Spectator's Journal/Carrot and Shtick
Teachout, Terry
CARROT AND SHTICK FLUSHING: Why announce the death of Sir Laurence Olivier on the front page while the death of a greater American, Mel Blanc, rated only a mention on page 7 the day before? Let's...
...Fair enough...
...Well, goodness, you can't copy their reactions and all of that...
...hung on until 1969, but the quality of its output dropped off sharply in the late '50s, and few of its post-1960 shorts were worth watching...
...Henry V? Wuthering Heights...
...For the most part, though, animated cartoons regressed to the level of cheap, insipid fodder for dim-witted children...
...But if you can take a fellow and have him get hit on the head and then he cracks up like a piece of china, then you know you've got a laugh...
...SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL into theatrical release together with whatever Warner feature happened to be playing at your neighborhood movie house that week...
...I want to get inside him, and feel him from my viewpoint...
...The executives at Walt Disney Home Video quickly cornered the kiddie market with expensively packaged I 11•11 45% OFF videocassettes of animated shorts dating from the '30s and '40s...
...Kill the wabbit...
...Under Clampett's supervision, Bugs Bunny became the cartoon equivalent of the fast-talking school-of-Cagney tough guys who adorned so many Warner Bros...
...and MGM/UA followed suit, their videocassettes sold modestly until the release last year of Who Framed Roger Rabbit...
...Since we began as "The Pink Sheet on the Left" back in 1971, the best informed Conservatives in America have relied on us as a watchdog of the left wing...
...After all, I am a pussycat...
...Duck!, directed by Chuck Jones and written by Michael Maltese...
...W by did it all have to end so soon...
...The second, Looney Rotes and Merrie Melodies: A Complete Illustrated Guide to the Warner Bros...
...Truer words were never written...
...From time to time, unexpected flashes of wit would emerge from the Saturday morning slough...
...But I don't care...
...cartoons shown on network television today are heavily cut, sometimes to accommodate commercials, more often because the wimpy network censors of the 1960s and '70s were paranoid about on-screen violence...
...Or, if you don't have a VCR, just turn on your television bright and early any Saturday morning.' Or alternatively, let me direct your attention to two new books about Warner Bros...
...I'm an elk—shoot me, go on, it's elk season...
...had a not-so-secret weapon: an unbeatable stable of great "actors...
...The mere presence of a cool customer like Bugs invariably reduced Daffy to a quiveringly aggressive state of neurotic frustration, and when Jones brought Hubris and Nemesis together in Rabbit Seasoning Rabbit Firs and Duck...
...According to the Associated Press, it is estimated that Blanc's voice is heard by 20 million people daily...
...cartoon studio and slipped Terry Teachout is a member of the editorial board of the New York Daily News...
...The economic conditions that made the mass production of fully animated short subjects possible in the '40s and '50s are gone forever...
...Following the Hanna-Barbera lead, the surviving animation studios promptly began cranking out hundreds of shatteringly banal made-for-TV shorts...
...Duck!, his celebrated Bugs-Daffy-Elmer trilogy, the results were uncannily reminiscent of screwball comedy at its high-speed best...
...Is not to be forgetting Moose and Squirrel, darling...
...Michael Maltese, Warren Foster, and Tedd Pierce wrote the best of the scripts...
...It was Jones who gave Bugs his most characteristic line: "Of course you know this means warn Likewise, he saw Daffy as a "self-preservationist," an animated id ceaselessly buffeted by all the baser emotions...
...We never had it so good...
...Damn those Eisenhower-era brats...
...If it's in print, Whole Toon Access can get it for you...
...I can't help it...
...Not with what Bugs Bunny is, but who he is...
...With the departure of Clampett in 1946, Chuck Jones, a superb animator who described himself as "an actor with a pencil," became the dominant creative force at Warner Bros...
...and MGM are still full of buried treasure, and the cream of the postwar Warner crop is already available on videocassette...
...2) "I have sent for you, Dodgers, because we are facing a crisis...
...cartoons...
...Jones saw Bugs not as a malicious imp specializing in gratuitous acts but as a "counterrevolutionary," a peace-loving rabbit who attacked only when provoked...
...Animation, is a copiously illustrated, intelligently written coffee-table history of the Warner Bros...
...He is the editor of Ghosts on the Roof: Selected Journalism of Whittaker Chambers, 1931-1959 (Regnery Gateway...
...The surprising facts about them," Manny Farber said of the Warner cartoons in the New Republic in 1943, "are that the good ones are masterpieces and the bad ones aren't a total loss...
...by Terry Teachout contains complete plot synopses of every Warner Bros...
...I'm principally concerned with character," he explained...
...D on't take my word for it...
...Bob Clampett and Friz Freleng, the top cartoon directors at Warner during the '40s, welded it all into an oeuvre as immediately recognizable as the work of Ernst Lubitsch or Billy Wilder or John Ford...
...from 1936 to 1942, took the slapstick of the great silent comedians and stretched it beyond the bounds of the physically possible...
...Reporting like that made the Washington Post call me "the right wing's answer to Abbie Hoffman...
...If a quick stroll through either volume doesn't make you hunger to see Bugs Bunny & Co...
...Improbable as it seemed, fully grown men were responsible for these elegantly composed collages of wisecracks, frying pans, malfunctioning catapults, and big red sticks of dynamite...
...We have reason to believe that the only source is on Planet X." (3) "I—I—I can't stand it . . . I gotta have a bird . . . I'm weak . . . I'm weak...
...Fully animated cartoons are among the least cost-effective products a Hollywood studio can make With the breakdown of the studio system, the major studios found it too expensive to keep The best intelligence network in Washington for anybody who wants to keep track of the radical left—that's what The American Sentinel has been for 18 years...
...They attempted to make Laurel and Hardy a cartoon series...
...Far fewer, I can assure you...
...To be sure, Walt Disney remained the "prestige" animation studio throughout the '40s, raking in the Oscars and THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1989 monopolizing the attention of those few critics who were seriously interested in popular culture...
...Sign up for a full year subscription at the special introductory rate of only $49—that's 45% off our regular subscription price...
...Don't count on it...
...Disney abandoned the full-scale production of theatrical shorts in 1954, MGM in 1957...
...T s a second golden age of animation .1 just around the corner...
...ID Visa ^ Mastercard D American Express I Card # Signature - — I I I Exp...
...How many were touched by Olivier's talent during the same time period...
...If your local video store doesn't have any, write to Whole Toon Access (Box 1604, 4710 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105) and ask for a copy of The Whole Toon Catalog...
...The worst was yet to come...
...Congressman Phil Crane...
...Enter, just in the nick of time, the VCR...
...Rabbit...
...Though Warner Bros...
...But if you saw one, even once, you probably remember it to this very day...
...All three films were one-reel animated short subjects made in the mid-'50s by the Warner Bros...
...But 1 before you write off Bugs Bunny and his friends as a mere footnote to cinematic history, see if the following snatches of dialogue ring any bells: (1) "Shoot me again...
...But the vaults of Warner Bros...
...the third is from Birds Anonymous, directed by Friz Freleng and written by Warren Foster...
...cartoons so special...
...Pick up one of the many videocassettes devoted to vintage Warner Bros...
...What made Warner Bros...
...A modest investment on your part will pay for itself in hours of raucous laughter...
...Guess again...
...Date NO RISK NAME ADDRESS CITY/STATE/ZIP 31 TO ORDER CALL TOLL-FREE 1-800-443-0445 OR MAIL COUPON "one of the most authoritative and informative newsletters on the activities of our adversaries on the left...
...think The American Sentinel is worth every penny, I'll refund your money—no questions asked...
...I love the smell of burnt feathers and gunpowder and cordite...
...The only cartoon studio that could match Warner Bros...
...to start turning out Scooby Doo and Teenage Mutant Ninja -flirtles instead...
...Magoo...
...the second is from Duck Dodgers in the 241/2th Century, also by Jones and Maltese...
...As Senator Jesse Helms said, "the average American would be appalled if he were suddenly to discover what is being done to his country and its principles by extreme left-wing forces...
...Carl Stalling composed reams of miraculously appropriate background music...
...We found out early," he recalled, that if you did something with a character, either animal or human or whatnot, that couldn't possibly be rigged up in live action, why, then, you've got a guaranteed laugh...
...the most popular animation studio in America...
...cartoon studio...
...Discover how Liberals in Congress have made their own foreign policy—and how it conflicts with America's...
...30 .`Voice of the People" New York Daily News, July 24 Y ou beg to differ...
...Disney-type animation," Hanna explained, "is economically unfeasible for television, and we discovered that we could get away with less...
...American MIAs—still alive in Vietnam • How one defense contractor "lost" over 1,000 classified documents on the Stealth bomber • House Armed Services Committee invites Soviet Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev to testify against the Bush Defense Budget...
...movies of the '30s...
...But Warner Bros...
...This brilliant evocation of High Hollywood Animation caused thousands of aging baby boomers to discover that the cartoons of their childhood were fully as funny as memory insisted...
...Mel Blanc and Stan Freberg did most of the voices...
...That is why your publication is so valuable...
...If you want to see the real thing, your best bet is to rent or buy one of the many Warner cartoon collections available from Warner Home Video or MGM/UA Home Video...
...But Disney made the kind of goody-goody cartoons your third-grade teacher wanted you to see, while Warner (and, later, MGM) made the kind of cartoons you wanted to see, the ones about talking animals who beat the hell out of each other...
...Let's face it, Olivier was only reading words written by others while Blanc created some of the most famous characters of all time—Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Foghorn Leghorn, Barney Rubble—the list is endless...
...The first, Steve Schneider's That's All Folks!: The Art of Warner Bros...
...Director Bob Clampett subsequently refined Avery's basic prototypes into the classic characters that helped make Warner Bros...
...Warner Bros...
...And any time you don't THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1989 their animation departments going...
...Subscribe now and I'll send you a FREE copy of an 83i page expose of the radical left in Congress—"What's Left of Bipartisan Foreign Policy...
...laugh for laugh during the '40s and '50s was MGM, where Tex Avery produced such frenzied one-shot exercises in animated surrealism as King-Size Canary and Little Rural Riding Hood while Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera churned out one hilarious Tom and Jerry cartoon after another...
...Unlike Walt Disney's full-length animated extravaganzas, they got next to no publicity...
...Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Sylvester, Wile E. Coyote, and Yosemite Sam were every bit as distinctive as the finest screen and radio comedians of their time, and at least a hundred of the thousand-odd shorts in which they starred are still as fresh as ink and paint...
...In the wake of Who Firmed Roger Rabbit, Disney put together a new animation unit exclusively devoted to making Roger Rabbit shorts for theatrical release, and Warner Bros...
...I enjoy it...
...Every two weeks we break stories the Establishment media ignore or bury, like...
...IMO IM I= MN ME NMI MN I= INN The American Sentinel 325 Pennsylvania Ave., SE, Suite 272 Washington, DC 20003 I Enter my No-Risk Introductory Subscription...
...Blame it on capitalism...
...Charge my...
...What malign spirit caused the studios that once made cartoons like Duck Amuck and What's Opera, Doc...
...cartoons, both published by Henry Holt...
...Before moving to MGM, Avery directed three key cartoons that introduced early versions of Warner's main characters, Porky Pig (Gold Diggers of 49, 1936), Daffy Duck (Porky's Duck Hunt, 1937), Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd (A Wild Hare, 1940...
...Jones brought a new kind of psychological subtlety to the studio's already well-defined characters...
...even produced two brand-new Daffy Duck theatrical shorts, The Duxorcist and Night of the Living Duck...
...Plug into the network today...
...In one of the cruelest ironies of animation history, Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, the creators of Tom and Jerry, developed "limited animation," an inexpensive form of mass-production animation based on the stylized graphic techniques devised in the late '40s by UPA (the studio that created Mr...
...in action, your sense of humor is malfunctioning...
...Avery, who worked for Warner Bros...
...cartoon ever made...
...Cartoons, is a hefty paperback that 'Most of the Warner Bros...
...The world's supply of Aludium Phosdex, the 'shaving cream' atom, is alarmingly low...
...It all started with Tex Avery, the first post-Disney animator to realize that animated cartoons could aspire to more than the saccharine "realism" of Walt Disney's "Silly Symphonies...
...Daffy Duck played the ultimate screwball, a gleeful votary of the Great God Whirl, while Porky and Elmer, the ideal stooges, served as helpless, unwitting victims of the chaotic forces unleashed by the Bugs and Daffys of the world...
...It's fiddler crab season...
...If I don't agree The American Senn. nel is Washington's best watchdog of the radical left, I can get a full refund—no questions asked.D $49 check enclosed...
...Rabbit...
...The first excerpt is from Duck...
...Editor & Publisher P.S...
Vol. 22 • October 1989 • No. 10
