The shocking revelation that made me spit out my tea

Were we-all talking about the Wizard of Oz? Am I obsessed with this topic right now? A few posts ago I shared something from my childhood: a YouTube video of a low-budget, extremely weird cartoon from a series called Tales of the Wizard of Oz. I noticed a few people had posted comments along the lines of "I remember watching these in Ontario in 1961!" and "why do all the characters have Canadian accents?"


They do, but you have to listen carefully for a "hoose" or "aboot" (or "hewwwse," which is REALLY southern Ontarion, in fact right out of Scotland). I can even hear them trying to replicate the Bostonian/Bronxian accents of the actors from the 1939 movie: "If I only had a haaaaaahhhht"; "Puddem uhhhhhp."  But the "hewwwse" still pops through.

I had some idea that these were produced by a Canadian impresario named Budge Crawley, but the more digging I did, the stranger it got. Familiar names like Bernard Cowan kept cropping up (he was a jack-of-all trades announcer: "This is Bernard Cowan speaking", a hangover from radio when nobody knew who the fuck was talking).


But this! This was pay dirt, gold in my hand. Whenever I find an old scanned newspaper clipping, I have to try to blow it up (figuratively speaking). I was able to section up this yellowed old thing from the Montreal Gazette, circa 1961, so that it's almost legible.

I don't know about you, but the smudgy black and white photos that ran along with this piece remind me of that surreal silent movie Metropolis with all the identical workers trudging along in lockstep. Positively Orwellian. At best the Crawley animation factory must have been a sweatshop with slave wages, and not even Disney looking down his cheap-ass nose at you and getting his cigarette-ash all over your Day-Glo-colored cell of the witch's groovy castle.

The piece itself ain't much: it's mostly a nuts-and-bolts account of a "new" style of animation (read: cheaper than Disney's). But right in the middle of the dull grey prose came a surprise that nearly blew me out of my chair. Oh OK, it didn't do that, but I nevertheless did  a spit-take with my Red Rose tea.

Not too exciting, is it? But look at the names of the voice actors! Along with such then-notables as Alfie Scopp, Paul Kligman and Pegi Loder, we see none other than. . .

Scotty before he was Scotty! No wonder those characters said "hewwwse". I have no idea which voice impressions were James Doohan's: not the witch, surely. Not Rusty the Tin Man, nor the Wizard, who sounded like W. C. Fields. He must have voiced the gabbledy-gabbledy sound of the munchkins, or done guest spots as the dragon or Rubber Man.

The secrets of Oz never end.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

The best TV theme song of all time!

No doubt about it. Superchicken has it all over Quick Draw McGraw and Deputy Dawg and even Cool McCool for great theme songs, summing up all that was super-cool about that era in animation.

"That" era being the '60s, which immediately gives away my age. Good thing I don't give a rip about it.

It's not just the lightning-fast delivery, it's the split-second montage of images - not equalled or even approached until The Big Bang Theory - that makes this theme song memorable.

I found a clip of Jerry Seinfeld singing it once. I can't, but it's still fun to watch.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Cartoons from HELL

This is better than the Flintstones!

Where Disney stole his stuff

I saw a documentary on TV years ago that talked about European influences on Walt Disney's animation. To make a long story short, he stole everything. These ghostly riders are from Murnau's 1926 masterpiece, Faust. Compare and contrast to Night on Bald Mountain from Fantasia: except that these guys are a lot scarier. How did they do this, I wonder? Special effects were all manual then, but surprisingly creepy. Those horses, Jesus! (It took me years and years to track this clip down. I still can't find the documentary anywhere. I think it was originally in French.)

In the garden of good and evil

As usual, this started out as something else: I got thinking of a documentary film I saw years and years ago, in French and overdubbed with English narration - I think it was called Once Upon a Time - all about the European influences on Disney's animation. In other words, how much he stole from other sources: other animators, literature, music, etc. etc. And never more so than in Fantasia, his high-toned, high-falutin' animation of "classical" music. This was the kind of movie that kids squirmed through, bored, or scared (the dinosaurs in Rite of Spring; the scary creatures, ghosts and skeletal horsemen in Night on Bald Mountain).

I tried to find the original documentary, came up empty (it barely exists on DVD, and only in Europe and only in French. I shall have to wait.) Then I thought about Night on Bald Mountain, one of the most celebrated pieces from Fantasia, and how many images Disney "borrowed" from Murnau's creepy classic from 1926, Faust.

The hideous horsement (whom I saw on TV many years before, an isolated clip that only made sense to me 25 years later); the big scary guy wit' da wings, and lots of other stuff. But I didn't want to post a 9-minute clip from Fantasia, so then I got watching the Ave Maria that follows after: try as I might, I can't diss this, as the animation is so utterly otherworldly. Yes, Disney is strutting his animated stuff, saying, look, have you ever seen animation like this? No. And we never will again.

But THEN I found this rendition of Ave Maria by Barbara Bonney, and I have to say it is the finest I have ever heard. I heard her sing Peer Gynt many years ago (in fact I still have a recording of the complete work, with Norwegian dialogue) and loved her voice, but I have to say I never cultivated her properly, so it's good to hear this.

The visuals in this are crummy, but that makes you shut your eyes and really listen. THIS kind of good really could defeat Faust's evil forces.

(Sorry this came out in such awkward order. The video kept disappearing or half-appearing or otherwise getting screwed up, so it's under the post A pool of stillness: Barbara Bonney's Ave Maria.

Betty Boop Cartoon Banned For Drug Use 1934

This has to rate as the strangest cartoon I've ever seen. What were these guys smoking?