On the edge

Sad, bad - glad? Cartoons that will make you very happy

The less you say about cartoons like these, the better, but since I don't want to look like a total slacker, I should say something. This is the infamous Magic of Oz that came out of nowhere, still impenetrable after years of attempted internet analysis. Who is Robert Capeheart, and how has he avoided arrest up until now? Probably he's dead, because this looks really old, maybe 1940s or '50s. There is so little point to it: it doesn't appear to be a Part 1 or part ANYthing of something. It has no story and no discernible action, but it does have some dreadful songs in it. The voice synchronization is almost as bad as in Paddy Pelican (which see). I have never seen a more irritating collection of characters, but (to make it worse, and I know I am not the only one who has said this) there is something disturbingly familiar about them. Where have I seen that lion before? The eyes seem to suggest anime, but it didn't exist back then. Or maybe this is where anime came from.

This is a Spanish cartoon dubbed into German, and only a little bit of it, but if you don't mind a very loud Spanish guy shouting on top of the very loud Spanish sound track, you can find the whole 55-minute thing somewhere on YouTube. This clip gives you a pretty good idea of what it's like. The question is why.

This is the one that spoils me for all the rest - The Adventures of Paddy the Pelican, an exercise in WHAT THE FUCK????? if ever there was one. It defies all explanation in its sheer badness. As far as animation is concerned, you might as well take two pieces of paper with different drawings on them and switch them back and forth. The vocal characterizations are just dung, that's all they are. You've got to see this.

Spunky and Tadpole, a not-very-seminal cartoon (in spite of its semen-al name) that was mostly just '60s schlock, though I think it came out around 1959. 1959 was a shabby, dog-eared year. It couldn't quite decide what to be. Personally, I think everyone is terrified by "9" years because they are scared to death of what the next decade might bring, or not bring. In this case, they should have been more scared. I remember the title Spunky and Tadpole and probably watched them when I was three or four years old, so didn't understand anything I was seeing (any more than I understood Ernie Kovacs, one of my first incomprehensible life experiences). But the title stayed with me. Did I think these cartoons were good? What's good when you're four?

And here is the unavoidable, Jesusly-bad The Adventures of Clutch Cargo and his Pals, Spinner and Paddlefood (in another exciting adventure called blah, blah, blah, etc.) This is the one where there is a real mouth superimposed on top of a primitive drawing of a face, There is no hope or fear of animation here: it's just completely static drawings that are occasionally dragged stiffly across the screen to represent "action". The mouths look to be infected with herpes or at least really bad cold sores, or smeared with lipstick that won't wipe off. Awwww, Clutch!

This episode, or minisode or sod-off or whatever-it-is, features a Chinese Eskimo (as the Inuit were called by racist Americans back then) speaking in some sort of slurred Japanese/Filipino accent. I will not try to analyze the significance of this.

When you think about it, though - Clutch - Spunky and Tadpole - how Freudian can it get. No wonder I grew up to be this way.

This is U. S. Army propaganda in the form of a hysterically jolly exercise video. I wonder if anyone ever followed it. I have no idea where these old films come from. One would have hoped they would be destroyed after 1949 or so. It even pictures tanks rolling along, so maybe it's a wartime cartoon. Kind of like Hitler appearing in that Donald Duck thing. I have to ask you, though - why do these things always seem so - ? Homosexual? There is a note of hysterical gayness here that I simply cannot ignore.

Bucky and Pepito. Mediocre, with moments of excruciating grace. I like the fact that you always hear the same background music in EVERY cartoon ever made in the '60s. It's like the sound of the horse whinnying that's always the same, the sound of the car wreck, or even the canned laughter used in sitcoms where you can hear certain laughs over and over again. Soundtrack Central or something. I probably watched this but was too little to remember, or it was just too forgettable. It just sort of came on as I sat there on the floor with my fat little legs splayed out and and ate my Junket pudding.

Pow-wow. It was OK to make fun of Indians back then because they weren't considered real people. They really weren't. They were extras and background and "filler" in Westerns, where they appeared in hordes, always wearing elaborate headdresses that were never used except in ceremonial occasions, and then only by Plains tribes. The best gig they could get was as the Lone Ranger's sidekick. Don't get me started on Jay Silverheels, because I think he was magnificent and made the Ranger look like a old queen in spandex pants. Most Indians weren't played by Indians anyway, which must have been depressing. Even if a Jew didn't look Jewish, he could probably get away with playing an Indian.

This wasn't really labelled except as Dementia 5, but I figured out that it's from a particularly trippy episode of Rocket Robin Hood. Must be from the early '70s then, when acid trips were common knowledge: but really, Robin Hood and pals, out in space, tripping on acid?

Eadweard Muybridge: HOW HE DID IT!

SOLVED! The mystery of how Muybridge took all those photos which created an illusion of motion long before motion picture technology even existed. It was pretty complicated stuff, involving a lot of tripwires and cameras set to go off in split-second sequence. Seems to have worked, though the documentary I took this gif from talked a lot about how Muybridge was a bit of a fiddle. He was an Edison figure, more of a personality than a scientist, and certainly a showman who knew how to present his "facts" to best advantage (as did P. T. Barnum). He killed his wife's lover and was acquitted because he convinced everyone he had the husbandly right to blow the man's weiner off. The guy looked half-crazy and never looked you in the eye and may have even had brain damage.

Next subject.

Monkeyshines: more creepy than Halloween

It's All Saints Day, the bellybutton of the Mexican Day of the Dead celebration which lasts from October 31 to November 2. In celebration of which, I'm going to post something totally irrelevant: something I came across years ago and which fascinated me. As usual, it's attached to the idea of obsolete technology which was cutting-edge and even astonishing in its day.

YouTube has graciously provided me with many clips of early gizmos which were meant to create the illusion of motion. I'm not sure if Eadweard Muybridge invented the idea or not, but his studies of horses and buffalo and giraffes in motion were groundbreaking. Somehow (I can't find out how because I have to get out of here in a minute), he had rigged it up to take a lot of photos of a moving object over a few seconds. Trip-wires, or something, except that then the horse might trip! (haha). However he did it, when the photos were shown in rapid succession, the horse or buffalo or Thompson's gazelle or whatever-it-was seemed to be running. (Until then, people were so ignorant that they claimed a horse always had one foot on the ground when it ran. Reminds me of what Ann Landers told teenage girls they should do when making out.)

It's really just the old flip-book idea in more sophisticated form, leading to the mutoscope - you know, the crank job with its 20-second-long, supposedly titillating scenarios.

Meantime, Edison was experimenting with the kinetoscope, which used a kind of film - a quantum leap beyond these rapidly-shuffling leaves of paper - but still pretty primitive. Only one person could look at it at a time, creating the strange and steamy intimacy that made the church thunder against its wicked graven images. An experimental Edison film called Monkeyshines (in two parts) is especially strange and seems to reach out to us from some eerie dimension in the deep past. In the first part there are just flickers of what might be a human form. Part Two is a little more recognizable, but still weirdly primitive and low-tech.

(Wikipedia entry)

Monkeyshines (1889 or 1890), an experimental film made to test the original cylinder format of the Kinetoscope, is believed to be the first film shot in the United States.

Monkeyshines, No. 1 was shot by William K.L. Dickson and William Heise for the Edison labs. Scholars have differing opinions on whether the first was shot in June 1889 starring John Ott or sometime between November 21–27, 1890 starring G. Sacco Albanese. Both men were fellow lab workers at the company; contradictory evidence exists for each claim. Monkeyshines, No. 2 and Monkeyshines, No. 3 quickly followed to test further conditions.

These films were intended to be internal tests of the new camera system, and were not created for commercial use; their rise to prominence resulted much later due to work by film historians. All three films show a blurry figure in white standing in one place making large gestures and are only a few seconds long.

(NOT Wikipedia entry): I REALLY have to get out of here, I'm late for whatever it is I'm going to, which is none of your business anyway, but here are some bizarro Muybridge things I found along the way. And his name really was spelled Eadweard. Maybe his mother couldn't spell? (Oprah's real name is Orpah, did you know that? Now you do.)

POST-LEAPFROG OBSERVATIONS. This Muybridge guy was some character. His real name was Edward Muggeridge, by the way, but he didn't think that was colourful enough, so he kept changing it until he thought it was back to its original medieval form. It wasn't - just very hard to spell. And just how would you pronounce EADWEARD anyway?

I present this blog the way I dig out my facts: in jigsaw fashion, finding a chunk of valuable information, but later finding something else that seems to fit or, more often, just changes the whole picture. That is why I am so given to post-blog observations: it's to represent the process of discovery, the nosy eagerness and ferreting-out. Research is never a straight line, is it? (unless it's very dull research). Or maybe I'm just too lazy to write formal essays with all the loose ends neatly woven in. But such watertightness is, I've always thought, a great way NOT to learn, because everything is already neatly sealed. Much scientific discovery has been effectively choked off and died due to this approach.

So! Here is another nice nugget about Muybridge, whom I did NOT set out to talk about! At all! I was going to talk about Monkeyshines, and got sidetracked, but Muybridge is much more interesting than Edison because he murdered somebody:

His most famous work began in 1872, when he was hired by Leland Stanford (later the founder of Stanford University) to photograph horses. Stanford reputedly had made a bet that for a moment, all four of a racehorse's hooves are off the ground simultaneously, and he hired Muybridge to take the pictures to prove him right. This was difficult to do with the cameras of the time, and the initial experiments produced only indistinct images. The photographer then became distracted when he discovered that his young wife had taken a lover and may even have had their child by him. Muybridge tracked down the lover and shot and killed him. When Muybridge stood trial, he did not deny the killing, but he was nonetheless acquitted. Muybridge left San Francisco and spent two years in Guatemala. On his return, Muybridge resumed his photography of horses in motion, this time far more successfully. He set up a row of cameras with tripwires, each of which would trigger a picture for a split second as the horse ran by. The results settled the debate once and for all: all four hooves do leave the ground at once, as the top middle image in this sequence demonstrates.

". . . For which I will gladly pay you Tuesday."

*DISCOVERY!* I have made a discovery! More Muybridge dirty pictures, hitherto unknown to anyone, even Muybridge! (Taken from the Muybridge Institute for Pornography, Stagreel, Minnesota).