Movies in the Cartoons, Cartoons in the Movies
From the moment they uncorked their bottles of india ink, pioneer animators started referencing Hollywood culture. As a Duck called Daffy would say it, old cartoons are “just sloppin’ over” with movie star caricatures, movie star in jokes, movie star catch phrases. Even Bugs Bunny, we are told, stole his carrot chomping technique from Clark Gable in “It Happened One Night.”
But on the other three fingered hand, live action films from Hollywood’s golden age returned the favor far less frequently. As far as I can tell, it’s a kind of unusual to catch the offhanded cartoon reference (like the kid in the lynch mob in Fritz Lang’s “Fury”, doing a horribly inappropriate Popeye imitation) much less seeing something actually worked into the fabric of the film (the 1939 Ginger Rogers comedy, “Bachelor Mother” featuring a whole subplot about the then current Donald Duck craze.)
I love old time movies almost as much as old time cartoons, and I always dig those instances when the two intersect. Just about my favorite such moment is in a Buster Keaton feature, “Go West.” Late in the film, Buster dresses up in a devil suit. We realize the costume is supposed to be red, but in this pre-Technicolor era it photographs jet black. Keaton the director knows a good visual pun when he sees one, so at the first opportunity for Keaton the performer to ‘think’ while sporting big pointy horns and a draggy tail, he starts pacing back and forth, doing a spot on imitation of Felix the Cat!
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On March 20th, 2006 at 12:00 am
This is a topic you and I could talk endlessly about. Have you ever seen SHE MARRIED A COP (1939)? It’s an obscure Republic “B” picture about a New York City policeman being wooed by a woman who runs an animation studio (”Fay Fables”). She tricks the cop into using his voice in a cartoon short (about a Pig policeman!). The animation in the film was suppliled by Leon Schlesinger’s then independent studio. This story was remade by Republic as a Gene Autry B-Western, SIOUX CITY SUE (1947, and available on DVD), with Walter Lantz providing the animated sequences. Both films have interesting interpretations of what an animation studio supposedly looks like.
On March 20th, 2006 at 12:00 am
Yeah, I’ve seen them both a l-o-o-o-o-o-ng time ago. Hard to remember exactly what the animation looked like. Have you ever read the old mystery novel “Cold Poison” by Stuart Palmer? It’s a 1954 Hildegarde Withers story set in a very thinly disguised Walter Lantz studio. Someone lent me a copy last year (I had never heard of it)… very cute on what he gets right, and what he gets wrong (they refer to animation ‘gels’ all the way through.)
On March 23rd, 2006 at 12:00 am
Growing up in the 50s, cartoons were a constant source of Hollywood information for me. That’s where I learned who Clark Gable was, fer chrissakes, and Theda Bara and Gloria Swanson and others. Also lots of classical music that I knew by sound but not by name, so that when I heard it as an adult I would think wow, that’s from the cartoons! Never thought about that “learning” aspect before, but in retrospect they were highly educational without being annoying. Hmmm.