In the glaring absence of anything remotely resembling good news, we attempt to celebrate the January 8th birthdays of David Bowie, Elvis Presley, Shirley Bassey and Little Anthony - and note that January 9 is (drum roll) National Balloon Ascension Day!
I'm not kidding, there is a National Balloon Ascension Day!
Funny, all this writer can think of on National Balloon Ascension Day is Frank Morgan and the ending of The Wizard Of Oz.
And THE RED BALLOON!
In cinematic tribute to National Balloon Ascension Day, here's all-time favorite Buster Keaton!
Buster co-stars with Mack Sennett Studio ingenue and star of the 1927 version of Chicago Phyllis Haver in THE BALLOONATIC (1923), second to last of the Keaton Productions silent short subjects.
Alas, did not find any interviews with Buster about the making of this high-flying comedy short. My guess is the self-effacing Keaton would say it was no big deal and that his talented technical director and prop master Fred Gabourie had everything ready to roll in short order.
Jumping from the early 1920s to the mid-1960's, way back in my elementary school days, many moons ago, loved hearing this catchy tune on the AM radio titled THE YELLOW BALLOON by . . . The Yellow Balloon, an uber-happy sunshine pop group led by actor Don Grady of My Three Sons fame.
If one ever finds a TV performance featuring The Yellow Balloon in which the guys aren't lip synching a la Milli Vannili or Ashlee Simpson (or Homer, Marge, Bart and Lisa Simpson, or for that matter current Saturday Night Live stalwart Ashley Padilla), we'd love to see it. Once heard, those ever-bouncy 1960's ditties by such groups as The Yellow Balloon, The Mojo Men and The Left Banke prove most difficult to dislodge from the brain!
Also in 1966-1967, the pop group The 5th Dimension, featuring 5-part vocal harmonies, the equally catchy melodies by songwriter Jimmy Webb and mellifluous musicianship of studio virtuosos The Wrecking Crew, waxed poetic about beautiful balloons in the massive hit Up, Up and Away.
On the topic of balloons, the Charles Mintz Studio, producers of the Krazy Kat, Scrappy and Color Rhapsodies series for Columbia Pictures, made Looney Balloonists, which got run repeatedly on KTVU-TV's Captain Satellite Show in the early 1960's. This oddly charming cartoon features a peppy musical track by Joe DeNat and looks like the handiwork of the crew led by Ben Harrison and Manny Gould. Animators Allen Rose and Harry Love receive screen credit.
A balloony blog post would not be complete without the penultimate entry from the Ub Iwerks Studio's Comicolor series, the otherworldly and downright nightmarish BALLOON LAND.
Also known as THE PIN CUSHION MAN, this fever dream has scared the beejeesus out of numerous kids and their parents.
Thanks to 16mm and 8mm prints of Iwerks' Comicoior series by home movie distributor Castle Films, the evil pin cushion man's uber-villainy has reigned for decades.
Post-1965 audiences have seen this surreal masterpiece on the big screen as a direct result of it falling into the public domain long ago.
Respectful hat tips go to those godsends of pre-Turner Classic Movies times, repertory cinema and ragtag film collectors who rented cheap venues for the purpose of presenting classic movies and cartoons.
Happily for animation buffs, we hear a Blu-ray collection of Ub Iwerks' Comicolor cartoons is forthcoming. Until then, honor National Balloon Ascension Day by attending a Hot Air Balloon Festival and watching the following bits from Pixar's Up (2009) and Blake Edwards' wacky 1965 opus The Great Race.
Along with standup comedy by Jim Gaffigan.
In closing, the gang at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog regret not finding a video clip of the bit from Charley Chase's hilarious 1928 film THE FAMILY GROUP which features a spectacular sight gag centered on balloons and hope we'll have it for the 2027 National Balloon Ascension Day post. RE: The Lot Of Fun, we extend thanks and a Max Linder top hat tip to Dave Lord Heath, a source of detailed Hal Roach Studios history.
Alas, instead of preparing for this weekend's National Raisin and Spice Bar Day and National Caramel Day, the gang here has been watching the stock market party like it's 1929, crash like a motor sports catastrophe and plummet like a cheating knuckleballer's 78 mph pitch laden with foreign substances. Even Bert Lahr is losing it!
All we can think of (as we bite what's left of our nails) is the movies and cartoons of the Great Depression, a time no sane person wants to return to. Among the best: Frank Capra's 1932 film American Madness, starring Walter Huston.
One of the most memorable of the short subjects that tackled the Depression was Charley Chase in the Hal Roach comedy THE PANIC IS ON (1931).
A slew of animated cartoons from the early sound era directly address the Depression. Ub Iwerks' Flip The Frog series frequently places our cartoon heroes on the streets and in bread lines.
Even the always plucky Oswald The Lucky Rabbit got hit by hard times.
The Charles Mintz Studio practically specialized in topical cartoons in the early 1930's.
THE FLOP HOUSE is as much an excuse to go-for-broke in the wacky sight gags department as social commentary. Were destitute cartoon animals, no doubt wiped out by the stock market crash, living in flop houses? Yes. Did the ever-enterprising Scrappy run a flop house? Yes.
Eventually, the extended hard times led to a sub-genre of cartoons, known as "let's beat that darn Depression with good will, hard work and a happy song." Hugh Harman & Rudy Ising's jaunty musical from the MGM Happy Harmony series, Hey-Hey Fever (1935), brings the Great Depression and its devastation to Mother Goose Land!
The epitome of this sub-genre remains the Ben Harrison & Manny Gould crew's Color Rhapsody LET'S GO (1937). Even insects got clobbered by the 1930's!
Who was the man, the Big Kahuna in the field of music for animated cartoons? Well, there were several - Scott Bradley (MGM), Darrell Calker (Walter Lantz Productions/Universal), Leigh Harline at Disney's and the team of Sammy Timberg and Lou Fleischer - but in general, the first name in the "Password" answer is the incomparable Carl W. Stalling (November 10, 1891 - November 29, 1972).
Warner Bros. cartoon-meister elaborates on the greatness of Carl Stalling.
Carl W. Stalling, composer-conductor-arranger extraordinaire with Walt Disney Productions, the Ub Iwerks Studio and Warner Bros. (pre and post Leon Schlesinger), had a way of improving the films' quality wherever he went.
The Skeleton Dance (1929) in particular was innovative and a groundbreaking film by the Disney studio.
Carl Stalling contributed many wonderful scores to the cartoons produced by the studio of ace Disney animator and special effects inventor Ub Iwerks in 1930-1935.
Leon Schlesinger hired Carl to succeed Norman Spencer as the Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies music man and the improvement in the cartoons was immediate.
It's a tough call as to which individual Looney Tune or Merrie Melodie features my favorite Carl Stalling soundtrack. In addition to PORKY IN WACKYLAND, PORKY PIG'S FEAT directed by Frank Tashlin and THE GREAT PIGGY BANK ROBBERY directed by Bob Clampett immediately come to mind.
In addition, note that the new Flip The Frog Blu-ray from Thunderbean is officially available. If you don't have it yet, this set is chock full of excellent Carl Stalling scores and animated goodness from the talented likes of Grim Natwick, Berny Wolf, Al Eugster and Shamus Culhane.
We're thrilled and delighted to have lived long enough to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio opening in Hollywood, after an early stretch making Newman's Laugh-O-Grams in Kansas City. We're glad we got to see Leslie Iwerks, Ub's granddaughter and author (with John Kenworthy) of The Hand Behind the Mouse: An Intimate Biography of Ub Iwerks, do a presentation on Ub and Walt many moons ago:
We are saddened that two of the best cartoonologists and Walt Disney Productions historians, Jim Korkis and Russell Merritt, have passed and presumably found the drawing board and screening room in the Happy Hunting Ground. Have a hunch that Russell knows where the pristine 35mm nitrate prints in the next world are!
Today's post pays tribute to the early days of the Disney Brothers studio.
Walt and Roy moved with the Disney family to Kansas City, Missouri in 1911. The first Disney Brothers studio was located at 31st and First Avenue in Kansas City.
This is where Walt began his illustrious career as an animation producer.
The Disney Brothers studio relocated to the West Coast and began making cartoons in Walt and Roy's uncle Robert's garage at 4406 Kingswell Avenue in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles . . . on October 16, 1923.
In the same year in which Buster Keaton's Three Ages, Charlie Chaplin's The Pilgrim, Harold Lloyd's Why Worry and the Otto Messmer cartoon classic Felix in Hollywood were released to movie theaters, the Disney brothers studio, now in Los Feliz, began following Alice's Wonderland with 56 Alice comedies, combining animation with live-action. Alice's Wonderland, the unreleased Newmans Laugh-O-Gram, turned out to be the series pilot.
Alice comedies ran until the Disney studio started making Oswald The Lucky Rabbit cartoons for Universal Pictures in 1927.
Alice Comedies - several very entertaining entries poste don the YouTube Channel of Craig Davison, who has posted numerous animation rarities from the silent era.
Wikipedia elaborates: Kingswell Avenue in Los Feliz was home to the studio from 1923 to 1926. Kansas City, Missouri natives Walt Disney and Roy O. Disney founded Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio in Los Angeles in 1923 and got their start producing a series of silent Alice Comedies short films featuring a live-action child actress in an animated world. The Alice Comedies were distributed by Margaret J. Winkler's Winkler Pictures, which later also distributed a second Disney short subject series, the all-animated Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, through Universal Pictures starting in 1927.
Upon relocating to California, the Disney brothers initially started working in their uncle Robert Disney's garage at 4406 Kingswell Avenue, then, in October 1923, formally launched their studio in a small office on the rear side of a real estate agency's office at 4651 Kingswell Avenue. In February 1924, the studio moved next door to office space of its own at 4649 Kingswell Avenue. In 1925, Disney put down a deposit on a new location at 2719 Hyperion Avenue in the nearby Silver Lake neighborhood, which came to be known as the Hyperion Studio to distinguish it from the studio's other locations, and, in January 1926, the studio moved
there and took on the name Walt Disney Studio.
Meanwhile, after the first year's worth of Oswalds, Walt Disney attempted to renew his contract with Winkler Pictures, but Charles Mintz, who had taken over Margaret Winkler's business after marrying her,
wanted to force Disney to accept a lower advance payment for each Oswald short. Disney refused and, as Universal owned the rights to Oswald rather than Disney, Mintz set up his own animation studio to produce Oswald cartoons.
Ultimately, the joke would be on Mintz, who was subsequently informed that he didn't actually own the lucky rabbit. Ozzie was actually owned by Universal Pictures and the character would continue well into the sound era, thanks to the Walter Lantz studio.
Walt Disney's pre-Mickey Mouse cartoons from the 1920's are covered in depth in Russell Merritt and J.B. Kaufman's superlative and highly recommended Walt in Wonderland: The Silent Films of Walt Disney book.
As far as that lucky rabbit goes, well, what can the Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog gang say other than we LOVE Ozzie!
The following video of Oswald cartoons feature excellent commentary tracks by Mark Kausler, who knows more about animation history and the technique/practice of animation than anybody.
The Ozzie cartoons, notable for stellar work by such animation legends as Ub Iwerks, Hugh Harman, Rudy Ising, Friz Freleng and Rollin "Ham" Hamilton are both enjoyable and fascinating, with early examples of what would turn up a couple of years later with Disney's Mickey Mouse and the early WB Looney Tunes cartoons.
Am partial to the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit series over the Alice Comedies, partly due to the more advanced animation in the 1927-1928 series. David A. Bossert, J.B. Kaufman (Foreword) and David Gerstein (Archival Support) wrote a terrific book devoted to the Disney Oswalds.
It's still available and a tad pricey, but well worth it for those who love animation history, silent cartoons and the evolution of Disney.
For the Disney Studio, it would be on to the successful Mickey and Silly Symphonies from here. Former Disney animators such as Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising formed their own studios.
94 years ago today, Steamboat Willie, the first Walt Disney Productions sound cartoon and the second starring vehicle for Mickey Mouse, premiered at Universal's Colony Theater in New York City. Walt elaborates, in an appearance on his television show.
Steamboat Willie wasn't the first cartoon with sound - Max Fleischer's studio had already made a bunch of Screen Songs a.k.a. Sound Car-tunes.
Fleischer Studios also produced a documentary about the introduction of sound to movies.
What's new and different about Steamboat Willie is the way sound was synchronized and how the music by Carl W. Stalling and sound effects were as much the star of the show as Mickey. Contemporaneous efforts from other studios just slapped a music track on a silent cartoon. Walt Disney, Ub Iwerks and Carl Stalling asked the questions "what can we do with sound?" and "what can we do that nobody else is doing?"
Who could be attributed with the animation style of Steamboat Willie and its predecessor Plane Crazy? Ub Iwerks!
Charles Mintz had hired away much of the staff from Disney and (at least briefly) took possession of flagship character Oswald The Lucky Rabbit, leaving the extremely talented Ub Iwerks as Walt Disney Productions' top animator.
Steamboat Willie was followed by the first Silly Symphony, The Skeleton Dance, which extends and further develops the creative use of music (Carl W. Stalling!) and sound effects.
Ub and Stalling would leave the Disney Studio in 1930 and then produce the first sound cartoon in color, Flip the Frog in Fiddlesticks.
And the also terrific book by David A. Bossert, J.B. Kaufman (Foreword) and David Gerstein (Archival Support) devoted to the Disney Oswalds. David Gerstein's
In addition, it is highly likely that a search for articles about Walt Disney, the early sound era and Ub Iwerks by such terrific authors and historians as John Canemaker and Jim Korkis will turn up something interesting on these topics.
Returning from a calamitous and illness-filled hiatus, this blogger yearns for good cheer and levity. Thankfully, the 2022 NBA champion Golden State Warriors have brought a heaping helping of the former; extending big time kudos, bravos and huzzahs to the W's on winning four championships in eight years with joy, hard work and style. As far as the latter goes, IT'S SHOWTIME and nothing creates levity like BIG SCREEN FUN!
And, invariably, movie fun accompanied by unhealthy food!
Since SHOWTIME means plenty of quality time spent with classic cartoons, the gang at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog is thrilled to hear that Steve Stanchfield and Thunderbean Animation have been making excellent progress on the upcoming Blu-ray release featuring the Ub Iwerks Studio's rowdy Flip The Frog.
Making his froggy silver screen debut a decade before Tom & Jerry, Flip was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's first entry in the cartoon universe.
All 38 Flip cartoons will be on the Blu-ray.
No doubt a certain factor we 21st century audiences love about the series - the unabashedly randy pre-Code part of the equation - displeased the MGM brass no end.
In particular, Soda Squirt is not just one of the ruder, nastier Hollywood cartoons of 1933, but the only one to feature both a way over-the-top caricature of way over-the-top character actor Tyrell Davis and a sight gag involving a melting, dripping ice cream cone.
Is there any joke or storyline the Ub Iwerks Studio crew won't do because it's in incredibly bad taste? No - absolutely not.
The completed Flip restorations that have been posted on YouTube thus far look fantastic.
You know you're a diehard classic movie buff when you actually watch YouTube to see original theatrical titles from 1930's movies; not the complete films - the titles.
Since the Flip cartoons were largely seen on 16mm film via prints by Blackhawk Films, Commonwealth Films and Official Films, these original MGM titles are brand new to us in 2022.
Love these cool titles, seen by 21st century classic movie fans for the first time, featuring the fabulous MGM Lion.
Steve and Thunderbean Animation are among the few who love and relish Great Depression-era animated cartoons as much as we at this blog do.
Enjoyed Thunderbean Video's last plunge into the Ub Iwerks Studio catalog, into the series that followed Flip the Frog.
Alas, Willie, the tell-tale tellin' Baron Munchausen kid, would not take the moviegoing public by storm, as Felix and Mickey did.
Nonetheless, Willie Whopper, the kid with the wild and unfettered imagination a la Charley Bowers, is the central figure in a bunch of highly inventive and enjoyable cartoons.
As is the case with Flip, the Willie vehicles are unabashedly wacky, undeniably randy and closer to the cartoon universe of the Fleischer Studio than to Disney, partly due to the wildly imaginative animation of ex-Fleischer (and future Disney) animator Grim Natwick.
The Flip The Frog and Willie Whopper cartoons were lots of fun, but not interested in "cuteness" in any way, shape or form and this may have sunk them with 1930's movie audiences that wanted something at least somewhat cuddly and adorable.
The suits at MGM couldn't have been pleased.
Again, nine decades later, the weird, wacky and surreal qualities of the Willie Whopper and Flip the Frog adventures endear them to animation fans and classic movie buffs. . . as much as the irreverent cartoons became anathema to those at MGM who signed the contract with Ub and Pat Powers.
To a lesser degree, this sensibility would extend to the Iwerks Studio's Comicolor Fairytales series.
The Iwerks studio would hold on for a few more years after the Flip the Frog and Willie Whopper series (and, most importantly, the contract for theatrical distribution by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) ended.
None of the other major studios offered to distribute the Ub Iwerks Studio's ComiColor cartoons, so P.A. Powers' Celebrity Productions marketed the series using the state’s rights system of selling to regional distributors.
The Comicolor Fairytale series would not have the advantage of big studio distribution and, thus, could not be booked into anywhere near as many movie theaters as the Flips and Willies did.
With the lion's share of the Comicolor Fairytale series being in the public domain, animation presenters, film collectors and archivists have frequently featured these cartoons in screenings.
Many in the series possess originality and a fair share of clever and inventive moments.
Some Comicolors, such as Summertime (1935), revisit the Silly Symphony format quite successfully, presenting more a tribute and homage to the 1929 Disney cartoons Iwerks, with music director Carl W. Stalling, did so much to create and develop than an out-and-out imitation (a la the mid-1930's Merrie Melodies and Happy Harmonies, made by Ub's ex-Disney mates, Friz Freleng, Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising).
The following, one of the very best of the Comicolor series, The Brave Tin Soldier, manages to combine a genuine fairytale with a surprisingly adult storyline.
How adult? See 6:40 - 6:42, two seconds which always elicit gasps whenever this cartoon is screened.
The penultimate entry from the Comicolor series would be the otherworldly and dreamlike - no, make that downright nightmarish - BALLOON LAND a.k.a. THE PIN CUSHION MAN.
Even the frequently maligned and overlooked Iwerks Columbia cartoons from late in his studio's ten year run have their charms and in this animation aficionado's opinion rank among the very best of the Columbia Color Rhapsodies.
Yes, they can at times be in pre-1950 style bad taste, but not nearly to the degree that the pre-Code Flip the Frog cartoons are.
An added plus: stellar contributions from Mel Blanc and other ace voice artists.
One noteworthy Ub Iwerks Columbia cartoon that is quite striking and imaginative is THE HORSE ON THE MERRY GO ROUND (1938). Again, the aforementioned edge, weirdness and utter lack of cuteness that made these not a hit with 1930's moviegoers ends up a factor in the Iwerks cartoons' favor in the 21st century.
After over a month spent unhappily "adulting" in hospitals and doctors' offices, along with such not-fun experiences as insurance disenrollment, count this blogmeister happy to be back posting, hopefully every week to ten days.
Topic of the next post: a YouTube channel, which appears to be spearheaded by historian and author Jane Fleischer, devoted to the terrific cartoons of the Fleischer Studio.
Alas, the gang at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog has not found a pristine 35mm nitrate negative of Tod Browning's London After Midnight in a cave or basement somewhere, but we will wish all a Happy Halloween nonetheless!
We'll kick today's Halloween-themed post off with a few cartoons.
Here's one of those indescribable Van Beuren Studio entries from the "Aesop's Fables" series. Starts with a fantasy about finding a pot of gold over the rainbow and then veers off into a netherworld, including demons and apparitions among the patented bizarre imagery the Van Beuren and Fleischer animators were so skilled at creating.
Didn't know there was such a thing as horny fossils until seeing this 1932 Betty Boop epic. I don't get it. They're fossils. . . THEY'RE DEAD!
Ace animator Ub Iwerks produced Skeleton Frolic among a series of cartoons his studio sub-contracted to Columbia Pictures from 1936-1940. It is a followup of sorts to the groundbreaking 1929 Walt Disney Silly Symphony cartoon The Skeleton Dance, but realized in the prevalent animation style of the mid-1930's.
Skeleton Frolic is very enjoyably spooky and a fine example of Technicolor cartoonmaking. Love the musical element, presumably provided by Eddie Kilfeather, as well as the super-cool backgrounds throughout. Not sure who animated it; Ub himself, fastest animator in the West and Walt Disney's not-so-secret weapon in the 1920's, did the honors on much of the Silly Symphony cartoon. Could that be Irv Spence's lively, distinctive and imaginative animation on the skeleton orchestra sequence?
It's likely the experts, from Mark Kausler to Devon Baxter, have an answer for that question. IIRC, by the time Skeleton Frolic was produced in late 1936 - early 1937 as the second Iwerks Studio contribution to the Columbia Color Rhapsody series, top animators Grim Natwick, Berny Wolf and Shamus Culhane had long since left to join the Walt Disney Studio.
At this point, we at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog down a pint of pumpkin spice ale and two or three pumpkin spice double cappucchinos and enjoy the entertainment.
Photo by Christopher Walters
Can't decide between The Bride Of Frankenstein and Young Frankenstein as my Halloween choice.
Will have no choice but to watch both. Again.
Nothing says scary quite like The Paul Lynde Halloween Special (1976), co-starring none other than the great Margaret Hamilton.
We at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog watch it every year without fail!
Now it's time for some trailers from terrible movies!
And, unquestionably, it wouldn't be Halloween without a judicious selection of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and Creature Features TV show openings!
Seems we always finish the annual Happy Halloween post with a slew of references to the 1948 Universal Pictures feature Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein and its various followups. Since the gang here remains resolutely Way Too Lazy To Write A Blog, we'll do it again. . . Happy Halloween!
