WB Animation: "Hillbilly Hare"

It's time for another who-animated-who analysis of a great Warner Brothers cartoon, Robert McKimson's "Hillbilly Hare." I am not enough of an expert on animation to tell you exactly who animated what, so (with his permission), I have drawn on an old post by animator and WB animation expert Greg Duffell, who knows more than anyone I've encountered about the styles of individual animators. What follows is in my own words, with mostly my own comments, but the identifications of who animated what is based on Greg's original post (available here courtesy of Google Groups). My thanks to Greg for his permission to draw on his expertise.

"Hillbilly Hare" is one of the all-time great Bugs Bunny cartoons, culminating in perhaps the funniest sustained sequence in any cartoon: the three-minute sequence where Bugs poses as a square-dance caller and leads two hapless hillbilly brothers through a sadistic square dance ("Whop him low and whop him high/Stick your finger in his eye"). McKimson, who would later be stuck with the "B" grade animators, had a definitely A-level crew at this time. The great Rod Scribner had just re-joined the studio after several years away due to illness, and this was his first cartoon for McKimson's unit; other animators who worked on this cartoon were the great Lantz and Disney animator Emery Hawkins (shuffling from one unit to another after the WB unit he was in, Art Davis's, had shut down) and three McKimson regulars, John Carey, Phil DeLara and the director's brother Charles.

The opening scene, with Bugs walking through Cornett Wood's hyper-realistic design environment and singing "I Like Mountain Music," is by Emery Hawkins, who gives us a skinnier, more fluidly-animated Bugs than most:



After the first hillbilly sticks a gun in Bugs's face, Charles McKimson takes over. One of the immensely talented McKimson brothers (the third brother, Tom, was an animator and layout artist at Warners), Chuck McKimson was given a lot of the close-ups and "characterization" moments in Bob's cartoons; his animation of Bugs seem to stick the closest to Bob's pose drawings, and reflect some of Bob's own preferences as a director, like giving Bugs heavy eyelids and a kind of wise-ass Groucho Marx attitude:



The scene with the second hillbilly (voiced by John T. Smith is by John Carey; the scene also seems pretty close to McKimson's own preferences in terms of drawings and poses, but is a little looser than Chuck McKimson's:



Some real looseness takes over as Rod Scribner gets his first piece of animation, with the two brothers looking for Bugs; Scribner was never as wild for McKimson as he was for Bob Clampett, but his preference for full body motion and broad acting still comes through:



Phil DeLara, who made characters a little cuter than usual for a McKimson cartoon (Greg writtes: "some nice, cute-faced Bugs here....quite different than the way
that Bob McKimson usually draws him in his layouts") gets the shot of Bugs singing "Pop Goes the Weasel":



Emery Hawkins, always good at having a character stretch and bend while he's running, gives us Bugs running into an explosive powder house:



Most of the next scene with the hillbillies falling for Bugs in drag is Phil DeLara, though Greg says that one close-up shot of Bugs in drag may be Chuck McKimson. DeLara does some fine work on the lecherous hillbillies:



Chuck McKimson gets another close shot, of a jukebox with (apparently) animatronic humans inside it:



For the square dance scene, Emery Hawkins animates the whole dance inside the house, up to and including the part where Bugs takes over calling the dance:



When we cut to outside the house, Rod Scribner has taken over, with his body-contorting animation starting to really get a workout (again, he can't cut loose the way he did in the '40s, but it's certainly funny and expressive animation and very much the kind of thing only Scribner would do):



Scribner keeps going up to the bit where the hillbillies "wallow around in the old pig-pen," which is handled by Chuck McKimson, including some more vaguely Groucho-esque poses from Bugs:



Now Scribner takes over again for the extreme violence of Bugs making the hillbillies pummel each other and poke each other's eyes:



And the last scene of the cartoon ("right hand over, left hand under") brings back Emery Hawkins and his skinny, fluid Bugs...



...right up to the final shot where Bugs bats his eyelashes at us as he plays the violin.

"Hillbilly Hare" is available on DVD on the "Looney Tunes Golden Collection, Volume 3."

Blocked

Not much to say today, so I'll just post a song lyric about having nothing to say. This is from the operetta His Excellency, written by W.S. Gilbert in the early 1890s; it's a very good libretto that, unfortunately, was not set by Arthur Sullivan. Gilbert gave it to another, inferior composer, and the result was a flop. (The sad thing is that the libretto Gilbert then wrote for Sullivan, The Grand Duke, wasn't nearly as good as His Excellency, so Gilbert was wasted on His Excellency and Sullivan was wasted on Grand Duke.) A semi-autobiographical song, not unlike some of Jack Point's songs in Yeomen of the Guard, was given to a practical joker who complains that all the good jokes have already been done:

Quixotic is his enterprise, and hopeless his adventure is,
Who seeks for jocularities that haven't yet been said.
The world has joked incessantly for over fifty centuries,
And every joke that's possible has long ago been made.
I started as a humorist with lots of mental fizziness,
But humour is a drug which it's the fashion to abuse;
For my stock in trade, my fixtures, and the goodwill of the business
No reasonable offer I am likely to refuse.
And if anybody choose
He may circulate the news
That no reasonable offer I am likely to refuse.

Oh happy was the humourist - the first that made a pun at all -
Who when a joke occurred to him, however poor and mean,
Was absolutely certain that it never had been done at all -
How popular at dinners must that humourist have been!
Oh the days when some stepfather for the query held a handle out,
The door-mat from the scraper, is it distant very far?
And when no one knew where Moses was when Aaron put the candle out,
And no one had discovered that a door could be a-jar!
But your modern heroes are
In their tastes particular,
And they sneer if you inform them that a door could be a-jar!

In search of quip and quiddity I've sat all day, alone, apart -
And all that I could hit on as a problem was - to find
Analogy between a scrag of mutton and a Bone-a-part,
Which offers slight enjoyment to the speculative mind:
For you cannot call it very good, however good your charity -
It's not the sort of humour that is greeted with a shout -
And I've come to the conclusion that the mine of jocularity,
In present Anno Domini, is worked completely out!
Though the notion you may scout,
I can prove beyond a doubt
That the mine of jocularity is utterly worked out!

Grudge Matches I'd Like to See: Audrey Hepburn vs. Katharine Hepburn

Bloodlust on! Two Hollywood superstars, tired of people thinking they're related just because they use the same last name, decide to face off for an all-out fight to the death. Who wins this battle?

Note: This is a question of who'd win in a fight, not who's a better star (the answer to that is Audrey, but since I don't much like almost any Katharine performance after 1940 or so, I may be unfairly prejudiced).

Betty Friedan vs. Glenn Ford

This is like my fifteenth post about one line from one movie, but the death of Betty Friedan once again got me thinking of my least-favourite movie line of all time, from the movie The Courtship of Eddie's Father. I wrote about this recently in my post about why I like feminist movies and TV shows, but to repeat myself: Dina Merrill tells Glenn Ford that she wants to be defined as an individual, by her own work and accomplishments, instead of defining her life by her relationship to a husband or children; Glenn Ford scoffs: "You'll have to be satisfied with the vote; I don't think it'll ever become a national movement." This line is a perfect combination of several different kinds of wrongness: morally wrong, wrong in the context of the scene, and completely wrong as prognostication.

But what Friedan's death reminded me of is this: The Courtship of Eddie's Father came out early in 1963, meaning it was filmed in 1962. The same year it came out -- probably in the summer -- Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique was published. That means that Ford's line was not only wrong in predicting the future, but it was instantly proven wrong: the movie predicted that feminism would never become a national movement the same year that a book came out that kick-started feminism as a national movement. So it's sort of the highest level of wrongness that one line from a movie can attain.

It's also a reminder (the whole movie is a reminder, actually) of why that book was necessary.

The Pride of Walvis Bay

This isn't related to any particular event, but I just felt like rounding up some links pertaining to some of best kids' comics of all time, the 1950s/early '60s "Little Archie" comics by Bob Bolling. What I wrote about Bolling last year still applies; instead of rehashing the parent comic with younger characters, he created an entirely new and unique world, with characters who were all his own (even if they happened to have the same names as their teenage counterparts). His stories ranged from observational comedy and sentiment to action-adventure and science-fiction.

Anyway, Bolling is still alive, and recently there's been a resurgence of interest in his work, which led to Archie Comics bringing out a collection of his Little Archie work (limited to the action-adventure and sci-fi stories only, though). At the time the collection came out, Newsarama did this interview with Bob Bolling, where he discussed the origin and development of the Little Archie series.

The San Diego Comic-Con did a Little Archie panel last year, in connection with which they did this interview with Bolling, Archie editor Victor Gorelick, and Dexter Taylor. Taylor was the "other" Little Archie writer/artist; in the early Little Archie comics he contributed stories more or less in the style of Bolling (though not as well written or drawn), and he took over the series after Bolling was moved over to other projects. Around that time, Taylor was asked to make the Little Archie comic more similar to the parent title -- incorporating "The Little Archies," dating stories, and so on -- and so if you remember Little Archie as being just an even blander version of regular Archie, you're remembering those issues. (Bolling did get to do a few more one-off Little Archie issues in his own style, though.)

Finally, Scott Shaw of Oddball Comics, one of the biggest Little Archie fans out there, did two weeks' worth of tributes to Little Archie and Bob Bolling in July 2002 (July 22 through 26) February 2004 (scroll down to February 16 through 20), including screen captures from some of Bolling's best stories.

Just as Bolling wrote several different kinds of "Little Archie" stories, he had several different drawing styles depending on the story; for straightforward comedy stories he used a more cartoony style, while for the action-adventure or suspense material he used a different style, and the Mad Doctor Doom stories were something else again.

And I've linked to it before, but there's nothing quite like the story where Betty's cat Caramel (a Bolling creation, like Betty's older sister Polly and several other characters in the Little Archie universe) talks to Betty and Veronica and tells the story of being a stray cat with three kittens, and how she had to give up her children to various humans for adoption. I wish I had the whole story to post, but the final page is pretty heartbreaking.

I'd recommend getting the currently-available collection of Little Archie stories, and tracking down the original issues if you can find them (there's a lot of good stuff that isn't in the collection).

The thumbnail at the top of the post is from Bolling's own favourite Little Archie story, "The Long Walk."

The Oscars Are Over and John Rogers Won

I'm sure other people are linking to it, but this John Rogers post, smacking down a bizarre politicized response to the Academy Award nominations, is very close to attaining best-post-ever status (or should that be "best.post.ever status?").

Zola-icious

DVD Beaver has some screenshots from Criterion's upcoming release of Jean Renoir's La Bête Humaine.. Based on Emile Zola's novel, it turns Zola's determinism (characters are doomed by genetic and environmental forces they can't control) into something resembling the more mystical fatalism of film noir. With its plot elements of murder, adulterous passion and a femme fatale (Simone Simon), it's one of several '30s French movies that helped provide a blueprint for the type of stories we think of as belonging to film noir, just as German movies provided the template for the visual style of noir.

Incidentally, Renoir wanted Simone Simon to follow up her role in this movie by playing Christine in The Rules of the Game; she wasn't available, and her replacement, Nora Gregor, wasn't really up to the challenges of the part. Though this may actually have helped the movie, because the parts of the other characters were built up to de-emphasize the inexperienced Gregor, giving the film its famous ensemble-cast quality; if Simon had been in the film, she would have clearly been the lead character, and the movie would have developed differently.

Lyrics: "Shopping Around" from Wish You Were Here

Some more good classic Broadway lyrics: from the score of Wish You Were Here (1952) by the ever-underrated Harold Rome (Pins and Needles, Fanny, Call Me Mister, I Can Get It For You Wholesale) comes a song for a secondary female character, "Shopping Around." Most songs about looking for Mr. Right are about saving oneself for Mr. Right; this is a bit different -- and expresses what is probably a healthier attitude. It's another nice example of Rome's ability to write lyrics that have the rhythms and inflections of everyday speech.

If you wanna know why I've a roving eye
When another cute guy passes there,
I just wanna try before I buy
The bargains and husbands ready-to-wear.
'Cause a man isn't like an expensive sweater
Or department-store dress on the rack.
If you pick him up and take him home, and then find something better,
Nobody, but nobody, will take him back.
So

I'm shopping around,
Just looking,
Where men are concerned,
I'm just shopping around.
A girl must compare
Men for wear and for tear
Before she buys.
If she wants the best,
Then she just has to test
All kinds of merchandise.
So while I'm still young,
I'm testing,
Don't wanna get stung,
No, sir, not little me.
There's no guarantee
On a bridegroom-to-be,
So if you want the best to be found,
You gotta keep shopping,
Leisurely shopping,
Not buying,
Just shopping around.

You don't buy the first pair of shoes from the clerk,
You don't buy perfume till you spray it.
You don't buy a clock till you're sure it will work,
You don't buy a piano till you play it.
A new vacuum cleaner may be a sensation,
But ladies, always get a free trial demonstration.

So while there's a chance,
I'm sampling,
I'm taking romance
In the smorgasbord way.
From the last organ note,
Love is all table d'hote,
So you must choose the best to be found.
That's why I keep shopping,
Leisurely shopping,
Not buying,
Just shopping around.

Original Screen Played

The Boston Globe reviews a book by critic David Kipen The Schreiber Theory, which argues that the auteur theory is all wet and that we should be paying more attention to the vital role of the screenwriter in film.

This isn't actually a new argument, even in book form; Richard Corliss made the same argument in his book Talking Pictures, where he evaluated the work and style of several prolific Hollywood screenwriters.

This approach to evaluating movies has its positive and negative sides. It's true that the auteur theory puts way too much emphasis on the visual style of a film as opposed to what is in the script, as if the director is most successful when he's working against the script. (The early auteurists had a particular fondness for movies where a director brought a lot of visual flair to a terrible script, like Nicholas Ray did to a movie like Party Girl; it was considered the ultimate triumph of the director's art to make something out of nothing, rather than make a good movie from a good script.) The fact is that most movies pretty much resemble what's in the final script, and most good movies start with good scripts.

The problem with developing an auteur theory of screenwriting is that most screenplays are, in practice, not products of a writer's vision, even the relatively few produced screenplays that are entirely the original creation of one screenwriter. A movie usually has a supervisor, someone who is guiding the way the final product turns out; sometimes it's the director, sometimes it's the producer, and sometimes there's a tug-of-war between the producer and the director. But whoever is in charge is usually going to have an idea of what he wants the movie to be like -- and that means that he is going to want a script that fits his idea of what the movie should be. He's either going to have the screenwriter rewrite the script until it fits his conception, or he'll bring in other writers to get it the way he wants it. The end result is that the writer is not writing to serve his or her own vision, but someone else's; screenwriting is usually done to someone else's specifications.

An obvious example is Casablanca. The man in charge of the movie was the producer, Hal Wallis. He bought an unproduced play, assigned three screenwriters to work on adapting it for the screen (Julius and Philip Epstein and Howard Koch), had them rewrite each other's material, did some rewriting of his own, brought in other, uncredited writers to tweak it. The final script is a mish-mash of many different contributions, but all the contributions were made in the service of what Hal Wallis wanted the movie to be. It makes sense to say that the finished product reflects his vision even if he didn't do most of the actual writing.

Or take Frank Nugent, the former New York Times movie critic who wrote most of John Ford's best post-WWII films (including Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Quiet Man and The Searchers). In a letter to filmmaker/critic Lindsay Anderson, he explained his working relationship with his director (and father-in-law) Ford:

Ford works very, very closely with the writer or writers. . . . Usually a script is written scene by scene, gone over, discussed, rewritten maybe, then okayed. . . . The finished picture is always Ford's, never the writer's.

Obviously the identity of the writer makes a difference -- Nugent did terrific work for Ford, and other screenwriters often didn't do as well. But it's clear that the scripts were written to Ford's specifications, not Nugent's; the writer was not being paid to express his own creative vision, but to help express someone else's.

Are there auteur screenwriters? Sure. Some non-directing, non-producing writers have such a degree of control over their scripts, and such a strong style and creative personality, that the film reflects their vision as much as the director's or producer's. Auteur screenwriters would include Jacques Prévert (Children of Paradise), Paddy Chayefsky, and, before he became a director, Preston Sturges. But for the most part, a screenwriter is a means to an end; he or she is working to carry out someone else's goals, be it the director's the producer's, or the studio's. That's not meant to put down writers, nor to justify the way they're traditionally treated in the film industry (barred from the set, treated as interchangeable), but it's part of the nature of moviemaking.

Da Nomineez

So the Oscar nominees are out. Somewhat noteworthy is the fact that the five nominees for Best Picture are the same as the five nominees for Best Director. This hardly ever happens; usually they'll nominate four directors from nominated pictures, and one director whose film isn't nominated for Best Picture. The weirdest moment came when Driving Miss Daisy won Best Picture even though its director, Bruce Beresford, wasn't even nominated for Best Director, raising the question of how a movie could be the best of the year in spite of the immense handicap of a director who wasn't even among the top five directors.

This would seem to be a good time for renewing my argument that having a "Best Director" award makes no sense and that the Best Picture prize should go jointly to the producer and the director. Given the nature of a director's job on a movie -- supervising the whole production, rather than any single aspect of the production -- it doesn't really work to say that someone could be the best director if he didn't make the best movie.

Catalogue Product

The Digital Bits reports that Warner Home Video, the current leader in old movies on DVD (in part because they own the catalogues of at least three major studios, and in part because of their wisdom in hiring George Feltenstein) will rush a ton of "catalogue product," as it is known, onto the market in 2006. Titles range from the sublimity of a two-disc The Maltese Falcon to the ridiculousness of Marlon Brando in Mutiny on the Bounty. A lot of good titles in there, though a surprising lack of good comedies.

Items of interest include the rest of the Astaire/Rogers films, a "Pre-Code" collection (including Baby Face), and a "Warner Tough Guys" collection, consisting of "tough" movies the studio made when they could no longer make out-and-out glorification-of-gangsterism movies; it includes an old favorite, the gangster comedy A Slight Case of Murder (one of the few good non-animated comedies Warner Brothers ever did).

Also, the item announces the official contents of the John Ford box set; the good news is that there are two John Ford sets, but the bad news is that neither one includes Wagon Master:

There's a new John Wayne/John Ford Collection on the way, which will include The Searchers: 50th Anniversary Two-Disc Special Edition (1956), along with a Stagecoach: Two-Disc Special Edition (1939), Fort Apache (1948), The Long Voyage Home (1940), The Wings of Eagles (1957), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), They Were Expendable (1945) and 3 Godfathers (1948).

There's also The John Ford Collection that will include The Lost Patrol (1934), The Informer (1935), Cheyenne Autumn (1964), Mary of Scotland (1936) and Sergeant Rutledge (1960).

Defam'd

The San Diego Union-Tribune has an article on Mark Lisanti, creator of the Defamer site.

Grudge Matches I'd Like to See: Alfred Hitchcock vs. Rod Serling

Good evening. Tonight's Grudge Match I'd like to see is:

ALFRED HITCHCOCK, a successful film director who became a public figure by hosting a TV anthology series that he produced (Alfred Hitchcock Presents) vs. ROD SERLING, a successful television scriptwriter who became a public figure by hosting a TV anthology series that he produced (The Twilight Zone).

Two icons of irony in mortal combat. Who will be left standing after the inevitable twist ending?

OT: Parallels

Off-topic, but did you realize that from a certain point of view, the entire history of American presidential elections from 1980 to the present can be seen as a repeat of the history of the same country's elections from 1932 to 1968?

Observe:

- A President finds himself weakened by a bad economy, and loses his bid for re-election to a challenger who promises to restore confidence to the nation (Hoover losing to Roosevelt; Carter losing to Reagan)

- The new President proves popular, though his policies are controversial (Roosevelt, Reagan)

- The popular President is succeeded by his Vice-President, who is less popular (Truman, Bush I)

- After years out of the White House, the opposition party finally recaptures the Presidency with a moderate, likable candidate (Eisenhower, Clinton)

- The new President's party loses the Congress in the second year of his presidency (Republicans lost the Congress in 1954; Democrats lost the Congress in 1994)

- After two successful terms, the President is succeeded as a candidate by his Vice-President (Nixon, Gore), running against a callow candidate without a great deal of experience who comes from a powerful and influential family (Kennedy, Bush II). Unable to fully capitalize on the popularity of his predecessor, the Vice-President loses an extremely close race, whose results are hotly disputed (1960, 2000).

- Early into the new presidency, an event occurs that scares the world, brings the nation together, and seems to give the ruling party an obvious advantage on national security, though some argue that the ruling party may not have handled the situation very well (Cuban Missle Crisis; September 11, 2001)

- The ruling party holds onto the Presidency in the next election (1964, 2004).

- A big-spending Texan president (Johnson, Bush II), whose party controls the House and Senate, runs up a big tab and gets the country into a war that becomes highly controversial, with controversy raging over the reasons for the war and over the question of whether it is winnable (Vietnam, Iraq II).

Sure, some things don't match up (the Kennedy assassination has no parallel now, thankfully). But there's a lot of stuff that does match up.

This explains why I'm tradesporting on Al Gore to be President in 2009. Apart from the fact that I think he will run, and win, history just seems to be on the side of the Vice-President who barely lost in a year ending in 0.

Mozart Bashing

For those of you looking for something a little different for the Mozart Year, there's always this interview with Glenn Gould, where he gives some of his infamous thoughts on Mozart ("a composer who developed towards mediocrity").

There's also the great line from the movie Vertigo, where James Stewart is in a sanitarium, and Mozart music is being pumped into his room as "musical therapy." Barbara Bel Geddes ends the scene by telling a doctor:

"You know what, doctor? I don't think Mozart's going to help at all."

And finally, there's the comments of Beethoven on Mozart's operas:

"I could not compose operas like 'Don Giovanni' and 'Figaro;' toward them I feel too great a repugnance. I could never have chosen such subjects; they are too frivolous."

Take that, Wolfgang!

A Bushel of Peckinpah

I wanted to write something about Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country -- the perfect blend of old-fashioned Western and revisionist Western -- but Tom Block's Review says most of what needs to be said.

I will add that while most of Peckinpah's Westerns use the theme of aging cowboys dealing with the death of the old West (and the old-fashioned Western), it's particularly poignant and effective in Ride the High Country because the movie was made at a time when the old movie industry was in a state of virtual collapse. The studio system was broken, but nothing had come along to replace it; studios like MGM (which made High Country) were floundering. Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea were products of the old movie business, where Westerns were plentiful and profitable; by 1962, with the role of the "B" movie having been taken over by television, they were as much of an anachronism in the movie business as Steve Judd and Gil Westrum are in the world of Ride the High Country.

The shooting script is available online, so I can cut-and-paste the best part of the film, the great speech by Edgar Buchanan as a drunken judge: performing a wedding ceremony in a brothel, he unexpectedly delivers a poignant speech about marriage, human nature, and the effects of time:

JUDGE TOLLIVER
We are gathered here in the high
mountains, and in the presence of
this august company, to join together
this man and this woman in
matrimony... Now matrimony is an
honorable estate, instituted, blessed,
and commended and commented on by
almost everybody.
(then to Billy and
Elsa -- gently, simply)
I am not a man of the Cloth, and
this is not a religious ceremony. It
is a Civil marriage. But nonetheless,
it should not be entered into
unadvisedly, but reverently and
soberly... You know, a good marriage
has a kind of simple glory about it.
A good marriage is a rare animal,
hard to find -- almost impossible to
keep...
(stumbling, remembering)
I don't know -- you see... Well,
people change. It's important for
you to know at the beginning that
people change. You see, the real
glory of marriage don't come at the
beginning. It comes later and it's
hard work.

Supe's On

The Digital Bits confirms that Warner Brothers is finally going to have Richard Donner put together his own cut of Superman II. More about that, and the tangled history of that film, in this earlier post.

None of that solves the problem of Margot Kidder and her grating performance as Lois. Nor the mystery of why they used Kidder after Anne Archer made an excellent test for the part. But it'll help to have some of Donner's scenes put back, though part II will always have the drawback of not having an ending (it was supposed to end with the scene of Superman turning back time to save Lois -- which also explained why she forgot Clark was Superman -- but that ending was used for part I instead).

Feel the Mozart Love!

Well, it's Mozart's 250th birthday, which apparently is more significant than his 249th birthday for some reason. This round of "Mozart fever" seems a bit more restrained than the last big Mozart year, 1991 (200th anniversary of his death, as if we're supposed to celebrate the fact that he died young). That year may actually have had the little-noted effect of killing off the classical recording industry: in the middle of the boom in sales caused by the coming of CD, the record companies issued a bazillion new Mozart recordings, most of them instantly-forgettable, and created a glut of classical recordings on the market, none of which could make back their costs. It was all downhill from there for major-label classical recordings. So thank you, Wolfgang, for helping to wreck the recording business.

On a serious note, one thing I think people don't always appreciate about Mozart is that he wasn't some kind of amazing boy genius. Among child-prodigy composers, he was not one of the most impressive by any means; the music he wrote as a boy isn't nearly as good as the work of the youthful Felix Mendelssohn or Erich Wolfgang Korngold. These were true prodigies; Mozart's early music is the work of a talented young musician who knew all the formulas, but it's not music that suggests a great composer in the making. Mozart worked hard, studied, perfected his craft as a composer, and became great.

We're Tiny, We're Stimpy

Animator Jenny Lerew posts something I never thought I'd see: John Kricfalusi sketches for Tiny Toon Adventures. See here and here. It was a freelance assignment he did on an episode called "Who Bopped Bugs Bunny?," where a character called Slap-Happy Stanley (a takeoff on Terrytoons' Stanley the Elephant) kidnaps Bugs Bunny in revenge for losing the Oscar to the rabbit's "Knighty-Knight Bugs." I don't recall whether the version of Stanley actually used in the episode bore a lot of resemblance to Kricfalusi's designs.

Fayard Nicholas

Fayard Nicholas has died at the age of 91. Fayard and his younger brother Harold were The Nicholas Brothers, the most amazing tap-dancing team of all time. Their routines, preserved on film in the several (but not enough) movies they got to appear in, were astonishing; they seemed to defy the laws of physics.

Mark Evanier has some reminiscences of Fayard Nicholas. And here's a 1999 interview with Fayard Nicholas.