16mm Castle Terry Boxes

Courtesy of Bob's cleaning purge comes these 16mm Castle Terry boxes. I love the colors in this one! Above Kiko can be seen punching out his own name. He was known to be self-destructive in this way.

Man, that Kiko drawing got some mileage. It first appeared in a series of promotional posters issued in 1937 on the subject of 'Red Hot Music' - probably the best Kiko.

This one is a bit tattered however Farmer Al's 16mm obsession led him to a life of near sensory deprivation. He was not known to emerge from his sooty bunker, wherein was stored the likes of 'Roman Punch', 'Club Sandwich' and the early masterpiece 'Monkey Meat', except for only the most basic (and depraved) of human functions. A later autopsy confirmed Farmer Alfalfa's actual age to be 23.

You mean I could have OWNED 'Holland Days'? Farmer Alfalfa's purchasing of liquor for minors was something he'd ultimately be arrested for in May, 1936. The trial dominated entertainment headlines until Mickey Rooney went berserk with a hacksaw in November of that year.

Nice copy of "I Ain't Got Nobody"

This has been up for a year but I just stumbled over it: a clear copy of one of the best Fleischer Screen Songs: I Ain't Got Nobody (1932). Cheggitout!

Bowsky & Tendlar in 1934

1936 gag cartoon of 'Prof' Bowsky from The Animated News.

After a long delay I am back with my post on the pairing of (at least by the credits) Willard Bowsky and Dave Tendlar in 1934. Records do not exist of the crews at that time but our first glimpse of the crew contingent occur in The Animated News issues starting in 1935. 'King of the Mardis Gras', for example, lists the Tendlar crew as: Tendlar, Graham Place, Bill Sturm, Nick Tafuri, Harold Walker and Eli Brucker. The same year the 'Preview' for 'Dizzy Divers' lists the Bowsky crew as: Bowsky, Nick Tafuri, Harold Walker, Bill Sturm, Tex Hastings, George Germanetti & Graham Place. So, as you can see, people were getting shuffled around.

Figuring out exactly who is who in a Fleischer cartoon is the sort of jigsaw fellow cartoon clubhouse pal (and Fleischer fanatic) Bob Jaques has spent a lifetime trying to unravel. The trail gets spottier the earlier you go into the 30's. Crew records either don't exist or I've never seen 'em. Naturally, this post like everything on this blog is my own personal take on the subject. After all the link that carries you here is 'journeytojohnsbrain' isn't it? Hey! Wipe your feet before you come in!

Gag cartoon of Dave Tendlar by John Stanley, May '35

I'm not sure why I keep landing on 1934 as a year of interest. From the output of films that year there is a sense of coalescing of talent. The raunchy approach that had marked so many of the best Fleischer cartoons the years previous was, for the most part, left behind while the quality of the animation improved if moved a smidgeon more towards the clinical. In fact a number of gag cartoons in the Animated News the year following (1935) make reference to "Keeping it Clean". While 1934 is generally regarded as the year the code caught up with Betty Boop it was also the year Popeye's popularity skyrocketed into the stratosphere. So, 1934 was a transition year for Fleischer Studios.

1935 gag cartoon by an inbetweener.

Didn't start out that way though. "Red Hot Mamma" (released in February) really evokes the earlier period of Fleischer cartoons. Metamorphosis, hallucination and moral ambivalence (hell is a place where even a horny devil can't catch a break) predominate as does the 'Mystery Cave' convention of earlier masterpieces "The Old Man of the Mountain" and "Snow White". This is true blue Betty: saucy, tough and swingin' in an environment spawned of the supernatural. 

Scene from 'Red Hot Mamma'

The gag of the tails connecting with electrical bolts must have been interesting enough to be used twice: here and again with the electric eels in "Betty Boop's Lifeguard"

Hot stuff!

Bowsky and Tendlar's next collaboration, the Screen Song "Lazy Bones" (released in April) is a little harder to assess. Most of the issue with this particular cartoon stems from the awkward animation of the horses and the prosaic nature in which the race is presented. The problem of Fleischer horses is often used to scewer the animation as primitive but 1934 was still pretty early and none of the Disney cartoons of that year featured animation of a realistic horse. By the time of 'Alladin & his Wonderful Lamp' perhaps they should have figured it out but, as Greg Ford accurately points out in his audio commentary for 'Alladin', Fleischer cartoons are a 'different animal altogether'. 'Lazy Bones' is no where near Fleischers' best but, as duds go, it's still a pretty good cartoon-testimate to the level of craftsmanship that existed there. It was the second film, after the better 'Boo Boo Theme Song', to feature Borrah Minivetch and His Harmonica Rascals.  Their live action sections were edited out of both films in the extent 16mm versions I've been able to see.

"Realistic" animation and the Fleischer style did not make good bedfellows. The same thing happens in the animation that bookends the later "Time For Love". The result is off putting but "Lazy Bones" has some great stuff worth holding out for!

"Aw, just two minutes mooore" It's always good to hear the voice of Popeye inexplicably emanate from a different character.

Those put off by the weirdly animated horses at the beginning miss this wonderful 'slice-of-life' moment at the end. Times is tough fer Lazybones.

January 1935 review of 'Lazybones' from 'Box Office Magazine'

Lazy Bones was probably the first official affiliation between Hoagy Carmichael and Fleischer Studios. A snippet of his famous 'Stardust' can be heard in the Screen Song 'By The Light of the Silvery Moon' and, of course, he composed the songs for Mr. Bug.

Bowsky and Tendlar's next collaboration was a Popeye cartoon: "Shoein' Hosses" (released in June). I hadn't seen this in a while and my memory of it often reverts backs to that horrible 16mm version we all had to suffer through for years. We were damn lucky to get that Popeye DVD set! Again, 'Shoein' Hosses' could be seen as a simple by-the-numbers fight story between Popeye and Bluto. The blacksmith shop certainly sets up the kind of environs we'd see later in, not surprisingly, the Tendlar directed 'Anvil Chorus Girl'. Looking at 'Shoein' Hosses' again I was struck though by it's incredible simplicity (and clarity!) of staging, timing and posing. Man, that burned out 16mm must have really distracted me from this great cartoon! Even though the subject may not be that exotic, this film is a master class in so many things that are missing from contemporary animated fare.

This simple action explains everything you need to know about Popeye's motivation in 'Shoein' Hosses'. No needless exposition of how much he has fallen in love with Olive, why or that he is even in love at all. It's not important - he wants to impress Olive.

But hey, nobody's perfect ... as evidenced by this perspective shot that makes the horse look 4 times the size of Popeye! Either way the scene is hillarious. Horse racing (and the gambling connected) was a favorite pastime of the Fleischer animators and factor into two cartoons Bowsky and Tendlar did in '34. One wonders if the choice of subject related to their interest in the sport?

When Bowsky and Tendlar returned to the Betty Boop series a change feels like it has taken place. The lechery so evident in 'Red Hot Mamma' seems absent: replaced by an ineffectual Lifeguard called 'Fearless Fred' who had appeared in the first Fleischer cartoon to be released in 1934: the Doc Crandall and Tom Johnson directed 'She Wronged Him Right'. Still, 1934 was a transitional year and 'Betty Boop's Lifeguard' (released in July) probably has the sexiest Betty animation of any of her cartoons as she cavorts as a mermaid. Thanks to it's annoying song ("It's Fweeeeeeeedie") it's not an easy cartoon to get through in spite of it's gorgeous animation. Patient observers however will note the film ends with a very Crandall-like dragon, a la 'Snow White'. The animation in general seems to shift towards that rawer Crandall style at the end too leading this observer to wonder if any of that rotating Crandall crew participated in the animation of 'Betty Boop's Lifeguard'.

EFX animation was one of the things that showed a marked improvement in 1934. Compare the rolling surf that opens 'Betty Boop's Lifeguard' with that of the earlier Tendlar cartoon "Is My Palm Red" to see what I mean.

(hubba) 

A Crandall like beast.

The Crandall connection feels, if anything, stronger in the next cartoon credited to Bowsky and  Tendlar: "Shiver Me Timbers" released only a few weeks after 'Betty Boop's Lifeguard' indicating that, unless they had two going simultaneously, it must have been warehoused awaiting release. "Shiver Me Timbers" feels like an early 30's Fleischer cartoon. The animation is little funkier than Betty Boop's Lifeguard but contains all the hallmarks of that earlier hullucinatory approach in films like 'Snow White'. It gets into a darker place though, then the films I've mentioned above, and the anxiety laden nightmare-like plot (where were Popeye, Wimpy and Olive coming from at the beginning? Why are they so indifferent to the scary metamorphosis occurring all around the haunted ship?) led many a tyke to hide behind the family sofa. Doesn't get much better than that.

Possibly the most ominous beginning in cartoon history!

Pure surrealism. Olive & Wimpy are scared but I'd be running for my life at this point!

This great panic drawing of Wimpy is only on-screen for a few frames. I've reproduced here. It's an amazing scene.

Nobody strokes Popeye and gets away with it!

The last film of 1934 credited to Bowskyand Tendlar, "The Little Dutch Mill" (released in October) is a strange mix of old, new and foreign by way of the Disney Silly Symphonies series. The cute boy, and duck of the piece seem like intruders and their gingerbread village way outside NY City limits but there is still a lot of great stuff happening in 'Little Dutch Mill'. Lack of sincerity is sometimes leveled at the Color Classics but LDM's 'rehabilitation not retribution' moral as interpreted by the Fleischer animators (he is rehabilitated but also emasculated!) seems as sincere a reaction as you could ever get from a bunch of macho he-man NY animators. What really distinguishes 'Little Dutch Mill' is the chance we have to see something like an early Fleischer cartoon as it would have been interpreted in color - a valuable window! The Color Classics aren't for everyone but I have no doubt that a 35mm print of the Cinecolor (red & green) "Little Dutch Mill" would delight the eyes much in the way the WHV 'Popeye Meets Sinbad' exposed layers of detail unseen by anybody in decades.

The scene that opens 'Little Dutch Mill' shows a strong Art Deco influence. I feel that Fleischers interpreted this style to animation better than any other studio of the 30's.

Sure, it seems like a strange universe for the Fleischers to be inhabiting but there's fun stuff happening in this cartoon.

A wonderfully expressive pose of 'The Miser' looking here almost beatnik-like.

Intruders.

Of all the films I've mentioned there are probably only two that could be considered bonified classics: Red Hot Momma & Shiver Me Timbers. Still, for those who can suffer through what may seem like shortcomings of the others there is great stuff to be seen. By 1935 Tendlar was leading a group of his own many of whom, as I mentioned at the start of this post, were also working for Bowsky. One wonders if there was any animosity between them over that? The cartoons they did together in 1934 skirt the mundane at times but, in my opinion, succeed though sheer drawing skill, ingenuity and graphic might. You will always be surprised by something you didn't expect to happen in a Fleischer cartoon!

An interesting epilog to this post is this cartoon which appeared in the November '35 issue of The Animated News. I've heard tell he was out on the coast to visit relatives. Did he make the studio rounds? I've never heard anything about it. In fact, I'm not even sure the Coast is the California coast! At any rate Bowsky returned to Fleischers where he stayed until joining the army in WW2.

Electric Eels!

I had forgotten about this turn for the wonderfully surreal in the gorgeous (but admittedly trite) 'Betty Boop's Lifegaurd' (Willard Bowsky, Dave Tendlar 1934). Are they light bulbs or glowing eyes looking at you!? More of my thoughts on the Bowsky/Tendlar collaboration of 1934 in a future post...

Mr. Bug at the Cinematheque

I'm leaving the blog to go dormant for a while, as I'm sure some of you have already noticed, but didn't feel right about not saying anything about a recent screening in my area of Mr. Bug Goes To Town which played here last Sunday.

Crispen Glover and Charlie Chaplin on the same bill? What kind of crazy town is this?

The Pacific Cinematheque is a small art-house theater in downtown Vancouver. The screen is not too large but large enough to approximate the scale of a 35mm. The audience drew mostly young animation students and a few families and their kids.

This was the first time I had ever seen it with Paramount Logos and original titles. This re-issue titled version above has been the only way I've ever been able to see it for years! For those curious the 'Mr. Bug Goes to Town' titles are the identical font to the one above. However the truck-in starts in the right spot!

If you look at the title card that follows 'HOPPITY GOES TO TOWN' above there's a bit of a jump. The camera shot was restored in this print of 'Mr. Bug Goes To Town' beginning properly in a deeper blue part of the star field before panning off to the planet below. The soundtrack starts with the Paramount Logo which was new for me as was the logo itself: almost a Puppetoon version-wish I had snapped a photo!

I'm not sure if it was just because I was hearing the soundtrack through a theater's sound system but the sound on this was probably the best I've ever heard. Fleischer soundtracks occasionally come off as a little thin or distorted. This could be due to the transfer but the AMC version which I'm using to illustrate this post suffers from this ... only very slightly ... but I noticed the difference with last Sunday's 'Mr. Bug'. It really sounded great - very clear and full!

According to Jerry Beck, the film is a recent restoration from the UCLA Film & Television Archive struck from the negative they have there. It screened in LA in recent months and Jerry was able to tip off the Cinemateque's program director where to find it. Of the versions I know of (which now number 4 - one of which is 16mm) this Japanese Print is as close an approximation of what was shown ... though not quite as dark. If anybody can clarify any further drop me a comment!

The AMC version is also missing a line: Mr. Bumbles reply to Smack & Swat's "It's us, boss". The line was present in the UCLA print.

Of course one always hopes that some day this and some of the other goodies, like the newly restored Raven, which are housed at UCLA will get green-lit for a still Paramount controlled Fleischer DVD retrospective. I know they have good materials on the Color Classics, a series poorly represented (in beat, dark & faded 16mm prints) in the DVD market for years, but that's the subject of another rage ... er I mean post.

JOYEUX NOEL

From the December 1935 issue of the Fleischer Animated News (click to enlarge). Happy Holidays & thanks for visiting my brain in 2010!!

John Kirby in 'Shakespearian Spinach'?

Well, the video is still out so this week so I thought I might offer up what is still available to me: audio - and a mystery musical passage from the 1940 Max Fleischer Cartoon: "Shakespearean Spinach".

The cartoon, 'Shakespearean Spinach', was released in January 1940: well into Fleischer Studios' Miami stay. From what I have read the move was advantageous in some ways more than others. While the lush climate must have been overwhelming for bunch of urbanites outside of New York for the first time there still was the matter of how the heck to conduct business when so far away from it. It must have been a crazy amount of telegrams securing long distance all the various services required for a cartoon film studio to operate - especially in the wild and wooly 30's! As I understand it, one of these problems was music. You weren't likely to find the top musical talent as simply in Miami as you would have in New York in the 30's. This is why, as I understand it, the music (or parts of it) were farmed out to New York and Los Angeles. This long distance approach could have meant the increased likelihood of being short on music when production of a cartoon was finishing. Was this going to stop production? Heck no!

Four years prior to the Fleischer move there began a new strip of nightclubs located on NY's 52nd street. Among them were: Leon & Eddie's, The Famous Door, Kelly's Stables & others. The idea was to have a street of clubs which offered different varieties of jazz music: from dixieland to swing and, ultimately, bebop. It was an area where musicians as different in style as Art Tatum and Eddie Condon could be heard directly across the street from each other. It was at 52nd Street's Onyx Club that John Kirby and his 'Orchestra' (actually a sextet) made it's home. The Kirby band (at the time known under the monicker "Biggest Little Band In The World") forged it's way in the jazz world with light, but incredibly tight, ensemble swing arrangements of popular classical melodies. The practice of 'swingin' the classics' was generally despised by serious music critics but the public ate it up. Besides there was no royalty to pay to record such tunes! Soon everything was getting the swing treatment: from Bizet's Carmen to Dvorak's Humoresque to Flotow's Martha.

Which brings us back to the mysterious music heard in the 'third act' of Shakesperean Spinach. Oddly enough it was around 1941 that ASCAP pulled all the songs it owned from the radio necessitating the use of such royalty free songs. Whether this impacted Fleischer Studios (or if the exact chronology lines up) I don't know. What I do know is that at every time I watch 'Shakespearean Spinach' I am quite certain I am hearing Martha as performed by The John Kirby Orchestra. Or rather a 78 of the John Kirby Orchestra as a distinct change in the compression of the soundtrack is clearly audible. The practice of using 78 rpm records to 'sweeten' or otherwise fill out soundtracks certainly wasn't new to animation. At least one of Iwerks' Willie Whopper cartoons made use of 78 records by Jelly Roll Morton but it was unusual by 1940 standards. Back in New York the Fleischers could have hired John Kirby for a soundtrack (as they had with Cab Calloway & Louis Armstrong years earlier) but once in Miami, virtually Siberia as far as the Music Industry was concerned, were they backed into using a record? I can find no recording of Martha by John Kirby in my collection so I can't be sure. I think I have all the commercial records through 1941 ... but they also recorded for Radio. For those interested here is the link to 'Shakespearean Spinach".

The passage I'm referring to occurs roughly between the following points (below). You will have to let it completely load before you can scroll to the correct point.

(4:50)

(6:30)

Is it John Kirby?

Charlie Shavers & John Kirby pose before the Onyx 'O'.

I can't give definitive proof but here is John Kirby performing 'Bounce of the Sugar Plum Fairy' and, again, at the end of this link performing a movement from Beethoven's 7th Symphony. Take a listen and maybe you can solve a mystery.