ReFrederator Blog

It’s Relatively Speaking Week, and the idea was that we would trot out cartoon character kinfolk for the next few days. What you get today is “The Wabbit Who Came to Dinner,” a terrific Friz Freleng item from 1942, wherein Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd do a lot of yappin’ about rich Uncle Louie (or, as EF would have it, Uncle Wouie.)

We will ignore, for the moment, the inconvenient detail that the old guy never actually shows up, and focus instead on how fully these cultural icons fell into character so early in their screen careers. Bugs looks a bit scrawny and Elmer is positively corpulent — about this time Mr. Fudd seemed to suffer an alarming, though temporary, weight gain (I think the idea was for him to look more like the actor supplying his voice, Arthur Q. Bryan, but the end result has him more closely resembling a kidney bean.) [Read more…]

Okay, okay. We already had our Superman film festival this summer — just thought we’d pull the plug on our Science Friction Week with one more starring the Kid from Krypton. And this is the first one! The famous one! The one that got nominated for an Academy Award!

Hard to imagine the impact of Max Fleischer’s pilot film, “Superman” in 1941. Nothing like it had ever been seen on movie screens! Realistic (more or less) animated figures, spectacular special effects, a straight faced (more or less) science fictiony story — all wrapped up in sleek, streamlined trimmings. The Man of Steel does battle with a death ray and a crazy scientist who’s lookin’ a lot like a chorus boy from a production of “The Mikado.” What a kick!

And the most amazing thing is this is, objectively, perhaps the weakest of the original Fleischer Superman cartoons! Narrative techniques would be sharpened, character [Read more…]

Y’know how there’s always that thing? The blip that suddenly appears on popular culture radar — something that has nothing to do with YOUR everyday life, but seems boundlessly fascinating to professional comedy writers? Pretty soon the damn thing is shoehorned into every skit, monologue or movie, and before you can say “that’s so day before yesterday” it’s gone again. Last year it was ’speed dating’ (and I’ve seen the 32 sitcom episodes to prove it.) In 1933 it was ‘technocracy.’

Whatever the real definition was, technocracy quickly became the buzzword for anything futuristic and a little nutty. In today’s cartoon, “Techno-Cracked,” that means building your own robot with a jack o’ lantern head. This gets my vote as one of the best Flip the Frog films, full of goofy ideas and great, chunky, Ub Iwerks style animation. The mechanical man starts off being kinda funny, but he’s got those spooky hollow [Read more…]

There was a time when ninety percent of all the medical research in this country was focused on the tricky subject of brain transplants: armies of renegade surgeons with thick Hungarian accents were forever yanking out brains from the skulls of guys, and popping them into the skulls of different guys, and those different guys were always wearing gorilla costumes. No, really.

Our film, “The Mad Doctor” is the Disney version — a nutty medico wants to switch the heads of a chicken and Pluto Pup. It’s up to the kid with the bowling ball ears and nifty red shorts to come to the rescue in today’s 1933 classic directed by David Hand. For a Mickey Mouse cartoon, this is pretty potent stuff, full of scary flourishes and gruesome details — the crazy scientist shows us an explicit diagram, complete with bloody saw! The Disney team may have been emboldened knowing (WARNING: SPOILER! [Read more…]

Retro future stuff today. “All’s Fair at the Fair” was Max Fleischer’s animated anticipation to the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Looking back, this cartoon version of the world of tomorrow was only a tad more ridiculous than the straight faced predictions at the real deal.

The good news is this is one of those Max Fleischer cartoons full of crazy inventions — there are plenty of robots, “instant” things and environmentally challenged contraptions to amaze and delight. Our protagonists, Elmer and Mirandy, are plum dang tickled about the whole she-bang and eventually end up in some sort of art deco extreme make-over night club! I love the way the film takes a few seconds from all the astounding sights to let us hear those ‘candid’ comments as folks leave the futuristic dance floor.

Not every toon vision of technology run amuck is so darn cheery. SciFi looks a little bleaker tomorrow as [Read more…]

[Read more…]

There had to be a first Baby Huey cartoon, and ReFrederator’s got it, wrapping up our Birdbrain Week. Witness “Quack-A-Doodle-Doo” from Paramount Famous Cartoon Studio, 1950.

Baby Huey — always a favorite with little kids, specifically little boys with too much energy and too little attention span to wash down that last Three Stooges short with anything overly nuanced. Nothing like a 300 pound, dumb-as-a-sackful-of hammers duckling to get a whole bunch of little guys giggling (also jabbing, poking and generally, bouncing off the walls.) Sid Raymond did lots of dumb guy characters in his voice over career, but his Huey has a certain moronic edge on all the others, something extra that makes the big galoot so endearing (okay, okay… endearing to ME and some select aficionados. A lotta other people — not so much.)

I also once had a teacher the whole school nicknamed “Baby Huey” (Junior High is the cruelest of [Read more…]

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Introducing Heckle and Jeckle — sort of. Birdbrain Week continues with “The Talking Magpies”, a 1946 Terrytoon that, technically, stars Farmer Al Falfa. A bickering couple of married birds show up early in the show, and they don’t act much like any cartoon characters we recognize. Then the old geezer starts to chase them and suddenly, two stars are born! Mr. and Mrs. Magpie mutate into two preposterously resourceful smart alecks (both with male voices) who are way too fast for our silent-movie-leftover hero. They are back to being magpie and wife for the closing gag, but the damage was already done, and Terrytoons would never be the same (thankfully.) These wise guys would soon star in their own series, snapping up the pace for the entire studio!

And a word about that Talking Magpies stuff. Heckle and Jeckle were always billed as “The Talking Magpies.” I guess there was a pre-cartoon era [Read more…]

Today’s Birdbrain Week Cartoon, “Scrap Happy Daffy” is one of those chest swelling WW II era items — Daffy Duck pushes civilian scrap and junk drives. We not only get Daffy in his normal everyday visage, but ‘Superduck’ too, as well as a whole host of funny looking duck ancestors (oh, and Adolf Hiltler stops by for one of his occasional animated appearances.) The mallard’s persistent lisp doesn’t prevent him from delivering a snappy patter song early in the proceedings.

“Scrap Happy Daffy” was directed by Frank Tashlin in 1943 —pretty late for a theatrically released black and white cartoon. Interestingly, both Warners and Columbia would let their background men go nuts with non-literal, stylized scenics in these late b/w efforts — what do you think of Daffy’s scribbly looking pile of junk?

More classic cartoons coming your way, everyday — here at ReFrederator.

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Dave Kirwan