ReFrederator Blog

The picture above is from “Making “Em Move,” a 1931 RKO/Aesop’s Fable. I’m always grabbing frames from this particular toon because A. it’s one of favorites and B. it’s a film in one of my favorite sub-genera, namely cartoons about people making cartoons (or, in this case funny animals with rubber hose arms making cartoons.) John Foster and Harry Bailey directed this prehistoric talkie, and it’s general plot gimmick (cartoon characters make, then exhibit their own cartoon) was reshaped and reused later for the likes of Popeye, Porky Pig and others.

Warner Brothers seemed to have a particular lock on this sort of thing. Another personal fave is “The Cartoonist’s Nightmare,” an early Looney Toon from Jack King that had an animator kidnapped and tortured by his own feisty drawings! Better known WB efforts like “You Ought to Be in Pictures,” and “Duck Amuck” had cartoon characters and their supposed masters interacting all [Read more…]

Some cartoon characters are so deeply ingrained into modern culture, it’s hard to imagine them making a first appearance. Was there a time without Bugs Bunny or Donald Duck? Difficult to visualize.

Here’s Casper the Friendly Ghost in his 1945 film debut, “The Friendly Ghost.” Although he looks more like a dollop of Cool Whip than his eventual visage, the spunky little spook came into the world with his personality pretty much fully formed. In his first cartoon, Casper moped around, inadvertently scaring a bunch of characters who all say “A ga-ga-ghost!” and then do something really CRAZY! Eventually he finds some new friends, broadminded children who are not put off by his mortality challenged status. In other words, the same gig Casper has been successfully working for the last sixty plus years. Hey, if it works, don’t knock it!

Dave Kirwan

Cuckoo clocks! Old cartoons are lousy with ‘em. Put them high on the list of animated inanimate objects (anvils, seltzer bottles, steam cabinets, vanishing cream, etc.) that seemed so essential in constructing a socko cartoon short, back in the day.

Of course, unlike all that other stuff, a cuckoo clock is an item that somebody born after the Truman administration might actually have seen in real life. More importantly, this particular type of timepiece was a uniquely versatile prop, and could be used in a jillion different ways by a good cartoon director. It might pop up as a single spot joke, as seen above in Chuck Jones’ “Fox Pop.” Or it could reappear throughout a film, as a running gag. Occasionally, the bird in the clock became a kind of Greek chorus, commenting in some way on the action around him, letting us know, if nothing else, the passage of time.

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Oooooooo! Fire with legs! Experienced effects animators used to say flame was the hardest thing to realistically simulate in cartoons, but unrealistic fire is running all over the place in old toons. As soon as something catches ablaze, said flame sprouts limbs and starts indulging in all sorts of anthropomorphized antics.

Dave Fleischer directed “Ding Dong Doggie” in which a shape shifting inferno suddenly transforms into an entire football team. Burt Gillette directed “Moth and the Flame,” a Silly Symphony starring a flame that does Clark Gable impersonations. And Tex Avery… man, Tex Avery directed “Red Hot Rangers” where the conflagration that lays waste to thousands of woodland acres is personified as a character so cute and adorable, you’d swear he scampered out of an old Harvey comic book (see above.)

Personally, I like it when the artists push the smoldering envelope, and give their animated flames the works — arms, legs, eyeballs, you [Read more…]

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I’m the kind of guy who goes through life, observing the world around me, all the time mentally supplying my own sound effects — cartoon sound effects!

I’ve never slipped on ice without that “Wa-Wa-Wa-Hooie” from the Goofy cartoons going off somewhere in my head. When I see the little first grade girl next door sneak around while playing hide and seek, I imagine the “dinka-dinka-dinka” noise Fred Flinstone makes on his tippy toe approach down the bowling alley.

But mostly what I hear on my imaginary soundtrack are the noises from old Terrytoons. This, of course, makes things a lot less confusing, since the studio only seemed to have about a half dozen actual effects, all of which they used over, and over, and over, and over again. Any forceful impact was accompanied with a kind of peach carton crunch, guns always sounded like the same little drum tap, and everything from [Read more…]

Generally, cartoon characters are pretty reckless about the law of gravity. Makes sense — where they come from, it’s a rather loosely enforced law anyway. Sort of like prohibition. Character A., suddenly unsupported by any physical means, may instantly plummet with an off screen crash (or, upon impact, turn into pancake, an accordion, or simply leave a Character A. shaped hole in the ground.) As often as not, however, gravity itself might be a little late arriving at the scene. Character A. may remain suspended in mid-air, until he realizes he’s in trouble, whereupon the physics of his situation belatedly take hold, and pull him below. Sometimes gravity gives the guy time enough to FULLY realize his bad fortune before kicking into gear: it slowly dawns on Character A. he’s hovering in mid-air, he slowly feels beneath himself, to make sure he’s not standing on anything, he slowly waves goodbye [Read more…]

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Old-time animation fans can attest to the sad fact that classic cartoons have not always been readily accessible. Not that long ago die hard toonaholics had to go to some pretty gruesome extremes to view vintage stuff. I have a friend who admits to haunting shopping malls in the early eighties, looking for those little enclosed kiddie booths that showed 8mm sound cartoons for a quarter. He would wait until the passing crowd was reasonably sparse, then squeeze his adult sized bulk into this tiny fiberglass box, trying to get a glimpse of some obscure Terrytoon.

While living in Connecticut a decade or so earlier, I myself would go out of my way to frequent drive-ins, because they were among the last places to show old cartoons with regular work-a-day, unrelated feature films. That was the good news. The bad news was that in that neck of the woods, drive-in programs [Read more…]