The Wizard of Odd: Elizabeth's great invention

The Picnic Panic: deeply surreal

I have always found this old cartoon gorgeously surreal. The deeply-saturated colors, the shining pastel faces of the little girls, the hokey music and chorus - not to mention the unlikely characters - lend it a certain unrealistic charm. Of course animation is an obsession with me - I even try my hand at it myself sometimes, with disastrous results. 

I kept wondering WHAT the opening song reminded me of - it drove me crazy! - until it occurred to me: By a Waterfall, Busby Berkeley's incredible aquatic number in Footlight Parade, one of my all-time favorite movies. It's also a little like Wedding of the Painted Doll from Broadway Melody, which I will also post below. The fragment of animation looks very similar to the first cartoon, but as usual with YouTube, it's just a bleeding chunk. I can't trace it back to anything.

Special bonus video! Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell sing Pettin' in the Park, which has a similar dut-da dut-da dut-da dut-da DA-DAA rhythm to it. They also sang an awkward version of By a Waterfall, but I couldn't find it anywhere. You think Elizabeth Holmes has a deep voice? Wait until you hear Ruby Keeler. She can no more sing than she can dance, and yet she was a huge star. Maybe it was those puppy-dog eyes.

And just one more! This is one of my favorite numbers from Footlight Parade, Honeymoon Hotel. Even by today's standards, it's pretty racy, though in a cheerful, lighthearted way that makes it a lot more fun and less "illicit" (though it's all about forbidden sexual rendezvous(es) and how nobody feels any guilt about them at all).

As always, it's a good idea to watch these on YouTube rather than these little squares (which actually serve as thumbnails that play). Click on the bottom right. You can also go full-screen - click on full-screen! - but it might turn out kind of blurry 'cause it's old-fashioned low-rez.)

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.

I found a big mistake!

We all love Rocky and Bullwinkle, right? No? Okay. That was just a rhetorical question. I have no idea if you like them or not, or even know who they are. But I found something interesting on a YouTube video featuring the running gag which appeared on the show every week: "Hey, Rocky! Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!" In every case, Bullwinkle the magician pulls the head of a wild animal out of the hat and responds with some quip like, "No doubt about it. I'd better get another hat." (A different wild animal each time.) Then Rocky says, "And now for something we hope you'll really like!" This gif is the full non-audio version of the segment, about ten seconds long.

j

But if you keep watching it, it becomes apparent that at about the six-second mark, something very strange happens. Hint: keep your eye on the lower left-hand corner.

One of the main characters. . . disappears. Rocky vanishes. He just isn't there any more.

Slowing this down, it looks even more bizarre. What were the animators thinking? 

Then witness Bullwinkle making his usual smart remark to an empty stage! There's a great big wall of nothing where Rocky should be. He's looking down and talking to nobody.

This is followed by Rocky's cheery announcement, "And now here's something we hope you'll really like!" It's likely this little bit of animation was reused in all these segments to save money.

But notice that it bears little or no resemblance to the original set. The colours are more saturated, the curtains look strange - sort of gathered into folds - and there's a big black "something" above Rocky's head. There was some sort of emblem or crest on the curtains behind Bullwinkle's head that appeared to have a B on it. This, whatever it is, looks nothing like that. It looks like they got some three-year-old to draw their backgrounds for them with a black crayon. This was some sort of cut-rate animation sweat shop. We didn't see just how amateurish and ugly all this was, because we all loved Rocky and Bullwinkle so much.

Well, I did.

Oopsy. I was wrong! This is the Rocky announcement at the end of one of the other magician bits, and it's totally different. The curtains are green, blocky, no gathers, and have some sort of thing on them like an upside-down hot water bottle (if you know what THAT is). But pay attention to Rocky, and you'll see they have repeated the animation from the first one verbatim, except for little details like the tail. In the first one, it looks like an animated slug with no features on it at all. But the second one - pay attention to his feet, how they lurch back and forth in a way that is horribly cheap and unnatural. In fact, I can almost see the bottom line of the curtains showing through his little feet. 

Disney it ain't. Not even Rankin-Bass. And yet, these guys were wildly popular in their day, in the style of early '60s animation. We were much less critical as kids.

Oh happy day!

            

Squid Inc.

How to have a beach body

Conjunction Junction, what's your function?

I have to tell you this.

I remember these things from, oh, probably my late teens (when, by the way, I was already married). But they did not die. They went on and on.

Not only did my kids watch Schoolhouse Rock videos (they were called cartoons then) in the early '80s, my GRANDKIDS were fairly recently subjected to them in school. I couldn't believe it - budget restraints, or what?

They couldn't believe it when I began to sing along with them, "Conjunction Junction, what's your function?" and "Anyplace that you can go, and anything that you can know/You know they're nouns/You know they're nouns". (For some reason I keep thinking of the Statue of Liberty part.)

These aren't particularly good, but they're nostalgic, and this one is nicely restored by somebody-or-other. It comes from one of those ubiquitous Facebook nostalgia pages that I increasingly spend my time on, wanting to distract myself from the impending Armageddon which will surely come if that evil prick in the White House isn't impeached within a year.

"I took a ferry to the Statue of Liberty. . . "

Yes, there really IS a Pogo cartoon!

This is fascinating! It's a kind of sketch or early draft by Walt Kelly for a Pogo animated cartoon. This had already been done, abominably, by Chuck Jones, who somehow got the rights from Kelly. The two cartooning styles didn't mix, and the results were characterizations that were just "off" in every conceivable way. June Foray voiced Pogo in a sugary little-girl voice, a cross between Rocky the Flying Squirrel and those screechy princesses she did on Fractured Fairy Tales. The animation was similarly out of whack. These creatures just weren't from Okefenokee Swamp, or anywhere else for that matter.

I don't hate Jones. Some of his stuff is brilliant, and the Grinch (the original) will never be equalled. But somehow or other, this thing didn't gel.  Kelly frankly hated the result, which was aired once and shelved, but which you can still see (of course!) on YouTube.

This, though, is a treasure, a stumble-upon while dredging through an underground maze of Pogo-files. Though this isn't the final animation and only involves a few frames per second, it still has a sense of movement and grace. And it's Pogo-ish. Kelly does ALL the voices himself, which I think is a clever dig at Jones and the atrocious choices he made in voice characterizations.

This little fragment has an environmental message which was far ahead of its time.  Kelly only lived to be 60 due to grossly-neglected diabetes which caused him to go blind and lose a leg. Considering all this, these preliminary sketches are remarkable. They're some of the last creations of a dying man.

Think of how it would have been! Just picture it. It would have been like being right inside those Sunday colour comics with all our quirky old friends. But it was never to be.

It's the Nietzsche Family Circus: a cute Nietzsche saying for every family occasion!

Nietzsche Family Circus

Randomized pairings of Family Circus cartoons and Friedrich Nietzsche quotes.

One must have a good memory to be able to keep the promises one makes.

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© 2016 Ron Belmarch. All rights reversed.

NOTE. The random-Nietzsche-quotes thingammy doesn't work here (this is just an example), but if you click on the following link, it'll take you to the actual site where you can find the actual quote-generating thingammy. I think. Or maybe I'll just copy n' paste a few?

http://www.nietzschefamilycircus.com/

Nietzsche Family Circus

Randomized pairings of Family Circus cartoons and Friedrich Nietzsche quotes.

No one lies so boldly as the man who is indignant.

There is in general good reason to suppose that in several respects the gods could all benefit from instruction by us human beings. We humans are - more humane

Undeserved praise causes more pangs of conscience later than undeserved blame, but probably only for this reason, that our power of judgment is more completely exposed by being over praised than by being unjustly underestimated.

      

The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.

When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory.     

Love is blind; friendship closes its eyes.      

SHORTCUT. If you click on "Share" (under the blue "Next" button), it should take you to the quote-generator-thingie.  Just try it and see!

"A horse is a horse, of course, of course" - Friedrich Nietzsche

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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