Harry-Go-Round » Harry-Go-Round

I Live!

Harry — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 05:56:37 +0000

Horrifying but true: This is only my third Harry-Go-Round blog post of 2009. I have some excuses, none of which are very good. For one thing, I’ve been blogging like a madman at Technologizer, the site that’s been my day job since July of last year. For another, this site was on an ancient version of WordPress which was A) overridden by crippling spam attacks; B) corrupted; and C) more or less impossible to upgrade. (I’ve moved it to a new WordPress setup with a different theme, which is why our look and feel have changed ever so slightly.

I’m still alive and well, and I swear I’m going to try to blog more often here. Starting very shortly: I was fortunate enough to visit the Walt Disney Family Museum on its opening day earlier this week, and want to tell you all about it.

Meanwhile, the one part of this site that’s been at least sort of active has been our chats. They continue, and continue to be fun–please join us at 6pm PT most every Sunday night.

Emru Townsend

Harry — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 06:35:11 +0000

I don’t have any records on this, but I first encountered Emru Townsend about twenty years ago. Twenty years ago almost exactly–the fall of 1988, I believe. We met each other on the online service BIX, and while we didn’t meet in person until many years later, I count our friendship as beginning when we first met online.

Emru and I lived in different cities in different countries (he was from Montreal) and came from different backgrounds, but we had a heck of a lot in common. We both loved animation and comics. We both loved gadgets (especially Amiga computers, which we both owned back then). We both loved words and pictures–both the consumption and the creation thereof. When BIX launched a section to animation, it was therefore no surprise that we both helped to run it. And we continued to happily collaborate, in one way or another, from then on–he wrote for my fanzine, I wrote for his fanzine, and he ended up doing lots of wonderful work for PC World, the magazine and Web site where I worked.

In those good old BIX days, I was in touch with Emru on more or less a continuous basis, and he was such a vivid personality that I felt like I knew him extremely well even though we’d never laid eyes on each other. He was smart, funny, talented, and, above all, a remarkably calm, sensible person. When we finally did meet, when I visited Montreal on business, it felt sort of like a small family reunion with someone I’d never encountered in person and who wasn’t a relative, along with his wife, Vicky. Emru cooked me steak and walked me around town (including a stop at the comic shop where his sister, Tamu, worked), and we sat around and talked, and talked. He was precisely the same person I loved knowing online.

One of the small highlights of my career to date involved a story idea I came up with for PC World called “The Ten Worst Games of All Time.” Several people on staff politely told me that it was it was a marginal idea for an article. I kind of liked it, and assigned it to Emru. He did a bang-up job, and it was very popular. And then I was listening to one of my favorite radio shows, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, and heard it do a segment on the show. I pinged Emru to see if he knew, and he said that he did, and that Wait Wait was a favorite of his, too. Sheer joy.

In recent years, Emru blogged for PC World, and helped us cover the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas each January, so that show turned into another mini-reunion each year. (He often talked about his son, Max.) He was going to attend CES 2008 for us, but shortly before the show, he was feeling poorly and saw a doctor. He soon learned he had leukemia–and that his best chance at beating it would require finding a match for a bone marrow transplant.

He reacted in typical Emru fashion: He and Tamu founded a site called Heal Emru which was in part a platform for trying to find a donor–but it ended up spreading the word about bone marrow donations in general. I know that it will save lives.

Emru got his bone marrow transplant, and blogged about it at Heal Emru, with typical grace and good humor. But it wasn’t enough. He passed away tonight, with his family at his bedside. I’m still trying to process this information, but I feel extremely fortunate to have known him.

More to come…

A Scrappy Sendoff

admin — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 18:15:12 +0000

Monday was my last day at PC World, after an amazing thirteen-and-a-half year ride. My colleagues threw a wonderful party to say goodbye. And among the things they gave me is this amazing drawing by John Cuneo, one of my favorite illustrators. That’s me (with my phone around my neck–I really wear it like that), Scrappy (with GPS handheld), and my Mazda3 with the license plates I have no intention of giving up…

Andrew Leal, Blogger

Harry — Sun, 18 May 2008 01:25:05 +0000

For years, Andrew has been a friend and regular at my Sunday-night chats. I keep telling him he should be blogging. And I’m glad to say he finally listened. Check out Spanish Popeye…

Noble Origins

Harry — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 04:55:51 +0000

While I wasn’t looking, Bob McKinnon’s Stepping Into the Picture: Cartoon Designer Maurice Noble was published by the University of Mississippi Press. As you may know, I interviewed Maurice in 1991 for Animato (the published piece was also titled “Stepping Into the Picture“), and we then became good friends. But during the many happy hours we spent together over the last decade of his life, we spent far more time talking about the current state of animation than Maurice’s long and illustrious career. So I’m looking forward to reading Bob’s book and learning new facts, when my copy from Amazon.com arrives later this week.

In the meantime, though, I’ve read the excerpt of the first chapter that’s available on Amazon. And I believe that Bob McKinnon has one of the most basic possible facts about Maurice Noble’s life wrong–because it doesn’t jibe with what Maurice told me.

On page one of Stepping Into the Picture’s first chapter, McKinnon has Maurice being born on May 1st, 1910 to Almon and Lena Noble. Which was certainly the official version of things, and perhaps the one that Maurice himself believed for most of his life. But sometime in the late 1990s, he told me that his older brother–yes, as he approached his ninetieth birthday, he still had one–had recently informed him that Maurice had been adopted.

Maurice, according to his brother, was kin to the Nobles–but he was the out-of-wedlock offspring of someone else in the family. Back then, that was something that nobody would have wanted to talk about, so hewas taken in by Almon and Lena. It was typical of Maurice that he took this news with poise and good humor–he said that it actually explained why his mother always seemed a little more distant with him than with his siblings. His brother told him all this to get it off his chest while they were both still alive.

Even before he told me he’d learned this, Maurice told me that he didn’t know for sure what day he was born on–but had chosen to commemorate his birth on May 1st. So–combined with McKinnon’s mention of Social Security records that have Maurice being born in 1911, not 1910–it seems reasonable to come to the conclusion that no living person may know much about the exact timing or circumstances of Maurice Noble’s birth.

(Wikipedia maintains that Maurice was born in 1911, which may well be true. But I’m glad that he chose to celebrate his ninetieth birthday in 2000, when he was in astonishingly good health and surrounded by friends, including me, rather than in 2001, when an unsuccessful operation led to his death on May 18th.)

I don’t, by the way, blame Bob McKinnon for not recounting this in Stepping Into the Picture. I know his research for the book dates at least back to the early 1990s–and I presume that Maurice didn’t tell him about the adoption story. Actually, I don’t know how many people Maurice shared the information with at all, though I suspect he told some or all of the Noble Boys about it. (And I don’t think he’d have any problem with it being more widely known now, almost seven years after he left us, which is why I’m sharing it with you in this post.)

If by chance you know more about Maurice’s parentage and birth than I do, I’d love to hear more…

Anyhow, I loved Maurice Noble as a human being, and there aren’t many things in the whole world of animation I love more than his work. So I’m hoping that Stepping Into the Picture is good. And since it apparently doesn’t have much in the way of illustrations, I hope we get a lavish book of Noble artwork someday–at least one other Noble book is in the works, incidentally, and we may need several to cover every aspect of this exceptionally interesting person and artist.

(The photos of Maurice above don’t have anything specific to do with this post, but I thought you’d enjoy them. The top one was taking during his military service, perhaps during his work with Dr. Seuss on Private Snafu cartoons; Maurice proudly displayed it in his home. The bottom one was taken by me in the Summer of 2000, in Los Angeles’s Chinatown, a favorite Noble haunt; it shows a happy, healthy guy who’s as close to being in his prime than you could possibly imagine a ninety-year-old–or, maybe, an eighty-nine-year-old–being.)

It’s January 31st

Harry — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 06:27:00 +0000

And I’m quietly celebrating a certain holiday–so sue me…

Chat Tonight!

Harry — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 17:38:39 +0000

For the first time in what seems like months, I’m here tonight for our “weekly” chat at 6pm PT. I hope you”ll be, too…

Mr. Vick, Meet Miss Boop

Harry — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 05:36:17 +0000

Don’t you think Betty and Grampy pretty much figured out the proper response to all instances of cruelty to animals?

This is a…Test!

Harry — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 18:07:02 +0000

If this shows up, I can blog from my phone, at least sorta…

San Francisco Sights

Harry — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 05:39:03 +0000

I have a new cell phone with a decent camera, and I’m wearing it on a strap around my neck–which means that whenever I see somethng interesting, I can take a picture for posterity.

Mr. Magoo lives! He’s in the window of a clothing store (at a legendary corner: Haight-Ashbury), inexplicably but happily modeling a child’s dress:

If this building was here in 1920–and it looks like it probably was–it’s where Jay Ward’s family lived at the time of his birth:

(Side note: The building next door to this one houses, among other things, a Disney Store…)