Speaking of Droopy, someone has posted a Droopy cartoon made for some Filmation show in the late '70s. I would try and describe how bad it is, but words can't do justice. Just watch. And see if you don't give up after the first two minutes of absolutely nothing happening.
This series made its debut in 1980. Filmation got the rights to animate Droopy as part of a Tom and Jerry show they were then doing. Word was they only got that due to a lawsuit raging between Hanna-Barbera and MGM at the time. The MGM properties were briefly licensed to Filmation as a spite move, and in this YouTube clip you're watching the fruit of that legal maneuver. Filmation's strong suit was a sick genius for selling the same stock shots to the same three networks over and over as different shows. They absolutely never understood comedy. It was a dreary Hollywood television cartoon landscape in that era. People who hated the 1990's cartoons have no concept of what a battle it was to pull things out of the degenerate wasteland of a decade and a half earlier.
ReplyDeletePeople cite the so-called great writing of Filmation shows shows like their Superman/Batman stuff and the Star Trek cartoon as the saving grace to their slashed-to-the-bone animation, but i'm not experiencing any of that good writing here; The voices are bad (Is that one of the producers voicing Droopy???), The writing is dull and hackneyed, which combined with Filmation's patented anti-animation, create probably the Anti-Christ of all 70's cartoons.
ReplyDeleteI've shat better.
ReplyDeleteTK
Jesus christ, I rather sit on a rusty nail for ten mintunes then watch this crap for two.
ReplyDeleteThis particular cartoon was written by Coslough Johnson, who was Arte Johnson's brother. But none of the Filmation Droopy cartoons are funny, no matter who wrote them. Everything about them is awful, though their atonal music and the brain-dead timing stand out. You're hearing stock library scoring from every series they did cut right in the middle of musical bars by picture cutters rather than music editors. Filmation was geared to reusing shots, which killed any chance of holding audience interest. These things survive as textbook examples of how not to make cartoons. For that they arguably have some value.
ReplyDeleteI remember seeing these (and the Tom & Jerry ones) as a kid. I also remember only sitting through them to get to the good cartoons that followed.
ReplyDeleteOnly one of these cartoons was funny and it wasn't because it meant to be. The cartoon featured Droopy dancing over and over and it was so terrible, it was hilarious.
The biggest thing about this abomination wasn't the horrible voice actor trying and failing to sound like any previous version of the character, or the bad lines that are put in all of the characters mouths. No the worst thing (and you can imagine just how bad it is based on the two things I bothered to mention) was that apparently no one associated with this thing had actually watched any of the Tex Avery films because this has nothing to do with the way Avery's character behaved. The horror, the horror!
ReplyDeleteBrent McKee: That "horrible voice actor" is Frank Welker:
ReplyDeletehttp://imdb.com/title/tt0282315/
Still, Welker just can't do Droopy.