ReFrederator Blog

Welcome to Birdbrain Week at ReFrederator! Well, look, here we are in one of those late thirtyish animated communities, where the woodland folk are all chipper, making busy, and everything is so darn cute! Guess again. Two minutes into the film Woody Woodpecker shows up, in all his early goony-bird-design glory (buck teeth, cock-eyes and Little Lotta legs) and suddenly we’re in downtown 1940’s cartoonland, with two psycho protagonists trying to consume each other!

This is “Pantry Panic” (1941) directed by Walter Lantz himself . Of all the wisenheimer cartoon stars (Bugs Bunny, Screwy Squirrel, et al) Woody certainly seemed the most ravenous, and here, in one of his first films, he already has a murderous case of the munchies! Seems to me the little guy was usually obsessed with eating, and when he got really hungry, he wasn’t above reversing the food chain to get a decent meal! What do you think [Read more…]

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Satires of gay nineties’ melodramas were a major cartoon sub genre back in the thirties, when folks still had a living memory of the originals being parodied. Those films got most of their titters gingerly poking fun at stuff like handlebar mustaches and ladies’ bustles. Then in 1942, comes the dazzling “Dover Boys at Pimento University, or the Rivals of Roquefort Hall.” Yeah, we’re still, technically, sending up the conventions of an earlier era, but the eccentric pacing, stylized animation, and out-the-window humor was a staggering leap forward for director Chuck Jones. It’s also one of the funniest damn things Warner Brothers ever released!

Tom, Dick and Larry, ‘Good Old P.U.”, Dainty Dora Standpipe — what a riot! An antique motorcar figures into the proceedings (after all, this is “Planes, Trains and Automobiles Week”) and we just love the asthmatic sound effect that comes with. When evil Dan Backslide swipes said put-put, [Read more…]

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We’re off to the middle portion of our “Planes, Trains and Automobiles Week” with a 1936 Max Fleischer Color Classic, “Play Safe.” Aside from the image of a speeding locomotive screaming like a little girl who has just wet her pants, there’s not much that’s really ‘ha-ha’ funny here. But this is one of those 1930’s movies that always exerts a strong emotional hold on small children. Must be something about the wildly inappropriate behavior of the little boy playing on a real boxcar (he’s — what — four?) or the heroic rescue by the family dog (the tyke’s folks must take their parenting tips from “Peter Pan” — as long as you have a St. Bernard handy, who cares if the kid is playing ten feet away from an active railroad!)

Then there’s the spectacular 3-D special effects that make the so-called full sized trains look like an electric set come [Read more…]

ReFrederator is moving ahead full speed with “Planes, Trains and Automobiles Week.” Our airborne artifact today is “Falling Hare,” the 1943 Bob Clampett classic all about Bugs Bunny and an obnoxious gremlin — and yes, YES, Bugs is way out of character here, playing fall guy to a tiny twerp with ailerons where his earlobes should be. Then again, yes, yes, YES, this one’s about as funny as these things get — big laugh out loud moments all over the place!

WB animators like Rod Scribner and Bob McKimson had to knock themselves out to keep director Clampett fully supplied in new, never-used-before reaction shots. In fact, I’ve heard scholarly wabbitalogists suggest that Bugs is only pretending to be duped and frightened in this film, just so he can indulge in a magnificent series of comic takes late in the proceedings (my favorite is the one where the bunny “waterfalls” off his chair.) He [Read more…]

The hook this week is “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” and we’re off with a flying start, plane-wise, with a 1937 Max Fleischer cartoon, “I Never Changes My Altitude.”

Man, I’m nuts about this cartoon — one of my all time favorites! Love the way Popeye starts up his airplane. Love those simple little chores Bluto has dreamt up for Olive Oyl (painting the stabilizer while they are still up in the air?) Love the opening shot, a fabulous 3-D set-up of an old time air field. Love Jack Mercer’s ad-libs, which are even funnier than usual here (but, it took me 30 years of repeated viewings to finally get the “this is tear-ible” pun!) Most of all, I love, love, LOVE the way this film starts with Popeye crying his eyes out over being jilted — I mean the poor guy is openly sobbing! I say if the ol’ sailor man is [Read more…]

Hansel! Gretel! Together again like you’ve never seen them before! Wait… no… actually they’re together again exactly as you’ve seen them before — especially if you were in grade school any time between the mid fifties and the mid seventies. That was the era when the puppet fairy tales of Ray Harryhausen were as ubiquitous in American classrooms as number 2 yellow pencils.

Ray animated the models. Ray’s mom sewed the costumes. Ray’s dad machined the metal armatures within the figures. Ray’s dog did make-up. Okay, I lied about the last one, but the point is not only did they shoot these exquisite little films on teeny weeny little sets, they made ‘em on teeny weeny little budgets as well. Yet Harryhausen squeezed every iota of production value he could out of his mini- epics. He devised sophisticated camera moves, and executed them one painstaking increment at a time, all the while [Read more…]

Could you be more iconographic than Mutt and Jeff? I mean, they’re part of the language, right? (Mutt and Jeff: tall guy and a short guy.) And yet how many people born after the Truman administration actually remember reading their adventures regularly in the funny paper, much less seeing them animated?

For the record, these guys were created in comic strip pre-history by Bud Fisher 99 years ago (real number.) Then, for much of the movies’ silent era, audiences enthusiastically greeted the boys’ theatrical cartoons, of which there seems to have been a jillion (fake, exaggerated number.)

Today we’re looking at “Westward Whoa”, a film that was originally produced by the Associated Animators Studio in 1926, but was one of a handful of M&J shorts painstakingly redrawn in color and retrofitted with a primitive soundtrack sometime during the early thirties. It’s probably a bit of overstatement to call this version a [Read more…]

“Betty Boop and Grampy” is today’s addition to our “Singular Duos Week” — another terrific team from the Fleischer cartoon mill. Toondom’s foremost inventor and certainly the most uninhibited character ever to wear spats, Grampy always brought out the best in Betty during the later part of her film career. Let’s be honest — once her hemline came down, and her lyrics turned strictly PG, La Boop could be just a bit boring at times. Enter the animated elder statesman, a guy who always has an idea for a good time (the only reason he even uses his magical thinking cap.) Pretty soon Betty is her old happy go lucky self, hoofin’ it up with just about anyone hanging around (in this film, Grampy tells BB to bring the gang to a party at his house — the “gang” turns out to be all the men she meets for the very first [Read more…]