Ramapith: David Gerstein's Prehistoric Pop Culture Blog

2011: One Last Look Back

2012-01-01T00:57:00.005-05:00

Happy New Year, everyone. I thought I'd take a (belated) look back at a fond acquaintance whom we lost a couple of months ago.

With his incredible output, writer and researcher Earl Kress made a difference like few others in the animation and comics fields. He’ll be missed; even, unknowingly, by those who wish certain properties were as good as they used to be, and don’t realize that Earl—with his great background knowledge of the properties' history—was the one who made them good.
Beyond this, I'm uncharacteristically at a loss for words; the man's work provides such a perfect testimony.

(Above: From Tom and Jerry Meet Sherlock Holmes [2010], written by Earl Kress. Special thanks to Mike Matei for tech help.)

I Taut I Taw New Posts Coming

2011-08-23T22:16:00.014-04:00

"You bet you sthaw new posthts coming!"

Er—thanks, Sylvester. As my close friends are well aware, I've been up to my eyeballs in work lately—but that's not to say it hasn't been a lot of fun. I've been editing Fantagraphics' Floyd Gottfredson Library of Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse and writing for Tom Stathes' Bray Animation Project, and I'm looking forward to blogging about both.

But first it's time to welcome you back! As a preview of what's coming, here's a recent find that may not be in its most presentable form, but still answers a few old questions:

The original titles for Tweetie Pie (1947) still don't exist as a whole in any one place—but apart from color, now we know approximately what the viewing experience was like. After I located an unprojectable silent, black and white nitrate neg in a private collection, I fixed up a facsimile by mating still frames from it with the audio located by Larry Tremblay awhile ago (yes, some older TV prints included this track—completely out of sync with the new picture element).

A color element on these original titles has yet to surface. Thad Komorowski has already located other previously unseen color elements from this period, so Tweetie Pie can't be far away.

The credits for Tweetie Pie had been lost for a long time. I'm glad to share them.

The brick wall pictured at the bottom of the Merrie Melodies card was apparently Warners' 1940s method of concealing the "In Technicolor" credit on some black and white prints of color cartoons. I've seen it on a couple of other elements from this period. It fades in and out of view with the Merrie card; it is never (to my knowledge) on other parts of the title sequence.

Here's hoping I don't have to fade out for too long before blogging some more. Thanks for your patience, fellas. (And yours too, Sylvester. Some day you'll eat that darn canary. Weird foods rule.)

Update, August 24: Above, I said: "Thad Komorowski has already located other previously unseen color elements from this era, so Tweetie Pie can't be far away." Sufferin' succotash... the guy moves fast. Thad noticed that Bugs Bunny Superstar (1975) actually showed the title card Tweety image in color, identified there only as a random "Hays Office-approved" character design. Thhanks, Thad:

Lost Laugh-O-Grams Found—And Shown

2010-10-14T03:00:00.020-04:00

"Alice isn't Alice." Those three words recently marked the start of an exciting series of discoveries for me and others. But what could they mean?

Like a lot of cartoon researchers, I've long been disappointed that more of Walt Disney's 1920s Kansas City animation didn't seem to survive. Recently, though, colleagues and I have turned up some exciting discoveries—some of which, I'm pleased to announce, are about to reach public eyes after a long, long absence.

First, a bit of background. Until recently, it was believed that only four of Disney's Laugh-O-Grams fairy tale cartoons still existed: Little Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots, Cinderella, and The Four Musicians of Bremen (all 1922). It was also conventional wisdom that the fairy tales had been a series of six, released only in the United States—and perhaps only in part; for soon after buying the series from Disney, non-theatrical distributor Pictorial Clubs of Tennessee filed for bankruptcy.

But Pictorial Clubs had shady sister companies in different states. Some, it turns out, continued to distribute Laugh-O-Grams years later; all seven of them, not six. Jack and the Beanstalk and Jack the Giant Killer (both 1922), two titles traditionally misremembered as one and the same, were actually different shorts. A 1922 press release, discovered by researcher Michael Barrier, announced that the series would include both titles; John Kenworthy noted the two titles listed as separate, completed cartoons among Laugh-O-Gram Films' bankruptcy records.

As the sound era dawned, the seven fairy tales changed owners. As early as 1991, J. P. Storm and M. Dreßler's pivotal German study Im Reich der Micky Maus included German release information for a 1929 Disney cartoon series entitled "Wuppy"; in his Animated Film Encyclopedia (2000), Graham Webb revealed an American equivalent alternately titled "Whoopee Sketches" and "Peter the Puss." Bollman and Grant were credited as producers for the New York-based Sound Film Distributing Corp.; in England, Wardour Films distributed the reels theatrically.

Webb was the first to verify that these Whoopee/Peter titles were Laugh-O-Grams retrofitted with soundtracks—with "Peter the Puss" being a new name for Disney's Julius the Cat (or his Laugh-O-Gram prototype). The Whoopee/Peter title "Grandma Steps Out" turned up in the collection of David Wyatt, and was clearly Disney's Little Red Riding Hood. Webb tagged Disney's Cinderella (1922) as the Whoopee/Peter "The Slipper-y Kid," Goldie Locks and the Three Bears (1922) as "The Peroxide Kid," and Puss in Boots as "The K-O Kid."

But there were more Whoopee/Peter titles than there were Laugh-O-Gram fairy tales. Some records suggested 12 Whoopee cartoons were released; nine made it to Germany, and Storm/Dreßler and Webb collectively found title listings for ten. Would we ever actually see the films to conclusively identify them all?

"Alice isn't Alice." In 2005, researcher Cole Johnson told me about having screened a misidentified cartoon at the Museum of Modern Art. Though tagged as Disney's Alice and the Three Bears (1924)—as it had been since its acquisition, decades before—this cartoon didn't feature a live-action Alice, as was SOP for the Alice Comedies. Instead Alice was animated. Or was it Alice? Cole believed we were seeing Goldie Locks, and the print title, "The Peroxide Kid," guaranteed it. Exceptional find, Cole.

Where one retitled print existed, might there be more? Sure enough. In time, MoMA proved to possess other previously unprovenanced reels that, when inspected, revealed Whoopee and/or Peter main titles. Now the discoveries, and confirmed identifications, flew thick and fast. Two Whoopee Sketches, "Rural Romeo" and "Egg-Splosion," turned out not to be Disney shorts. As for those that were, we already knew "Grandma" was Red Riding Hood and "Peroxide" Goldie Locks; now "The Four Jazz Boys" was confirmed as Bremen, while helpful MoMA staffers found for me that "The Cat's Whiskers" matched Disney's Puss in Boots.

Of course, if "Whiskers" was Boots, then Webb had been incorrect with one title assignment. What was "The K-O Kid"? MoMA had a film element bearing that title, but it was not screenable when I did my initial research last fall. Luckily, a 1969 MoMA plot synopsis survived—and matched up point for point with a 1924 review of Jack the Giant Killer (above), which I'd located in The Educational Screen non-theatrical exhibitors' magazine. Shortly after, another print also turned up at MoMA; now elements of both have been combined and Giant Killer properly restored and preserved.

In the shuffle, one might have forgotten Jack and the Beanstalk, on which no element has yet turned up at MoMA. With luck, however, I did locate an element in a private collection last spring; once again under its Peter the Puss title, "On the Up and Up." Thus all seven Laugh-O-Gram fairy tales have now been found.

Want to see some? Sure you do. And that leads me to more good news—some will be screened, and soon. This October 31 will bring us a Halloween treat: longtime silent film scholar and fellow cartoon researcher, Serge Bromberg, is coming from Europe for MoMA's annual To Save and Project festival, and he'll be presenting a special Laugh-O-Grams program. Along with now-preserved prints of Little Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots, and Four Musicians of Bremen, the newly discovered Jack the Giant Killer and Goldie Locks and the Three Bears will also be shown. Serge will provide his usual stellar background info and piano accompaniment. And as icing on the cake, later Ub Iwerks cartoons will also be at the screening, including Flip the Frog's Techno-Cracked (1933) and my personal favorite, Don Quixote (1934).

Can't make it on the 31st? Come on November 4. This is one time when cartoon research has gotten great results—for Cole Johnson, Serge, the MoMA staff, and myself.

Any other points to add? Yes: together with Beanstalk in the private collection was a print of Cinderella, restoring a long-lost final scene (at right) coming after the end of Disney's current element. Looks like Cindy and Prince Charming didn't live happily ever after.

And the latest Whoopee Sketch rundown, as of now:

(Whoopee title • original title)

"Bottle of Rum" = ?
"The Cat's Whiskers" = Puss in Boots
"Egg-Splosion" = non-Disney Bill Nolan short
"The Four Jazz Boys" = Four Musicians of Bremen
"Grandma Steps Out" = Little Red Riding Hood
"The K-O Kid" = Jack the Giant Killer
"On the Up and Up" = Jack and the Beanstalk
"The Peroxide Kid" = Goldie Locks and the Three Bears
"Rural Romeo" = non-Disney Bill Nolan short
"The Slipper-y Kid" = Cinderella

Anyone got that "Bottle of Rum"? LeChuck? Jack Sparrow?... Bootleg Pete?

Special thanks to J. B. Kaufman, Tom Stathes, Timothy Susanin, Michael Barrier, Didier Ghez, Leonard Maltin, Jerry Beck, and Thad Komorowski.

Mystical Felix Monday: There's More?

2010-10-04T03:00:00.007-04:00

Hey, who said it was over? At the time our Fantastic Felix Friday celebration finished up last week, an e-mail snafu had unknowingly kept me from receiving Don Oriolo's replies for two extra Felix the Cat interview questions. But the Cat always comes back—and now Don is back, too, with one of the funniest Felix anecdotes ever. All in service, of course, to Felix the Cat: The Great Comic Book Tails, Don's new book with Yoe! Studio—an exciting collection of Otto Messmer, Joe Oriolo, and Jim Tyer Felix adventures that's available now.

What, you want another adventure here? Oh, all right. But I don't want to spoil too much. So following below is "The Great Inventor" (Four Color 135, 1946), a Felix story that's not in Great Comic Book Tails. While I don't want to state the credits with certainty, I believe pages 1-13 are largely by Otto Messmer, with inks by Otto, Joe Oriolo and possibly Jack Bogle (pages 4 and 5). Pages 14-16 are—I believe—penciled by Jim Tyer and inked by Joe.

(Comic © Felix the Cat Productions; all rights reserved.)

And now I'm back with Don for those final two questions—switching to boldface interview style now!

Don, the stories in Great Comic Book Tails seem almost to be trying to top each other for wildest adventure or most outrageous fantasy scenario. What's your own favorite from among those stories? And what would you say was your dad's most outrageous Felix cartoon story?

I love "Felix Pulls Through" (Felix the Cat 13, 1950)! I remember my father penciling and inking it like it was yesterday... I was fascinated when Felix threw the magnetic ore into the air and the cannonballs and weaponry were attracted to it, thereby veering away from Felix. I totally remember when my father drew the cluster of cannonballs all stuck together; I watched with baited breath as he inked it, and I could see it coming to life. As soon as he inked around the little reflective windows that he left white, the whole scene popped; that stuck in my head to this day! That's how I ink reflections, too.
Regarding Felix animated on the screen, I loved Master Cylinder, King of the Moon (1959)—when Master Cylinder established himself as king, it was so bizarre; that a character named after the working business of an auto brake system was crowned king of the moon. Why? I had these battles with my father all the time. His answer was, "Why not?"

So what was the most outrageous situation Felix ever got you into? These things tend to happen when he crosses our paths.

Well, it's funny you should mention that, David. About 12 years ago (seems like yesterday!) my mother got involved in investing in an "amusement" park in Palm City, Florida. The object was to have more "intellectual" exhibits for children—and to do away with traditional amusement rides, et cetera. It was more like an outdoor library than an amusement park!
And the whole construction of the park was running years over schedule; it was not looking good. Well, one of the things that my mother donated—along with the usual bricks with family members' names etched into them—was a version of "Where's Waldo?"... or rather "Where's Felix?" Yup, you heard it... I designed—and the park council produced—seven solid brass Felix statues, painted black and white. They were amazingly heavy and each one stood about three feet tall. They were actually pretty cool... but by the time they were ready, I was getting very skeptical about the plan. The principals in the park, called "Gift Gardens" after someone named Gift, were constantly bickering and replacing each other with even less efficient people. You have to understand that they actually built this thing. It was probably about 10 to 15 acres with a brand new high masonry wall around the whole bit.
The park opened without fanfare; and as I walked past the "Where's Felix" section—a nicely landscaped plot of land about thirty feet square—and looked around, I saw no press; just a handful of people and a bunch of bizarre exhibits. Whatever kids were there walked along the path with glazed looks on their faces. "Where are the rides?" I said to myself. "This does not look good."
To make a long story short: the park opened one day, and was locked tighter than a sardine can the next day! I was like, "What the heck?" It started with good intentions, but was built by do-gooders raising money from local retired people, and it also felt like maybe they did it as some kind of tax shelter scam. I was livid. I went back that afternoon and there was already graffiti on the beautiful eight-foot wall. "Okay," I said, "this confirms my suspicions; this park is going to be looted and destroyed in a matter of days." No security... it was completely abandoned.
I thought back; how would Errol Flynn get over this wall in Robin Hood? Oh, yeah... there's a ladder over there...

You saved the statues.

Yeah, you got it; I climbed over the wall, and I carried those ridiculously heavy statues from one side of the park to the front wall. One by one I placed the rescued Felix statues on the top of the wall. I was exhausted... but these were our Felix statues; we paid for them plus plus plus... and the park owners had abandoned the place. I was upset to say the least.
In any event, today those statues live in my studio and the homes of a couple of my nephews. Boy, the things we do for that Wonderful Wonderful Cat!

I'll say! Truth is stranger than fiction.

Glad to have you h— uh, glad to have you here again, Don. And speaking of strangeness; to finish off this blogpost in style, it's time to share a true Felix oddity with readers. Dating from 1924, "Since Felix Has Been Shingled" was among the earliest Felix spinoff tunes; and is rare enough that until very recently, I wasn't aware it had been recorded.
But times change. Rarities are rediscovered. And now—thanks to collector David Moore—here's England's own Clarkson Rose with the story of our favorite cat... being forced to get a lady's hairdo. Maybe fiction is stranger.

Felix has been walking since the day that he was born
And so to keep him home at nights we had to have him shorn;
We did not like to 'bob' him; he didn't look the part;
So we went and had him shingled and it nearly broke his heart.

Now Felix is shingled he won't go out of doors;
He lies on a cushion and snores, and snores, and snores.
He's canceled engagements which he'd made by the score
Since Felix has been shingled he won't walk anymore.

Felix caused great jealousy amongst the other Toms,
But since he has been shingled now, they wag their to's and froms.
He rivals them no longer among the lady cats;
He never spends his ev'nings now in other people's flats.

Now Felix is shingled he won't go out of doors;
He won't trim his whiskers, he's left off his plus fours;
The Sheik of the Tabbies in the good old days of yore
Since Felix has been shingled he won't sheik anymore.

Felix rivaled Owen Nares when he made his bow
But Felix now is owing hairs; meow! meow! meow!

Don't forget to visit my sister (brother?) blogs from last week's Fantastic Felix Friday:

http://andeverythingelsetoo.blogspot.com/
http://www.cartoonsnap.com/
http://www.comicbookbin.com/
http://www.comicrazys.com/
http://www.fourcolorshadows.blogspot.com/
http://itsthecat.com/blog
http://thehorrorsofitall.blogspot.com/
http://www.theitchblog.com/

Thanks Craig, and thanks Don!

Fantastic Felix Friday: Behind the Scenes

2010-09-24T13:30:00.054-04:00

Rowr! It's been awhile since Felix the Cat prowled Ramapith's ivy-covered halls. But the feisty feline always comes back. This week I'm honored to help promote him in a new project for which I was a consulting researcher: Craig Yoe's and Don Oriolo's Felix the Cat: The Great Comic Book Tails. We're all calling today "Fantastic Felix Friday" and many of us collaborators are blogging about the book—time to do my bit.

Lots of us know Felix from his classic cartoons—both the vintage Otto Messmer head-trips of the 1920s and the famous Joe Oriolo Professor/Rock Bottom battles of the 1950s. Many of us know Felix's comic strip exploits, too—in which Otto and Joe again played central roles, drawing blissful dailies and Sundays for many a decade. But there's never been a really solid collection of Felix's comic book adventures. However—the times, they are a-changing! Thanks to both the Oriolo company archives and various collectors' holdings, Craig and Don (son of Joe) have put together this lavish, in-depth look at the first ten years of Felix made for magazines.

When Felix's original comic book stories kicked off in 1946, he wasn't quite the same cat that he'd been twenty years earlier on-screen. His catty resourcefulness remained, but in other ways he had become more human than feline. Felix lived in a house now; paid his bills (or tried to!) and generally coexisted with people as a peer, not a pet.
But if Felix's animal nature had declined, his propensity for fantasy was wilder and woolier than ever before. This was the Felix who not only visited Toyland and various Oz-like domains—but permanently owned a magic carpet, enabling him to go back to them again and again. This was the Felix who discovered that when you cooked vegetables, giant vegetables would one day catch you and try to cook you, too.

Eyes downward, readers, and you'll find "Starbust" (Four Color 135, 1946), the opening story in the new book. Dig that Art Deco star on Page 1—and don't you just love how this actually becomes a story about escaping the star? Nobody but Felix got into adventures this wacky. Nobody else dared.
Pages 1, 2, 4, 6, and 9-16 appear to me to be drawn by Otto Messmer, with inks mostly by Messmer but sometimes by Joe Oriolo (the extra-wide cut in Felix's pie-eye on Page 4, Pic 2 suggests Oriolo in this period, as do images of Felix with a round back to his head rather than the usual cowlick).
Pages 3 and 5 are by Jim Tyer—dig the classic Tyer bum and sheriff designs!—and 7 and 8 appear to me to be Messmer and Tyer working together.

But let's see what you think. Then join me after the jump for an even more special Felician feature... (Comic © Felix the Cat Productions, all rights reserved.)

Welcome back. (Nice comic, huh?) I've got Don Oriolo with me today—son of Joe, Don began life scampering around his dad's and "Uncle Otto's" drawing boards; not a bad place to start out! I thought I'd interview Don for "Fantastic Felix Friday" to get some inside dope about the stories in Great Comic Book Tails—and about some other long-simmering Felix mysteries.
I'll switch to boldface for proper interview technique and let's get going!

Glad to have you here, Don! Hm, where to begin? Most Felix comic book stories were drawn by Otto Messmer and your dad, Joe Oriolo. But for the first couple of years at Dell, super-screwy cartoonist Jim Tyer—best known for his distinctive, outrageous style at Terrytoons and Fleischer—was also a contributor. Did you meet Tyer when he worked with your dad? Did Joe or Otto have any special memories of him?

Hi, David... first of all, let me say it's always a pleasure to talk with you, and I'm continuously amazed at your knowledge of all things Felix. Yes; Jim, or Mr. Tyer as I called him, was one of the Fleischer guys that my father and Otto worked with during those wondrous Fleischer and Famous Studios days. My father loved to have barbecues, and the Fleischer "family" was always there. I know both my father and Otto admired Jim's talent. Jim also worked on a couple of Trans-Lux [Felix TV] episodes.

The Felix stories in this book come from a transitional period when Felix's supporting cast was changing. We see Flub the dog, Inky and Winky, and Pokey the pig, but only in relatively brief parts. On the other hand, we also get a brief cameo from a crook who's clearly a Rock Bottom ancestor (in the story "Seeds and Proceeds"). When your dad added Rock and the Professor to the cast, how did it come about? They were almost never in the comics, so did Trans-Lux request that the cast be filled out especially for TV?

That's exactly how it happened. Trans Lux wanted more ancillary characters... so my father reached back to Butch who became Rock Bottom.

You mean Butch the bully from the 1950s-era newspaper strips, right?

Yes. Butch was sort of a predecessor of Rock... minor changes, of course. "Rock Bottom" was a name that just popped out of my father's head; a typical punnish play on words that the Popeye guys always toyed with. Poindexter was the last name of my father's lawyer, Emmett Poindexter. Pokey the pig was also called Starvin' Marvin...
The Professor was an an amalgam of various "professorial" characters that appeared in the comics and strips through the years. I think one of the most brilliant off-the-cuff design concepts was the button on Poindexter's lab coat... I always asked my father what that button did, and I always got the runaround. I think he only used it a couple of times in the series.

Many of the Great Comic Book Tails show Felix with his Magic Carpet—and a very unmagic travel bag. Your dad made the decision to combine them, creating the famous Magic Bag. But had the Carpet been your dad's creation too? What motivated the decision to change two into one?

Yes, it was my father's. My father was fascinated with the Arabian Nights and The Thief of Bagdad (1940). He would always tell me, my brother and sister stories of flying carpets and time machines. I was always imagining that one of the Persian rugs in our house could fly me anywhere in the universe—and in my playtime imagination, it did. The Magic Bag was an element created to give an easy way out in the five-minute [TV] episodes... it replaced the piercing of the fourth wall in simpler terms for a series with such a limited budget.

Felix's Carpet was this big, clunky looking thing...

It was the way both my dad and Otto drew rugs—tassels and all. Those guys never thought about taking the easy way out when they were doing the strips or comic books. They always went the extra mile with the backgrounds.

Fairy tales and fantastic travel are a recurring theme in these Felix comics adventures—gotta love the kingdom of Vegeteria and the other kooky places Felix visits. Did your dad or "Uncle Otto" ever tell you why this theme became so crucial for Felix? Was any inspiration from L. Frank Baum (Oz) or Johnny Gruelle (Raggedy Ann) involved? Your dad worked on Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy (1941) at Fleischer [illustration at left]...

Raggedy Ann was loved by both my dad and Otto. My dad also eventually did lots of design work for Joe Raposo of Sesame Street fame [songwriter for Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Musical Adventure (1976)]. Otto drew a mean Raggedy Ann, also. The Fleischer theory was that everything was alive... even vegetables danced along with the streetlamps and talking doorknobs. My father read everything Baum ever wrote. I wish I still had those old books.

Speaking of fantastic travel, your dad introduced Vavoom, the noisy little Inuit who was a spiritual successor to many of the earlier eccentric characters Felix had met on his travels. Can you tell me a little about how Vavoom originated?

I had a little drawing board next to my father... I was home sick one day from school, and as my father was doing the daily Felix strip, I sneezed. He flew off his chair. I thought "Wow, I have a powerful magic sneeze!" So I "force-sneezed" at my father who flew backwards, and stumbled down the stairs as I continued to "sneeze" at him. Not long after that he designed a character loosely called Sneezy. When they were deciding on the cast of the Felix TV series, he brought that character up; Trans-Lux liked the character, but said "You can't have him promote unhealthy, sickly behavior!" After which my father changed his name to Vavoom, after the Jackie Gleason phrase—va-va-va-voom!

For years, Felix studio founder Pat Sullivan claimed to have created Felix. Later, his estate continued to control the character—and as long as they did, Sullivan continued to get the credit. I'm not going to get into the issue of Felix's creation right now—but we both know Messmer might never have gotten any due had your dad not acquired permanent Felix rights from Sullivan's heirs. How did this come about?

Pat Sullivan, the nephew [of studio founder Pat Sullivan] traded 50% of the stock to my father for his creating and selling the pilot of the Trans-Lux Felix TV series. I bought all of the remaining stock from the stockholders through the years.

Speaking of the TV series, it's time for one of those existential questions. Sometimes the Professor is Felix's sworn enemy, battling with him for Magic Bag possession. But at other times, the Professor is Felix's boss, hiring him as lab help or to babysit Poindexter. How did your Dad explain the Professor's varying roles as bad guy and good guy?

It's sort of the same concept as Bluto being friendly to Popeye in a couple of episodes. It just happened by way of scripts that were churned out in hours. Don't forget they were doing a few episodes a week. They didn't overthink anything or analyze anything because there was nothing to analyze. They were creating what is our history now—and didn't think of the ramifications!

In the 1950s, Felix's nephews Inky and Winky became especially popular for awhile, even getting a comic book of their own. But as longtime Felix fans know, the kittens have an oddity attached to them. The comics called them Inky and Dinky; the merchandise called them Inky and Winky, especially later on. Can you tell us why this was?

My father just liked the name Winky better... and the word "dinky" had a connotation of being insignificant at the time; it didn't sound positive to my father. I remember his having that conversation with me as a child.

Felix is a bit of a rascal—known to nab the occasional fish or down the occasional martini. It's part of what makes him human. But in the 1950s, for awhile we saw less of this. What restrictions did Trans-Lux put on Felix's mischief?

They wanted a "younger" show. That's why Jack Mercer [voice of Felix and all other male characters on the show] spoke in slow deliberate tones. Felix was to be everybody's best friend—who could solve any problem anyone had, even if it meant taking the easy way out with the Magic Bag.

One more newspaper strip question. For awhile in the 1940s, Messmer's Felix daily featured nothing but battles between Felix and Skiddoo the mouse—day-in, day-out. Did Messmer or Oriolo ever tell you why the strip went through this period? Did it have to do with King Features' decisions?

A lot of the writing on those strips were off the cuff mental streaming of Otto and my dad. Mice worked with cats—and Farmer Gray!—so why not with Felix? It was a way of getting a running gag in a time when they were expected to churn out a script a day.

Some stories in Felix the Cat: The Great Comic Book Tails come from Dell Comics editions; others come from Toby Press, which took over publication in 1951. Why did Felix make the move from Dell to Toby?

I think Dell was winding down with their commitment to publish the Felix comics and Toby was very, very interested in carrying on. I personally really like the Toby Press days—though it was one almost-interchangeable comics community as I saw it as a kid. My father was always going to one or all of the offices on a weekly basis. I was happy because he always came home with a bag full of comics. I was like a pig in—well, you know what I mean. I was a very happy kid!

And I've been very happy to have you here, Don!

That almost wraps up our Felix goodies for today—but not quite! This wouldn't be a Ramapith blogpost without an extra-esoteric turn-of-the-century pop tune. In the earlier-referenced Greatest Comic Book Tails story "Seeds and Proceeds," vegetable-grower Felix discovers super seeds that create incredible plant growth. "Burbank should see this," Felix grins. Huh? This unusual pop culture ref is a shout-out to Luther Burbank (1849-1926), pioneer horticulturalist—a man who may be little-remembered by the general public today, but to whom every gourmet and naturalist owes a debt of gratitude.

Let's finish things off with "Burbank the Wizard" (1911), an earlier tribute to "the world's greatest farmer" by singer/comedian Murray K. Hill...

And don't forget to visit the other Fantastic Felix Friday bloggers! We've all joined together today to create a web-wide Felix maelstrom of mirth:

http://andeverythingelsetoo.blogspot.com/
http://www.cartoonsnap.com/
http://www.comicbookbin.com/
http://www.comicrazys.com/
http://www.fourcolorshadows.blogspot.com/
http://itsthecat.com/blog
http://thehorrorsofitall.blogspot.com/
http://www.theitchblog.com/

Lucky New Oswald Finds

2010-09-02T17:15:00.018-04:00

As one of my favorite research topics, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit is also the subject that my longtime friends expect me to blog about most. So I generally try to keep it to a minimum—because who wants to be predictable?

Of course, sometimes an unpredictable Oswald discovery is made. Then what? When it's unpredictable and Oswald-related—but David Gerstein is blogging about it—do the unpredictability and predictability cancel each other out? (And if something's not predictable or unpredictable, what is it?)

Predictable or unpredictable, you've just seen a very rare cartoon. In fact, a lot about Oswald is rare—or worse. Of the 26 Disney-made Oswald cartoons of 1927-28, Disney could locate only 13 in time for their 2007 DVD release (a fourteenth, Poor Papa, apparently exists but was inaccessible). Of the 26 Winkler Oswalds of 1928-29, only ten seem to have surfaced in modern times; and none in sound prints, though some were originally released with sound.

It's easy to guess that the all-sound Lantz Oswald package must survive in full, but you'd be wrong; Universal has master elements on most, but not all. On the other hand, collectors often assume that what's not in the general rotation must be lost; and that's wrong, too. For example, my fellow Oswald scholar, Pietro Shakarian, recently learned that our colleague Tom Klein possessed a few titles that others did not. With Tom's kind permission, we're now able to share Broadway Folly, the cartoon shown above—and Cold Feet (1930), another classic Bill Nolan-era straggler:

Thanks, Tom! (Tom, by the way, is the author of "Walt-to-Walt Oswald" [Griffithiana 71, 2001], a seminal paper on the character's early days—crucial reading.)

So which Lantz Oswald cartoons are still MIA? Here's what Pietro and I believe to be a definitive list—with summaries based on the original copyright synopses. Anyone want to help us find these?

Cold Turkey (released 10/15/29; production number 5043, © MP 728)

Synopsis: Taking time off the job to dance with his "best girl," waiter Oswald is interrupted by an irate customer who wants an order of duck for dinner. Oswald obliges, but the duck resists death by decapitation and hanging. Oswald finally solves the situation by shooting the duck with a cannon, leaving it "done to a turn—and well roasted." Oswald: "Want some?" Girl: "I bite!"
Note: If the synopsis is accurate regarding dialogue, this would seem to be the first Lantz cartoon with spoken words (during this period, Lantz and his crew otherwise largely relied on a slide whistle to perform Oswald's voice).

Pussy Willie (released 10/28/29; production number 5063, © MP 758)

Synopsis: Oswald heads to his girlfriend's house and is faced with the problem of her "kid brother," who gives Oswald no end of trouble. Willie's misdeeds include putting pepper in the flowers that Oswald gives his girl. Fed up, Oswald throws "the imp off a dock." The kid returns and finds Oswald and his girl—desperate for privacy—locked in a safe. Willie uses TNT to blast them to Heaven—and comes along with them to slam the pearly gates in their faces.
Note: We're presuming "Pussy Willie" is the same bratty little cat who debuts in Disney's All Wet (1927)—then reappears as Homeless Homer in the eponymous Winkler title (1928), and once again as the girlfriend's kid brother in Lantz's The Fireman (1931). Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising reused him at Warner as Bosko's foil, renaming him "Wilbur"; you have to wonder if Oswald paid Bosko to take him.

Nutty Notes (released 12/9/29; production number 5062, © MP 855)

Synopsis: When Oswald gets a new job at a music store, his "bruin" boss tasks him with hoisting a piano to "Ozzie's girl's" apartment—on the top floor of a skyscraper! After several efforts fail, Oswald tricks a goat into kicking the piano upward, but the kick is delivered with "too much English," and the hurtling piano rips the roof off the building. Upon Oswald's descent, he is united with his girl and the two kiss happily.
Note: The poster survives, as illustrated at right. While the copyright description calls Oswald's boss a bear, the poster pictures a cat.

Ozzie of the Circus (released 12/23/29; production number 5024, © MP 938)

Synopsis: Oswald spends a day at the circus where he runs into a smart-aleck pup. The dog trips the barker, causes problems for the "two-headed sax player," and ties Oswald's tail to a strength-test indicator. After getting loose, Oswald chases the pup but soon finds himself pursued by an angry gorilla. The chase goes on and on; carrying over to the closing title, where "we leave them hotfooting it around the Universal universe—a dangerous triangle going around in circles!"
Note: Erroneously thought to be the first-released Lantz Oswald short until research in 2005 proved otherwise.

Kisses and Kurses (released 2/17/30; production number 5127, © MP 1147)

Synopsis: Oswald is part of a showboat troupe, with his girlfriend Fanny as leading lady in a melodrama. "Little Blue Eyes, the heroine, live[s] with her aged father in a wee cabin down on the Swanee. Simon Hardheart [played by Pete] demand[s] her hand in marriage, but Blue Eyes spurn[s] him. In fury, Simon tie[s] her to a railroad track and vows to run over her with an old locomotive called The General." She is rescued by Oswald, who splits the track—and by extension, the train and villain—in half! The show is a success and Oswald and Fanny embrace for the closer.
Note: The General got its name compliments, no doubt, of Buster Keaton!

Bowery Bimboes (released 3/18/30; production number 5154, © LP 1162)

Synopsis: Oswald is a cop on the beat in the Bowery. A girl catches his eye and the two engage in a rough Apache dance. But the girl is kidnapped by a tough-guy rat who spirits her to a skyscraper and hoists her to the top. Oswald comes to the rescue with an extension ladder; he saves her, but the ladder breaks. The two end up falling to the ground—but revive in time for a closing kiss.
Note: It seems likely to us that the tough-guy rat is the one who's also in The Prison Panic (1930). While the picture element for Bowery Bimboes is presently lost, an original soundtrack disc survives in my personal collection. Thanks to Ron Hutchinson's tech support, I'm honored to present it to you here:

Hey, that's not the end of the Ramapith audio selection for today. I'd be remiss if I didn't share Billy Murray's and Aileen Stanley's priceless performance of "Down By the Winegar Woiks" (1925), the song that you (appropriately) heard over Bowery Bimboes' opening titles:

And how about "Hi-Lee, Hi-Lo," as heard in Cold Feet? This one is all over 1930s cartoons—Donald Duck sings it in On Ice (1935), and it even survives as his theme in a couple of period comics (example at right from 1936 Sunday page: story by Ted Osborne, art by Al Taliaferro). Here's George P. Watson covering it in 1909:

Pietro, meanwhile, has caught studio musician David Broekman enlivening Broadway Folly with "Hittin' the Ceiling," a tune from Universal's rare part-Technicolor musical Broadway (1929). Carrying on in the same spirit, Broekman colleague Bert Fiske used the Broadway number "Sing a Little Love Song" for the marriage-proposal scene of Oswald's Oil's Well (1929; see sequence starting at 1:53).

I'd be remiss not to mention Pietro's contributions to Golden Age Cartoons' Walter Lantz Cartune Encyclopedia, where he informs me he's just now adding our new Oswald discoveries to the 1929 and 1930 pages. Hop on over, rabbit-style, to read more about them.

Update, September 3: I'd be remiss, too, not to link us to the first new Disney animation of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit in 82 years. Nope, it's not what some of you would have expected...

Rare Fleischer Talkartoon Found (A Shameless Plug)

2010-08-21T16:00:00.003-04:00

Every major cartoon studio has rare and lost films to its name. Nitrate deteriorates; 16mm gets vinegar syndrome. "Duplicate" prints are cast away without careful inspection of the "master" element. Often the only source researchers know for a given title is an element that's inaccessible or unscreenable. Several Max Fleischer shorts fall into this category, preserved only in noncirculating master copies at various archives. Occasionally new prints are made from these masters. But not all the time.

Luckily, new sources for rare films occasionally turn up—and with help from a few friends, I've presented several here in their entirety. Today, though, we've got a Ramapith first—a surviving rare cartoon that I'm not going to show you all of! (Hey, hold off on the rocks and socks a minute...)

Ace of Spades (1931) is a Talkartoon with a difference. Other Fleischer shorts included some soundtrack elements derived from pre-existing recordings, but this one invokes Southern and African-American vaudeville discs almost all the way from start to finish. Earlier text sources claim we're hearing the actual records on the soundtrack; as I perceive it, it's more likely that the Fleischer studio carefully re-recorded the songs and lyrics, as each has been reworded slightly to match the cartoon's poker-playing theme. "Push Them Cards Away," for example, was originally the minstrel tune "Push Dem Clouds Away" (cover by Harry C. Browne, 1917):

So why can't I show you all of Ace today?

Ace was recently acquired, in the print excerpted below, by my longtime colleague Tom Stathes—and he'll be "re-premiering" it this Friday, August 27, at "Travelaffs," the latest installment of his Cartoon Carnival screening series. If I gave the whole cartoon away, I'd be scooping him. I can, on the other hand, help plug him!

"Travelaffs" will reveal the four corners of the world as they never were: with Looney Tunes, Van Beuren, Ub Iwerks, Dick Huemer and others taking you to Italy, China, bull-infested Spain, and the politically incorrect Congo. Ace of Spades, with card sharp Bimbo out to win a poker tournament and "buy [him]self a ticket to the sunny South," fits right in with the program.

Near New York? You can fit in, too. Check out "Travelaffs," Tom Stathes Cartoon Carnival #6—where the lost will be found.

Update, August 30: We got a nice, fat turnout. Thanks a lot, friends.

On With the Show (Thanks, Toby)

2010-08-09T11:31:00.004-04:00

With the dog days of summer having passed Chihuahua and moved on to Rottweiler, my work schedule is getting a little less hectic—and some comics projects due out in the winter are finally being put to bed. So who knew? I'm back to my blog after a little too long.

This wouldn't be Ramapith, of course, if I didn't get things moving with a rarity—and here's one so rare that it's only partly survived over the years. Carrying on the dog theme, it's Dick Huemer's Toby the Pup at his silliest. The Showman (1930) was originally a sound cartoon, but seems only to exist today as a silent print; quite a pity, as it's obviously a high-energy musical short about singing and dancing on stage. I've created the most appropriate replacement score possible by chaining together bits of other Joe De Nat Mintz scores—and a music hall tune, and one snippet from a non-Mintz score. Can you identify them?

(We're also missing some opening scenes of audiences arriving at the theatre, but I didn't have time to sit down at a light table and redraw those. Mea culpa.)

I may not be able to blog as often as I did last fall, but I'm hoping to be back before long with some more cool discoveries. Keep your fingers crossed for me... all four of them. Even if you're wearing thick white gloves.

Work Is Heck

2010-02-12T02:19:00.003-05:00

But the Ramapith blog isn't gone for good. There's lots to come—after I meet just a couple more deadlines. Patience, readers. Prudence, too. And Purviance, if you're lucky.

(Flip the Frog drawing from Kodascope film catalog, 1930s; original provenance uncertain)

Big Ramapith From the North

2009-11-18T18:09:00.008-05:00

Another big blog entry coming soon, I promise; but I'd be remiss not to draw your attention to this update of my earlier Halloween post. Following on the challenge I gave you there, I've now got some in-depth analysis of 1920s production methods with—I hope—some interesting observations.
To the right we're seeing some of Vitaphone's original press material on Big Man From the North (1931), one of the relevant shorts. "Bosco" (sic) is spelled as such in most early Looney Tunes publicity materials I've seen, though the proper version of the character's name had in fact been formally registered as early as 1928.

Ninety Years—Nine Lives

2009-11-10T21:00:00.014-05:00

As late as the 1930s, J. R. Bray's Colonel Heeza Liar was remembered as "the Mickey Mouse of his day," but the first true cartoon superstar was Felix the Cat. I've covered this character's great appeal before, but there's never enough Felix for me—so I'm taking the occasion of his big 90th anniversary to offer some specials for your reading and viewing pleasure.

Let's start with animation. While a picture isn't always worth a thousand words, classic Felix creator/director Otto Messmer crafted beautiful, artistic acting that really does defy description now and then. Here's a special Ramapith birthday tribute just for our hero—oops! Looks like Felix's pals Kitty, Inky and Winky (and Dinky), Laura, and Skiddoo got into it too...

(Music: Scott Joplin's "Pineapple Rag"; Itzhak Perlman, violin, and Andre Previn, piano)

Longtime Otto assistant and Magic Bag inventor Joe Oriolo came aboard in the 1940s (at right: probable cover collaboration with Jim Tyer, 1949). While we can never forget Oriolo's most famous creations, odd-couple bad guys The Professor and Rock Bottom, I'm sharing a different side of Oriolo today. His circus story "The Big Finale," below (from Harvey's Felix the Cat 106, 1959) is one of my favorite Oriolo works—with its 1920s-style mayhem, inimitable punning, and a great one-off female lead. Joe cut his artistic teeth at the Fleischer Studio, and the Betty Boopish "Katrina" is a sweet tip of the hat to his old mentors.
By the time of "The Big Finale"'s publication, Oriolo had taken over creative control of Felix and launched his famous TV series. But I'm not sure everyone at this particular circus considers our hero a "wonderful cat"...

Today Felix keeps on walking, as Joe's son Don plans new projects at Felix the Cat Productions—including a few that I think fans of the classics will appreciate! Don is also personally taking oil to canvas to paint Felix modern art, visible now on the studio's Facebook page.
Special thanks to Don for encouragement in the course of prepping today's little tribute. And props to the unsinkable Tom Stathes and Mark Kausler for providing select source materials. On his own blog, Mark is also celebrating Felix with classic 1930s daily strips right now... don't miss them!

(Magazine spread courtesy Cole Johnson; art attributed to Dana Parker)

Ninety Years—Nine Lives (Preview)

2009-11-10T00:14:00.004-05:00

November 9, 1919-November 9, 2009.
Incredible, ain't it?
Just a placeholder so I don't miss the actual anniversary (though I'm already a few minutes late by Eastern time). More soon.

An Oswald Trick (Or Treat)

2009-10-31T17:56:00.021-04:00

Little time to blog today; big Halloween doings. But I couldn't let the holiday pass without a special Ramapith commemoration.

When Walt Disney's Oswald the Lucky Rabbit staff moved on in 1928, that wasn't the end of Disney's 26 Oswald cartoons. Some were reissued with sound by Universal in the 1930s. Others survived in a less direct way, as former Oswald staffers remade them—or remade elements of them—with other star characters. Oswald's Harem Scarem (1927) became Disney's later Mickey in Arabia (1932). Oswald's Rival Romeos (1928) became Ub Iwerks' Flip the Frog short Ragtime Romeo (1931).

But no one did remakes quite like Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising did remakes. Their early Looney Tunes boasted so much Oswald mimickry that Bosko himself might as well have been a lucky rabbit minus the ears. And Disney's Ozzie of the Mounted (1928), in particular, was a source of gags and story like none other.
Here's the silent Ozzie now with a rather suspicious... soundtrack (!). Can you use the plot elements to tell us where it comes from?

I'll update this blogpost later with the answer(s). Happy Halloween!

Update, November 18: As some of you guessed, Hugh and Rudy's Looney Tune Big Man From the North (1931) provided most of my score because it's the most direct Ozzie of the Mounted remake—in part, anyway. Let's have a look at it now; while the opening is virtually identical, the plots diverge some of the way through. Pete's sled dogs in Mounted become Bosko's dogs in Big Man. And lots of Big Man's action takes place inside the saloon, whereas Oswald and Pete stay outside. (My pet theory is that Honey already worked there, and Oswald didn't want Bosko to catch him with her. Stop looking at me like that.)

One Mounted element that didn't make it into Big Man was the robot horse, because Hugh and Rudy decided to give him a Looney Tune of his own. (Or rather "its" own? This four-legged Dalek is the least sentient cartoon robot I've ever seen...) Here's Ups 'n' Downs (1931), from which more of my soundtrack came:

Finally, I'd be remiss not to cite our friend Mark Newgarden, who noted that my Mounted revamp "syncs up too well." Doesn't it? But I won't take the credit. When researching these cartoons for this blogpost, I found that Mounted reflected a then-new trend at Disney: to animate repeating action in regulation 6-, 8-, 12-, or 24-drawing cycles, as evidenced also in Bright Lights and Rival Romeos (if not, oddly, the contemporary Sky Scrappers). These actions could thus conveniently be timed out by the second—and Harman-Ising continued the practice at Warner once the sound era began, extending it to house musician Frank Marsales in the form of a one-second beat. Adding Marsales' scoring to Ozzie of the Mounted meant the fast-action sequences had to match.

Additional pieces of my Mounted score came from H-I's Box Car Blues and Congo Jazz (both 1930); in the latter, even a triple-meter motif is built on that one-second beat.

Was Disney the first studio to effectively animate silents to a rhythm, however basic? Who initiated the practice there? (It's not in Harman-Ising's earlier Aladdin's Vamp [1926] or Disney's earlier Great Guns [1927], for instance.)

October Original Titles

2009-10-17T02:36:00.038-04:00

Wak! It's been forever since I've updated around here. Sadly, I'm still under the gun with one project or another. But the least I can do is return briefly to a topic everyone's been asking for: the hunt for original titles. Like Ozzie of the Mounted (1928), my fellow scholars and I will get our men—even if we lose our heads!

It's not a new discovery, of course, that many theatrical cartoons had their original title cards replaced for later reissue. The actual revelations are the original titles themselves—often because the cartoons' corporate owners dumped their originals, but sometimes because originals perished in spite of the studios' best efforts. Luckily (see my lengthier discussion here), in-depth research has brought back stragglers of all stripes.

The Moose Hunt (1931) is a Mickey Mouse short for which Disney's original titles elements went missing at some point in the past. Here we see a faux-original title card recreated for a recent DVD set...

...and here is an actual original I more recently got the chance to see. In this case, the recreation attempt was about as close as could be imagined; the positioning of the words is different, but the proper card style was chosen and even the title font is similar.

Alas, sometimes the re-creator can't be quite as prescient. In the case of Fiddlin' Around (1930), it's new knowledge that the cartoon was called that from the start. Studio records suggested that Mickey's violin-recital short was titled "Just Mickey" in its first release, and the faux title for DVD reflected this conventional wisdom:

But the CW isn't always right. The late Denis Gifford was the first to show me theatrical materials that suggested Fiddlin' Around as the 1930 release title, and now we get a look at the original title card as well:

Interestingly, this shows that the first and second seasons of Columbia Mickeys had slightly different card styles. The background is darker on this 1930 episode (as with a few more that I'll share later on); much of the white lettering lacks a black outline; and most critically there's an effort to make the text on the chalkboard look like it's Mickey's own work. Better take some handwriting courses there, Mick.

Hm, and maybe you ought to get some plastic surgery while you're at it:

Thanks to research buddy Cole Johnson and collector Ralph Celentano, above we have an item I'd never seen before—the 1930 Columbia reissue card for a Celebrity-era (1928-29) Mickey cartoon. While I'm not aware of an original Celebrity card surviving for When the Cat's Away (1929), others hold out from the period:

With no extended knowledge on the matter just yet, I'll make an educated guess that Columbia staffers—rather than anyone at Disney—drew up that new title card for Cat's Away (and, presumably, other Celebrity Mickey shorts). It's hard to imagine anyone on Uncle Walt's per diem transforming the studio stars into possums.

Of course, sometimes you didn't change species when your title card was remade. You just went from professionally drawn to fourth-grade level. Here's Dick Huemer's Toby the Pup as seen on reissues...

...and here's the hound as viewed by cinemagoers in 1931:

Should I be disturbed that Toby's feet look as much like hands on the original card as on the fake? I'm just not sure why he had to wear shoes with toes. Maybe Pervis the Goat ate all the normal shoes in the area—in Circus Time (1931), he eats one of Toby's gloves.

Gotta dash back to meeting deadlines, but I'd be a boob if I didn't go without delivering another item I'd promised for awhile—one more early Tom and Jerry title card. Most of us know The Zoot Cat (1944) as looking like this reissue print:

But here's what audiences saw in 1944. Dig that color, squares. Go man, go go go:

For completeness' sake, here also is Fraidy Cat (1942), with a rare intro card that we've already seen on the earlier Midnight Snack (1941).

That's it for now—but there are more discoveries being made all the time. Sometimes, as my friend Tom Stathes is always showing me, certain reissues are interesting, too:

Yes, that's a Columbia-era short with the United Artists title design. But some things are worth the wait...

Update, October 18: I'd formerly pictured an MGM lion card for The Zoot Cat that understandably misled some of you—the lion was a circa 1940 card, while the cartoon is from 1944. Thad K, who has looked at this print as well, remembered that its lion opening had in fact been spliced on from a different source.
Zoot Cat almost certainly had a standard 1944-era opening as seen on this print of Screwball Squirrel (1944).

D23's Love Bug Will Bite You

2009-08-18T21:29:00.017-04:00

And now a quick word from our "sponsor"—well, Disney's D23 website isn't actually responsible for anything on this blog. But I love the way they explore Disney lore, and have had the fun of writing a couple of articles for them (one published thus far). So I'm proud to spread the word about their upcoming Expo via some candid vault raider footage...

But hey, this wouldn't be a Ramapith posting without a little homegrown history. We've just had a close Herbie encounter—but did you know the "Love Bug's" nickname came from a classic song that already had a Disney connection? Courtesy of the nearly all-encompassing British Pathe and WPA stock footage libraries, here's Aussie comic Albert Whelan in 1940, mimicking Ned Sparks and Gordon Harker on "You Can't Fool an Old Hoss Fly," Will Fyffe on "I Belong to Glasgow"—and our old pal Donald Duck, among others, on the original "Love Bug Will Bite You (If You Don't Watch Out!)"

Haven't had enough yet? Oh, awright. I'm feeling generous, so here's "Hoss Fly" as rendered by the stellar 1920s team of Billy Jones and Ernest Hare...

...and a 1929 recording of Will Fyffe's original "I Belong to Glasgow."

I belong to Santa Barbara, but I left my heart in Copenhagen. And now I'm recommending you go to Anaheim...

Yes, Virginia—we'll miss you, Alice

2009-08-17T16:21:00.020-04:00

I'm back today from more than a month's travels—some of which involved exciting research and animation-related discoveries. I'll be busy for a few days now wrapping up one project or another, but that doesn't mean I don't have a lot to share, and soon.

Sad to say, I got home just in time to receive some bad news: the passing of Virginia Davis, first to perform the role of Alice in Disney's classic silent Alice Comedies. Decades after her fanciful adventures with Julius the Cat, I was lucky enough to meet Virginia at a late 1990s film festival, where we initiated a VHS swap of Alice shorts from our personal collections. Each of us had access to a couple of transfers that the other lacked. Trading Alice Comedies with Alice—talk about an honor I never thought I'd have!

Virginia was a gentlewoman to the end and a wonderful source of anecdotes and inspiration. To say she'll be missed is an understatement. To look even at a poorly reproduced 1924 publicity photo (above right) is to see an indomitable creative spark that still stood out, decades later, in Miss Davis' modern-day outlook on life. The Winkler Pictures ads at left and below—based on, but not identical to, the posters for Alice Hunting in Africa and Alice's Spooky Adventure (both 1924)—emphasize that indomitable spirit, too.
Following beneath is the 1926 Pathé copyright sheet for Virginia's 1923 debut, Alice's Wonderland (here retitled "Alice in Slumberland"), in which Alice's entry into Cartoonland does look a little like her reception into some benevolent hereafter. Chase, a poster at the Termite Terrace Trading Post, said it better than I could: "RIP, Virginia. Hope you have many adventures with that cat up there..."

Making New Donald Duck Adventures: Tamers of Nonhuman Threats! (Part One)

2009-06-23T22:07:00.091-04:00

I've spoken much on this blog about favorite creations of the past—but as a comics editor and writer, I've personally had the honor and privilege of working with some stellar creators in the present. One of my most exciting experiences began in the summer of 1999 at an Egmont Creative task force meeting, where I learned about a project provisionally called "Goosebusters."

What: A strange (in the good sense) branded series starring Donald and Cousin Fethry as paranormal investigators/"men in black"/secret agents.

Egmont is a Denmark-based Disney licensee. Every year they produce several thousand pages of Disney comics stories, written and drawn by talents around the world. From 1997 to 2004, I was part of the Egmont editorial team, supervising some of these writers and artists under Editor-In-Chief Anna Maria Vind and Creative Director Byron Erickson. My "unit," as I called it—I was the only editor to use animation studio terminology!—included talents such as Stefan Petrucha, Sarah Kinney, and Don Markstein, and we produced more Mickey Mouse, Goofy, and Uncle Scrooge stories than anything else. But there was room to expand. In 1998, for example, I was on hand for the revival of Fethry Duck.

Story Type: Comedy/Adventure (predominately a lot of fantasy).

Fethry, as past readers of this blog will know, is Donald's obsessively nerdy cousin. In classic 1960s comics created by Dick Kinney and Al Hubbard (example from "Weaving and Ducking" [1964], right), this geek gained fame through his highly unique mix of creativity, selflessness, and unwitting thoughtlessness. But it was a hard balance to pull off just right. By the late 1970s, many Fethry stories featured a distorted duck, often shown as dumb and egotistical. In 1992, Egmont ceased using the character, determining that this version was more unpleasant than funny. A few years later, though, the question came up: could the original, more interesting Fethry be brought back?

The Purpose of the Series: In general, to take advantage of ongoing reader interest in [science fiction] stories.

As a longtime aficionado of the Kinney-Hubbard stories, I wanted to give this a try. With my writer friend, Fethry expert Lars Jensen (left)—then working under a different editor—I created a character guide on the "classic" Fethry; scripted a few short stories myself, then handed the character over to writers in my unit. Still, the results were only three- to six-page tales at first; and working with my then-regular team, I could not involve Lars at the time. I wanted to produce more ambitious Fethry projects and see Lars get a crack at them, too.

Supporting Characters: The Head (maybe a literal alien head) of a secret non-specific-government organization, and maybe other members of this organization. The main Disney Duck characters have roles only as appropriate to individual stories.

Which brings us back to that 1999 editors' meeting. While we Egmonters decided on many of the themes for our story production from scratch, this time our publishers had given us some rough plotlines upon which they wished to see new ongoing story subseries—or "branded series"—based. One was provisionally titled "Computer Kids": tales about Donald's nephews in a computer club. One was called "Football": Mickey's nephews, Morty and Ferdie, were to join a soccer team. And then there was "Goosebusters," the series I volunteered to edit. Publishers wanted to capitalize on the popularity of science-fiction media—Ghostbusters, Men in Black, Goosebumps, The X-Files—and show Donald and Fethry as part of a huge, secret monster-, ghost-, and alien-hunting organization.

The Tone of the Series: The key word is "fun", but not camp... Donald might know what a loon Fethry is sometimes, and the Head might get ulcers from Fethry’s doings (if he had a stomach), but the point is not to do stories in which the only purpose is to point to Fethry and laugh at what a moron he is. This same point is also true of Donald...

Adventure stories featuring Fethry? Wak! I was there. Then again—wait a minute. Donald is a duck bent on self-preservation. And Fethry drives Donald crazy, however unknowingly. Now Donald was willingly going to subject himself to a dangerous monster-fighting job... with Fethry as his partner? Making this believable would be part of the assignment, just like making any comic book plotline relatively convincing. I needed to work with a writer who knew Fethry well and was up for a challenge! It was time to get Lars Jensen—and though he didn't usually work for me, I received special permission to work with him now. Then it came time to pick an artist; who better than Lars' fellow Dane Flemming Andersen (above), whose wild, bouncy linework struck me as perfect for the lunacy of Donald-Fethry teamups. With my creative team established, then, it was soon time for writer, artist and editor to spend a week away from the Egmont office and our regular lives, brainstorming each day from morning to night...

Imagine: There’s a secret government agency that’s a combination of ghostbusters/alien-sitters and or -fighters/paranormal investigators. And imagine that, through a twisted string of circumstances, the Head of this agency gets the idea that Cousin Fethry is an expert in the field. And imagine that Fethry gets so enamored by the Head’s recruitment pitch that he accepts. Further imagine, that Fethry somehow manages to talk Donald into joining him as his partner. The result of all this imagining? All hell breaks loose!

This last paragraph marked the heart of the document I've been excerpting: the "Goosebusters" assignment sheet that Flemming, Lars, and I were given by Byron Erickson. It reflected a mixture of wishes and decisions from Byron, Maria, Egmont management, and the affiliate publishers. Now we three creators got to spend a week holed up in Copenhagen's Hotel Neptun, enjoying the perk of all the food we could eat at any restaurant I chose. The price of these luxuries? We were sworn to translate our assignment into a series—and come back with a complete series bible by the Monday following!

It was going to be fun, yet a little stressful—handling the writing and editing side, Lars and I almost felt like we were characters in a slightly tense comic book story, ourselves. And well, what do you know? After less than a day at Hotel Neptun, our tension became Donald's own. Who gets stuck with all the bad luck? Who feels like a loser compared to successful Uncle Scrooge? Who's always being run out of town due to crises he's caused—but can't afford to clean up? No one but Donald Duck, of course (whose team headgear I tried to envision in crude thumbnails, above left). So what if joining the "Goosebusters" became the answer to these problems? The flip side of the danger in being a secret agent, after all, is the feeling of being a winner when a mission goes right; the feeling of bravado when you get to handle cool secret agent gear. And if being a monster fighter also paid really, really well, Donald would have no choice but to lean on "Goosebuster" missions after his domestic Duckburg disasters caused expensive trouble.

Suddenly Donald had a reason to be a "Goosebuster"! Lars compared it to making a sick patient's body accept a complex medicine; sometimes medicines B and C are required to make medicine A go down. But do it right, and the result is health; or in this case, healthy logic. On a good day, Donald could actually enjoy his secret agent job. On a bad day, Donald would still be forced to stick with it—kvetching all the way.

And Fethry? Well, what if the Head was, in fact, halfway right about Fethry's being "an expert in the [paranormal] field"? A cryptid-obsessed Fethry might be too eccentric for a real scholar, but he could believably learn enough to be helpful to missions in spite of himself. Maybe Donald could use this...

Wow! While Lars and I were figuring those relationships out, Flemming was drawing! The images you're seeing show some of the first results this master came up with—an improved version of Donald's headgear and uniform, an elaborate interior view of what a secret government agency might look like, and then a slick lady "Goosebuster" agent. This was the heyday of early video game action heroines like Lara Croft, Jill Valentine, and Claire Redfield, so we all felt like sourcing that same trope... but with a twist. Imagine Lara, Jill, or Claire ten years further on in their lives, when the thrill of adventure has been replaced by grim world-weariness. What if such a jaded action heroine were Donald's trainer? We'd have a clash of titans! In that spirit, Lars called our frazzled senior agent Kolik, "a name that sounded rock-hard... like you could bruise yourself on it." It also sounded like colic—a kind of pain, just like she and Donald would give each other when they argued! The character first called Anya Kolik became Katrina, then Brandy, then finally Katrina again. Lars and I loved the great helmet Flemming created for her, too, though even today we haven't yet explained why she's the only agent who wears one—or how exactly it hides her huge mop of hair. Suction?

The gadgetry of "Goosebusters" quickly went beyond Kolik's helmet. Soon Lars and Flemming were devising futuristic flying scooters and the "weirdness radar," with which paranormal activity could be detected from afar. We decided agents could store their gadgets in special armbands that seemed to compress the gadgets down to a small size. But this goofy hi-tech came with problems—the "armband compressors," as we called them, almost never seemed to contain everything a mission called for. I may have been the first to sketch an armband compressor (above left), but Flemming (above right) outdid me for believability! I'm a writer; he's an artist.

Speaking of believability, you'll recollect that we were asked to make the series' characters sympathetic, not parodic or silly ("...[avoid] stories in which the only purpose is to point to Fethry and laugh..."). And this led to an important question regarding our opening setup. If we were to take the characters' situations seriously, then the "Goosebusters" had to treat their missions seriously. So how seriously could the Head ever take nerdy Fethry? Could the Head believably become convinced on his own that Fethry was an expert paranormalist, or did Fethry have extra aid or circumstances on his side? An early suggestion from Lars, preserved in my notes, plumped for the latter:

Either Fethry or Donald works for Scrooge [on a project]; somehow [the nature of the project means that] they either work opposite the Goosebuster organization or against them. At the end of the story, Scrooge manages to pass them onto the organization. They’ve caused so much destruction for the Goosebusters that the Goosebusters make them work it off, hence their continued employment.

Nope... wouldn't work. Editor Dave and Writer Lars hashed it out: after being introduced to the "Goosebusters" as visibly destructive characters, the Ducks weren't realistically very likely to be employed as agents—an obviously sensitive position—to work off their debts. And how much Scrooge/"Goosebusters" contact could take place without Scrooge learning the nature of their work—and thus becoming permanently aware of his nephews' "Goosebuster" identities? We'd been asked to create a secret agency; if other Ducks learned about it, the consequences could be serious (sketch from Lars, above right; no, not that serious).

We needed a new way for the circumstances to favor Fethry's—and, eventually, Donald's—hiring as secret agents. Version two sounded significantly better:

Night at Fethry’s; he’s watching monster movies or reading books and going on about his obsession. Shadowy figures (emissaries of the [Head]) have [a] weirdness radar that has led them there. Fethry is talking out loud about how he’d like to get Donald involved. "Are you interested in the paranormal?" comes a voice. "Yes!" gushes Fethry. [The next day we find Fethry] bursting in on Donald. Donald hears his pitch, and after first rejecting it, decides to go along—cynically saying "Great, I'll bust one ghost with [you]"; ghosts don't really exist, Donald thinks, so he isn't afraid at all.

Still a problem here, though; Fethry seemed to be the focus character, sidelining the more sympathetic Donald. There had to be a way to get Donald into this setup from the start. Third time was the charm...

In a moment of weakness, Donald has reluctantly joined Fethry for a night of movies about Fethry’s latest kick: the paranormal. After one too many installments of “The Meatloaf That Ate Vegas"... a sickened Donald pushes off for home, but overenthusiastic Fethry will not be stopped. Even alone, he continues... obsessing about his latest fad. It’s now that outside Fethry’s home, we see two shadowy figures passing by... talking to Agent Kolik on the phone [though] we won't see Kolik at all... as yet; the [agents] are in the neighborhood to watch Fethry and dialogue reveals they (or their organization) has done so from a distance for a while... "I want to investigate the paranormal!” Fethry says to no one in particular. “And I wish Cousin Donald could join me, because it's so obvious he wants to!" BANG! Next day Donald is grabbed from his garden (or wherever)...

Bingo. Rather than be recruited directly by the level-headed Head, Fethry could instead intrigue two low-level agents who would help make the case to the Head for him. Should Fethry (and by extension, Donald) then fail to live up to expectations, those other agents would take the brunt of the blame—and never forget it. In later stories, they could even become resentful rivals on the force! At first, the recruiters-turned-rivals were simply called "the two agents" or "two guys" in our notes. They spent awhile as Yin and Yang before crystallizing as Jackson and Finch, a steely-eyed Puritan and his oafish cool-dude partner. While not incompetent, Jackson and Finch are average, imperfect, and insecure enough to feel threatened by their hirees; Lars once accurately stated that "Jackson and Finch would probably be the Donald and Fethry of the group if Donald and Fethry were not there." With Donald and Fethry there, the results were dynamite!

Hmm... dynamite. As noted on our assignment sheet, the name "Goosebusters" had always been just a provisional name for our secret agency. Lars noted that despite being an obvious Disney play on ghostbusters, it "would only be believable in the context of the series if our heroes were constantly fighting Gus Goose." Over racks of ribs at Copenhagen's Hard Rock Cafe on January 19, 2000, Donald's and Fethry's paranormalist employer became TNT—initially "Terror Neutralization Taskforce" and finally Tamers of Nonhuman Threats.

I'm glad we didn't go with my earlier (joking) suggestion, "Monster Butchers." We wouldn't have been allowed to kill them off, anyway.

Hey, it's the end of the post but we're not through yet. I'll return to TNT soon to tell about how more new characters were created; how the Head got a body; and how a highly reluctant Donald got sent on his first few missions.

Allwine Does Gottfredson: A Tribute

2009-06-19T20:50:00.030-04:00

Wayne Allwine will be missed.

I'm not the first to say so. In fact, my blog must be about the five-hundredth cartoon blog to spread the news, insofar as Disney's longtime Mickey Mouse voice artist actually passed away several weeks ago. But I'm going to regret Allwine's loss not just for what he did, but what he could—fate permitting—have done so much more of, because he was so incredibly right for it.

Allwine's Mickey Mouse was featured most often in the context of light entertainment—most often aimed specifically at kids. From his first work in the New Mickey Mouse Club (1977) through numerous sing-along records and the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse TV series (2006-present), Allwine typically portrayed a mouse who was primarily a substitute parent for toddlers; a bubbly, gently authoritative man-child, but little more. This Mickey was rarely depressed or conflicted, nor did he have reason to be. On the other hand, I can't blame Allwine for having delivered the kind of host character that preschool entertainment often demands. He was asked to do it, and he was fine at that.

It's just that Mickey can be more than that character. Disney comics fans know that in the pages of four-color funnies, Mickey is a star aimed at all ages; not just children. Instead of an adult, establishment role model, the best comics portray "a mouse against the world": a stubbornly optimistic, imperfect but determined youth trying to prove himself in competitive and downright dangerous situations and surroundings. And in funny business—because an earnest, struggling underdog can get into awfully embarrassing scrapes, too.

This is the Mickey developed first by Floyd Gottfredson in the 1930s dailies; the Mickey who battled Pegleg Pete on fighter planes and escaped from the Phantom Blot's deathtraps. And tried to get out of modeling dresses for Minnie, "doggone th' luck!"

In Runaway Brain (1995) and the Mouseworks and House of Mouse series (1999-2003), as well as its Three Musketeers companion film (2004), Allwine finally got precious chances to portray something close to this version of Mickey. While every project had its arguable drawbacks—these obviously weren't golden age cartoons—we did get to see Mickey the smart aleck again; Mickey the underdog; even Mickey the dramatist, perhaps more than in any animated incarnation. And Allwine delivered the voicework in a way that, I think, Jimmy MacDonald never could.

Let me show you what I'm talking about with a little "best-of" compilation that I've put together. You'll have to put up with sometimes-crude TV animation to enjoy the Allwine acting, but maybe if I throw the Phantom Blot into the mix...

Ironically, Mickey Foils the Phantom Blot (1999) was also the exception that proved the rule. As enjoyable as aspects of Mouseworks and Three Musketeers were, the best opportunity never materialized: there was never, during Allwine's lifetime, a real series of long-form Mickey adventure cartoons made, nor was a chance taken to actually adapt any comics characters or environments beyond the Blot and—briefly—the relatively unimportant Chief O'Hara. We can only imagine, most of the time, how well Allwine's Mickey would fit into the full environment of the comics character.

Luckily, we don't have to imagine all the time, thanks to a few rather uncommon Allwine performances I'm pleased to share. In the mid-1990s, Disney mounted a promotional campaign called "The Perils of Mickey," consisting of merchandise based on several classic Gottfredson comics adventures. Was a plan ever made to expand this push into animation? I don't know, but I'm certain that at some point, it expanded into recordings. An abbreviated version of Gottfredson's classic "Blaggard Castle" (1932), pitting Mickey and Horace Horsecollar against Professors Ecks, Doublex, and Triplex, was recorded as a Disney "storyteller album" with Allwine and others in the roles. It doesn't seem ever to have been released that way, but one can find it on ITunes and Amazon now—minus the "Perils" branding. In the spirit of fair use (sorry, you'll have to buy the whole thing if you want it!), here's a little excerpt, complete with the corresponding Gottfredson strips for comparison:

"Blaggard Castle" wasn't the only time Allwine would record Gottfredson, either. In 1938, Western Publishing issued a series of Disney storybooks with blandly generic titles—The Story of Mickey Mouse, The Story of Dippy the Goof, and so forth—containing Big Little Book-like retellings of Gottfredson Sunday gag pages. In 1996, Applewood Press reprinted these books with accompanying CDs, each containing recorded versions of the books' texts with then-current Disney voice actors in the roles. Here's Ted Osborne's and Floyd Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse Sunday page for November 29, 1936...

...and here's Allwine's reenactment. To make it more like the Sunday page and less like the book, I've eliminated the narration that originally bridged the dialogue...

(Oh, okay. You want to hear the narration, too? Here's the complete version, with Horace's voice actor narrating as Horace. I'm not sure it's the more recent Bill Farmer here, but I could be wrong...)

Let's hear it for Wayne Allwine—a man who didn't live in the golden age of animation, but who was capable of a wonderful golden age Mickey Mouse. (And if any of my readers knows more of the backstory behind the "Blaggard Castle" recording, I'd be grateful for a scoop.)

Tho-MAS! Come Up and See Some Rarities Sometime (Hic!)

2009-06-11T19:59:00.037-04:00

Researchers revel in the search for classic cartoons' original titles. Almost every major studio reissued its cartoons years after their creation; sometimes to theatres, other times to TV. And almost every major studio retitled its cartoons for the purpose, drafting new and more modern opening and closing titles.

Often these new titles weren't as imaginative in style as the old. Sometimes they swapped the original cartoons' episode-specific graphics for a tedious sameness. Other times they simply lacked the period charm that the originals had had.

But often there was no going back. Many studios, including Disney, Warner, and MGM misplaced or completely lost numerous original title sequences after replacing them. Often the originals were snipped off the negatives and thrown away. Other times they were simply reshelved until it was difficult to find them. In the case of MGM in particular, original versions of the shorts were saved—but then a studio fire destroyed the elements.

Luckily, enough searching, hunting, and pecking can bring refugee copies of the originals to light. At a collection I recently visited, I met up with a few rare Tom and Jerry stragglers. The condition on some was only fair, but at least now we can see a little more of them than we usually do.

The Midnight Snack (1941) was the second Tom and Jerry short, and the first to call the characters by their well-known names. A similar title sequence survives on The Night Before Christmas (also 1941), but we didn't know how it looked on the first cartoon to feature it. Now we see that it shared the same brilliant blue style as the basic MGM cartoon titles of the period:

(This may have been the only time the proper episode title appeared on the Tom and Jerry card. It doesn't happen in The Night Before Christmas—nor in Fraidy Cat [1942], a print of which I also saw and which combines the Tom and Jerry card above with the Fraidy Cat title that we still see today.)

Jumping ahead a year we find Puss 'n' Toots (1942), Tom's first ill-fated love story. The print I saw was not complete, but we do get a differently-colored version of the Tom and Jerry intro card and an era-appropriate end title.

Moving forward again we have Mouse Trouble (1944). The Tom and Jerry intro card here is in fact one we're used to seeing, though the screengrab that circulates today survived only on a single nitrate frame; this is the first time I'd seen it on an actual print. The Mouse Trouble-specific title and credits cards themselves are also colored and designed differently than on the reissue. Until we find more originals, a lot of such differences may be lost to the ages.

There's still at least one early Tom and Jerry intro card that I've never seen on a print; you can see it below in its surviving pencil sketch, as presented years ago on the Cartoon Network website. I'm guessing this could have been used in 1943, and maybe one day we'll see; perhaps there are more rarities out there?

(Speaking of rarities, some of you may wonder whether the several Tom and Jerrys that I viewed, like some other early MGM cartoons, included gags that were tweaked or altered for their reissues. I didn't see any, nor do the copyright synopses indicate any.)

Update, June 14: Thanks to my accidentally getting my screengrabs crossed, the "Supervised By" card shown here for The Midnight Snack was actually the one for Fraidy Cat. Vdubdavid at the Termite Terrace Trading Post noticed the incorrect production number—thanks! I've got the correct Midnight Snack card up now, and will repost the Fraidy Cat version later.

Link, June 15: Thad has posted actual footage of another MGM rarity with original titles: Avery's Wild and Woolfy (1945). This cartoon was altered for reissue, and we can now get a look at the first release print in action. Nice job.

Update, October 20: O-W-T out! The Tom and Jerry intro card I showed for Mouse Trouble here was really from The Zoot Cat (1944). Now I've fixed it—identical card design, but very different looking prints, and the Zoot Cat card is now seen only where it belongs. Thanks, Gabriel Katikos.

Ub Iwerks' Rep: From Flip to Flop

2009-06-06T22:34:00.014-04:00

Why did Ub Iwerks leave Walt Disney's employ in January 1930? For leave he did, and fast; enticed by an offer that, according to Michael Barrier and John Kenworthy, Iwerks at first didn't realize was masterminded by Pat Powers, Disney's own distributor.
Conflict with Walt himself is thought of as the main reason for the split, with the suggestion that Walt took Ub's talent for granted. But another reason has been leveled, too. At the same time that Iwerks got bad vibes from his longtime friend and employer, he is also said to have received a growing number of good vibes, plaudits, and credits from voices outside the studio. This external praise, as much as any internal strife, may have convinced Ub that departure was in his best interest. Once he made that departure, the praise continued quite strongly for a time—seemingly validating Iwerks' action.

Most of us haven't seen actual examples of this praise before, but today I'm presenting two for your reading pleasure. The first example, from Germany's Reichsfilmblatt in 1930, was reprinted in Storm and Dreßler's superb Im Reiche der Micky Maus (1991). Coming on the cusp of Iwerks' independence, this early announcement of his solo productions explains that

Following the exemplary success of capricious little Mickey Mouse, a new star has now turned up in sound film heaven: Flip the Frog. Again it is Ub Iwerks, the ingenious creator and artist of Mickey, who has taken a great hop forward. His Flip is far more capable than the spindly mouse of mimicking and mocking the posturing and fussing of humanity...

Yet a better, if briefer, clue to the admiration Iwerks received came months earlier in fall 1929—in an item I don't think has ever been reprinted. When Columbia Pictures—again through Pat Powers—first contracted to release Disney's Silly Symphonies, its four-page "press sheet" was remarkably frank about how at least certain parties viewed the Disney/Iwerks relationship. "Walt Disney is head of the studio," Columbia's corporate voice explains, "but the artist who perfects the details is named 'Ub' Iwerks. He is assisted by a staff of 'animators' [sic], who follow his sketches and continuity..."
Reality notwithstanding—the same presskit calls "Oswald the Cat" an earlier Disney creation and scrupulously avoids mentioning Mickey, a non-Columbia property until 1930—the implication could not be more clear: Disney was the businessman, Iwerks the artiste and director. The back page's biography of Disney, calling him a "child of fate," certainly lavishes Walt with purple prose, yet still cannot walk back that first impression.

(Momentary break to discuss the poster art illustrated in Columbia's presskit: I've seen these one-sheets before, but never any for El Terrible Toreador (1929) until now. The poster and presskit call the film The [sic] Terrible Toreador, but that's actually a mistake; though the original titles are not on DVD, collectors possess them—see image at left—and they carry the commonly accepted El at title's start.)

Only some time after Iwerks' split did the first impression begin to recede. Later in 1930, another German article was entitled "The True Creator of the Mickey Mouse Films." It contended that

The creator of the now world-famous Mickey Mouse is the American film producer Walt Disney. The original concepts for Mickey and his inamorata Minnie stem from him, as do all the ideas for the Mickey Mouse film treatments. The artist Ub Iwerks, falsely credited as the father of the Mickey Mouse films, was initially an employee of Walt Disney. He has long since been expelled from the Disney firm.

From hero to pariah overnight. What a crazy trip.

Felix Down Under: The Oily Bird Comic Strip

2009-05-25T04:39:00.019-04:00

From kat to cat: it's time to bring one of my all-time favorite cartoon stars to this blog. Otto Messmer's Felix the Cat was one of the first animated characters who really acted—emoting to the audience, nodding and winking and turning viewers into co-conspirators. Who didn't want to go on an adventure with this wonderful cat? And those adventures... ranging from wacky comedy to truly far-flung fantasy. I've been a classic Felix buff since childhood—and the Silver Age Felix of Joe Oriolo, replete with funny bad guys and Jim Tyer animation, deserves his bon mots, too. Apart from these screen incarnations, Felix had just as rich a life in the comics, with Messmer, Oriolo, and Tyer once again contributing most of the great moments.

But there was another Felix besides those we know so well. From 1927 to 1931, Felix's then-new daily strip featured stories drawn largely from recent cartoons—in adaptations so close you'd think actual animation drawings were used. And they were! Early Messmer assistant Jack Bogle was called upon to create these continuities, and his process evidently involved choosing the "best" frames from each scene, then reinking them and adding comics details such as dialogue and extra shading. But the stories, though near to their inspiration, weren't exact. Their dialogue, dense where Messmer's was sparse, painted Felix as a kind of smart-alecky hick—an interpretation that appeared nowhere else. No Felix but Bogle's babbled "The Night Before Christmas" every time he got knocked unconscious. And no Felix but Bogle's had a canine sports coach pal named Julius, who featured in several Bogle continuities that weren't adapted from films.

Very few of Bogle's continuities have ever been anthologized in the United States. But curiously enough, Australia's Adventures of Felix comic book couldn't get enough of them in the late 1930s and early 1940s. That comic book's annual extras provided the striking covers I'm displaying here today, and that comic also offered the complete Bogle continuity seen below, an adaptation of The Oily Bird (1928) that originally ran from October 24 to November 3, 1928.

"Luke McCluck, a barnyard chicken, enters the house for no good reason..."

Nothing more to see here—keep on walking! (To the official Felix website, where their Oriolo "Comic Strip of the Day" features vintage 1950s strips... with Felix as almost a feline Dagwood.)

Not the Funniest Freleng: Krazy's Port Whines

2009-05-15T11:40:00.018-04:00

Travel and intense research have me busy this week, so I haven't had much of a chance to post. But for your amusement (?) and edification, here now is Port Whines (1929), another of the earliest Columbia Krazy Kat shorts—and another that hasn't been seen with sound in decades.

See Jerry Beck's earlier post on Ratskin (1929) for the inside information on where the video element comes from (and why it looks the way it does). Thanks to Cole Johnson—and by extension, the Vitaphone Project—for supplying the audio. As before, I handled the editing, and while the two elements didn't always match, I did my best to stretch and splice and sync things up as they should be. The video element has British main titles, fascinating enough in and of themselves that I didn't want to put faux Columbia originals in their places.

Port Whines isn't the most exciting cartoon we'll ever see. Only a few moments of delightfully crude violence save us from a rather basic musicale. In fact, even as a song cartoon the film falls short; while Ratskin featured a lively mix of popular songs, the body of Port Whines is dominated by the public domain "Life on the Ocean Wave," "Sailing, Sailing," and "Pop Goes the Weasel."

Only the main title tune, "Me-Ow," is a licensed number—and even it would soon be replaced with Mintz's self-owned similar cue, "You Are the Kat's Meow" (first used in Kat's Meow, 1930).

Perhaps the most interesting moment comes at 3:45, where the rooster's smoke ring stunts look to be animated by none other than Friz Freleng. Freleng worked with Mintz's New York staff in 1929 while waiting for Harman and Ising to sell their Bosko the Talk-Ink Kid (1929) pilot; in Port Whines, Freleng's obviously West Coast, Oswald-inspired design style clashes with the other animators' work. By Farm Relief (1929), however—just two shorts later—the rest of the Krazy staff seems to be imitating Freleng, with various degrees of success. The trend would only continue when the studio moved west in early 1930, and more Los Angeles animators joined the relocated crew.

It's no mean tribute to Freleng, especially at this early stage of his career, that his brief sojourn at a foreign studio should have had such an influence. The formerly Fleischerian stock company of earlier Harrison and Gould, with its truly bizarre elephant and hippo characters, would never be quite the same.

Sketches For Fethry Duck's First Appearance

2009-05-09T13:00:00.002-04:00

Disney comics' "S-coded" story production program—S for Disney studio—began in 1962. George Sherman, head of Disney’s Publications Department, had heard that the Disney comic book stories being produced in the United States weren't enough to fill the overseas comics. Sherman hired Tom Golberg to supervise the making of new stories principally for foreign use. Dick Kinney, former story man on Disney shorts and numerous TV cartoons, was one of the series' chief writers. In a 1964 S-coded story, "The Health Nut," Kinney and artist Al Hubbard (Scamp, Mary Jane and Sniffles) created Fethry Duck, one of my favorite Disney characters.

Donald's faddist cousin is Duckburg’s most highly motivated citizen. To meet Fethry is to be smothered by his craze of the moment: an exciting new hobby, a protest against society’s ills, or the urge to attain enlightenment, just to name the most typical types of obsessions. Alas, while infinitely well-meaning, Fethry is also unknowingly clumsy, thoughtless, and tactless—so the more exposure one has to his interests, the more punishment one takes. Enter Donald, whom Fethry considers his favorite relative. Fethry is simply determined to expose Donald to as many of his interests as possible. Uh-oh!

Today I'm sharing the earliest Fethry drawings I know to exist. Several years ago, the Disney studio briefly sold publications development art on eBay. The intent was to unload material that had already been documented by Disney, but a previously lost box of especially early S-coded production materials was discovered in the process. Among them was Dick Kinney's scribble-script to “The Health Nut,” the first five pages of which I'm reproducing here.

While I can't be sure that (as I once presumed) these are definitely the very first sketches of Fethry, they're certainly among the first, and certainly offer a look at Kinney’s developmental process that would not have been possible before. The simple, direct drawings crackle with the life and energy of animation storyboards: we can feel the raw emotion of a New Age nerd bursting onto the scene and radically revising Donald’s existence. Of course, they don't yet contain the ingredients that final story artist Al Hubbard brought to the table. Without (or before) Hubbard, Fethry's hat is almost a yarmulke; his eyes wide, his hair very different, his aggressive enthusiasm almost pugnacious.

On the back of page three, Kinney half-sketched an early trial image of Fethry with droopy eyelids (below). But it is plainly Hubbard—whose corresponding art I'm also reproducing here—who first brought the character’s classic, improbable grace to bear, and who gave him the truly baggy-eyed, lovably flaky facial features we know today. Like many unintentionally overbearing people in real life, Fethry had two extremely doting parents.

[Thanks to Alberto Becattini for details on Golberg's role. See more of Al Hubbard's comics at Thad's and Andrea's blogs. Scans of published "Health Nut" story come from Walt Disney's Comics and Stories 638 [2003], which you can buy here.]

The Tammany Kat is Loose: Ratskin

2009-05-06T03:00:00.017-04:00

Call him/her whatever gender you will—George Herriman's Krazy Kat is cartoondom's most famous masochist. When not reveling in the dubious joys of being bonked with a brick, Krazy is willfully undergoing other embarrassments. Employing Felix the Cat's voice double is just one example.

Jerry Beck, blogging at Cartoon Brew, is just now featuring a cartoon I've helped him "restore"—Ratskin (1929), Krazy's first sound short at Columbia. The Vitaphone Project recently recovered the film's long-lost soundtrack; Beck had his amateur video recording, and doing a little editing, I've aided in reuniting the two. And who knew? The usually far more kreative Krazy howls and yowls in a comically awful house cat impersonation, notable for its similarity to the poorly-received Felix "voice" Pat Sullivan employed at the time. Did the same actor meow badly for two New York studios? What was Charles Mintz thinking?

Maybe he felt it was the only way to tie into a famous song on the soundtrack! Ratskin is the first of many cartoons I know to enlist "Me-Ow," a 1909 pop tune by Harry Kerr and Mel B. Kaufman. Sylvester, Bosko, and Farmer Al Falfa have gamboled to this chestnut so often that almost every animation fan knows the melody—if not its name and theme. Here, courtesy of the invaluable UCSB Cylinder Archive, is Irving Kaufman performing the tune ten years after its creation:

Apart from being catchy in and of itself. "Me-Ow" exemplifies the bond between vintage cartoons and bygone cultural mores, a topic I'll be discussing fairly often here. In the early 1900s, cats weren't just household pets; they were equally common as strays, and thus seen as symbols of illness, savagery, and feral behavior. Of course, such behavior often mandated societal "punishment." So the image of the cat as comedic fall guy was also born at this time—but with an undercurrent of grotesque realism rarely present today. The drowned cat, sacked and tossed in the river, was a fact of life in 1910. So was the cat on a fence being battered with boots, and the randy cat slain by its multiple mates. In "Everybody Knows It's There," a David Reed tune recorded in 1908 by Edward M. Favor, the narrative could casually describe "every cat in town" being "slaughtered"—presumably as disease-carriers—and expect listeners simply to smile at the animals' bad luck.

In line with this, is it such a surprise that "Me-Ow!" is actually about a pet owner's unsuccessful efforts to kill his furry ward? Maybe it made Jerry Mouse's top ten.

Ratskin also features other popular songs of its era, some of which Cartoon Brew has listed for us. But I'd like to draw your attention to another that fascinates me: "Tammany." Dating from the worst period of Tammany Hall graft, Gus Edwards' and Vincent Bryan's tune likens political thugs to the lawless Indians of racist stereotype—an obvious comparison, given the Tammany society's use of Native American terminology. By the time of the later Merrie Melodie Bowery Bugs (1949), "Tammany" had simply become a tune evoking a late-19th-century slicker; in Ratskin, its original meaning was still remembered, thus its tongue-in-cheek use with an actual Wild West scenario. Here it is as performed by Billy Murray, later the voice of Bimbo, in 1905:

Hmm, it seems I've strayed rather far from Coconino County here. Then again, so would Columbia's version of Krazy Kat. Quick, Ignatz... the brick!

[Updated—thanks to Cole Johnson for corrections re: the Tammany society's Native American connection.]

All's Well in Lilliput

2009-05-02T11:49:00.001-04:00

Though today, the Fleischer studio feature Gulliver's Travels (1939) strikes me as a gently enjoyable missed opportunity, the tiny land of Lilliput was hot stuff at the time of the film's first release. Hot enough, anyway, for the studio to spin its Donald Duck/Grumpy morph Gabby off into a cartoon series of his own. (Everyone who's stared at a cheap drugstore VHS or DVD rack is sure to have encountered Fire Cheese [1941] sooner or later. I bet half of them are still mystified by its title—but I digress...)

I bumped into this Look Magazine preview of Gulliver in an archival collection awhile back and thought it deserved sharing. Though the source material—and thus my copies—were undated, loose pages, I've since learned that this feature was published in the January 2, 1940 issue.

Since I'm hardly an expert on the Fleischers' later days, I won't claim to know the details of the Gulliver print ad campaign—but I'm glad for any information others might provide. In the meantime, I'll check out a few more Gabby shorts on YouTube; their public domain status makes them perennials, and it's amazing just how many modern tweens and teens have posted comments in praise of the little blowhard. He's almost achieved the lasting popularity now that he failed to attain in the old days.

Max and Dave might be proud... if they could watch those deep red Eastman Color prints without wincing. Is everybody hap-hap-happy?

Oswald's Bright Lights, Big City

2009-05-01T00:54:00.001-04:00

Uh-oh, it's here. A few of my friends have been awaiting and/or dreading the inevitable post on Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. I've spent quite awhile chasing rare cartoons from this early Disney (and then Winkler, and then Lantz) series, and the character's a personal favorite, too: a feisty, often frustrated little guy who finds trouble by trying to be smarter and slicker than he actually is. Not so different from Bosko or the early Mickey, sure—but Oswald, a creature of the silent era, didn't have to stop everything to play music on barrels and lily pads twice a minute. In retrospect, it means that the films are less repetitive and have more time to spend on gags and story.

At the start, the series also benefited from Disney's drive to innovate: I'd argue that at the time, no other studio had both personality animation and production values at the same high levels. From my perspective, many outfits (Sullivan, Fleischer) had one but not the other.

Of course, I'll never claim any era of Oswald is gold. As with many pre-Tex Avery cartoons, the pacing can be sluggish. Sound later led to the same tedious songs and dances that so many studios employed. And from about 1931, Oswald lost his puckish nature and became just another leading man—eventually cutesy and dull, too, with his remaining good cartoons being good for reasons other than Oswald's presence in them. Avery's Towne Hall Follies (1935) is a clever short in which the rabbit could be damn near anybody, and would have been funnier as Bimbo.

Here's a cartoon from when Oswald was still somebody. Bright Lights (1928), with its elaborate stage show and multiple-character action, looks like the kind of picture that won audiences to the series and gave Charles Mintz apoplectic fits: why couldn't this be done cheaper? The rubes will never know the difference!

On DVD, Bright Lights was mastered from a print with many scenes that weren't in other surviving copies—but that appeared to be a bit out of order. For this version I've used a studio draft (thanks, Mark Kausler) to approximate what I think the original intent may have been. The music you'll hear concludes with Charles Dornberger and his orchestra performing "Tiger Rag"—you'll have to ignore the fact that the animals on-screen are lions and a leopard. And what better 1920s tune for an ape bandleader to conduct than "The Monkey Doodle-Doo"?

A tip of the hat, by the way, to blogger colleague Ryan Kilpatrick, who's just now blogging about the Oswald shorts at his Disney Film Project blog. Ryan is relatively new to 1920s Disney cartoons, and is introducing himself to them by experiencing the vast majority in chronological order—an experience that wouldn't have been possible just five years ago. Thanks to Leonard Maltin's Walt Disney Treasures DVDs (with help from Tom's Vintage Film silents collections!), it can be done today, and I envy Ryan for having the opportunity.

You can go here to buy the Oswald Treasures DVD: a project I was honored to consult on—and for which I didn't want to suggest that scenes be given an iffy reshuffling at the last second (Bright Lights was acquired very late in the game). A blog, on the other hand, is just the place for such gnarly science experiments.

Legendbreakers: Hare-um Scare-um

2009-04-27T12:56:00.001-04:00

I've always had a soft spot for Hare-um Scare-um (1939), Bugs Bunny’s third cartoon. As a kid, I actually ranked it among the best Warner Bros. shorts: I liked the gags, I liked the goony formative version of Bugs, I even memorized the song he sang. While I grew out of considering the film a classic, I remained interested by new discoveries related to it. Michael Barrier learned, for example, that Hare-um marked the first time the new star was advertised as Bugs Bunny (even though he wasn’t named in the film itself). More recently, Mike Van Eaton and Jerry Beck found original art to a promo brochure that was part of that ad push.

When I first heard talk of Hare-um—a cartoon I thought I knew inside and out—perhaps having an extra scene or scenes, I didn't believe it. I went into denial. But soon, an urban Internet legend had developed to the point where I finally became curious. Could I get to the bottom of it? What would Duck Twacy do? What would... Snopes do?

Merrie Meleodies - Hare-Um Scare-Um (1939)
Uploaded by Cartoonzof2006

Legend: Hare-um Scare-um (1939), the third cartoon to feature a prototypical Bugs Bunny, has been edited for violence in the print we usually see (above). The full, original version ended with Bugs and his "whole family" beating the stuffings out of hunter John Sourpuss and his dog, perhaps so violently that only their decapitated heads are left to roll away over the hill for the closer.

Status: PARTIALLY TRUE.

Examples:

[Jerry Beck and Will Friedwald, The Warner Brothers Cartoons, 1981]

"The censored ending has the hunter being beaten up by the rabbit and his whole family."

[Visitor to The Unofficial Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies Page, c. 1998]

"This is what I was told was missing at the end: All of the rabbits attack the hunter (not Elmer Fudd, but a one-shot hunter) and his dog. The smoke clears and we see two heads—the hunter's and the dog's—rolling off down the same roadway into the sunset as the iris brings the toon to a close."

[Visitor to Toon Zone, 2002]

"Supposedly the rabbits beat up the hunter and dog, causing a cloud of smoke. When the cloud clears you see the heads of the hunter and dog rolling down the road."

[Visitor to Misce-Looney-Ous blog, 2008]

"I don't know about 'heads rolling into the sunset,' but in the version I've seen, the rabbits just start beating the heck out of the hunter and his dog, then iris out. If there's a longer version (and there could be), I haven't seen it."

[Visitor to YouTube, 2009]

"yea i think i have seen both on cartoon network in 2000 when i wuz 4 im 13 now iand i think i remember seein both in my long term memory i remember the dog and hunter gettin beat up and their heads are rolling down a hill." [SIC!]

Origins: The 1998 version of the rumor, posted to the Censored Cartoons Page and recovered through the Wayback Machine, turned out to be the earliest mention I could find anywhere of "rolling heads.” As such, it's notable for its "I was told" qualifier: the writer made clear that he hadn't seen the unedited ending himself; he was just quoting an anonymous source. Neither perfect understanding nor certainty was implied.

But the Censored Cartoon Page got around, and the iconic mental image of disembodied, rolling heads obviously stuck in film geeks' memories. Even the modern version of the Censored page describes the "rolling heads" scene as common knowledge, at least in the context of hearsay.

Yet there are obvious problems with it. One commonly referenced element—the dog's presence—is extra-unlikely, as the dog exits the film two full minutes before Sourpuss issues his challenge to fight. And while the goofy, Egghead-like Elmer prototype could remove his head for a gag in 1937 (Cinderella Meets Fella), would Schlesinger animators really decapitate Sourpuss permanently—even for a scene that was nixed?

Sometimes an obvious clue is right in front of your nose. As you’ll see above, years before any reference to rolling heads, Jerry Beck and Will Friedwald referenced a less explicitly gruesome version of the final sequence in their seminal book, The Warner Brothers Cartoons (1981). How had I forgotten that? If I wanted more details, why not simply try to watch what they’d watched?

Luckily, at least one original print of Hare-um Scare-um still existed. I cornered and screened it recently in a film archive. Here’s what I saw.

"I can whip you and your whole family!" shouts John Sourpuss.

Bugs and his infinite family appear and put up their dukes. We hear the same musical flourish that marks the fadeout in the standard version—but there's no fade this time.

The bunnies rush Sourpuss...

...and fight in a cloud of dust. There's no sign of who's winning at first.

At the end of the battle, the bunnies rush away as one, down the road and over the horizon—visible only as a dust cloud trail.

The remaining smoke of battle clears to reveal a disheveled, but intact Sourpuss.

A critical-looking Bugs zips back onto the scene alone...

...to return Sourpuss' battered rifle to him, throwing it down on the ground hard. Smack!

Bugs (sternly): "You oughtta get that fixed. Somebody's liable to get hurt!"

His sternness vanishing, Bugs reverts to his former looney attitude.

He laughs and whoops his way down the road toward the horizon—bouncing on his head all the way, pogo-stick style.

John Sourpuss, left alone, does a long, furious slow burn...

...then snaps like a twig, and—now insane—bounces on his head toward the horizon, too. Iris out.

How many copies of the original are out there? Surely not many; I can state with surety that Cartoon Network never aired one. On the other hand, it seems possible that some thirty years ago, when Beck and Friedwald did their original research, the news of what they'd seen got around. Maybe some cartoon fan remembered the scene in full, described it vaguely to another...

...and a statement like "they bounce over the hill on their heads" was simply misheard as the more grotesque "heads bounce over the hill." After all, the scene was snipped from most versions of the film. If one hasn’t seen a censored moment, it’s easy to presume it must have been yanked for the ugliest reasons. Maybe that’s how the rumor got started.

Given that the scene seems non-controversial, why was the edit done? I can only make an educated guess: it’s so much like the ending of the earlier Daffy Duck and Egghead (1938) that it comes across as completely unoriginal.

"Hold onto your seats, folks! Here we go again..."

[Thanks to Jerry Beck and Mark Kausler for a lot.]

Bosko Shipwrecked: The Comic Strip

2009-04-25T15:31:00.000-04:00

When Mickey Mouse had a certain type of adventure in an early 1930s cartoon, you knew Bosko would have it, too. Though Looney Tunes' African-American boy was created before Mickey, he wasn't animated until afterward—and creators Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising mimicked Disney like crazy. If Mickey starred as a big game hunter (Jungle Rhythm, 1929), so would Bosko (Congo Jazz, 1930). If Mickey played Robinson Crusoe (The Castaway, 1931), so would Bosko (Bosko Shipwrecked!, 1931). Of course, Bosko did enjoy some pastimes Mickey didn't—Mickey was never a World War I pilot, for example, or a soda jerk. But the basic cartoon flavor was very similar.

Where Mickey and Bosko differed was in the comics.

Mickey came to newspapers in 1930 with Walt himself writing, Ub Iwerks penciling and Win Smith inking. Aimed as much at adults as children, Mickey Mouse quickly hit its stride with rich, personality-based adventure stories. But by then Iwerks and Smith were gone.
I'll deal with Iwerks later (what, David Gerstein ignore Flip the Frog?). Today we'll follow Smith, who eventually got involved with the art chores on another daily comic strip—starring Bosko.

Floyd Gottfredson, Smith's successor on Mickey Mouse, would recollect that Smith had cracked under the strain at Disney: drawing Mickey was hard enough, he felt; then Walt asked him to write it, too. Smith quit rather than do both—and indeed, the Bosko work process for Stephen Slesinger, Inc., would seem to have been in line with Smith's preferences. Walker Harman handled writing on the strip, while Robert Allen did the art at first. And the end product was simpler as a whole, too. Instead of a serial designed for all ages, Bosko aimed only at very young children. At the start (top right), it was a standalone single panel in verse—emphasizing charm more than humor.

Don't tell me. I don't need convincing. It's beautifully drawn, but weak.

Then, though, like Mickey Mouse, it began to change. First came Smith's involvement; samples suggest he began as inker/letterer, then progressed to solo artist. But then came a thematic change. Jerry Beck's Cartoon Research pages have long featured strips 67 and 68 in the Bosko series, marking the start of a continuity. While keeping verse narration, Bosko was trying—vaguely—to get somewhere. Unfortunately, these two undated, clipped strips were for a long time all we had of this ongoing story:

Today, though, I'm pleased to show you what happened next. From issue 30, Dell's The Funnies comic book reprinted the Bosko continuity in roughly consecutive order. It's from those issues that I've remounted the strips in easy reading format so we can share "Part 1" of this serial, based loosely on Bosko Shipwrecked.

Still not too hot, but historically priceless—and the further we go, the more the Win Smith of Mickey Mouse, with his classic quirks, will be immediately obvious. Anyone want to see "Part 2"?

(Thanks to Mark Kausler for Hugh Harman's pre-Smith credits information. Mark, if you'd like to add anything here, please do!)

The Mouse Hangs High

2009-04-24T15:25:00.002-04:00

Scared yet?

No, not by that image to the right—by the nerve-wracking fact that I’ve got a blog.

I mean, my friends know I'm often "drowning in chaos" (as I like to put it), fighting with several freelance deadlines at once. I wrote the book on spreading myself too thin—while I was working on three other books. And now blogging will just take up more time. It makes my skin crawl, dammit.

But Eve and everybody has blog fever, and I'm afraid the peer pressure's got me too. Other fans and researchers have historical oddities to share? After years of comics and cartoon gruntwork, so do I. Ancient recordings? So do I. Snarky opinions? So's your old man.

The great illustrations in this post come from one of the first French Disney publications—and almost certainly the first Mickey Mouse novel ever written. Scribed by Magdeleine du Genestoux and published by Librairie Hachette, Mickey et Minnie (1932) adapted the first few 1930 Mickey Mouse comics continuities to prose... lots of prose. Whole chapters go by without illustrations. But when art does appear, it’s the work of Félix Lorioux (1872-1964), a man who drew the mouse like no other.

Félix Auguste Henri Marie Lorioux—his career covered in more depth elsewhere on the web—was an artist from childhood, toiling with stained glass at a local cathedral before attending a fine art school in Angers, France. Moving to Paris afterward, Lorioux designed clothing and product packaging before finding his niche in children’s books. Lorioux met Walt Disney when the latter toured France as a Red Cross ambulance driver during World War I; in some way, the connection led to Lorioux’s later employment as the first French Disney illustrator.

Nevertheless, Walt was apparently nonplussed by Lorioux’s abstractionist take on Mickey, Minnie, Pegleg Pete, and Sylvester Shyster. As a result, Lorioux would only work on a couple of additional Disney books. But while I can easily see the off-model aspect of Lorioux’ drawings (compare with a couple of their original comics inspirations, also pictured), I am captivated by their raw energy and enthusiasm. Shyster, with his three-day growth and butterfly-infested hat, makes me think of a refugee from a 19th century madhouse.

Want to join me for more of this lunacy? Sure you do. I’ve got plenty more coming on an entirely irregular basis. Be here.