Author: Harry McCracken

More on the Des Moines Peanuts Artist

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Back in 2005, I posted an online reprint of a very, very unusual Des Moines Register and Tribune supplement, in which Charlie Brown and Lucy pay a visit to that newspaper’s headquarters. It was probably one of the most-read items I’ve ever published here–among other things, I got Boing Boinged.

In the original post, I guessed that the artist, Bob Davenport, was a staff artist at the paper. Now his nephew–also a Bob Davenport, by the way–has posted a comment on my original piece confirming my guess and providing some details about the man behind the supplement and his other work.

Columbian Art

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I’ve blogged before about the amazing yearbooks that Columbia published in the 1930s to promote its slates of films. They go for big bucks at auction, but last year I was able to acquire the 1935 edition for a semi-reasonable price. I did so, of course, because it included a promo for His Scrappiness. But the whole darn thing is kind of amazing.

I don’t know most of the films promoted in its pages, and can’t say whether they were any good. I have no idea who painted these spreads, or whether they were used only in the presumably small-circulation yearbook. But I do know that this is some of the most spectacular promotional art I’ve ever seen.

Whatever happened to the art of movie ads, anyhow?

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You Never Know What’ll Show Up

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Mike Barrier has a fascinating, fascinatingly-illustrated piece on recently-discovered story sketches by Webb Smith for the landmark flypaper sequence in Playful Pluto. Or maybe they’re visual notes by that sequence’s animator, Norm Ferguson. Or possibly they’re by someone else.

Like Mike, I hope the collective wisdom of smart animation scholars can come to a definitive conclusion about who did these sketches–but even if it can’t, they’re a major find.

HareTV

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Visit AOL Video–which is, of course, owned by the company that also owns Bugs Bunny and cohorts–and you’ll find an odd mishmosh of cartoons that seem to skew towards the less memorable Warner Bros. efforts, and which, confusingly, includes links to Warner cartoons on other sites, such as YouTube, that have already been deleted. Perhaps because they violated Time Warner copyrights. Which leaves one wondering why an AOL service linked to them in the first place.

But you can’t gripe too much about a service that lets you watch this, legally and for free, albeit in somewhat blocky form…

Ancient Harry-Go-Round

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Here, for no particular reason other than that I just redesigned around here (and courtesy of Archive.org) is a glimpse of an early version of this site. I think it’s the second major iteration, from early 2000. Note that my background color hasn’t changed in all that time…

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