Marcus & Davis and Harrison & Gould production crews.
This futuristic 1934 Scrappy cartoon, The Great Experiment, takes place in 1990, starting at 3:25.
The Krazy Kat series, no stranger to social commentary in such cartoons as Lambs Will Gambol, Disarmament Conference and Prosperity Blues, came up with another classic with The Peace Conference (1935).
The Hot-cha Melody, in which Krazy Kat, a Tin Pan Alley songwriter seduced by Beelzebub himself into plagiarism, ends up haunted by the ghost of Robert Schumann, is another winner.
It would appear that Sid Marcus and Art Davis, supported by a talented staff that at one point included the brilliant animator Emery Hawkins, clearly wanted desperately to hold onto at least some of the trademark bizarreness surrounding Scrappy as the 1930's progressed.
Key to the difficulty in doing this was the departure of director-head animator Dick Huemer from the Scrappy crew to Disney, where he would immediately contribute rather amazing animation to such 1933-1934 cartoons as Lullaby Land.
The following year, Huemer would animate most of the equally amazing scenes of Donald Duck in The Band Concert.
Huemer (seated on the right) subsequently teamed up with Joe Grant to become a key story contributor at Disney's for decades.
Dick Huemer would join his friend and former colleague from Fleischer Studios, Ted Sears, as a creative force in Walt's story department.
Meanwhile, going on without Huemer, the Sid Marcus and Art Davis production crew tried their best to keep that otherworldly quality and unfettered imagination in the Scrappy series, thanks in no small part to the mindbogglingly creative animation and framing of action by Davis. Some Scrappy cartoons, such as the second half of Let's Ring Doorbells and all of The Puppet Murder Case (1935), are every bit as sick-sick-sick as such first season episodes such as The Dog Snatcher and The Chinatown Mystery.
Like such brawling Fleischer Popeyes as Can You Take It, these hallucinogenic Scrappy adventures can even be a bit startling to audiences today expecting harmless cartoon fun. One would think the twisted tone of Scrappy cartoons must have been a shock to the children in movie audiences of the 1930's, but what the heck - who knows?
In Scrappy's Color Rhapsodies series, he is toned down into a nice little boy as opposed to the a-hole we see in many of the early episodes and The Puppet Murder Case. It's tough to endorse this change!
For awhile, the Ben Harrison and Manny Gould Krazy Kat crew took over the Scrappy series while Marcus and Davis were making Barney Google cartoons in 1935-1936 - in some cases with very good results.
There were also not-so-good results, such as the sugary sweet, downright treacly Dr. Bluebird, reflective of the unbearably cutesy stuff that would emerge from the Color Rhapsodies series in the last half of the 1930's.
Then again, a few Color Rhapsody cartoons starring the kinder, gentler version of Scrappy, such as this one made by Marcus & Davis, In My Gondola (1936), manage to come up with a Columbia style oddball spin on "Disney cute" and actually succeed in a very entertaining way.
Generally, the Mintz wheelhouse tended to be cartoons featuring Hollywood star and radio star caricatures. This dated back to a great number of movie star spoof cartoons from earlier in the decade. Such caricature cartoons were nothing new to the animators at Mintz. Movie star caricatures had been a staple of both the Krazy Kat and Scrappy series (the aforementioned SEEING STARS and THE WORLD'S AFFAIR, SCRAPPY'S PARTY, MOVIE STRUCK, etc.). They became a sub-genre of the Columbia Rhapsodies and were among the funniest films in the 10 year run. The caricatures also turn up frequently out of nowhere when the storylines hit a lull. The movie and radio star impersonations were not always stellar, since the in-demand caricaturist T. Hee appeared to be on a shuttle bus between Warner Brothers and Disney, making tremendous cartoons - The Coo-coonut Grove and Mother Goose Goes Hollywood would be two - at both studios, but there is a certain spirit and likability to these Columbia cartoons as well.
There was one exception to Cartoondom's "let's be Disney Lite" trend, a little island within one puryevor of cartoon fun, actually physically separate from the rest of the studio, that outpost in the Schlesinger-Warner Bros. studio led by Tex Avery and known as Termite Terrace. While the B&W Looney Tunes directed by Bob Clampett in the late 1930's would not be equalled, let alone surpassed, by the Columbia Color Rhapsodies, WB cartoons did give Sid Marcus and Art Davis to go-ahead to be. . . well, a little wackier and more true to themselves. More on that in Part 3. . .
This writer and animation buff, for reasons he will never, ever entirely understand, possesses a deep and profound affinity for B-studio cartoons.
This affinity is as strong as his love of 2-reel comedies, as well as B-movies (and sometimes C, D, E, F, F# and Gb movies) in the science fiction and film noir genres. Some of it is directly due to constant exposure to massively phantasmagorical animated mayhem on television in glorious black and white during the late 1950's and early 1960's.
Of the various B-studio cartoons, it's a tossup between the Charles Mintz/Screen Gems Studio, which produced series for Columbia release, independent producers Les Elton and Ted Eshbaugh, and the Van Beuren Studio, which cranked out Aesop's Fables, Tom & Jerry, Cubby Bear and Little King cartoons for release by RKO Radio Pictures (note: the Van Beuren cartoons have, fortunately, been well served by DVD releases from Steve Stanchfield's Thunderbean Animation).
First and foremost, before getting into those 1930's Columbia cartoons, we shall start with something most of you animation buffs reading this blog already know: a bit of Machiavellian film history, familiar to all who saw the Pixar movie Up and found themselves the sole individual in the theatrical audience to chortle loudly upon hearing that the evil bad guy's name was Charles Muntz.
Charles Mintz is known in the annals of animation history as the Universal Pictures producer of the Walt Disney Studio's popular silent era starring character, Oswald The Lucky Rabbit. Publisher and author David Gerstein has told this story of the break between Disney and Mintz at length in his article, Of Rocks & Socks: The Winkler Oswalds on Jerry Beck's Cartoon Research website, as has writer Don M. Yowp in a post from his excellent Tralfaz website, That's Oswald.
Mintz was married to pioneering animation producer and businesswoman Margaret J. Winkler. Also involved in the studio, from silent days to its closure in 1941: production manager George Winkler, whose job description was "crack the whip".
Winkler Productions, distributors of Otto Messmer's Felix The Cat and Walt Disney Productions' Alice In Cartoonland series, enjoyed great success with Disney's cartoons featuring Oswald The Lucky Rabbit and the sprightly animation of Ub Iwerks.
Disney was working as Mintz and Universal's employee and wanting a budget increase for the next season of Ozzie cartoons. Mintz countered by giving Walt an ultimatum: accept a budget AND a pay cut or be fired.
Mintz won this gambit and successfully took control of both the studio and the Oswald The Lucky Rabbit character. Having successfully wrested control of the popular character and hired animators Hugh Harman, Rollin Hamilton, Paul Smith and Ben Clopton from Walt's staff, Mintz finished the remaining Oswalds on the Disney contract and then organized a new studio to produce the next series on May 5, 1928.
Except for Ub Iwerks and apprentice animator Les Clark, the Walt Disney Productions staffers jumped ship to work for Mintz. You know the rest of the story: Ub joined Walt in California to create a new flagship character for the Disney Studio. . . and that would be Mickey Mouse.
Charles Mintz started his association with Columbia Pictures as the executive producer behind the New York animation studio, led by Ben Harrison and Manny Gould (1904-1975). Both had been animating on the silent Krazy Kat series that Bill Nolan had been making in 1925-1927, then began directing and producing them with Tired Wheels, released on October 8, 1927. Winkler Productions cranked out silent Krazy Kats and much of this crew would follow Mintz to the new studio in California.
By the time the Harrison and Gould crew started making Krazy Kat cartoons, the character was in at least its second movie incarnation, the first closer to the George Herriman comic strip character than those that followed (at least until Gene Deitch's made-for-TV series for King Features in the 1960's). While these cartoons advertise themselves as being based on the comic strip, that would be a tenuous connection at best. The look is there, but Herriman's minimalist universe and essential concept is not. Only one entry from the subsequent "talkie" Krazy Kat series, Lil Anjil (1936), attempted to tackled the George Herriman version of the character.
These initial entries in the Krazy Kat series were the first films Charles Mintz produced for Columbia release. The following, the first "talkie", released theatrically on August 15, 1929. . . well, it's pretty darn crude and not anywhere near the level of the Fleischer Studio's Inkwell Imps series.
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That said, soon after those first few talkies, the Krazy Kat series hit its stride. The series improved rapidly and began delivering striking and original ideas, with that wonderfully distorted imagery of "rubber-hose" era animation. Here's a 1930 entry The Apache Kid, seen provoking a rousing audience response more than seven decades later.
In particular, the Great Depression tale Lambs Will Gambol and the gritty gangster movie sendup Taken For A Ride, like The Apache Kid, are imaginative and memorable cartoons.
Once having hit their stride, the Mintz studio's Krazy Kat series delivered the "all talking all singing all dancing - and almost all bizarre" job description of early 1930's cartoons at times exceptionally well.
At their best, this series could, with some panache and originality, equal anything produced by Disney and Fleischer at the time.
The second crew that brought a certain East Coast sensibility to sunny California turned out to be several artists formerly with none other than the Fleischer Studio - and actually did contribute animation to the aforementioned Inkwell Imps cartoons: the legendary Dick Huemer, previously known for his stellar work on Fleischer's Koko The Clown (and subsequently a key storyman with Disney, in collaboration with Joe Grant), gagman par excellence Sid Marcus and the great Warner Bros. animator and director Art Davis.
This crew's first series with Mintz was the, not surprisingly, quite Fleischer-like Toby The Pup cartoons, produced for RKO Pathe release in 1930-1931.
The next series to be produced by the Huemer-Davis-Marcus crew starred a little city kid named Scrappy.
The first in the series, Yelp Wanted, is an astonishingly dark cartoon; Scrappy is on the mean streets and surrounded by danger. There's astounding animation by Dick Huemer throughout.
Unlike Disney's Mickey Mouse, Hugh Harman & Rudy Ising's Bosko and the Walter Lantz version of Ozzie The Lucky Rabbit, all three emotionally and spiritually in sunny California, the first Scrappy cartoons definitely have an urban New York City flavor.
Without a doubt, both our protagonist and the bullies that bedevil him are definitely NOT from Park Avenue.
These initial opuses de Scrappy are truly twisted, often wildly push the 1931 "squash and stretch"envelope to its limits and look like they were drawn by R. Crumb - in short, everything we at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog adore about early 1930's cartoons!
Not to be outdone, the Harrison and Gould crew produced a good number more highly inventive Krazy Kat cartoons at the same time. Several feature a very creative use of music.
As ace animator Dick Huemer's work on the first two seasons of Scrappy made for quite a few unbeatable classic cartoons, the animation of Manny Gould, Preston Blair, Al Eugster and others contributed lively pen-and-ink flair to the Krazy Kat series.
Other Krazy Kat entries - The Disarmament Conference, Prosperity Blues and the aforementioned Lambs Will Gambol - are distinguished by how they incorporate surprisingly stark social commentary about current events and the Great Depression into the cartoony landscape.
Meanwhile, the 1932-1933 Scrappy cartoons add a double shot of very goofy, anarchic humor into the mix.
In such cartoons as The Flop House, the results are hilarious.
With high hopes to emulate the Fleischer Studio's success with Popeye, the Mintz Studio bought the rights to Billy DeBeck's comic strip Barney Google in 1934. Unfortunately, the series, produced in 2-strip Technicolor, folded after four films.
What little this 1930's animation fan has seen of the surviving Columbia Barney Googles indicates that they may have, after working with the characters for a bit, settled in and produced very good work.
While unlikely to have reached the high level of the Fleischer Popeyes or the two Milt Gross MGM cartoons starring his own characters, Count Screwloose and J.R. The Wonder Dog, these cartoons definitely have their moments.
There's considerable promise in quite a few individual scenes, as this reconstruction of the first Barney Google cartoon, Tetched In The Head, from the handful of surviving 50 foot silent 16mm home movie prints indicates.
The Mintz/Columbia Barney Googles are somewhat comparable to the MGM Captain And The Kids (a.k.a. Katzenjammer Kids) cartoons, very good in segments and occasionally an entire cartoon but never quite hitting the mark overall, Friz Freleng's fine work directing the latter series notwithstanding.
With that observation on silvr screen efforts to translate comics to animated cartoons, we close today's post. The "rest of the story", what happened to the Color Rhapsodies as the 1930's wore on and how this affected the B&W Krazy Kat and Scrappy cartoons, will be in Part 2.
Acknowledgements go to Milton Knight, Craig Davison, Don M. Yowp, David Gerstein, Pietro Shakarian, Mark Kausler, Lee Glover and Jerry Beck. For more on Scrappy cartoons, check out the Scrappyland site by journalist and vintage animation expert Harry McCracken. See the aforementioned Tralfaz website and the Uncle John's Crazy Town comics and animation blog for more about the Charles Mintz Studio, Margaret J. Winkler and Krazy Kat. For more on Dick Huemer's career in animation, read the fascinating and incredibly thorough oral history conducted by author Joe Adamson.
