Scary little Christmas: The Snowman

Now this one is truly terrifying. This snowman morphs into something bordering on the Satanic. The accompanying text has a warning: "This ain't Frosty." It's not for kids under the age of twelve.

Is it plagiarism if you steal from yourself?

I could (and do) watch old cartoons all day long. Now that I have YouTube, I am in fact good for nothing else. But it's an interesting thing to look at the really old ones, like these two. They represent the first entries in a very long series by Warner Bros:  Merrie Melodies. (Perhaps you've heard of them.)

The first one, Lady Play Your Mandolin, features a drunk horse, and the second, You Don't Know What You're Doin' (which some YouTube wag called Justin Trudeau's theme song) a drunk dog who must have had a genetic mixup with the horse or something. Or else the animators just got lazy.

I mean! This is Cartoon One and Cartoon Two of the immortal, incomparable Merrie Melodies series, and they're repeating themselves in the second cartoon. The shot of the character screaming at the camera is pretty much identical, except the horse is white and the dog is black. Even the dragon-ish looking thing is pretty similar.

They say Disney stole from everyone - I wrote about that once, and I may steal from myself and re-run it because I don't remember much about it. But on the second cartoon? I think they should've quit while they were ahead.

Actually, it was this documentary I was thinking about. (I can't believe I found it again! I had no idea of the title or when it came out or anything, but if you keep Googling, anything is possible.) It was shown once on CBC, years and years ago, and never again - in French, with English subtitles. There's no English in this version at all, so I didn't get very far. But hey, if you're French. . . It's an eye-opening look at just how much Uncle Wally got away with.

Olive's beauty ritual

Hippo meltdown

 

What a dog!

Took me a while to find, or re-find this. I kept remembering a Betty Boop cartoon that somehow wasn't a Betty Boop cartoon. And this one isn't. A. Betty. Boop. Cartoon.

Surely it is not, because not only is she NOT called Betty Boop in this cartoon - she isn't even the same species.

Most afficionados of early animation know that BB started life as a dog. And if they don't, they're idiots and should go stand in the corner. It's not obvious that she evolved from a canine, of course, unless you've watched Max Fleischer cartoons from 1930 - 1931, in which a strange, flapper-esque character with long pendulous ears trots around on high heels talking in a squeaky, seductive voice.

A DOG.

Nobody knew what to call her when she made her debut in a cartoon called Dizzy Dishes. Though some people were heard to call, "HELP".

In this first incarnation, "Betty" (unnamed) dances on the table, flipping up her skirt and puffing out her face as if it's retractable, an animal snout or muzzle. She is both seductive and unbearable, her eyes like multi-legged insects. There's no sound here, but it's just as well.

This cartoon is typical of the nightmarish atmosphere of the Fleischerscape, one of those things where you just. . . can't. . . wake. . . up. The other character, which looks like a cross between a bug, a dog and Felix the Cat, becomes disturbingly aroused by this - thing.

I could never quite square those floppy ears with that huge, semi-human head teetering on an absurdly tiny human body. They seem stuck-on somehow, and eventually, like the back legs of a whale, they would recede into uselessness, turning into a pair of hoop earrings to maintain character consistency.  Doggiform, without being dogged. 

But the one I didn't remember, or almost remembered, or forgot to remember - I couldn't figure out why I couldn't find it, and certainly the title meant nothing to me. I only remembered somebody ringing a doorbell, Betty leaning out a second-story window, and a whole lot of furniture dancing around.

I found it almost by accident in a Betty Boop compilation, one of those two-hour YouTube jobbies, only this one was in chronological order. I knew it had to be EB (Early Betty) because I had a gif of her with floppy long ears.

Not only are her ears  monstrously large, she acts like a maniac, mugging and flopping her head around. The only thing that signals Betty is her substantial cleavage. Cleavage on a dog, though.

So flipping through the compilation, the two-hour compilation, the two-hour LONG compilation of Betty Boop cartoons, I realized the one I wanted would have to be near the beginning. But it didn't jibe somehow, because the one that SEEMED to be the right one was called Barnacle Bill. Oh hell. That was a Popeye cartoon, wasn't it? This couldn't be the same one. Or the same title. Or whatever.

It actually was, though, or is. This character, the bug or dog or whoever-he-is, Binky or Blinky or Blanky or Blonky, is actually Barnacle Bill the Sailor, and he and "Betty" go through the routine. Except! She isn't even called Betty in this:

Nancy Lee, one of Betty's many aliases (along with Fifi, Frou-Frou and Arf-Arf).

So this character - aha, his name is Bimbo, though that makes no sense to me - having been swallowed up by Nancy's wall, is subjected to her seductive overtures. When the sofa begins to speak and Bimbo becomes airborne, things get really strange.

So now the secret is revealed: Betty was hideously ugly at the start of her career. She continued to look pretty strange, but at this point there was nowhere to go but up.

Post-it Note: I found the lyrics of the version of Barnacle Bill I remember from the old Popeye cartoon, but when removing the formatting of the thing, THIS happened: so I thought I'd leave it the way it is.

As featured in the 1935 Popeye cartoon "Beware Of Barnacle Bill", with the voices of William Costello as Popeye, William Pennell as Bluto (playing Barnacle Bill), and Mae Questel as Olive Oyl: OLIVE: Popeye, dear, we cannot wed Popeye, dear, we cannot wed Popeye, dear, we cannot wed I love another sailor POPEYE: Who's the guy that won your heart OLIVE: It's Barnacle Bill the Sailor POPEYE: Who's the guy that thinks he's smart OLIVE: It's Barnacle Bill the Sailor POPEYE: Why, that false heart and flattering tongue He courts them all, both old and young He courts them all, but marries none Your Barnacle Bill the Sailor OLIVE: But he's strong and handsome, too But he's strong and handsome, too But he's strong and handsome, too My Barnacle Bill the Sailor POPEYE: I'll twist his toes and squeeze the nose Of Barnacle Bill the Sailor I'll mop the place with his false face The Barnacle Bill the Sailor I'll grab him by his dirty neck And when I'm through he'll be a wreck I'll sweep and smear and swab the deck With Barnacle Bill the Sailor OLIVE: Who's that knocking at my door Who's that knocking at my door Who's that knocking at my door Tell the fair young maiden BARNACLE BILL: It's only me from over the sea It's Barnacle Bill the Sailor I've come to take you away with me I'm Barnacle Bill the Sailor Hurry before you get me sore I'll rare and tear and rant and roar Hurry before I bust in the door It's Barnacle Bill the Sailor OLIVE: Here I come to let you in Here I come to let you in Here I come to let you in My Barnacle Bill the Sailor (Barnacle Bill and Popeye begin to fight) BILL: No one ever challenged me POPEYE: Says Barnacle Bill the Sailor BILL: I'm the terror of the sea POPEYE: Says Barnacle Bill the Sailor BILL: A fee and a fi and a fo and a fum Yo heave ho and a bottle of rum ?????? sailor, your day is done Oh, says Barnacle Bill the Sailor (Popeye eats his spinach and defeats Bill) OLIVE: Popeye, dear, I love you best Popeye, dear, I love you best Popeye, dear, I love you best When will we get married POPEYE: I've changed me mind so you can wed Your Barnacle Bill the Sailor You're nothing more than cabbage head Ev'ry dame's a selfish cat They only turn and leave ya flat Just the way ya did to that Poor Barnacle Bill the Sailor Goodbye!

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Bugs in Love

Joys of the season: creepy old Santa cartoons

As everyone is aware, now is the season of love, laughter and creepy old cartoons. The best ones come from the 1930s, early '30s if possible: there are examples from the '20s, but to my taste they're a bit primitive. Who knows whether this one, Toyland Premier (a direct ripoff of Disney's Mickey's Premier, full of moving celebrity caricatures) was in color originally, or if someone filled in this gory and somehow voluptuous red.

The point is, my favorite YouTube-to-gif site, Y2gif, has gone bust, or at least catawampus. It won't do anything for me. If you enter the info, the web page code, as you're supposed to, this little thingie swirls and swirls forever, until it "times out". The fault is theirs, so the page tells us. So fuck 'em. I CANNOT wait any longer to make holiday gifs!

The search was on for an alternate, and fortunately there were several, because the first one I tried was so shitty it made me want to scream. The videos could be barely 5 minutes, the gifs were no more than 5 seconds, and it took at least 10 minutes for your poorly-made gif to be finished. So it was with a great gasp of astonishment that I found Gifsforum.com: not only did it take much longer videos, upwards of 15 minutes or maybe longer, it would also produce a large, high-quality video of UP TO 15 SECONDS  in a very short space of time.

Thus the dancing clowns, moving in a seemingly endless loop. I'm wondering now whether to remake all of my Harold gifs, but the thought of it is exhausting. Harold makes my heart ache these days, like a lost love or someone who has gone overseas to fight. You don't know if you'll ever see him again, and you never did get as close to him as you wanted. You got close enough to notice he always smelled good, and that's a rare trait in a man. Nothing special or fancy, just a tinge of tweed or saddle leather or even fresh hay.

I yearn because even though the hard part is supposed to be over, it ain't. If no one is interested in my work-of-the-heart, something is going to die inside me forever, and I know it. So I keep the home fires burning.

And just look at these gifs! Juicy, long gifs. I compare here the same logo on 2 different programs:

I think Gifsforum does something to these pictures, sharpens or crops them or something, because they lack that muddy black-barred quality. My favorite Harold reaction, the incredible 15 seconds while sitting in a chair 20 stories high, giffed up beautifully with no problems. Gifsforum also has a lot of alternate settings for size, speed and even color effects, though I have no idea what they mean. (They'll also run backwards.) Y2gif had only one real advantage: a feature that made them much harder to set up, but often produced the best effect. You could literally set the video for hundredths of a second, so that there would be no extraneous material to mar the little gems, the micro-videos these things truly are.

I've never been a filmmaker before, and this is likely as close as I will get. But goddamn it! These things are fun. I can spend hours doodling and diddling with them. I know some people can't stand them, and most of them seem to last less than a second so that the effect is stupid and jerky. Now that they're getting longer, who knows. All that needs to happen now is that someone will post Why Worry? in parts, so I can take Part 3 and excerpt the final, sizzling-hot kiss at the end, the only truly passionate Harold Lloyd kiss  in his repertoire (and rare in the entire silent comedy ouevre). Given that Harold had just started his first serious extramarital affair with his co-star, I think this kiss speaks volumes about where both of them were emotionally and sexually. Imagine having to take and retake, over and over, the way he seizes on her, catlike, like a great lion grasping a lioness by the back of her neck while they mate.

Enough of this, I've got to go trim the eggnog or whatever. I have seriously mixed feelings about this time of year, can be as fatuous as a puppy-dog when the lights start to ring-ting-tingle (or is that the bells?). Then I just sag into this morose mood that seems to have no end. My dreams seem to be slowly washing downhill, eroding like a sand cliff eaten by waves.

Never mind, everybody,  Santa's coming, let's all cheer up!

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Christmas Cartoons from the Third Reich

I searched far and wide, long and hard for this special Xmas video. Took maybe 2 minutes. There are numerous weird, antiquated cartoons out there that express, supposedly, the spirit of the season, but this is the strangest: it's a Santa's Workshop kind-of-thing with a decidedly military flavour. This was from the early '30s and I don't think the Nazis had really happened yet, so this must have been a kind of foreshadowing.

From that disturbingly hearty beer-hall anthem at the beginning to the precision-march of the toys at the end, the whole thing is an exercise in conformity and obedience.  I was completely squicked out by Santa's final song, which reminds me of nothing more than that festive Yuletide carol,Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles. As with most cartoons and  film portrayals of Santa, he is terrifying, with an evil whiskey-voice that sounds like the guy who did Peg Leg Pete or whoever he was,  that big ugly guy with the villainous laugh. 

No wonder little kids' first encounter with Santa Claus seems to uniformly inspire terror and screams, until their parents force them to sit on this bizarre character's bum-hot lap and listen through a synthetic beard to his wet flabby lips pronouncing lies about what they'll get this year.  All that "well, we'll see" bullshit.

Who IS this monster who envelops them in the scent of sweaty polyester? As with almost all childhood mysteries, no one explains it to them. They have no idea who or what Santa is. It's a kind of initiation, almost a Christmas circumcision in which the cost of entry into the Spirit of the Season is bleeding and pain.

Kids want to believe, they really do, though it must really fly in the face of logic in these days of high technology. It was hard enough when I was a kid and technology had reached its apogee with our giant Webcor reel-to-reel tape recorder in which the tapes constantly broke and had to be spliced with scotch tape. We could at least record the sound tracks of our favorite  cartoons and movies and play them over, and over, and over again until our parents screamed, the tape snapped and the reel went flap-flap-flap-flap-flapping around. 

So now how do they do it? How do they maintain such a transparent fiction? Aren't they frightened by some strange man dressed in a red fur costume breaking into their house? At some point, don't they realize that their parents have been lying to them?

My daughter, a TV news reporter who at 8 years old already had a gift for getting to the real story, one day asked me in a sort of "come on, tell me" voice, "There isn't really a Santa Claus, is there?"

So what was I to say? At eight, she wasn't even disillusioned. She just wanted to wring the truth out of me. 

"Well. . . ummm. . . Christmas is a lot more magical and fun if you pretend there's a. . . "

"I thought so." She looked more satisfied than dismayed, her suspicions confirmed. Then she looked at me again with that let's-get-the-real-story expression.

"What about the Easter Bunny?"

Ye gods! Was there anything left of childhood? Were there no harmless illusions we could maintain? Not in the face of an 8-year-old future TV news reporter.  It wasn't long until I overheard her talking to one of her little friends, sharing her newfound knowledge about how they'd all been blatantly deceived for years.

"Uh, Shannon. .. "

"WHAT? I'm just setting her straight here. I'm doing her a favor."

We never got to the Tooth Fairy, but I am sure by then she had figured it out on her own.

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Do animal hybrids exist? Ask Betty Boop

You can always tell I've run out of inspiration when I begin to post totally bizarre gifs.(Never mind that it's every day.) I seem to be obsessed with these tiny captured cartoons that repeat, and repeat, and repeat, without even having to click "play".

Betty Boop is still emblematic of the 1920s flapper/sexpot character, her pre-Code outfit leaving nothing to the imagination. Her dress is about the size of a postage stamp, and no one knew how the front stayed up (Max Fleischer's iron will, I guess - but I can imagine what the stag reel was like). She often flipped up her microscopic skirt to reveal garters, thigh, and (let's face it) ass.

But her first appearance in a bizarre thing called Dizzy Dishes begs the question: did anyone know who or what Betty Boop was supposed to be? She wasn't even named here, and maybe originally she was just a one-off. Certainly, she was so grotesque that no one would ever want to see her (or hear her - that screechy chalkboard voice) again.

Nevertheless, she was significantly remodelled in time for a return engagement, the mental-institution eyes toned down, the spiky head gradually getting bigger and bigger until it barely balanced on her slutty little body. Huge heads on tiny bodies remind us of dolls, or babies - an instinctive response. I think men secretly lusted after her.

Then came the Hollywood Code as enforced by the Hays Office, a repressive legion of decency that took all the fun out of the movies. Betty's hemline plunged, her neckline shot up, and she began to look increasingly matronly. Here she even pulls her apron down over her knees. Betty! What happened to the little sex fiend who flipped her skirt up in the animal cafe?

Later I think she sold war bonds or something, wearing plaid woolen skirts and brown Oxfords.

The fact is, Betty was originally a dog. Either that, or a human-dog hybrid (a phenomenon I explored in a previous post: FOUND: Cujo's Rogue DNA!). A hideous one, too, flirting shamelessly with that whatever-it-is who pushes his erection-like heart back into his chest. Those aren't earrings you see dangling from her head: they're EARS. Her snout pops in and out as she offers grotesque kisses and flaunts her canine cleavage. Just what were the animators trying to tell us here: that Betty was a bitch?

The odd thing is, her humanizing (or humanization) happened in stages. The flappy ears remained even as her face began to look more normal.  Eventually she graduated to long pendulous earrings that still look a lot like those fleshy flaps.

Perhaps some minute trace of dog genes lingered. I would hate to see her children.

(Post-post: I just noticed, in that third gif, that she isn't wearing any panties.)

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Christmas Cartoons from the Third Reich

I searched far and wide, long and hard for this special Xmas video. Took maybe 2 minutes. There are numerous weird, antiquated cartoons out there that express, supposedly, the spirit of the season, but this is the strangest: it's a Santa's Workshop kind-of-thing with a decidedly military flavour. This was from the early '30s and I don't think the Nazis had really happened yet, so this must have been a kind of foreshadowing.

From that disturbingly hearty beer-hall anthem at the beginning to the precision-march of the toys at the end, the whole thing is an exercise in conformity and obedience.  I was completely squicked out by Santa's final song, which reminds me of nothing more than that festive Yuletide carol, Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles. As with most cartoons and  film portrayals of Santa, he is terrifying, with an evil whiskey-voice that sounds like the guy who did Peg Leg Pete or whoever he was,  that big ugly guy with the villainous laugh.

No wonder little kids' first encounter with Santa Claus seems to uniformly inspire terror and screams, until their parents force them to sit on this bizarre character's bum-hot lap and listen through a synthetic beard to his wet flabby lips pronouncing lies about what they'll get this year.  All that "well, we'll see" bullshit.

Who IS this monster who envelops them in the scent of sweaty polyester? As with almost all childhood mysteries, no one explains it to them. They have no idea who or what Santa is. It's a kind of initiation, almost a Christmas circumcision in which the cost of entry into the Spirit of the Season is bleeding and pain.

Kids want to believe, they really do, though it must really fly in the face of logic in these days of high technology. It was hard enough when I was a kid and technology had reached its apogee with our giant Webcor reel-to-reel tape recorder in which the tapes constantly broke and had to be spliced with scotch tape. We could at least record the sound tracks of our favorite  cartoons and movies and play them over, and over, and over again until our parents screamed, the tape snapped and the reel went flap-flap-flap-flap-flapping around.

So now how do they do it? How do they maintain such a transparent fiction? Aren't they frightened by some strange man dressed in a red fur costume breaking into their house? At some point, don't they realize that their parents have been lying to them?

 

My daughter, a TV news reporter who at 8 years old already had a gift for getting to the real story, one day asked me in a sort of "come on, tell me" voice, "There isn't really a Santa Claus, is there?"

So what was I to say? At eight, she wasn't even disillusioned. She just wanted to wring the truth out of me.

"Well. . . ummm. . . Christmas is a lot more magical and fun if you pretend there's a. . . "

"I thought so." She looked more satisfied than dismayed, her suspicions confirmed. Then she looked at me again with that let's-get-the-real-story expression.

"What about the Easter Bunny?"

Ye gods! Was there anything left of childhood? Were there no harmless illusions we could maintain? Not in the face of an 8-year-old future TV news reporter.  It wasn't long until I overheard her talking to one of her little friends, sharing her newfound knowledge about how they'd all been blatantly deceived for years.

"Uh, Shannon. .. "

"WHAT? I'm just setting her straight here. I'm doing her a favor."

We never got to the Tooth Fairy, but I am sure by then she had figured it out on her own.

I defy you to count all the stars in this

I usually hate these things, these old cartoons that feature caricatures of stars from Long Ago. I was a little shocked how many of them I knew, cuzzadafact that they ARE from so long ago: this was 1933, remember! Then howcum I recognized Ed Wynn and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and so many others that I associated with the '40s or '50s or even later? Harold Lloyd is in there, too, in a couple of places. One of the earliest Popeye cartoons has Mahatma Gandhi in it, but I don't think he's in this one. Anyway, this is my Friday Surprise.