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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

In reviewing The Simpsons Movie for The New York Times (July 27, 2007), critic A. O. Scott wrote, “Ten or 15 years ago, The Simpsons Movie, which has been contemplated for almost as long as the show has been on the air, might have felt riskier and wilder. But The Simpsons, for all its mischief and iconoclasm, has become an institution, and that status has kept this film from taking too many chances”.

Online critic James Berardinelli wrote that “The primary satirical targets are religion (an easy mark), environmentalists (also easy), and government stupidity (even easier). The Simpsons Movie does not go after hot button issues nor does it tie itself to a time and place by addressing current events”. Early in the film Homer Simpson leafs through a Bible and exclaims this book has “no answers.” Is this merely Homer being stupid, or are the filmmakers attacking the Bible? If it’s the latter, isn’t that an unusual move for a family movie to take in a country in which religious believers make up the majority of the population? In the case of environmentalists, the movie comes down on the side of Lisa Simpson, who sincerely believes in the cause. As for “government stupidity,” the movie accuses the government of something worse than mere stupidity.

The more I think about The Simpsons Movie, the more I think it may be considerably more daring than the reviews I’ve read have noticed. And it is very much a satire about what is going on in America right now.

The Simpsons‘ creative freedom, on television and now on film, is particularly striking since it is part of Twentieth Century Fox, which is part of Rupert Murdoch’s vast News Corporation empire. So too is the Fox News Channel, with its leanings to the political right.

According to a July 30, 2007 article in The New York Times, “Activists are urging Home Depot, which recently unveiled an environmentally conscious marketing program, to withdraw advertising from Fox News, whose hosts and commentators dismiss global warming as liberal hysteria. . . .A short video by Robert Greenwald, Fox Attacks: The Environment, has been viewed more than 380,000 times since it was posted on YouTube on July 9.”

But The Simpsons Movie voices a strong environmental theme. Earnest, liberal Lisa tries to stop the people of Springfield from polluting their local lake, and, surprisingly, manages to overcome their apathy on the subject. According to Entertainment Weekly, Simpsons creator Matt Groening “mentioned an article he’d read about a community battling hog-waste pollution,” which became the springboard for the movie’s plot. When Homer dumps a silo full of his new pet pig’s manure into Lake Springfield, he triggers a chemical reaction out of a science fiction/horror movie. A squirrel that was exposed to the polluted water grows many more eyes. (This is surely an allusion to one of the earliest Simpsons episodes, 1990’s “Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish,” in which radioactive wastes from Mr. Burns’ nuclear power plant result in a mutant fish with an extra eye.

In the film Arnold Schwarzenegger is President and gives a free hand to Russ Cargill, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), who takes drastic action in response to Lake Springfield’s mutagenic pollution. Rather than do anything to clean the lake up, he dispatches the military to encase the entire town within an enormous dome.

How seriously can we take the satirical treatment of the EPA? The writers’ point may simply be the absurdity of the idea that the EPA, of all government agencies, could possibly engage in this sort of rogue military action. Do any of you recall that in The X-Files movie (1998), FEMA was supposed to be a major player in the all-powerful alien conspiracy to take over the world? Anyone who watched the DVD after FEMA’s catastrophic performance after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans probably finds the idea of an omnicompetent FEMA grimly funny.

There are conservatives in the Republican Party who want to restrict the powers of the EPA or to abolish it altogether; they might like The Simpsons Movie‘s portrayal of the EPA as a menace to freedom. Then again, there are also liberals who believe that the EPA has not been effective enough in combatting environmental dangers; they would notice that the EPA doesn’t do anything to solve Springfield’s pollution problem, but just literally puts a lid on it.

I realized what the movie might be up to during the sequence in which we are shown endless rows of National Security Agency employees monitoring the phone calls of apparently ordinary Americans. The NSA man who thus located Marge Simpson is ecstatic, boasting that finally the government had located someone it was searching for. This is presumably a reference to the controversy over the real federal government’s recent venture into warrantless wiretapping in its surveillance of alleged suspects in the “war on terror.”

If the movie’s NSA gag has a serious subtext, then what other political commentary might lurk just under the surface? Are the film’s President Schwarzenegger and EPA head Cargill merely supposed to be a fool and a knave, respectively, with no connection to the real world? Or is this Schwarzenegger, who declares that he was elected “to lead not to read,” intended to remind us of our current President? Schwarzenegger irresponsibly allows Cargill, a man with a questionable agenda, to do whatever he wants. Are we meant to think of President Bush following the ideological agenda of his neoconservative associates in plunging the nation into what now appears to many as a hopeless war in Iraq? Is Cargill’s military assault on Springfield meant to remind us of the current administration’s reliance on massive military force to “solve” the situation in Iraq?

Were any of these allusions made consciously by the writers and producers of The Simpsons Movie? Or were they unconsciously acting to recent political developments in plotting their movie?

Over the years I’ve written a lot in this weekly column about “post-9/11″ stories, which reflect Americans’ new fears of being attacked by a foreign adversary. The Simpsons Movie seems to me to be an example of a post-“post-9/11″ story. The focus of this emerging genre is not the terrorist threat to the nation, but the dangerous measures that the government took in response to that perceived threat: the quagmire in Iraq, the assault on civil liberties.

Another target of this post-“post-9/11″ genre might be an attack on government incompetence, as demonstrated by the Katrina debacle.

Hurricane Katrina was certainly an environmental disaster, and there was nearly universal outrage at the delayed, inadequate efforts by FEMA and the federal government to aid the people of New Orleans following the catastrophe. During the hurricane and its immediate aftermath, over fourteen thousand people sought shelter in the Louisiana Superdome, there were inadequate supplies of food and water, dreadfully unsanitary conditions, and insufficient medical care.

Here’s another parallel that the filmmakers may or may have consciously intended. In The Simpsons Movie the people of Springfield are imprisoned within a dome, where the government leaves them to rot, and we watch as living conditions deteriorate over three months. Are we intended to see a connection to New Orleans after Katrina? My hunch is that this parallel is more than mere coincidence.

In other words, The Simpsons may indeed now be a pop culture institution, but The Simpsons Movie is much more biting politically than the television show usually is, or than film critics have given it credit for.

One of The Simpsons Movie‘s surprises for me was this political subtext. Another surprise was the strong mythic overtones to the plot. The early scene in which Grandpa Simpson collapses in church and begins uttering prophecies seems to me like nothing I’d ever seen on the TV show. Yes, on the surface the scene was played for laughs, and yet the prophecies came true. It was as if by ignoring Grandpa’s warnings (which he didn’t understand anyway), Homer was defying fate, thereby causing the disaster that befell Springfield. Perhaps the Simpsons Movie writers were intentionally parodying “end of the world” movies, and therefore were parodying the trope of the Cassandra-like warnings that go ignored. Still, the prophecies prepare us for the supernatural doings later in the movie.

The Joseph Campbell monomyth structure is especially evident in in the movie’s second act, set in Alaska. Less than a week before, I was reading the middle section of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in which Harry wanders in the wilderness, having escaped from his enemies, but having lost nearly everything and everybody. In The Simpsons Movie Homer and his family manage to escape from the dome (thus crossing a threshold) and flee to Alaska, where they live in an isolated cabin. But Marge and the kids head back, determined to try to help the people of Springfield. Homer refuses, but finds himself wandering through the wilderness, as if through a Campbellian labyrinth.

But Alaska also proves to be Campbell’s “enchanted realm,” and not just in the clever earlier sequence in which Disney-like animals help Homer and Marge prepare for a night of lovemaking. Homer encounters an Iniut woman who is a mystic and serves as his mentor figure. Through her guidance he has a vision in which he undergoes dismemberment: even in a cartoon, it’s somewhat shocking to see Homer’s body separated into component parts. This is the metaphorical descent into the underworld, Campbell’s “Supreme Ordeal,” and a symbolic death. Only when Homer has his epiphany, realizing he no longer cares about himself but knows he must help the people of Springfield, do the parts of his body rejoin. This is his symbolic resurrection, and his new determination to help the townspeople is the Campbellian “boon” that will enable Homer to save them in the third act.

Again, since this is The Simpsons, the filmmakers are parodying the Campbell pattern. But the surprise is that they are both kidding the Campbell monomyth and using it semi-seriously to structure Homer’s character arc.

The third big surprise in the film for me was the portrayal of Homer’s next door neighbor, Ned Flanders. You may recall a past Simpsons episode (“Home Sweet Home-Diddily-Dum-Doodily,” 1995) in which Flanders temporarily adopts Bart and Lisa, and his attempt at baptizing them is depicted as horrific, as if his trying to brainwash them into joining some strange cult. The show usually mocks Flanders for his religious devotion and naive benevolence; this episode was anomalous in casting him as a villain. The movie changes all this, mostly avoiding jokes at Ned’s expense.

In their joint appearance on The Charlie Rose Show (August 30, 2007), Matt Groening said that the secret of The Simpsons’ success was executive producer James Brooks’ insistence from the beginning that the show’s main characters had to have “real emotions.” The movie shows this, too, through Marge’s genuine anguish in separating from Homer, Bart’s unexpected pain at feeling betrayed by Homer, and his growing appreciation of Flanders’ fatherliness. In the movie Ned, who is so often a figure of fun on the TV show, finally becomes as real as characters in The Simpsons can get. He becomes a figure of genuine goodness, an ideal father.

At the climax of the movie, however, Homer surpasses Ned. As the movie’s first act showed, Homer is capable of extraordinary stupidity and irresponsibility. But that is matched by his capacity for extraordinary heroism, as well, as Homer shows when, reunited with Bart, he succeeds in saving Springfield from annihilation.

One reason that I’m glad to see that The Simpsons Movie did so well commercially in its first weekend is that it looks like two-dimensional drawings come to life, just like the TV show–and the way animated feature films used to look! However much computers were actually used on the film, it looks like hand-drawn animation. Therefore the film’s success should help make the case that audiences will still go see traditional-looking animated films, as long as the stories and characters merit their attention.

TRAILER TROUBLES

Like the rest of you, I enjoy seeing trailers for upcoming movies when they give me glimpses of what looks like something I’ll really enjoy. Ratatouille had a spectacular trailer, with Remy fleeing through the kitchen from pursuers, and finally just avoiding being pinned to the wall by flying knives, in an iconic shot used in the movie ads. I was disappointed that the sequence didn’t turn up in the actual movie! The new trailer for next year’s Get Smart movie perfectly captures the spirit of the original television series.

Then there are trailers that seem like cheats. For example, there’s that trailer for the sequel to Batman Begins, The Dark Knight. Those of you who saw it at the San Diego Con should be advised that you didn’t get an exclusive: I saw the same trailer before The Simpsons Movie. There’s a bat symbol on a black screen, and you hear voices–Alfred, the Joker–and that’s it. Well, if they had nothing to show, why even bother?

And then there are trailers that actively persuade me not to go see the movie in question. Before The Simpsons Movie started, I saw the trailer for the upcoming computer-animated film of Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who. It started beautifully, with a close-up of a CGI flower, but once Horton showed up, speaking in Jim Carrey’s voice, being self-consciously wacky, it became clear that this movie has nothing to do with the gentle humor of Dr. Seuss.

But worse followed: the trailer for a CGI Alvin and the Chipmunks (and really, who asked for this?), in which Alvin tries to prove that a piece of his brother’s excrement is actually a raisin by putting it in his mouth. No, I did not make this up. What were the publicity people for this movie thinking? It’s as if they are handing us critics the perfect image to describe a movie that I fear may look like a raisin but decidedly isn’t.

DOGGING HIS TRAIL

Back in May, when I bought the Warner Home Video’s DVD set Tex Avery’s Droopy: The Complete Theatrical Collection from a Best Buy store in midtown Manhattan, not only did the cashier break into a smile at seeing my purchase, but he even launched into a Droopy impression. Last month, I picked up the Woody Woodpecker and Friends DVD set at a different Best Buy, and the female cashier was already holding a copy of her own. Either this is coincidence, or Best Buy has a commendable policy of hiring animation buffs.

Usually I only buy DVD sets if they have special features I want to see. (Otherwise, I can just record the film off television.) The Droopy set includes a documentary about director Tex Avery that tells viewers such things as (1) that Avery’s cartoons move fast (yes), (2) that Avery had great comic timing (true), (3) that Avery’s cartoons frequently break the fourth wall (correct), and (4) that Droopy speaks with a “Southern drawl” (absolutely wrong). In other words, this documentary mostly offers only basic information about Avery’s work which will come as a surprise to those who are first learning about him, but that most animation collectors who purchase this set will already know. Moreover, even though Turner Broadcasting, which owns the MGM Droopy cartoons, also holds the rights to all the cartoons Avery directed at both Warners and MGM, the documentary only shows us clips from the Droopy shorts. So this is a disappointment.

But, of course, the set is worth getting because it has all twenty-eight Droopy cartoons that Avery directed, all of which are good, and one of which, Northwest Hounded Police (1946), is one of the greatest cartoons of his career. I’d always considered this to be a remake of the first Droopy cartoon, Dumb-Hounded (1943). But having this DVD set allowed me to watch them back to back, and now I consider them more as variations on a theme.

In each one a criminal wolf is hunted by Droopy, the slow-talking, slow-moving, melancholic dog who represents the law. But no matter where the Wolf goes, Droopy is there. If there’s one thing that the Wolf succeeds in leaving behind, it is any pretense of realism. In Dumb-Hounded the Wolf flees by car, plane, and boat, at velocities that might make the Flash’s head spin, yet Droopy, who seems barely to move, settles into his hideout, only to find Droopy patiently awaiting him. In Northwest Hounded Police the Wolf races to the Arctic wilderness, finds Droopy, known in this short as Sgt. McPoodle of the Mounties, flees again, and eventually ends up on a tiny Pacific island, where Droopy is concealed beneath a tiny rock. Many times when the Wolf comes face to face with Droopy, his surprise and horror are so great that he does a “take” that bursts the body’s normal limitations: his eyes bulge out like telescopes, or his entire body will fly into disconnected pieces.

Chuck Jones’s Wile E. Coyote has been likened to Sisyphus, in that both eternally strive at a task at which they will never succeed. In these two Avery cartoons, the Wolf is in a Sisyphean situation as well, unable to evade his mild-mannered pursuer. It’s like Les Miserables as surreal farce. Or it’s like a nightmare, in which the dreamer is unable to escape his doom, no matter what he does. It’s a funny-animal version of Kafka. Droopy is like the Greek god Nemesis reinterpreted as an inoffensive-seeming little dog.

Watching the two shorts back to back, I discovered that even though they have the same premise, they consist of nearly entirely different sets of gags. The prominent exception is that at one point in both cartoons, the Wolf is so desperately racing to escape Droopy that his momentum carries him past the sprocket holes at the edge of the film into a blank, white void whereupon he swerves and runs back into the film, his version of reality.

This is a perfect example of the one truly illuminating point that the DVD’s documentary makes: that whereas Disney animated films sought to create a credible reality, Avery broke the rules of reality and reveled in demonstrating that anything can happen in a cartoon. In effect, he was the anti-Disney.

Northwest Hounded Police is the better of the two cartoons because it pushes the comedic nightmarish aspect even further beyond the bounds of reality. At one point the Wolf undergoes plastic surgery, only to look in the mirror and find that his new face is Droopy’s! How can he outrun Nemesis when it is part of himself? (This might also suggest that Droopy represents the outlaw Wolf’s sense of guilt, which is indeed a part of himself he cannot escape.) At another point in Northwest, the Wolf hides in a movie theater and starts watching an MGM cartoon, which turns out to be, in effect, Northwest itself: Droopy looks out from this cartoon-within-a-cartoon and addresses the Wolf, who understandably panics.

In these two cartoons Droopy and the Wolf do indeed break the fourth wall and speak directly to the audience. Avery goes still further in indicating that these characters know that they are in an a film: not only does the Wolf run past those sprocket holes, but at one pint in Dumb-Hounded, Droopy tells the audience, “I surprise him”–the Wolf– “like this all through the picture.” It’s as if Droopy is an actor who has read the whole script, or an actor who has been in repeated performances of the film, like a performer in a play. Avery emphasizes the artificiality of the animated medium, and this is a subject to which I will return next week.

I’ve already described another cartoon in this DVD set, The Shooting of Dan McGoo (1945), in a previous installment (see “Comics in Context” #100). But before I move on to another subject, I want to mention another of my favorite Avery cartoons in this collection, The Three Little Pups (1953). As its title suggests, it’s a parody of the story of the Three Little Pigs, and in particular, the Disney version, which was then two decades old, with Droopy as Practical Pig. The Wolf of Three Little Pups, cast as a dogcatcher, starts out wearing an expression of melodramatic villainy and conducts a fast, frenzied assault on Droopy’s brick doghouse. But then, abruptly, he stops, shifts into what will be his usual manner for the rest of the cartoon and speaks to the audience in a laid-back Southern drawl (a real one). This Wolf is voiced by the great Daws Butler, using the same Southern drawl that will eventually become the voice of Huckleberry Hound. Unlike his frenetic counterpart in Northwest, this Wolf moves and speaks slowly and quietly, much like Droopy himself. Their ensuing battle reminds me of Laurel and Hardy comedy shorts like Them Thar Hills (1934) and Tit for Tat (1935), in which the comedy duo and their adversary move with a quiet, grave dignity in the course of unleashing slapstick violence on each other. I will also return to the evolution of Butler’s easygoing Southern canine in next week’s column.

OH YOU SQUID

I surrender. I can resist no longer. My Quick Stop colleague Fred Hembeck is right. SpongeBob SquarePants really is as good as he says it is.

Nickelodeon premiered five new SpongeBob episodes during the last full week of July. I caught some of them in the midst of watching a good number of animated cartoons from the Hollywood studio period for this week’s column and next week’s. SpongeBob may not have their high production values or masterful animation, but in terms of wit and invention and strong characters and voice acting, the new SpongeBob cartoons I saw were equally enjoyable as many of these classics, or even more so.

Among the new SpongeBob shorts I saw was “The Krusty Sponge,” which introduces a feared food critic who is nonetheless less imposing than Ratatouille‘s Anton Ego: Gene Scallop, based on–and voiced by–Today Show movie reviewer Gene Shalit. After Scallop’s review of the Krusty Krab restaurant singles out cook SpongeBob for praise, owner Mr. Krabs, the very personification of greed, converts this fast food establishment into a SpongeBob theme restaurant. It’s a subversive satire on the omnipresence of SpongeBob merchandising in real life, suggesting that it threatens to overwhelm the original character in the cartoons.

I’ve been thinking that SpongeBob is like a 21st century equivalent to Mickey Mouse. Each has a boyish persona, and each has an iconic appearance based on simple, appealing geometrical shapes: circles for Mickey, and a square–along with the curves of his mouth and eyes–for SpongeBob. The big difference between Mickey and SpongeBob is that SpongeBob is allowed to act downright weird at times.

Here’s an example. In another new short, “To Love a Patty,” SpongeBob encounters a “Krusty Patty” hamburger that he deems to be so perfect that he literally falls in love with it. Though SpongeBob is old enough to have a full time job, live on his own, drive and (in another new short, “Boat Smarts,” even shave), he is basically a big kid who doesn’t appear to have hit puberty yet. His creator, Stephen Hillenburg, has asserted that SpongeBob is “somewhat asexual”. Nonetheless, in “To Love a Patty,” it’s as if SpongeBob has enormous sexual urges that get misdirected onto his perfect hamburger, whom he names “Patty” (of course).

This allows the cartoon makers to satirize the blindness of love. As time wears on, “Patty” starts to rot and stink, but SpongeBob sees and smells only “her” imagined beauty, until the stench and decay finally becomes too great for even him to ignore.

Since SpongeBob, as a cook, creates hamburgers, then you could read “To Love a Patty” as a satire of the creative artist’s obsession with his own creation, and his blindness to its flaws.

Finally Mr. Krabs persuades SpongeBob that passion for a Krabby Patty is good, but it must be fulfilled by eating the Patty, which SpongeBob proceeds to do. Mr. Krabs has convinced SpongeBob to redirect his sexual drives into hunger, consuming and destroying the object of his desire. If you think about it, this suggests something a wee bit disturbing about Mr. Krabs. It’s just as well that he clearly sublimates his own sex drives into his ecstatic passion for money.

SpongeBob’s relationship with the female squirrel Sandy Cheeks seems to be a platonic friendship. Then again, those two express their friendship by having karate fights with each other. What’s being sublimated through all this mock aggression?

Well, Hillenburg was quoted in the same article as saying “The character SpongeBob is an oddball. He’s kind of weird, but he’s kind of special,” I can agree with this.

However, watching several new episodes reinforced my decision that my favorite character in the show is SpongeBob’s neighbor and co-worker Squidward, who is perennially annoyed by SpongeBob’s wacky behavior. If SpongeBob is childlike, then Squidward is an adult. Moreover, whereas the extroverted SpongeBob likes almost everybody, Squidward feels no obligation to put on a happy face to please other people when he doesn’t want to. Perhaps Squidward’s appeal is that he gets to voice the exasperation and irritation that we normally have to hold back.

Squidward also reminds me of a 1971 film by Federico Fellini, The Clowns. In it, Fellini concentrated on two types of clowns, which are often paired; the White Clown, who is the straight man, an actual or wannabe authority figure, and the Auguste, whom Fellini called a “rebel,” who engages in slapstick. The White Clown represents order; the Auguste is comedic chaos. Squidward is in the White Clown tradition, forever annoyed by SpongeBob, his personal Auguste. (I figured out that Squidward is analogous to the White Clown before starting this week’s column. And in the course of writing it, I discovered a Wikipedia article that also labels Squidward as White Clown and SpongeBob as Auguste.)

Next week Ill be reviewing the new Woody Woodpecker and Friends DVD, and Woody and his recurring antagonist Wally Walrus also fit the categories of Auguste and White Clown, respectively. But SpongeBob and Squidward aren’t actually antagonists: SpongeBob regards Squidward as his friend and is normally oblivious to Squidward’s disdain towards him.

Moreover, the SpongeBob series even grants Squidward some sympathy for putting up with SpongeBob’s manic efforts at friendship. In “The Thing,” a short that debuted in January, but which I saw last weekend, Squidward is accidentally covered in cement, rendering him unrecognizable and unable to talk. SpongeBob finds him, decides that he is some strange kind of animal, and adopts him as a pet. The short takes Squidward’s point of view, focusing on his horror at being caught in this nightmarishly absurd situation, and being unable to stop it.

It may be that Squidward secretly envies SpongeBob and wishes he were more like him. In the new short, “Good Ol’ Whatshisname,” Squidward discovers that the popular SpongeBob knows the names of all of the Krusty Krab’s regular customers. Squidward becomes so obsessed with learning the name of a customer before SpongeBob does that he steals the customer’s wallet and lands in prison.

In another new short, “Squid Wood,” SpongeBob creates a puppet version of Squidward. The puppet presumably represents Squidward as SpongeBob envisions him, and keep in mind that SpongeBob is generally oblivious to Squidward’s grumpiness. Everyone prefers SpongeBob’s kinder, gentler puppet version of Squidward to the real Squidward, to the latter’s horror.

And in another new short, “Breath of Fresh Squidward,” an electric shock temporarily gives Squidward an alternate personality. Squidward’s Mr. Hyde turns out to be even happier, nicer and more extroverted than SpongeBob. Thus SpongeBob and Squidward reverse roles, with Squidward unwittingly driving SpongeBob to distraction. Finally another electrical shock restores Squidward to his grumpy normalcy. The more benign side of Squidward is once more trapped within his subconscious, and it would take the equivalent of a bolt from the blue to free him once more.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

This is the final weekend for “Stan Lee: A Retrospective,” the exhibition that I co-curated at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in Manhattan (www.moccany.org). The show closes on August 6.

The ComicMix website recently ran Mike Gold’s very appreciative review of The Marvel Vault, the book I co-authored with legendary Marvel writer and editor Roy Thomas. You can see the review here, and ComicMix, a mix of news blogging, columns, and even podcasts about comics and related subjects, is well worth visiting on a regular basis.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson