Category: Columns

In last week’s column I embarked on a mission: to track down animated cartoons that had made an impression on me when I was in grade school, but which I hadn’t seen since, and watch them again through adult eyes. I wanted to see how many of them I could find on the Internet, and what other animated cartoons of note might be there as well.

My quest proved to be more successful than I’d imagined. I found a lot of vintage cartoons that I recalled as mediocre or worse, and which lived down to my memories: King Leonardo and Friends, Linus the Lionhearted, Silly Sidney and Deputy Dawg and more. But there were also plenty that proved to be true classics.

Although I’ve seen many of the 1940s Superman animated cartoons as an adult, somehow I never caught up with the one I found perhaps most memorable from my childhood, in which Superman battles a gigantic tyrannosaur. But now I’ve found it: it’s called The Arctic Giant, produced by the Fleischer Studios, directed by Dave Fleischer, and released by Paramount in 1942.

Like the other Fleischer Superman cartoons, The Arctic Giant is remarkable for its dramatic lighting, “camera” angles and visual compositions and its sheer energy and momentum. The superhero genre was only four years old in 1942, yet the Fleischer studio caught its spirit perfectly. But what I didn’t expect from The Arctic Giant were the little touches that the Fleischer team added to the cartoon.

A prologue sequence recounts how the colossal dinosaur was found frozen in the Arctic and was transported south in a freighter with similarly colossal refrigeration facilities. A new wing is built for the “Museum of Natural Science” in Superman’s home city specifically to exhibit the frozen creature. The cartoon never names this city, but the museum’s main building is clearly the actual American Museum of Natural History in New York City, with its towers that make the 77th St. facade look like a storybook castle. The Fleischer Studios were originally located in New York, so perhaps they thought of Superman as based there, too.

There’s not much dialogue in the Fleischer Superman cartoons, but the few words pay off in this one. Assigned by The Daily Planet editor to cover the dinosaur exhibit, Lois stops by Clark Kent’s desk to kid him that he’s so timid the sight of the monster would make him faint. This may be condescending, but it seems more witty than cruel, and Clark, once Lois has left, seems amused by it. It’s the sort of repartee I’d expect from the Lois of the 1990s Superman animated series; how interesting to see that the Fleischers had already caught the Lois and Clark relationship so well a half century earlier.

Of course, the dinosaur is not dead but in suspended animation, and, of course, he wakes up. Lois interviews a workman at the museum who sets down an oil can, which accidentally topples into machinery, cutting off the refrigeration that keeps the dinosaur comatose. In this high tech present, I’ve had enough experience with equipment that malfunctions because one little thing unexpectedly went wrong, so it seemed just right to me that to little falling oil can would end up releasing the monster.

When I first got to the real American Museum of Natural History, I think I was slightly disappointed with the size of the dinosaur skeletons. Big as a real tyrannosaur is, it still fits within a room on the museum’s fourth floor, whereas in my childhood, pop culture tended to make a dinosaur at least as tall as the entire museum. So the awakened “Arctic Giant” is far bigger than a real tyrannosaur: his foot is so big that he simultaneously steps on and flattens two police cars. Marauding through the city, this tyrannosaur looks like he is the size of Godzilla, and that’s pretty amazing, considering that The Arctic Giant came out twelve years before the first Godzilla movie (1954)!

Watching Arctic Giant, I wondered, if Godzilla wasn’t the Fleischers’ model for their “Arctic Giant,” could it have been King Kong? That makes sense: they are both gigantic monsters that stalk through a major city; like the dinosaur, Kong too was transported to New York by boat; Kong and the “Arctic Giant” both wreck an elevated subway line. And, of course, the dinosaur also menaces a young woman: at one point the tyrannosaur scoops Lois up in his mouth!

Superman goes to the city’s–and Lois’s–rescue, and there is a striking sequence in which Superman leaps to the tops of a succession of skyscrapers. Even though Superman streaks across the sky in the opening credits, this cartoon was definitely made before it was decided that Superman could fly. On the other hand, on the cover of Action Comics #1 Superman raises a car above his head; by Arctic Giant his strength has grown tremendously. The monster demolished the museum wing in escaping, and in order to rescue Lois, Superman lifts enormous chunks of rubble that dwarf him in size. This looks astounding to me in 2008; what must it have looked like to audiences in 1942, long before the recent rise of CGI, back when the superhero genre was still brand new?

Upon rescuing her from the rubble, Superman warns Lois to stay out of danger, but once he’s gone, she says she’s not giving up on this story. She doesn’t seem foolhardy, as she often does in these cartoons, but rather dedicated to her job. She isn’t the least bit shaken after her close encounter with the dinosaur, and that seems appropriate for Superman’s leading lady, and should have strongly impressed audiences in this pre-feminist period: she wasn’t continually screaming like Fay Wray did at Kong.

The Arctic Giant mostly seems to take place in New York City, but the marauding monster soon crashes his way through a dam as big as Hoover Dam, flooding what seems to be a country setting with small houses. Superman topples a mammoth mass of rock to seal the gap in the dam. Then the monster is back in the city, wrecking a bridge that looks very much like one of New York’s (with Superman lifting an entire span, with trucks and cars on top, back into place!) and finally stalking towards what could be Yankee Stadium. This is where the dinosaur scoops Lois up in his mouth, and Superman has to go in after her. It’s not quite the “belly of the beast” in Joseph Campbell’s phrase, but close enough to fit the archetype. Once Superman rescues her (again), Lois again shows nerves of steel, whereas you or I, after spending time in a dinosaur’s maw, might be in the verge of nervous collapse; after Superman again cautions her, she even jokingly addresses him as “milord.” She kids Clark Kent abut fainting, but this Lois seems incapable of doing the same.

I recalled Superman killing the tyrannosaur in Arctic Giant and my disapproving: kids, after all, love dinosaurs. On seeing the cartoon again, I am pleased to say my memory was wrong. Superman topples the dinosaur, and there’s a Daily Planet front page with a photograph that seems at first glance to show the tyrannosaur lying prone, but this time I saw the headlines saying that Superman “subdued” the creature, what is now in the “park zoo” (Central Park? Bronx Park?). So it seems that the Fleischers anticipated Jurassic Park here.

And so the cartoon ends with Lois and Clark at the Planet, with Lois sitting on Clark’s desk, showing off her legs (the Fleischer team clearly regarding her as a sex symbol for the adults in the audience), and Clark doing what was a trademark of these Superman cartoons, breaking the fourth wall by giving a wink to the audience. The Arctic Giant lasts only a little over eight minutes, but it has thrills, spectacle, humor, sex appeal, and a “meta” touch at the end. What more could one want?

More than once, upon hearing volunteers at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art ask visitors to become MoCCA members that they ought to play the musical question from Max and Dave Fleischer’s Bimbo’s Initiation (1931): “Wanna be a member? Wanna be a member?”

I don’t recall seeing Bimbo’s Initiation as a child, but it certainly and deservedly turned up in Fleischer retrospectives I saw in the 1980s, and it’s about as different from the Fleischers’ Arctic Giant as can be.

“Bimbo” is certainly an odd name for a male anthropomorphic dog, who is now best known for his supporting roles in Betty Boop cartoons. In this cartoon, however, Bimbo is the lead and Betty the supporting cast member. Not only that, but this is one of her earliest appearances, when she was supposed to be a dog, not a human. She looks like the familiar later version, except for her doglike ears.

Watching Bimbo’s Initiation again on YouTube, I decided to apply the Joseph Campbell approach to this infamous cartoon. Walking along a city street, Bimbo tumbles down a manhole, thus inadvertently crossing a Campbellian threshold and descending into an underworld. This might also be an allusion to Alice falling down the rabbit hole into Wonderland. Bimbo, however, finds himself in a sort of hell.

Bimbo lands in the subterranean headquarters of a strangely garbed secret society, who chant in deep male voices, “Wanna be a member? Wanna be a member?” “No!” protests Bimbo. But their invitation is a Campbellian “call to adventure,” and according to Campbell’s monomyth, denying the call always leads to dire consequences. So Bimbo finds himself in a series of seeming death traps, often involving sharp, phallic blades, one of which comes to life and tries to bite him. If the dangers weren’t treated in a somewhat comedic manner, this could easily be a horror story.

As the cartoon’s title indicates, Bimbo is being put through an initiation ritual by this secret society. Presumably these traps are intended as a test of manhood. But whenever the society members return to pose their musical question, “Wanna be a member?” Bimbo persists in refusing to join, and yet more danger ensues.

Midway through the cartoon, the dog-eared Betty Boop appears and beckons to Bimbo. This time Bimbo, sexually aroused, happily accepts the invitation and he follows Betty through a doorway only to lose her and be subjected to yet more traps. Ultimately Bimbo is confronted once more by the leader of the secret society, who poses his question “Wanna be a member?” yet again. Bimbo still refuses, until the leader unmasks, revealing “himself” to be Betty. Now Bimbo definitely wants to be a member, the other secret society members reveal themselves to be Betty lookalikes, and the cartoon ends with Bimbo and Betty dancing hand in hand, while the Boop lookalikes provide a backup chorus line. The subterranean hell has become a romantic heaven.

So, if Bimbo is being initiated into masculinity, he refuses as long as he perceives it as requiring submission to alpha males upon threat of violence. Achieving adult masculinity becomes much more appealing to Bimbo when he comes to see it as the means for making a sexual connection with Betty. (So perhaps the word “member” in this cartoon is also a sexual allusion.) At the cartoon’s end Bimbo has passed the initiation, but instead of participating in power games with other males, he instead wins the hand of the leading lady.

Long before I read my first DC superhero comic, I was a staunch fan of another DC Comics title, The Fox and the Crow, a funny animal series which had an impressively successful run from 1951 to 1968. Although I was pleased to see the Fox and Crow turn up in cameos in the first issue of DC’s new revival of Captain Carrot, DC didn’t own these characters. Not until the 1980s, when I read Of Mice and Magic, Leonard Maltin’s pioneering history of animation during the Hollywood studio system years, did I learn that the Fox and Crow first appeared in Fox and Grapes, a 1941 cartoon directed by Frank Tashlin, who later and briefly made memorable cartoons for Warners. Tashlin would go on to direct live action comedies starring Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis (who, coincidentally, also starred in DC Comics series in the 1950s and 1960s).

Despite all the classic cartoon retrospectives I’ve attended over the decades, Fox and Grapes never turned up and remained a mystery to me. But now YouTube has finally given me the chance to see it, and it is surprising from start to finish.

Surprise #1: The Fox and the Crow are unmistakably voiced by none other than supreme Warners voice artist Mel Blanc!

Surprise #2: Maybe this shouldn’t have been so surprising, since I remembered from the comics that the Crow’s first name was Crawford and the Fox’s first name was, of all things, Fauntleroy, as in Little Lord Fauntleroy. When the Fox makes his entrance in Fox and Grapes, he is skipping along a bridge, virtually dancing, wearing a straw hat and enormous bow tie, whistling or singing “la la la” to the tune of a Strauss waltz, his rear end swinging back and forth. Later, Blanc elaborately rolls his “r’s” when the Fox speaks of grapes. Could it be that Tashlin intended the Fox to be gay? (In that same year, 1941, Disney released The Reluctant Dragon, whose title character also seems to be as stereotypically gay.)

Reportedly, Chuck Jones credited Fox and Grapes as a major inspiration for his Roadrunner series, which began in 1948. I expected to find some vague similarities. But now that I’ve finally seen this cartoon, my Surprise #3 is how astonishingly close Fox and Grapes is to the Roadrunners.

First, there’s the Fox’s obsessiveness, which is arguably greater than Wile E. Coyote’s. The premise of the cartoon is that the Crow is trying to get hold of the Fox’s picnic lunch, and learns from the fable of the fox and the crow in “Eslops Fables” that foxes love grapes. (There’s a “meta” dimension to this cartoon.) So, the Crow hangs a bunch if grapes from a branch high on a tree, and offers to exchange them for the Fox’s picnic food. The Fox refuses to trade and says he will simply jump up and seize the grapes. This leads to a long series of blackout gags in which the Fox tries over and over to reach the grapes and fails every time. Like his fellow canine predator, Wile E. Coyote, the Fox will not give up. But unlike Jones’s Coyote, the Fox already has lots of food right there, and, in fact, had already consumed plenty before he even saw the grapes. The Fox isn’t motivated by hunger; he’s simply after a particular delicacy, and yet despite continual failures, he won’t cut his losses and be satisfied with the food he already has. The Fox and Coyote are both obsessive compulsives, and they both suffer from hubris and overreaching.

Still more surprisingly, many of the gags in Fox and Grapes will be familiar to any Roadrunner aficionados. The Fox repeatedly ends up falling from great heights. At one point the impact literally flattens him, compressing him as if he were an accordion. As with the Coyote, most of the Fox’s failures come from overlooking the one little thing that could go wrong with his plans. At another point, the Fox stands on one end of a kind of teeter-totter, strains to lift an enormous rock, and then, with great effort, hurls it into the air. His intention is that the rock will hit the other end of the seesaw, catapulting him upward towards the grapes. Instead, of course, the rock falls directly back down, crushing the Fox beneath. How often have we seen variations in that gag in Roadrunner cartoons?

Fox and Grapes isn’t just an inspiration for the Roadrunner series; it’s virtually a blueprint! But Chuck Jones and writer Michael Maltese elaborated on this basic structure in numerous ways, turning the Roadrunner series into something conceptually superior to the Tashlin cartoon, and even more profound, as I will explain in some future column.

Who was the first superhero I ever saw on television? I can’t be sure. Was it Superman in the Fleischer cartoons, or Mighty Mouse? Or was it Tom Terrific? He was the title character of a Terrytoons series created by Gene Deitch that ran for years on CBS’s Captain Kangaroo show, back when CBS programmed for children on weekday mornings rather than try to compete with the Today show (here and here).

Tom arguably qualifies as a superhero by the standards established by Peter Coogan in his book Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre (See “Comics in Context” #162). First of all, he has super-powers: he wears a “thinking cap” that not only augments his intellect but also enables him to transform into anything. Distinctively shaped like a funnel, the thinking cap also acts as a symbol of his superheroic identity, as much as the chevron or insignia on the typical superhero’s costume. Of course, he also has a mission, to do good.

On the Internet I found a complete five-episode Tom Terrific serial. Alas, it does not feature Tom’s archnemesis, Crabby Appleton, whom I haven’t seen in decades, but instead substitutes a worthy opponent who seems newly relevant in the wake of the popularity of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies: the piratical Captain Kidney Bean.

The Tom Terrific cartoons turned their miniscule budget to heir stylistic advantage. The characters an backgrounds are simple line drawings, devoid of color: in fact, you can even see the background lines through the characters. But I suspect that graphic simplicity was appealing to very small children, as was Tom’s strikingly visual shapeshifting power.

Like so many superheroes, Tom has a sidekick: his case, his talking pet, whom he calls “Mighty Manfred the Wonder Dog,” Tom insists that Manfred is as heroic as himself, but as surely even the youngest viewers could tell, Manfred is actually sleepy, stupid and virtually immobile. This may be a clever satire on the way that many pet owners project personality traits onto their pets that the animals don’t actually have.

Seeing Tom Terrific now, I wondered, is it possible that Deitch and his colleagues named “Mighty Manfred” after the title character of Lord Byron’s 1816-1817 romantic poem Manfred? If so, Deitch and his writers were amusing themselves in this instance, knowing that the full irony of Mighty Manfred’s name would never be grasped by their target audience.

Though little kids would understand that Tom is mistaken about his dog’s heroic qualities, perhaps they would not realize that the cartoons also poke understated fun at their boy hero’s innocence about the world in general. The “Captain Kidney Bean” serial makes it clear that its pirate villain is considerably nastier than its naive hero realizes. In this regard Tom Terrific reminds me of the Batman TV show later in the 1960s. In both cases this is a joke that grows old quickly. Tom Terrific was aimed at very young children, and has little to sustain adult interest.

But I am impressed on the cartoons’ emphasis on Tom using his “thinking cap” to think his way out of dilemmas rather than resorting to violence. How often do kids’ cartoons make being smart seem cool?

The vintage cartoons that proved to be better than I had remembered were from Bob Clampett’s legendary Beany and Cecil series. I expect that one reason is that, like Jay Ward’s The Bullwinkle Show, made during the same period of late 1950s and early 1960s, Beany and Cecil worked on two levels: these series had colorful characters and plenty of slapstick action that would appeal to the target audience of little children, but also simultaneously aimed verbal humor and satire at an older audience. Significantly, both Beany and Cecil and Bullwinkle ran on prime time television before settling into Saturday morning berths. The smarter children would pick up enough of that upper level of humor to recognize that Beany and Cecil and Bullwinkle didn’t condescend to them, but instead respected their intelligence and even initiated them into appreciating more sophisticated kinds of wit.

Beany and Cecil are, respectively, a young boy who wears a beany cap, which, in the cartoons, enables him to fly, and his best friend, a “seasick sea serpent.” (That new movie, The Water Horse, has hit upon a similar pairing.) They travel the world with Beany’s “Uncle Captain,” Horatio Huffenpuff, an amusingly ineffectual and cowardly father figure, in his ship, the Leakin’ Lena, and frequently run afoul of perennial nemesis Dishonest John.

The animated Beany and Cecil was a follow-up to Clampett’s more child-oriented Time for Beany, a puppet show on local television in Los Angeles. There are examples of this show on the Web, too, such as Episode 241 from 1951, which I found disappointing. lacking the energy and sharp verbal wit of the later cartoon series. Even so, this installment finds the regular cast of characters in Hollywood, where the villainous Dishonest John persuades Cecil to get himself some publicity by jumping of the roof of a building–and Cecil does! It’s a kids’ puppet show, so Cecil survives, but nonetheless gets badly banged up. The publicity stunt works, and a producer hires Cecil to be in a movie–and wants him to jump off another building. Thus a startling dose of adult cynicism about show business turns up in what is supposedly just an innocuous show for children.

Maybe the sign that Clampett ultimately wasn’t interested in doing a show just for small children is his treatment of Beany. Tom Terrific is also a young boy, but he’s the dominant character in his cartoons. In contrast, Beany is a blank, registering little personality beyond his characteristic smile, which sometimes seems as if it is as permanently affixed as Jack Nicholson’s Joker’s. It’s as if Clampett decided that since the audience is primarily made up of kids, there has to be a kid on the show for them to identify with. But really, was wearing a beany cap EVER cool?

One of the main reasons that Boomers loved this show was Beany’s unlikely costar, Cecil, the Seasick Sea Serpent. Think about it: Cecil is actually a gigantic snake! It seems to me that Clampett and the other writers set themselves a formidable task in having to do cartoon scripts about a major character who could only pick things up with his mouth!

But rather than being creepy, Cecil is wholly lovable. Watching these cartoons online, I realized that Cecil had much the same appeal as Ben Grimm, the Thing in Fantastic Four. Both of them, when in combat, are superhumanly powerful, courageous, and nearly unstoppable. (The Thing shouts, “It’s clobberin’ time,” while Cecil’s battle cry is “I’m comin’, Beany boy!”) But both of them also work superbly as comedy characters. They have similar personalities: hot-tempered but loyally devoted to their friends, prone to insecurity and embarrassment, with a ready sense of humor. (Ben mutters, “What a revoltin’ development this is,” while Cecil, faced with a similar situation, simply exclaims, “What the heck!”) Cecil’s voice would sound just as appropriate coming from the Thing.

The other true star of these cartoons is Dishonest John, familiarly known as D. J.. Dressed all in black, with a mustache long enough that he could twirl it, were he so inclined, Dishonest John looks like an updated version of a villain from a silent movie melodrama (and, indeed, an ominously tinkling piano theme accompanies his entrances). Sometimes the cartoons give D. J. a specific motive for his villainy in that particular adventure, like getting filthy rich. But it eventually becomes apparent that his real motivation is his sheer joy in nasty mischief. Although Clampett probably didn’t realize it, D. J. is a descendant of the “vice” figures of medieval drama, who were both evildoers and comedians, who often spoke directly to the audience. So does D. J., who seems well aware that he is in a cartoon. His trademark line (“Nya ha ha”) demonstrates that no one is more amused by his evil antics than he is.

Once I saw which Beany and Cecil cartoons were available on YouTube, I went straight to “Super Cecil,” Clampett’s comedic venture into the superhero genre. Cecil has sent away for a mail order superhero costume, which he dons to become “Super Cecil.” He doesn’t gain any super-powers in the process, but perhaps Clampett was here acknowledging that Cecil often plays a role like a superhero in these cartoons, overpowering the bad guys with his colossal strength.

Determined to outdo Cecil, Dishonest John switches to his own costumed identity, the Bilious Beetle–and his costume enables him to fly! The insect-themed name and the use of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee” as the Bilious Beetle’s theme music suggest that Clampett was alluding to the Green Hornet. But it wasn’t until years after “Super Cecil” that the Batman TV show of the mid-1960s firmly impressed the concept of the costumed super-villain on the minds of the general public. I’m impressed that Clampett was thus parodying super-villains years earlier.

The Bilious Beetle tricks Super Cecil into thinking he’s kidnapped Beany, the perennial abductee in these cartoons, but actually D. J. is using a hand puppet in Beany’s image. This is a “meta” joke for anyone who knows that Beany and Cecil originated as a puppet show (as is the fact that the cartoons never show the end of Cecil’s tail, as if he were still a hand puppet). I suspect it may also be Clampett’s comment on how empty Beany was as a character. The cartoon didn’t even need the “real” Beany to lure Cecil into action. D. J.’s Beany puppet is no more than a Hitchcockian MacGuffin, a plot device of no inherent worth!

There are plenty of visual gags as the Bilious Beetle leads Super Cecil on a merry chase, giving the cartoon strong comic momentum. But it struck me that whereas in Clampett’s cartoons for Warner Brothers, the slapstick would have been the main source of laughs, in this cartoon the comedy principally comes from the personalities of D. J. and Cecil. First D. J. is wittily triumphant, while Cecil is repeatedly frustrated, setting up the cartoon’s payoff in which Cecil turns the tables on his adversary, culminating in a great gag in which Cecil unleashes a swarm of actual “bilious beetles” on their costumed namesake, whom they regard in a way I will not disclose here: go see the cartoon yourselves.

The title of “The Phantom of the Horse Opera“ evokes Lon Chaney, but he’s actually a Western outlaw who has the power of invisibility. (Coincidentally, he thus resembles Marvel Comics’ Western version of Ghost Rider, now known as the Phantom Rider.) When the Phantom first appears in this cartoon, he does indeed seem menacing, until Clampett undercuts the ominous tone by having him speak: he sounds like the 1940s comedian Jerry Colonna. Nowadays Colonna’s most enduring work is probably his vocal performance as the March Hare in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (1951). Watching “Phantom” on YouTube, I wasn’t at first sure whom the Phantom was imitating, (The cartoon’s final gag makes it clear by revealing the Phantom’s face as a Colonna caricature.) Beany and Cecil cartoons continually engage in such references to the pop culture of their day. But I find that this cartoon captures Colonna’s comic persona so well that even if you’ve never heard of Colonna, you should still find the Phantom’s dialogue funny.

Since Cecil is so enormous, how can human-sized adversaries get the better of him? In “Phantom” the answer comes in the cartoon’s high point, a well constructed comedy set piece in which the Phantom, step by step ruins Cecil’s lunch, spraying him with ketchup, smearing his face with mustard, and dousing him with pepper to make him sneeze, bewildering the sea serpent, who can’t see his invisible tormentor.

Inevitably, the Phantom kidnaps Beany, who just as predictably calls, “Help, Cecil, help!”, but even the Phantom seems exasperated with Cecil’s one-dimensional co-star: “Who writes your dialogue, kid?”

The cartoon climaxes when the Phantom’s “invisible paint” turns Cecil invisible, too, and he has a knock-down, drag-out battle with the Phantom that literally shakes the landscape around them. Breaking the fourth wall, Cecil briefly pauses to tell the audience this is “the greatest fight ever filmed” but “it’s too bad you can’t see it.” I wonder if Clampett and company are joking here that their budget wouldn’t allow them to actually show such a fight, or maybe that the television censors wouldn’t let them show anything this violent.

Better still is “The Wildman of Wildsville“, whose title character is a beatnik artist presented as if he were a “wild man” living in the jungle. This is a topical reference to the Beat movement of the 1950s, and yet, again, Clampett and company make the character so vividly funny that the cartoon has not dated.

The cartoon opens with Captain Huffenpuff presenting one of his typically pun-filled maps. He intends to capture the “ferocious wild man” on the “Hungry I-land,” a reference to the “hungry i,” a famous San Francisco night club of the time. Among the locations on the map are “Mort Soil”–an allusion to political satirist Mort Sahl, who performed at the hungry i–and the “Lenny Spruce.” Wait a minute! A cartoon that was shown to children on Saturday mornings in the 1960s actually made a not-so-veiled reference to Lenny Bruce!?! What the heck!! And that’s not all: later on the Wildman refers to Oscar Wilde!

Once the Captain and company arrive on the island, the backgrounds begin evoking the Abstract Expressionist art of the period. To my astonishment, some of these backgrounds even imitated the “drip” paintings of Jackson Pollack! Which children in the 1960s could possibly have recognized that? And yet Clampett and company put it in, laying a surprise for any adult who knew Pollack’s work and saw their cartoon.

The Captain, Beany and Cecil are out to capture the Wildman, as if he were a wild animal. Clampett and his collaborators are thus satirizing the way that mainstream culture regards people on the radical avant-garde as if they were part of an alien culture, potentially dangerous. The mainstream wants to tame these radical innovators. But in Clampett’s cartoon, it’s the Wildman who wins, just as so many once-controversial artistic movements end up being accepted into mainstream culture (like, say, taking the comics medium seriously). Using his paint, he endows Cecil, Beany and the Captain with berets, dark glasses, and goatees. As Cecil wisely observes, “If you can’t beatnik “˜em, join “˜em,” and the cartoon ends with the nouveau-Beat Beany, Cecil and Captain dancing along with the Wildman to a jazz beat. They’ve gone “wild,” too.

In 1988, four years after Bob Clampett’s death, The New Adventures of Beany and Cecil arrived on television, only to vanish after five episodes. It came and went so fast I don’t think I even knew about it at the time. But one of the delights of MoCCA’s 2006 “Saturday Morning” retrospective was a looseleaf notebook of photocopies of Bruce Timm’s storyboards for one of the new cartoons, “The Courtship of Cecilia,” written by Quick Stop contributor Paul Dini! Now I’ve found this cartoon on YouTube as well (in two parts: here and here). In Clampett’s own “Cecil Meets Cecilia,” Dishonest John disguised himself as a “she-serpent” to humiliate Cecil, and the real Cecilia only showed up at the end. The new cartoon builds upon the original’s premise, by having Cecil alternatively interact with the real Cecilia and with D. J. as the phony Cecilia, thoroughly confusing our serpentine hero. The new cartoon also follows Clampett’s lead in concocting awesomely awful puns (D. J. laments, “Cecil’s singing is giving me a haddock. I wish I was hard of herring.”), metafictional gags (D. J. exults, “I love being a cartoon bad guy–nya ha ha!”), and surreal visual metaphors. Describing what it feels like to be in love, Cecil says he feels “burning hot,” whereupon his face melts and feels as if he is “coming apart,” at which point his body shatters into fragments. This is pretty good! It’s too bad the series didn’t last, apparently in large part due to network interference.

Looking over these old cartoons over the last two weeks, it seems to me that many of those I remember most strongly were the ones that didn’t conform to the conventional notion of what Saturday morning animation should be like. They were wilder and subversive in some way. Matt Groening cites Bullwinkle as an influence on The Simpsons (see “Comics in Context” #8: “San Diego 2003: Day Three: Gaiman, Groening and Bradbury”), so perhaps today’s prime time animation is the true heir of the subversive classics of Saturday mornings of the 1960s.

–Copyright 2008 Peter Sanderson

Recently I attended a performance of Frank Conniff and Jerry Beck’s Cartoon Dump stage show, featuring screenings of atrocious cartoons from 1950s and 1960s television, and then watched more of the same sort on the Worst Cartoons Ever! DVD, which Beck hosts (see “Comics in Context” #209: “Down in the Dump”). That set me wondering how I would react to seeing other cartoons from my childhood. As an adult I’ve watched Warner Brothers and Popeye theatrical cartoons. which are available on DVD, and seen Hanna-Barbera TV cartoons on Boomerang. But what about the more obscure cartoons that don’t get shown on television anymore, that I have not seen since I was in grade school? I decided to start hunting them down on YouTube and other Internet video sites.

One of the first that I located was “Master Cylinder, King of the Moon“ (1959), an episode of producer Joseph Oriolo’s Felix the Cat cartoon series. Herein Felix and his friend Poindexter, the genius nephew of Felix’s archfoe, the Professor, journey into a jungle environment beneath the surface of the moon, where they first encounter the villainous Master Cylinder. I remembered the Master Cylinder as being a sinister alien robot, which proved not quite true. It turns out that he’s a cyborg: indeed, he’s a former student of the Professor, who accidentally destroyed his body in an explosion, and his brain was transplanted into this cylindrical robot form. That’s rather a ghastly concept to inflict upon child viewers, but the cartoon doesn’t play the revelation for horror. Something else I didn’t remember was that the Master Cylinder is also a rather goofy villain. His eyes appear in what is essentially a thin television screen, and he keeps losing the vertical hold. Moreover, despite all of the Master Cylinder’s blustering threats, he is defeated quite easily, when his robot body is simply unplugged from a nearby electrical outlet while he is busily ranting away.

As you can see, this cartoon is an adventure story with some clever comedy elements. In another example, the Professor, piloting a spaceship to the moon to rescue his nephew, sights an alien hitchhiker in space and puts up a sign reading “No Passengers.”

As for Felix, he speaks in a falsetto voice and seems blandly nice; he’s given to laughing and his trademark line is “Righty-O.” In short, he’s boring, and it’s lucky that the presence of characters like the bad-tempered Professor, the cheerfully brilliant Poindexter, and the monomaniacal Master Cylinder compensate for his lack of personality. Watching this cartoon I realized that this version of Felix is really a watered-down Mickey Mouse with pointy ears.

I was in grade school when I saw Oriolo’s color Felix cartoons, but, before that, among the very first cartoons I recall seeing on television were from the original, silent Felix the Cat series of the 1930s, which are credited to their producer Pat Sullivan but were actually the work of the brilliant early animator Otto Messmer (1892-1983). Since they are now in the public domain, you can find plenty of these cartoons on the Net, and their Felix is far more interesting than the talking late 1950s version: he’s got a mean streak.

Take, for example, Felix Revolts (1923). This early animated cartoon demonstrates that its makers thought of it as an outgrowth of newspaper comic strips: dialogue for Felix and other characters appears on-screen in rectangles that are equivalent to word balloons. Felix looks much more like a real cat in this cartoon, and is frequently shown walking on all fours. Nevertheless, even in this early cartoon, Felix also engages in his characteristic walk, pacing back and forth on his hind legs, his front paws clasped behind his back, wearing a grimly thoughtful expression. After Winsor McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur, Felix was the first great star of animated cartoons, and like Gertie, he vividly registered personality on-screen.

In this cartoon Felix undergoes a series of humiliations at the hands of humans. First shown foraging for food in a barrel, Felix swipes a fish from a fish market, only to be beaten up by the owner. Later, another man cruelly feeds Felix red hot mustard, causing the cat to spin about like a propeller: he has to drink an entire small pond to relieve the agony. Subsequently, Felix passes by the town hall, where he hears the town officials declare that “Cats are useless” and plan to “starve ” the cats “out of town.” Like later cartoon characters such as Bugs Bunny, Felix has been pushed to the brink and now unleashes comic vengeance on his oppressors.

Felix summons the town’s other cats, a horde mostly consisting of Felix lookalikes and delivers a rabble-rousing speech. “We’ve had a dirty deal long enough!” Felix declares, “So let’s make life miserable for them!”

That night Felix keeps the whole town awake by leading a chorus of felines in coordinated yowling. Yes, it’s another example of the image of the conductor that I’ve found in so many classic animated cartoons, as well as a forebear of later cartoons about noisy cats “singing” at night, like Friz Freleng’s Back Alley Oproar (1948). Felix’s initial move may have been counterproductive though: the angry townspeople shout things like “Kill those cats!”

But Felix is far from finished. Next he takes personal revenge on the fish market owner by using worms as bait to lure the store’s fish, who come back to life (if indeed they were dead) and dive off a pier. Felix laughs triumphantly, but, unlike the laughing of his late 1950s TV counterpart, this is laughter with an edge of aggressiveness.

Finally, holding a white flag of truce, Felix meets with a bunch of mice–or are they rats? “The town is yours,” he tells them, adding, “We’re all on strike.” Yes, this is a cartoon about the importance of unions. (It’s also an inspired variation on the fable of the Pied Piper.) This is the perfect cartoon for sympathizers with the current Writers Guild of America strike.

According to the cartoon, the “ruthless rats run rampant” through town. We see rats chasing a policeman, a visual symbol of the rule of law disintegrating into chaos. So perhaps Messmer is signaling that the cats’ strike is not wholly a good thing.

The strike ultimately forces the town officials to surrender to the cats’ demands. The mayor presents Felix with a document guaranteeing that cats will be treated with “courtesy” and afforded access to kitchens and garbage cans. Amazingly, Felix Revolts concludes with Felix and his fellow cats victoriously raising clenched fists into the air, a traditional signifier of radical politics and revolution.

A few years later, Felix has evolved into the more familiar, round-headed figure walking on his hind legs in Felix Trifles with Time (1925). This cartoon also opens with Felix scrounging for food, this time in a garbage can. This cartoon likewise emphasizes humans’ cruelty to cats: one man throws him off the roof of a building, resulting in an amazing overhead shot of Felix plunging towards the ground, reminiscent of Wile E. Coyote’s later vertiginous falls. Upon landing, Felix, as a typical silent cartoon character, is unharmed, and even temporarily detaches one of his legs to examine it for injury. But he is angry.

This time, rather than attempting to change the system, Felix escapes from it. Felix encounters the allegorical figure of Father Time, an elderly, bearded man carrying a clock, persuades him to send him back to “a better age” for a day, and thus Felix ends up in prehistoric times. In sending Felix into outer space, the Oriolo series was true to the original silent series, which likewise placed Felix in fantastic settings.

But Felix discovers that prehistoric times are far worse than his own period. Felix discovers a gigantic dinosaur bone, the answer to his hunger, only to be chased away by a doglike dinosaur.

Worse, Felix encounters a Stone Age tailor, who beckons to him. Here Messmer gives us a close-up of Felix looking sadly wary and vulnerable. For a long moment Felix is no longer the combative trickster but the pathetic perennial victim of man’s cruelty: no wonder Felix won audiences’ hearts. Felix’s fears prove justified. The tailor strips him of his fur, and his caveman customer walks out in a new black fur coat. You might expect the typical gag of the hairless animal shown wearing underwear. But no, instead Felix, except for his intact head, has become a living skeleton! This is the sort of grotesque gag you are far less likely to see after the silent era, with its characters whose bodies easily come apart and reassemble. Luckily for Felix, the tailor’s customer soon goes skinny-dipping at a nearby beach, and Felix reclaims his fur.

But Felix is still not out of trouble, as he is next menaced by an elephant as colossal as those in the Lord of the Rings movies. Luckily, it is now that Father Time returns Felix to his own time. The cartoon ends with Felix back in the garbage can from the beginning, happily finding a tiny bone to eat. “No more Stone Age for me,” says Felix in a title card; “Give me the garbage.” If Felix Revolts advocated revolutionary change, Felix Trifles with Time takes the opposite position, preaching satisfaction with what you have, even if it amounts to “garbage.”

At the end of the silent movie era comes a little masterpiece for Felix: Comicalamities (1928), an exercise in animated metafiction. Not only is Felix very much aware in this cartoon that he is a cartoon character, but he even participates in the creation of the cartoon.

Comicalamities opens with a live action artist’s hand (or, rather, an animated photograph of one) drawing Felix, just the way that Koko the Clown first appears in the Out of the Inkwell cartoons. Felix acknowledges the audience by bowing to us, but then characteristically gets angry when he realizes that the artist failed to draw his tail, and shouts at him. in response, the artist draws Felix’s tail; in effect, Felix has started “directing” the cartoon he is in. Felix breaks into a happy smile until he notices that the black areas of his body haven’t been filled in with ink. Again Felix angrily calls to the off-screen artist, but this time receives no response. The cat walks off the blank background of this scene into the next scene, set on a city street, where he employs a “bootblack” to color in his fur, as if he were polishing shoes.

Subsequently, Felix encounters a female cat sitting on a park bench, her hands covering her face as she weeps. When she removes her hands, Felix is visibly revolted on seeing how ugly she is. But then he turns sympathetic again, and beckons to the off-screen artist, who hands Felix an eraser. Felix then uses the (photograph of a) real eraser to obliterate the female cat’s face. The artist next hands Felix a (photograph of a) pen, which Felix uses to redraw the girl cat’s face to look considerably prettier. So now Felix has become a cartoonist himself, altering reality within his cartoon world.

Felix then uses a mirror, the traditional symbol of vanity, to show the female cat what she now looks like: this proves to be a mistake. Earlier in the cartoon Felix turned a small fir tree into an umbrella. This is a standard gag in the series by which one object is used as a similar-looking but different one. Similarly, Felix finds an enormous lily and turns it into a dress for the girl cat.

But now she starts making demands: she wants jewelry. Felix goes to the edge of the sea and beckons to the off-screen artist, who creates a line of ink with his on; Felix then climbs down the line into the sea. There he finds an oyster bed, consisting of oysters in actual beds, a gag that will recur in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (1951). Tickling the “baby” oysters, Felix finds one whose teeth’ are actually pearls and steaks them. Then we see the oysters’ mother, who has a human body but an enormous oyster shell for a head. The detached head goes after Felix, who encounters other sea monsters as well. Felix gestures upward for help, as if beseeching aid from God; in response, the animator pours ink into the ocean, turning it pitch black, and Felix escapes back to land under cover of darkness.

Felix gives the pearls to the female cat, but now she wants a fur coat. So Felix finds himself in the Arctic, where he sights a rather friendly-looking bear, wrestles with him, but gets overpowered. The screen begins doing an “iris out,” with the aperture closing around Felix, as if his defeat marked the end of the cartoon. But Felix hasn’t given up “directing” his own cartoon, and holds onto the closing iris with both hands (like Daffy Duck in a similar situation in Chuck Jones’s 1951 Duck Amuck), shouting (silently) to the cartoonist. The hand of the cartoonist, as if it were the giant hand of God, picks up the bear, who falls out of his fur (but not, thankfully, in skeletal form), and then presents the fur to Felix, who returns to the female cat.

Wrapped in her new fur coat, the female cat snubs her benefactor Felix. Enraged after all the effort he went to, Felix does something I’ve never seen Koko do. As if everything on screen were a single drawing, Felix tears off the part containing the female cat and rips it into shreds! It’s a startlingly misogynistic ending that one would never see in a contemporary cartoon intended for kids. Moreover, although Comicalamities, like the Inkwell shorts, openly acknowledges it is an animated cartoon, this climactic act by Felix shatters the illusion of the on-screen “reality” more shockingly than any other animated film I know. More than any other silent cartoon I’m aware of, Comicalamities dramatizes the paradox of animated films of that period: they invite the audience to suspend disbelief in the reality of the characters on-screen, while simultaneously flaunting the artificiality and unreality of the animation medium.

You see, I told you back in column 200 that I would eventually get around to the silent Felix the Cat cartoons, and I keep my word to my readership!

What other silent cartoon classics could I find on the Internet? Several examples of the work of animation’s–and comics’–first great master, Winsor McCay, are available on YouTube, including the celebrated Gertie the Dinosaur and the animated documentary The Sinking of the Lusitania. I chose to watch one of McCay’s animated versions of his Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend comic strip, Bug Vaudeville (1921). While a rather torpid man sleeps in a lovely wooden glade, he dreams of himself watching and applauding, with youthful enthusiasm, a circus with giant insects as performers; there are bug acrobats, bugs who engage in a boxing match, and even a butterfly standing atop a giant beetle, like a bareback rider on a circus horse. We see the dreamer in silhouette, sitting in a row of seats in the foreground, as if he were seated in front of us in a vaudeville–or movie–theater. The final act on the “bug vaudeville” bill is an immense spider, who, instead on remaining on-stage, swings out over the seats and attacking the dreamer, who, of course, wakes up.

Have any of you attended a circus or live theater of some sort in which one of the performers comes down into the audience to inveigle someone to become part of the performance. If you don’t want to be picked, this can be scary. Bug Vaudeville builds upon that sort of fear. What if the wonders–and horrors–that we safely watch on the movie screen came down from the screen?

I wrote about a number of early examples of Max and Dave Fleischer’s silent Out of the Inkwell series, starring Koko the Clown, when I reviewed Warner Home Video’s Popeye Vol. 1 DVD set last year (see “Comics in Context” #190: “Pop Eye-Con”). My favorite cartoon in this series, though, is one of the last, Koko’s Earth Control (1928), starring “The Inkwell Imps,” Koko and a dog named Fitz.

According to the usual Inkwell formula, the cartoon begins with Max Fleischer (in live action) drawing Koko, who comes to animated life. Max and Koko interact, with Max acting as a dictatorial father/superego figure and Koko as a rebellious child–or the id incarnate.

Although Koko’s Earth Control begins with a live action artist’s hand (or, rather, an animated photo thereof) drawing Koko and Fitz, Max never appears on-screen. Perhaps that’s because he’s not needed. In this cartoon Fitz becomes the embodiment of id, while Koko attempts, unsuccessfully, to restrain Fitz’s rebellious impulses.

At the start of the cartoon, the animator’s hand draws Koko, in his clown outfit, and Fitz wearily trudging along the rim of a rotating Earth. If Samuel Beckett had done animated cartoons, maybe this is what he’d draw.

But the emptiness of Koko and Fitz’s existence ends when they come across the “Earth Control” building. Koko experiments with levers that control the weather or turn day into night. Meanwhile Fitz discovers a lever with a sign warning forbidding anyone to touch it, since pulling this lever will bring about the end of the world. But Fitz represents the side of ourselves that rebels against authority, that wants to do what we are forbidden to do, exactly because it is forbidden, no matter what the consequences. This lever is like the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, and Fitz needs no serpent to urge him on. Despite heroic efforts, Koko cannot stop Fitz from pulling the forbidden lever.

As I have written before in this column, there is a large body of works, in comics and other media, that deals with the end of the world. Koko’s Earth Control is one of the relatively few tales of the apocalypse that is a comedy.

First the animated world around Koko and Fitz is thrown into chaos. These are literally unnatural disasters: the cartoon is making the point that the rules of reality have been overturned. Inanimate things come to life: Koko sees an erupting volcano that, before his horrified eyes, transforms into the gigantic face of a man puffing on a cigar.

Whereas in the typical Inkwell cartoon, Koko escapes into the real world to pull pranks, this time the worldwide chaos in the animated world spreads into the real one. In a shot I’ve always found amusing, two men on a sidewalk desperately hold onto each other as the ground beneath them tilts in one direction and then the other. What’s clearly actually happening is that the camera is being tilted, and I wonder if the Fleischers expected the audience to realize that, and thus were giving an ironic wink to their viewers. More startling is a shot in which Koko watches out the window as New York City skyscrapers (or cut-out photos thereof) collapse against each other.

At the end of the short, Koko and Fitz try to keep their balance on a real world table as it rocks back and forth, and finally collapse into immobile pools of ink. It’s as if they had died: ashes to ashes, and ink to ink. Maybe Beckett would have liked this ending, too.

Returning to my search for cartoons that have stick in my head since boyhood, I located Tulips Shall Grow (1942), part of George Pal’s series of Puppetoons, stop-motion animated films that employ wooden puppets. This short is set in Holland, and the lead puppet characters are the cutely named Jan and his girlfriend Janette. They both traditional native Dutch costumes, complete with wooden shoes, and perform a charming clog dance together. To complete the charming stereotypical image, Janette lives in a windmill, and there are tulips everywhere. As a small boy I thought, yes, this must be what life in the Netherlands is like.

But it wasn’t Jan and Janette I remembered from this short; it was the Screwball Army, an implacably advancing legion of literal screwballs–metal balls with screws for heads. They had a threatening, robotic way of marching, and Pal made clear to his 1940s audience what they were doing: he shoes us one of the marching Screwballs and then shows a goose waddling right behind it. Yes, the Screwballs represent a goose-stepping Nazi army, invading the Netherlands, just as the actual Germans did. But as a child I didn’t make the connection, and probably didn’t even know about the Nazis when I first saw Tulips Shall Grow. Instead I regarded the screwballs as if they were the Terminators of their day. Today, watching the short again, the Screwballs seem absurd and ominous in equal measure. When I was a child, they weren’t funny at all, but truly alarming.

I didn’t recall that the Screwballs weren’t alone; there were also enemy planes that resemble birds of prey, which drop bombs, and tanks, one of which smashes through Janette’s windmill. The tulip fields are devastated and, once the windmill is wrecked, Jan searches for Janette in vain. To my astonishment, Pal makes it seem as if she perished in the onslaught.

Next comes an even greater surprise. Pal shows the mournful Jan kneeling in prayer. Then a massive storm erupts overhead. it is as if God Himself is responding to Jan’s prayer and wreaking an Old Testament style of vengeance upon the evildoers. Lightning strikes down the warplanes. Torrential rains cause the mechanical Screwballs to rust, incapacitating them. Then comes an image I still remember after decades: one of the tanks, bearing the Screwball army flag, slowly sinks into the mud–and oblivion.

With the invading forces defeated, sunshine returns, and Jan finds Janette back at the windmill, which miraculously reconstructs itself before their eyes. They reprise their clog dance off towards the horizon, as row upon row of tulips sprouts up behind them. It’s as if the love between the hero and heroine restored fertility to the devastated land of Holland, and as if the rain that brought destruction to the Screwballs brought new life to the countryside. I may no longer find the Screwballs scary, but I appreciate Tulips Shall Grow more now than I did as a boy.

I decided to see just how good a tool the Internet is at locating obscure cartoons from my childhood. There is one that particularly haunted me in my early grade school days. I didn’t know its name, but it was about a mad musician who stole a dinosaur skeleton and kept shouting a rhymed couplet that I still remember in middle age: “The best bones of all/Go to Symphony Hall!” whereupon he launched into long, insane laughter.

One thing that the Internet quickly teaches you is that you are not alone. Googling, i discovered that others vividly recalled that cartoon’s catchphrase, although they, too, did not necessarily know its name. But finally I tracked it down, and its title proved to be as inexplicably absurd as its plot: The Case of the Screaming Bishop, released by Columbia Pictures in 1944.

What the hell could this title mean? My further research suggests that the title The Case of the Screaming Bishop parodies that of one of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason novels, The Case of the Stuttering Bishop, which Warners turned into a movie in 1937. However, there is no bishop, screaming or otherwise, in this cartoon, though everything else but the kitchen sink seems to be.

Watching the cartoon again after so long, I can understand why it seemed so strange to me as a child, not frightening but fascinatingly bizarre and disconcerting. Instead if the bright palette of most animated cartoons of this period, Screaming Bishop is literally dark, taking place almost entirely at night, mostly in nearly deserted streets or in rooms nearly empty of people.

Soon after the start of the cartoon, the villain appears crying “I did it!” and uttering that boast for the first time, “The best bones of all/Go to Symphony Hall” and laughing hysterically. What does he mean? “Bones” certainly sounds macabre. And who is this? His physical appearance, with a mane of hair like Bozo’s and grotesquely comic features, is at once clownlike and sinister. I first saw this cartoon years before I first learned about Batman’s foe, the Joker, but Bishop’s bad guy seems like his distant relative.

Moreover, this cartoon turns out to be a spoof on Sherlock Holmes, whose counterpart in Bishop is named Hairlock Combs. If I heard correctly, the detective’s sidekick, who acts and sounds like Nigel Bruce’s classic portrayal of Dr. Watson, is named Gotsome. (You can see them at here) When I saw this cartoon repeatedly as a child, it was years before I first knew about Holmes. Since I was unaware of the foundation for these caricatures of Holmes and Watson, their behavior must have seemed all the stranger to me.

When Gotsome arrives at Combs’s Baker Street home to tell him about the theft of the dinosaur skeleton, he finds the flat seemingly deserted, and yet he hears Combs’s voice. Finally, Combs’ head emerges from a lamp (presumably parodying Holmes’s mastery of disguise). Combs warns Gotsome that they are being watched, and the “camera” searches Combs’ darkened flat, showing all manner of things with staring eyes: a stuffed bird, a fish mounted on a wall, a Chinese lion statue, a bear rug, a moose head. Finally, there is a portrait of a man from a previous century, and as we watch, the mad villain knocks him out and usurps his place.

Later, Combs answers his front door and the villain is there and hands Combs a telegram reading, of course, “The best bones of all/Go to Symphony Hall.” The villain then literally fades away into nothingness. Combs looks for him and we see a huge target on his back. Arms reach out from behind a wall, holding a bow, and fire an arrow. Gotsome cries out a warning, we see the arrow hit the target, and then see Combs standing to one side, admiring the shot. Now imagine that you are a second grader trying to make sense out of this. One deduction you might reach is that in the world of this cartoon, potential death and madness lurk everywhere.

Disguised as a pantomime horse, Combs and Gotsome visit the scene of the crime, the Museum of Unnatural History. (I’ve been to London’s real Natural History Museum, and the exterior in this cartoon bears no resemblance to the real thing, but the old-fashioned exhibit cases shown within are dead on.) There Combs and Gotsome (removing their disguise) decide to reconstruct the crime by building a imitation dinosaur skeleton, at full scale, out of a pile of scraps of wood. (The real skeleton resembles the Diplodocus skeleton in the entrance hall of London’s real Natural History Museum, but this may be mere coincidence.) Somehow lifting the enormous fake skeleton, they rush with it towards the door, which is way too small, and the skeleton smashes into bits with a sound like that of a bowling ball hitting tenpins. Somehow Combs and Gotsome do not find this discouraging, hurriedly rebuild the fake dinosaur, and try to take it out through a window, which is even smaller. The bowling ball sounds again. Gleeful in his obsessiveness, Combs has them rebuild the fake dinosaur again, and this time proves to be the charm. He still hasn’t figured out how the villain got the real dinosaur skeleton out of the museum. but he has discovered that, when struck, the “bones” of the fake skeleton sound like the keys of a xylophone (which he pronounces “sillyphone”). Eureka!

And so the scene shifts to a concert at London’s “Symphony Hall” (which probably should be the Royal Albert Hall, but never mind) where we find the villain, identified as Professor Streptokowsky (a combination of Leopold Stokowski and a strep throat?) onstage playing “the world’s largest xylophone”–the real dinosaur skeleton. Combs and Gotsome rush in with a bobby, who puts Streptokowsky under arrest.

Back at Baker Street, Gotsome asks Combs how he solved the mystery. “Elementary, my dear Gotsome,” Combs replies, removing his mask to reveal the face of Streptokowsky’s face who reiterates, “The best bones of all/Go to Symphony Hall!” That’s the end, which never failed to leave my grade school self in a state of befuddlement. It’s as if law and logic have been supplanted by absurdity, anarchy, and–since the villain is a musician–art.

This is still the strangest theatrical cartoon from the Hollywood studio era that I’ve ever seen. Even the most surreal Tex Avery and Bob Clampett cartoons follow their own sort of logic. But now, as in my childhood, I admire this cartoon’s sheer imaginativeness and its absolute commitment to the idea that anything goes, as long as it’s funny. It is a monument to utter comedic absurdity.

But, as Daffy Duck asks at the end of Duck Amuck, who is responsible for this? Screaming Bishop was written by John McLeish, who also, it seems, performed the voice of Combs, and was directed by Howard Swift, about whom I knew nothing–until I took my Google search still further.

It turns out that Howard Swift directed another cartoon that I saw over and over again in my early grade school years: Kickapoo Juice (1944), from Columbia’s short-lived attempt to adapt Al Capp’s Li’l Abner comic strip into animation. Abner and his leading lady Daisy Mae only appear briefly in a framing sequence for this cartoon. Its real stars are Abner’s mother, the feisty Mammy Yokum, and two of the strip’s supporting characters: the ironically named Hairless Joe, a shaggy hillbilly, and Lonesome Polecat, a politically incorrect caricature of a Native American, who specialize in brewing their literally explosive “Kickapoo Joy Juice.” Here is further evidence that Hollywood theatrical cartoons were aimed at adults as well as children. Not only is this cartoon center on alcohol, but Hairless Joe and Lonesome Polecat spend a good part of it sampling their own wares. Believing that they’re setting a bad example to Abner, the apparently super-strong Mammy attempts to steal the colossal vat of Kickapoo Juice. This leads to sequences with either Mammy or HJ and LP running back and forth, carrying the enormous vat. Yep, it’s just like Combs and Gotsome carrying their wooden dinosaur skeleton mock-up. The animation auteurists among us here can find a gag that serves as Swift’s directorial signature.

Kickapoo Juice has the same propulsive energy as Screaming Bishop, but it doesn’t plunge into utter, reality-shattering nonsense the way that Bishop does.

To me the most remarkable thing about Kickapoo Juice is its subject. Most of the audience for its original theatrical run may have been adults. But when Kickapoo Juice was part of a package of Columbia animated shorts sold to television, its new audience was small children like myself. And this is a cartoon that memorably shows two of its lead characters joyously getting drunk! Recently a DVD collection of early Sesame Street episodes was designated for adults only, because some of its humor is no longer considered fit for children: for example, allegedly, the Cookie Monster’s obsession with cookies is now regarded as an inducement to childhood obesity. Is it even imaginable that Nickelodeon or PBS or Cartoon Network (before 11 PM) would run a cartoon about two backwoods brewmasters getting bombed?

And yet I survived seeing Kickapoo Juice over and over in my early grade school years, though, of course, back then I probably had no idea what alcohol was. Next week I’ll look at still more cartoons from my early memories.

–Copyright 2008 Peter Sanderson

One of the questions on The Beat’s annual survey for her Publishers Weekly blog is to ask what “guilty pleasures” her contributors are anticipating in the new year. Last year I named the forthcoming Disney DVD release of The Adventures of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, collecting the silent cartoon series that Walt Disney made just before the creation of Mickey Mouse. This DVD set finally came out in December, and I now realize that there’s nothing “guilty” about the pleasures these cartoons provide. I expected they’d be interesting as foreshadowings of Disney’s later work, but not particularly good in and of themselves. But the Oswald cartoons turned out to delightful period pieces from the early history of animation. Watching these, you can see that Disney was already well on his way to the success he would achieve only a year later with Mickey Mouse.

The Disney company hadn’t released the Oswald series on home video earlier because it didn’t own the cartoons or the character until recently. Back in the 1920s Walt Disney made the Oswald series for distribution by Universal. But then, as a featurette on the DVD explains, Universal sprang surprises on the young Disney: not only did they own Oswald, but they had also hired Disney’s animation staff away from him–except for his best animator, Ub Iwerks, who remained loyal–and would produce the Oswald series without him. This proved to be a blessing in disguise, since Disney was now determined to remain independent and own his own intellectual property; soon he and Iwerks jointly created Mickey Mouse, and Disney was on his way to becoming a cultural colossus. Recently, Disney’s new, enlightened management made a deal with NBC Universal in which Disney regained control of Oswald, and this DVD set soon followed.

Not only does the Oswald DVD set contain copies of all the extent Disney Oswald cartoons (which apparently took some hunting), but also some 1920s Disney cartoons that preceded and followed the making of the Oswald shorts.

The three cartoons that preceded Oswald are from Disney’s Alice Comedies series. Whereas in Max and Dave Fleischer’s silent animated series Out of the Inkwell, a cartoon character, Koko the Clown, entered the real (live action) world, in the Alice shorts a live action girl, Alice, appears within a cartoon world populated by anthropomorphic animals. Hence the evocation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in the series’ title is quite appropriate.

In watching the first Alice short included in this set, Alice Gets Stung (1925), I was initially surprised by how little Alice appeared in it, though perhaps I shouldn’t have been, since I presume that it was harder and more expensive to combine live action footage of the girl portraying Alice with the animation than it was to do the animation alone.

Making Alice’s regular costar, Julius, a cat who looks an awful lot like Felix the Cat seems too much like imitating the competition. (It seems that Disney’s distributor insisted on having a cat in the cartoons: see here) But, as noted, even the premise of Alice is simply taking the Fleischers’ idea for Inkwell and reversing it. At this point Disney is still reacting to his competitors’ ideas rather than heading in a brand new direction.

Alice Gets Stung begins with a lengthy sequence with Julius the cat chasing a rabbit (which doesn’t strike me as being a cat’s natural prey) and the rabbit’s efforts at thwarting him. For example, Julius reaches down into one rabbit hole, while the rabbit emerges from another hole behind him. This is a variation on what became a standard gag in Bugs Bunny-Elmer Fudd encounters. Watching this cartoon, I felt that Disney had stumbled onto the idea of the rabbit as trickster–but perhaps didn’t yet know what he had. Shouldn’t the rabbit be the star animal of this cartoon, not the cat, who, as the predator, seems to be playing the bad guy? Maybe this rabbit points to the creation of Oswald, though it would be Warners that perfected the idea of the animated trickster rabbit with Bugs Bunny.

Even though Daffy Duck can get blasted by Elmer Fudd over and over without suffering greater harm than a temporarily displaced beak, many classic Warners cartoons still depend on the audience’s belief that the hunter or predator could potentially do harm to the animal hero: Wile E. Coyote does indeed want to eat the Roadrunner, and Elmer Fudd does indeed want to kill the wabbit. In the world of Alice Gets Stung, there seems to be no real threat of death or even injury. At one point Julius pulls off the lower half of the rabbit, but the halves soon rejoin, and the rabbit seemingly suffers no pain whatsoever. Later, Julius removes his own eyes and mouth and positions them over one of the rabbit holes; when the rabbit emerges from the other hole, the eyeless cat captures her. This is a rather grotesque extension of the convention of the Felix the Cat silent cartoons, whereby Felix can detach part of his body, like his tail: at another point in this cartoon, the rabbit uses her tail to powder her face. Amusing as this sort of thing can be in silent cartoons, it also makes the characters seem overly unreal, and one can see why later funny animal cartoons mostly disposed of this convention of detachable body parts.

You’ll notice I refer to the rabbit as “she”: this was a surprise, too. Once caught, the rabbit pours out a sob story about her infant children–whom we see in a brief vignette, all in the same cradle and wailing for “Mama”–as two other rabbits play violins, with heart and flowers appearing onscreen as substitutes for music. Moved, Julius lets the rabbit go, whereupon the rabbit laughs at the cat–presumably her story was all a lie–and the chase resumes. This time Julius pursues the rabbit down the rabbit hole where, with no evident cause, the rabbit suddenly grows to giant size and the tables are turned. There is no logical reason why this should happen, but I suppose the rabbit’s increased size might be a metaphor for growing braver and more aggressive, having gaining the advantage once she is on her home ground.

The live action Alice shows up and, in a neat trick, is shown carrying a cartoon fire hydrant. which she and Julius then use literally to flush the rabbit out of her hole. But again this struck me as misjudgment by Disney. Why is our heroine joining the cat in pursuing the rabbit? Shouldn’t we root for the rabbit, as the predator’s potential victim, and admire her cleverness?

The “hearts and flowers” sequence suggests that Disney might already have been longing for the opportunities that sound could provide for his cartoons. So does the next major sequence in Alice Gets Stung, which shows animals playing music as members of a band. This prefigures Disney’s The Band Concert a decade later. Moreover, in Alice Gets Stung animals’ tails get pulled to cause them to emit musical notes, a gag that would be much more famously used in the first Mickey Mouse cartoon to be released, Steamboat Willie. Alice Gets Stung also uses the image of the conductor–in this case, a bear-that would keep recurring in classic Hollywood theatrical cartoons, including The Band Concert.

Alice shoots a gun at one of a pair of dancing bears. This is another misjudgment by Disney; why should the heroine attack an animal that has been entertaining the audience? In the world of the Alice shorts, however, even being shot repeatedly does not harm the bear, who begins dancing in time to the (silent) gunshots. But after bullets sever his head and limbs, once his body parts rejoin, the bear is understandably enraged. Frightened, Alice and Julius shrink in size (reversing the previous bit of the rabbit growing gigantic with courage) and Alice becomes a cartoon character herself. In the end she and the cat are beset by bees, thus finally providing an explanation for the cartoon’s title.

Death seems to be real in the next Alice cartoon included, Alice in the Wooly West (1926), although the rules by which it operates are unclear. This time Julius looks even more like Felix and he is cast as a Western gunfighter. Bandit mice hold up the passengers of a stagecoach, but Julius rides to the rescue and shoots the mice dead. This is even more startling if you consider that with the creation of Mickey Mouse, Disney would soon firmly establish the convention that in funny animal cartoons, mice are the good guys and cats are the bad guys.

The head of the bandits looks like a bear in a top hat, who seems to be, yea, the forebear of the principal villain in the Oswald cartoons, the top-hatted Putrid Pete. The bear kidnaps Alice, and in the ensuing battle, Julius separates the bear’s head from his body with repeated blows. This causes the bear no harm, his head and body rejoin, and the conflict continues.

In a reworking of a gag from the previous cartoon, this time Julius removes not his eyes but his black fur to use as a decoy. Julius not only clobbers the bear from behind but actually buries him on camera, leaving a flower on his grave! It’s as if Bugs Bunny literally killed Yosemite Sam! So here’s another mistake that Disney would avoid in years to come.

But Alice rejoices, although Julius is embarrassed at her seeing him in his underwear. It’s an odd gag if you think about it, since it evokes the human taboo on nudity by using an animal, to which the taboo would not apply. Variations on this gag would get stranger still in the Oswald series.

The third Alice cartoon in the set, Alice’s Balloon Race (1925), foreshadows the airplane race in the Oswald cartoon, and in both the villain is a bear in a top hat whom the Oswald series would call Putrid Pete. (What an unfortunate adjective to apply to someone with such an appealing first name!)

I was particularly impressed by a bit in which Alice’s balloon crashes in the background and she bounces out into the foreground. Running the sequence back on my DVD player, I could see the point at which the tiny cartoon Alice who is bounced out of the balloon turns into the live action Alice who lands in the foreground. But it happens so quickly that the audience surely had the illusion that it was the real Alice all the time.

Bodies are even more malleable and unkillable in this short than in the others. Falling from the sky, Julius smashes into bits upon hitting the ground, and immediately resumes shape and life. Later Julius enacts a typical Felix-style gag, detaching his tail and turning it into an umbrella. But then this cat goes way further into the grotesque: he eats his tail, which then emerges from the back of his head and then slides down his back until it reaches its proper position. Even the animation experts on this cartoon’s commentary track reacted as if they nearly couldn’t believe their eyes.

The first Oswald cartoon in the DVD set, Trolley Troubles (1927) presents its hero as the driver of a means of public transportation, picking up passengers, just as Steamboat Willie does with Mickey. Oswald looks chubbier here than heroes in the other cartoons. He’s also the visual missing link between Felix the Cat and Mickey Mouse. All three are short and black, with white “faces,” black noses, and round heads: the major difference is in the shape of the ears. In Trolley Troubles Oswald also proves to have detachable body parts, using his tail as a brush. More disturbingly, he detaches his lucky rabbit’s foot and rubs it on his head for luck.

In these cartoons Oswald displays a range of emotions that foreshadows Mickey and later animated characters. Unlike many later animated stars, with the major exceptions of Donald and Daffy Duck, Felix, Oswald and the early Mickey were easily prone to anger. In Trolley Troubles Oswald literally hits an obese passenger off the vehicle.

In the most striking sequence, Oswald’s trolley plummets through a series of tunnels. Oswald stands in the foreground, his back to the audience, so we are essentially watching the sequence from his point of view, or, to put it differently, it is as if we are riding the trolley along with him, as the cavernous openings to the tunnels engulf the screen. It’s reminiscent of riding a roller coaster; it’s an early version of the sort of effect that today one might expect to find in a video game.

With the next cartoon, Oh Teacher (1927) Oswald embarks upon a theme that was not often to be found in Felix or Inkwell cartoons: love. here Oswald has a girlfriend, a female rabbit; this obviously prefigures the relationship between Mickey and Minnie Mouse, which is so important to the early Mickey cartoons.

When she accidentally tumbles into a lake, the unnamed girlfriend cries “HELP!”; not only do the letters appear onscreen, but Oswald rides them. as if they were a horse, to the lake to try to rescue her. Earlier in the short a question mark, used to denote a character’s puzzlement, was employed as a hook by the cartoon’s villain. These silent cartoons thus emphasize their own artificiality by taking an written word or a punctuation mark and turning it into a physical object. Maybe the detachable body parts in these cartoons serve a similar purpose: reminding the audience that Oswald and company are pen and ink creations, just as when Koko devolves back into ink at the end of his cartoons.

The girlfriend mistakenly thinks that it was the cat who saved her and snubs Oswald. The cat literally knocks Oswald’s head off, and though the head bounces back onto Oswald’s body, this still seems unintentionally disturbing. It is somehow easier to suspend disbelief and accept an anthropomorphic rabbit as real than it is to accept the idea that a living being can survive beheading.

In the standout sequence of Oh Teacher, Oswald angrily waits behind a schoolhouse to clobber the bullying cat with a brick. The cat unexpectedly comes up behind him, and Oswald nervously tries to hide the brick behind his back, switching it from one hand to the other. When the cat spots the brick, Oswald desperately starts lifting the brick with one hand, as if he is using it for weightlifting exercise. All of this happens in pantomime without a single word onscreen. This is real animated acting; the three Alice cartoons did not even attempt anything like this.

The next cartoon, Great Guns! (1927), suggests that even a decade after the devastation of World War I, Americans had a different attitude towards war than they do today. When war is declared in this cartoon, animals immediately enlist in the armed forces en masse, including Oswald.

Oswald is very much in love in this cartoon: in its most astonishing segment, the shot of Oswald kissing his girlfriend goodbye dissolves into a shot of Oswald kissing a photograph of his girlfriend, as he sits in a World War I-style trench, with rain pouring down around him.

There’s a good touch of Fleischer-style risqué visual humor that I hadn’t expected to find in a Disney cartoon: as soon as the enormous war cannons fire, they immediately collapse into a flaccid state.

Most of the cartoon is taken up by an aerial battle between Oswald and an enemy combatant, each piloting a plane; once again, Disney has cast a mouse as the bad guy.

At this cartoon’s end Oswald is reduced to what looks like shrapnel by a cannonball. His girlfriend, serving as a nurse, sweeps up Oswald’s remains, pours them into a giant shaker, as if she were mixing a drink, and pours out a pool of black ink, which (in the manner of Koko in the Inkwell cartoons) takes form as Oswald. Thus Oswald undergoes death and resurrection, and he gets the girl!

Walt Disney and his principal animators came from Kansas City, and the early Mickey cartoons have rural or barnyard settings. So it’s not a surprise that the next Oswald cartoon teams the rabbit with a cow, but the title character of The Mechanical Cow (1927) is, inexplicably, also a robot! Can we see the seeds of Disney’s future interest in audio-animatronics here? The flaccid cannon joke is repeated here, and Oswald again has a rabbit girlfriend, who is abducted by the bad guys.

In this cartoon the bad guys are ultimately devoured by sharks. I suppose that, considering that characters can survive dismemberment and beheading in the silent Disney cartoons, we shouldn’t take deaths in them seriously. Still, the Alice and Oswald cartoons certainly operate on a harsh moral code.

In The Ocean Hop (1927) Oswald competes against Putrid Pete, with top hat and peg leg, and others in an airplane race across the Atlantic. This updates the theme from Alice’s Balloon Race while probably alluding to Charles Lindbergh’s groundbreaking transatlantic flight, which also inspired the later Mickey Mouse cartoon Plane Crazy. Putrid Pete uses chewing gum to glue Oswald’s plane to the runway so it can’t take off. Instead, Oswald and some mice–friendly ones, this time–turn an unusually long dachshund into a substitute plane, utilizing balloons to lift him into the air. In another Felix-style gag, Oswald uses a word balloon containing a question mark as one of the balloons, employing the question mark to hook it onto the dachshund. (This is a more elaborate version of a similar flying dachshund gag from Alice’s Balloon Race.)

In the best moment of this film, a title card announces, “Then Night Falls,” and we see huge black raindrops falling around Oswald’s plane, which then merge into a sort of black sea of night. This has nothing to do with how night falls in the real world, but it makes a lovely alternative.

At the end Oswald falls from the sky to land safely in Paris, where he looks distinctly uncomfortable as Frenchmen congratulate him by kissing him on the cheek. Was Disney hinting at homosexuality here?

In All Wet (1927), set at the beach, Disney tries an interesting experiment with Oswald’s leading lady. Usually Oswald’s girlfriends, who are sometimes rabbits and sometimes, strangely, cats, are flat-chested; lacking breasts, they tend to go topless, like the early Minnie Mouse. What identifies them as female are things like hats with flowers or skirts and even visible panties. But the lady rabbit in All Wet not only wears a dress but is drawn with the suggestion of a bust. Indeed, at one point in the cartoon, she hides from the camera in order to change from her dress into a one-piece swimsuit. She even strikes flirtatious poses. She’s by no means built like a Jessica Rabbit or even Betty Boop, but she’s certainly preferable to the androgynous female leads of so many early cartoons.

Trying to impress her, Oswald bribes (!) the lifeguard into letting him substitute for him; she rows out to sea and feigns distress, but ends up in real danger. In a clever sequence, Oswald and the girl rabbit are continually being separated as waves lift him or her high up out of the other’s reach. But the girl rabbit seems less than real when Oswald, in giving her artificial respiration, rolls up her body and legs, as if she were a rug!

The Rival Romeos (1927) are Oswald and Putrid Pete, this time without a peg leg. Early Fleischer cartoons depict a world in which everything could be alive and mobile. The silent Disney cartoons in this set generally steer away from this approach, but in Rival Romeos Oswald and Putrid Pete drive cars with faces and personalities. Putrid Pete’s car refuses to drive into mud, and Oswald’s car joins Oswald in laughing at Pete.

With the opening of Bright Lights (1928), Disney and his team are obviously setting themselves new visual challenges and meeting them. This short opens with an animated version of an electric sign such as one might have seen in Times Square, with dancing stick figures, advertising “Mlle. Zulu, shimmy queen,” an exotic dancer. Then we go inside the theater to find yet another example of a conductor in classic animation, this time an ape leading an animal orchestra. There’s a chorus line of scantily clad dancing girl cats, followed by Mlle. Zulu herself, who performs her shimmy dance in an impressively animated serpentine manner.

All of this is before Oswald even makes his entrance. When he does, Oswald proceeds to demonstrate his growing range as an animated actor. His heart bulges from his chest as he thinks about the sensuous Mlle. Zulu, and he grows embarrassed when he unconsciously rests his hand on the derriere of a poster image of Mlle. Zulu, which then angrily comes to life.

Though Oswald’s personality grows fuller and more believable, the characters bodies remain unbelievably malleable. A theater guard hits Oswald so hard that he turns into a mass of tiny Oswalds, which merge back into the full size version; this is a recurring gag in the Oswald series. Oswald retaliates by tying the guard’s legs around a lamppost, as if he were made of rubber. I also like the clever bit in which Oswald tries to sneak into the theater by hiding under a patron’s enormous shadow as if it were a carpet.

With Ozzie of the Mounted (1928) Disney shows ambition as a storyteller by moving away from familiar rural and urban settings into the Canadian wilderness, parodying the same tales of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that later served as fodder for Jay Ward’s Dudley Do-Right. In this cartoon the familiar furry villain in the top hat is identified as Putrid Pete alias Kid Pete alias Peg Leg Pete, a name later given to Mickey Mouse’s feline adversary. Oswald’s horse is another robot, although why Disney was so interested in mechanical farm animals remains a mystery.

My favorite of the Oswald cartoons in this set is Oh What a Knight (1928). On the commentary track Leonard Maltin and Mark Kausler suggest that this is a parody of Douglas Fairbanks’ Robin Hood (1923), which makes sense since the early, adventurous Mickey has also been compared to Fairbanks. So Oh What a Knight is a parody of the swashbuckler genre in film, with Oswald as a kind of heroic singing troubadour: we can’t hear him sing, but there are plenty of musical notes drawn on screen, as Oswald makes his entrance, singing, while his donkey dances along. Robert Israel, a veteran composer of scores for silent films on video, created the musical accompaniment for the Oswald cartoons. I’m especially pleased that he sets Oswald’s singing entrance in Oh What a Knight to music from Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, which deals with medieval singers. Later in the cartoon, Israel quotes from Tannhauser, another Wagner opera about a singing knight (and possibly Israel’s nod to Chuck Jones’s What’s Opera, Doc?, which extensively uses music from Tannhauser).

It’s been two decades since I saw Fairbanks’ Robin Hood, but the most astounding segment in Oh What a Knight reminds me of Errol Flynn’s much more familiar The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), co-directed by Michael Curtiz, which was made a full decade after this cartoon. Both the Flynn Robin Hood and Curtiz’s The Sea Hawk (1940) culminate with swordfights in which the combatants cast enormous shadows on the walks behind them. Was this a swashbuckler movie tradition that predated Curtiz’s films? For, lo, in the greatest segment of Oh What a Knight, Oswald and an armored Putrid Pete wage a swordfight complete with ominous shadows behind them. Moreover, at one point Oswald exits the battle to go kiss the leading lady, while his shadow continues the duel with Putrid Pete in his place!

As the cartoon’s commentary track says, Oswald “recharges” his energies during the battle by continually returning to his lady love for a kiss. In this cartoon and some others, Oswald’s leading lady is not a rabbit but a cat. It would seem strange if Mickey Mouse’s girlfriend were not also a mouse, but then again, in more recent times Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy have gotten away with interspecies romance. I like the way that Disney and his animators kept devising new ways in these cartoons to portray Oswald’s sexual arousal. For example, at one point in Knight, his leading lady’s kiss causes Oswald’s feet to rotate in ecstasy.

Like Bright Lights, Sky Scrappers (1928) places Oswald in a then-contemporary urban setting: a skyscraper under construction. Putrid Pete sexually harasses Oswald’s girlfriend, a female cat, leading to an energetically staged battle between Oswald and Pete on a girder suspended high above the ground. Still, the cartoon disappointingly fails to evoke the suspense of the live action “thrill comedies” with similar settings that surely inspired it, like Harold Lloyd’s Never Weaken (1921) and Safety Last (1923) or Laurel and Hardy’s later Liberty (1929). It certainly pales in comparison to the split second timing of Popeye and company sleepwalking on and off girders in A Dream Walking (1934), whose complex visual choreography and split second timing was presumably beyond the capability of animators in the 1920s. The main problem, though, is that there’ not enough sense of potential sense of danger from falling in Sky Scrappers. At one point Oswald, climbing a rope, falls several stories, squashes on impact, but immediately resumes normal form, seemingly feeling no pain. He’s so rubbery that if he fell off the girder, one wouldn’t be surprised if he bounced.

The Fox Chase (1928) is another example of misjudging audience sympathies. Surely the audience would side not with Oswald the fox hunter but with his intended victim, the clever fox who outwits him. This fox is not only a trickster but a shapeshifter, adopting a disguise in the cartoon’s final moments that thwarts his hunters once and for all. In the high point here, Oswald tries to drive the fox out of a log by rolling it up like a rug–or like his leading lady from All Wet.

The last Oswald short, Tall Timber (1928), utilizes another ambitious setting, opening with Oswald rowing a canoe down a river, past a wilderness, down waterfall and, excitingly, through rapids. This time Oswald is a duck hunter, but, once again, I found my sympathies going to the duck. But then the cartoon resumes thrill comedy mode. Oswald finds himself riding a moose and being catapulted towards the screen–and the audience–until his face fills the frame. Then Oswald flees from an onrushing, rolling boulder, which finally, literally flattens him against a tree. The result is that Oswald is literally rail thin, but far taller. Oswald tries to restore his true shape by hitting himself with another heavy rock, but this impact distorts his body to the opposite extreme. An amazingly weird closeup shows Oswald’s head, inflated like a balloon. In long shot Oswald now looks short and obese, and his ears are no longer long but rounded: in fact, he looks like a fat Mickey Mouse! Two bear cubs seize either end of Oswald and pull, finally causing the rubbery rabbit to snap back to normal shape. Nevertheless angry, Oswald pursues the bear cubs to what looks like an immense black rock, but proves to be their huge, ferocious mother. But after an offscreen battle in a cave, the mother bear flees, with a furless body in bra and panties (yet another of the various animal “nudity” gags in the Oswald series that falls flat). Oswald then reenters, wearing a resplendent fur coat; he dons a top hat and lights a cigar in triumph. That seems an appropriate final image for what amounts to his curtain call in this final Oswald cartoon.

On the second disc are three key cartoons, animated by Ub Iwerks, that Walt Disney made independently, after Universal took Oswald away from him. They include the Mickey Mouse cartoons, Plane Crazy (1928) and Steamboat Willie (1928). The opening credits for each cartoon call it “a Walt Disney comic by Ub Iwerks,” a description that’s interesting for two reasons. First, the phrasing indicates that Walt Disney was in charge, but that Iwerks was the actual hands-on creator of the film. Second, the phrase “Walt Disney comic” suggests that at this point Disney–and perhaps his audience, as well– regarded the animated cartoon as a cinematic kind of comic strip, rather than as a separate artform.

Plane Crazy was the first Mickey Mouse cartoon that Disney made, and it was originally created as a silent cartoon. But it was the third Mickey cartoon, Steamboat Willie, with its groundbreaking synchronized sound track of music, dialogue and sound effects, that was the first to be released. But watching Plane Crazy, I found myself thinking that even apart from the question of sound, it was a good thing that Mickey actually made his debut in Steamboat Willie instead.

Opening in a barnyard, Plane Crazy presents Mickey as rural rodent who, with hep from other animals, builds his own plane and models himself after Charles Lindbergh, the first pilot to fly solo across the Atlantic. (We even see a surprisingly realistic picture of Lindbergh in the film, which sharply contrasts with the “cartoony” style in which the animal characters are drawn; Mickey even musses his hair in imitation of Lindbergh’s.) Mickey invites Minnie Mouse to join him on his flight. Eventually Mickey starts flirting with her and puts his arm around her; she wags her finger and tells him no. Looking devilish, Mickey speeds up the plane and puts it through aerial maneuvers that frighten Minnie. then he forcibly kisses her, Minnie slaps his face and she jumps out of the plane to escape him, her skirt billowing into a makeshift parachute. In other words, Plane Crazy portrays Mickey Mouse as guilty of sexual harassment, acting no differently than Putrid Pete in Sky Scrappers!

Watching Steamboat Willie after the Oswalds, I realized that much of the first half of the cartoon and its final scenes is conventional for its time, nowhere nearly as inspired as the best of Felix, Inkwell and Oswald. Mickey is the pilot of a steamboat, and his boss is an enormous cat with a high hat, an early version of his archfoe Black Pete (whom we can now see as Putrid Pete’s descendant). The bullying Pete pulls Mickey’s body, as malleable as Oswald’s, out of shape, stretching it till Mickey’s midsection looks like a rubber hose. There’s some vulgar comedy business with Pete spitting. Too late to board the steamboat, Minnie runs alongside it until Mickey uses a winch and hook to lift hold of her panties, a rather demeaning way to treat the leading lady, and deposit her on the boat. At the end of the cartoon Pete forces Mickey to peel potatoes, a parrot laughs mockingly at the mouse, and Mickey gets angry, beans the parrot with at grown potato, and laughs. This material seems all too conventional. sometimes crass and even mean-spirited.

But the opening image of Mickey at the wheel of the steamboat shows why Steamboat Willie fired the public imagination. Mickey is smiling, happy, and whistles a tune we hear on the soundtrack. It’s not just the fact that Steamboat Willie had synchronized sound that made it a breakthrough: it’s the way that Disney adapted his characterizations and stories to the opportunities that music provided. By making music, either by whistling or by playing his improvised instruments later in the cartoon, Mickey becomes a source of pure joy.

The middle of the cartoon has no story: it’s just Mickey playing his instruments, whether they are spoons and pots or various animals. For example, the musical sequence begins when a goat eats the sheet music for “Turkey in the Straw”; Mickey discovers that by turning the goat’s tail like a crank, the goat becomes a living gramophone, with the music coming from his mouth. Steamboat Willie has incurred criticism for Mickey’s supposed sadism, pulling a cat’s tail, or stretching a goose’s neck, or, startlingly, pressing a female pig’s udders in order to produce musical sounds. But in the context of the Oswald cartoons, in which characters’ rubbery bodies rarely sustain any harm, this doesn’t seem so bad to me. Presumably viewers in the 1920s would accept the convention of the period’s cartoons that these animals are not really being hurt. Instead, the audience would be carried along by the music Mickey is playing with these animals, in an effect that is simultaneously comedic and pleasurable simply as music. The cartoon’s ending, with the reversion to expressions of violent anger, is a letdown: it would have been better had Steamboat Willie ended with a musical gag of some sort. It’s Mickey the music maker who first won audience’s hearts.

The final cartoon in this DVD set is The Skeleton Dance (1929), animated by Ub Iwerks, the first of Disney’s Silly Symphonies series. This cartoon is a little masterpiece even though it has no actual story. Whereas the “Turkey in the Straw” segment in Steamboat Willie was an extended interlude between more conventional story sequences, The Skeleton Dance is entirely founded on music. The cartoon begins as a sort of visual tone poem, establishing an eerie mood both through the music and through classic visual elements from horror tales: lightning, the ominous eyes of an owl, a seemingly deserted church and graveyard, a howling dog (who looks like Pluto in silhouette!), and flying bats. Soon the cartoon introduces notes of humor as well, with black cats battling by pulling each other’s noses as if they were rubber bands. This reversion to Oswald-style visual humor is abruptly interrupted when a skeleton looms from behind a tombstone separating the cats and then leaps directly at the “camera,” invading the viewer’s space. Four skeletons then begin their dance, which takes up the rest of the cartoon, sometimes entertainingly silly, sometimes macabre, sometimes both at once.

The success of The Skeleton Dance led to Disney’s long series of Silly Symphonies which were built around music, frequently classical music. I’ve written about a number of Silly Symphonies before after seeing them at Lincoln Center (see “Comics in Context” #136: “Before There Were Cars”). Last December I attended the Museum of the Moving Image’s four-part retrospective of Silly Symphonies, including The Skeleton Dance and demonstrating how Disney further developed his new invention, the musical cartoon, but that is a topic for a future installment.

–Copyright 2008 Peter Sanderson