Festival of Bad Animation, Part Zero: Worse than Bad

More, more, we need to know MORE about Paddy the Pelican!

Incredibly, there is a Wikipedia entry for this thing, so it must have existed. One YouTube version said it was shown as part of a bad animation festival at Comic Con (a. k. a. ComiCon, Comimicoon, and Goddamn Commie Bastard). 

The Adventures of Paddy the Pelican was an animated television series that debuted in children's local stations in Chicago in 1950s. It is exceedingly rare, but has gained some fame for appearing on Jerry Beck's "Worst Cartoons Ever." On the DVD, he states that he has not found any evidence that this particular animated adaptation was aired on TV, although there is evidence that the Paddy the Pelican character began in 1950 as a local TV puppet show on Chicago's WENR-TV. Paddy's adventures were presented in comic strip drawings done by Sam Singer.This show was scheduled to appear on the ABC network in the fall of 1951; Singer had also started producing a newspaper, Paddy Pelican Junior Journal. The animated episodes currently in existence all have copyright dates of 1954.

The show is notable and infamous for its shoddy pencil-sketch artwork, reused animation, rambling and apparently improvised voiceovers, muffled and poorly synchronized soundtrack, and general low-budget problems. The only music is a few chords played on an organ, although the title card is accompanied by a man making noises apparently intended to sound like a pelican squawking.

Singer, who worked for Disney and other Hollywood animation studios, also produced a television Uncle Mistletoe local children's television show, based on the Marshall Field's character of the same name, as well as other early animated shows.

I thought Marshall Fields was a department store, and I dooooooo not like the sound of Uncle Mistletoe, who reminds me of one of Santa's evil henchmen. As usual, there is the claim that he "worked for Disney": maybe he was his bookie or something, or the go-fer. At any rate, absolutely no animation was used in the production of this cartoon.

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Festival of Bad Animation, Part 1: Don't Eat the Mushrooms in Oz

What a strange labyrinth is YouTube. I often find stuff I haven't seen since I was preverbal. It strikes me very strangely now. Perhaps cartoons were my first language.

This one, though, Jesus Christ, who let this out of the bag? And WHAT is it, anyway - why can't  I find any information on it? It isn't just the bizarre non-animation, it's the disjointedness of it in general, the way songs inexplicably burst forth out of nowhere. And the creepiness, probably unintentional. It gives me the impression of an outline or rough draft, perhaps a trial balloon for some ambitious project involving actual animation. But even that would have to make a modicum of sense. This is just a truncated chunk of story, starting in the middle and ending a little further along in the middle. 

Perhaps this was shown at Masonic retreats, or at Shriners conventions before they brought on the dancing girls covered in whipped cream.

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Festival of Bad Animation, Part 2: The Completely Bizarre Adventures of Hercules

Do you-all remember those godawful Mighty Hercules cartoons ground out by Trans-Lux in the early 1960s? Believe me when I say that they'll look like Fantasia beside this strange thing. I can't figure it out, don't know what the story is supposed to be. The animation appears to be construction-paper shapes moved along by an invisible hand, or maybe there's a magnet on the back. It's all so unexplained. I want to know more, but in a funny sort of a way, I don't.

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Festival of Bad Animation, Part 3: Who the Hell is Paddy the Pelican?

I don't know why this is, but I keep on dredging up stuff on YouTube, animated things that are just inexplicable. They are so primitive that they hardly qualify as animation, and in this case the lines barely stay on the screen but seem in constant danger of falling off. I see lots of plagiarism of Disney's Big Bad Wolf, not to mention a generous dose of Heckle and Jeckle. It seems every animator from these old cartoons "started with Disney", working for slave wages in Uncle Walt's sweat shop as a kind of badge of honour. I don't think this guy ever got out of his basement. Disney, my ass! He should be making those flip books, I mean the ones drawn on pads of paper, not all this computer nonsense. But there IS something outstanding about Paddy the Pelican: the theme song. The words, in particular, have come to haunt me day and night.

(I can't seem to get rid of the dud video at the top of this, and don't want to make a new post - lazy - so watch this one - or don't. Ha, ha, ha, ha-ha HA hah haaaaa.)

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This is why nothing happens to you

EDNA'S case was really a pathetic one. Like every woman, her primary ambition was to marry. Most of the girls of her set were married - or about to be. Yet not one possessed more grace or charm or loveliness than she.

And as her birthdays crept gradually toward that tragic thirty-mark, marriage seemed farther from her life than ever.

She was often a bridesmaid but never a bride.

That's the insidious thing about halitosis (unpleasant breath). You, yourself, rarely know when you have it. And even your closest friends won't tell you.

Sometimes, of course, halitosis comes from some deep-seated organic disorder that requires professional advice. But usually - and fortunately - halitosis is only a local condition that yields to the regular use of Listerine as a mouthwash and gargle. It is an interesting thing that this well-known antiseptic that has been in use for years for surgical dressings, possesses these unusual properties as a breath deodorant.

It halts food fermentation in the mouth and leave the breath sweet, fresh and clean. Not by substituting some other odor but by really removing the old one. The Listerine odor itself quickly disappears. So the systematic use of Listerine puts you on the safe and polite side. Lambert Pharmacal Company, St. Louis, Mo

This Smart Moire Cosmetic Bag FREE with PURCHASE OF LARGE SIZE LISTERINE
THE HIT OF PALM BEACH at your druggist's while they last
This offer good in U. S. A. only

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Hitchcock redux

Telephone to Glory: the ultimate infomercial

Telephone to glory, oh, what joy divine!

I can feel the current moving on the line.

Made by God the Father for His very own,

You may talk to Jesus on this royal telephone. 

Central’s never busy, always on the line,

You can hear from heaven almost any time.

’Tis a royal service, built for one and all,

When you get in trouble, give this royal line a call. 

Telephone to glory, oh, what joy divine!

I can feel the current moving on the line.

Made by God the Father for His very own,

You may talk to Jesus on this royal telephone. 

There will be no charges, telephone is free,

It is built for service, just for you and me.

There will be no waiting on this royal line,

Telephone to glory always answers just in time. 

Telephone to glory, oh, what joy divine!

I can feel the current moving on the line.

Made by God the Father for His very own,

You may talk to Jesus on this royal telephone

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"Slices, dices, makes julienne fries": Ronco gifs

I.

I love.

I love old.

I love old ads.

I love old ads on.

I love old ads on YouTube

Cuz then I can gif them good.

This lady

does spazz

over dried-out

food

cuz it's good

for you and me.

Come see!

In times of old, 

when everything was orange,

a thing you cranked

spewed food

that you then fried,

and then you died.

Here Grandma cleans her teeth

and Fido cleans his teeth

we all have cleaner teeth

but she does complain

about that funny taste.

Throw popcorn at your records, boys,

while the tone arm hums

its seductive song.

"Oh-oh! Dropped the garbage?
AGAIN??"

Punch that thing in the thing, make an ugly design

And pay for the thing that makes that thing!

Men!
Steam your coat,

Men!

Steam your tie,

Men! 

Steam your pants,

Men! 

Till you die,

It's the STEAM-A-WAY!

This thing

grinds up your hair,

dries your panties to a frizzle.

But your fresh drawers

and puffy head

will make you rightly sizzle!

Drying tip: put your panties on your head

and dry 'em both at once!

Great for pubic hair, too.

Your date will go wild with desire,

And you'll say,

"Thank you, Tidie Drier!"

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Poor Alf

"Again, the Rhapsody": George Gershwin revisited

I'm all afizz tonight, and for an unexpected reason. I just came out the other side of one of those old Hollywood juggernauts, the 1945 Gershwin biopic Rhapsody in Blue. It really was a too-long movie, and kind of heavy going. I wouldn't even have watched it (again), except for the fact that I'm re-reading A Talent for Genius: The Life and Times of Oscar Levant. I went through a "thing" a couple of years ago and probably bored everybody (but who's everybody?) with endless posts on Levant, one of the strangest human beings ever to walk the earth (and a musician, so I inevitably fell madly in love with him). Levant was one of several people who "played themselves" in Rhapsody, since they knew and/or worked with Gershwin while he was alive. 

It had that earnestness that film bios had in the 1940s, and though it attempted to portray Gershwin's drivenness and arrogance, it didn't quite come off, largely because Robert Alda was just too weak and mild. He was nice-looking, looked vaguely like Gershwin without that exotic feline strangeness, and could play the piano well enough that he didn't have to fake it, though it was Oscar Levant's inspired performances that ended up on the soundtrack. Alda was. . . well, he was nice, even in his temperamental rages. He conveyed the agony of the brain tumor that killed him by pressing on his forehead and sighing, "These headaches."

Levant wasn't in it very much, and when he was, I was surprised at how baby-faced he looked, almost boyish, with those haunted eyes. I study Levant whenever I see him, and in this movie I noticed something different, how his body language isn't strictly American. The Old World follows him around. He leans his forehead towards people and stares at them when he talks, grabs or perhaps grasps people by the arm, even pinches Alda's cheek in a "mein boy" attitude. He is both sardonic and warm. An exotic thing, I don't know what it is, something almost Middle Eastern about the cheekbones, or surely Slavic. And green eyes, which show up mainly in An American in Paris in the scene where he is lying in bed smoking. 

I'm getting to the part that sneaked up on me, hypnotized me almost, and I didn't expect it. But it seems so obvious now. It was the music. A mammoth hunk of the repertoire, most of it well-performed and pretty much all of it familiar to me, but this time - . What is it that makes your perception of things slip sideways? I was inside the music, inhabiting, dwelling within those dissonant chords, and not just grabbed by the crazy rhythms but infected, injected until my bones began to dance to the music's free will. 

I began to hear Gershwin as both coolly, almost offputtingly elegant and screamingly driven, furiously primitive in the sense of touching the Essence. I began to see a world within his songs, almost a universe. The perfection of it hurt me, jarred me. At the same time, the wildly jarring syncopation, the massive primal rushes of energy were dizzying, like plugging directly into a brain on intense overload. 

The sexuality of it was stunning. I had never heard sexuality in Gershwin before. Ever. I grew up with it, we had records lying around of Gershwin, An American in Paris and multiple versions of Rhapsody in Blue (and here I am reminded of  Levant's mother, her dry comment to her son: "Again, the Rhapsody?"). I have a few favorites, one of them being the I've Got Rhythm Variations. My favorite Gershwin song is The Man I Love, but almost no one knows how to sing it.

But tonight, somehow, it was all changed, changed utterly.

What happened here,  I wonder - how did it fall open, all this grey buttoned-down stuff, the music of my parents, bursting in a heady rush like a  tropical flower that flings itself open and gushes with an overripe, intoxicatingly embarrassing fragrance? This has nothing to do with the mild civilized Gershwin I knew, this bom-bompa, bom-bompa, bom-bompa of something deeper than drums, something that makes the concept of "rhythm" seem laughable. 

Even now I can't capture it, I go around and around the subject. I did not even realize fully that I was being mesmerized and taken over until the end of the thing, when I noticed I felt very strange. There was one song, and God how I wish now that I remember which one, because the chords were gorgeously, sourly dissonant, to the point almost of pain, and I loved it, oh I loved it, loved it and wanted more of it, and now I forget which song it was because they all bled together into one great throbbing Thing.

I did not expect this ambush, a slow cumulative effect that steamrollered me, out of this fusty old '40s movie with its cliches (Gershwin, in a Paris hotel room with the Eiffel Tower visible out the window, hears cab horns going "toot-toot-toot" and rushes to his notation paper, wild with inspiration, writing with an elegant flourish on the title page: "An American in Paris"). Right now I feel tired enough to die and know I have to go to bed. I don't know what it is about music, does it change as we change? New layers are exposed all the time by fresh artists, to the point that the original is sometimes twisted into a corkscrew, its essential meaning lost.

Anyway. When I hear this, Judy Garland's raw and sweet version of my favorite Gershwin song, complete with its distortion and wavering sound, I realize some few artists always knew what was hidden inside this deceptive stuff. Almost every artist sings it as a standard ballad, without much expression, and I want to scream: how can you not hear, how can you not see? The lyric is hopefully hopeless, the yearnings of a waif with no life, of a wispy woman barely hanging on until Her Hero arrives to take away all the ugliness and disappointment, the despair. It's all there, both in music and lyric, but almost everyone misses it. 

There is something about genius that makes us think, "Of course!" Makes us think, "Why didn't anyone think of that before?" or even, "hasn't it always been that way?" But no. Someone blitz-brained it into being, and I'm glad it didn't have to be me. I don't believe I am up to such dark, warlocky tricks.

Post-blog discoveries. I've become fascinated with the brain tumor that killed Gershwin at age 38, the way the whole thing was grossly mishandled as "hysteria" or "neurosis", even "attention-seeking". Seen through today's glasses, it's impossible to look at this set of symptoms and NOT see something neurological going on.

This from the New York Times Health section explains a little bit:

When he was 23, Gershwin began complaining of vague abdominal pain and constipation. Doctors found no physical basis for the complaints and told him the illness was in his head. He eventually sought psychotherapy.

But in early 1937, his behavior turned bizarre. He tried to push his chauffeur out of a moving car, smeared chocolates on his body, complained that he smelled burning rubber and forgot his own music at a performance.

He received little sympathy. ''There were people who said of him that he was an attention-seeker,'' said Hershey Felder, the creator and star of ''George Gershwin Alone,'' a Broadway show. ''They thought he was just making antics.''

On June 23, Gershwin was admitted to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles, complaining of debilitating headaches. He refused a spinal tap, a painful procedure that was commonly used to diagnose brain tumors, and was discharged with a diagnosis of ''most likely hysteria.''

Less than a month later, he was taken back to the hospital, unconscious. In the right temporal lobe of his brain, surgeons found a cyst filled with an ounce of dark yellow fluid. They removed it, but it was too late. The pressure had begun to bear down on his brain stem, which controls functions like heart rate, respiration, temperature and consciousness, forcing part of it outside his skull. He died on July 11.

(Worst part of this, which they don't say: Lee Gershwin, his brother's acidulous bitch of a wife, seemed to have a hate on for him. Once when he fell in a restaurant and couldn't get up, she was quoted as saying, "He's just after the attention. Leave him there."

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Rhapsody in Strange: a George Gershwin curiosity

"Of course you can go straight!"

"I squeezed! And squeezed! And squeezed!" The Rainbow Sponge Lady takes ecstasy to a whole new, previously-never-attempted level. Personally, she raises my blood pressure for reasons I can't even fathom. Maybe it's all those nightmarish designs. They resemble the awful visions I have before a migraine.

"No flab on this arm!"

The wife-tossing contest

He really means this stuff. He thinks it really happens. That's what drives me crazy. Today my husband starts to tell me about this "custom" they have once a year on Skytrain: that everyone (in unison, presumably) drops their pants. I didn't believe it and cross-examined him.

"No, it's true. It's once a year. Everyone does this at the same time."

"WHY?"

"It's a custom, kind of a celebration."

"But why do they do it on Skytrain? Is it some sort of protest?"

"No. Just something they do."

"Who's they?"

"Everybody. You know, that group."

"What group?"

"The group that does it."

But wait, there's more. Another day, he says all women on Skytrain are allowed to take their tops off. "Then they walk down the street," he said. I wanted to say: They. Do. Not. Walk. Down. The. Street. With. Their. Tops. Off. But it was no use. He is firmly convinced that it happens. 

This man has a Master's degree in biochemistry. He is not a doofus, supposedly. His last delusion was the "Wife-Tossing Contest" which he described in detail to me and two of my astonished grandchildren. Yes, he believes there is a wife-tossing competition somewhere in Scandinavia (he didn't specify where), a festival with costumes, ethnic foods, wine, etc. I asked him "wouldn't they be badly injured?" He said, "oh, no, they lay a whole lot of mats down first." He MEANS this, he thinks it really happens, and now they pull their pants down on Skytrain.

It's some testicular thing, maybe. The women parading around topless, certainly. But wife-tossing.  I just had a Finnish Facebook friend tell me, a bit piqued, that they have a wife-CARRYING contest there, and sure, I've seen footage of it. It's hilarious. The wife doesn't have to do much except hold on. And somewhere along the line, though I can't find any YouTube videos to support it, I've heard of dwarf-tossing. I wonder if he just conflated the two. 

On our first date or so, one billion years ago B. C., he decided to amaze and impress me with a whole lot of True Facts. Bill then was like someone who walked off the set of Revenge of the Nerds, or maybe a very retro version of The Big Bang Theory. He wore plaid shirts rolled up to the elbow (and the lower part of the sleeve was several shades darker, for some reason), white undershirts that showed at the neck, a plastic pocket protector, and glasses held together at the bridge with electrical tape. He showed me his slide-rule tie clip once, and when the romance had progressed a little further, his "Peter Meter", a device for measuring the penis that is handed out on your first day of engineering school.

Some of our first hot and heavy dates were in the lab, in which I got to see him cooking up "bugs": microorganisms which were designed to eat oil spills. Later I typed part of his Master's thesis on an old Olivetti manual typewriter. 

I think it was in the London Cafe, sitting there eating our cheeseburgers and chips, that he looked at me and said, "Did you know that you have over 200 bones in your foot?"

"No, I didn't know that."

"You mean you haven't heard of it before?"

"No, I didn't know that because it's NOT TRUE."

We had no internet then, so sat arguing about it for half an hour or so, then had sundaes. Eventually I came up with the correct information in a medical book. Bill was nonplussed. No, I mean it. I mean he was the correct meaning of nonplussed, which is "surprised and confused".

"You're saying there aren't 200 bones in your foot?" He still looked doubtful. I didn't have a Master's degree, so how would I know?

"Maybe in your foot."

"No, I mean are there 200 bones in everyone's feet."

"Yes," I said. "IF THEY'RE RUN OVER BY A TRUCK."

Another date, another amazing bit of information: "Did you know that in some parts of the world, a hedgehog can grow to be 200 pounds?"

By this time I was getting a little used to it, but we still had a vigorous argument about tribal myths and glandular beavers. No one won, but I still didn't believe in the 200-pound hedgehogs. Many, many years later I heard about the South American capybara, a rodent not unlike a giant guinea pig that can easily top 200 pounds. Another conflation? Who knows.

Part of me is nonplussed, and the rest of me surprised and delighted that such a smart person could say such dumb things.  They're endlessly entertaining, of that I have no doubt. I should have written all of them down, I'd be making money at this gambit by now. The only one that sticks in my mind now is his version of the animated show Beavis and Butthead (and he wasn't being funny, he really thought it was called this): "Buttwist and Weasel."

When his errors are pointed out, it doesn't bother him. At all. He has this giggle. The more hotly I contest his blatantly untrue fact, the more he giggles.  He doesn't care that he was wrong, maybe because secretly, against logic, against reason, against all that is holy and visible in the universe, he KNOWS he is right.

Post-blog blag: I've been corrected about 150 times, so I guess I have to admit defeat. This appeared in the redoubtable, always-influential, ever-readable newspaper 24 Hours:

Scores of SkyTrain riders were travelling by the seat of their underpants on a chilly Sunday afternoon for the fourth-annual No Pants SkyTrain Ride.

Starting at 1 p.m., riders doffed their pants in an effort to spread a little stripped-down mirth to beat the winter blahs.

According to social media sites spreading the word, riders were encouraged to board their train cars and then strip out of their pants as soon as the doors closed.

Tips for explaining the unusual behaviour included telling fellow passengers they simply forgot their pants, and insisting it’s a coincidence others made the same mistake and boarded the train minus the lower half of their wardrobe.

For those feeling a little shy about the stunt, it was suggested modesty could be upheld by wearing two pairs of underwear.

On the Vancouver No Pants Skytrain Ride Facebook page, 199 had confirmed their intention to take part.“This is the best way to start off a new year. Count me in, and count my pants out,” posted
one confirmed participant.

“I am so getting granny panties for this,” posted another. “This is priceless — how can I not do it?”

The No Pants Subway Ride is an annual event organized by New York City prank group Improv Everywhere, whose motto is “We cause scenes.”The initial ride took place in the Big Apple in 2002 when seven brave riders unzipped. According to the group’s website, the pant-less ride has today spread to 60 regional rides in more than 25 countries.








OK, but I still don't get it. My mind just keeps going to a certain scenario. Young men - OK, sometimes old men get boners all the time, and we KNOW they do. They can generally hide them (or they think they can) if they have pants on. But with mere gaunch (gitch, gatch, gotchies), they won't be able to hide a thing. I'd have to look at a whole lot of stiffies, whether I wanted to or not, and to be honest with you, I don't.

Is this concern far-fetched? Think about it. You think you won't see stiffies on men who are staring at a few hundred women in their underwear?

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Best film trailer of all time