Time for some Floppy!
Best rendition ever of Marshmallow World (not including Darlene Love’s version, obviously):
Meeting of the Minds
Ladies and gents, I give you Scrappy Mintz and his Three Stooges…
Con Job
I’m in San Diego for Comic-Con–and tweeting some of my impressions at my Harry_Go_Round Twitter feed.
I’ll be around for chat tonight–but a bit late. Feel free to have fun without me.
Hey There, It’s a Yogi Bear-Themed Adhesive
Lemme get this straight–zombie-eyed Hanna-Barbera characters (including a miscolored Top Cat and a miscolored, weirdly-garbed Huck Hound are marching towards Disneyland. Along with a kid in an ill-fitting T-shirt. This is the sort of thing that could only happen in an ad for paste.
(Reprinted without permission from Richie Rich #39, November 1965.)
What if Scrappy Had Lived?
I thought I had all the home-movie boxes that featured Scrappy, but I was wrong–I picked up this one today. I’m not sure what decade it hails from, but it features a nicely modernized Scrappy and Oopy–looking a little as they might have appeared if they’d made it into the Tashlin Columbia years or even the UPA era.
(The cartoon inside, by the way, is a Krazy Kat–Railroad Rhythm.)
Unlike Ed Sullivan…
…Topo Gigio is still alive and kicking–or at least apparently operating this pizzeria in Benidorm, Spain .
Maybe It’s Hetty Hoop…
They love Betty Boop in Guadalest, Spain, which I visited yesterday–or at least the gift shops were rife with Betty stuff. But I’m suspicious about this particular T-shirt…
Shamus in the New York Times
I was pleased to see a story on my friend Shamus Culhane, by Michael Cieply, in The New York Times. It’s on a new scholarly article by Tom Klein on Shamus’s 1940s Lantz cartoons, and particularly on the modern-art like experiments in a few of the films, such as Woody Dines Out and The Loose Nut.
The tone of the article is a bit odd: It makes it sound as if Klein uncovered Shamus secretly inserting subliminal messages into the films so clever that they went unnoticed for almost seventy years. But if you’ve read Shamus’s autobiography, Talking Animals and Other People–and if you haven’t, you really ought to do so right this very moment–he dwells on the fact that he got extremely experimental and artsy with the Lantz cartoons. And the modern-art “mini-films” that Klein writes about, while brief, aren’t subliminal. In fact, they’re quite striking and look nothing like anything anyone else was doing in Hollywood animation at the time.
Moviegoers in the forties might not have paid attention. But cartoon buffs who revisit these films today know that Shamus brought a highbrow approach to what would otherwise have been pretty mundane shorts.
And I still can’t figure out why the article segues into a discussion of caricatures of real people in recent Disney animated features, such as a cameo by Charles Solomon in Fantasia 2000.
Tom Klein’s article isn’t available for free on the Web as far as I know, but it’s possible to purchase it as a downloadable PDF. It’s excellent.