National Lampoon's Vocation

This New York Times article on the rise and fall of National Lampoon prompted me to dig out my copy of "This Side of Parodies", a 1974 paperback collection of the best parodies from the early, funny years of the Lampoon. Many of them are by Canada's own Sean Kelly (who now leaves the Lampoon off his resume, according to the article); a former English teacher, he was fantastic at capturing and caricaturing the stylistic nuances of whatever writer he was parodying, from Robert Frost's overuse-- of-- dashes-- to James Joyce's coy wordplay. Among my favorites of Kelly's poetry parodies are his absolutely pitch-perfect sendup of Thomas Hardy:

We might have met on Ramsgate Strand
Or waved from passing trains;
Instead, we met in Flanders, and
Blew out each other's brains.

And his take on R.L. Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses, "A Child's Garden of Castration Anxieties," which is hilariously rude and also an excellent slam on Stevenson's Victorian moralizing; it also contains a fine spoof of Edward Lear, "Wipe That Lear off Your Face":

The Pribble who has no Dong
Once had one excessively vast,
But his uncle Roberto, one callico time,
Took it off with a mixture of beeswax and lime
To use on his boat for a mast
(An act which was morally wrong).

The Prebble who has no Dork
Once had one as cute as a cob,
But his half-cousin Clarence McClovis McClutter
Thought a carving knife perfect for smearing on butter
And utterly bungled the job
(Which proves that one should use one's fork).

The Porbul who has no Dink
Once had one as surely as you,
But his parents neglected to keep their young sprout
From diddely doodely dinkling about,
And it fell off one day in the loo
(Which gives one occasion to think).

Part of the appeal of the early National Lampoon is the way it sort of fused together the sick-joke humor of the '60s, the Lenny Bruce, take-no-prisoners style, with the more youth-oriented style of Mad Magazine. Take a story like "Telejester" by Chris Miller (included in the parodies book because it's written in the style of Damon Runyon), about a druggie who discovers that he has the power to project any image he wants onto national television. Basically it's just a wild, silly catalogue of crazy stuff he does to the Nixon government -- dressing Ron Zeigler in a Gestapo uniform; putting pictures of Haldeman and Ehrlichman on Miss Alabama's breasts -- but for those readers who are familiar with Runyon, there's also the fun of seeing that style of narration applied to a different and far more drugged-out milieu, and there's also an unsettling serious undercurrent to the story: in a way it's a bitter satire of satire itself, a large-scale acknowledgement of the fact that you can't actually drive bad leaders out of power by making fun of them. It's like Mad Magazine with an R rating and a college degree.

Ernest Lehman

Screenwriter Ernest Lehman, who died last Saturday at age 89, had an exceptionally high batting average when it came to writing movies; of the dozen or so movies he wrote, the vast majority were successful, and several won Oscars -- though, strangely enough, he never won an Oscar himself. In the '60s, he became identified with big-studio adaptations of tricky properties; West Side Story and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? didn't seem like natural fits for the cinema, because of the stylized concept of the former and the claustrophobic feel of the latter. Lehman managed to make these properties screen-worthy while still sticking fairly close to the original stage scripts. And The Sound of Music is an exceptionally clever adaptation that does a good job of avoiding mawkishness and giving the story some bite (as the Time Out Film Guide noted, The Sound of Music does a much better job of portraying the threat of Naziism than the film version of Cabaret ever did). Ironically, his least successful effort of that decade was with the one property he took on that should have been easy to adapt to the screen: Hello, Dolly!

Still, Lehman's best work was almost certainly his original screenplay for North By Northwest (parts of which he recycled a few years later for The Prize), along with his hand in adapting Sweet Smell of Success from his own novella, though much of the best dialogue in the film is by Clifford Odets. Lehman also directed one film, the ill-conceived, ill-cast film version of Portnoy's Complaint; I wrote a bit about that one here. Though it's not a very good movie, there's something endearing about its Old Hollywood sensibilities, and it's too bad that Lehman's strengths as a screenwriter -- careful construction, well-crafted and funny dialogue, ability to balance respect for the source material with respect for the film medium -- weren't much in demand in the more informal world of '70s cinema.

Commercialism

The site In the '80s has an intriguing section devoted to "Favorite Commercials From Television and Radio in the Eighties", where readers share their memories of the commercials they saw and heard in that already-distant decade. Because all the contributions (indexed alphabetically by product) are from different readers, some are more informative than others, but they're a great trip into the golden age of cheesy commercials, a time when even commercials produced by big agencies looked pleasantly low-tech and low-budget, and when wacky jingles and memorable advertising characters ruled our commercial breaks.

One '80s commercial they left out of this site was one for, I think, Sinutab. As I recall, it featured two motorcycle cops standing by their bikes, and one of the cops looks very unhappy. "What's the matter?" his partner inquires. "OH!" the other cop moans, stroking his head and looking in the mirror on his bike. "I've got a terrible headache! There's pain around my eyes, and my nose is stuffed up!" His partner recommends Sinutab, and we dissolve to an "after" shot of the two cops happily working, headache free.

I always kind of liked commercials like this, silly as they were, because, again, they were so low-tech: it's just a couple of scenes of two guys, shot and edited as cheaply and unobtrusively as any '80s prime-time TV drama. Pretty soon commercials would get bigger, faster, louder, with more editing tricks but fewer opportunities to connect with the characters in them. Me, I still say "There's pain around my eyes and my nose is stuffed up!" every time I have a sinus headache.

Another '80s commercial that is not on that site, probably because it's only been shown in Ontario, is the Marineland commercial. Somebody came up with a jingle that Marineland -- the aquatic equivalent of The Simpsons' "Discount Lion Safari" -- has been using in all its commercials ever since, making it probably one of the longest-lived commercial jingles of all time. It's gone through several versions, but it usually goes more or less like this:

Everyone loves a holiday,
Watching the whales while they swim and play,
They jump in the air
Splashing waves in your hair,
Everyone loves Marineland!

In Niagara Falls, Ontario,
It's always a fun place to go,
Seeing friends you miss,
A great big kiss,
EVERYONE LOVES MARINELAND!

The "great big kiss" line was accompanied by a shot of a whale kissing a little girl. I don't think they use that line, or that shot, anymore since a beluga whale nearly bit a girl's hand off at Marineland a few years back, but they're still using the jingle, and they will probably continue using it until Armageddon.

Oh, and the agency that created perhaps the most memorable cheesy commercial of the '80s, the Hefty Cinch Sak campaign, has a brief audio excerpt on its website. Though you really need to see the commercial (I couldn't find a video, alas) to get the full effect. Suffice it to say that there is no limit, none, to the applications of that commercial. In doing a Google search for references to this commercial, I found this post from an argument about Marxism:

Most of the arguments I've heard against democratic centralism, appear to be of an individualistic, undisciplined, middle class (notice how I didn't say petit-bourgeoisie) nature. The whole thing can best be summed up by major trash bag manufacturers TV commercial during the 80's: Democratic Centralism-HEFTY, HEFTY, HEFTY! Anti-democratic centralism-wimpy, wimpy, wimpy"

Now that's a universally applicable commercial.

Coming Distractions

I'm working on another "Great WB Animators" post that should be up this weekend.

If You Weren't My Son, I'd Hug You

Anyways, to continue on the "King of the Hill Democrats" subject...

King of the Hill's cultural position was always a bit of a strange hybrid. On the one hand, it was created as a companion piece to The Simpsons, used a ton of Harvard Lampoon people on the writing staff, and, especially in the first couple of seasons, had a lot of the dry, multileveled humor we associate with the Lampoon and The Simpsons, the kind of jokes that play on the audience's prior expectations or prior knowledge. An example of this kind of joke is the line in the pilot episode where Hank Hill and his friends discuss Seinfeld; the joke is based on the fact that we, the audience, wouldn't expect these guys to talk about Seinfeld while standing near a pickup truck and drinking beer.

On the other hand, the show was rightly celebrated for being an authentic portrait of Texas, co-created by Texas resident Mike Judge and with many native Texans on the writing staff, it was supposed to be an inside look at a region, and a culture, that wasn't usually accurately portrayed on TV. An early episode of the show summed up this side of the show: Hank entertains a client from Boston (voiced by Billy West), who is disappointed that Hank and the town of Arlen don't live up to his preferred stereoypes.

So King of the Hill, especially early on, was kind of a two-tiered show, with two levels of interpretation for two different segments of the audience. For people who identified with the region and culture it portrayed, it was a sympathetic, insider's look at everyday problems within that culture. For people who were not part of that culture, it was a satire, with the characters never quite understanding why they sometimes came off as looking absurd. It was to Texas what Seinfeld was to New York: simultaneously on the side of its characters and keeping an ironic distance from them. Or as one of the writers summed it up: "For most of the country, it's a really cool, smart show about people they know. For New York and L.A., it's like an anthropological study."

The ultimate expression of this two-level strategy was the first episode of KotH's second season, when it was a bona fide phenomenon (a lot of people forget that King of the Hill was huge for its first two seasons, a much bigger cultural phenomenon than Family Guy ever was). This was called "How to Fire a Rifle Without Really Trying", about Bobby Hill, a surprisingly great shot, entering a father-son fun shoot with Hank, who can't shoot at all due to a mental block caused by the way his father, Cotton, treated him. As co-creator Greg Daniels explains on the DVD commentary track for this episode, it was deliberately conceived as the opposite of the typical sitcom episode about guns; most sitcoms did a gun episode at some point, and nearly all of them revolved around the question of whether the family should own a gun at all, usually climaxing in a scene where a family member almost gets accidentally shot, and the family gets rid of the gun. Daniels decided that because "guns were a fact of life in Texas -- it wasn't a question of whether you had them or not," KotH's approach to the subject would be to treat guns and gun ownership as simply a normal part of life. So Hank owns a gun, buys a gun for his twelve year-old son, fathers enter shooting contests with their kids, and none of this is considered unusual.

But having taken that approach, the episode adds a heavy dose of irony: almost every line in the episode is a satirical jab at the characters for being so comfortable with guns. Nobody expresses a genuinely anti-gun viewpoint in the episode (Hank does mention some statistics about the dangers of guns, but he doesn't really believe them), but unbeknownst to themselves, the things the characters say are meant to point out the absurdity of being so completely used to carrying weapons:

HANK: He must've killed a thousand ducks.
PEGGY: A thousand ducks! Well, that is wonderful! Did you kill any bunnies?

INSTRUCTOR: "I didn't know it was loaded" is not an acceptable excuse. "I wasn't there" or "I never met those people" are better excuses. When I was your age, I used to get so excited about hitting the target that I'd run right out onto the range. That's how I lost this thumb, and later, this eye. If it weren't for the NRA safety guidelines which I eventually accepted, I'd be a stub standing here before you.

DALE: Guns don't kill people, the government does.
BILL: Hank, guns have been around for years. If they were dangerous, I think someone would have said something.

In the early seasons especially, Hank used to be the butt of a lot of jokes about his uptightness and old-fashioned views, and a lot of the jokes were based on the idea that something Hank does seems normal to him but is supposed to seem ridiculous to us, most notably his "weird propane fixation." Yet while Hank often had to moderate or change his views by the end of the episode, his basic values were usually proven right -- more right, certainly, than the parade of arrogant "twig-boys" (usually voiced by David Herman) who interfere with Hank's ability to live his life and raise his son the way he prefers. A famous episode in this style was "Husky Bobby", where Bobby becomes a model for plus-sized children's clothes: Hank is mercilessly made fun of for his discomfort with almost everything about late '90s values and pop culture, but in the end, he turns out to be right to pull Bobby out of modeling. Bobby and other characters argue throughout the episode that it's okay for Bobby to look stupid if it makes him feel good about himself (Peggy: "Being different is the most wonderful thing in the whole wide world"), but when he sees the other chubby boy models get picked on and beaten up, Bobby realizes that his father was right: there is a downside to doing whatever feels good in the short term.

King of the Hill has abandoned some of its ironic detatchment as time has gone on, moving closer to Hank's point of view. The episodes today are less likely to end with Hank having to admit he was wrong; instead other characters usually come over to his side. But there's still a good balance between celebrating and mocking Hank and his views, and that's part of what makes the show work for so many different people: if you're culturally conservative, you can enjoy the show's slams on cultural liberalism; if you're culturally liberal, you can enjoy the show's satire of culturally conservative people.

Another reason for KotH's broad appeal is that Hank himself was carefully constructed to be as appealing as possible across the political spectrum. He is an old-fashioned, culturally conservative guy, but he's not unwilling to change his views when new facts are presented to him. He would not be the sort of hack you read on bad conservablogs or hear on morning talk radio, clinging to his position no matter what the facts on the ground happen to be. So almost anyone can respect a guy like Hank.

Also, Hank is often contrasted with other, less reasonable characters, in order to make it clear that he's basically a reasonable guy. In one episode, his conspiracy-mongering friend Dale suddenly decides that the government is right about everything (when he discovers that the Warren Commission Report might have been right, he abandons all his anti-government beliefs); Dale's usual conspiracy theorizing was meant to show that Hank was, by comparison, what we would now call "reality-based," and compared with Dale's newfound jingoism, we see that Hank is the kind of patriot who doesn't mistake patriotism for unquestioning support of the government. Hank is also fairly middle-of-the-road on the big cultural issues; he attends a mainstream Methodist church with a liberal female minister, and in one memorable episode he fights against a fundamentalist who is trying to get Halloween banned as "Satanic." The only regular character on the show who might fit in with the "religious right" (tm) is Hank's niece Luanne, who conducts Bible-study groups in a bikini and expresses an intention to vote for Bush so she can pray in junior college -- but even her religious affiliations are never really specified, and she eventually joins Hank's fight against the anti-Halloween people.

Hank's wife Peggy claims she's not a feminist, and is uncomfortable with ideological feminists like a character voiced by Ani DiFranco (who, Hank's friend Bill Dauterive memorably notes, is "dressed kinda pro-choice"), but she is functionally feminist on many issues, and strongly proclaims her belief in her status as an equal partner in her marriage:

I am not a feminist, Hank. I am Peggy Hill, a citizen of the Republic of Texas. I work hard, I sweat hard and I love hard and I gotta smell good and look pretty while doing it. So, I comb my hair, I re-apply lipstick thirty times a day, I do your dishes, I wash your clothes and I clean the house. Not because I have to, Hank, but because of a mutual, unspoken agreement that I have never brought up, because I am too much of a lady.

That's sort of the cultural position of King of the Hill: the characters live their lives in ways that we might think of as "liberal," but they have a culturally conservative way of looking at the world. When Hank is out of work, he is proud of Peggy for doing extra work to support the family, but he is angry at Bill for suggesting that Peggy is now the man of the house. It's very true to the way most people live their daily lives: people do what they do; they don't politicize their personal decisions; politics and culture are secondary. And the enemies on King of the Hill are usually the people, liberal or conservative, who try to impose broad political or cultural beliefs upon the way we live everyday life.

Which is why KotH is popular with people of every political stripe: it's essentially an apolitical show, where taking politics too seriously interferes with the ability to do what needs to be done in life. That's why I can't really see it as a guide for Democrats or Republicans or anybody: KotH is about issues that don't have political solutions, and is a sort of reminder that politics is not a major part of most people's day-to-day lives.

The Best of All Possible Sites

Here's a great site, Michael Hutchins' "A Guide to Leonard Bernstein's Candide. It's an exhaustive resource for fans of that frustrating, elusive, unworkable, brilliant musical, Candide: one of those shows that will never quite work, but has so many good things in it, and so much ambition and craftsmanship, that no one will ever stop trying to make it work. Hutchins guides us through all the many different versions of the show and the tangled textual history of it.

His judgments are dead on, too; he correctly notes that Lillian Hellman's original book, which is no longer used (in part because she withdrew her permission to use it), is far superior to the camped-up scripts that have been used in subsequent productions. Hellman's book takes liberties with Voltaire, and worse, it's almost entirely unfunny -- not surprising when you consider that Hellman wasn't exactly known for being a laugh riot or making her points with any subtlety. But it's an efficient and effective enough book that gets us from sequence to sequence, and song to song, without the lame gags of the Hugh Wheeler version that has been used in varying forms since 1973. (Hellman, in a letter to Bernstein: "You are too unfeeling to know that I could not have wanted a hack like Hugh Wheeler to fool around with my work.")

The original production of Candide was also sort of the apotheosis of '50s middlebrow culture, for which there has been quite a bit of nostalgia of late. The people who worked on it were either members of Broadway's mid-cult elite (Hellman, Bernstein) or high-culture types doing Broadway work without shame (director Tyrone Guthrie, lyricist Richard Wilbur). The cast included a Shakespearian actor, Guthrie favorite Max Adrian, a Broadway ingenue, Barbara Cook, and several genuine operatic voices -- this was a time when Broadway shows still didn't use microphones and weren't afraid of "legit" singers -- including tenor Robert Rounseville, the original Tom Rakewell in Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress. It's a reminder of a time when all the best talents in the world seemed to be converging on Broadway, determined to fuse art and showbiz into one and create something that would appeal to highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow alike. It didn't exactly work with Candide, but it certainly increases the nostalgia factor to think that there was a time when Broadway could have attracted and even welcomed such a variety of talents and styles.

I Tell You What

You've probably seen this New York Times Magazine article by Matt Bai, "King of the Hill" Democrats?, in which he discusses the cultural significance of the show.

I have some thoughts on this which I'll post soon, but first of all, I'm amazed that Bai didn't think to include this quote, from an episode where Hank catches Bobby reading an ad in a publication that doesn't have Hank's approval:

HANK: The New York Times Magazine? Published by the New York Times Newspaper? Oh, Bobby!
BOBBY: I wasn't reading the articles!

Music Clearances and Cartoons

To briefly combine two subjects I've written on quite a lot lately, music clearance costs and classic cartoons: can you imagine what the difficulties must be in clearing the music for old Warner Brothers and MGM cartoons? Carl Stalling at Warner Brothers and Scott Bradley at MGM filled their scores with popular songs that were, at the time, owned by their studios and therefore could be used without cost. But by now, the music publishing companies that WB and MGM used to own have changed hands, so when Stalling quotes, say, Raymond Scott's "Powerhouse," WB has to clear the song for the home video releases. Now multiply that by all the dozens of still-copyrighted songs that Stalling would quote, and it's easier to see why these cartoons took so long to appear on DVD.

Great WB Animators: Part 1

Update, July 8, 2005: Part 2, dealing with two more animators, is here.

One of the reasons why Warner Brothers cartoons are so fascinating to watch is that, more than at any other studio, the individual animators had strongly individual styles that were not swallowed up in the "house style" of the studio. Of course WB had a general style, defined not only by the kind of comedy they did, but by the budget (less lavish than Disney and therefore more dependent on strong poses and key drawings to make expressive points). But within that style, the best animators preserved their own quirky, not always by-the-book ways of doing things.

Even strongly contrasting ways of drawing a character were tolerated, sometimes even within the same cartoon. For example, Ben Washam, one of Chuck Jones' best animators, always drew Bugs Bunny with teeth that come to a point at the bottom; it's off-model and contrasts with the way all the other animators drew Bugs, but that was the way he could get the most expression out of Bugs, and nobody was going to make him do it differently just for the sake of making his Bugs look more like the others'. Bob Clampett's two best animators in the '40s, Bob McKimson and Rod Scribner, had totally contrasting styles of animation -- McKimson fluid and graceful, Scribner wild and extreme (really extreme, not Loonatics extreme). But their styles co-existed within the same cartoon and sometimes even within the same scene.

Because WB animators worked on individual scenes and shots, rather than individual characters -- that is, instead of assigning a particular character to a particular animator, a director would break up cartoons into scenes and assign an animator to draw all the main characters in his assigned scenes -- they had to be extremely versatile, adapting their styles to all kinds of different characters. A potential downside of this, at times, is that the acting in a particular scene is sometimes more expressive of the animator's individual personality than the character's: though obviously Rod Scribner animated Bugs Bunny differently from Daffy Duck, the difference between his Bugs and Daffy is not always as great as the difference between any character animated by Scribner and any character animated by Bob McKimson.

With that in mind, I'd like to write an occasional piece on the styles of particular WB animators. I'm not as much of an expert on this as some, expecially Greg Duffell, who can identify just about any WB animator's style and whose posts on alt.animation.warner-bros taught me a lot of what I do know about these animators. But I can, at least, point out some scenes that these guys animated, and mention the basics of what set them apart.

When I give examples of their work, I'll mostly be referring to cartoons that are on the first two Looney Tunes DVD sets, mostly because it's an easy frame of reference. And keep in mind that this is nowhere near an exhaustive survey of the best WB animators; it's really just a survey of a few animators whose styles are easy to spot.

Also, up until about 1945, WB credited only one animator per cartoon, even though most cartoons were animated by three or four people. So I'll sometimes be identifying animators' work in cartoons they're not actually credited for working on.

With that out of the way: this first post will deal with four animators, chosen more or less at random. Hopefully I'll cover a few more animators in future posts.

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Manny Gould

Gould animated for Bob Clampett in the mid-1940s, and for Bob McKimson for a couple of years after Clampett left. He wasn't at the WB studio very long, but he left his mark as one of the best of the wild and crazy animators, perhaps second only to Rod Scribner.

One of the characteristics of Gould's animation is to have the characters do extremely broad gestures with their arms and hands, waving their arms around while they talk, and often making the same broad gesture with both arms at once. He wasn't quite as free as Scribner was with distorting faces and bodies for comic effect -- the wildness of Gould's animation is more in the physical acting. He liked to have characters move wildly and stick their arms and heads into the camera, but his drawings are a bit more down-to-earth than Scribner's.

Some examples of Gould's animation for McKimson are many of the scenes with Smoky the Genie in "A-Lad-In His Lamp," who always punctuates his speeches by waving both of his ultra-long arms; the opening scene of "The Foghorn Leghorn," and the Jingle Bells scene in "Daffy Duck Hunt," with Daffy waving his arms to and fro as he conducts Porky and his dog in a premature Christmas song. For Clampett, he did the scene in "The Great Piggy Bank Robbery" where Daffy knocks himself out -- see the way he sticks his arm up in the air and throws his whole body forward into the camera as he speaks -- and the scene in "Kitty Kornered" where Sylvester makes his big speech about being skidded out, skooted out, etc., with other characters reacting broadly to Sylvester's broad movements.

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Ken Harris

Harris animated for Chuck Jones almost from the beginning of Jones' time as a director and continued animating for Jones throughout his years at WB and beyond. He also animated for Richard Williams on the titles for Return of the Pink Panther and Williams' abortive dream project "The Thief and the Cobbler" (massacred by a studio and finally released as "Arabian Knight").

Harris was a brilliant animator of action, a master of the art of getting characters to express personality and emotion while doing things. One of his greatest achievements was the final scene in "A Bear For Punishment," especially the dance sequence, where, in addition to the basic gag of Mama Bear tap dancing while never changing her usual clueless facial expression, he creates all kinds of hilarious movements with the legs and feet, suggestive of someone dancing up a storm and yet conveying boredom and stiffness through her body language.

He seemed to draw characters with relatively small heads and pinched features; Bugs Bunny in the final scene of Jones' "Hare Conditioned", which looks like a Harris scene, has rather small eyes, nose and mouth. Harris conveyed expression with little looks and facial movements: he was great at raised eyebrows or shifting a character's pupils to the side of the eye for a puzzled or sarcastic look. He also seemed to love having characters look at the camera, sort of sharing their feelings with us without actually breaking the fourth wall; his animation of the Coyote's flying scene in "Gee Whiz-z-z-z" is marvelous, but the heart of the scene is the Coyote's triumphant look at the camera, just before his triumph is cut short. He was also good at animating non-speaking animals and making them act sort of like animals while keeping their cartoony qualities: he did the crying scenes of the dog in "Feed the Kitty" and animated one of my favorite Jones cartoons, "No Barking", the last cartoon featuring the Frisky Puppy who barks wildly and scares Claude Cat, all by himself.

Greg Duffell had a great analysis of the Harris touch in the scene in "Rabbit of Seville" where Bugs puts beauty clay on Elmer's face, waits for it to harden, and then chisels it off; I've quoted it before, and I'll quote it again now:

Typical of Harris, even in what might seem like a repetitive action of hammering, he subtly modifies each hit, each grimace by Bugs. Bugs seems like a living, breathing character here. What magic!

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Virgil Ross

Ross was not only one of the best WB animators, but one of the longest-running contributors to Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies; he started at the Warner Brothers studio in 1935, after a stint with Walter Lantz, and he stayed at WB until the cartoon studio shut down almost thirty years later. From 1935 to 1941 he animated for Tex Avery; when Bob Clampett took over Avery's unit, Ross animated for Clampett for a couple of years, but he and Clampett apparently didn't see eye-to-eye. Ross was transferred to director Friz Freleng. He worked on nearly all Freleng's cartoons for the next twenty years. After the studio shut down, he did some more work for Freleng's company, Depatie-Freleng, some television work, and some animation on Ralph Bakshi's Fritz the Cat.

If animation is acting, then Ross's style can be described as a preference for seemingly subtle acting. I say "seemingly" because there's no such thing as genuine subtlety within the style of the WB cartoons; these are not subtle characters or subtle gags. But Ross liked relatively restrained movements, conveying character with little gestures rather than big ones. You can see this in one of the first cartoons Ross worked on for Bob Clampett, Bugs Bunny Gets the Boid (1942). Ross's first scene in the cartoon starts when Bugs says "What's up, doc?" to Beaky Buzzard. The shot before that, animated by Rod Scribner, has the characters very loose and seemingly free in the way they move. When Ross takes over, he has Bugs and Beaky moving much less, and they express themselves through little gestures: Ross animates Bugs sticking his hands out and to the side as a way of trying to look innocent; Beaky tilting his head 90 degrees as he says "Don't tell me now, don't tell me" (trying to remember what he's trying to catch). Ross doesn't always look like he's doing a whole lot, but every gesture counts, and every movement says something about the character and what he's trying to do in the scene.

As Ross went on, he perfected the art of expressing emotion and personality with small but carefully-executed movements. My favorite Ross scene is probably the scene in "A Bird in a Guilty Cage" where Sylvester tries on a series of hats. His reaction to each hat is different and distinct: he sticks out his tongue and shifts between poses in deliberately limited movement; his face droops from a broad smile to a depressed frown; and, of course, he winds up looking devious yet stupid as he spots Tweety perched on top of a hat. The whole scene is perfectly in character for Sylvester even though he doesn't talk and is doing something seemingly uncharacteristic for him (trying on hats, and women's hats at that); Ross gets to the essence of the character -- what's likable and what's pathetic about him -- with small but perfectly-executed movements. Less can sometimes be more in animation.

Another thing you'll often see when Ross animates is character sort of leaning over to one side as they talk, or punctuating their lines by pointing with one hand or even one finger. You can see this, for example, in the scene in Freleng's "Greedy For Tweety" when Granny makes her first appearance: the animation budgets weren't much by this time, so she mostly just expresses herself by pointing her finger, almost rhythmically, while she speaks.

Other Ross scenes: the opening of "High Diving Hare," the lullaby scene in "Back Alley Oproar," most of the song and dance sequence in "The Hep Cat" (though another animator, probably Rod Scribner, did the close-ups). He was great at dance and singing sequences, and many of the shots of Bugs playing the piano in Rhapsody Rabbit are his, including the shot where Bugs's fingers get tangled up.

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Rod Scribner

Scribner is best known for the work he did for Bob Clampett from about 1941 to 1946. Before 1941, Scribner animated for Tex Avery, and after Clampett left he animated for Bob McKimson.

His IMDb bio does a good job of describing his style. The ultimate Scribner scene comes near the beginning of Clampett's Tortoise Wins by a Hare. The opening scene of the cartoon is nearly all re-used footage from an earlier cartoon, "Tortoise Beats Hare." And then we cut to a Scribner-animated Bugs in his house, watching the earlier footage on a screen. He kicks over the projector, and Scribner takes off. Bugs's actual movements aren't all that broad here; Scribner doesn't make his effects by having Bugs overact. What he does is to treat the character's face and body in a very free way, using extreme and sometimes distorted drawings to convey emotion. Bugs doesn't just hunch over to display his perplexity; his whole body seems to crumple as if there's no spine holding him up. He doesn't just look angry toward the end of the scene; his face takes on almost grotesque shapes, with huge teeth drawn in for dramatic effect.

That was the Scribner touch: a willingness to break the rules -- to make drawings that were not pretty, break certain norms of anatomy and movement -- in order to enhance the impact and mood of the scene, and an ability to take characters' bodies to extremes without ever losing the feeling of solid movement. It's easy to draw bodies in free motion if you want characters to look like they have no weight to them. But what Scribner could do, as for example in McKimson's "Of Rice and Hen" in the scene where Foghorn Leghorn stops Miss Prissy's suicide attempt, was to make characters' bodies move in all directions at once, and strike the most extreme poses, while always giving the impression that the characters were characters and not just a bunch of random drawings. There's nothing wobbly or random about his animation, no matter how seemingly free it gets.

Bill Melendez's commentary track for "The Big Snooze" has some good observations about Scribner's style, as does John Kricfalusi's not-all-about-me-for-once commentary on "The Great Piggy Bank Robbery." Here is what looks like a Scribner drawing from that cartoon.

Sidebar on the Bottom and the Posts on Top!

My attempt to work out the new and unexpected template problems provided by the good people at Blogger (those magnificent bastards!) have so far been unsuccessful, so as a temporary solution I've moved the archives and blogroll to the bottom of the page. I'll continue to work on getting a sidebar that's actually, you know, on the side, but at least you can read the posts now.

A Music Clearance Nightmare

Here's a really interesting interview with an independent filmmaker who describes, in detail, the difficulty and expense of clearing the music for a documentary film she made about ballroom dancing. Read it, and then think about what it must cost to license the music for a big film or TV series, not only in terms of money, but in terms of the time spent on negotiations and clearance agreements. It's a real mess.

Which is yet another way of saying that we shouldn't expect to see WKRP in Cincinnati any time soon.

T Time

I'm still behind on finishing my semi-substantive posts, so here is another exercise in super-frivolity: the lyrics of a song I wrote a couple of years ago in an attempt to come up with the ultimate theme song for Mr. T nostalgia. Actually, it was also written for a projected situation in my attempted NewsRadio musical; the idea was that Joe would sing it at a meeting, interrupting Dave's attempts to discuss work and leading the whole staff in a hymn to '80s nostalgia. But it works better out of context.

I did have a tune for this, but I can't post it here, so here are the words, and imagine any tune you like (it would probably be an improvement on mine):

Mr. T!
Sing the praise of
Mr. T!
Sing for days of
Mr. T!
Learn the ways of
The amazing Mr. T!
He’s so cool!
No one’s tougher!
Listen, fool,
No one’s rougher!
He ain’t cruel,
But you’ll suffer
If you mess with Mr. T!
He drinks his milk, he likes the youth...centers,
That’s why he’s a star.
The villains shake and quake when Mr. T...enters,
Because they know he’s gonna throw ‘em helluva far!
He’s so bad,
Grim and gritty,
When he’s mad,
It ain’t pretty,
And I’ll add
That I pity
Any fool who steals his chain,
Or who puts him on a plane,
The prediction will be pain,
Oh, yes,
If you mess with Mr. T!

Remember how he sounded when Hannibal described his latest crazy plan?
Remember when he pounded that scoundrel Dennis Franz for messing with his van?
Remember he was shorter than Murdock on the show? Hey, what was that about?
Remember that reporter who tagged along with them, and then got booted out?
Remember how he sold us the thermoses and lunchpails we would bring to school?
Remember how he told us to be somebody or we'd be somebody's fool?
Remember when he listed the reasons why we should be proud to be a kid?
Remember he insisted we never should do drugs, although of course, we did?
But we wish we'd done as we were bid
By

Repeat Refrain

I Power Blogger, But Blogger Doesn't Power Me

I don't know why the page is so hard to read at the moment -- some kink with blogspot, I think. I'll try to fix it.

Trailer-Made

My favorite meta-joke in the Moonlighting series comes at the start of the episode "Somewhere Under the Rainbow" (aka the leprechaun episode). An announcer intones: "Tonight, on Moonlighting," and then there are thirty seconds' worth of clips from the episode we're about to see. The clips are very short, chosen seemingly at random, cut together out of sequence, and just make absolutely no sense at all.

This is a parody of a kind of opening that a lot of shows had in the '70s and '80s: an "on tonight's episode" trailer consisting of thirty seconds' worth of clips to whet our appetite for the episode. The concept made sense, but the way the clips were chosen and arranged, it was almost impossible to figure out what the episode was supposed to be about. The Stephen J. Cannell shows all opened like this: thirty seconds' worth of apparently random clips of lines that made no sense out of context and footage of stuff blowing up.

I don't know when shows stopped doing this kind of thing -- probably around the time that shows became more serialized, so they needed to start with a "previously on..." prologue rather than a preview of the new episode. It's one of those things that just screams "'80s TV," though.

Curse of the Leopard Zombie Cat People

To whet your appetite for the previously-mentioned Val Lewton Collection, here's a link to an excellent site, The Val Lewton Screenplay Collection reprints the original screenplays for all the Val Lewton / RKO horror films. Don't read them, of course, unless you've seen the films or don't mind having them spoiled for you.

It also has an excellent selection of articles on Lewton and those who worked with him, including several contemporary newspaper articles. One particularly interesting article, published in the Los Angeles Times in 1943, interviews the three key people in making Lewton's first three movies: Lewton, director Jacques Tourneur, and editor Mark Robson (who, along with Robert Wise, took over as Lewton's directors after Tourneur went off on his own), though Lewton does all the actual talking. Some good quotes:

[Lewton] "We make the audience participants; we make them do the work. How? I'll tell you a secret: If you make the screen dark enough, the mind's eye will read anything into it you want! We're great ones for dark patches... Remember Simone's long walk alone at night in 'The Cat People?'... Most people will swear they saw a leopard move in the hedge above her -- but they didn't! Optical illusion; dark patch."

Lewton & co. use the short story as their model because they believe you can't sustain horror beyond a certain length. "Our formula is simple," Lewton said. "A love story, three scenes of suggested horror and one of actual violence. Fadeout. It's all over in less than 70 minutes."

And, after the interviewer notes that characters in Lewton movies are usually "practical, matter-of-fact folk":

"That's Jacques' fine hand," Lewton nodded toward Director Tourneur, who is hardly the talkative sort. "Jacques doesn't like people who just live in old castles waiting to be scared. He insists that they have jobs, something to work at. He also insists on having what he calls 'weather in the streets,' even when weather has nothing to do with the case!"

The article also mentions some generic titles for upcoming Lewton movies (remember, RKO usually gave him the titles and then he'd come up with a movie to go with it, even when, as in Curse of the Cat People, the story had almost nothing to do with the title). Some of them, like "The Seventh Victim," got made, and superbly, though with Robson directing rather than Tourneur; others, like "The Screaming Skull" and "The Amorous Ghost," never got made, and it's doubtful that Lewton even came up with stories to fit those titles. But another article posted on the site, from 1945, mentions two projects he had in development that didn't get made: "Die Gently, Stranger," to be set on and around the beaches of Stockholm and to use fear of water and fog as the main source of horror, and "None So Blind," which was to star Joan Bennett and probably (based on the title) would have been some kind of proto-Wait Until Dark.

Also, shockingly, the obituary of Tourneur, from 1977, doesn't even mention Out of the Past. Shows you how the reputation of that movie has skyrocketed in recent years.

Underblog is Here

I have a couple of big-ish posts I'm working on, but in the meantime this blog is distressingly thin lately. I'd write a "coming soon" post about posts I hope to put up soon, but that would be tacky and might expose me to the soon-to-be-passed "truth in blogging" laws when one or more of those posts inevitably doesn't materialize.

Meanwhile, here's a piece called "From Donald To Dean," comparing Donald Hamilton's Matt Helm novels to the movies. The surprise is that the movies did occasionally keep stuff from the books; The Silencers actually has more of Donald Hamilton in it than the near-contemporaneous Bond movie, You Only Live Twice, has of Ian Fleming.

A Song For Our Time

For some reason, even though I am not entirely up to speed on the Most Important Story of Our Time, this song from the musical Plain and Fancy keeps going through my head:

Comes a time in his life
When a man should take a wife.
If I have to take a wife,
So why not Katie?
Milk and cows Katie knows,
Katie mends and Katie sews,
And a farm with Katie goes,
So why not Katie?
It could be if I wait,
Comes along a perfect mate,
But for this a man could wait
Until he's eighty.
So in meeting when I stand
With my hand in Katie's hand,
And a wedding dinner making in the pot,
When they ask "Do you take Katie?"
I will answer like a shot:
Do I take Katie?
Why not?

Carmen, Je T'Aime

I am not, as a rule, a big fan of historical recordings of complete operas. Emphasis on "complete"; historical recordings of excerpts of operas -- Caruso, Battistini, Ponselle, Pinza, the whole list -- are wonderful. But there were relatively few complete recordings of operas made before the mid '50s, and those that were made tended to have less than stellar casts, casts that were more representative of a good night in a repertory theatre than of something you'd want to hear over and over. Most of Gigli's complete recordings have one great singer (Gigli) and a lot of singers like Maria Caniglia or Toti Dal Monte who are representative of good, solid singing rather than Golden Age standards. I don't think the art of the complete opera recording really took off until the mid-'50s, when producers like Walter Legge and John Culshaw started trying to assemble casts with a really top-flight singer for each part, even the small parts, rather than casts that represented a typical night in Milan or Vienna or New York.

But the downside to that kind of starry casting is that it inevitably brings together singers who don't usually work together. (Maria Callas and Tito Gobbi had never performed Tosca onstage together at the time they recorded it.) And the upside of the repertory-theatre style of earlier opera recordings is that, at their best, they can give an idea of how an opera can go when performed by people who are all agreed on a particular style.

What I'm ramblingly leading up to is that my favorite recording of Bizet's Carmen, and indeed one of my favorite opera recordings of all time, is the 1950 recording by Andre Cluytens with the orchestra and chorus of the Paris Opera-Comique. This recording, currently available on the Naxos label in England and Canada (Naxos hasn't released it in the U.S. due to copyright issues), features an all-French-speaking cast, and an approach typical of the Opera-Comique and unlike any grand opera company. It was the first recording to use dialogue instead of the recitatives that Ernest Giraud wrote after Bizet's death, but the uniqueness of the approach has to do with more than just the dialogue. The whole company essentially approaches Carmen as a very serious musical comedy, or an exceptionally difficult operetta. Cluytens' tempos are fast; the orchestral textures are light and have the idiomatic sound of French orchestras of the era -- including a bizarrely wobbly way of playing the horn.

Everybody enunciates the words very clearly, and because they all know what the words mean, they can actually put some bite into their exchanges and even into the dialogue scenes. And Solange Michel, the Carmen, is nothing like the heavy-voiced, vampish Carmens in most recordings and performences; she is relatively light-voiced, takes advantage of all the opportunities to display the character's sense of humor, and doesn't start to darken her voice or her characterization until Carmen foresees her death in the card scene. The whole recording gives us Carmen as a lighthearted, fast-moving piece that turns dark in act 3 and becomes tragic at the end -- and though none of the singers are the best ever in their roles, collectively they give a better sense of teamwork, and of being one with their characters and the story, than any other recorded Carmen cast. That's the advantage of the idiomatic, home-team approach to recording opera.

The sound is, by the way, quite good for 1950, and this was one of the first opera recordings to include sound effects to indicate stage action (the producers may have overdone it, in fact, with the sound of dancing feet and castanets in the opening of act 2).

I'm Less EXTREME!!!

The creator of "A New Bunny," the infamous parody of Warner Brothers' Loonatics project, has a new Flash cartoon mocking WB's proposed redesign of the Loonatics characters:

"Another New Bunny"

Ya Got Trouble, Right Here in Paradise

Variety mentioned the other day, in an article on screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely (The Life and Death of Peter Sellers), that they are currently writing a remake of Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise for director Cameron Crowe. There have been a lot of rumors for the last few years that a remake was in the works, but this is the first time I've heard of a director being attached.

Since Trouble in Paradise is one of my favorite movies of all time, you might expect me to lament the news that Hollywood is remaking yet another movie that can't possibly be improved upon. But actually, I'm hoping the remake gets made, and I wish it well. Why? Because nobody is making good romantic comedies anymore, and most romantic comedies today have anything interesting emptied out of them at the script stage. At least a remake of Trouble in Paradise will be a rom-com that starts with a story that is not inherently stupid.

Of course, a remake of The Shop Around the Corner also starts with a good story, and we saw how the last remake turned out. But that's due to Nora Ephron being Satan.