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Here’s an example of how fast the culture is changing. As regular readers know, I’ve given many talks at New York City’s Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (www.moccany.org). Two years ago I decided to hold a discussion of Stardust, the novel written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Charles Vess, both luminaries of the comics world. Nobody showed up. A month and a half ago, I was sitting in a local restaurant, gazing out the window, and saw a bus go by, bearing a advertisement for the Stardust movie on its side.

Last month I write about how the makers of the movie Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer so disastrously failed in their attempt to translate classic stories by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, notably their “Galactus trilogy,” to the screen. (See “Comics in Context” #184–185, and Quick Stop contributor Paul Dini makes his own incisive attack on the film in his podcast “Dini Double Feature” #3.) In contrast, the Stardust movie is considerably more faithful to its source material. Neil Gaiman sold the movie rights to a director he trusted with the material, Matthew Vaughn, and persuaded him to hire Jane Goldman, who collaborated with Vaughn on the screenplay (see “Comics in Context”#144). In numerous recent interviews Gaiman, who is one of the movie’s producers, has made clear he is happy with the finished film.

The movie still differs from the book in numerous respects. The changes range from the slight (the hero is named “Tristran Thorn” in the book, but “Tristan,” like the Wagnerian hero, in the movie) to major (a radically revamped final act, in which various characters meet different fates than they do in the book). A short episode in the book, in which Tristran is befriended by Johannes Alberic, captain of a flying “sky-ship,” becomes an extended sequence in the film which metamorphoses Captain Alberic into the pirate Captain Shakespeare, a considerably more flamboyant character.

Sometimes changes were made for budgetary reasons. In the book there is a battle between a lion and a unicorn, but to save on the CGI budget, only the unicorn appears in the film. Some changes were made due to the demands of dramatizing a prose story onscreen. Hence, Stardust the book devotes its opening chapter to the story of Dunstan Thorn, leading up to his son Tristran’s birth; the movie greatly condenses this section in order to introduce Tristan more quickly. And sometimes it seems that Gaiman was simply overruled by Vaughn and Goldman, who wanted to take their own approach to an aspect of the story. (Gaiman entertainingly describes the process of adapting Stardust into film in an August 8, 2007 National Public Radio interview.)

While I can understand the reasons why various changes were made in adapting the book, it is my role as a critic and independent scholar to show how even minor changes to a significant work of fiction can result in the loss of valuable nuances in the book. (And if you haven’t either read the book or seen the film, consider yourselves given spoiler warnings.)

Take the lion and the unicorn episode, for example, from Chapter Five. It serves many purposes. For one thing, as Tristran realizes, the battle between the two creatures is a reenactment of a famous nursery rhyme (“The Lion and the Unicorn were fighting for the crown. . . .”). The book has already established that Tristran is journeying through the enchanted realm of Faerie: this episode further suggests that this is the world of fairy tales, in which children’s fantasy stories take on reality. The lion and the unicorn appear on the royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom, so their presence in Stardust marks its version of Faerie as a specifically British fantasy world. Moreover, Stardust‘s lion and unicorn may serve as an allusion to Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, in which a battling lion and unicorn likewise appear. Alice and Tristran each recalls the nursery rhyme when he or she sees the battling lion and unicorn.

Although these subtexts are all worth notice, they are less important than what the episode conveys about the characters of Tristran and the book’s leading lady, Yvaine, the star in human form who has literally fallen to Earth. So far Yvaine has been utterly contemptuous towards Tristran, throwing mud at him and insulting him as soon as they first met in Chapter Four. Tristran doesn’t have Yvaine’s problem with anger management, but he is wrapped up in his quest to find a fallen star and bring it back to Victoria, the young woman whom he believes he loves. He is so obsessed with Victoria and his quest that he is rather lacking in empathy towards other people.

“”˜I broke my leg,” said the young lady [Yvaine].
“˜I’m sorry, of course,’ said Tristran. “˜But the star.'”
(Stardust, Harper Perennial edition, p. 103)

Tristran isn’t so “sorry” that he offers to do anything to relieve Yvaine’s pain or to comfort her. Moreover, once he realizes that Yvaine is the fallen star he seeks, he takes her prisoner, binding her to himself with a magical chain. He intends to give her to Victoria, as if she were not a person but an animal or object. Although the book never uses the word, this naive, innocent young man is nonetheless treating her as a slave.

But Tristran probably doesn’t realize the import of what he has done to Yvaine. Nor is he cruel: by the start of Chapter Five he makes a splint for her leg, offers to find her a doctor, and worries that she’ll starve. (Actually, according to the book, stars don’t eat.)

When they encounter the battling lion and unicorn, Yvaine demonstrates her own deep capacity for compassion, even for these fearsome beasts. “‘Stop them,’ whispered the star. “˜They will kill each other.'” (p. 114). When it becomes clear that the lion will kill the unicorn, Yvaine pleads with Tristran to try to stop the battle. Although Tristran knows that he cannot possibly stop the battling creatures by force, and that they would probably kill him as well, he nonetheless advances till he is only “an arm’s length from the beasts” (p. 115). Recalling the nursery rhyme, Tristran picks up a crown lying in the nearby grass and places it on the lion’s head; with that, the fight is over. Despite her own broken leg, Yvaine makes her way over to the unicorn and comforts it; she insists that they stay with the wounded animal, “and Tristran had not the heart to refuse her” (p. 116).

So through this episode the book first reveals Yvaine’s capacity for great empathy and kindness. It also depicts Tristran’s first important act of bravery in the story. Moreover, although at the end of Chapter Four, Tristran accepted Yvaine’s description of him as “a ninny, a numbskull, a lackwit and a coxcomb,” his solution for taming the lion is rather clever. (As with “The Tale of the Three Brothers” in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, children’s stories and rhymes prove to contain genuine wisdom.) He may be naive, often unthinking and self-deluded, but Tristran can rise above these failings and display true intelligence. Further, why did he risk his life to save the unicorn? Was it simply his emerging capacity to care about other beings than himself and his idealized vision of Victoria? Or was Tristran also acting out of a growing unconscious affection for Yvaine? Tristran embarked on a quest to find the fallen star in order to please Victoria; Yvaine effectively asked him to go on a quest to save the unicorn, and he obeyed, even though his conscious mind warned him against it. Stardust is principally the story of Tristran’s development from callow boy to mature adult, and this episode presents a striking step in that development.

The sequence concludes with Yvaine and Tristran lying on opposite sides of the unicorn, but still joined by the chain, on which Tristran focuses his attention just before falling asleep. Yvaine and Tristran are separate but linked, and his efforts to hear her quiet singing suggest he wishes he were figuratively closer to her. Even though Yvaine had earlier warned Tristran that she would do anything she could to obstruct her quest, in saving the unicorn’s life, they have acted in unison, foreshadowing the emotional bond that will grow between them.

The chain reminds me of the handcuffs in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 film The Thirty-Nine Steps, which serve a similar thematic purpose: its hero on a cross-country quest is handcuffed to a woman who resents him and intends to thwart him, but they end up as both allies and lovers.

But a CGI lion was judged to be too expensive for a single scene, and the scene really isn’t essential to the story. So in the film Tristan and Yvaine encounter the unicorn, who is needed for subsequent plot developments, under more peaceful circumstances. And yet look how much the lion-and-unicorn sequence in the book contributes to the careful reader’s understanding of the main characters, the setting in Faerie, and some of the book’s themes. I wonder if the lion’s fascination with the crown might even serve to parody the obsessions of other Stardust characters–the old witch (played by Michelle Pfeiffer in the film) and the murderous Septimus–with power.

In order to find the fallen star for Victoria, Tristan/Tristran had to cross over from normal reality into a world of the supernatural.

In Joseph Campbell’s The Hero of A Thousand Faces, he describes the various phases of the archetypal “hero’s journey” monomyth that underlies adventure stories. Among these is the protagonist’s “crossing of the threshold” which separates the normal, ordinary world from the realm of adventure, which is often enchanted. To get past the threshold, the protagonist must contend against a “threshold guardian.”

Stardust the novel makes its threshold wonderfully explicit. Tristran lives in the British town of Wall, which is named after an actual wall, which separates the town from a literally enchanted realm, that of Faerie. There is only a single gap in the wall, which is guarded by the townspeople of Wall, who are determined not to allow any of Wall’s children or any visitors to the town pass through into Faerie; apparently, the adult townspeople of Wall have no intention of going there. The only exception to the prohibition comes once every nine years on May Day, when the townspeople of Wall cross through the gap to attend a fair that is held in the meadow immediately on the other side.

The nature of the wall raises questions in my mind. Does the wall, which comes out of the woods and reenters them, have end points, enabling someone to walk around it? Is the wall presumably some kind of dimensional barrier, and Faerie actually located in another dimension? That would explain why Captain Alberic/Shakespeare couldn’t just sail his flying ship over the wall.) Probably wisely, Gaiman leaves the answers to these questions as mysteries: fairy tales do not conform to scientific principles. But his narrator does explain in the book that “Faerie is bigger than England, as it is bigger than the world (for, since the dawn of time, each land that has been forced off the map by explorers and the brave going out and proving it wasn’t there has taken refuge in Faerie. . . ) ” (p. 63). This suggests that while Faerie seems on the surface to be part of our world, just over that wall, it is actually an alternate reality, constructed over the ages by the imaginations of storytellers.

The movie avoids referring to the enchanted realm as Faerie. Why? Was the name considered confusing because Tristan does not encounter any actual fairies in the film? Was it thought that movie audiences nowadays cannot separate the word “fairy” from its alternate meaning as a slur against gays? By using the term “Faerie” for the realm beyond the wall, the book suggests that this is a truly magical world which perhaps predates human civilization in Britain. Moreover, Stardust is set in the 19th century, and its use of the term “Faerie” connects the book with the tradition of depicting fairies in Victorian literature and art.

Most importantly, Gaiman’s use of the name “Faerie” in the book makes it immediately clear to the reader that this is indeed an enchanted realm on the other side of the wall. One of my problems with the movie is that the world on the other side of the wall never seems like a truly magical land to me. It looks beautiful, certainly, but it looks and seems real. Referring to it as “Stormhold” makes it sound like another nation, not a supernatural domain.

This may be a difficult distinction to make clear. Certainly the movie’s “Stormhold” has witches and ghosts and even a unicorn. But Macbeth has witches and ghosts, too, yet no one contends that Scotland is a literally enchanted realm comparable to the land of Faerie. The witches in Macbeth seem like anomalies in an otherwise normal world, or they represent supernatural forces that are normally hidden from mortal view. The Stardust movie makes Stormhold look so realistic that its witches and unicorn likewise seem like anomalies to me. At one point in the book (p. 63), Gaiman’s narrator recounts a legend that as mountain range in Faerie is actually the body of a sleeping giant. The reader can then imagine a mountain range with a vaguely humanoid form, adding to his sense of a magical world, but how could a film visually convey that?

Other recent movies successfully make their distinctions between the normal and magical worlds. Take The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: as soon as the kids step through the wardrobe, they are surrounded by snow (at the wrong time of year) and sight a faun and talking beavers. The sheer number of unusual, supernatural phenomena plays a role. It’s always clear in the Harry Potter movies that Hogwarts is a magical place, what with ghosts and paintings with moving, talking figures, and staircases swinging about with minds of their own.

In Stardust the book Gaiman quickly establishes the supernatural feel of Faerie once Tristran crosses over there: he encounters a “hairy little man”–“if man he was,” notes the narrator-, as well as “tiny people” who emit a flickering light, who might be actual fairies. Later, memorably, there is a talking tree (acknowledged by Gaiman to be inspired by Tori Amos) and, much further on, a talking badger. None of them make it into the movie. As early as page 63, the book’s narrator assures us that “Here, truly, there be Dragons. Also gryphons, wyverns, hippogriffs, basilisks, and hydras.” But in the film’s Stormhold, the supernatural still seems to me to be the exception rather than the rule.

In the film, when Tristan and Yvaine first find Captain Shakespeare’s flying pirate ship soaring unto view, it initially seemed out of place to me: I hadn’t seen anything so massively, spectacularly supernatural in the film up to that point. In the book I accepted Captain Alberic’s flying ship right away. Having read about so many other impossible things by that point, I accepted the ship as a reasonable addition.

The most interesting aspect of the wall in the book for me is that the male townspeople of Wall take turns acting as guards–including Tristram himself and his father Dunstan, each of whom ends up violating his duty by crossing over into Faerie. In other words, this is the only case I can think of in which the protagonist is himself one of Campbell’s threshold guardians! In order to become a hero, he has to give up the role of threshold guardian and defy his former fellow threshold guardians.

In the book this also means freeing oneself from the townspeople’s own version of groupthink. The townspeople of Wall are devoted to not letting anyone cross the barrier either way between their world and Faerie. But why? Neither Dunstan nor Tristran seem to know, nor does anyone else in Wall say why.

The townspeople’s guardianship of the wall seems to me to be a metaphor for a mindset that fears and resents the unknown, that insists on conventional thinking and behavior, and that discourages all but the truly insistent on pursuing alternative paths through life. The only people whom the townspeople of Wall allow to pass through the gap have “a look in the eyes, and once seen it cannot be mistaken” (p. 4). Perhaps Tristran too developed this “look.” It’s as if Wall is a fairy tale version of an archetypal small town, whose citizens are crippled by provincial ways of thinking, and the land over the wall represents the archetypal big city, where those willing to embark on the quest can find “miracles and wonders” (p. 13).

In the movie there only seems to be one threshold guardian for the wall: an ancient man who is nevertheless amusingly formidable in preventing people from crossing the gap. (Does he never sleep?) I think that the movie misses something important here. The book has presented us with a powerful image of an entire community that devotes itself to preventing individuals from leaving and making a different kind of life. (Suddenly I find myself thinking of television’s The Prisoner.) In the movie it may well be that the community doesn’t even know that there is an enchanted world on the opposite side of the wall, and there is only this one aged, lone eccentric who shoos (or bears) people away from the threshold.

But what about that exception, on May Day every nine years, when the townspeople cross the threshold just far enough to attend the Faerie fair? This initially puzzled me, but I decided that these May Days are like Mardi Gras and Carnival, or Halloween or Saturnalia. There is a tradition of holidays when the normal rules of order and proper behavior are suspended. It is as if these holidays are outlets for emotions, for sides of our personalities, for activities, which are suppressed during the rest of the year in order that society may function in an orderly fashion. And so in Stardust the book, that outlet for the people of Wall comes once every nine years.

In the movie, though, the enchanted realm’s meadow and its fair are permanently off limits to the people of Wall. Perhaps the filmmakers didn’t want to puzzle the audience as to why there was an exception to the rule about not crossing the threshold.

As noted, Stardust‘s leading lady is Yvaine, a star in human form. who has fallen to Earth. The idea of a star in human form is not new. There is even a Marvel character, Cloud, a member of the Defenders in the 1980s, who was an entire nebula who took the form of a teenage girl (and sometimes a teenage boy) on Earth. I dealt with the concept in this column in my discussion of P.L. Travers’ first Mary Poppins book, in which one of the Pleiades appears as a young girl named Maia and even goes Christmas shopping in London (see “Comics in Context” #158).

What I found most intriguing about the Maia episode, and another one in which Mary Poppins hangs paper stars in the sky, is that they imply that in the world of Mary Poppins, science is wrong. Similarly, after meeting Yvaine, Tristran tells her “that he had always supposed stars to be, as Mrs. Cherry had taught them, flaming balls of burning gas many hundreds of miles across, just like the sun only further away” (p. 111). Mary Poppins and Stardust postulate that science is merely illusion, a notion that is appealing although not to be taken seriously. Science tells us that our planet is a miniscule part of a cosmos too vast for us to comprehend, to which we mean nothing. It is a bleak vision of reality. Wouldn’t the universe seem to be more benign if it had a more human scale, if the stars turned out to be people like ourselves, or to be tiny lights that we could reach out and touch just by climbing Mary Poppins’ ladder?

Still, one of the problems that I have with Stardust, both as a book and as a movie, is in accepting Yvaine as actually being a star. I don’t have trouble with Maia, because Mary Poppins is a more whimsical sort of book than Stardust, which takes a more dramatic tone. I feel that I should take Yvaine more seriously as a character than I do Maia. Are we to imagine that Yvaine and her fellow stars exist in humanoid form, albeit with the ability to shine, up in the heavens? Or do they exist in some other sort of form, and Yvaine took on human form when she fell into the realm of Faerie (just as the book and film tell us that she would transform into an unliving piece of rock–a meteorite–if she left Faerie and entered the “real” world)? Even if stars exist in the heavens in humanoid form, wouldn’t their native realm be very different from Earth’s? Yet Yvaine seems to have no trouble adjusting to Earth.

Certainly, Yvaine gives off light, but she does not seem to me to be a different kind of being in essence from Tristran/Tristan and the other humans. I find myself thinking back to Lee and Kirby’s “Galactus trilogy,” in which another celestial being literally falls to Earth–the Silver Surfer–and encounters a human being–Alicia Masters. Lee and Kirby depict the Surfer as initially not comprehending the ways and nature of humanity, until Alicia opens his eyes not just to the value of the human race, but to the potential for humanity–qualities such as nobility and compassion–within himself. The Silver Surfer is metaphorically an angel or god who has fallen into the world of mortals. That’s the metaphorical role that Yvaine too is intended to fill. Yet neither in the movie nor in the book do I get the sense that there is anything truly unearthly about Yvaine. She seems not like a fallen goddess, but like a dethroned princess, forced to put up with someone–Tristran/Tristan–whom she considers her social inferior.

I’ve thought of another parallel as well. In the book when Tristran and Yvaine first kiss, at last acknowledging their love for each other, the narration states, “He opened his eyes as he kissed the star. Her sky-blue eyes stared back into his, and in her eyes he could see no parting from her” (p. 234).

That last clause seems familiar. Charles Dickens wrote two endings for Great Expectations, and the final version of his second ending concludes thus: “I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so, the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.”

Is the similarity in phrasing only a coincidence? Tristran and Yvaine are like Dickens’ once naive Pip and the formerly disdainful Estella. In the Stardust book the narrator even points out to us in Chapter One that at the time of his story “Mr. Charles Dickens was serializing his novel Oliver Twist (p. 5), as if alerting the readers to be on the lookout for Dickensian parallels.

Dickens’ concluding lines for Great Expectations may suggest a happy ending, with Pip and Estella united in love. But they are actually ambiguous. Just before Dickens’ final paragraph, Estella, who admitted to have been changed by her experiences, told Pip that they “will continue friends apart,” which is hardly an expression of undying love. Just because Pip “saw no shadow of another parting from her” does not mean that they will not part. Indeed, Pip, as narrator recounting his past, may be phrasing it this way to suggest that there was such a “shadow” that he ignored at the time.

Moreover, in fine tuning this ending, Dickens had previously phrased the last line this way: “I saw the shadow of no parting from her but one.” It has been suggested that this “one” shadow would be that of the inevitable parting of lovers by death. (For more about Dickens’ ending, see here and here.)

This interpretation is relevant to Stardust the book, because, in retrospect, Tristran’s failure to see his “parting” from Yvaine is ironic. As we learn in the Epilogue, “Tristran and Yvaine were happy together.” But “Not foreverafter”–as fairy tales traditionally claim at their conclusions–“for Time, the thief, eventually takes all things into his dusty storehouse,” and Tristran inevitably dies.

Death is not such a bad thing in the world of Stardust. It’s instructive to be writing about Stardust so soon after doing a column about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (see “Comics in Context” #187). (Spoiler alert through the end of this paragraph!) J. K. Rowling was insistent on the mystery and finality of death in her Harry Potter series until Harry makes his (apparent) journey to the borderline between the world of the living and the realm of the dead, where he (apparently) encounters Dumbledore’s spirit towards the end of Hallows. In Stardust the sons of the Lord of Stormhold, once they have been killed, immediately reappear as ghosts; in the movie, this is even treated as a running gag. At least for those in the realm of Faerie, death is not oblivion, so Tristran’s death in the book is not the end for him.

But Yvaine is an immortal, and Gaiman ends the book on a bittersweet note, with the description of Yvaine, still alive and still young, but parted from her true love by his death, standing “for hour after hour” at the top of her palace: “She says nothing at all, but simply stares upward into the dark sky and watches, with sad eyes, the slow dance of the infinite stars.” (It’s an image something like the final, enigmatic shot of Rouben Mamoulian’s 1933 film Queen Christina, whose title character has also lost her lover and is staring out into the unknown.) She has been parted both from her true love and from the other stars. Possibly in death Tristan has become part of the infinite; Yvaine is condemned to be separate from it.

But at the end of the movie the narrator informs us that Tristan did not die, but after he and Yvaine jointly ruled Stormhold for many years, they used a magic candle to transport themselves into the heavens, where they lived as stars, presumably for eternity. So, I wonder, did Tristan achieved immortality, did he remain a very old man? Or was he somehow rejuvenated? More importantly, what does it really mean for Tristan to become a star? Did he retain his human appearance, or was he transformed into a different, sort of being?

Despite the transformation of the hero into a star, this is in essence the conventional ending of a fairy tale: the hero and heroine live happily ever after, in this case, literally forever. But the book has an unconventional ending for the genre. For one thing, the narrator cautiously implies that Tristran and Yvaine’s life together was not entirely blissful: “they were happy, as these things go, for a long while.” The narrator acknowledges that Tristran inevitably died, and that Yvaine faced a life (perhaps eternal?) of loneliness. All good things come to an end.

This is a more realistic and thought-provoking ending, befitting a fairy tale for an adult audience. Indeed, I would say that what makes Stardust the book interesting is its unconventional approach to familiar tropes of fantasy and fairy tales, while many of the changes that the movie makes push the story in a more conventional direction. This is a subject I will explore further in next week’s column.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

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