One of the rotating topics of this blog, along with animation, film noir, music and comedy, has been silent movies - and, lo and behold, it's National Silent Movie Day.
That Silent Movie Day Livestream whetted this film buff's appetite for more silent era animation, so the credo of today's post is, not surprisingly, let's bring on the silents, especially cartoons and short subjects, and lots of 'em, starting with Felix the Cat!
Otto Messmer actually made a series of Charlie Chaplin cartoons back in the teens, so it's fitting that we follow Felix with Chaplin's A DAY'S PLEASURE.
Continuing this annual celebration of silent films, courtesy of the heroes at EYE Film Museum, are classic comedies starring Marcel Perez a.k.a. "the international mirth maker." These are prime examples of the Robinet series produced by Ambrosio in 1911-1914. Many Robinet comedies co-star the excellent actress and comedienne Nilde Baracchi as Robinette.
Perez, who starred in and directed movies in both Europe and America under more names than those of a fiction author who creates a gazillion novels using more than one nom-de-plume - Marcel Fabre, Michel Fabre, Fernandea Perez and Manuel Fernández Pérez, for starters - is quite brilliant.
From the YouTube channel of the fabulous EYE Film Museum are superb Perez comedies.
Whether starring as Robinet, Tweedy, Tweedledum or Twede-Dan, Marcel Perez successfully blended the European and American approaches to slapstick. There is also a futuristic fantasy element which sets him apart from other comedians.
Have devoted posts on this very blog to the comedic and cinematic exploits of Marcel Perez, who moved around like an MLB relief pitcher who gets traded or signs with a new team as a free agent every year! Strongly recommend following this by checking out Andy Galaxy's Marcel Perez playlist.
That National Silent Movie Day livestream sent this blogger, uncharacteristically powered with turbo jets, both to Mark's superlative blog and, of course, MORE silent Fleischer classics.
A motherlode of silent era cartoons can be found on the Craig's Cartoon Capers YouTube channel: LOTS of excellent, pretty good and just plain bizarre cartoons from the silent era! KO-KO'S BIG SALE must be seen to be believed. Notably, there are playlists for both the Fleischer Studio's Out Of The Inkwell series and the subsequent Inkwell Imps.
Those Ko-Ko cartoons, for some reason, bring to mind the way-out and ingenious stop-motion animation of the great Charley Bowers.
On the topic of early cartoons, for National Silent Movie Day, must go back to the sources, the guys who started it all, Émile Cohl and Winsor McCay!
Won't be getting into silent features in today's post (THE GENERAL, SUNRISE and THE LAST COMMAND are three great ones), as there are scribes - just two are Fritzi Kramer at Movies Silently and Lea Stans at Silent-ology, currently doing a blogathon for the 2022 National Silent Movie Day - who write much more eloquently about them than the gang here does, but am posting a bunch of favorite short subjects.
Buster Keaton in COPS is the movie that made me a silent film fan for life.
Since all amazing silent comedies invariably lead to more amazing silent comedies, here's Buster Keaton in ONE WEEK.
When asked to identify the single silent 2-reeler that makes me laugh the most, I may not be able to answer the question, and shall struggle to get the list of the funniest silent comedy short subjects down to less than five or six films, but certainly one of them would be Laurel & Hardy in PUTTING PANTS ON PHILIP (1927).
With the possible exception of Laurel & Hardy, none of the silent film comedians gets bigger, louder and more frequent belly laughs from this writer and comedy fan than Charley Chase. Here is a hilarious bit from ACCIDENTAL ACCIDENTS.
From Dave Glass, who has posted an outstanding silent comedy playlist on his YouTube channel and, with Dave Wyatt, produced excellent classic comedy DVDS and Blu-rays, here's a very funny clip from Charley in NEVER THE DAMES SHALL MEET.
No matter how many times the gang here sees WHAT PRICE GOOFY, MIGHTY LIKE A MOOSE and HIS WOODEN WEDDING, never fail to end up ROFL. These are up there with the silent Laurel & Hardies (many also directed by Leo McCarey) among the funniest films ever made.
There's good news for screenings of silent movies at long last.
The San Francisco Silent Film Festival will be doing its winter events on December 3.
The KFJC Psychotronix Film Festival, which periodically incorporates silent films into the extremely and wildly varied celluloid mix, shall return, after a three year hiatus caused by COVID, to Foothill College in Los Altos, CA for its 30th anniversary shindig on December 10.
Awaiting the Tommy Stathes Cartoon Carnival online program tomorrow and The Silent Comedy Watch Party on Sunday, we at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog begin the Memorial Day Weekend - after a respectful nod to the doctors, nurses, EMTs, ambulance drivers and other essential workers who have been the brave American heroes through this COVID-19 outbreak - by remembering the pioneering animators of yore, starting with the great Otto Messmer.
To begin whetting our appetites for early animation, Earl Hurd's Bobby Bumps series is always a great place to start.
Earl Hurd (1880-1940) could be considered the first to create, in Bobby Bumps, a character that inspires the approach to personality animation that would be seen decades later with Disney.
The animation of Earl Hurd was quite innovative in its day and the Bobby Bumps series retains its considerable charm and appeal over 100 years after the cartoons were produced.
We'll continue the compendium with a few of the artists who started it all. One of the first exhibitors to experiment with animation was Charles-Émile Reynaud (1844-1918), inventor of the Théâtre Optique film system, patented in 1888. Reynaud, pre-dating the Lumiere brothers and Alice Guy Blache, premiered his innovative predecessors of animated film at the Musée Grévin in Paris on October 28, 1892.
This history was not lost upon Walt Disney, who devoted an episode of his television series to the years of animation, starting with the zeotrope.
At the turn of the 20th century, Thomas Edison's studio and J. Stuart Blackton produced the first U.S. cartoons.
Filmmaker Émile Cohl was breaking new ground in France in the early 20th century.
Nobody in animation, before or since, was more innovative than the great comics artist/raconteur/animator/filmmaker Winsor McCay.
Returning yet again to the Daily Motion channel of Cartoon Research historian Devon Baxter, as he has posted several prime examples of the Fleischer Studio's terrific and highly imaginative work from the silent era.
Closing today's post: the wild and apocalyptic Ko-Ko's Earth Control, backed by a weirdly incongruous "Movie Wonderland" soundtrack.
We wish all of you reading this a happy Memorial Day Weekend; stay safe and, as the memorable Max Fleischer Color Classic cartoon insists, Play Safe. Kudos, bravos and huzzahs to all who are doing YouTube presentations, watch parties and other types of public service to help their fellow citizens through a stressful time.
Binge-watching turn of the 20th century films by Émile Cohl, for this movie buff, leads inevitably to the films by another innovator in animation, Winsor McCay, the creator of amazing comics and editorial cartoons. We love the epic comic Little Nemo In Slumberland. When it comes to pure visual fantasy, Little Nemo can't be beat - more than a century later.
Count us among the frequently astonished and awed by the comics and films of this astoundingly talented artist-vaudevillian-animator-raconteur.
The prolific illustrator began creating comics for the New York Herald such as Little Sammy Sneeze and Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend in 1903 and originated Little Nemo in Slumberland, comic and fantasy Technicolor dreamscape, in 1905. McCay started in movies by bringing Little Nemo to animated form. Note that in the opening, one of Winsor's pals is Vitagraph comedy star John Bunny.
At Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog, we love the wonderfully grotesque film Winsor McCay made starring a wiseguy mosquito. Its not just the film's obvious visceral impact - it's that the flying blood-sucker's just a bit of a mischievous bastard. Could be considered one of the first cases of characterization in animation.
And then there's Gertie. . .
McCay's vaudeville act, with him as ringmaster and Gertie the dinosaur as featured performer, must have been something to behold.
From Wikipedia: Gertie the Dinosaur debuted in February 1914 as part of McCay's vaudeville act. McCay introduced Gertie as "the only dinosaur in captivity",[66] and commanded the animated beast with a whip.[66] Gertie seemed to obey McCay, bowing to the audience, and eating a tree and a boulder, though she had a will of her own and sometimes rebelled. When McCay admonished her, she cried. McCay consoled her by throwing her an apple—in reality pocketing the cardboard prop apple as a cartoon one simultaneously appeared on screen.[67] In the finale, McCay walked offstage, reappeared in animated form in the film, and had Gertie carry him away.[68]
Our favorites: the way-out Dreams Of A Rarebit Fiend cartoons.
One of the most astonishing McCay films is the surviving fragment from The Centaurs (1921), featuring advanced sophistication of animated movement and line.
Animator-documentary filmmaker-historian John Canemaker, author of Winsor McCay: His Life And Art, introduces The Cartoons Of Winsor McCay, featuring Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), Little Nemo (1911), How a Mosquito Operates (1912), The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918), Bug Vaudeville (1921), The Pet (1921), The Flying House (1921), The Centaurs (1921), Gertie on Tour (1921) and Flip's Circus (1921).
Silent era animation expert Tommy José Stathes of The Bray Animation Project introduces a program on the 100th Anniversary Of Bray Studios. Cartoon rarities include: The Artist's Dream (1913), How Animated Cartoons are Made (1919), Farmer Alfafa Sees New York (1916), The Circus (1920), The Mad Locomotive (1922), A Fitting Gift (1920), The Best Mouse Loses (1920), Colonel Heeza Liar, Detective (1923), Bobby Bump's Pup Gets the Flea-Enza (1919) and Dinky Doodle in Lost and Found (1926).
We at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog adore the cartoons of the Van Beuren Studio and are thrilled to see that the guy who has been personally responsible for restoring so many of them, who literally tracked down 35mm nitrate prints of Aesop's Fables, Don & Waffles/Tom & Jerry, Cubby Bear and Little King cartoons for DVD transfers, Steve Stanchfield of Thunderbean Animation, will be interviewed on TCM by Robert Osborne.
The Animation From Van Beuren Studios lineup includes the Aesop's Fables The Fly's Bride (1929), A Swiss Trick (1931), Silvery Moon (1933) and Rough On Rats (1933), the Burt Gillett Toddle Tales cartoon A Little Bird Told Me (1934), and three classics - The Wizard Of Oz (1933), The Sunshine Makers (1935) and Pastry Town Wedding (1934) - by 1934-1935 Van Beuren Studio director and independent cartoon producer Ted Eshbaugh.
If this TCM presentation leaves the animation-crazed heart yearning for more, Steve has a YouTube channel that is a veritable cornucopia of classic cartoon coolness.
Today, Google's homepage pays tribute to one of the true innovators of early 20th century comic art, Winsor McCay (1869-1934). McCay was a gifted, feverishly imaginative and insanely prolific artist, as well as the pioneering animator who created Gertie The Dinosaur.
Google has presented a Winsor-style dreamscape - fittingly, as McCay's comic strip Little Nemo In Slumberland was first published on this very day in 1905.
When it comes to pure visual fantasy and psychedelia at its very best, Little Nemo In Slumberland can't be beat - more than a century later.
After I posted a couple of the very, very few surviving films by the remarkable early animator Émile Cohl, one of my film buff friends responded by sending me a link to an equally wonderful clip by another genius of early cinema, animation, comic art and illustration, Winsor McCay.
I've seen this clip before in 16mm, but never in a nice color print like this one. The mere thought that McCay drew and hand-colored EVERY FRAME boggles the mind.
I had an absolutely head-scratchingly bizarre experience on Facebook this morning.
While writing an e-mail message about arcane historical minutiae regarding the 1921 Roscoe Arbuckle scandal, of interest to perhaps two dozen film geeks worldwide, I kid you not, the words "Death To America" showed up on my screen. I did a Jimmie Finlayson-style "double take", said WTF and totally dismissed it as the product of my ever-overactive imagination. Then, a couple of minutes later, there those words were again, clearly, not too big, but in bold type. WTF?
This is too weird even for me.
And it happened as the news of the day was. . . shameless election fraud by Iran's hard-line powers that be (by any definition, a regime that has demonstrated repeatedly that they don't give a rat's ass about the wishes of their own people), led by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, A.K.A. "The Godfather". With the understanding that Khamenei is the big cheese there - somewhat analagous to Al Davis' Supreme Leader relationship to the Oakland Raiders - and calls the shots, gees, Louise, could you be just a tad more clever about stealing an election than that?
Us pampered and apathethic Americans can only have admiration for the Iranian people, no doubt appalled by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's gross mismanagement of the country's economy (not to mention his general ineptitiude and penchant for embarrassing his nation in public), who have the guts to stand up against the repression of the ruling right-wing cabal.
It is no accident that outside observers are not allowed to even view Iran's election process. Hmmmm - do you think we need a more unsubtle reminder that the necessity to accurately monitor presidential elections in other parts of the world, including right here in the U.S.A, persists?
That tangent aside, Facebook has been hacked, continues to be hacked and will be hacked again. It would certainly be interesting to learn the source of this hack. I'm guessing a young hacker with no girlfriend/boyfriend and lots of time to burn.
And perhaps this also means no more "Welsh Rarebit" for me anytime soon as well. To illustrate:
Maybe I have indeed lost me bloomin' mind (after decades of threatening to do so) and it's time for a lengthy stretch of, in the immortal words of Elmer Fudd, "west and wewaxation at wast."
