Cult Cartoons, Part III: More B-Studios

First and foremost, there's the Van Beuren Studio. Animation fans say "God bless Amadee J. Van Beuren", who was the personification of the absentee producer, off somewhere else while his animators churned out delightfully crude Aesop's Fables, Tom And Jerry, The Little King, Amos N' Andy and Cubby Bear cartoons. His office wasn't even in the same building as the studio!



To this day, many decades later, the Van Beuren cartoons manage to be simultaneously inept, saucy and hilarious.



Here are a few great and indescribably bizarre examples of animated mayhem from the New York "B" cartoon studio that resided just down the block from Fleischer's:

And then there was Columbia Pictures sales executive turned cartoon producer Charles Mintz (1889-1939). . .In the 1920's, businessman Charles Mintz tried to show Walt Disney who was boss by taking his starring character and most of his staff. Could the thoroughly maligned outfit known as the Screen Gems Studio have been God's revenge on Mintz for screwing Walt Disney out of his studio and rights to the beloved Oswald The Lucky Rabbit back in the 20's? Or was the fact that Universal Pictures subsequently won rights to Oswald and sent Mintz packing retribution enough?








In any case, after Universal ate Mintz' lunch, he retreated to a more hands-off approach - so it's very likely that Mintz' disinterest enabled the preponderance of bizarre cartoons that emerged under his watch in the 1930's as head of the Columbia/Screen Gems Studio. Another factor was the presence of the unique, imaginative and royally twisted gag mind of director/storyman/animator Sid Marcus.



At one point, both the looked-down-upon Mintz cartoons and those of Ub Iwerks' struggling studio were released in the Color Rhapsodies series. Both meet all of the criteria for cult cartoons!

Here are some 1931 Krazy Kat and Scrappy cartoons produced by Mintz, the former by the production crew headed by Manny Gould (yes, the same guy who contributed stellar animation to Bob Clampett and Robert McKimson cartoons at Warner Bros.) and Ben Harrison, the latter by Sid Marcus, Dick Huemer and Art Davis.

More Psychotronic Cartoons By New York's Van Beuren Studio

Here's Gypped In Egypt, a 1929 B&W classic from those prolific purveyors of low-budget surrealism, the ex-Paul Terry staffers of New York's Van Beuren Studio. Utterly jam-packed with that distinctive early sound era blend of laughs and utter bizarreness, it's just one of at least eight Van Beuren cartoons that consist entirely of all principals getting chased around by skeletons, mummies, apparitions and ghouls for no apparent reason. The ersatz stars: a Mutt & Jeff-like duo known as "Don & Waffles", who do a most excellent job of falling into a cartoon universe abyss - and then really getting into trouble.



"Don & Waffles" would soon be redesigned as goofy-looking humans and christened "Tom & Jerry". . . eight years before the debut of Bill Hanna & Joe Barbera's cat and mouse duo.