Many Thanks
It’s Thanksgiving and still Cartoon Starlet Week, so here’s Refrederator giving thanks for all those princesses, damsels in distress and other assorted lovelies who pop up in our animated classics. We certainly appreciate the fact that they were [A] almost always pivotal to the plot and [B] a lot harder to draw than, say, your standard issue exploding duck.
Of course, no one had to draw the heroine in today’s film, RAPUNZEL …she’s a model animated by stop motion master Ray Harryhausen. He did have to design her performance, instill a proper feminine personality and add just the right winsom touch to bring the familiar fairy tale to life. No easy task, that.
But this ones a real goody, and an appropriate holiday treat for all those baby boomers who grew up watching the Thanksgiving night broadcast of Harryhausen’s classic features in the 60’s.
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On November 23rd, 2006 at 12:00 am
And I want to give thanks to Refrederator for making it easy to see these cartoons again. As a teenager and young man in the late ’70s, I took a keen interest in theatrical cartoons and I found and read books by Jerry Beck, Joe Adamson, and Leonard Maltin. It was a time when drawing and coloring cels was too expensive (esp. 24 frames per second), and computer animation had not yet arrived. Reading Of Mice and Magic, I read about Iwerks, Van Beuren, and Screen Gems cartoons and looked at “stills” from their cartoons, ruing that I would never actually get to see these cartoons. In 1982 I went to see Chuck Jones (at MIT) and Bob Clampett (at the AFI) and wondered if either would be remembered in a generation. Today I get a free cartoon every day and a forum to discuss it with other like minded people. I truly appreciate the service you provide and want to thank you for it.
On November 24th, 2006 at 12:00 am
Well, thank you, Tom, for checking in day to day. We dig making this stuff available as much as you do watching it. It’s nice to think that at least some of those wonderful artists lived long enough to see a tiny portion of appreciation from the many fans of their work!