ReFrederator Blog

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 [Read more…]

Whoa! You’ve heard of virtuosos attacking this or that piece of music with enthusiasm? In today’s cartoon, “Bars and Stripes,” the instruments attack back; after sprouting little arms and legs, they run around lobbing musical notes like hand grenades! Their opponent in this epic battle is Krazy Kat, who, at this point in his movie career, bears zippo resemblance to his comic strip namesake (well, he still has that odd shaped ribbon on the back of his neck, but that’s about it.)

Manny Gould and Ben Harrison directed this opus for the Charles Mintz studios back in 1931. About the time the piano starts regurgitating huge melodic missiles at our protagonist, you’ll be deciding that early talkie cartoons are A: charmingly uninhibited, displaying wild imagination, unbridled by traditional concepts of narrative, or B: deeply disturbing, exhibiting the fevered hallucinations of a borderline psychotic. Maybe a little of both.

Harmonize with us again tomorrow [Read more…]

ReFrederator introduces “Muscial Moments Week” with a deathless classic, Bob Clampett’s “A Corny Concerto.” In one swell foop, Leon Schlesinger’s cartooniest director delivers death blows to both “Tales of the Vienna Woods” and “The Blue Danube” with a couple of animated interpretations that will forever corrupt your abstract enjoyment of these musical selections.

To drive his demented points across, Clampett uses several of the Warners’ signature cartoon stars, although, oddly, all in somewhat idiosyncratic fashion. “Tales” features a teaming of Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig, two characters who spent virtually no time together in other classic WB shorts. The hero of the crazed ugly duckling story in “Danube” is unmistakably Daffy Duck, but in a tiny, infantile form. And the whole melange is introduced by Elmer Fudd, apparently sending up Deems Taylor, the narrator in Disney’s “Fantasia.” Now, Mr. Fudd is a fellow who traditionally shows up, even while rabbit hunting, nattily attired [Read more…]

“I See Dead People Week” disappears after today’s creepy classic, “Spooky Swabs.” This is a landmark film from 1957 — after a 24 year run, Paramount’s last theatrically released Popeye cartoon. And, YES, the original pre-war Max Fleischer Popeye series was truer to the source material, grittier, goofier, and just plain more fun. And NO, the post-Fleischer team at Paramount Famous never quite figured out how to keep their Popeye cartoons from being repetitious and formulaic even as they improved production values. But, MAYBE the later cartoons can be appreciated for what they were — slickly done and pretty entertaining little films that are light years ahead of most of the TV versions that were just around the bend.

Popeye knocks the sheets out of a ghost ship this time, although as the picture above suggests, he takes quite a beating from said spooks, and Olive Oyl, first. The haunted crew look and sound [Read more…]

ReFrederator brings you another ghostly offering as part of our “I See Dead People Week.” Today’s toon is a Betty Boop entry from 1933, “Is My Palm Read?,” and brother, we don’t even know where to begin to describe this one! Ghosts — yes. But also a man eating grass hut, a bug that moonlights as a lipstick, baby pictures of a very nude Ms. Boop and a narrative thread that defies time and space. Even applying the very lenient standards of 1930’s cartoons, this early Max Fleischer talkie doesn’t come close to making sense… and is pretty much a total kick start to finish!

Crazy about this one! Love the ‘racy’ little details! Dig the dream world logic! One of my favorites — let us know what YOU think.

ReFrederator is back tomorrow with one more spooky selection.

Dave Kirwan

“I See Dead People Week” lurches on with “Bold King Cole,” another Technicolor extravaganza from director Burt Gillette, and the last theatrically released Felix the Cat cartoon. This time out, the gang at RKO/Van Beuren redesigned Felix with a little body and a really big head, and then retrofitted him with a great singing voice. He’s kinda charming here, although I certainly miss the ‘Hey! Don’t screw around with me’ abrasive edge the little guy displays in his silent films.

This cartoon would have us believe that the undead have much more to fear from lightning strikes than we, the living. A well aimed zap of electricity and some very nasty (but very musical) ghosts disintegrate in a puff of smoke. A few jillion volts surge through Felix, and the only after effect seems to be the periodic transmogrification of his head into a light bulb (which wouldn’t even be that inconvenient [Read more…]

From 1931, we are visited by an unsettling little apparition entitled “Spooks,” starring the ever popular Flip the Frog. Flip was the brainchild (or brain-tadpole, if you prefer) of Ub Iwerks, the one time partner of Walt Disney. After his first few adventures, Flip stopped puddle jumping, and was redesigned to look not so much like an amphibian, but a noseless, earless Mickey Mouse type character wearing a little sailor hat. Seems to me many of his best films involve the fantastic and the downright creepy (i.e. “Funny Face,” “The Cuckoo Murder Case,” “Techno-Cracked,” etc.)

Since animated skeletons were to Ub Iwerks what Monument Valley was to John Ford, it’s not surprising that “Spooks,” a cartoon crammed with boney antagonists, is one of the best of Flip’s best. I really like the crazy curve backgrounds in the haunted house. And we never seem to be far away from one of Iwerks’ trademark [Read more…]

We messed up on Friday’s post of Toonerville Trolley, but it should be all fine and dandy now. We’ll try not to mess up in the future. But, who knows?

–Fred

It’s only appropriate that we initiate “I See Dead People Week” with “The Friendly Ghost”, the 1945 debut of the screen’s premier deceased cartoon character, Casper. The casual viewer might note this short has a somewhat higher ‘creepy’ quotient than later episodes — not so much like “Isn’t this really scary?” creepy, but more “Isn’t this kinda disturbing, and exactly what were they thinking?” creepy. About the time our dead cartoon hero falls even deeper into chronic depression and attempts (redundantly) suicide, you begin to understand why this started out as an UNPUBLISHED children’s book.

On the technical side, Casper was also the first translucent cartoon star with an ongoing series. As a kid, I spent way too much time wondering what kind of paint the artists at Paramount Famous Cartoon Studios used to get that tissue paper transparency effect. Some later cartoons like “To Boo or Not to Boo” actually used [Read more…]

ReFrederator punches out with our last Occupational Hazard Week cartoon — “Toonerville Trolley” from 1936. This was the first of RKO/Van Beuren brief series based on the funny page favorite, “Toonerville Folks.” Supposedly, the Skipper is the official responsible for moving said Trolley from point A. to point B., but based on the exploits depicted here, I’m not sure the guy could make it through the workday without a superhuman helping hand from the Powerful Katrinka. None of the other comic strip regulars show up in this one, but there is a cameo from another RKO cartoon luminary, Molly Moo-Cow (now, don’t go staring at us — Molly Moo-Cow was too the real name of a real character with her own real series of cartoons. Honest!)

Anyway, this is another animated example of the well worn cartoon convention that any moving object, colored red, will soon be targeted by an angry [Read more…]