Apparently, in old Japan foxes and “tanuki” were considered to have mystical powers of disguise…

I’m quoting this from the person who uploaded the video on youtube:

“UGOKIE-KO-RI-NO-TATEHIKI(1933)
(Moving picture -Fox and Asian racoon’s cheats each other)
Director:Ikuo Oishi

In the temple that became ruins, the fox that disguises as the samurai does the fight of magic with Asian racoon’s parent and child.

It seems that it was influenced from the style of Max Fleischer’s Cartoon.”

Cheesey? Gouda nuff for me at the time.

R.I.P. Soupy Sales.

Nostalgia is an odd thing. I think no matter how hard you try to explain something to a future generation, life goes through so many changes so fast that what was important and relevant to one generation seems odd and arcane to the next. Try explaining how you were mesmerized by the technology of ”Pong” on a monochrome 12″ monitor to a kid playing “Halo 3” on a 50″ HDTV with surround sound. I’m sure that children of today who text message each other as a primary method of communication will seem like cavemen to those communicating wordlessly through sensory implants sometime in the future.

I say this only because I know some will look at these clips and just not get it. And that’s okay, not everything transcends time. But it’s pretty amazing that as a child in New York City I was able to find plenty of entertaining diversions on television even though there were only three stations, and none of them broadcast 24/7. As an adult with digital cable, I’m stunned that there sometimes isn’t a single viable program during a particular hour. Perhaps it’s the ability for children to be open-minded enough to find the value in anything. Perhaps it’s the fact that it’s all been done so many times, I’m jaded.

But I fondly remember looking forward to certain programs after school and on Saturday mornings. One of these was The Soupy Sales Show, a “kiddie show” that featured corny puns, some zingers aimed way over kid’s heads, and two of the most unlikely sidekicks on television, Black Tooth and White Fang.  Soupy played his own girlfriend (in drag), a detective named Philo Kvetch (my favorite of his characters) and probably took more pies in the face than anyone outside of the Three Stooges. He wasn’t afraid of doing the silliest thing to get a laugh, and his charm radiated through the television set.

So Rest in Peace, Milton Supman, a/k/a/ Soupy Sales.

So with nostalgia on the brain – and with apologies to several other programs that could easily make this list - here are ten early childhood memories, some of which still pop up on television (and rightfully so):

Soupy Sales – “Do The Mouse” and more. Most late night hosts consider interacting with the crew an integral part of the show, but you can tell from this clip just how loose and fun it must have been on set. It was always a bit crazy – including the famous incident where Soupy asked kids to tiptoe into their parents’ bedroom and send him all the pictures of the Presidents from their wallets – but he was one of a kind.

Popeye cartoons – Another show where the content was framed and introduced by an adult authority figure – in this case “Captain Jack McCarthy”, a local host posing as a sea captain in a yellow slicker. I seem to recall that the Popeye cartoons ranged from the classic Max Fleischer originals to the later King Features editions, but I was a mere Swee’pea at the time.

The Three Stooges – When dozens of previously filmed ”shorts” were made available to television, someone got the brilliant idea of marketing them to children. The Three Stooges show was also staged with an adult authority figure (“Officer Joe Bolton“ was the guy in NYC) who would open the program and introduce the film and a cartoon. And parents were rightly concerned that a new generation of kids would want to poke each other in the eyes.

Abbott and Costello – Not to be confused with their movies, The Abbott and Costello Show was a half hour comedy program that was a framework for the duo to perform gags and burlesque routines under the guise of a sitcom. The show originally aired before I was born but was shown in syndication for years.

Shindig - Hard to believe there was more great rock’n'roll on television in the early ’60s than there is now. Check out the guests on this last episode and the legacy of artists who…uh…shindug. This was hip at the time.

Where The Action Is – Dick Clark’s follow-up to American Bandstand featured Paul Revere and the Raiders as the virtual house band and was loaded with great bands and songs for thirsty music lovers like me.

The Little Rascals – I’m sure they mixed in Our Gang comedies along with the Little Rascals flicks, but the premise was the same. And odd collection of precious and precocious children with little or no adult supervision, a dilemma and usually a lesson learned. Not a happy ending in real life, though.

Hullabaloo – Yet another font of great music, this show occupied the Monday time slot that eventually went to another staple of my youthful TV diet, The Monkees. The show tried to bridge the generation gap a bit by having established artists introduce newer ones.

Rocky and Bullwinkle – Hilariously subversive and one of the best written shows ever on the air. Like many children I enjoyed the campy stories, bad puns and funny characters (not to mention the additional features including Aesop and Son and Fractured Fairy Tales). As an adult, I’m getting the jokes I can’t believe the censors missed!

The Adventures of Superman – George Reeves was already dead and gone by the time I was religiously watching the program at dinnertime every weekday. I must have seen every episode of this show fifty times each.

And for your bonus round…

The Bowery Boys – Also known as the Dead End Kids, the Little Tough Guys and the East Side Kids, the Bowery Boys were a more comic descendant of the Depression-era street kids from movies like Angels With Dirty Faces and Dead End. I’ve had a lifelong argument with my father about who the leader of the gang was, but that depends upon whether you are discussing the original crime drama films or the comedy flicks. Billy Halop was the film guy but Leo Gorcey was the undisputed leader of the comic programs. Saturday mornings will never be the same without Slip Mahoney and Sach (Huntz Hall).

I gotta investegrate this citation

This neat little website might be a great place to waste idle time:

http://sketch.odopod.com/

Too bad I don’t have the time.

A few updates:

1) I have a number of doodles/sketches/photoshop fun that I’ve neglected to post, just because I’ve forgotten/don’t have time/want to work with them more.

2) Going through the voiceover recordings and working with my sound designer on getting a preliminary audio track settled. Storyboards/animatics are soon to follow. Then after that…ANIMATION! I’ve realized how I have to go through a lot of headaches just to get to the point at which this was all for. If I didn’t have to deal with all the BS that comes with producing a movie, and just focus on animating, I’d be so much happier.

3) But before that’s done, I have to finish up a friend’s project soon. Deadlines approach!

4) In other news, comedy show yesterday, UT film showcase tonight, scary movie at midnight, Max Fleischer double feature tomorrow, professor-student reunion this weekend, beach this weekend?  Oh, and I got a new book. And maybe I’ve had ideas lately about making a graphic novel (ha ha ha, like that will happen).

Strange blog post. Probably indicative of my fragmented life.

The moral ambiguity of this cartoon is a little troubling to me when watching it today, but maybe things weren’t so black and white in the Great Depression. What happened to the children? Didn’t Mariutch have a gang of children she was with? And why is her husband happy when she finds out she’s actually a stripper? I won’t even comment on the Italian organ grinder with a monkey stereotype. Oh, wait; I just did. Still, I have to love any cartoon with a good giraffe gag. Take it away, plucky immigrant fellow:

Haven’t really had the energy to write reviews, so posting random stuff from youtube is the most I can be bothered to do at the moment. In any case, this was one of the earlier Fleischer cartoons; Betty Boop was a supporting character in the Bimbo cartoons before she became popular. This is pretty surreal, mind melting stuff. Watch many more Fleischer cartoons here; they are public domain at this point.

Here are a few posters for Fleischer’s Gulliver’s Travels, the second ever feature length animated film after Disney’s Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs. 

The posters are very attractive but the film itself has been criticised quite a bit. I don’t mind the film but would have liked to have seen the Fleischer’s original idea where Popeye would have played Gulliver, in the tradition of the earlier Popeye 2 reelers. 

I suppose the problem with Gulliver is that most people have only seen it via the cheap and nasty public domain DVDs that you can pick up from those $2 shops. These all seem to have been made from a pretty rotten quality print and can make the film almost unwatchable.

Anyway, the posters are all very nice and show just how much effort went into advertising a film back in the 1930s. Compare these to one of today’s animated films like Shrek.

Here’s the poster from my favourite Popeye cartoon, the 2 reel special Popeye The Sailor Meets Sindbad The Sailor. This film and the other two reelers, were used to prepare the Paramount to the idea of making a feature length animated film.

The other day Australia’s free newspaper MX (and with MX you don’t get value for money) ran a brief expose on how Disney artists in the 1970s used a rotoscope device to trace scenes for the ‘classic’ (MX’s word, not mine) animated film Robin Hood. This would be a huge scandal if most people hadn’t known of this for at least the last thirty years.

The 1970s weren’t exactly a great time for animation. Disney were tracing scenes from Snow White to make Robin Hood, while the last few animated short series that played in cinemas came to an end. Hanna Barbera and Filmation made thousands of horrible animated TV shows that people of my generation grew up with and sadly now get all nostalgic about. Perhaps because things were so terrible at this time it is the reason why I gravitated towards watching true classic cartoons like Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, Tex Avery’s MGM cartoons, classic Disney films of the mid-late 30s, etc, instead of Scooby Doo, Superfriends or The Smurfs. Things really didn’t improve until the late 1980s.

As for what the rotoscope is, this is something that MX helpfully did not explain. It was a device invented in the 1910s by Max Fleischer that enabled him to trace live action footage of his brother Dave, in order to get more realistic movement for his Koko the Clown character. By the 1930s the rotoscope use wasn’t as common as it was, but the Fleischer’s still used it on occasion with Betty Boop, particularly when she had to do an elaborate dance routine like in Minnie the Moocher.

As for Disney ‘cheating’ by using the rotoscope to do some scenes in Robin Hood, so what! Every studio has in some way cheated on some cartoons for budgetary or other reasons. I don’t see this as any worse than a ‘so called’ newspaper like MX cutting and pasting articles from Perez Hilton’s website or celebrity Twitter and presenting them as real news.

To see a list of films where the rotoscope has been used go to Wikipedia.

I really like lookin’ at these old cartoon posters. They are a great piece of animation art and replicas can be bought quite easily form e-stores such as Moviegoods. Here are two different posters that were used for Popeye The Sailor Meets Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves.

Stop me if you’ve heard this before but you know how sometimes you watch animations and it’s obvious that somehow they were taken from actual film footage?  That’s called ‘rotoscoping’.  It was a technique invented by the great Max Fleischer, creator of a favourite character of mine – Betty Boop.  (He was also the creator of Popeye).  Rotoscoping basically traces the individual frames of  live film footage.  It must be an incredibly laborious task, but then so is all animation.  

Why am I wibbling on about rotoscoping?  Simply because I was looking around You Tube this morning and came across this track that I like by British music duo Zero 7.  The video uses rotoscoping and I find it fascinating to watch the people in this reduced down to single line drawings.  I think you actually notice more of their body language in this simplified state and as an ardent people watcher I find it fascinating.  Great video, great track.

You’ll see that in this 1932 short film, made my Max Fleischer, the animated portion satirizes “television” and “channel surfing,” long before those were commonplace.  The Fleischer sense of humor wasn’t gentle: every ethnic stereotype gets mocked here, along with the metamorphosing cats, dogs, and frying eggs.  But when the ball starts bouncing at the end, I defy you to keep from singing along.  These “four boys and a guitar” are truly original, truly irreplaceable.  (Louis, Coleman Hawkins, and Vic Dickenson loved them, and they swung more cohesively than many jazz groups.)

Discover the amazing stranger from Planet Krypton that is “Faster than a streak of lightning!” and “Mightier than a roaring hurricane!” when Warner Home Video (WHV) and DC Comics release Max Fleischer Superman, a 2-disc collection featuring 17 action-packed vintage theatrical cartoons from the Warner Bros. vault, on April 7, 2009 for $26.99 SRP.

The Superman animated cartoons, commonly known as the “Fleischer Superman Cartoons” were a series of seventeen animated Technicolor short films, which were based upon the comic book character Superman. These groundbreaking theatrical shorts are the very first animated DC Comics Superman cartoons and the first cartoon entitled “Superman” to be nominated for an Academy Award® (Short Film – Animated). Each cartoon is brimming with action and special effects, beautifully drawn and colored, braced with fabulous background paintings and brought to life with realistic movement. These animated shorts are seen as some of the finest, and certainly the most lavishly budgeted, cartoons produced during the Golden Age of animation.

Episodes:

Disc One:
1. Superman (Mad Scientist)
2. The Mechanical Monsters
3. Billion Dollar Limited
4. Arctic Giant
5. The Bullesteers
6. The Magnetic Telescope
7. Electric Earthquake
8. Volcano

Disc Two:
1. Terror on the Midway
2. The Japoteurs
3. Showdown
4. The Eleventh Hour
5. Destruction , Inc.
6. The Mummy Strikes
7. Jungle Drums
8. Underground World
9. Secret Agent
Max Fleischer Superman will include incredible bonus features such as:

• The Man, The Myth Superman
A revealing and captivating documentary which defines the tradition of the exciting and thought provoking “Super Human” archetype of hero and why Superman resonates with fans on such a deep and personal level.

• First Flight: The Fleischer Superman Series.
This documentary features interviews with surviving members, relatives and biographers of the animation and production team, also contemporary animators such as Bruce Timm (Batman: The Animated Series), Paul Dini and Dan Riba (Superman: The Animated Series) who detail the influence these cartoons have had on their own works.

“These animated short films were the first cinematic adaptation of the classic comic book character, Superman,” said Amit Desai, WHV Vice President of Family, Animation & Sports Marketing. “Warner Home Video is absolutely thrilled to release Max Fleischer Superman for an entirely new generation of fans.”

Mit diesem Film möchte ich Snowie, dem hilfsbereiten Kerlchen, meinen Projektkollegen,

und allen  Sonne  und  Frühling  erhoffenden Besucher, eine Freude machen .. 

 .. und alles Liebe und Gute wünschen. 

Song Of The Birds (1935)

Producer: Fleischer - Studios

gefunden: archive.org

Tip-www: Uwe

Like you, I tried to imagine all those players assembled in one place and failed.  But everything is possible on YouTube.   Melissa Collard called my attention to the Don Redman / Betty Boop clip, circa 1932-33.

Has anyone written a history of Max and Dave Fleischer and associates?  I know there are Betty Boop fanciers, but I wonder about Fleischer’s choosing famous African-American jazz musicians and their bands in his cartoons.  Did he love the music?  Or was it because he could get these bands and players (think of Louis, Cab, and an uncredited Luis Russell ensemble) fairly inexpensively?  Anyway, here is I HEARD:

The opening theme is CHANT OF THE WEED — the vipers’ theme song, punctuated by wood blocks and the oceanic swaying on beautifully-dressed musicians.  Then we enter the deliciously surrealistic world of the Never Mine — the noon whistle eating its lunch, the beaver cooking pancakes on its tail.  Not to mention the whole peristaltic underground travel system.  All of this while Redman himself sings HOW’M I DOIN’?  I hope he didn’t mind being transformed on film into a canine member of the waitstaff.  Betty’s vocal (presumably that is Mae Questel) is also accompanied by a miniature mixed choir who pop in and out of the staircase in time.

When the lunch hour is through (note how that whistle lets everyone know) all the miners reverse their steps — going back under the shower which now rains down filth so they are suitably attired for the mine — to the strains of I HEARD.  Don’t miss the cat-telephone-switchboard while Claude Jones, Ed Inge, and Bob Carroll have brief solo spots before Don’s vocal.  It’s hard to keep up with the action of a terrifying descent down an elevator shaft (Betty, characteristically, loses her dress for a moment), ghosts playing baseball with a bomb — all the nightmare anyone could imagine while the Redman band plays goblin music.  But everything ends well — the bomb does the miners’ work for them and they can go home to the strains of WEED, which is perhaps an in-joke here.

These cartoons happily mix the surreal and the swinging, the wild camera angles anticipating later films.

After that, almost anything would seem sedate.  However, an Eddie Condon group (circa 1952) does its best in real time, no animation, working out on FIDGETY FEET with Wild Bill Davison, Cutty Cutshall, Ed Hall, Gene Schroeder, Condon himself, an off-camera Jack Lesberg, and Cliff Leeman.  (I was reminded of this and the last clip by Loren Schoenberg.)

The Mob seems to be doing a gig on an aircraft carrier, but that’s of less import than the fine sound and the beautiful interplay of this group.  They had performed FIDGETY FEET thousands of times at the club, so the routines are razor-sharp in performance, but what I delight in here is the collective exuberance, particularly that rhythm section.  Cliff Leeman!

And watching a very expert and enthusiastic Gene Schroeder makes us remember just how much piano he played, night after night, without anyone paying sufficient attention.  (He made one 78 session, four songs, as a leader, for the Black and White label, in 1944, but he deserved more.)  And Condon himself, so often slyly categorized as someone who talked more than played and drank more than he talked, shows how he directed and drove this band.  Imperishable stuff, fierce and compact at the same time.

Finally, how about seeing — not just hearing — Lester Young play POLKA DOTS AND MOONBEAMS?

The rhythm section on this Art Ford telecast (from 1958, I believe) is Ray Bryant on a terrible piano, a happy Vinnie Burke on bass, and an unacknowledged drummer who sweeps his brushes most respectfully.  Yes, the clip is out of synch, but that adds to the poignant dreaminess of the performance, with Rex Stewart wandering in the shot.  Since there’s so little Lester on film, this is even more precious.

What follows suggests that no one — at the moment — recognized how beautiful a performance it was, or perhaps it was just that Art Ford (and his passel or posse of jazz critics at home, ready to call in) had to “keep it rolling.”  Sylvia Syms, with the same rhythm and a perky Rex Stewart offstage, wisely change the mood.  Who would be foolish enough to follow Lester in the same lovely, mournful mood?

All the Olympians . . . .

This is the original 1948 Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer cartoon that was made by the Jam Handy studio. It was directed by Max Fleischer.

The Jam Handy studio is not as well known as the other animation studios of the golden age but the information I have read about it is quite interesting. They were primarily producing industrial films, not theatrical cartoons.

I love the black and white Fleischer Popeye cartoons. I especially love the ones that they made before they moved to Florida in the late 1930s. There are a miriad of reasons why I love these cartoons and most of them can be seen in Lost And Foundry.

Firstly, the backgrounds that the Flesichers used were just beautiful, whether they were using the 3D table top backgrounds or the more traditional cel painted backgrounds.

The voice work and chemistry of the actors was terrific. You can tell that Jack Mercer and Mae Questel and Gus Wickie (Bluto, who is not featured in this cartoon) are enjoying themselves and the under the breath mutterings that they do are so hilarious. The later Fleischer cartoons and early Famous Popeyes don’t have the same chemistry, probably because Questel did not move to Florida with the Fleischer studio, and Wickie’s untimely death. However once they got back to New York and Questel rejoined Mercer, and Jackson Beck took over as Bluto, that chemistry returned (too bad the quality of the cartoons had gone down at that stage!).

The cartoons weren’t just about Popeye and Bluto beating the crap out of each other. Even the most formulaic of Fleischer cartoons were really interesting and the Fleischer always tried to be innovative.

review by Rachel Newstead

For the animated cartoon, sound arrived not with a bang, or a whimper, but a bark.

The scene: a movie palace of decades ago. The lights go down. On a grainy black-and-white screen, the audience sees a black cartoon dog in an iris shot a la the MGM lion. Several barks issue forth from the screen.

The bark that changed the history of animation: from "My Old Kentucky Home"

A series of mildly amusing gags follow: the dog enters his home, where he removes his coat and hat. Cartoon magic transforms a statue in the corner into a water pump, while the dog’s hat becomes a washbasin. His coat, which he has thrown over a chair, does double duty as a towel, then a tablecloth as he prepares to eat his meal. While sharpening his dentures, the dog pauses to replace a loosened tooth, knocking it back in place with a mallet to the tune of “The Anvil Chorus.”

Disdaining the meat he’s selected for his evening meal for the juicy bone inside, our canine friend doesn’t consume it, but pulls and stretches it like putty, until the soup bone resembles a trombone. (OK, you try coming up with a better pun in the wee hours of the morning.) He plays a few notes of a familiar tune–”My Old Kentucky Home”. Turning to the audience, with a voice not quite in synch with the mouth movements, he says, “Follow the ball, and join in, everybody!”

That audience didn’t know it then, but they’d just witnessed cinema history. The cartoon they saw–with sight and sound gags so typical of the “wide-eyed ’30s”–premiered not in the thirties, but 1926.

What about “Steamboat Willie”, you ask? Oh, yes–we all know the story, as Hollywood (and Walt Disney) had told it for decades:

From the moment Mickey Mouse appeared, and turned every available pot, pan, and farm animal in his reach into a handy musical instrument, the dying animated-cartoon industry was saved. Mickey, so we’re told, was animation’s Al Jolson, the star of the first sound cartoon, proving that sound was here to stay. In his wake, rival studios panicked, tripping over each other trying to acquire and understand a baffling new technology. Each tried to make its own “Steamboat Willie”, with results ranging from “fair” to “atrocious.”

Like all legends, this story has a grain of truth, but only just. It conveniently forgets that not only was “Steamboat Willie”not the first sound cartoon, it wasn’t even the first that year.

Some six weeks before Mickey made his November 18, 1928 debut, Paul Terry entered the running with his cartoon “Dinner Time.” Though to say it posed no threat to Disney’s status as the “first” is a vast overstatement–Disney himself dismissed it as “a lot of racket and nothing else.” Audiences agreed, and it was quickly forgotten.

Rather, the fatal blow to the Disney legend comes from a man who had in fact been making sound cartoons when few people had ever heard of Walt Disney–Max Fleischer.

It’s probably safe to say most people are unaware of Fleischer’s astounding achievement. Animator and historian Ray Pointer, however, isn’t “most people”: he brought six of these groundbreaking cartoons together in a DVD documentary/compilation called Ko-Ko-’s Song Cartoons.

Using Lee DeForest’s Phonofilm system (a sound-on-film method devised by Theodore Case and E. I. Sponable, the future inventors of Fox’s Movietone), Fleischer made about a dozen such cartoons in two years, all part of his Song Car-Tune series. To add sound to such a series was not only logical but irresistible to the technically-minded Fleischer–sound shattered the barrier between film and audience, allowing for a more intimate, interactive experience. Audiences couldn’t help but sing along.

Of course, the whimsical and fluid animation helped; not content to merely have the audience “follow the bouncing ball”, the printed lyrics would grow, stretch and transform into animated representations of the song. In Tramp, Tramp, Tramp The Boys Are Marching, the words on screen transform into three hoboes (“tramps”, get it?). On the line “And beneath our country’s flag,” the word “flag” transforms into a literal flag emblazoned with a pawnbroker’s symbol (another visual joke, as pawnshops are likely to be frequented by tramps). While their first tentative efforts to synchronize speech were less than successful (the brief dialogue spoken by the dog in My Old Kentucky Home is about a half-second off) the “bouncing ball” sequences never missed a beat. The cartoons eventually reached a surprising degree of sophistication–the animators were soon able to move beyond old standards and match their drawings to the syncopated rhythm of Irving Berlin (When The Midnight Choo-Choo Leaves For Alabam).

These frames (above and right) show the Fleischers' off-kilter sense of humor already developing. The way had been paved for Betty Boop

Rough spots aside, those experimental years provided the Fleischers with invaluable experience in working with sound, and what they learn would eventually enable them to produce the offbeat, ad-libbed “post-synch” tracks that characterized their best work in the thirties. Had they waited until everyone else had adopted the new technology, they might have been compelled to do things Disney’s way–and the hilarious sotto-voce muttering of the Popeye sound tracks might never have been.

For an old animation geek like me, with a lifelong fascination with vintage music and early talkies, Pointer’s compilation is the answer to a prayer. That said, I do have some minor complaints: I was disappointed to find that several of the cartoons, such as By The Light Of The Silvery Moon, were not shown in their entirety–that’s a minor quibble, as what I saw was charming enough. The $26.95 price tag is a bit steep for a scant 40 minutes, but considering the wealth of animation history contained within, I’d have gladly paid twice that much.

I was born far too late to be a part of that anonymous 1920’s audience as they saw history being made. But now, I at least have some idea how they felt.

link
Enjoy~ ^^
It’s named “Ink Clown’s Journey”
The video are footages taken from Max Fleischer’s 5 old animation from like 50-100 years ago ^o^ Guess the name of the video? Haha actually you can find the answers right in the video credit section XD
Result of several days working with my best team mate – great great friend ever – Nguyen ^^
Although it’s not perfect yet, We love this video, indeed, very much! cause we’ve spent lots and lots of efford into it T.T idea, finding public domain videos, cut, script, and sound, and blablabla..
So we proundly introduce you this video
A Final assignment for Multimedia engineering class this semester

Only another assignment for Dim2 ( which is the tutorial flash ) and then come the final exam XD
In 2 week I’m gonna finish my second term.
So excited for the holiday lol ^o^

DoThuyLinh_s3183636
RMIT university, 2008
 

I finished reading Elmer Gantry yesterday and, let me tell you, that was a depressing read, one of those “everyone-gets-it-except-the-people-who-deserve-it” novels that aggravate me so much. (They aggravate me even more because, well, that’s kind of how life is, down here at the bottom of the gravity well)

Well, I’ll show ya, you dirty fundie! I’ll put up something that’ll make your sanctimonious toes curl! Something that was censored by the Hays Code! Yah! I’m gonna put up, uh, put up…

Betty Boop?

Yep, believe it or not, the Motion Picture Production Code of 1930 actually thought that Betty Boop was too sexy, and forced Max Fleischer to tone her down. Think about that. In the 1930’s, a significant portion of the population – significant enough to make the Hays Code necessary, at least – thought that Betty Boop was risqué. Nowadays, on the other hand, you can get Betty Boop pajamas for your kid. Watta difference nine seven decades and three or four generations makes; imagine the clean and well-scrubbed hell that was pop culture back then if Betty Boop was considered worthy of censorship.

And what gets me is that Betty Boop doesn’t deserve it (nothing does, but Betty Boop doesn’t deserve it by half). I mean, yeah, she’s got a short little nothing of a dress, not to mention (various Tex Avery sounds: homina-homina-homina ah-oo-ga ah-oo-ga aroooooooooo “Hotsie totsie you got the moxie, sister!”) a garter belt. But to my jaded eyes, which are used to the nonstop dog-fucking and mass Satanic orgies and hot blonde-on-blonde-on-donkey-on-fireplug action and gratuitous midget-freebasing[1] and decapitation-by-bazooka scenes of today’s popular culture, Betty seems a little, well, tame. (And I know that baby talk of hers is supposed to be alluring and sexy, but it just makes me want to gouge those huge Margaret Keane-grade eyes out)

But, hey, let’s not let the straights ruin our fun. I’ve always like Max Fleischer cartoons. They’re a source of slightly naughty, occasionally un-PC and very creative fun. This 1933 Betty Boop cartoon, Snow White (brought to you today by by the letters DoctorScissors)  is fun, cute and imaginative – in the sense that Max Fleischer must have synthesized LSD long before Dr. Albert Hoffman and then took a huge hit before writing the script for this cartoon. And it has Cab Calloway singing St. James Infirmary Blues, so it can’t be all bad.

I’m reading Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest right now. It’s the book that Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars was based on, which means the nominal good guy wreaks all kinds of well-planned and byzantine need-a-program-and-a-scorecard hell on the nominal bad
guys. It shall rock.

[1] This could be either a midget freebasing or someone freebasing a midget. Or both.