If there's one this blogger likes more than 1940's B-studio cartoons it's WEIRD AND BIZARRE 1940's B-Studio cartoons.
Like this one.
And this one. . .
And this one. . .
Here's a video aptly illustrating a response that ONLY Your Blogmeister has to Columbia cartoons, the most loathed animated antics in silver screen history - yes, even more than the Fleischer Studio's wretched Animated Antics series.
Since even animation historians would gleefully volunteer to transfer Columbia Color Rhapsodies and Phantasies TO nitrate film, Your Blogmeister may be the only person on the face of the earth, including the guys who actually who made these cartoons, to respond to them as the individuals in the following Monty Python's Flying Circus clip do.
Described by animation historian Jerry Beck as "the little studio that couldn't", the ragtag outfits of Charles Mintz and Screen Gems produced cartoons for Columbia release from 1929 to 1946.
The Screen Gems studio enjoyed a brief blaze of glory under renegade producer/director/storyman Frank Tashlin, after he literally hired dozens of skilled animators off the picket line in front of the Disney Studio.
Alas, like any love affair, THAT one didn't last long. After the abrupt departures of Tashlin and such young ex-Disney animators as John Hubley, Zack Schwartz and Dave Hilberman, the Screen Gems studio's product got cheaper - and, in some cases, exponentially weirder, especially in the studio's last year. The Fox & Crow series continued through the 1940's while the Color Rhapsodies and Columbia Phantasies went further and further off the rails.
There are, however, such isolated films as The Herring Murder Mystery, director/writer Dun Roman's sendup of the hit radio show Information Please, in which the trademark Columbia bizarreness works quite well. There's an original style of cartooning here that's quite different from both the Tex Avery/WB/MGM approach and The Disney Way. Too bad Mr. Roman, years later among the staff members who ran the Val-Mar Studio in Mexico for Jay Ward Productions, did not get the opportunity to head his own production unit at Screen Gems and stick around awhile. Unfortunately, the door was ever-revolving at Screen Gems.
Sometimes even good directors for some reason turned out terrible cartoons there, as if possessed by "bad cartoon" demons or thunderstruck by some sort of George Romero style soul-sucking zombieism in the middle of a storyboard session.
Case in point: this late period Screen Gems opus Pickled Puss. This was directed by Alex Lovy, later a mainstay at Hanna-Barbera Productions and responsible for directing some decent early Woody Woodpecker cartoons in 1941-1943. Is it possible to write a story starring a drunk-off-his-butt feline and, unlike Otto Messmer's Felix Woos Whoopee, a dozen other cartoons along similar lines or any sketch featuring Foster Brooks on The Dean Martin Show, do absolutely nothing with the premise and have NO GAGS? NONE? Unfortunately, the answer is . . . yes, although the cartoon remains Good Weird Fun nonetheless.
The following Incredibly Strange Cartoons all date from the very end of the Screen Gems studio's existence. Some are so off-the-wall, one wonders if marijuana and LSD were dispensed in storyboard meetings. WARNING: this one is in bad taste, very bad taste. In other words, if easily offended, please, grab a cup of coffee or go watch The Sound Of Music!
Several 1945-1946 Columbia cartoons featured ultra-wacky stories by gagman Cal Howard and/or were written and directed by Sid Marcus as if he was swilling generously from a fifth of single malt Scotch at all times. Here's one starring "Flippy", the rather brazen Screen Gems ripoff of Tweety Bird (and especially the Friz Freleng version of the WB cartoon star).
There is, if one can set aside the largely accurate "this isn't anywhere near as good as even a 1946 clunker from Warner Brothers" observation for a moment, the strangest inspiration, as well as genuinely imaginative moments, can be found in every one of these Screen Gems Studio train wrecks. And, no, dear readers, Mr. Blogmeister is not on drugs except prescription medications for diabetics.
During the studio's dying days, Looney Tunes director Bob Clampett had a cup of coffee there between stints with Warners and his own studio. The result: Incredibly Strange Cartoons!
At one point, Clampett and Sid Marcus were in the same crew. It was simply not meant for two such idiosyncratic, eccentric and happily subversive gag minds to work together. In fact, it's amazing Marcus stuck around beyond Day One. Yes, these cartoons are weird, all right - and how!
Many of the oddest and most delirious Screen Gems cartoons were written by Cal Howard, yet another legendary character (noted for possessing a wild sense of humor) who worked in many studios and places in animation.
Granted, next to the very best work of Tex Avery, Frank Tashlin and Chuck Jones, they can be found wanting, but by comparison to the auto-pilot stuff from Disney, the godawful late 1940's - early 1950's crap from Famous Studios and the astonishingly artless assembly-line drek of the latter 1960's and 1970's, well, they just don't look all that terrible to this cartoonologist.
That said, the only parting bon mot Monsieur Blogmeister can come up with is "whatever that guy at the Screen Gems Studio's drinkin', give me a shot and a chaser."
Plunging yet further into the world of inept children's entertainment, today's posting begins with a magnum opus that qualifies as both the worst Christmas film ever made and the worst excuse for "sock puppets" in the history of Western Civilization - the one, the only Santa In Animal Land.
And then there's the biggest thing on TV other than Uncle Miltie and the biggest thing in showbiz at the time other than Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis: The Howdy Doody Show. Here's Howdy and the gang, followed by a hilarious spoof, Howdy Deedy, from The Ernie Kovacs Show.
Again, as with Jay Ward, Alex Anderson and the Crusader Rabbit series, enterprising animators and puppeteers devised ways to crank out TV shows that entertained children but were also genuinely funny enough to NOT provoke grownups to bolt the room in abject terror and revulsion.
First there was puppeteer Burr Tillstrom, not inept in any way, shape or form - and the creator of the Kukla, Fran & Ollie Show. While it's unfair to lump this pleasant, likeable and amusing program in with reeking Cartoon Dump style disasters, the show's success did inspire a barrage of sock puppet programming.
The former director of the wildest Warner Bros. cartoons, the looniest Looney Tunes, animator-raconteur Bob Clampett, no doubt cognizant of Kukla Fran & Ollie's popularity, brought his sock puppet characters, Beany & Cecil, to the small screen in Time For Beany and promoted the show with zeal. The program boasted fans as illustrious as Albert Einstein and its top-notch writing staff included Stan Freberg, Daws Butler, Charlie Shows and (before UPA hired him to collaborate with Phil Eastman in their story department) Bill Scott.
Ultimately joining in the sock puppet brigade with tempered enthusiasm: the Jay Ward Studio, producers of Crusader Rabbit, Adventures Of Rocky & Bullwinkle, Fractured Flickers, Hoppity Hooper and George Of The Jungle). For awhile, the aforementioned Bill Scott did a sock puppet version of Bullwinkle Moose - unquestionably, the most subversive sock puppet ever, and soon yanked off the airwaves with extreme prejudice!
Mr. Blogmeister's favorite sock puppet show ever - sorry, Bob, Burr and Fran (still love you) - is unquestionably The Kapusta Kids In Outer Space from The Ernie Kovacs Show.
And then there's the dark side of sock puppet-dom, the indescribable Andy's Gang. The host is Andy Devine, who took over hosting duties from Smilin' Ed O' Connell, who originated the children's program on radio. The TV version comes across as happy 1950's kidvid - but directed by David Lynch. Could PETA sue retroactively for the wanton abuse of Squeaky The Mouse here?
We at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog have yet to determine what's more infamous, Andy's Gang or Jerry Lewis' never-released The Day The Crown Cried!
Your Blogmeister freely admits it - he likes terrible cartoons. No, make that horrid cartoons that were (shudder) MADE FOR TELEVISION!
Today's post will commence the "how low can you go" exercise with a cartoon that satisfies the prime "ineptly made" and "nonexistent storyline" requirements, Robert Capeheart's The Magic Of Oz.
Daring to ask yet further just what elements make a crap-tastic TV-toon, author/film historian Jerry Beck and Frank Conniff (from MST3K and Cinematic Titanic) devoted an entire show, Cartoon Dump, to skewering both cartoons of the ilk of The Magic Of Oz - so bad it doesn't even have an imdb entry - and such well-meaning but dreadful children's shows as The New Zoo Review.
We'll serve up some Cartoon Dump clips at the end of this posting, after presenting just a few of the show's odiferous headliners, starting with The Big World Of Little Adam and Spunky & Tadpole by Beverly Hills Productions.
To make a crap-tastic cartoon, what Frank Zappa termed "cheepnis" is not enough! After all, in the late 1940's, Jay Ward and Alex Anderson figured out how to make entertaining cartoons on no budget; write exceptionally funny scripts, closer to a Bob & Ray radio show than to Mickey Mouse - and spend the budget on damn funny voice actors. Voila - Jay Ward Productions' witty Crusader Rabbit and (later) Adventures Of Rocky & Bullwinkle series.
Frankly, other criteria must be met for inclusion in the cinematic dung heap. Animation? Nonexistent. Music? Canned, cheesy or preferably both. Character designs? Ugggg-leeeee! Storylines? Don't make me laugh!
The sum total of all these elements must add up to something both head-shakingly awful and unintentionally humorous.
Scoring a Grand Slam with two outs in the 9th and a 3-0 deficit in all of these departments, and only ever-so-slightly less stunningly inept than The Magic Of Oz, would be the cartoons by bargain basement Sam Singer Productions.
On a minimal budget and auto pilot, Sam Singer Productions created the always execrable Bucky & Pepito and ever-excruciating Pow Wow The Indian Boy.
My personal "worst ever" candidate would be Trans-Lux Productions' The Mighty Hercules.
Even though there are, amazingly, cheaper TV cartoon shows than this - and, no kidding, talented veteran New York animators were hired to provide the occasional full animation moments that are interspersed between the hours of limited animation on this and other Trans-Lux productions - unquestionably there's something horribly wrong with the series as a whole.
Nothing compares in sheer WTF factor to these Hercules cartoons, which still manage to compel otherwise responsible, upstanding adults to imitate the astonishingly irritating Newton The Centaur ("Helena wants to jump your bones Herc. . . Helena wants to jump your bones Herc") out of sheer spite for the annoying little bastard.
Making Hanna-Barbera TV toons look incredible would be those series produced using the patented Synchro-Vox technique, which involved superimposing live-action human lips on the macho cartoon characters.
The Synchro-Vox cartoons often get laughs just from how incongruous the live-action lips look on these ultra-heroic comic book style characters.
Here's the Synchro-Vox Valhalla: an unsold pilot for a prospective series based on the Moon Mullins comic strip!
The Cartoon Dump extravaganzas at the Steve Allen Theatre in Hollywood presented a veritable Dishonor Roll of made-for-TV monstrosities.
Funny, every one of these animated abominations in today's post entertained this blogger, for whom approximately 99.3512% of all sitcoms produced since the second Bob Newhart Show constitute a rare form of torture. Such low art on a lower budget as Bucky & Pepito seems like high art compared to the 21st century market-researched drivel from broadcast TV and such cable sources of agony as Disney Channel and Nickelodeon.
There will be lots of films from the usual silent comedy suspects - Hal Roach, Sennett, L-Ko, Fox, Vitagraph and Educational.
Headliners run the gamut from Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle to satirist/actor Will Rogers to Ziegfeld Follies star Bert Williams to the inimitable Edward Everett Horton to mucho malevolent Henry Lehrman L-Ko Comedies scoundrel-star Billie Ritchie (the man who put the "low" in "lowbrow") to such lesser-known but screwy comedians as Hank Mann, Larry Semon and Marcel "Tweedy" Perez.
MoMA presents Cruel & Unusual Comedy
Program 1: Love Sick: Mating Rituals
Program 2: Movie Mania: Fun In The Dark
Program 3: Food Fights: Chaos á La Carte
Program 4: Police Brutality: Wrong Arm Of The Law
Program 5: Leisure Time: Recreational Hazards
Available now: Steve Rydzewski's highly entertaining book on the dashing, the suave, the debonair, the leading man of leading men. . . Ben Turpin!
Turpin was one of the funniest guys in the history of movies and still makes us laugh more than 100 years after his 1909 screen debut as the cross-eyed cad in Mr. Flip.
Also out now: the awaited tome by film historian and Slapsticon curator/programmer Richard M. Roberts on the Hal Roach studio, Smileage Guaranteed: Past Humor, Present Laughter, his first in a series of books. It's very welcome - Roberts has penned excellent comedy film history articles for Classic Images and other publications for many years.
More fantastic film history books will be out later this year. Available for pre-order and officially out in stores on December 16, Marilyn Monroe: Her Films, Her Life by Australian author Michelle Vogel, known for, among many biographies, her book on another great actress-singer-comedienne, Lupe Velez. Since the iconic Marilyn was, in this blogger's opinion, also among the greatest of silver screen comediennes and an under-rated actress, this will finally give her onscreen legacy the respect it deserves.
Both in front of and behind the cameras, Mr. Chase (A.K.A. Charles Parrott), remains one of the all-time comedy kings. Since Chase's death at 46 in 1940 literally denied the producer/director/writer/comedian the credit he was due for decades, so this study of his starring vehicles in talkies by diehard classic comedy buff, film historian and prolific author Jim Neibaur is long overdue.
The writer of this blog needs to get his mind off depressing world events at least for a moment - and what better way then to reflect upon the greatness of classic comedy films!
Comedian-actor-writer-director Edgar Kennedy, ubiquitous presence in classic films and unequalled Jedi Master Of The Slow Burn, is a favorite of this blog, so we're pleased to learn that Minneapolis film historian and curator Ron Hall has spearheaded The Edgar Kennedy Restoration Project.
The restoration project, A.K.A. The Slow Burn Challenge, aims to find, restore and release all 103 of Edgar's classic RKO comedy shorts in a new series called The Edgar Kennedy Show, duly noted on the Cafe Roxy and Matinee At The Bijou websites. The project also has a Facebook page.
Having made his screen debut in 1911, the same year as Nestor's popular team of Eddie Lyons and Lee Moran, Kennedy numbers among the very first American screen comedians, following Ben Turpin, Augustus "Alkali Ike" Carney and Roscoe Arbuckle.
His career with Mack Sennett's Fun Factory goes back almost as far as that of Fred Mace, Madcap Mabel Normand and Ford Sterling, the very first Keystone players.
Edgar, as does hard-working stock company actors St. John and Joe Bordeaux, seems to turn up in every single Keystone comedy in 1914. And, as Sennett veterans St. John, Hank Mann and Polly Moran did, Edgar also worked in Fox Sunshine comedies.
After busy stints with L-Ko, Fox and Universal, Kennedy found his comedy mojo in a big way, both as actor and director, at the Hal Roach Studios, starting at the end of 1927.
He worked with Laurel & Hardy, Our Gang, Charley Chase and Max Davidson in a good many of the greatest comedy films ever made.
Mr. Kennedy, of course, not only made a smooth transition from silents to talkies, but would offer his inimitable slow burning presence to films involving everyone from Wheeler & Woolsey and The Marx Brothers to Dick Powell.
It would be quite the understatement to say that Edgar made frequent guest appearances as character actor, comedian and all-purpose nemesis in feature films.
Some of Edgar's best roles in features were near the end of his career, in the films of comedy writer-director-playwright-wunderkind Preston Sturges. In The Sin Of Harold Diddlebock, Edgar's the bartender who serves milquetoast Diddlebock (played by offscreen non-milquetoast Harold Lloyd) his first highball. It's a drink that would make W.C. Fields, John Barrymore, Errol Flynn, Buster Keaton AND Lloyd Hamilton stop in their wobbly tracks.
Edgar has also one of the most important scenes in Sturges' masterpiece, the very under-rated Unfaithfully Yours, as a classical music maven: enters at 1:50.
The very busy Edgar, in addition to doing a gazillion guest shots in silent and sound features, also headlined the "Mr. Average Man" series, 103 comedy shorts produced by RKO Radio Pictures from 1931 to 1948. It's an expertly written and performed prototype for the TV sitcom, with Edgar inexorably and invariably driven to the "slow burn" by his loony family.
At first, the "Mr. Average Man" comedies were written and directed first by series creator Harry Sweet, then subsequently by George Stevens and a number of other directors, including Hal Yates in the 1940's.
Does Mr. Blogmeister have a personal favorite Edgar appearance, besides the "Handle Handel" bit from Unfaithfully Yours? Yes - and that would be this fantastic production number, "Let That Be A Lesson To You", from the comedian-packed WB musical Hollywood Hotel. Watch the whole clip and see Dick Powell and Ted Healy (in his last screen appearance) mimic "the slow burn" - enjoy!
Friends, Romans, countrymen, animation buffs and Los Angel-inos, leave work early on Monday to see the premiere of Mark Kausler's new cartoon Some Other Cat.
Some Other Cat will be in Monday afternoon's all-animation program at the L.A. Shorts Festival in North Hollywood and shall mark the second appearance by the jaunty feline star of It's A Cat, Mark's 2004 cartoon.
Nobody is more knowledgeable about animation than Mark and Greg, nobody, not even the lifelong cartoonologist and Michael Maltese worshiper who writes this blog.
The L.A. Shorts Festival holds forth at the Laemmle Theatre, Noho 7, 5240 Lankershim Boulevard, North Hollywood, CA 91601: phone 310-478-3836. Don't miss it!
To commemorate Labor Day, we ask what's the last word on work songs? The answer: this bit from Blazing Saddles: screenplay and story by Mel Brooks, Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder.
