FRED Entertainment

One of the major event in cartoon art in 2007 is Warner Home Video’s release of Popeye the Sailor 1933-1938, a DVD set collecting the first sixty Popeye cartoons produced by the Max Fleischer Studios. This is everything that a DVD set of vintage animation should be.

First there is the handsome artwork on the case, depicting Popeye in the style of the Fleischers’ 1930s cartoons, adapted from the design by the character’s creator, comic strip artist E. C. Segar. The artwork, and even the simple orange color of the box, impart a wonderful vintage feel to the collection, as if this is what a DVD set would be like if it was produced seventy years ago. Picking my set up at a local Best Buy, I received an exclusive bonus: the chain sells its Popeye sets in a tin case bearing Popeye’s likeness, further reinforcing the appealing retro look.

Inside, the Popeye cartoons have been remastered, giving them sharp, clear image, enabling viewers to marvel at the beauty of their painted backgrounds, something to which I’d never paid attention when watching the shorts on television or even in theaters. Something I had noticed in the past was the Fleischers’ use of actual three-dimensional sets in some scenes, against which the animated characters would be filmed. Watching these DVDs I found myself thinking that these sets convey more of a sense of three-dimensional depth than even today’s computer animation can achieve (at least without making viewers wear 3-D glasses). After decades of seeing these cartoons start out with the logo of Associated Artists Productions (A.A.P.), which was their first television distributor, it is refreshing to see their original openings, with Paramount’s mountain logo, restored. Between the Paramount logos and the clarity of the restored prints, you can imagine that you are seeing these cartoons the way that they looked when they were first released during the Great Depression.

Then there are all the special features! The producers of this DVD cover Popeye’s history, in the comics, in animation, and even in Robert Altman’s 1980 live action film: its screenwriter, Jules Feiffer, and actor Paul Dooley, who played Wimpy, turn up in the set’s mini-documentaries.

What may be even more surprising is that the producers even feature material that has nothing to do with Popeye but which will be of interest to aficionados of early animation that led up to the Fleischers’ Popeye series. One of the documentary features on the set is “Forging the Frame: The Roots of Animation 1900-1920,” co-produced by Greg Ford, the curator of Lincoln Center’s retrospective of cartoon musicals, which I covered at such great length in this column starting with “Comics in Context” #100. This documentary goes all the way back to J. Stuart Blackton’s pioneering Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, made in 1906. (Hey, that means that last year was the hundredth anniversary of the animation medium. Shouldn’t there have been a major celebration in museums, revival film theaters, and comics conventions?) The documentary spotlights Winsor McCay, the first truly great creative figure in American comics and in animation, and offers excerpts from four of his landmark films, Little Nemo (1911); How a Mosquito Operates (1912), pointing out how it inaugurates animation that depicts a character’s personality; Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), in which McCay created the first great success in personality animation; and The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918), rightly characterizing it as a documentary in animated form. “Forging the Frame” provides excerpts from several other remarkable early cartoons, featuring such characters as Mutt and Jeff, Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse (adhering recognizably to George Herriman’s original versions), and the early Felix the Cat, and then you can watch the entire cartoons elsewhere in this amazing DVD set. My only complaint about these silent cartoons in the set is that, since silent films were originally shown with musical accompaniment, I wish that Warner Home Video had provided them with musical scores. Maybe there wasn’t enough money in the budget, but a simple piano accompaniment would do, and there are talented silent film pianists who regularly perform their own scores at New York’s Film Forum and Museum of Modern Art.

Two weeks ago I was disparaging special features on DVDs that provide no more than the most basic information that the animation buffs who buy the collection will already know, or will figure out for themselves on watching the cartoons. The “Popeye Popumentaries” and commentary tracks on this Popeye set do their job right. There is a wide array of experts on comics and animation history represented, including historians Jerry Beck (who played a major role in producing this set), Greg Ford, Michael Barrier and Leonard Maltin; animation professionals including Ren and Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi, former Disney director Eric Goldberg, omnipresent cartoon and comics authority Mark Evanier, and Quick Stop contributor Paul Dini; comic strip giants Mort Walker, Jules Feiffer and Mutts creator Patrick McDonnell, who get to speak about Segar; and the current voice of Popeye, Billy West, who provides an amazing on-screen demonstration of the difference between Popeye’s usual gravelly low voice and the higher voice that the great voice actor Jack Mercer used for improvising Popeye’s asides to the audience.

Throughout this four disc collection the commentators continually bring subjects to my attention that I hadn’t considered before: that the Fleischer Popeyes are mostly set in New York City, where their studio was located; the characters’ seedy apartments, reflecting Depression-era living conditions; the Fleischer studio’s skill at depicting the volume and solidity of their characters, and its prowess (which astonishes the present day animation pros) at animating characters in perspective, as in the great cartoon A Dream Walking (1934), in which Popeye, Olive and Bluto sleepwalk along the girders of a skyscraper under construction.

One major surprise in the commentaries is the reaction of Mexican-born animators Jorge Gutierrez and Sandra Equihua to the early Popeye cartoon Blow Me Down! (1933). Whereas a cautious, politically correct sort like myself would think that the Mexican stereotypes in this cartoon are offensive, Gutierrez and Equihua think they’re funny and happily reminisce about their delight as children in seeing Popeye visit their homeland.

Another big surprise comes in the featurette about “The Voices of Popeye,” which shows an excerpt from a wartime cartoon in which Mae Questel, the voice of Olive Oyl, substituted for Jack Mercer as Popeye. You have to hear it to believe it: it’s a good rendition of Popeye, yet it’s still believable that a woman managed to do it.

There are many cartoons in this set that I must have seen as a child but simply do not remember. Daniel Goldmark, an authority on the use of music in classic cartoons, provides the commentary on The Spinach Overture (1935), a cartoon I only vaguely recall seeing before. But I’m sure glad it’s here, since it features Popeye and Bluto as rival conductors, and fits a theme I’ve explored in several past columns: the use of the conductor as a figure of power, and symbol of the creative artist, in animated cartoons, as in Walt Disney’s The Band Concert (1935) (see “Comics in Context” #110) and Chuck Jones’s Long-Haired Hare (1949) (see “Comics in Context” #101).

I want to focus on two Popeye cartoons in this collection: the two-reel color featurettes Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor (1936) and Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves (1937). I’ve been wanting to write about them since I saw them on the big screen during the aforementioned Film Society of Lincoln Center retrospective on cartoon musicals. I’m used to seeing these two cartoons in faded prints, but the restoration on these two-reelers in this set seems miraculous. Again, the familiar A. A. P. logos have been banished: Warner Home Video has located and restored the gorgeous original opening credits for both featurettes. The colors in the cartoons are now vividly bright. What is most astonishing is the way the 3-D sets now look, such as the intricately detailed outside of a cave in Sindbad and the seemingly infinite desert sands in Ali Baba. The interior of the Forty Thieves’ cave now has an extraordinary sense of reality, as does the solid-looking treasure chest, filled with gems, at the cartoon’s end. And as a commentator points out, somehow the colorful 3-D sets and the animated backgrounds blend together rather than looking entirely different!

These two color two-reelers, each twice as long as a typical Popeye black and white short, are based on stories from The Book of One Thousand and One Nights, popularly known as The Arabian Nights. Later, the Fleischers did another color Popeye featurette based in an Arabian Nights tale: Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp (1939).

I wonder why the Fleischers decided on this Arabian theme. Did they decide to pit Popeye against another famous sailor, Sindbad, and since that was a success, continued with other famous Arabian Nights tales? Or were the Fleischers responding to the fact that Walt Disney was making an animated feature film of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs? (Disney’s Snow White was released in 1937, but had began production three years earlier.) Since Disney had chosen a well known story from the Brothers Grimm’s collected fairy tales, did the Fleischers think that that they should build their Popeye featurettes around similarly famous tales, and picked The Arabian Nights?

The Fleischers’ Popeye featurettes are comedic examples of Orientalism, in the sense of the Western perception of the cultures of the Near East to the Far East. Obviously, events such as the September 11 attacks have altered the popular American conception of the Muslim nations of the Near and Middle East, but American versions of Arabian Nights fantasies persisted long enough to serve as the basis for Disney’s own animated Aladdin (1992). The Woody Woodpecker and Friends DVD set contains two inventive Swing Symphonies cartoons set in this imaginary Arabian Nights world: director James Culhane’s Abu Ben Boogie and The Greatest Man in Siam (both 1944). (Siam is actually an old name for Thailand, yet The Greatest Man in Siam is clearly set in an Arab country. Perhaps this serves as an example of just how accurate Western fantasies about Arab culture can be.)

Differing sharply from its two predecessors, the Fleischers’ Aladdin has a metafictional framing device in which Olive Oyl is writing a screenplay about Aladdin, and imagines Popeye playing the role: the main part of the two reeler is therefore the movie that Olive envisions. (This reminds me of Chuck Jones’ 1950 animated short The Scarlet Pumpernickle, which similarly has a framing device in which Daffy Duck has written a screenplay, and the rest of the cartoon is Daffy’s imagined movie, with himself in the title role.)

In contrast, in the Fleischers’ Sindbad and Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves, Popeye actually meets these legendary characters. Then again, Sindbad has opening cast credits, as if Popeye, Olive and company were actors playing parts in a movie, and certainly we are expected to recognize Bluto as “playing” Sindbad and the leader of the Forty Thieves. There’s an ambiguity here, in keeping with the Fleischers’ characteristic reminders to the audience not to suspend disbelief entirely and that they are watching a cartoon.

The main point is that Aladdin casts Popeye as an Arabian Nights character, whereas in Sindbad and Ali Baba, Popeye is presented as himself. One of the DVD commentators suggests that in Sindbad and Ali Baba Popeye has been displaced back to the time of the stories. I think not. Popeye, Olive and Wimpy wear their standard 1930s costumes in the two featurettes, and Ali Baba clearly establishes that Popeye sails a Coast Guard ship to Arabia. Somehow Popeye and friends, representing modern times, co-exist with the legendary Arabia of The One Thousand and One Nights.

To my mind it is fitting that Popeye should meet Sindbad and the Forty Thieves, because, whether or not the Fleischers consciously realized it, by 1936 the super-strong Popeye had become a modern American counterpart of the mythic figures of The Arabian Nights. It’s become a commonplace that the superhero genre embodies a modern mythology, and that superheroes are modern pop culture counterparts to heroes like Hercules and Samson. Popeye isn’t technically a superhero, but he is an iconic hero with superhuman abilities who also qualifies as a contemporary mythic figure.

On the commentary track for Sindbad, when the climactic battle between Popeye and Sindbad is about to begin, John Kricfalusi jokes that these cartoons represent what America is all about. The Fleischers did appear to regard Popeye as an iconic American figure. In Sindbad, as in many Fleischer Popeye cartoons, Popeye’s triumphant climactic battle is accompanied by the patriotic music of John Philip Sousa’s The Stars and Stripes Forever. The Fleischers obviously saw something particularly American in Popeye’s heroic battles against the bad guys.

The Fleischers’ Sindbad and Ali Baba pit Popeye, as American iconic hero, against iconic figures from The Arabian Nights, who are cast as villains. (In The Arabian Nights, Sindbad, whose name is usually spelled “Sinbad,” is a hero.) These highly entertaining but decidedly chauvinistic featurettes assert that Popeye–the pop culture hero of a relatively new nation–is not only merely the equal of the mythic figures of older, alien cultures (as opposed to Europe), but their superior. Does this parallel a patriotic sentiment in America in its new role as a world power between the two World Wars: the idea that America is superior to foreign powers and can best them if need be? I leave it to you readers to judge what connection these two cartoons pitting Popeye against Arab foes may have to current American attitudes towards the Muslim nations of the Middle East.

Whereas in these Fleischer featurettes Popeye conquers figures from mythic Arabic culture, Abu Ben Boogie and The Greatest Man in Siam take a different approach. These two cartoons anachronistically set 1940s swing music into an Arabian Nights-style setting, thereby recasting the Arabian fantasy world into a then-contemporary American mode. In these cartoons American culture doesn’t conquer traditional Arabian mythology, but coopts it.

Walter Lantz’s Swing Symphonies series demonstrates how different pop culture was in the 1940s than it is now. Would any major cartoon studio today do a series of cartoons built around, say, hiphop music, for a general audience? And the Fleischer Popeye featurettes leave me with yet another question: why didn’t producer Max Fleischer and director Dave Fleischer adapt one of Segar’s own Popeye stories from the comics as a two-reeler?

INTO THE INKWELL

I am especially happy that this Popeye DVD set includes ten episodes of one of my favorite animated series, the Fleischers’ silent Out of the Inkwell, most of which I had never seen before.

Like the Fleischers’ Popeye and Superman cartoons, the Inkwell shorts usually present variations on a basic formula. A cartoonist, who is almost always played by Max Fleischer himself in live action footage, uses pen and ink to draw a clown–who was eventually given the name Koko–who comes to life within the cartoon “world” on the paper on the drawing board. Hence, Koko has emerged “out of the inkwell.” (That an animator is more likely to draw a character in pencil goes unmentioned. As for Koko’s name, which some cartoons spell “Ko-Ko,” I wonder if it is a reference to Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner and principal comedy character in Gilbert and Sullivan’s most celebrated operetta, The Mikado.) After going through various escapades in the cartoon world, Koko emerges from the drawing board into the real world, often to get even with Max, who is both his creator and his tormentor. In the typical ending to these shorts, Koko enters the ink bottle, which Max then seals with its cap.

Over the last few weeks I have referred to the traditional pairing of a “white clown,” who represents order and authority, with an “Auguste,” a clown who rebels against authority and rules. The Out of the Inkwell cartoons magnify to an extreme the gap in power between its counterparts to the white clown and Auguste. Koko is explicitly presented as a clown: he is the Auguste. Max takes the role of the white clown, or might better be compared to the ringmaster. Max is not only in charge, but he is literally the creator of Koko and his animated world. Koko, even when he escapes into the real world (with his animated figure juxtaposed atop live action film), ordinarily remains the same size as he is on the drawing board; hence, Max towers over him as if he were a giant–or as an adult does over a small child. Max is the artist who created Koko and who attempts to control his creation. Max is also like a father and Koko like his son, whom he attempts to dominate. Ultimately, Max is to Koko as God is to us. Max created both Koko and the world in the animated sections of the shorts. Max stands outside Koko’s “reality” and dominates both it and him.

The usual formula of the Inkwell films has Max creating Koko out of nothingness with pen and ink. The films work different variations on Koko’s creation: in Modeling (1921), for example, Max draws a mass of small circles which, before our eyes, merge and form into Koko. In Trapped (1923) Koko emerges from Max’s hand, in a perfect image of the animator as godlike creator. (All of the Koko shorts that I mention in this week’s column can be found in the Popeye DVD set.)

Normally at the end of an Inkwell short Koko seeks refuge within the ink bottle. This leads to the question of whether Koko continues to exist “alive” within the ink bottle or whether he returns to being merely ink. At the end of Modeling, when Koko hides in the ink bottle, the angry Max pours the ink out onto the table in a tiny puddle. This strikes me as a macabre image of Koko having entered oblivion. If human beings’ lives proverbially go from “ashes to ashes and dust to dust,” Koko’s life goes from ink in the ink bottle back to ink. Of course, since Inkwell is a series, the audience knows that Koko will return to life in the next short, so, whether or not the Fleischers realized it, the Inkwell series represents a repeating cycle of “death” and resurrection.

The ending of Modeling, with Max pouring Koko’s inky “remains” onto the table, demonstrates that if Max is Koko’s “god,” he can be a cruel deity. In Invisible Ink (1921) no sooner has Max created Koko than he imprisons him by drawing chains and cuffs to bind him, as if he were in a dungeon. Then Max, like a bully teasing a child, forces Koko to hunt for his hat. (Koko seems to have a particular attachment to his hat, perhaps because his clothes are really his sole possessions.) In Jumping Beans (1922) Max unleashes Mexican jumping beans on Koko, initially frightening him. In Bed Time (1923) Max strands Koko on top of a cartoon mountain in order to get him out of the animator’s way. In Trapped Max draws a man-sized spider with a human head who pursues Koko, imprisons him in his webbing, and even tries to serve him as dinner to his family of similar creatures. (So would they be the first “spider-men” in cartoon art?) And in A Trip to Mars (1924) Max forces the unwilling Koko to ride a cartoon rocket to a cartoon version of the Red Planet.

Not only does Max expose Koko to danger in Trapped, but he also sets a mousetrap to catch a live action mouse in the same short. Koko and the live action mouse are roughly the same size, and the short seems to be drawing a parallel between then: both are Max’s potential victims.

Even though the shorts portray Max Fleischer himself as the animator, they are designed so that the audience will side with Koko against him. The payoff in the Inkwell shorts comes when Koko turns the tables on his creator, like a son striking back at his father, or a mortal taking revenge on God for his suffering in life. When Koko invades the real world in Modeling to play pranks, it seems to be merely out of a sense of mischief. But in other cartoons, such as Jumping Beans, Koko explicitly vows vengeance on Max.

What I find especially interesting in the Inkwell shorts selected for this DVD is that Koko himself turns “artist” in order to fight back against Max. In Modeling Max shares a studio with a sculptor, who is making a bust of a rather ugly man with a big nose. Perhaps Koko, a creation of one form of art, cartooning, is jealous that Max and the other people in the studio are paying more attention to the bust, the creation in a more highly regarded form of art, sculpture. It’s a sort of sibling rivalry, with a subtext of popular art versus fine art, and the Fleischers stack the deck by making Koko far more appealing than the rather repellent sculpture of the equally repellent client. Or perhaps the real rivalry is between Koko and the real life artists.

Max had outfitted Koko with skates and drawn a frozen pond for him to skate on. First Koko creates his own portrait of the sculptor’s grotesque subject by skating in such a way as to carve the impression of his face into the ice. Then Koko makes a gigantic snowball and molds it into a bust of the sculptor’s client, imitating what the sculptor did with clay. Max, the sculptor and his client are unimpressed, so Koko emerges from of the animated world–that is to say, the sheet of paper on which Max drew him and the frozen pond–and into the real world. Unnoticed, Koko crawls into the statue, causing it to move as if it were alive. This startles the three humans. In actuality, the Fleischers were using stop motion animation to cause the bust to seem to move on film. But in terms of the story, it is Koko who is moving the statue from within: Koko has thus become an animator himself. No wonder Max gets angry when he discovers what is happening: his own creation has become a rival animator.

As noted earlier, Max chains up Koko in Invisible Ink and subsequently taunts him. This time Koko as clearly seeking revenge, and he more explicitly becomes an animator. Having escaped from the drawing board into reality, Koko imitates a trick that Max played on him earlier: he leaves a message that if Max wants to find him, he should follow this line. The line leads Max on a long trail inside and outside his studio. Meanwhile Koko creates duplicate images of himself in many different poses. The line finally leads Max into a room filled with Kokos, among which the real Koko hides. However, Max casts aside the alternate Kokos, which do not move.

Obviously, Koko needs to improve on his plan of multiplying himself, and does so in the later cartoon, Jumping Beans. Again vowing revenge for Max’s mistreatment of him, this time using a stamp to create duplicates of himself which move, and which line up in formation, as if they were Koko’s private army. So Koko as artist has created his own image over and over, and as animator has brought them to life. The legion of Kokos attack and overwhelm Max, binding and tying him to the floor, as the Lilliputians did to Gulliver. So, yes, this image anticipates the animated feature film of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels which the Fleischers made over a decade and a half later. Luckily for Max, he is carrying a small blade which he uses to cut himself free, and the Kokos flee into the ink bottle.

As noted, Max is a giant in comparison to Koko, so it may be significant that in two of the cartoons in the Popeye DVD set Koko encounters menacing cartoon giants. In Jumping Beans a giant beanstalk sprouts, and Koko climbs up the stalk far into outer space, past the moon and sun, until he arrives in the land of the giant of “Jack and the Beanstalk,” who turns out to be an immense head atop a comparatively tiny body. Upon escaping–and falling– back to Earth, Koko vows vengeance on Max for exposing him to such danger. In Bed Time Max traps Koko atop a mountain where he is pursued by another giant, this one with more normal bodily proportions. Yet again Koko vows revenge on Max. After all Max is the “giant” who is Koko’s true nemesis.

That revenge takes an appropriate form in Bed Time. Koko again invades the real world and enters Max’s bedroom. As Max watches in horror, Koko grows bigger, achieving human size, and then continuing to grow further. Max escapes the building, but Koko has become a true giant, and we watch him stalk through New York City, towering over buildings, hunting for Max.

And then Max wakes up. Perhaps, even in an animated/live action short in which one might assume that anything can happen, the Fleischers drew the line at Koko turning into a giant. Another possibility is that the Fleischers were insistent that Koko could not be allowed to overturn the order of the real world; that’s why the shorts usually end with Koko returning to the inkwell, ending his disruptions of order, like Superman’s foe Mr. Mxyzptlk saying his name backwards and returning to his home dimension. Koko as a giant would be unstoppable. Therefore the short establishes that Koko only became a giant in Max’s nightmare; Max awakes and sees Koko safely immobile on his drawing board. It’s as if Out of the Inkwell had suddenly turned into Winsor McCay’s Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, which may well have been a partial inspiration for Bed Time.

The strangest of the Inkwell cartoons in this DVD set is A Trip to Mars, in which Max forces Koko to be the unwilling passenger on a rocket heading to the fourth planet. Before blasting off, Koko plants dynamite underneath Max’s chair. The rocket takes off with Koko aboard, and the dynamite explodes, catapulting Max into outer space as well (as the short shows a live action Max against an animation background). The Mars on which Koko lands seems like an anticipation of Bob Clampett’s Warners cartoon Porky in Wackyland (1938): a mad, surreal world where any impossible gag could happen. Koko’s Mars also looks as if it might be an absurd version of New York: Koko spends part of the cartoon in Mars’s subway. Meanwhile Max continues to hurtle through space. The cartoon ends with both Max and Koko landing on the rings of Saturn and running along the rings as if they were a treadmill. Finally both Koko and Max are removed from Saturn and dropped into an ink bottle, and a hand comes from offscreen and places the lid on the ink bottle, sealing them in.

This raises an obvious question: just whose hand is that? The finale of A Trip to Mars presents both Koko and Max as the pawns of a more powerful manipulator. Perhaps the hand represents Max Fleischer the filmmaker, as opposed to Max the character in the film.

Now I wonder if director Chuck Jones and writer Michael Maltese were consciously reworking the Out of the Inkwell premise when they created their celebrated cartoon Duck Amuck (1953). The She-Hulk’s annoyed comments directed at her unseen cartoonist, John Byrne, likewise seem to echo Inkwell, intentionally or not.

The Out of the Inkwell series is founded on drawing a line between the real world and the world of animation and watching Koko cross it. Commentators on the Popeye DVD make the point that while Walt Disney kept striving for greater realism in his animated cartoons through the 1930s, the Fleischers simultaneously reveled in the blatant “cartooniness” of their animated films. Popeye and his castmates don’t look like real people, and even in a later Fleischer cartoon like Sindbad inanimate objects will still occasionally come to life.

Some of the early cartoons on the DVD also acknowledge their own artificiality. In Bobby Bumps Puts a Beaner on the Bum (1918) the title character sits on the animator’s hand as he draws. In the first Felix the Cat cartoon, Feline Follies (1919), Felix (here called Tom) plucks musical notes out of the air and turns them into parts for carts he and his girlfriend ride.

So we can see two traditions in animation history. The Disney tradition moved towards greater realism. But the rival tradition, celebrating the “cartooniness” of the medium, is even older, and continued through the Fleischers’ body of work until they attempted to move towards Disneyesque realism in Gulliver’s Travels (1939) and a more successful heightened realism in their Superman series. Tex Avery’s MGM cartoons further explored how cartoons can bend and break and twist the laws of reality. From the late 1940s into the 1960s, the UPA animation studio rebelled against Disney realism in its own way, through emphasizing stylized designs in characters and backgrounds. The result again was to emphasize the artificial nature of animation rather than use it to imitate reality.

Today the “cartooniness” tradition is carried on by The Simpsons and South Park and, yes, SpongeBob. However, the “realism” tradition has triumphed through the dominance of computer animated films, which have nearly entirely displaced hand drawn animated films in early 21st century movie theaters. (When I was watching Ratatouille I found myself thinking that the backgrounds looked just like photographs of the real Paris.) Anime seems to me to be a mix of the two traditions, with simplified, stylized figures often juxtaposed against realistic backgrounds, as in Hayao Miyazaki’s films. It’s rather like the Fleischers filming Popeye and Olive against those actual 3-D sets.

Should you want to learn more about the Popeye and Woody Woodpecker DVD sets, listen to one of the people behind both sets, animation historian Jerry Beck of the Cartoon Brew blog (www.cartoonbrew.com), on Stu’s Show on Shokus Internet Radio (http://www.shokusradio.com/), live from 4 to 6 PM Pacific time (7 to 9 PM EST) on Wednesday, August 22.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

Universal Home Video’s Woody Woodpecker and Friends DVD set, which was released on July 24, provided me with a rare opportunity to get in touch with my early childhood memories. It was as a young boy that I first saw various Disney animated features, and many, many Warner Brothers and early Hanna-Barbera cartoons, as well as the Max Fleischer Popeyes. I also watched the syndicated half-hour Woody Woodpecker Show on television, hosted by his cartoons’ producer, Walter Lantz, which packaged Lantz cartoons from the 1940s.

Over the decades, I’ve rewatched many of these cartoons thanks to television, animation festivals at revival theaters, and, nowadays, DVDs. But I hadn’t reacquainted myself with the classic Lantz cartoons of the 1940s as an adult; I may have seen a few here and there, but I don’t remember. I recall seeing some of the later, uninspired Woody Woodpecker cartoons from the 1950s and early 1960s, in which the formerly dangerously madcap bird had turned cute and acquired nephew Knothead and niece Splinter. As the Wikipedia entry on Woody declares, “The domestication of Woody Woodpecker was complete,” and I was not impressed.

But though my memories of the 1940s Woody cartoons were dim, I retained warm feelings for them, and was eager to watch the new Woody DVD. It is amazing to be watching these cartoons and suddenly to encounter images that spark memories from my childhood, like Woody sticking a grease gun in nemesis Wally Walrus’s mouth and pumping grease out through his ears (in director Dick Lundy’s 1947 Well Oiled), or Andy Panda and his guardian angel (also a panda) dancing off towards the horizon at the end of Apple Andy (directed by Lundy in 1946). What’s even more amazing is to be watching one of these cartoons that I haven’t seen in decades and suddenly remember what the next gag is going to be. Obviously, the Lantz cartoons made a great impression on me way back when.

As soon as I got the Woody DVD home, I immediately watched the Woody cartoon that I most clearly recalled liking as a child: The Barber of Seville, from 1944. This appears to be the most celebrated of the Woody cartoons, having been selected in a survey of a thousand animation professionals and historians as one of “The 50 Greatest Cartoons” for Jerry Beck’s 1994 book of the same name. This cartoon also inaugurated what looks to me to be the prime period in Woody Woodpecker’s onscreen career. It was the first Woody cartoon directed by former Disney animator James “Shamus” Culhane, and was co-written by Ben “Bugs” Hardaway, who had created Woody (as well as a prototype for Bugs Bunny at Warners, hence Bugs’s name) and was now supplying his voice. Moreover, this cartoon debuted Woody’s new, sleeker character design, which was considerably more appealing than the grotesque appearance he bore in his first cartoon (1940’s Knock Knock), without devolving into the cuteness of the 1950s Woody.

Rewatching Barber was full of surprises: I didn’t remember most of the cartoon at all. For one thing, it opens with World War II references which would have sailed over my head when I was a child, assuming that they were not cut from the syndicated Woody show. Woody decides to get a haircut, and, alas, it was not until I started working on this week’s column that I realized that, wait a minute, this premise makes no sense: Woody’s famed topknot consists of feathers, not hair! But I expect this doesn’t occur to 99.99% of the people who have seen this cartoon over the last sixty-three years. Anyway, Woody decides to get a “Victory” haircut (which would separate the topknot into a “V” formation) but is thwarted when he strides into the Seville Barber Shop and finds it deserted: the barber, named Tony Figaro, has left a note, “Gone to take my physical. Back soon.”

One of the lessons of these 1940s Woody cartoons is not to do anything that attracts Woody’s attention, lest chaos ensue. Finding himself in a barber shop, with apparently nothing better to do, Woody decides to play barber himself, a decision that cannot end happily for any unwary customers. Soon the first victim walks in, and here was surprise number two. Beck’s book gently refers to him as a Native American, but this first customer is a stereotypical caricature of an Indian chief that would never be allowed in mainstream animation today: he can’t speak English correctly, for one thing. The chief initially does nothing to provoke mistreatment, but Woody, perhaps more through incompetence than malevolence, swaths his head in towels that are so hot that Woody uses the overheated chief’s mouth to toast bread, and his feathered headdress shrinks into a badminton shuttlecock. Understandably furious, the chief threatens Woody with a tomahawk, in more stereotypical behavior, and Woody finally bests him by turning him into a living “cigar store Indian.” I suspect that this sequence was not cut from The Woody Woodpecker Show, but I am glad I did not remember it.

Next comes the section that I did remember, in which a construction worker, who vaguely seems Italian, enters the barber shop, asks to get “the whole works,” and certainly does. Woody turns a blowtorch on the man’s hardhat, lathers his whole face and even his feet, and then slashes at the terrified man with a razor while singing Figaro’s famous aria “Largo al factotum” from Gioachino Rossini’s opera The Barber of Seville. This is intended to be sung at high speed, like the famous Gilbert and Sullivan patter songs, and Woody does so, moving rapidly in time to the music. This is the part of the cartoon which earns its high reputation, with Culhane utilizing shots of Woody that last as little as a fraction of a second, and even putting three, four and finally five Woodys onscreen simultaneously, to signify that he is moving so fast that he seemingly appears in different places at once.

Unfortunately I didn’t enjoy the spectacle as much as I’d hoped, because I felt that the sequence hadn’t been set up properly. What had the poor customer done to be so beset by this razor-wielding madman–or madbird? At the very end of the cartoon the customer takes revenge by trapping Woody inside the barber pole (a fate echoing that of the Indian chief: being turned into a living version of an inanimate object). But that didn’t make the shaving sequence funnier for me in retrospect.

Can we assume that director Chuck Jones and writer Michael Maltese were aware of Culhane’s Barber of Seville when, only a half decade later, they did their 1949 animated short Rabbit of Seville, in which Bugs Bunny plays barber to Elmer Fudd, in this case to the accompaniment of the overture to Rossini’s Barber (see “Comics in Context” #102)? If so, then Jones and Maltese recognized the problem and corrected it. In the opening of Rabbit of Seville, a particularly nasty-looking Elmer fires his gun repeatedly at Bugs, who looks unusually desperate. More than in most Bugs Bunny cartoons, Jones and Maltese are thus emphasizing that Elmer is out to kill Bugs. Hence, Elmer’s murderous intent dramatically justifies the lengths to which Bugs goes to retaliate, even including slashing at Elmer’s face with a razor.

Maybe Culhane and company recognized the problem, too, because they solve it in their very next Woody cartoon, The Beach Nut (1944). This introduces the character who becomes Woody’s leading foil, Wally Walrus. Last week I wrote about the traditional pairing of the White Clown, who upholds order, and the Auguste, the buffoon who creates chaos: Wally and Woody fit these respective roles. The cartoon makers are still dealing in ethnic humor, since Wally inexplicably speaks with a Swedish accent, but in his case it seems harmless. Wally is physically much bigger than Woody, placing the woodpecker in the role of the underdog. More importantly, Wally is pompous, bad-tempered and overbearing, and takes a dislike to Woody even, as in this cartoon, when Woody initially has no malicious intentions towards him. In another cartoon on the DVD Wally even admits to the audience that he should just ignore Woody, but nevertheless takes action against him anyway. The Beach Nut even makes clear that Wally is a potentially greater threat to order than the irreverent Woody: at the cartoon’s end Wally inadvertently destroys an entire pier in his war on Woody, thereby plunging himself and numerous people into the ocean. Furthermore, Wally’s personality seems to embody stifling conventionality: he is a square, whereas Woody is a free spirit. Audiences will naturally side with the uninhibited Woody, who, in The Beach Nut, just wants to have fun, against Wally, who fills the archetypal comic role of the “refuser of festivity.”

So, at least on this initial reviewing, I didn’t enjoy Culhane’s Barber of Seville as much as I’d expected. Still, I found much that was interesting in it. For one thing, the cartoon links Woody to Figaro, the trickster barber and servant who was created by the French playwright Pierre de Beaumarchais and who famously became a symbol of the spirit of revolution against the aristocracy; Rossini’s Barber is an operatic adaptation of one of Beaumarchais’ plays about Figaro, as was Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. Figaro is probably the most famous example of the long tradition of the trickster servant that goes back to comedies in ancient Rome. I expect that Jones and Maltese, with their intellectual ambitions, meant to connect Bugs to Beaumarchais’ Figaro as fellow tricksters in Rabbit of Seville. I wonder if Lantz, Culhane, Hardaway and company likewise used Rossini’s music in their cartoon because they recognized that Woody fit the trickster tradition.

It’s also intriguing to me that Culhane’s Barber, like so many other cartoon shorts from Hollywood’s Golden Age, prominently uses classical music. Of course, one doesn’t have to be an opera buff to recognize the familiar “Largo al factotum,” although I wonder if many of us first heard it in animated cartoons. Still, how many cartoons have been made for television over the last fifty years that have been constructed around a piece of classical music? I can’t think of one. Culhane’s Barber was hardly an anomaly at the Lantz studio, either. Elsewhere in the DVD set is a 1946 cartoon featuring Woody and Andy Panda as musicians that bears the title Musical Moments from Chopin! In The Bandmaster (1947), a Lantz cartoon that appears to be inspired by Disney’s The Band Concert (1935), Andy Panda conducts the “Overture to Zampa,” a now obscure 19th century opera. Of course, Disney’s Fantasia (1940) is the most spectacular example of the use of classical music in classic Hollywood animation. All of this suggests to me that classical music played a larger role in American popular culture before the rock revolution of the 1950s and 1960s.

Woody’s singing in Barber turns out not to be unusual, either. He does it in numerous 1940s cartoons. For example, in Culhane’s The Dippy Diplomat (1945), Woody bamboozles Wally by masquerading as a Russian ambassador and singing a Russian-style melody. Another cartoon I partly remembered from childhood was Culhane’s Ski for Two (1944), which twice features a sequence in which Woody sings “merrily” (to quote the song) as he swiftly skis down a slope: once again Culhane combined speed and song as he did in Barber. (This cartoon featured a deja vu moment for me. In the second skiing sequence, Woody is escaping with a huge bag of what he thinks is food that he has stolen from Wally’s cabin. I found myself thinking: it’s really Wally in the bag, and he’s going to do Woody’s famous laugh at him. Yep. Some childhood memories are permanent.) I like Woody’s singing: it fits his character. The singing expresses his sheer pleasure in pulling off his tricks.

Ski for Two also gives Woody a new motive for his pranks: in this and later cartoons Woody is driven by hunger to pull his tricks on Wally Walrus or other adversaries. Thus, Woody is not just a trickster but he also fits another comedy character archetype: the parasite, forever hungry.

Yet another cartoon that I recalled from my childhood was Culhane’s Woody Dines Out (1945), whose title fits the parasite theme but does not hint at the short’s macabre content. I found this cartoon quite eerie when I was a child, both because of the dark settings and its sinister premise: a taxidermist is determined to make a fortune by capturing, killing, stuffing and mounting a “king-size woodpecker,” namely Woody. It’s well worth remembering that cartoons, and movies in general, can provoke different reactions in small children than they do in adults. Today I don’t find Woody Dines Out disturbing at all, although I still find its premise remarkable for a cartoon for family audiences.

A much bigger shock comes in Bathing Buddies, a 1946 short directed by Dick Lundy, in which Woody is Wally’s tenant and reads Wally’s list of regulations, which includes “No opium smoking.” I believe that if we are looking for proof that animated theatrical cartoons of the 1940s were aimed at adults, we have found it. Did Lantz and his coworkers assume that kids in the audience wouldn’t know what opium was?

What interests me more now about Woody Dines Out is a gag that is set up early in the cartoon, as the taxidermist imagines the fame and fortune to which he aspires. The cartoon shows us images in a thought balloon over his head, including one of the taxidermist surrounded by beautiful women. (The women are human, and the taxidermist is a cat, but we are apparently supposed to accept this.) At the cartoon’s end, after he has been soundly defeated by Woody, the taxidermist sadly reviews his previous fantasies of success. This time, when he gets to the thought balloon full of beautiful women, it is not the taxidermist sitting in their midst, but Woody, who triumphantly utters his trademark laugh. Here is the most startling example of Woody the trickster’s ability to defy the laws of reality: he has even invaded his enemy’s mind and commandeered his fantasy!

Now I find two other Culhane Woody cartoons far weirder than Woody Dines Out—Who’s Cookin’ Who? (1946) and Fair Weather Fiends (1946). The first is set amidst the snows of winter, and the second on a desert island; in each one a ravenous, anthropomorphic wolf is trying to eat Woody. That’s not a surprising premise for an animated cartoon. The surprise is that Woody, driven to desperation by lack of food, is trying just as hard to eat the wolf! It’s as of the Roadrunner suddenly started trying to hunt and eat Wile E. Coyote! This takes the theme of Woody as parasite, driven by appetite, to its extreme.

It also makes Woody stand out among his fellow animated trickster heroes. Woody, Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck all began as manic “screwball” characters. Bugs, however, evolved into a character who would not unleash his tricks against an opponent without provocation (“Of course you know this means war.”). In sharp contrast with the manic prankster versions of Bugs in his earliest cartoons, Bugs, beginning with Tex Avery’s A Wild Hare (1940), coolly manipulated his adversaries, who had less emotional control. Bugs resembles the eiron figure of ancient comedy, the self-deprecating trickster who maintains an ironic perspective on the world around him. Daffy started out as pure screwball but evolved into an exemplar of common human failings (including greed, egotism and cowardice).

In his own earliest cartoons, such as his first, Knock Knock (1940) and second, Woody Woodpecker (1941), which are both in the DVD set, Woody looks grotesquely goofy and acts insanely: in the second cartoon he even consults a psychiatrist. Appropriately, Woody was originally voiced by Mel Blanc, who famously did the voices of Woody’s fellow screwballs Bugs and Daffy. Even though Blanc’s voice was electronically speeded way up for Woody’s high-pitched voice, I find Blanc’s acting style still very identifiable at points in these early Woody performances, such as the scene in Knock Knock in which Woody mock threatens Andy Panda while swelling to gigantic size. Until recently I didn’t know that even after Ben Hardaway succeeded Blanc as the voice of Woody, the cartoons still recycled Blanc’s recording of Woody’s trademark laugh. (However, I’m rather fond of another laugh that Hardaway does as Woody, when he’s snickering at an adversary; you’ll hear it in all of the Culhane Woody cartoons.)

Even though Woody no longer seems insane in the Culhane cartoons, in the 1940s he remains an uninhibited prankster who freely follows his desires, whether they are for food or revenge or, as in Barber, simply to have fun, regardless of its effects on others. If Bugs and Daffy evolved into adults, one perfect and one imperfect, the Woody of the 1940s is still childlike. Many of the 1940s Woody cartoons end with Woody being punished for going too far: sometimes the retribution seems excessive and mean-spirited, as when Wally traps Woody in his “tit-for-tat” machine in 1947’s Smoked Hams, directed by Dick Lundy, but other times Woody seems to get the appropriate degree of comeuppance.

But it’s hard to get the better of Woody Woodpecker in these cartoons. The 1940s Woody can seem like a trickster as a force of nature, as when he whirls about giving that super-speed haircut and shave in Barber.

One of my favorite cartoons on the Woody set is Woody the Giant Killer, directed by Dick Lundy in 1947. After Culhane left the Lantz studio, Lundy took over the Woody cartoons, with Hardaway still co-writing them. The Lundy cartoons aren’t as sharp or inspired as the Culhane Woodys can be, but they’re still fun, and Giant Killer is remarkable. It starts disappointingly, with Woody being tricked into buying magic beans like those in the story of “Jack and the Beanstalk.” I’m aware that it’s part of the trickster tradition that the trickster can be tricked himself, but Woody normally seems too clever to fall for this con man’s spiel. As you expect, Woody ends up ascending a huge beanstalk into the realm of the giant, and here’s where the cartoon takes off. Despite his colossal size and strength, the giant never stands a chance against Woody for a moment, and with surprising ease, Woody not only bests the giant but makes him his servant. Perhaps I should object to the cartoon, because the giant didn’t provoke Woody, who, as in Barber, is once more the aggressor. But I was simply impressed by the sight of little guy Woody simply overwhelming this colossus. Once Woody sets his mind to go after someone, he is, as I said, like a force of nature, nearly unstoppable.

The Woody cartoons on the DVD set’s third disc, from late 1948 to 1952 are less entertaining and interesting than those on the first two discs, from earlier in the 1940s, and present Woody as a more conventional funny animal protagonist. Nonetheless, I was astonished by the ending of Disc 3’s Wild and Woody (which premiered on December 31, 1948), in which Woody kills another of his regular opponents, Buzz Buzzard, with exploding TNT, and then escorts Buzz’s ghost to two elevator doors. Woody waves aside the elevator operator heading “up” to heaven, and instead puts Buzz on the elevator operated by a devil, heading down to hell. Of course Buzz returns alive in subsequent cartoons, but nevertheless, Wild and Woody demonstrates that Woody Woodpecker is capable of inflicting damage on his adversaries that makes anything Bugs Bunny does to Elmer Fudd look tame.

After leaving MGM, the great cartoon director Tex Avery worked briefly at the Walter Lantz studio, and the Woody DVD set includes the four animated shorts he made there before leaving theatrical animation.

Chilly Willy, the little penguin who dislikes the cold, debuted a year before Avery used him in I’m Cold (1954), and this cutesy character seems like an anomaly in the world of an Avery cartoon. (For what Avery thinks of cute characters, witness the mayhem inflicted on one in his 1944 short Screwball Squirrel.) In I’m Cold Chilly Willy, seeking warmth, attempts to steal furs from the cartoon’s real star, a guard dog with a familiar Southern drawl, voiced by Daws Butler. This cartoon thus represents another step in the evolution of Butler’s laid-back Southern canine from the Wolf in Avery’s Three Little Pups (see last week’s column) to Hanna-Barbera’s late 1950s TV star, Huckleberry Hound. Whereas the Wolf was the villain in Three Little Pups, albeit a likable one, the dog in I’m Cold isn’t a bad guy at all, but is clearly just doing his job. Significantly, Avery doesn’t take sides and allows both the dog and Chilly Willy to win, each in his own way, at the cartoon’s end.

In Avery’s The Legend of Rockabye Point (1955), Chilly Willy keeps making loud noises in order to wake up a vicious bulldog and sic him on a polar bear, who is forced to keep rocking the bulldog back to sleep. Avery had already used the premise of one character trying to stop another from making loud noises in his MGM cartoons Rock-a-Bye Bear (1952) and Deputy Droopy (1955, the same year as Rockabye Point!). Deputy Droopy (which is on the new Droopy DVD set) is the superior cartoon, but I like the twenty-years-later ending of Rockabye Point, which suggests that a bond can evolve even between enemies over time.

In Crazy Mixed-Up Pup (1955) a dog gets a transfusion of human blood, and his owner gets a transfusion of canine blood, with the result that the dog acts human, and the human acts like a dog. Each time someone witnesses this unusual behavior, the top of his or head springs open, a cuckoo emerges, and flags sprout from his or her ears, all to signify that the witness has just gone nuts. Avery keeps repeating this device, but it grows no funnier: I prefer the wild takes that wolves and other characters did in 1940s Avery cartoons.

My favorite of the four Avery cartoons is the final one, Sh-h-h-h-h-h (1955), in which a man, driven to the brink of madness by noises (a recurring theme, it seems), follows his psychiatrist’s advice and checks into a very, very quiet hotel. The patient ends up in a room next to a man and woman who keep playing a horn and laughing raucously. Though the patient never sees the couple (until the cartoon’s surprise ending), they somehow manage to thwart his every attempt to silence them. But what I like most about the cartoon is its middle section, before the obnoxious couple are first heard. The total silence of the sequence in which the patient checks into the hotel is genuinely eerie. It’s also disconcerting to realize that Tex Avery stopped making theatrical cartoons over a half-century ago. I have friends who were born the year that he stopped making cartoons for movie theaters, and they’re now middle-aged!

There are many other cartoons in the Woody DVD set, including some of Lantz’s remarkable Swing Symphonies, but I don’t have the time or space to get to them this week. Perhaps another time.

The Woody Woodpecker and Friends DVD set doesn’t have any commentary tracks, but it does have plenty of bonus features, principally featuring the late Walter Lantz, head of the studio that created the animated shorts in the set. There’s a short documentary about Lantz’s career, made towards the end of his life, a complete episode of The Woody Woodpecker Show, and various “behind the scenes” segments from the show.

After all these decades I was particularly interested in watching these segments. Lantz hosted the half-hour Woody Woodpecker Show, obviously following the example of Walt Disney, who hosted his own hour-long show in the 1950s and 1960s, first on ABC and then on NBC.

Even as a child I realized that Disney was the king of animation and that Lantz was a lesser figure, operating in Disney’s shadow. Walt Disney’s public persona was warm and friendly–very much “Uncle Walt”–as he acted as the television viewers’ guide to his pop culture empire. He may have been Uncle Walt, but I, and I assume, most viewers, recognized that it was an empire that he was showing us, and that he was the Great Man who had built it.

Recently rewatching the “Behind the Scenes” segments from The Woody Woodpecker Show confirms the impression that I recall having as a child. Walter Lantz lacked Walt Disney’s impressively charismatic presence as host. Lantz projected a gentler, quieter image. Whereas Disney welcomed us from what appeared to be his large, resplendent office, Lantz’s surroundings were clearly humbler.

In his host segments Lantz interacted with an animated Woody Woodpecker, just as Disney sometimes shared the screen with one of his studio’s animated characters on his show. (Woody continually taunts his “boss,” and there’s a nice moment on the DVD set in which Lantz, who normally projected a pleasant demeanor, gives the offscreen Woody a look subtly suggesting that the woodpecker had gone a bit too far.) Disney would also do shows in which he showed how animated cartoons were made, continuing a tradition begun by his 1941 feature The Reluctant Dragon. Lantz did this all the time in his host segments.

Now this reminds me of early animated cartoons, like Max and Dave Fleischer’s Out of the Inkwell series, which emphasized that the animated characters on screen were artificial creations: in the Inkwell series we see Max Fleischer (in live action footage) draw the animated character Koko onto a drawing board and they interact with each other. The audience is not encouraged to suspend its disbelief entirely; it’s as if this was the Max Fleischer counterpart of Bertolt Brecht’s alienation effect in theater. The audience simultaneously treats Koko as “real,” a living character, and recognizes him as a drawing “out of the inkwell.” (I will have much more to say about the Inkwell series in the coming weeks.)

Can you imagine an episode of Sesame Street, or, to go back to my childhood, Captain Kangaroo, in which the puppeteers came out from hiding and showed their young audience that Bert and Ernie or Mr. Moose were really just puppets animated by their arms? Now imagine yourself as a child watching The Woody Woodpecker Show. Walter Lantz shows you his cartoons, but in the host segments he shows you that Woody Woodpecker is really a series of drawings. Lantz is like a magician who shows the audience how his tricks are done. And yet this doesn’t spoil the tricks. I don’t recall being bothered as a child by seeing and hearing Lantz explain how Woody was not real; I found it interesting, and I assume that the rest of the show’s audience did, too, since this show lasted for years in syndication. Lantz obviously had enough respect for the intelligence of his younger viewers to have faith that they would accept the paradox.

In fact, even as Lantz explains the process of creating an animated cartoon in the host segments and the documentary, he continues to interact with the animated Woody Woodpecker, as if Woody were real. In one of my favorite moments on the DVD, Lantz explains that at one point his wife Gracie took over performing the voice of Woody Woodpecker, whereupon Woody–voiced by Gracie–expresses disgust that a “girl” is doing his voice! Woody’s appeal is so strong that the audience will happily continue to pretend that he is real even as Lantz is showing us that he is not.

In one host segment Lantz shows us how to draw Woody Woodpecker, using simple geometrical shapes as his basis. (Whether that is actually Lantz’s hand we see drawing in the closeups, I have no idea.) The segment suggests that it’s not that hard to draw Woody, and that you, the viewer, could do it, too, by following the same steps. In the other “behind the scenes” segments Lantz similarly explains other aspects of the process of making a cartoon, such as coming up with story ideas, so simply that grade school children can understand. Again. Lantz suggests that you, the viewer, could do this, too.

Surely Lantz’s “behind the scenes” segments must have inspired many kids to try their hands at drawing cartoons, and maybe some of them eventually became animation professionals. In watching these segments recently I realized that Lantz was, by extension, demystifying the creative process for any kind of art or writing. Through these segments Lantz was effectively telling children that they were capable of creative activity of any sort.

Here the difference between Lantz’s onscreen persona and Disney’s proves important. Watching him now on the DVD, I see that Lantz projected a gentler, more approachable, more intimate presence. Whereas Walt Disney seemed to be addressing a vast audience from his office, Walter Lantz conveyed the impression that he was speaking to you, personally, was letting you in on his secrets, and was encouraging you to follow in his footsteps and become an artist or writer yourself.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson