Black and white in colour: the enigma of Jingles

One of the strangest things I've ever seen. This purports to be a Christmas cartoon, and has a Christmas beginning sort of stuck on, but after that it's just bad animation. But it's fascinatingly bad. It doesn't seem to have a label on it. It's one of those no-name things, like that atrocious Wizard of Oz cartoon that no one can trace. 

I think this must have been a dry run for something, because it announces itself as A Musical Sketch in Color. Below the title is a reference to Mendelssohn's Spring Song - even less Christmassy! It's possible this was GOING to be a color cartoon, as it mentions something called Brewster Color, but it wasn't quite there yet, so "whoever" slapped a different label on it and hustled it out as a Christmas thing. It's shorter than most cartoons of the era, which were closer to eight minutes. 

This has elements of Fleischer in that material objects constantly come to life, usually in the most florid manner possible. A train turns into a caterpillar, which turns into a violin-playing butterfly. A bug plays a spiderweb like a harp to impress his ladybug love. It's bad Disney, or worse than that, a badly-smudged copy of a copy of a Fleischer cartoon that wasn't quite finished yet, but needed to be released because the bank was about to foreclose.

I actually like bad animation, in moderation at least. I've watched this a lot of times because it's so odd, so incomprehensible. I can't find any backstory on it at all, except a couple of names that lead me nowhere. Not exactly giants in the field of animation.

BUT WAIT! Suddenly, there's more.

If you ditch the Jingles, which never belonged there in the first place, and keep sifting through YouTube, you'll see that this was, indeed, a color cartoon by someone named Cy Young. The proper title was Mendelssohn's Spring Song. Young must have been a bona fide animator, though I can't find much about him. This cartoon appeared in several different places on YouTube, but  under the Spring Song title which did not match the only title I knew (the nonsensical Jingles). The main colors in Brewster Color appear to be red and green, so maybe the Christmas connection works after all.

But look what else! This, from an old undated website written by an animation scholar:

Mendelssohn's Spring Song-1931- A "Jingles" cartoon (only one made) animated by (Sy) Cy Young and a handful of art students. Young went on to head the special Effects department at Walt Disney Studios, doing some amazing work on Snow White, Pinocchio, Dumbo and Bambi. Reportedly, this is the film that gave Disney the idea to hire Young. Animated in New York, it was the first animation experience for Lillian Freedman, who was the first woman to work as an animator in the Studio system, at Fleischers. Brewster color was a two-color process that was patented in 1931 but only used in a handful of cartoons. (perhaps this film was a test?) Young moved back to New York after the strike at Disneys, working on commercials. Shamus Culhane told a friend of mine (Les Brooks) that Cy changed his name to "SY" to protect his ethnicity (sy, after all, could be Sylvester!). Cy commited suicide in 1959. Transferred from the only known print.

I am still confused by "A Jingles cartoon (only one made)", implying a series. But what kind of series: Christmas cartoons? If not, why is the theme music Jingle Bells? Some prints have two title pages, which is even more nonsensical. I wonder if this was ever shown anywhere. Or was it a sort of audition for Disney (which obviously worked)?

The tie-in with Disney and Fleischer interests me, because to me this just doesn't have the quality or charm of either studio. But Disney must have seen something in it, perhaps something he wanted and needed. Is it possible all those twittery florid nature cartoons sprang from this? Did he even invent the genre? 

At any rate, Cy Young had a sad end. Though this snippet didn't say so, he was Chinese-American and no doubt felt the sting and limitations of racism. It's yet another anomaly that he changed his name from Cy to Sy. How would that disguise his Asian heritage? Cy isn't Chinese at all.

But this, at least, is something to remember him by.

My life as a dog: the evolution of Betty Boop

I have always had mixed feelings about Betty Boop. How can I not? Her gigantic head wobbles on top of an impossibly tiny sexpot body, barely clothed: a wisp of a dress with no straps and back, a garter, fetish-calibre high heels. She speaks in a squeaky little-girl voice. And yet, there's something bold about her, something almost intrepid, as she gets herself into one pickle after another.

What shocks some people is the realization that Betty did not spring from Max Fleischer's pen fully-formed. She was a peripheral character in her first cartoon, Dizzy Dishes (1930) - well, actually it wasn't even HER in the cartoon (above). It was a grotesque, unnamed sort of dog-woman with a black nose and fleshy, pendulous ears, whose face sometimes popped out in a sort of weird canine snout. Betty wasn't even Betty then - she wasn't anything. She was named only after several false starts.

In the bizarre Barnacle Bill (later to be remade, much more effectively, in a Popeye cartoon called Beware of Barnacle Bill), her name is Nancy Lee. She still has the flappy, doggy ears and black nose, not to mention a sort of double-jointed quality. Betty/Nancy at this point is nothing more than a caricature - of what, we don't know.

I love the ability of inanimate objects to do weird things in Fleischer cartoons. What's the name for that? Does anybody know? But it's cool. Walls and sofas and things have a will of their own.

Let's face it, in these early cartoons, Betty is a real dog. The weird exaggerated glamour and sexpot persona is still miles away. Maybe it's that black nose - ewwww!

I think you see what I mean by grotesque - the rolling, popping eyes, cactus-spine lashes, spasmodic body language. The way those fleshy ears flap and dangle creeps me out. They look like ear lobes with gigantism or severe edema. In Mysterious Mose, she's a little less grotesque - it's a kind of middle stage in her evolution, but she still has a long way to go.

Towards the end of her life as a dog, the animators (here in Bimbo's Initiation) began to normalize Betty and nudge her towards humanness. But it took a full two years to figure out who Betty was supposed to be, from her weird table-dance in 1930 to leaning out the window (and losing her top) in her fifteenth outing, Any Rags (1932):

Note the changes, which are actually pretty radical. Her eyes have been downsized, with eye-shadowed lids. The eyebrows have been raised and made more delicate. Somewhere along the line Betty has acquired a hair stylist. I think the animators might have sat down for a conference before making this one. OK, hoop earings from now on! No more floppy flesh (though it's interesting how they felt they had to retain that familiar dangle). From then on she was Betty Boop, world's only cartoon sexpot, unchallenged until Jessica Rabbit came along some 50 years later.

And here are a few of my animations, based on the few frames available to me. These are from the infamous Dizzy Dishes, in which Betty had nowhere to go but up.

It amazes me how changing the order of the frames creates an entirely different effect: a Betty who is depressed, sorrowful, lonely, even terrified.

But lest we forget what Betty is really all about, here's a classic scene from the very first Popeye cartoon (which was in reality a Betty Boop cartoon - he "piggybacked" on her well-established fame). In fact, some claim that this scene explains exactly why the Hays code came into existence.

Blow me down (please)!

Old, brown, crumbling things always interest me. (Don't take that too literally.) I am a great Popeye fan, I mean the original grotty old Max Fleischer cartoons of the 1930s. By wartime, it had all started to fall apart as Popeye (along with Donald Duck and most other well-known animated characters) began to spew propaganda for Our Side. But I had always had some dim awareness that he was based on a real person.

The cartoon Popeye, the comic strip I mean, was created by someone named Segar, and it had vastly more characters and was far weirder than the cartoon. The Sea Hag and Alice the Goon come to mind, as does someone named Ham Gravy. But when it came to the screen, the character was subtly altered. Ugly as Popeye was in the cartoons, he was uglier in the comic strip.

THIS Popeye does resemble that fellow, Frank Fiegel of Chester, though I haven't been able to find out much about him. (Stay tuned.)

Meantime, here are two early Popeye moments that stick in my head:

From that ultimate authority on everything, Wikipedia:

"Local folklore in Chester, Illinois, Segar's hometown, claims that Popeye is based on Frank "Rocky" Fiegel, a man who was handy with his fists. Fiegel was born on January 27, 1868. He lived as a bachelor his entire life. According to local Popeye historian Michael Brooks, Segar regularly sent money to Fiegel."

From that other site bearing Ultimate Knowledge, Cracked:

Find-a-Grave "A stone for me bones, heh-heh, a post for me ghost."

Fiegel was something of a local legend in Chester while Segar was growing up: He was known for always being prepared to dish out an ass whooping and taking on several opponents at the same time. He even acted exactly like Popeye -- locals claim that children would startle him while he napped and he would "jump out of his chair, arms flailing, ready for a fight." His official cause of death was "warships grew out of his biceps."

POST-POP. I just had one of those wretched experiences where most of my post just disappeared. I clicked on Revert to Draft and everything. But it's gone now, a few hundred words at least, and photographs and gifs.

Not sure whether it's worth trying to piece it back together, but I'd rather not lose a couple of hours like that. But do I want to lose ANOTHER couple of hours doing a salvage job?

But I must carry on.

As a kid, I particularly loved this Paramount logo at the end. It only appeared in the first half-dozen or so Popeyes, so it was something of a collector's item. (That desk calendar in the background - I still use those, though it is getting harder and harder to find refills. At Staples, they looked at me like I was crazy. I finally had to break down and order one online from Acco, and it still isn't here. Canada Post is extremely slow.)

When my own kids were pre-teens, they loved the old Popeyes (for some reason). They came on every day at 5:30 a.m., and I taped them. I even edited them so there were no repeats. The game we played was this: to try to freeze the tape on the inkwell, but I don't know if any of us did it. Or maybe once.

Those were rare times, maybe the best times of my life, though of course I didn't realize it until much later. Until, maybe, now. We were all so crazy about Popeye that we once acted out all the parts in Beware of Barnacle Bill. I had transcribed the entire libretto from the cartoon and made it into a script.

Is this dull? Sorry. It's dull for me, too. Have you ever had to piece together a whole post that disappeared? I'm so angry my hands are shaking, and at the same time I am extremely bored. 

Anyway, what's next in this now-pretty-dull story? At this point I had six hours of Popeye on a single videotape. But DVDs were just coming in, and I so wanted my precious cartoons in a more convenient format. So I mailed the tape off to one of those places that claimed to transcribe VHS to DVD for a very modest price.

I never saw the tape again. I felt bad about this for years.

Fast-forward, or maybe slow-forward, to 2007, when I was meandering around the Zellers store. The late, lost, lamented Zellers. And I saw something I could hardly believe:

YES! It was a DVD boxed set of SIXTY Popeye cartoons, in chronological order from the first one in 1933. They were in amazing condition, remastered and all that stuff, but not mucked-with. Much of it, particularly the beautifully-drawn silver-grey backgrounds, I was seeing for the first time. Then there was the amazing Fleischer technique of using a miniature set on a turntable to create a 3D effect. I've had this explained to me several times, but I still don't get it techically. To my understanding, the moving animation cels were filmed superimposed over the live-action background set, which was turning. Beats me how they did it.

I soon got my hands on the next two collections, but I noticed all the cartoons were in black and white. I was sure the ones I'd watched with my kids had been in colour. (The childhood ones, who knew - everything was in black and white back then.)

It took me a while to untwist this story. It turns out Ted Turner did it. He ruined these things, or almost did, by changing them into sickly pastel colours, pink and yellow and minty-green. I wonder whatever happened to the "colorization" movement, and why Ted Turner now heads up that so-called bunch of film purists, Turner Classic Movies. Why was he forgiven? Money talks, I guess. What a thug the man is. Anyway, this mistake was undone at some point. 

Probably lots of intrigue here, but I don't care about it because I have somehow managed to retrieve MOST of my lost post, if in flat, dull form. I hate blogging sometimes, but I hate losing posts even more.

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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