Again with the anthropomorphized musical instruments! In today’s cartoon, Little Lulu gets clunked in the head while playing baseball, and has a truly bizarre nightmare about standing trial for mistreating her violin. The judge, prosecutor, witnesses and jury are all instruments who not only have arms and legs, but also compulsively rhyme whenever they speak. Before you can say “Busby Berkley meets Mack Sennett” the whole thing cuts to the chase… which also happens to be an elaborate production set to the song “You Gotta Have Music.” Our girl Lulu does wake up eventually, seems slightly more interested in her musical education, but has plunged even deeper into active fiddle abuse.
This one’s a classic — imaginative, funny and full of great imagery and witty visual puns (accordions as giant worms, musical notes as spiders, etc.) The director, Isadore Sparber, is unusually inventive in staging, cooking up little tricks like dissolving Lulu surrounded by violin bows into a scene of her behind prison bars. Here’s one of Lulu’s best… and the tune is kinda catchy too!
Oh, and about the title: the cartoon was originally released in 1947 as “Musica-Lulu,” but as you can see, it was re-issued as “Musical Lulu.” Still a great cartoon under any name.
ReFrederator returns tomorrow with more music, more mice.
Bird and Diz changed the world of music forever in the 20th century. (Initially I couldn’t tell; it sounded just as borning as big band dance music. Until I read the now-proven-inaccurate Bird Lives! which perfectly captured its incendiary moment.)
These tracks are important. They’re exciting. They’re fun.
Here’s my 2nd pass at the Teapot opening title card. Teapot went to town with some colored chalk and seems very proud of himself.
It’s still not done. The red lettering on the red brick wall doesn’t stand out quite as much as we’d hoped…might try some other colors although I still want to keep them Teapot colors.
So this is what it looks like when you look into a scanner…in case anyone wanted to know. We have a great big scanner at work and I just couldn’t resist.
Oh yeah - I’m still working on the show. To prove it, here are some cleaned-up extras (from a cafeteria scene). My clean up gal was Debbie Armstrong and she did a great job!
It is a summery day in L.A today, and that means it’s officially SLURPEE SEASON!!! WOOHOO!! My rule is that my straw must always match my outfit..luckily, there was one red straw left to match my beads and flowers on my shirt…Jun went with pink to match the streaks in her hair.
So, I noticed that I’d only posted Kat and Tessa’s turnarounds, but Kat’s other cronies, Gypcy and Kelly deserve their 5 minutes in the spotlight too…hey this IS L.A!
As Comicon 2006 looms in the future, Melissa and I–on top of finishing up the storyboard, putting the finishing touches on our main character turns, and figuring out exactly why golden delicious apples are so foul–are busy putting together all sorts of goodies just for you to covet.
Among other things, we’re making some STICKERS!!…well, they were stickers, until we figured out the paper didn’t have a sticker backing. So now they’re “trading cards”..or something. Either way–get this–they SPARKLE!! This thrills us to no end. Especially me, because I like shiny things.
Here’s that drawing of the village people that everyone wanted to see last week. Apparently having good powers means having the ability to–among other things–spontaneously conjure up disco acts from the 1970s. SO CRAZY.
Alan Goodman’s post about his cartoon schooling reminded me of a huge influence he had on the cartoon revival of the 90s.
Alan and I met in college radio in the early 70s and immediately started working on projects together. Doing audio comedy skits was very popular at our station. One of our favorite discoveries in the record library were some early, scratchy 60s releases of the Hanna-Barbera sound effects library. Our age made us HB freaks, and we had the greatest time mining the stuff for our productions.
Fast forward, against all odds I become the president of Hanna-Barbera Productions in 1992, and one of the first calls I got was from Alan asking when I was going to get him the ‘official’ library. After months of useless bureaucracy I found out the veteran studio personal was completely dismissive of this part of their hertiage, given that some of the effects dated back to the 1940s and Bill Hanna’s supervision of the Tom & Jerry production.
I’ll spare you the boredom, but after five years we finally released the library in the quality treatment it deserved. I’m still hearing those 60 year old effects in commercials (and cartoons). I feel like Alan did a good thing.
what is going on with the toonfuse? Jeaux Janovsky story about Snakes On A Plane the Remix is scoring through the roof! Obviously he emailed everyone and their Mom about voting on toonfuse. - Lee
