The DarmokTheGreen Experience

For Robert Burns night...

2012-01-25T14:06:00.001Z

In this post, I continue to follow in the footsteps of Matt Groening

2011-10-14T10:06:00.002+01:00

Another thing which frightened and/or disturbed me as a kid:

This picture of the wolf with his belly full of rocks in the ladybird edition of "The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids."

"You keep using that word..."

2011-10-13T18:08:00.004+01:00

How to play Downfall, Kid John V. version.

Load your counters in.
Then, begin! Tug at the wheels to get all your counters down to the trays at the bottom as quickly as possible, at the same time as your opponent is doing the same thing. Use brute strength to move the wheels the way *you* want them to move, while your opponent uses brute strength to do the same thing. And hurry up!

Yes, the link above says that you should take turns to move the wheels, and that's how parents and friends' parents told me I was supposed to play it, but I was unconvinced. For one thing, it didn't seem as much fun as my version. Also, the blurb on the box seemed to support my way of playing the game: it described it as a "strategy" game, and "strategy" quite obviously meant tugging at wheels trying to outdo your opponent. I guess I didn't really know what the word meant, and I was relying on the sound of the word - the "str" beginning must have sounded like "strength", "struggle" and "strain" to me.

That, and that's what I'd have *liked* it to mean.

Another face-changing reptile

2011-04-08T17:20:00.007+01:00

From Bob Clampett's "The Bashful Buzzard" (1945) You won't like this dragon when he's angry. Not only does he suddenly grow himself some teeth, but his head changes shape and size! It's not like we actually see his head changing on-screen... but Beaky Buzzard doesn't recognise the "mean" face when the dragon starts growling at him (0:58-1:08), so we have to assume either a) the dragon's head changed off-screen or b) Clampett assumed his audience would forget that they and Beaky had seen the "turtle" face a few seconds ago. (0:25-0:45)

By the way, anyone know where those "bringing home a baby bumblebee" lyrics orginated? Apparently there's a girl guides / girl scouts song with the same tune and the same lyrics, followed by "I'm squishing up / licking up / bringing (or barfing) up / sweeping up my baby bumblebee"... I wonder if this version predates or postdates Clampett's use here.

The stuff we remember

2011-01-21T19:26:00.000Z

I saw the Animaniacs segment "Bumbie's Mom" about 17 years ago. The plot is this: curmudgeonly veteran cartoon star Slappy Squirrel and her peppy nephew Skippy are watching the film "Bumbie, the Dearest Deer" (as you can imagine, it's a Bambi parody) and Skippy is traumatised by the mother's death. To cheer him up, Slappy takes Skippy to visit Vina Waleen, the deer woman who played the mother in the film.

Strangely enough, I only saw Bambi for the first time a couple of years ago - I had only known about it through osmosis before. It's interesting to compare the familiar parody with the unfamiliar original.

Specifically, the way the action is compressed. In the Animaniacs episode, the mother warns Bumbie that there is "no cover from the hunters" on the meadow, then, soon after, we hear a gunshot and Bumbie asks plaintively for his mother. (Cue Skippy bursting into tears) This is followed by the forest fire sequence, and Bumbie, still a fawn, calls again for his mother amid the burning trees.

That brief scene encapsulates what people remember about Bambi: Bambi is a baby deer, whose mother is shot by hunters, and there is a terrifying forest fire near the end. It was interesting, when finally seeing the film, to notice how much of a compression this is.

The part where Bambi's mother warns him about the hunters on the meadow comes long before she is shot by one... in fact, it's a completely different time of year. And, while the forest fire does follow from scenes where animals are in danger from hunters, it is even later... by which time Bambi is fully grown! He is also not still looking for his mother... in fact, I don't think his mother is even mentioned after the Prince (Bambi's father) tells him "Your mother can no longer be with you."

So, we have an amalgamation of three points in the film, separated by months or even years... concentrated into that one brief scene.

Dumboards - Part Two

2010-12-29T15:21:00.002Z

First of all, I'm not sure when he added this, but thank you to Michael Sporn for adding a link to my blog on his "Splog"! Now, it's high time I returned to the Dumbo storyboards he posted up several months ago.

Bath time!

Carrying on where I left off, here is a sketch of Mrs Jumbo taking her son to be washed... everyone remembers this sequence in the film - a look at the loving relationship between mother and son before they are separated. Tytla's animation is a great portrayal of warmth and affection, of the way they are thoroughly happy to be in each other's presence. This sketch goes for a more comical approach: Dumbo is being taken to his bath against his will, a sulky, bratty expression on his face, while Mrs Jumbo's expression shows amusement at her son's ineffectual resistence. A perfectly valid depiction of a mother-son relationship, but hardly fitting for the only time we see them alone together. To me, Dumbo's expression makes him look too specifically to a drawing of a human boy in a children's storybook... in the film his appearance seems more universal, appealing on both human and animal levels.

Mother and son

Speaking of humans, this pose for Mrs Jumbo and the way she holds Dumbo are much more anthropomorphic than the approach they finally settled on.

Whack-an-elephant

An unused example of the pain and humiliation Dumbo undergoes as a clown.

Wealthy Ringmaster

Now, in the film, the last we see of the Ringmaster is when Dumbo gets back at him during the Big Town sequence. In the following success montage, Timothy becomes Dumbo's manager, and is seen in a still, proudly signing a contract for him. All this is fitting: the Ringmaster was the one who separated Dumbo from his mother, while Timothy has been a loyal friend who we know can be trusted to look after Dumbo's interests. This sketch, however, shows the Ringmaster gaining from Dumbo's success - perhaps he was intended to be a more positive character than he eventually became.

The Dumbo Hop

Dumbo Peanuts

Presumably the story department came up with various ideas for the success montage, and Walt Disney, Ben Sharpsteen or whoever chose which ones to include in the film. There are a few on the Splog which I wish had survived, as they show Dumbo entering the popular consciousness... I'm particularly fond of the "Dumbo Peanuts"... a bit more endearing than the implications of using Dumbo likenesses to bomb civilians in German cities...

Anyway, there are actually many more boards in Michael's post: these are only the ones which I felt I had something to say about. Once again, you can find the rest here. Until next time!

Youse guise

2010-10-31T19:20:00.005Z

Now, here is a song I wish I'd known about when I was a kid. I mean, I was familiar with the voice of Bing Crosby from Christmas records, and I was certainly familiar with Disney cartoons (see pretty much any post tagged "personal" and/or "kidhood")... and vaguely familiar with the concept of a headless horseman. But not quite as familiar as I would become...

From Ichabod and Mr Toad, the Disney package-feature with the non-chronological title. This is therefore from the second half of the film, and if you want to know who animated what in this sequence... well, you're in luck, because the draft can be found right here. By the way, anyone got any idea what "black or white or even red" refers to? The obvious answer is hair colours, but the use of "black" and "white" rather than, say "brown" and "blonde" makes it sound like they mean skin colours.

I did once dress as a headless ... man of some sort one Hallowe'en, and went around the neighbourhood with my younger sister, who was dressed as Casper the Friendly Ghost. I mean, she sang the Casper theme (transcribed by the whole family from a video, and containing one or two mondegreens), it's a shame I couldn't have sung something appropriate as well.

The costume included an over-large sweater, with a bow-tie around the top (to keep it from falling down and exposing my real, attached head... thereby destroying the illusion), and a papier-mache head with a wig on top and a gloomy expression painted on the face. It was a fairly last-minute idea and (Could have just used a pumpkin and saved myself the hassle... the shops would have been full of them, and being a traditional Scottish family, it's not like we'd have had any other use for one...)

No, there's no photos. Well, no digital ones anyway. If people are really interested, I could scan something. However, for the past decade or so, may Hallowe'en costumes have usually been variations on the following theme: "barbarian", "renegade knight", "warrior"... or, with some facial make-up, "orc", and rely on some handy pieces of sacking cloth, the fact that the majority of my clothes are black, and some arms and armour I picked up at a costume shop a while back.

Yeah, both of these photos are from the same year (for some reason they were all I could find), but they may as well not be.

In this post, I shall follow in the footsteps of Matt Groening

2010-10-22T23:51:00.005+01:00

In the Simpsons comics, Matt Groening would often write some editorial (maybe he still does, I stopped getting them a few years ago... are they still running, actually, or is it all reprints? I mean, the ones I got were *already* reprints, of the American versions. Anyway...), sometimes related to The Simpsons but often just about his life. One of those was "Things which frightened and disturbed me as a kid." And that's kind of the approach I'd like to take to this post.

Sometimes it feels like my defining childhood moments involve watching something on TV which disturbed or haunted me. Usually they seem to be animated. There is one I remember which involved a ship which was overheating... the furnace was overloaded or something, and it was burning up. The main things I can remember are the scene where the characters escape by helicopter or something, and watch the ship blow up in a sort of mushroom cloud, and the fact that one of the characters had an unshaven face. If I saw it again I don't think it would have much of an effect on me, but at the time... well, let's just say I felt the need to leave the room any time The Simpsons was on - Homer's unshaven face brought back the unpleasant memory.

I'd love to find out what TV show that was, though.

Anyway, I think there can be something genuinely unsettling about the stark look of some of those 70s/80s animated TV shows, with their gloomy colours. One of them I am glad to say I was able to find. Say hello to... The Valley of the Dinosaurs, episode 5 "Volcano"!

Yes, it's only the second half. You're experiencing it the way I did. The first half isn't too hard to find if you're curious, and you want to know why this 70s family is hanging out with these cave-dwellers. Why these prehistoric Ama-zon inhabitants are white (or maybe slightly Asian) or why they speak in the same dialect as the 1970s family, only slower and with no inflections, remain mysteries.

So, anyway, this was a TV series that was on before Saturday morning Disney cartoons. So I invariably saw the last few minutes of it before the cartoons I wanted to see came on. This "Volcano" episode was being shown on the first morning I started seeing Saturday morning cartoons, and I must say that in spite of all the tackiness I see before me now, for a young kid like I was at the time, that volcano... referred to at 03:53 as "Devil's Pudding" for some reason... was High Octane Nightmare Fuel.

And, this was followed by an advert for some sort of superhero-based pasta shapes... which was animated, and involved a tidal wave of spaghetti sauce flooding through a city. I think I assumed this was the preview for the following week's episode: "Next time... the lava reaches the city and kills a lot of people!"

And then... the first cartoon on the Saturday Disney show was the Donald Duck classic "Good Scouts", where Donald and his nephews visit Yellowstone National Park... and begins with them all crossing a mud spring called "Devil's Stew Pot". Oh... and the fact that Donald later winds up on top of a geyser, which *erupts*, didn't exactly put the Hanna-Barbera Nightmare Fuel out of my head.

Dumboards - Part One

2010-10-08T15:10:00.005+01:00

With Mark Mayerson's Dumbo mosaic drawing to a close I realised I should post my impressions on the story sketches Michael Sporn posted on his "splog" back in May. They're a really interesting look at some unused (or changed) ideas the story-men came up with.

Casey Jones Jr

First of all, Casey Jr, "slow asleep" as Jerry Colonna would have it, in his shed. Notice the full name "Casey Jones Jr" which never appears in the film. (I remember a Little Golden Book or something which referred to the loco as "Casey Jones" though) The name comes from the American legendary figure of Casey Jones, who would later inspire Jack Kinney's short "The Brave Engineer".

Dumbo, Mrs Jumbo, and "friends"

Here we have the other elephants surrounding Mrs Jumbo, with Dumbo resting at her back end. Human figures can be seen in the foreground, and the backdrop (with coconut palm trees) suggests an outdoor setting. The elephants are arranged in the same semi-circular position they are when they complain about Dumbo in the film, but their expressions appear to be kind and indulgent. I'm not sure if this is meant to be a version of Dumbo's birth/delivery, but he already has the big ears.

Toot-Toot-O!

Here we have Casey Jr (deliberately) scaring Dumbo and Timothy. Casey doesn't really behave in this manner in the film, where "he" doesn't do anything as humanised as his annoyed finger-drumming in his Reluctant Dragon segment.

Giant of the Jungle

Monarch of the Jungle

Now, these two are the big'uns. People have often wondered who Dumbo's father is. His mother is referred to as Mrs Jumbo, with a married woman's title, and Dumbo himself is originally named "Jumbo Jr." So, who is Jumbo Sr? The fact that Dumbo is delivered by a stork shows that, in this fantasy world, childbirth (and conception) doesn't really work the same way it does in our world, so we just generally assume he doesn't have, or need to have, a father.

But, these drawing suggest he was originally going to have one. Quite a famous one too, identified as "Jumbo, Giant of the Jungle", advertised on a poster for "...ingling Bros" circus. The elephants comment that Dumbo "belongs right alongside his daddy" and that "he'll be there soon". What does this mean? Are the other elephants encouraging him to go on to a greater circus? Was this before their personality/ies had been decided on? Or are they just wanting him out of their circus?

Following Pinocchio and with Bambi in production, it seems to fit the mold that Dumbo, as a young male protagonist, would have a father out there somewhere, if not by his side, and it seems that one of Dumbo's themes was, at one point, going to be about the little elephant trying to live up to his father's success. In the second sketch, look at the size of Jumbo Sr's ears! Were the storymen making these sketches even thinking there was to be anything "un-natural" about the size of Dumbo's own ears?

Keep watching this blog for more thoughts on these story sketches, and thanks to Michael Sporn for posting them up! I would be posting these as comments on his blog, if they were a bit shorter (and, if I hadnt waited until so long after he had posted them up in the first place...)

Humans and animals in Friz Freleng's "Curtain Razor" (1949)

2010-07-22T18:55:00.002+01:00

Friz (or "I.", of you will) Freleng's "Curtain Razor" was made around the time that Warner Brothers stopped populating their cartoons with humanoid "funny animals" and started using animated humans, except for series regulars like Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck, or when the setting (e.g. a chicken farm) demands a certain type of animals (chickens, a guard dog, a fox or a weasel) as the main characters.

In this cartoon, Porky is a talent agent working for Goode and Korny, auditioning performers of various species.

Sometimes their species is an important part of the joke, sometimes it isn't. In the first category, we have a cricket or grasshopper with a loud, strong voice; a chicken who "lays an egg"; and a sheepdog with a flea circus. In the latter category we have the turtle with "a thousand voices"; the Crosby, Sinatra and Jolson birds; the goofy dog with the high-dive act... and, of course, the fox who blows himself up. We also have two humans... a two-headed guy who isn't in show business (he's the janitor) and "Cawford Coo" with his trained pigeons. Things get a bit blurred and confused: Porky thinks that the sheepdog (who walks on all fours, but enters by himself and speaks) is a "dog act" but doesn't assume the same of the high-diving bipedal dog in the bathing suit.

Contrast the two gags which Freleng would later re-use in 1957's "Show Biz Bugs. In the later cartoon, both the "Trained Pigeons" act and the "explosion" act were performed by Daffy Duck. But in "Curtain Razor", it was probably deliberate that one is performed by a human and one by a humanoid animal. It's probably better that "Crawford Coo" is a human, as the joke comes from the fact that the realistic pigeons behave just as real, untrained pigeons would (contrast the flea cricus in the same cartoon!) However, even though it isn't really important to the gag whether the guy who blows himself up is a fox or not, if the fox who blew himself up were human, it would probably be way too gruesome, and Freleng and his storymen may have decided that a gag like that should be left for imaginary beings like anthropomorphic animals, to keep it in the realm of the fantastic... no pun intended!

Dumbo Deleted Scenes - Part 4

2010-06-30T15:57:00.004+01:00

OK, here we go... the rest of the deleted scenes. I can't claim that my reflections are completely comprehensive, so if any of you notice anything you feel I should have mentioned... either about any of these scenes or others I may have missed... then let me know in the comments!

As before, these are transcripts from the drafts - you can find scanned copies of the originals on the A. Film L.A. website by following the links in the scene titles. The portions of the transcript in italics are the parts which don't appear in the film, the rest is included to provide context.

Sequence 16: Clown Sequence (Draft No. 1)
____

1 LS - Tent. Clowns in sillhouette celebrating and singing, "WE'RE THE SMARTEST CLOWNS ----."

2 MS - Ollie and Frank dancing and singing, "WE'RE THE ANSWER TO AN OLD RINGMASTER'S DREAM."

3 MS - "WE'RE THROUGH WITH PLAYING HICK TOWNS, FROM NOW ON IT'S ---"

4 MS - Group of clowns dancing and singing finish of song - "---THE BIG TOWNS, FOR THE GREATEST CLOWNS THE WORLD

HAS EVER SEEN."

5 CU - Clown who says "HERE YOU ARE JOEY, POUR IT IN ME SLIPPER."
____

The dialogue throughout this sequence is not given in full in the draft, but in a shortened (and sometimes very slightly paraphrased) form. Fortunately most of the cut song is included in the draft, and, better yet, Hans has posted up an acetate recording of it, and of the "hit the big boss for a raise" reprise that survived into the film.

Mark Mayerson mentioned that a lot of the film relies on "the principle of contrast", and there's certainly a lot of contrast going from the tear-jerker previous sequence to the clowns laughing it up in their tent. There would have been more of a direct contrast if they had kept these scenes in, as the film would have gone from one song (the lullaby) to another (the clowns' celebration song). Maybe that kind of cut would have been a bit too jarring, though.

And, yes, two of the clowns are identified as "Ollie and Frank". If they really are named after the two animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, it's very interesting. Neither worked on Dumbo, but would have been occupied on Bambi at the same time. Seems like some light-hearted in-house rivalry. It's also interesting that, so soon after Ollie's promotion to full animator, than he and Frank would already have been seen as some kind of double-act.

Sequence 17: Hiccups and Cure (Draft No. 2) has quite a few differences in the draft, but not much in the way of deleted scenes. Scene 12 is a kind of deleted scene: after Dumbo has swallowed the alcohol-enhanced water, he lets out a hiccup, and the draft mentions a close-up of Timothy saying "OH, I GUESS YOU HAD ONE LITTLE ONE LEFT OVER." However, in the film he is off-screen when he says this.

Also, in scene 18, after Timothy emerges from the bucket, the draft has him say "GIGGLE WATER!", evidently in response to his own question about "WHAT KINDA WATER IS THIS ANYHOW?" The question is in the film but the answer isn't.

Mostly, though, we can see the opposite of deleted scenes - scenes which are in the film but not in the draft. I expect Mark Mayerson will cover this when he reaches this sequence in his mosaic.

Sequence 19.2 - Dumbo learns to fly (Final Draft)

Now, this one's a bit more complicated than the usual clean lifts. Thanks to Zartok-35 for first noticing it.
____

29 CU - Dumbo's head. Crows flying around. Timothy jumps out of Dumbo's hat on to his trunk. Crows Laughing.

30 EXTREME CU - Timothy on Dumbo's trunk talks to him, kisses feather. "DUMBO! I KNEW YOU COULD DO IT. NOW OUR TROUBLES ARE OVER. HO-HO!" To crows off-stage: "YOU BOYS KEEP THIS UNDER YOUR HATS. MUM'S DA WOID."

31 CU - Crows on top of Dumbo's head: "SHO' NUFF, BOY." "WE DON'T GONNA TALK." "NOT TO NOBODY." "MUM'S DE WOID."

32 CU - Two crows on top of Dumbo's head. Crow with deep voice: "MUM'S DE WOID."

33 CU - Timothy on Dumbo's trunk, says "WAIT'LL WE GET TO THE BIG TOWN."
____

As Zartok mentioned, a close-up of J.C. was added after this, saying "BOY, THEM CITY FOLKS IS SURE IN FOR A SU'PRISE!" This seems like a bit of a redundant addition: more something that would be taken out to condense dialogue (see story notes from The Reluctant Dragon) than added. In the next sequence, Timothy says basically the same thing - in both the draft and the film.

Or maybe they really needed to hammer it in that flying elephants are supposed to be surpising, in a world where storks literally deliver babies! Then again, we have just had a whole song about how unusual a flying elephant would be.

But a couple of other things, too. I'm not sure if I'd describe scene 29 as a close-up of Dumbo's head, also, it contains Timothy's "I knew you could do it!" line that the draft places in the next shot. I guess they didn't want to lose that line even though they were cutting the scene where it appeared. It seems a surprising number of differences for a so-called "Final" draft.

Sequence 20 - Big town, Dumbo triumphs (Draft No. 2)
____

3 LS - Burning building. Old Woman Clown running back and forth, yelling, "POOR BABY, OOH, OH."

4 CU - Old Lady Clown yelling, "SAVE MY CHE-ILD."

5 MS - Fire truck enters and throws clowns.

6 MS - Firemen land and run in confusion.

8.1 Clowns grab net - They all fall down.

9 Fireman cranks group of firemen up ladder.

10 Firemen on ladder come up into scene. Ladder out. Firemen fall out of scene.

18 MS - Four Firemen run in with net yelling: "JUMP, COME ON, JUMP."
____

It seems that originally this sequence was going to have a build-up to Dumbo's leap as big as the one in the earlier "Fireman Sace My Child" sequence, with several scenes of clowns fooling around as before. In addition to those actually included in the draft, there are also mentions of scenes 2, 7, 11, 12, 13, 14 and 16 as "No Scene" and 8, 15 and 17 as "Out of Picture". The difference in terminology might refer to different dates when these scenes were removed. At any rate, it appears that they gradually cut more and more of the build-up and eventually decided to just lose the whole thing and "cut to the chase".

Also, from the end of the sequence:
____

62 CU - Timothy in hat says, "THAT'S THE STUFF, NOW THE VERTICAL FLIP-FLOP."

51 LS - Dumbo weaves through tent poles and zooms out at upper left.

64.1 Dumbo's shadow on tent top. Timothy says, "YOU'RE MAKING HISTORY!"
____

Now, as you can see, this is another more complicated cut -- it seems that the visual from scene 62 was used to end the sequence, but with Timothy's dialogue from scene 64.1. Also notice the numbering - quite a few shots in this sequence have been rearranged, as noted on the draft - similar to the "Fireman Save My Child" sequence. The draft we have is of the sequence as a work in progress, after they had started and before they had finished rearranging and removing scenes.

Well, that's it for deleted scenes. But the realms of "what could have been" extend further, with Michael Sporn posting some fascinating early storyboards on his blog last month, many of which are of unused story concepts. I'll take a closer look at them in a later post.

Dumbo Deleted Scenes - Part 3

2010-06-13T18:17:00.005+01:00

As before, these are transcriptions from the draft posted on Hans Perk's A. Film L.A. blog - material that was deleted from the film is put in italics, the rest is included for the sake of context.

Sequence 12: Gossips disown Dumbo (Draft No. 1)

This missing section includes a few more shots of the "gossip" elephants speculating about what happened to Dumbo after the Pyramid Act disaster. You'll also notice if you look at the draft that the sequence begins with scene 13, and the note: "Scenes 1 through 12 inclusive are out". Either the sequence was originally longer and the beginning was taken out before they even reached draft stage, or scenes 1-12 were an earlier version of the whole sequence, which was later discarded and replaced by the version described in the draft.
___

15 CU - Catty with block of ice on head - "OH, THAT WONT BE NECESSARY, DEARIE ... THEY'VE FIXED HIM GOOD!"

16 MCU - Matriarch and two elephants. Matriarch: "WHAT DID THEY DO?" Ella: "DID THEY BEAT HIM?"

17 CU - Prissy: "DID THEY THROW HIM IN THE... AH... CLINK?"

18 CU - Giggles (hopefully) "DID THEY SHOOT HIM?" (Giggles)

19 CU - Catty: "OH, A LOT WORSE THAN THAT, MY DEARS!"

20 CU - Matriarch. Catty, o.s.: Continues: "HE'D BE BETTER OFF DEAD." Ad lib chatter: "GO ON, TELL US, TELL US!" Matriarch, angry: "I DEMAND TO KNOW!"

21 CU - Catty: "WELL, THEY'VE GONE AND.." She pushes ice back into place with trunk "..MADE HIM...OH DEAR, I JUST CAN'T SAY IT!" Matriarch, o.s.: "OUT WITH IT!" Catty "....MADE HIM A CLOWN!"
___

It's strange to hear one of the "gossip" elephants use Timothy's term "clink" ... don't they have their own term for it? (The Ringmaster was going to call it "jail" in the "Menagerie" sequence, but that line was also cut)

I'm not sure why these lines were taken out. Maybe the "ad lib" nature of the "chatter" meant that they were just never recorded? Was the gleeful "did they shoot him" deemed a little too harsh? Did they think that it would be more reasonable for Dumbo to have been shot or locked up, and they didn't want to call attention to the unusual nature of his punishment?

Sequence 14: Fireman save my child (Draft No. 1)

Scenes were taken out and shuffled around both before and after this first draft was typed up.
As we can see by the scene numbers as well as additional notes, scenes 2, 7, 14, 20 and 25 have already been taken out, and scene 12 has been moved to follow scene 22. Then, some time after the draft was written, scenes 18 and 21 were taken out, and 19 moved to between 16 and 17.
___

16 MS - Clown running in with sprinkler to flower box. Cocoanut [sic] tree springs out of flower box.

17 Two-shot. Big clown runs in with little clown who has barrel on back - takes out eye dropper and puts one drop of water on fire.

18 Two-shot. Old woman screaming - mouth wide open. Clown comes in with atomizer and sprays mouth.

19 LS - Firemen running up ladder to burning house and throwing water in Dumbo's face.

21 MS - Eskimo clown runs up to fire and warms [rear end].

22 MS - Dumbo in midst of smoke. Fireman climbs up and fans him.
___

With a bit of detective work we can also speculate that, before the draft was written, some scenes were added to give Dumbo more of a presence in this sequence, which otherwise might lose him amid all the clowning. A reaction shot of Dumbo is numbered 12.1, and scenes showing the effect of pouring gasoline on the fire, including another reaction shot of Dumbo, are 26.1 and 26.2. These numbers suggest these were late additions to the sequence. It may be that the rearranging of the other scenes was also to make sure that the audience didn't lose sight of Dumbo for two long at a time. I'm reminded of the Battle of Helm's Deep in the film version of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, where they made sure that one of the main characters was on-screen for at least every third shot, so the audience had a focus.

As for the missing scenes themselves: I'm not sure who "old woman" in scene 18 refers to, although I guess it would have to be the clown dressed up as the elephant woman. Presumably "atomizer" means a breath freshener... I guess the gag was taken out because it's almost identical to scene 12 where a clown does the same thing with water from a flower, but a little less "clown-like." The "eskimo clown" from the deleted scene 21 doesn't appear at any other point in the sequence, and I'm curious as to what he would look like, and how late he was removed from the film. Then again, the "captain" from scene 12 doesn't seem to appear in any other shots either (notice the blue coat and epaulettes).

Dumbo Deleted Scenes - Part 2

2010-06-04T10:33:00.002+01:00

It occurs to me I should have listed what the draft number has been for each sequence. I have therefore edited the previous posts to include this information.

Sequence 10: Ringmaster's Idea for Pyramid Act (Draft No. 2)
___

1 MLS - truck to MCU - Shadows of Ringmaster and Joe appear against side of tent. Ringmaster says: "WHAT AN IDEA! YOU KNOW, SOMETIMES I WONDER WHAT MAKES ME..."

3 MCU - Tim and Dumbo watching Ringmaster. o.s. Ringmaster: "SO SMART!" Tim talks over his shoulder to Dumbo: "HUH! HE NEVER HAD AN IDEA IN HIS LIFE -" Ringmaster continues: "JUST VISUALISE..."

4 MCU - Shadows of Ringmaster and Joe. Ringmaster tosses coat - Joe catches it. Ringmaster, excited, continues: "IN THE RING STAND SEVENTEEN ELEPHANTS!"

4.1 MCU - Shadow of Joe - "hangs up" coat, missing pet [?] and allowing coat to fall on floor. Ringmaster o.s. continues "ONE ELEPHANT CLIMBS ON TOP OF ANOTHER ELEPHANT UNTIL..."

5 CU - Ringmaster wriggles out of pants, kicks them up in the air and catches them, as he says: "...FINALLY ALL SEVENTEEN ELEPHANTS HAVE CONSTRUCTED AN ENORMOUS PYRAMID..."

6 CU - Joe's shadow. Ringmaster, o.s., continues "...OF PACHYDERMS!" Joe, puzzled, scratches his head - asks: "WHAT'S A PACHYDERM, BOSS?"

7 MCU - Shadow of Ringmaster - Tosses pants to Joe, o.s., as he says "THAT'S AN ELEPHANT, STUPID. HANG UP MY PANTS!"

8 CU - Joe's shadow - He catches pants, hangs them up as he says "GEE, BOSS, I DON'T KNOW HOW YOU THINK 'EM UP!" Ringmaster, o.s.: "THAT'S NOTHING!"

11 CU - Shadow of Ringmaster wriggling into nightshirt - continues: "THERE STANDS THE PYRAMID OF ELEPHANTS..." Arms shoot up thru sleeves - "I STEP OUT!" Head pops thru neck of shirt - "I BLOW THE WHISTLE!"

12 CU - Tim on tent-peg - Ringmaster continues... "THE TRUMPETERS ARE TRUMPETING - THE DRUMS ARE DRUMMING -" Tim stands up to listen. Ringmaster, o.s., very excited continues "...AND NOW..."

14 MCU - Shadows of Joe and Ringmaster. Ringmaster continues: "...COMES THE CLIMAX!" Joe: "YEAH... WHAT IS THE CLIMAX?" Ringmaster: "I DON'T KNOW"

16 CU - Tim. Ringmaster, o.s. "...DOT'S CHUST VOT I DON'T KNOW." Tim relaxes into disappointed expression - says: "I KNEW HE NEVER HAD NOTHIN' ... BUT STILL I WAS HOPIN'."

17 MCU - Shadow of Ringmaster - "WELL, MAYBE IT COMES TO ME IN A VISION WHILE I DREAM. GOODNIGHT, JOE." Climbs into bed. Joe, o.s. "GOODNIGHT, BOSS."
___

The main thing from this draft section that isn't in the final film is the Ringmaster explaining to Joe what a pachyderm is. I'm glad they took this out - it just feels like the storymen are calling attention to the fact that they know a word which they think the "average Joe" doesn't. Anyway, we already know that the Ringmaster is talking about a pyramid of elephants, so the audience should know what he means, even if they've never heard the word "pachyderm" before. I do think that the Ringmaster ordering Joe to hang up his clothes is funny though, just after insulting him.

Notice that one of the Ringmaster's deleted lines is written in a thicker German accent than the rest of the dialogue. I'm not sure why that is, although even in the final film he starts to sound more Germanic as he falls asleep.

Also noteworthy is that Timothy's line about "hopin'" the Ringmaster had an idea was cut. I'm not sure why he would hope this: it hasn't occured to him yet that this could be Dumbo's chance to shine. I guess Timothy himself sort of makes a living from the circus and wants it to be successful.

Notice that although the film does not retain the Ringmaster's full description of the pyramid act, he still says "seventeen" elephants will perform rather than the seven who do (or eight in the opening shot, for some reason).

Sequence 11: Pyramid Act (Draft No. 3)

Not really a deleted scene, but an alternative version of a line, at the start where the Ringmaster is announcing his act.

___

3.2 CU - Rearview of Ringmaster: ...PYRAMID OF PROUD, PONDEROUS, PULSATING.....

3.3 CU - Ringmaster:...PULCHRITUDINOUS PACHY. PACHY.....I GIVE YOU THE ELEPHANTS!

___

It appears that the Ringmaster struggles over the word "pachyderm" and gives up. In the film he has no such problem with the word. Once again, the film differs from the draft in that it does not make such a big deal about the word "pachyderm" - the film-makers aren't trying to call attention to their vocabulary.

Dumbo Deleted Scenes - Part 0

2010-05-30T19:45:00.005+01:00

(edited 4th June 2010 - see "Dumbo Deleted Scenes - Part 2")

OK, in the rush to get that first post out, I missed out a couple of things - nothing really major though, and the first one isn't really a deleted scene, because more changes seem to have been made than just removing some footage.

Ain't that just like me to forget?

(Once again, deleted material goes in italics)

From sequence 5 "Circus Parade" (Draft No. 1)
___

13 - Dumbo's mother pans through - Dumbo holding onto her tail. Dumbo runs underneath mother. She goes out, leaving Dumbo in the open.

14 - Mother looks back at Dumbo.

15 - Dumbo looks up, runs after mother and falls in mud.

16 - Rear view, parade going back toward tent. Dumbo runs in, trying to catch up with parade.
___

In the film, scenes 13 and 15 seem to have been run together. The important thing missing is the extra shot of Mrs Jumbo and the final rear view. I don't know what kind of expression Mrs Jumbo was supposed to have, but the fact that she just carries on ahead and leaves him to try to catch up seems uncharacteristically neglectful. When they finished putting the sequence together, it seems they decided to solve the problem of "What is Mrs Jumbo doing?" by ignoring it, and keeping Dumbo as the only character on screen. Having the final shot be of Dumbo fallen in the mud puddle with the crowds laughing once again keeps the focus on Dumbo's ears as the source of his misfortune. It also leads nicely into the following sequence, of Mrs Jumbo washing him.

In the "Elephants Gossip" (Draft No. 4) and "Timothy Befriends Dumbo" (Draft No. 4) sequences there are a few extra scenes/lines I didn't catch last time but nothing worth writing home about. In "Elephants Gossip", the line in scene 8 "Yes, but mother love doesn't have to be blind" seemed to become "...can hide a multitude of sins." Scene 14 and the accompanying line "I'll bet she's furious" were cut, as were a couple of shots where Timothy is frightening the elephants.

In scene 31 of "Timothy Befriends Dumbo" Timothy rejects one of his own (unmentioned) ideas with "Aw, no... that's old stuff..." before he overhears the Ringmaster coming up with an idea of his own. Unlike his deleted lines from earlier in the sequence, I can't think of much of an argument for keeping this one.

If anyone catches anything else on the draft that I should have caught bit didn't, please let me know!

Dumbo Deleted Scenes - Part 1

2010-05-23T16:14:00.005+01:00

(edited 4th June 2010 - see "Dumbo Deleted Scenes - Part 2")

It's a good time to be a fan of Walt Disney's Dumbo and animation history. Hans Perk has just posted up a(n almost) complete animation draft, which Mark Mayerson is currently using as a basis for one of his celebrated mosaics. Also, as in the Pinocchio craze of '07, Michael Sporn is getting into the act by posting up some production drawings (including Bill Peet's bathing storyboard briefly glimpsed in the extra features on the 101 Dalmatians DVD).

The draft Hans posted isn't a final version - some scenes are uncredited on it, and some were cut from the film. It's these "deleted scenes" which I'm going to look at over two or three posts, starting with this one. The way I will do this is by transcribing the relevant parts of the draft and putting the deleted material in italics. Once again I would like to make it clear that what a draft calls a "scene" is what most people would think of as a "shot". I'll be using "scene" and "shot" fairly interchangeably here.

Probably the first material on the draft which was deleted from the film is in seq. 6.0 "Menagerie: Mrs Jumbo Goes Berserk". The relevant portion of the draft (Draft No. 2) is as follows:

45 - EXT CU - Mrs Jumbo's back legs - Skinnay reaches in between her legs - Pulls Dumbo out by the tail - Skinnay "C'MON OUT AND PLAY, LOP-EARS" Dumbo looks at Skinnay. Kids o.s. "MAKE A SAIL-BOAT OUT OF HIM!" Skinnay blows in Dumbo's ear. Dumbo looks at his mother, o.s., for help. [i]Skinnay grabs Dumbo's ears, jumps on Dumbo's back, and starts "Roman chariot" riding act. Kids, o.s., start laughing.[/i]

46 - EXT CU - Mrs Jumbo, very alarmed at Skinnay's treatment of Dumbo.

47 - CU - Skinnay in Roman chariot act. Mrs Jumbo's trunk lifts Dumbo out from under Skinnay - Skinnay falls flat - Kids, o.s., laugh harder than ever.

48 - MCU - Mrs Jumbo puts Dumbo between her legs. Pan with Dumbo, and truck in, as he runs to camera left and peeks around Mrs Jumbo's other leg. Kids o.s. "THE BIGGEST SLING-SHOT IN THE WOILD!" Kid's hand reaches into scene - grabs Dumbo's ear - stretches it - Snaps it in Dumbo's face - Dumbo squeals, hurt.

49 - EXT CU - Mrs Jumbo, angry - reaches with trunk past camera. Kids' o.s. laughter changes to frightened yells.

50 - MCU - [Rear ends] and feet of kids scramming out of scene. Skinnay is grabbed by Mrs Jumbo's trunk, hung over rope and paddled. Skinnay: "HELP! MAMA!" Kids, o.s. "HELP! SHE'S MOIDERIN' SKINNAY!"

The main thing which didn't make it into the final cut was Skinnay's "Roman chariot act." Maybe this is an example of Walt's desire for restraint, as witnessed in his decisions for the mourning scenes in Snow White or the "Your mother can no longer be with you" scene from Bambi. Alternatively, it could be that there was no way to animate it convincingly. Perhaps most importantly, limiting Skinnay's torments to blowing into and snapping Dumbo's ears helps to keep the focus on the large ears - if he were to jump on top of the poor elephant and ride him like a chariot he'd be mocking him all right, but not mocking the size of his ears.

A few more scenes were cut from this sequence.

53 - CU - Ringmaster cracks whip - yells: "DOWN, MRS JUMBO!"

54 - EXT. CU - Mrs Jumbo dodges whip.

54.1 - CU - Ringmaster. Cracks whip again. Turns to yell: "CALL THE RIOT SQUAD!" etc.

55 - MCU - Five or six roustabouts run in thru curtains, carrying pipes, ropes, etc., shouting. Ringmaster, o.s. yells "KELLY! RIOT SQUAD!" etc.

56 - MCU - More roustabouts run into sideshow thru side-door.

57 - CU - Ringmaster yelling "GET THE CHAINS! SURROUND HER!" Cracks whip at Mrs Jumbo, o.s. Roustabouts swarm into scene, hiding Ringmaster from view.

These cuts were probably made to quicken the pace of the scene - the film no longer contains a reference to the "riot squad". Note the odd reference to "Kelly", addressed by the Ringmaster. The animator of these scenes was named Walt Kelly - was this unseen character named after the animator, or did the typist just make a mistake?

Finally, the last shot in the draft for this sequence includes an additional line for the Ringmaster.

74 - CU - Mrs Jumbo's water tub (same tub Dumbo was bathed in at start of sequence) Ringmaster is soused in tub. Stands up in tub, dripping wet, very mad. Yells: "TAKE HER AWAY! PUT HER IN JAIL!"

In the film, he just seethes. The line is unecessary as the next shot is of Mrs Jumbo in "jail", and cutting the line means that the audience experience a mood shift (from "relishing Mrs Jumbo's short-lived victory" to "sympathy for Mrs Jumbo's plight") at the start of a sequence, rather than a few seconds before the end of one.

The draft (Draft No. 4) for seq. 9.0 "Timothy befriends Dumbo" contains some missing dialogue for Timothy.

19 - CU - Dumbo looks doubtfully at one ear, wiggles it, then becomes very proud, smiles, looks at other, wiggles it. Tim, o.s.: "YA KNOW, LOTS OF PEOPLE WITH BIG EARS ARE FAMOUS." Dumbo reacts to "famous," looks down at Tim, o.s.

19.1 - CU Dumbo, draws his head back in surprise as Tim runs up Dumbo's trunk. Tim says "FAMOUS. NOW, LOOK DUMBO..." Dumbo cross-eyed as he watches Tim. Tim: "IF YOU'RE FAMOUS, THEY DON'T MAKE FUN OF YA, YOUR MA DON'T GET SORE..." Dumbo's eyes uncross as he watches Tim. Tim turns suddenly to face Dumbo. Tim: "IF SHE DON'T GET SORE..." Tim runs back up the trunk to between Dumbo's eyes... "THEY LET HER OUTA JAIL 'N EVERYTHING'S OKAY!" Tim turns and starts towards end of trunk again. Dumbo's eyes uncross again as he watches Tim. Tim: "OH BOY! ALL WE GOTTA DO IS BUILD AN ACT!" Dumbo's eyes cross again quickly as Tim rushes back, taps Dumbo on the forehead as he says "...MAKE YOU A STAR!" Tim jumps up in the air as he says "A HEADLINER!" Dumbo's crossed eyes go up and down, following Tim. Tim runs toward the end of the trunk.

It's a good thing they took out the "If you're famous, they don't make fun of ya". While I'm sure there was much less celebrity mocking in 1941 than there is now, they still made fun of famous people. Heck, Timothy's previous line about big ears just goes to show that. Unfortunately, it also means there's not much of an explanation for why Timothy tries to make Dumbo famous, or what this has to do with his earlier offer to "help get your mother outa the clink." Maybe it was cut because someone in authority thought that too much spoken dialogue (well, monologue) was "boring" or something, but Timothy's logic is a little suspect... with Mrs Jumbo chained in a wagon, would she really get much of a chance to show she isn't "getting sore" at the treatment of her son?

I'll leave it here for now... if you're interested in finding out more about these or any other scenes from the film - such as who animated them, check out Hans' posts (although you can only see as far back as the May 2nd post, most of the others can be seen by looking for April 2010 posts), or, if you feel the need for the scenes to be identified visually, just keep an eye out for Mark Mayerson's marvelous, magnificent... I think I'm turning into the Ringmaster. I give you, the mosaics.

No-one... but Donald Duck!

2010-03-31T17:49:00.009+01:00

When I was a kid I got a set of three videos with Disney shorts on them. They were:

Celebrate With Mickey
Mickey's Circus - starring Mickey and Donald
Foul Hunting - starring Goofy
Beach Picnic - starring Donald and Pluto
Mickey's Birthday Party - starring Mickey, Donald, Goofy, and others
Wide Open Spaces - starring Donald
Man's Best Friend - starring Goofy

Donald's Birthday Bash
Donald's Happy Birthday - starring Donald
Contrary Condor - starring Donald
Crazy Over Daisy - starring Donald
The Eyes Have It - starring Donald and Pluto
The Flying Squirrel - starring Donald
Wet Paint - starring Donald
Clown Of The Jungle - starring Donald

Frontier Pluto
R'Coon Dawg - starring Mickey and Pluto
Flying Jalopy - starring Donald
Pluto's Playmate - starring Pluto
Moose Hunters - starring Mickey, Donald and Goofy
Donald's Nephews - starring Donald
T-Bone For Two - starring Pluto

Notice something here? (Besides the fact that you'd think they'd have a trio of videos named after Mickey, Donald and Goofy, rather than Pluto)

Mickey appears in
Celebrate With Mickey - 2 (co-starring with Donald and Goofy)
Donald's Birthday Bash - 0
Frontier Pluto - 2 (one co-starring with Pluto, one co-starring with Donald and Goofy)

...and by "co-starring with" you can pretty much read "upstaged by".

Pluto appears in
Celebrate with Mickey - 1 (co-starring with Donald)
Donald's Happy Birthday - 1 (co-starring with Donald)
Frontier Pluto - 3 (including one co-starring with Mickey)

Donald, on the other hand, appears in
Celebrate With Mickey - 4 (three with co-stars, one solo)
Donald's Birthday Bash - all of them (including one co-starring with Pluto)
Frontier Pluto - 3 (including one co-starring Mickey and Goofy)

Not only is Donald the only one to appear in all the cartoons on his own video, but he generally appears in more cartoons in the other videos than their supposed stars. AND his video has more cartoons on it than the other two.

I guess that's what people want. Donald by the barrelfull.

Fridge brilliance and Donald's Lucky Day (Disney, 1939)

2010-03-21T18:23:00.004Z

The TV Tropes website defines fridge brilliance as a circumstance where your reaction to something you read, watch or listen to is one of confusion and annoyance, but which, at some unspecified point later (proverbially, when you are just going about your life, opening a fridge to get out some food or drink) makes you go "A-ha! NOW I get it!"

Hans Perk posted the animator drafts for the cartoon "Donald's Lucky Day" in August 2006. The following month, Mark Mayerson posted a mosaic of the short, a critique of the story and some thoughts on the animators. It's the critique of the story which I'm mainly interested here, I just provided the other links for background info.

Some of Mayerson's critiisms are deserved: for example, the cat just disappears after the bomb goes off, and the fish are eaten by a smarm of anonymous cats rather than the one who's been appearing throughout the cartoon, which isn't a very satisfying ending. (Actually, it suggests the poor cat was blown up or drowned, which probably wasn't their intention) It would have been better if it had ended with the "hero" cat chowing down on fish, and Donald doing one of his end-of-cartoon "aw, shucks" type chuckles.

However, another of his comments is that Donald "would have been luckier if he lost the package immediately and saved himself a lot of effort." However, this would be impossible, because... it was still Friday 13th! The bomb is supposed to go off at 12 o'clock, right? So, up until that happens, it's Friday 13th and Donald is having an unlucky day. After the bomb goes off, it's now Saturday 14th. Donald exclaims "This is my lucky day!" meaning the new day that's just started. In fact, in the opening scene with the gangsters, they refer to the bomb as a "valentine", so they're thinking of it as going off at the start of the 14th (February, that is) as well.

OK, I don't know if that's what the intention of the writers/animators was. If it was, I guess the main problem is that they didn't make it clear enough. So, here's my revised ending:

Donald gets covered in fish. He hears on the radio something like: "When you hear the sound of the tone, the time will be 12 o'clock, midnight. That's the end of Friday 13th. Did you all make it?" Donald, overjoyed: "Oh boy! This is my lucky day!" Then the cat emerges out of his hat, gobbles down a fish, and rubs against Donald's face. Donald chuckles awkwardly. End.

The Lion King makes no sense, etc.

2010-02-28T15:09:00.006Z

Last night I had to put up with about ten students of varying degrees of drunkenness tonelessly "singing" a bunch of songs from the Silver Age Broadway-influenced era of Disney films. Probably the part of that which really epitomises the whole "fun to think back on, but not so great to actually endure" side of it is when all ten of them bellow the *spoken* parts of the songs.

Incidentally, I'm not so straight-laced that I can't enjoy a bit of mirth and music. But while I love Singin' In The Rain, The Bandwagon, and the style of songs from the 1940s which often appear in musicals from around that time, I'd never say I'm a "fan of musicals" because for most people that means being a fan of Les Miserables, Evita... um... you get the idea.

One of the things I brought up to the other people who were less than enthralled by this little music-fest (or rather, to anyone who I thought was likely to listen) was that many of the words from the Lion King songs make no sense in the context of the film. Simba sings about "the spotlight" and Scar makes a metaphorical remark about "the lights are not all on upstairs" (referring to the Hyenas' stupidity). It extends beyond the songs, too: Zazu says that Scar would make a "charming throw-rug". But the characters in the film should have no knowledge of electric lights, or furniture, or anything like that. There's no technology in their world. I know, they should have no knowledge of the English language either, but we can accept that as part of the internal logic of the film. Just like, if they actually *had* electric lights and so on, we could accept that as part of the film's internal logic, but not if they *don't* have any but still talk and sing about them.

(Incidentally, when I mentioned to one person about there being "internal inconsistencies", he pointed out that some of the animals, e.g. the antelopes, don't speak. That's an entirely different issue, and one I expect to write about in the near future.)

I guess anachronistic references in Disney films can be traced back to The Sword in the Stone, where there was a clearly established mediaeval setting, but where Merlin was able to reference things from the future -- always to the confusion of other characters -- because of his magic powers. This was taken to it natural conclusion (?) with the Genie in Aladdin. But then with The Lion King it just seemed to become "comic characters can know everything."

There should be a page for this on "TV Tropes", which deals with other media besides TV -- in fact there probably already is one, I just don't know what to look for. Basically, I'm meaning where a film establishes a world with its own internal rules, and then one character breaks these rules by making a joke about something no-one in that world should know about. This sort of thing doesn't always matter, of course. No-one cares about anachronistic jokes in Monty Python and the Holy Grail because the film doesn't try to pretend its world has any sort of rules about what its characters are or aren't familiar with. Shrek's kind of a grey area. I don't think Donkey should know what an in-flight movie is, because there are no planes in their world, but it doesn't feel like quite such a big deal somehow.

Vindication, like

2010-02-18T21:36:00.003Z

As part of my Museum studies course, I am expected to read a fair amount of "theory". This doesn't just mean reading about doing something without actually doing it, but more along the lines of "literary theory", or, if you will, "philosophy." And one of the books which I borrowed from the library to provide some of that theory was called "The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern" by Fredric Jameson. I've only read bits of it, but it's got some interesting things to say about our culture in general, including the popular kind.

It was interesting to read (on page 8, if you're interested in looking for yourself) the author's argument that Star Wars is a "nostalgia film" despite the fact that it doesn't actually take place in the past (well, not in a real past anyway), because it conveys the past by invoking an art form (old-time adventure serials) from the past. It then goes on to say that Raiders of the Lost Ark does both - it suggests the 1930s not just through its setting but through it's storytelling techniques.

Now, that's pretty much what I was saying about Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in my earlier post, although at the time the book was written, Raiders was the only Indiana Jones film on offer. They don't just take place in the 1930s, they take place, in effect, in a film made in the 1930s.

So, it's nice to know that the experts are agreeing with me. Maybe that means I'm kind of an expert as well.

Everybody do the Kennedy Buster dance!

2010-02-07T17:28:00.022Z

"Hare Today, Gone Tomorrow" was the first episode of "Tiny Toon Adventures" to be made, although seventeen other episodes were broadcast before it. It was written by Tom Ruegger, Wayne Kaatz, Gordon Bressack and Charles M Howell IV; directed by Ken Boyer and Eddie Fitzgerald, and animated by Kennedy Cartoons. You can watch it on the Tiny Toon Adventures Season 1 Volume 1 DVD.

In the first act of the episode Elmyra captures Buster, involving a lot of wacky high-jinks in Elmyra's house and a long phoney death scene for Buster.

The second act has Buster discovering Elmyra's other mistreated pets and setting them all free, but then getting re-captured himself.

The third act has the other characters, led by Babs, rescuing Buster and them all giving Elmyra a taste of her own medicine in an elaborate "Planet of the Bunnies" setpiece.

More thoughts on this episode from the animation fan community can be found on this discussion thread, where Speedy Boris describes it as a "very uneven mix of "80's adventure story" and [...] Looney Tunes-esque humor". In this interview Tom Ruegger seems to say that Fitzgerald directed the first and third acts, with Boyer directing the middle act. It makes sense that the middle act had a different director, as it is very different in tone. Although it contains a few gags, it doesn't have the Bob Clampett manic energy of the first or third act. (I'm not criticizing Ken Boyer, who directed several great episodes of the series) If Fitzgerald did direct 2/3 of the episode, though, it seems strange that most of the credited artists (storyboards, character layouts) are from Ken Boyer's unit.

Ruegger also describes the episode as "very bizarre half-hour story that feels more like three shorts", which suggests to me that each act had a different writer. I suspect that Bressack and/or Howell had something to do with the middle act where Buster releases the other pets from their cages, as similar scenes occur in "Sawdust and Toonsil" and "Hare-Raising Night", which they also wrote.

Apparently the third act was heavily re-written by Eddie Fitzgerald. I don't know whether the entire "Planet of the Bunnies" sequence was his idea, or whether he just expanded it and took it in his own direction, but it is a brilliant virtual non-sequitur. You might expect something like this to be the main part of an episode, but here it's just a bit on the end, which comes pretty much out nowhere.

It contains a lot of references to Bob Clampett's cartoons from the Golden Age of Warner Bros.

The giant pair of lips is from "Tin Pan Alley Cats" where jazz music sends a Fats Waller cat "outta this world" and into a WW2-era version of Wackyland. I don't believe they are announcing a science-fiction double-feature.

The scene where Buster and three other characters, disguised as Buster clones, all hide in Elmyra's bed and scare her seems to come from "Kitty Kornered" where Porky's cats disguise as Martians. Also, the little dance all the Busters do at the end of the scene was apparently inspired by the end of "Porky in Wackyland" where Porky discovers there are actually several Dodo birds and the one he has caught is not the last after all. And it contains a Clampett catchphrase "Now, we wouldn't say that!" That's three Clampett references in one short scene! It also inspired Glen Kennedy to create the Kennedy Buster Dance, something that would appear a lot in the episodes his studio animated.

Glen Kennedy, the animation supervisor of his studio, animated about two-thirds of this episode, (far more than usual) including the entire third act. His style is pretty easy to spot once you know what it is, but it really looks much more expressive in motion than these frame-grabs can show. One technique which I think is unique to his animation is when characters point up into the sky for no apparent reason.

Additionally, there are a few scenes which he doesn't appear to have animated, but which nonetheless contain some of his poses, such as a character running off-screen by stretching out of the frame and leaving his or her head behind.

The gag credit no doubt refers to the omnipresence of Glen's animation.

One short sequence, in which Buster dresses as a doctor, was by Jon McClenahan, when he was the only animator at his studio, StarToons, and was taking work from other studios. By his own admission he had not quite got a handle on the characters. He would go on to do great things in the rest of the series.

There are a few more scenes here and there which might be examples of his work before it grew into what it became. The shot above is from one such scene: it comes right after the "doctor" bit and seems to have been inspired by some of Chuck Jones' 1960s work.

You can understand why this episode was delayed instead of being the series premiere. Some of the character roles are pretty strange: Elmyra is treated as some sort of arch-nemesis, Babs is a presenter with nothing to do until the third act and who spends most of the time in her "Tinkerbunny" outfit. Plucky and Hamton make cameos outside the action (they show up out of nowhere during the "death scene", and only Buster seems to be aware of their existence). And Buster and Babs' accomplices for their plot against Elmyra are a strange mix of Furrball, Fifi and Tyrone Turtle!

Also, Charlie Adler hasn't quite got the hang of his Buster voice, especially during his death act. Acme Acres is vaguely defined as a "land of magic and enchantment".

The actual first episode to air, "The Looney Beginning" (an "origin story" which was the 48th episode to be produced), has more to recommend it as an introduction to the series, with Babs and Buster as the main characters, Montana Max as the villain, and the creation of Acme Looniversity. But I do kind of like the strange quirkiness of "Hare Today" - a look at how the series *might* have turned out.

Nothing but the lies

2010-01-26T21:57:00.004Z

I know that Captain Pugwash didn't really have crew members called "Master Bates" or "Roger the Cabin Boy". I know that the Cookie Monster from Sesame Street was not renamed the Veggie Monster as some sort of evil plan to indoctrinate kids into eating more healthily.

(Of course, I'm using "evil" sarcastically here. Although a plan to introduce healthy eating to kids could have a morally suspect element to it, if the plan is to make kids healthy enough to form an army of muscle-bound troops to help you take over the world. But I don't think that's on anyone's mind when they whine about the government having the audacity to try to stop their kids from getting heart diseases.)

The Sesame Street one I learned on snopes, the Pugwash one I knew from being familiar with the Pugwash *books* from my kidhood, confirmed by snopes. I have heard both of these claims stated as fact. I could have replied "That's not true..." but they were unlikely to believe me, and if I did convince them I'd just have been a kill-joy. So I kept my mouth shut and let them enjoy their slanderous anti-nutritious fun. Maybe I was right to do so, or maybe that just leads down the path to ignoring other, more important truths and tacitly accepting other, more damaging lies.

Oh, and if you want PG-13 names in Captain Pugwash... well, one of them is called Willy. How snickersome. But his last (or first) name is not Gilligan.

Four-eyes

2010-01-23T12:27:00.005Z

When I was a small kid, I remember having a typically small-kid-like top with a picture of a dog as an aviator on it. Also, the writing "Dog Gone Flying". The dog had a cheerful, friendly face, he didn't look evil or anything. However, there was something a bit disturbing about him. His face was quite small, compacted down in the lower part of his head. That's not disturbing, it an be quite appealing. What was distrurbing was the fact that, up on his high forehead were a pair of goggles... over another pair of eyes!

In the absence of any photos of this garment, here's a rough impression of it on MSPaint based on memory.

Hello, all you happy people.

2010-01-17T13:05:00.006Z

One of the presents I got this year was the DVD set of the theatrical Droopy shorts. It wasn't one of the first I decided to check out... in fact, unlike some of the other DVDs I got, I didn't stick it in my DVD player until a few days later! I guess this is because I had the feeling that these cartoons didn't represent the best of what Avery did at MGM, and that while I was watching them, something would remind me of a better Avery MGM cartoon, and I would wish I was watching that instead.

I think my negative feelings about the Droopy cartoons came from a specific group of them, from around 1950, which pitted Droopy against Spike the bulldog. They were built on a blackout gags formula, in which Droopy and Spike are competing for something, and so Spike tries various schemes against Droopy (either trying to kill him, or just make him fail at something) which all backfire in exactly the same way. The humour levels really seem to go down after the first four where he is pitted against the wolf.

As it turns out though, there were some other good ones made around the same time... "Out-Foxed", for example, and even "Droopy's Double Trouble", although it does feature Spike, is much more enjoyable to me than the five Spike and Droopy entries which came before it. This was the last Droopy cartoon Avery made before his sabbatical and brief replacement by Dick Lundy, and if the quality of the Droopy shorts are anything to go by, it was a much-needed break.

The following cartoons (on Disc 2 of the DVD set) are much more inventive, funny, and inventively funny. Even though "Three Little Pups" is a blackout-gag cartoon, it is still one of my favourites, and contains one of my favourite Avery gags (ironically featuring a bulldog)...

"Break it up, son. Joke's over."

Most of the post-sabbatical Droopy cartoons have a Western theme to them, and this may have been Avery's element.

Now, the last few shorts were directed by Michael Lah, and I was expecting the quality to plunge. But, interestingly enough, it doesn't! I'm not saying it was a similar situation to the Popeye cartoons, where the first Famous entries were better than the last few Fleischers - as I said above, the weak phase for Tex's Droopys came much earlier. I did enjoy them a lot more than those earlier "weak phase" Droopys though. "Grin and Share It" is based on the same formula, but, well, I prefer it. "One Droopy Knight" is largely a remake of the earlier "Senor Droopy" but I find the mythical knights-and-dragons setting more suited to the basic story than the bullfighting arena.

(the only thing that "Senor Droopy" has in its favour over "One Droopy Knight" is the live-action end gag)

Hmmm... it's only when getting that screengrab that I was reminded that Senor Droopy's opponent is the wolf, not Spike. Well, I'd still classfy it as one of the weaker formula shorts, not in the same league as "Dumb-Hounded" through "Northwest Hounded Police".

Kaa, the incredible shape-changing snake

2010-01-10T00:39:00.005Z

From a Sterling Holloway stork to a Sterling Holloway snake...

I didn't notice this myself, I had read a very offhand remark about there being two different looks for Kaa in the Disney Jungle Book. So I decided to check it out:

Indeed, in the clip below (his second sequence in the film) he looks much cartoonier than in the clip above (his first sequence). His eyes are closer together and rise further above his head, his nose tapers out the way instead of in the way... and the general shape of his face allows for more variation in movement... actually, in the later sequence he almost looks like a serpentine Daffy Duck, say... mid-1950s, Chuck Jones unit.

The later design is certainly the better of the two, and probably the "definitive" look for the character, but I wonder why the earlier sequence has the different design? A common explanation would be that it had a different animator, but you'd think on a feature film like this they'd have a standard model sheet and diligent assistants to keep the drawings close to that model sheet. Another possibility is that they changed the design after they had already animated the earlier sequence, but surely they'd get someone to reanimate it, like they did with Dopey's soap antics in the washing sequence of Snow White. After Disney's death did consistency really fall apart?

As some people might not know, Woolie Reitherman, the director of The Jungle Book, was very fond of reusing animation. In this case, the scenes of Kaa unravelling (1:56 - 2:07 in the first clip, 4:55 - 5:00 in the second) are the same. This creates a continuity error: when he unravels in the second sequence, the way he's wrapped around the tree branches changes completely. It also makes the difference in the design stand out a bit more.

Oddly enough, some of the following footage in the second sequence is reused from the first sequence, while some is new. But, of course, even in the new footage he still has the (older?) first sequence design.

Oh, and if any of you are turned on by the thought of a ridiculously long snake hypnotising you and coiling himself around you... well, keep it to yourself, OK? ;)

A closer look at... a single line from Walt Disney's Dumbo

2010-01-09T10:53:00.005Z

"Look Out For Mr Stork", the opening song of the Walt Disney classic Dumbo, with lyrics by Ned Washington and music by Frank Churchill and/or Oliver Wallace.

You know, I wonder how much we can understand about the Disney "style" by looking at one of the lines: "Remember those quintuplets, or the woman in the shoe?" (1:37 - 1:41 on the video and oddly not subtitled).

"Those quintuplets" presumably refers to the Dionne quintuplets - the Wikipedia entry certainly thinks so at least. I probably have the commentaries on the Looney Tunes Golden Collections to thank for figuring that out. The cartoon "Baby Bottleneck" (Bob Clampett, 1946), in which Porky and Daffy have to help out the "overworked stork", features a scene where Daffy is answering phone requests, and at one point replies, in a shocked tone, "Mr Dionne, please!" Clampett obviously realised that at least some of the audience would understand that Dionne = unusual amount of childbirth.

Dumbo doesn't get so specific, but refers to "those quintuplets", almost like "Oh, yeah, I remember reading something about a set of quintuplets in the news once" and this reference is immediately followed by a reference to a nursery rhyme, which is also about an unusual amount of children.

There's a couple of ways to interpret this, neither of which is necessarily right:
Disney (as a company) wanted to prove it was "with the times" by including a fairly topical reference, albeit a very non-specific one, then, having exhausted that attempt, fell back on the more comfortably familiar world of nursery rhymes.
or
The lyricist wanted to include a fairly topical reference, but some higher authority at the studio prefered that the film remain "timeless" (kind of like how Disney didn't want the vultures in The Jungle Book to be a rock'n'roll group because he thought that style of music wouldn't last very long) and so insisted he downplay the specificity of the reference and immediately follow it up with the kind of reference that the studio had become more familiar for.

There's probably plenty of evidence against either theory, but I do find that line an interesting example of opposing directions at the Disney studio.

Look out, Itchy! He's Irish!

2010-01-04T18:12:00.004Z

When I was a kid I read this joke:

"Is this yours? The name's all smudged."
"No, my name is Allsop."

I didn't quite understand it. I assumed the joke must be that the name "Allsop" apparently looked like a smudge of ink, and that Mr Allsop was saying "No, it's not smudged, my name really does look like that."

I also read a similar joke.

"Is this yours? The name's obliterated."
"No, my name's O'Brien."

I am ashamed to say that not only did I not notice the similarity between the two jokes, but I didn't know what "obliterated" meant either. (I'm not sure how old I was at this point) I thought it might mean "has an O' at the beginning" and the joke was that the foolish Mr O'Brien didn't realise his name was indeed "obliterated".

It was may years later, and, actually, many years after learning what "obliterated" really meant, that I noticed the similarity of the two jokes (some things just come to memory like that) - they were really just versions of the same joke: Person 1 is expressing that he can't read the name, Person 2 thinks that Person 1 *is* reading out a name similar to Person 2's real name.

Of the two, I think that the "O'Brien" version works better, as it's more plausible that someone might think "O'bliterated" is a real name than that they might think "Allsmudged" is. The only problem is that it's potentially insulting to Irish people, as it seems to belong on the same genre as the "Englishman, Irishman and Scotsman" or the "Pat and Mike" jokes, where a character's Irishness is used as a signpost that he is meant to be stupid.

The thing is, I don't think the joke is offensive unless you're already aware of the "Irish = stupid" tradition in so many other jokes. The guy isn't called "O'Brien" because it's a name befitting a stupid character, he's called "O'Brien" because it sounds vaguely like "obliterated". But unfortunately, because of all those *other* jokes, we have to put up with the "Allsmudged" version or risk offending someone. If it weren't for those jokes we could tell the "O'Brien" one to anyone we wanted and have a good old laugh together.

Let the old Doctor die with a fond goodbye...

2010-01-02T17:43:00.003Z

The four years of Russell T Davies' tenure as Doctor Who showrunner corresponded to my four years at University. I don't mean they were similar (although if I really analysed it, maybe I might find a few similarities), but the year after I graduated, no Doctor Who series. But now I've started a post-grad at a different university and... guess what! This year there will be a new series of Doctor who with a different showrunner. Not only that, but my postgrad course is at Glasgow Uni, and the new showrunner is Steven Moffat, who comes from very near Glasgow. Incredible!

Even without that personal coinceidental reason, I'm one of the many people who thinks Steven Moffat would be a great choice to take over. His episodes have really made the most of the time-travel element of the series... in "Blink" the Doctor records half a conversation for someone several years in the future who will provide the other side of the conversation. In "The Girl in the Fireplace" he and his companions are on a spaceship where different portals lead to different points in the life of a historical figure. In "Silence in the Library" he meets someone who has already met a later incarnation of him. To be fair, other writers, including Russell T Davies, have also done this to an extent.

But one of Davies' flaws, in my opinion, has been an over-fondness of including scenes where something big is shooting down at people in a city (usually London) as they flee for their lives. "The Next Doctor" was a great episode... but it was let down somewhat by the fact that RTD just had to include that giant Cyberman. (Well... he didn't *have* to. That's the point I'm making.) Steven Moffat, on the other hand, has almost always gone for the simple-but-effective... or maybe that should be the simple-thus-effective: people in gas masks, clockwork androids, living statues which are never seen to move onscreen. Oh, and his episodes are terrifying in a way which only ideas and not in-your-face visuals can be.

In Russell T Davies and Benjamin Cook's "A Writer's Tale", Davies mentions that he wrote the final draft of all episodes except Moffat's, Chris Chibnall's, Stephen Greenhorn's and Matthew Graham's. We therefore can be sure that the Steven Moffat who writes six episodes of the 2010 series will be the same Steven Moffat who brought us those earlier episodes, and that what we have seen before was not a version of his style that was filtered through Davies' own.

We know a bit about some of the other writers who will return, courtesy of wikipedia - Chris Chibnall will write two episodes (one two-part story, perhaps?), as will Gareth Roberts. Chris Chibnall wrote the highly entertaining "42" in the 2007 series, as well as some of Life on Mars, so that should be good. Gareth Roberts' episodes have also been great so far, although "The Unicorn and the Wasp" can feel a little flippant compared to some of the others. Also, as Roberts had been rewritten by Davies for both of his episodes we've seen before, we may be encountering an entirely new Gareth Roberts this year. We don't really know how much of either "The Shakespeare Code" or "The Unicorn and the Wasp" were Roberts' own and how much were Davies'.

And now we come to the big one: Richard Curtis will be writing an episode, apparently including "Vincent Van Gogh stabbing a yellow monster". I'm slightly wary about this. In a BBC interview he mentions that it's "a treat for his children" and that he's glad that families can sit together to watch "something like Doctor Who and the X Factor"... I'm hoping that he isn't only writing for children and fans of the X Factor. It's also a little troublesome for me that he is writing an episode with a historical setting, given that he has previously written a very well known TV series with a historical setting, one where accuracy ranked probably lowest on the list of priorities. But I hope that with Steven Moffat in charge he's not likely to make the same types of Blackadder-esque blunders which have medieval English kings being rulers of "Britain", which includes Scotland...

A closer look at Snow White sequence 8A: Entertainment (part two)

2009-12-29T21:30:00.002Z

Continuing from the previous post, this is an interesting sequence when it comes to casting as well, although the assignment of Snow White's scenes are enough to cause a headache!

Scenes 4, 49C and 58A credit two animators when Snow White is the only character on screen, and 23, 31, 37, featuring Snow White and the dwarfs, credit two Snow White animators (supervisor Ham Luske alongside either Grim Natwick and Jack Campbell) alongside one dwarf animator, despite the fact it would seem more logical to have one Snow White animator and two dwarf animators. To the list of scenes with two Snow White animators we can add 9, (Ham Luske and Paul Busch), 26 (Ham Luske and Marc Davis, Grim Natwick's assistant) and 28 (Ham Luske and Max Gray, who, as speculated before, could have been Luske's assistant)... and, following their example, 39 (Ham Luske and Amby Paliwoda). But they're maybe not quite as definite.

In fact, throughout the draft, no matter how many dwarfs are on screen, it is incredibly rare to have more than one dwarf animator credited. This sequence has several scenes of dwarfs playing instruments in the background while others do more interesting things in the foreground, yet each of these scenes credits only one dwarf animator. There could be an ommission in the draft, of course. Sequence 4C is full of them, and, in this sequence, we can assume that scene 49A must contain the work of at least one Snow White animator, even though only Spencer is credited.

The dwarf casting in this sequence partly follows some casting-by-character guidelines, and partly ignores them. Fred Moore and Bill Tytla get a few scenes, starting with some miscellaneous ones at the beginning. Check out Bashful's movements when he yodels in scene 5! Definitely the same animator who gave us Sneezy's convulsions in the "Spooks" sequence. Oddly enough, while Moore also animates the first half or so of the Tall Dopey scenes, it's Fred Spencer who animates the sneeze, despite the fact that Moore animated two of them in "Spooks".

There is a general sense of Dick Lundy "playing" Grumpy, with Marvin Woodward handling Bashful, Fred Spencer Dopey and Les Clark Sleepy. This type of casting can be seen in other sequences as well. However, there are no clear rules: for example, Les Clark animates scene 25A of Dopey picking up a symbal... although he is about to hand it to Sleepy, the latter dwarf is not in shot. Fred Spencer gets a quick shot (scene 40) of Bashful. Spencer animates Grumpy, Sleepy and Bashful in scene 53 (the three dwarfs to be fairly consistently cast, and usually *not* with Spencer!) Les Clark animates Dopey sliding down the pillar in scene 61. The uncredited Riley Thomson gets a few brief shots of various dwarfs towards the end, including an uncharacteristically energetic Sleepy in scene 49G.

There is no real consistent casting of the less prominent dwarfs, which, in this case, includes Doc! Also, Bill Tytla gets Happy's solo verse and tap dance at the beginning. Does anyone have any ideas why this might be?

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the continuity error. Scenes 44 and 45, followed by 49E, show pairs of hands which, judging by the sleeves, must belong to Dopey, even though Dopey is currently standing on Sneezy's head and dancing with Snow White. The draft simply refers to "hands".

In this interview, Wilfred Jackson, who directed this sequence, recalls an animator who did several Dopey scenes but whose name he cannot recall. It seems very likely he's thinking of Fred Spencer.

A closer look at Snow White sequence 8A: Entertainment (part one)

2009-12-26T16:53:00.004Z

The draft for this sequence, where the dwarfs make merry and entertain Snow White with the yodelling "Silly Song", was posted up by Hans Perk here. Although unfortunately none of the sequene directors are mentioned on the animator draft, we know from elsewhere (such as this article) that this sequence was directed by Wilfred Jackson, and that unlike with "Spooks" (sequence 4D) directed by storyman Perce Pearce, Jackson does not seem to have had any story input for this "Entertainment" sequence.

Barrier mentions that the storymen who *did* work on it had trouble fitting the individual dwarfs' personalities into the sequence, and I can understand that -- it's the sort of situation which, like the deleted soup-eating sequence, lends itself better to generic slapstick than character acting, but they pulled it off pretty well. It does seem a little surprising to see Grumpy in particular joining in with the music-making, but at least he's playing a pipe organ (which audiences might assoicate with churches, and therefore think of it as a more "serious" instrument?), sits with his back to the others and gets exasperated when Bashful disrupts his timing. One might expect Doc to take more of a supervisory role - trying to conduct or something - but I guess unlike most "control freaks" Doc does know how to unwind. :)

Snow White can feel more timeless somehow than other Disney features... Silver Age features can be criticized for the way they "modernize" traditional stories, but Disney's innovations, such as the dwarfs' names, feel much more universal or, from seventy-odd years later, traditional than the likes of, say, Robin Williams' humor as the Genie in Aladdin.

This sequence is an exception though. The lyrics to the song root this film in a fairly specific time frame and context. Happy's verse ("I love to dance and tap my feet, but they won't keep in rhythm) is a comical apology for inadequate dancing, which plays on the sort of excuses a woman might make for untidy hair ("You see, I washed 'em both today and I can't do nothing with 'em!"). It reminds one of songs like Irving Berlin's "The Best Things Happen While You're Dancing") from White Christmas (1955), which includes lyrics about being a "guy with two left feet". I don't really have a problem with that, though, despite its lack of consistency with the rest of the film (would the dwarfs *really* know about women trying to make their hair look nice? Would they really wash their feet, come to that?) I might feel differently if I lived in the '30s, though.

One shot of the dwarfs dancing is missing from the draft, except in a hand-written note "3 follows" after scene 2. Conversely, the half-minute scene 11 is listed in the draft but is nowhere to be scene in the film. The scene is described as "Sneezy sings verse - starts to sneeze - puts finger under nose". Maybe they decided one sneeze gag was enough for this sequence. I wonder if the lyrics to the verse survive?

Jack and Gus

2009-12-24T23:39:00.004Z

Every Christmas for the past few years I've got one of the Looney Tunes Golden Collections, and was very sad to see there wouldn't be another one this year. However, one of the presents I got this year (one of the two I got on the 24th rather than the 25th) was the Popeye 1933-1938 DVD! Having checked out a couple of shorts with commentary, I realise that the Bluto voice actor who probably voiced Mr Elephant would be Gus Wickie rather than Jackson Beck. I guess I should have looked it up rather than relying on my assumption Bluto = Jackson Beck.

Oh, and happy Christmas or whatever you do for fun on December 25th to all readers of this blog! (All two and a half of you...) :)

A closer look at sequence 4-D "Spooks"

2009-12-19T11:41:00.004Z

I think this was the first sequence to be animated after Bill Tytla's sequence 6-A "Dwarfs at tub washing" and Fred Moore's sequence 5-A "Bedroom". It was the first therefore to extensively use other animators on the dwarfs.

There are a few scenes by Moore and Tytla here, and they don't always seem to be cast with much rhyme or reason: Tytla was known for being best at Doc and Grumpy, and he does get most of the scenes where Doc gives orders and a few of Grumpy expressing his suspicion, but he also shares scene 39 with Babbitt, where the other dwarfs tell Dopey "We're right behind you!" I'm assuming Babbitt animated Dopey while Tytla animated the other dwarfs, but the way in which they are required to all speak in unison as a single unit goes against Tytla's deliberate intention to make all the dwarfs in the washing scene function as separate individuals, but it was probably what he was told to do, and he does get some slight variation in the chaarcters' gestures.

Fred Moore gets a couple of long scenes of comedy business, scenes 26 and 29, each measuring about 30 seconds and involving Sneezy's hay fever. Sneezy's almost snakelike contortions are a lot of fun to watch, but I can imagine it's the sort of thing Grim Natwick, which his anatomical realism, didn't like about Moore's animation!

Of the supporting animators, the ones who get the most sustained sections of footage are Art Babbitt and Fred Spencer, at the end of the sequence. Babbitt was assigned to Dopey, following his success with Goofy in the shorts, but got into a bit of trouble with management when he started improvising, something he always got away with in the shorts. In this sequence he animates Doc and the others sending Dopey upstairs, and Dopey reacting with (unusually vocal) terror at the sight of the yawning, stretching Snow White. Spencer takes over for the remainder of the sequence, when Dopey runs downstairs, and the others flee him, clobber him, and, after finally recognising him, ask him several questions about what he saw.

Both are fairly Dopey-centric scenes, with the other dwarfs mostly functioning as a single personality. Babbitt gets his fear and trepidation while Spencer gets his frantic energy and childlike suggestibility when he nods and mimes in repsonse to the other dwarfs' questions about what kind of monster he saw. Throughout the film Spencer was assigned to several Dopey scenes and scenes involving a lot of visual action.

There are a couple of scenes which must have been reinstated at the last moment - Scenes 17, where the dwarfs pass by the animals looking in through the window, and scene 25, where they discover the boiling pot on the fire. They are listed in the draft as being out, but this has been fixed in pen. Unfortunately there are no descriptions of the scenes, nor do we know who animated them...

You're not getting what you think you want, you're getting what you actually want

2009-12-17T23:24:00.005Z

I find it quite funny/interesting how this poster for Disney's The Jungle Book advertises "Kipling's famous characters", accompanied by images of characters who are in some cases very different from the way they are in Kipling's stories, and in one case (King Louie) entirely invented for the film. They must have been relying on Kipling's characters being not all that famous after all.

Also, apparently Bill Peet, the sole writer of both One Hundred and One Dalmatians and The Sword in the Stone, wrote an draft of the script which Walt Disney rejected on the grounds of being "too dark" and "too Kipling". As he was in the entertainment business, presumably his concern was that audiences wouldn't take to a film which was too much in the Kipling style or spirit.

That's where the irony (or whatever it is) comes in. The poster must have been designed for people who think of Kipling's name as a brand of quality and therefore would be encouraged to see a film when they see his name on it, but who are actually unfamilar with his work and, if they saw a film that really was a faithful adaptation, they wouldn't enjoy it.

Speaking of elephants...

2009-11-29T21:47:00.005Z

...which I was... um... depending on which order you read the posts. This is the Fleischer studios "Color Classic" titled "An Elephant Never Forgets."

I didn't put this up online, I just discovered it one day when I was browsing a few years ago. It would be great if there's a version of it out there in "Popeye Meets Sinbad" quality but even this copy is *much* better looking than the one I found back then.

There are still a lot of great things about this cartoon to enjoy though...

- The unmistakeably adult voices of this group of, presumably kids. It sounds like Mr Elephant is Jackson "Bluto" Beck and Gus Gorilla is Jack "Popeye" Mercer.

- The opening skipping song. "Rock-a-diddle-di-do-one-three-three"? What does that mean?

- The fact that, when Ferdie Frog pretends to be both himself and his sister, he uses the exact same voice for both of them.

- The names of the characters... usually alliterative, or just plain "Mister", then we have a cockerel named "Rooster Joe."

- The fact that the (swan? goose? stork?) teacher has absolutely no problem with the fighting that's broken out. My sister says she comes across as another kid who's only playing at being a teacher, and given that all the kids sound like adults, who's to say she isn't?

Ken Glennedy

2009-11-22T17:09:00.006Z

So, John Kricfalusi has posted up some of "Uncle" Eddie's Tiny Toons drawings on his blog. Interesting how he refers to the characters by the names of their Golden Age counterparts, and as being "babies" despite the fact that they are meant to be age 12-14 or so. I guess the Tiny in the name is kind of confusing, heck, before I saw any episodes, I thought the characters were called "Baby Bugs", "Baby Porky" etc. because that was the convention I knew about. Since I assume John K. knows better than this, I guess he's suggesting that the characters are rip-offs and immature, or something.

Fitzgerald was one of the first directors of the series (along with Ken Boyer, Art Leonardi and Art Vitello), and his name appears as a director on three of the earliest episodes, before his unit is taken over, first by Gerard Baldwin, then by promoted character layout / storyboard artist Rich Arons. After that Fitzgerald continued to serve as a writer and storyboarder (usually for the same unit, now under Rich Arons) and occasional director.

The subject of Kennedy animation crops up a lot in the comments. It has a bad reputation among TTA fans but I personally think it was just sometimes misused. Glen Kennedy himself animated (the majority of?) the first episode "Hare Today, Gone Tomorrow" and the segment "One Minute Til Three". (Sadly neither episode is available on YouTube, but you can find screengrabs at the above links)

In "Hare Today, Gone Tomorrow" the characters are not fully defined yet, and so a more "on-model" animation style might have helped to ground them as in some way consistent characters. "One Minute Til Three" on the other hand, is almost entirely devoted to Plucky's frantic mental state -- there is very little physical movement for the characters - and so Kennedy's wild distortions really make Plucky's feelings come across visually - it would be a pretty bland segment if Plucky stayed on-model the whole time. This is a similar situation to that described by Mark Mayerson in his 1980 article on Jim Tyer (and if you don't know who Jim Tyer is, then read this article and I guarantee you'll be seeking out certain Famous and Terrytoons shorts!).

Actually, Glen Kennedy (or at least Kennedy cartoons), Jim Tyer and John Kricfalusi do intersect in one TTA episode. The villain of the episode "Who Bopped Bugs Bunny" is a rival cartoon star named Stanley the Elephant, designed by John K. (his only connection with TTA) and based on the Terrytoons character Sidney the Elephant, originally animated by... Jim Tyer. Now, Glen Kennedy is only credited as a timing director on that episode, with Namcook Lee as animation director, but the scene where Stanley throws a diva fit with his director looks to my admittedly inexpert eyes like Glen might have animated it. It does look like it was animated by the Silver Age answer to Jim Tyer.

(Feel out of the loop because I'm talking about TTA episodes you've never seen? One solution to that: buy the DVDs! No, I don't get paid to write this, but it would be nice if I did.)

25/11/09 Edited to add: Jenny Lerew, another TTA charater layout / storyboard artist, has posted some of John K's Stanley the Elephant drawings on her blog, The Blackwing Diaries. Could anyone other than Kennedy have brought these to animated life?

Train of thought

2009-11-15T18:43:00.006Z

Ever been to the Museum of Transport in Glasgow? As a kid, obviously the preserved steam engines are the highlight. As a former kid, they still look impressive and are still, along with the other exhibits, great as a way of looking back to a past age, but their bright colours of blue, yellow and green somehow make it hard to imagine them being real. Maybe it's because most times one sees a steam train nowadays is in an old black-and-white film or photo, it's as if they really were monochromatic.

I know that pretty much every kid has at least a passing acquaintance with certain brightly coloured fictional locomotives, but I guess, subconsciously if not consciously, it seems as if their bright colours are as much a fantasy as their big grey faces.

Now, despite some momentary lapses on the part of some of my fellow students of 18th century Scotland, I think most people would think if a train showed up in a film set in 1745 they'd realise this was wrong. And yet, there was a railway *line* near Edinburgh from 1722, and one of the battles of the 1745 Jacobite uprising was fought along one! The line was used not by locomotives but by horses pulling wagons.

So, if someone made a film which included the battle, it would be more *accurate* to include the railway line, but it would be more *believable* not to... unless the film also included a scene with a horse pulling a wagon along the line. Which is more important? To portray history as it really was and risk people being pulled out of the film when they think you've made a mistake, or to change the facts so the audience will think you're remaining historically accurate?

You are getting Sleepy... Sleepy... no... not Sleepy, some other guy

2009-11-08T18:03:00.003Z

The Disney EverNotice site was a favourite of mine in my younger days, until it shut down. Fortunately, with the help of the wayback machine at archive.org, it is (sometimes) able to be seen again. And thanks to Paul Reiter providing a link over on A.FilmL.A., I was able to re-read an odd theory that was put forward on that site.

Visit the EverNotice Snow White page here, and scroll down the post by "Polar Bear" which begins "I've not seen the movie in a few years..." Basically, what the post says is that the character of Sleepy was a last-minute replacement for a different character, and that the evidence to support this is that Sleepy only appears for "a few minutes".

The strangest part of the theory is this: "Polar Bear" identifies another dwarf who appears in most scenes, with "a hatchet face and a red vest" who gets the lines "Goldenrods!" "Do you have to wash where it doesn't show?" and "Was it hard to do?" (in the lead-up to Someday My Prince Will Come).

The implication is that this other dwarf (with at least three lines of dialogue!) is a mysterious un-named character who appears in most scenes *in place* of Sleepy, but that's not really borne out by the film: the description matches Grumpy, Bashful says "Goldenrods" and "Do you have to wash..." and Sneezy (surprisingly, not Sleepy himself) asks "Was it hard to do?"

Incidentally (or not), Michael Barrier says the last dwarf name to be chosen was Sneezy, but that for a few days they were still considering "Deafy" instead. This was before animation began though. Still, you do have to wonder though: Sleepy and Bashful can look almost identical except for the facial expressions, there's a point at the beginning of the "Spooks" sequence where Sneezy seems to turn into Sleepy (scenes 5 and 7 on the draft), and scene 14, described in the draft of the "Entertainment" sequence as "Happy and Doc push Bashful forward" actually has Doc and Sneezy. One wonders if there were any points where one dwarf was redrawn as another...

A closer look at Snow White sequence 4A and 4B: the Heigh-Ho sequences

2009-11-01T22:51:00.002Z

The drafts for sequence 4A Dwarfs At Mine and sequence 4B Dwarfs March Home From Mine are on A. Film L.A. here.

Apparently, these sequences were nearly cut from the film (Barrier p.225), in
which case the dwarfs would have been introduced in the following sequence when the animals hear their singing in the distance and hurry to watch.

One advantage of keeping them in is the fact that the diamond mine is a good and memorable set-piece. I'm not sure if the individual dwarfs get a better introduction than they would in their next appearance. They are in small groups rather than all at once, but only Dopey and to a lesser extent Doc (and Sleepy I suppose) get a chance to show their personalities. Although Grumpy, Happy, Bashful and Sneezy are introduced in close-ups with individual singing lines, nothing they do or sing indicates what types of characters they are... it was up to the animators to convey personality.

For the close-ups, Bill Roberts introduces Happy and Grumpy, Marvin Woodward introduces Bashful and Sneezy, Les Clark introduces Sleepy and Art Babbitt introduces Doc. Group shots, particularly of the four digging dwarfs, seem to have been fairly arbitrarily cast, with the same group of characters animated by Al Eugster, Marvin Woodward and Shamus Culhane.

Eugster complained that very little of his footage remained in the film. (Barrier p.224) He does have the glory of having animated the very first dwarf scene to appear in the film, but as of the washing sequence (the most recent draft sequence to have been posted up) that seems to be all. We shall see whether any more of his work survived...

Of course, it's supervising animator Fred Moore who gets the main character stuff here, with Doc inspecting the gems and Dopey as his comical assistant, who tries to amuse Doc by placing diamonds over his eyes, accidentally throws himself into the vault and hangs the key up right next to the entrance where anyone can find it!

Frank Thomas' one scene is also of these two characters: a brief shot where Doc calls "Heigh-Ho!" to the other dwarfs to let them know it's time to go home. Thomas was apparently the first of the non-supervising animators to be assigned to the dwarfs (Barrier p.212) and, as with his first assignment in scene 5A where they first meet Snow White, he seems to have been given the material that Fred Moore didn't have time to do and wasn't important enough for him to do -- like a stand-in for a leading actor!

Shamus Culhane leads the dwarfs out of the mine and into the next sequence where the dwarfs return home. Perhaps in an attempt to acquaint the audience with their individual appearances, the first scene of sequence 4B: Dwarfs March Home From The Mine was to be close-ups on each dwarf, animated by the other dwarf supervisor, Vladimir "Bill" Tytla. The scene did not survive into the film, and the numbering (it is numbered 3 but placed before scenes 1 and 2) suggest that the directors weren't sure exactly where to place it anyway. Some nice scenes by Shamus Culhane, but unfortunately the effects animator responsible for the waterfall is not identified on the draft.

A closer look at sequence 3B - Snow White meets animals

2009-10-29T22:17:00.007Z

Definitely a Snow White craze - while at work this evening I saw a poster for a pantomime version of the story, and I overheard part of a lecture which quoted from a girl who had been to see another pantomime production of it in 1938. Probably one of the Disney-approved ones as they seemed to run the racket on Snow White performances at that time.

OK, open up the drafts on A. Film L.A. and stick Snow White in your DVD player, it's time to take a closer look at scene 3B - Snow White meets animals!

In Michael Barrier's book "Hollywood Cartoons" (which is what I'll probably mean when I refer to "Barrier" from now on) he mentions one of the problems which faced Disney and his employees during the making of the film was the casting of the dwarfs. It was impossible for one animator to handle all the dwarfs' footage, nor was it feasible to assign one animator to each dwarf as they spent so much time all on screen at once, interacting with each other. The result was to have several animators assign to the dwarfs, all of whom at some point animated *all* of the dwarfs, and therefore needing to learn the right way to portray all seven characters.

Presumably no such problem existed with the other group of characters drawn by a group of animators: the forest animals. They're less important to the story and less differentiated, with many being generic rabbits, squirrels and chipmunks. It's interesting to compare the designs to those used in Bambi, originally intended to be the second feature. They are more simply drawn than in the later feature, and I find this makes the rabbits more appealing than Thumper. The deer, on the other hand, I find both designs appealing, but the simpler Snow White design is probably less suited for a feature's main characters.

There are a few animals in this and later sequences who stand out as distinctive characters. Most memorable perhaps is the turtle, but there is also a family of deer and of bluebirds. No animator seems to have been consistenly assigned to these characters with the exception of the three bluebirds, who are usually handled by Eric Larson, including in a substantial section where the youngest of the birds sings with Snow White and hits a "sour note". This scene was obviously added to at a late stage, perhaps even during animation, because as Hans notes, scene numbers run from 15B to 15BBBBB!

Other than that, there are occasional consistent assignments: for example, Larson also animates both scene 9 where a group of squirrels flees into a tree trunk and 10A where they emerge from holes in the tree trunk. However, some assignments seem fairly arbitrary: while Bernard Garbutt animates scene 8 - a group of animals (inluding the doe and fawn) scurrying away, over a log, after Snow White wakes up, and scene 10B, featuring the same animals on the same background, the same set-up is animated at the beginning of the sequence in scene 3 by James Algar. No animator seems to "own" any of the animal characters, except for Larson with the three bluebirds.

All the animators working on this sequence were in Hamilton Luske's unit, as he was the supervising animator for Snow White and the animals. Barrier mentions he had seven animators in his unit: the three who animated the heroine (Grim Natwick, Jack Campbell and Robert Stokes) and the four who animated the animals (who he doesn't name but are presumably the four who animated them in this sequence: Eric Larson, Milt Kahl, James Algar and Bernard Garbutt). Luske also animated the Huntsman in sequence 3A and I'd expect he was the supervisor for the Prince as well, as he was animated by Grim Natwick and Milt Kahl. There are also two more mysterious names on the draft: Maxwell Gray and Tony Rivera. Gray animates the Huntsman in sequence 2B and Rivera's name appears alongside Campbell's, seemingly animating Snow White as well, in sequence 3A. It seems likely they were Luske and Campbell's assistants, respectively, and were assisting on the Snow White animation in this scene as well, but as the animals were also handled by members of Luske's unit, who knows?

Ham Luske actually drew a few of the animal scenes in this sequence himself, including scene 10, the first to feature the bluebird family who, as I mentioned before, were handled by Eric Larson the rest of the time. I wonder why this is. Did he have the technical expertise to animate the fancy flying they do, or did some person in authority feel that the supervisor should do the scene which introduces the characters?

In general Eric Larson animates the most scenes in this sequence and probably is most consistently assigned to specific characters. It's no surprise he became the supervising animator for all the (less anthropomorphic) animal characters in Pinocchio.

The draft Hans has been posting is not a final draft and so there are some interesting differences between it and the finished film. It contains several deleted scenes - this sequence has only one, 27A, and it already has a big question mark over it. There's also a small mistake: scene 15F has the same description as scene 15E, and should be something like "quails come out of cave". Other sequences contain many more scenes that were cut (or changed) later on -- keep checking both A. Film L.A. and this blog to find out more about them!

Snow White drafts!

2009-10-26T17:14:00.003Z

Hans Perk has started posting the Snow White animator draft to coincide with the release of the "Plantinum Edition". Will this be the start of a Snow White craze of 2009, like the Pinocchio craze of 2007? If so, I'm not going to be late this time! While I don't have any studio documents myself, I thought I would post some of my own thoughts and discoveries about the information on the draft Hans has so kindly decided to provide.

The casting of the early features interests me... unlike the later films which Hans has posted the drafts for, in Pinocchio and Snow White there were units of animators assigned to each character. We often read about how Snow White was animated by Hamilton Luske (supervising animator), Grim Natwick, Jack Campbell and Robert Stokes (and there's a great article about it here), some of whom also worked on the other "realistic" human characters (Natwick on the Prince, Stokes on the Queen). There also seem to have been units assigned to two distinct *groups* of characters -- the dwarfs and the forest creatures. In the case of the dwarfs in particular, this type of casting seems to have caused a few problems, as recounted in Michael Barrier's book "Hollywood Cartoons", and it will be interesting to see how this is reflected in the assignment of scenes to animators. So you can expect quite a few more posts here responding to the Snow White drafts posted on A. Film L.A.

How dumb do they think kids' TV fans are?

2009-10-16T10:00:00.008+01:00

When CITV stopped showing Tiny Toon Adventures at some point in the mid-90s, it was time to rely on buying videos. And thus I discovered the "volumes" of the series on video. These were not the motherlodes of silver-age goodness that the Volume 1 and 2 DVDs are today.

Volume One had New Class Day (segments), Kon-Ducki (full), Toons Take Over (full) and What Makes Toons Tick. It promised a "bonus 20 minutes" but there was none to be found - the small print explained quietly that this meant future volumes would only have three episodes on them.

Then came Volume Two, with Weekday Afternoon Live (full), A Cat's Eye View (segments), Acme Cable TV (full) and Love Disconnection (segments). You might notice that this video had four episodes on it as well. In fact, there was no indication on the back of the box that Love Disconnection was even on the video so maybe someone slipped it on in secret, who knows?

Then there was Volume Three. The blurb on the back announced that the episodes would be Duck In The Dark, Little Cake Of Horrors, Night of the Living Pets and Hare-Raising Night. If you know your TTA well, or take a look at the Tiny Toon Adventures Reference Guide, you'll realise that only Hare Raising Night is an episode - the rest are individual segments, from three different episodes. On the video the first three segments were packaged together like one episode, introduced by a clip from Love Disconnection - which, if you'll remember, was part of the previous volume! To make matters worse, the voice cast lists included the names of the episodes the segments came from, which increased the feeling of being ripped off (there's an episode called Best O' Plucky Duck Day??? why are we only seeing one-third of it?).

Next came Volume Four. I never bought that because the blurb on the back made it clear that it was just Volume One with a new box. Although it's possible it was actually *bits* of Volume One with a new box.

If you're gonna preach, for God's sake preach with conviction!

2009-10-09T09:05:00.003+01:00

People often call this Tiny Toon Adventures segment "preachy". I'm not really sure why. In order to be preachy, surely you have to be preaching something. People say it's preaching against eating meat, but when you compare it to the great Simpsons episode "Lisa the Vegetarian" (executive produced by vegetarian David Mirkin) it's really just a cartoon run-around in a factory, and an amusing look at the attitudes to meat production in a world of anthropomorphic animals. (No-one whines about classic Bugs Bunny versus Elmer Fudd cartoons being "anti-hunting" soapboxes, but then, the world has many more meat eaters than hunters)

Of course, the captions "Me" and "David" are not part of the actual episode; they are annotations added by the YouTube poster. I'm interested in the story behind them...

I do rather like the "Happy the Cow" bit (which puts me in mind of Suicide Food) but the gender-confusion irritates me, as you'd probably figured out.

And of course the ending kind of hits you over the head with the message that "this is a fantasy world where even vegetables have feelings - it has nothing to do with real life. We're not suggesting you actually go vegetarian or something!"

I can't speak for other vegans or vegetarians of course, but I expect both we and omnivores have problems with this cartoon, and for completely opposite reasons! But maybe I'm wrong. What do you think?

The effect of an indoor volcanic eruption on a gym roof

2009-10-07T21:42:00.005+01:00

There is one way in which this cartoon is dated... it didn't forsee the effects of social networking websites on goofing off. Other than that, I think it's fairly universal.

Oh, and for those of you who want the bare essentials, here are the rules of Buster's Guide to Goofing Off.

1. Time flies when you're goofing off.
2. Stop and smell the memories.
3. Never let on that you're procrastinating - people might think you're putting things off.
4. Never work on an empty stomach.
5. Short naps give you time to dream about what you're avoiding.
6. Do everything at the last possible moment.
7. Use short cuts whenever possible.
8. No matter what, always be able to run faster than those who don't follow Buster's Guide to Goofing Off.

Is it really worth pointing out that I should be working on an essay right now? :)

Spectre of the Subway

2009-09-19T20:03:00.007+01:00

Many, many years ago, I had a dream that I and the rest of the family were waiting for a train at Edinburgh Waverley station.

That's Waverley station there.

The train was sitting there in the station all right, but it wasn't doing anything.

Actually, it's only when I'm typing this post that I realise how silly an idea it is... sitting outside the train, waiting for it to move... so we can leave on it? Shouldn't we have been waiting on the train?

Oh well, maybe the doors hadn't opened or something.

Anyway, we were standing around, waiting for the train to move, and we had been doing that for ages, when I suddenly realised that the reason the train wasn't moving because it had nowhere to move. The track was only as long as the train was, and it was blocked off by solid wall at either end.

It also seemed after a while that the train was just a sort of orange pattern on the wall and/or floor, but that's kind of the way dreams work.

Well, this dream kind of stuck with me. Maybe it was the eerie silence of a station where the train didn't move. But it started to become a recurring dream, that of a train station where the trains were blocked off at either end.

It was only a couple of months ago, when I decided to visit the Glasgow Museum of Transport for the first time in over ten, maybe over fifteen years, that I finally discovered where the original dream must have come from:

This is part of the Museum's "Kelvin Street" display, which is a reconstruction of a hypothetical street in Glasgow in the... um... past. (Unfortunately I can't seem to get any images of the other parts of the display. I just have to recommend you visit it, if, like me, you like the uncanny feeling of being in a film noir, and cinemas which show cartoons like "Mr Duck Steps Out") It contains a replica of an underground station, with stationery old-fashioned train carriages sitting in it. Of course, the station doesn't have real tunnels on each side of it, it just has black tunnel-shapes painted on the walls... and compared to a real underground station, it is eerily quiet.

It's almost like the vision of Tombstone from the Star Trek episode "Spectre of the Gun." Dreamlike in itself... and most definitely the inspiration for a dream.

Can you dig it? I mean... You've got to dig!

2009-09-07T18:50:00.004+01:00

This is one of the series which was still there on the video when I found it in summer 2002, and, indeed, which I went on to make the website about. Educational kids' TV at its best. A series about everyday events which kids can learn basic scientific facts from. Animated fantasy sequences illustrating characters' thoughts. Songs which are outside the story's continuity which may or may not have been sung by members of the cast. Dialogue which doesn't patronize the five-or-six-year-old kids in the audience but which doesn't aim too far over their heads either... (Actually, one of Charles Way's episodes would have illustrated this point a bit better) in particular, no smirking innuendo. You can read what I thought about the series back in Ought Two here.

Oh, and those shots of flowers opening up seemed to be in every schools TV programme back in the early 90s.

It's just another parcel!

2009-09-07T12:24:00.005+01:00

Well... here he is! Check him out in all his lampshade-headed glory! It's Mr Boom! (or "Mr Boon" as continuity announcers would sometimes call him, presumably expecting a full rhyme with "Moon".) I don't remember this one (obviously, since it doesn't involve building a house) and you might notice the watching Earth bit actually comes *after* the guest... but before Mr Boo[m/n] gives us a song.

I'm not too impressed that the opening sequence seems to have been cut off, but I'm glad to see the complete (and rarely-shown IIRC) closing sequence on the end. Notice the date is 1990, so I'd have been 4 or 5 years old at the time... so I guess it could have been one of the episodes I saw. I don't remember that smiley face which sounds like a Cyberman kid though.

Hey, there's one notable fact about Mr Boom's physiology which I totally forgot to mention last time. His nose makes a squeak sound if you touch it. That was what really put him on the map for me as a kid so I'm at a loss to explain why I forgot it when I made the earlier post. And there's the name, Andy Munro. Guess it's the same guy then. I'm glad about that.

Other great things about this video include Mr Boom's use of the word "wheech" (or however you spell it), and the fact that the storyteller wears a spacesuit when he's outside, but the entrance to the Dome is just a cardboard door that won't shut properly.

So, in conclusion... thank you TributeToThePast... whoever you are!

The Pinocchio craze of Ought Seven

2009-09-07T00:54:00.001+01:00

When I look back fondly on my days at University, somehow it's the Spring 2007 semester that gives me the most nostalgic glow. However, one of the things about that time which really put it on the map had nothing to do with University life. I refer to when Hans Perk posted the animator drafts for Pinocchio!

In order to understand why that was so great, I need to take you back to the summer of 2002. Some piece of stimulus -- probably the Rankin-Bass animated versions of The Hobbit and The Return of the King -- gave me a renewed interest in some of the old animated films - especially the ones from the late '30s and very early '40s: Snow White, Gulliver's Travels, Pinocchio and Hoppity (aka Mr Bug) Goes To Town.

I do remember having that kidhood feeling of fascination/terror regarding Pinocchio. It was probably the one of those films which I had seen the least often... and perhaps that was why it was the one which caught my interest the most, although it would be almost a year before I saw it again. I did read about it, though, in a book that had been in the house a long time, which I had also not looked at for many years: Christopher Finch's The Art of Walt Disney.

In this book I discovered some information about the making of Pinocchio which I probably hadn't paid attention to when I looked in the book before. I learned that different animators were assigned to different characters: for example, Jiminy Cricket's animators included Ward Kimball, Woolie Reitherman and Don Towsley, and Lampwick was animated by Fred Moore. I recognised the names of many animators, and had long been able to distinguish the directors of Warner Brothers cartoons (I could tell a Chuck Jones cartoon from a Bob Clampett cartoon, for example), but this was the first time I had really learned anything about what the actual animators did.

In summer 2003 I had rediscovered "golden age" animation, and I found the Termite Terrace Trading Post on the ToonZone forums. (If those links are confusing you, this was before the TTTP moved to the Golden Age Cartoons forums) And there I was in contact with people who were able to tell you which person was responsible for which character or which scene in almost any cartoon - usually the Tom and Jerry and Warner Bros. shorts. I did hear (read, that is) vague talk about how the Disney studio always kept meticulous animation records, but I knew that if I ever asked the simple question "Who animated what in Pinocchio", even if anyone knew the answer it would be far to big and complicated for them to post.

Then in summer 2006, I saw that some animation historians had set up blogs where they were posting old studio records - animation drafts which listed each individual scene (what we would usually call a "shot") and who animated it. One blogger, Michael Sporn, had even posted up the first few scenes of the Pinocchio draft! But those were the only pages he had. And thus, it wasn't until February 2007 that I was able to finally see that which I had hoped for all those years.

So, over the next few weeks, as Hans posted more and more pages of the animation draft, I would learn the answer to "who animated what." In fact, at the time part of my University work actually involved studying old censuses which had been put onto computer databases and learning what conlusions could be reached from them. So after each of those classes on Tuesday mornings, I'd put aside one set of historical records and check the A. Film L.A. blog to see if a different type of historical records had been posted.

It was the start of a kind of Pinocchio craze among animation bloggers, but that will have to wait for another post...

Use your imagination!

2009-09-01T20:08:00.003+01:00

Some seven years ago I found a bunch of videotapes which had been hidden away in a cupboard. The videos contained educational kids TV programmes from about ten years earlier. Some of them were from the famous "Look and Read" series, which inspired me to discover Ben Clarke's site devoted to the "Look and Read" stories (at the time it was not part of the Broadcast for Schools site, which didn't exist back then) and create my own (much more simple-looking) website about two of the other "schools progs" from my kidhood - "Thinkabout Science" and "Science Challenge" -- with a LOT of help from Ben Clarke!

One series, however, I did not find any of was "Over the Moon". This was a Scottish show, starring a one-man-band who went by the name of "Mr Boom", which sort of rhymes with the name of the show. I didn't find any episodes because they were all on one video, and we taped over that video long ago, with some other educational stuff (including, I think, some "Look and Read") and then partly with "The Simpsons" until I discovered there was some "Look and Read" on it.

It's a shame that "Over the Moon" has been lost to the ages, though. What I remember is this:

It took place in a glass dome, purportedly on the surface of the Moon.
Mr Boom looked through a telescope to watch people on Earth, doing some sort of activity. The only one I remember was building a house, specifically the roof of a house, and Mr Boom explaining that this was to stop all the rain from getting in.
The second part of each episode involved some sort of guest, visiting him on the moon, and singing a song or reading a story. Actually, this may have only happened once, and I could be wrong about the song or story, except that most TV programmes for kids of that age tended to end with a song or a story.
The theme song included the lines: "Use your imagination, to jump over the moon, over the moon" and a harmonica solo. When they broadcast closing credits, it included the lines "You have used your imagination to jump over the moon, over the moon, return to your Earth location..."

I never really paid attention to the name of the guy playing Mr Boom. I guess I just assumed Boom was his real surname. I did realise that it wasn't really filmed on the Moon, though. And you know how I knew? When Mr Boom looked at the Earth, he looked through a telescope that pointed up the way. But everyone knows the Moon is *above* the Earth. So surely his telescope should be pointing down!

Always put off till tomorrow what you can do today...

2009-08-22T21:52:00.006+01:00

If you haven't read Terry Pratchett's "Lords and Ladies" or seen the animated film Aladdin and the King of Thieves, but intend to, you might not want to read the following post.

Quite a few years ago, I was reading Terry Pratchett's Discworld novel "Lords and Ladies". Near the beginning of the book, the youngest witch, Magrat, is about to marry King Verence II, who she fell in love with before she (or he for that matter) knew of his royal identity. She is uncertain about whether to go ahead with the wedding, and it is called off until the end of the book. For some reason, during the wedding scene a piece of music came into my head, and I had no idea where it came from. All I knew was the music seemed somehow appropriate... I was sure it must be from a film, where something was supposed to happen at the beginning of the film but, because of the film's main action, was delayed until the end.

For the next few years I pondered this mystery. Every so often I would be reminded of it, and it would sort of sit there irritating me, like a piece of food caught between two teeth.

It was only quite recently that I discovered it was actually even more appropriate to the situation than I had realised. I'm not sure what it was which made me see "Aladdin and the King of Thieves" for the second or third time in my life and the first in many years, but for one reason I'm glad I did.

Check out the soundtrack at 2:05. That's the mystery piece of music. You see, in this film Aladdin and Jasmine are "finally getting married" to quote several lines of the opening song, but the wedding is crashed by the forty thieves, and it doesn't really take place until the end of the film.

Now keep watching the clip until, oh, about 4:44, and you'll hear a remark by the Genie which might cause a few 'brows to raise. To wit : "I thought the ground wasn't supposed to move till the honeymoon." This is what is known as a smutty joke. What he means is "The ground isn't supposed to move until they are having sexual intercourse."

Well, presumably that's what he means. Of course, another interpretation of the line is "They aren't supposed to have sexual intercourse until the honeymoon."

I mean, really, you gotta feel bad for Aladdin and Jasmine. Some people have been a bit confused by the whole wedding angle of King of Thieves, noting that it looked like they were getting married at the end of the original Aladdin film -- y'know, the one which could afford such luxuries as a CGI flying carpet and Alan Menken. Well, that's what they were *going* to do, but The Powers That Be decided to change that... possibly because they were already planning to make a sequel or two, and unlike the people behind Shrek they didn't think it would be a good idea for the romantic leads to be a married couple for the duration of the sequel(s).

So, because of some avaricious executive, the poor young things have to wait from the end of the first film till the start of the third... and *then* they have to wait *again* until the end of the film!

OK, I guess there's some Alan Menken in King of Thieves. This coda (well, the song at least) was originally intended for the end of the first film, but removed because the characters were no longer getting married at the end (I assume).

Actually, quite a few reprises of the "Arabian Nights" song were cut from the first film... you can see them all here. But what's this? A difference in the lyrics! You see, the original, as printed on "aladdincentral" site, had a line about Aladdin and Jasmine "doing just what they all do best". In the King of Thieves version, you'll notice the line has become "May their marriage truly be blessed." Someone had a problem with the original line, and it's not even like it was saying they cut off their ears because they didn't like their faces.

So, to summarize:

Aladdin and Jasmine don't get a wedding at the end of the first film. They try to have one at the start of the third film but they are unable to until the end of the third film. The "ground isn't supposed to move", if-you-know-what-I-mean until their honeymoon. And even after they get married, they aren't permitted to "do just what they all do best", if-even-I-know-what-I-mean.

So, can we construct the Silver Age Disney viewpoint on sex and marriage (which may or may not go together like a horse and carriage) from this?

"Don't have sex until you get married. In fact, it's better if you don't even get married for a long time. And even then, after you get married, it's probably better if you don't do it then either."

DarmoktheGreen, bringing you semi-founded speculation since... um... possibly my Alice in Wonderland post. Or maybe the one about Indiana Jones.

A pirate I was meant to be!

2009-08-08T20:28:00.006+01:00

This should be a lot of fun. I'm a big fan of the Monkey Island series. I wonder how close they'll stick to the original script - new material would be good but I'm also hoping to hear the now-familiar voice of Guybrush performing lines like "You must have mistaken me for someone else, I am not a farmer."

I remember playing Monkey Island 2 when I was a kid - the version which had about 20 discs which you had to keep on taking out and putting in. I never reached the end of it, which was probably a good thing because you kind of need to be familiar with the climaxes of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi to really "get" the ending, two films I wouldn't see for a few years...

But that wasn't my introduction to piratical computer games. That would have been away back in about 1990, when we had a BBC Basic computer, and one of the games we installed was called simply "Pirate". I loved that game. There was no mouse on that computer, and you could give the game only six commands (expressed by six of the function keys) - north, south, east, west, yes and no.

Level one took place in a small sea (actually, I guess it was more of a lake - it was surrounded by coastline after all). Locations included dragon island (where you'd only survive if you had already acquired a sword earlier in your travels) and cat island, where a black cat would tell you its name - a name which would be required as a password to reach the land-based level 2.

Things which could happen to you included:

Killed by the dragon of dragon island
Cursed by a man who you refuse to rescue
Overthrown by your crew and ordered to "walk the plank" (a crocodile, or possibly a shark, eagerly awaiting your arrival in the sea)
Dashed against the rocks in that omnipresent coastline
Losing a battle with an enemy crew of pirates
Shipwrecked on an island and unable to signal for help because you hadn't captured any flags to signal with

That was in level 1. In level 2 you might get stampeded by a boar or struck by lightning... "and your boots smoke!" I never got any further than part way through level 2 so who knows how many wonders awaited later in the game?

Of course, as various characters point out in Monkey Island 3, you can't die in a LucasArts adventure game (unless they're trying something new) so I'm unlikely ever again to read (or hear) the following pronouncement:

"Cap'n, we are done for! The dogs are too much for us."

Eels!

2009-06-29T14:13:00.006+01:00

It seems that this old copy of "The Hundred and One Dalmatians" has a couple of pages missing. That's a bit annoying. Maybe I should try and find another one.

In the meantime, here are some thoughts regarding Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, specifically the infamous banquet scene.

In the extra features on the DVD, we hear Lucas and Spielberg saying how they wanted the scene to be full of old-fashioned slapstick comedy. Meanwhile, the scriptwriters Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz express their interest in Indian culture and Hindu religion. No-one suggests there's any sort of clash here, but I think there might be. Huyck and Katz wanted to make a film which takes place in 1930s India, while Lucas and Spielberg wanted to make a film which takes place in a fictional India which might be found in a 1930s film.

You ever seen this early draft of the script? It's discussed in this great article "Raiders of the Lost Drafts", but there's a few things the article doesn't mention but which I think are worth calling attention to. The banquet is there in all its glory, but it's followed by a scene with Indy and the English colonial officer. Indy reads the "bizarre choice of menu" as a clue that Pankot Palace is not what it seems, as "a devout Hindu would never touch meat". That may be a generalisation but if so it's a lot closer to the truth than the implication made in the film - that live eels served in the body of a snake, soup full of eyes and chilled monkey brains are representative of Indian cuisine.

Of course, this short scene doesn't appear in the film. My idea is that Lucas and Spielberg devised the banquet scene without really thinking about whether it was "accurate" or not, because they weren't really thinking of it as taking place in a real version of India. Huyck and Katz, with their genuine interest in India, tried to explain the strange food by calling attention to it as being a sign that Pankot Palace did not follow usual Hindu beliefs. But Lucas and Spielberg didn't feel that the banquet needed any explanation and so, with their powers as executive producer and director, they cut it.

(You'll note I refer to "Lucas and Spielberg" throughout this post, as I'm not sure which person was responsible for each decision)

So, who was "right" then? The writers or the producer/directors? Well, I've read posts on forums by a few people identifying themselves as Indian, some who like the finished film and some who feel offended by it. So I guess there's no one answer. But I think the portrayal of the Indian characters in any version of Temple of Doom is better than the portrayal of the African characters in the proposed "Monkey King" film, which contains an "ADORABLE" pygmy named Tiki, who is studied by a zoologist and lives in a zoo cage.

(Note: Although the online version of the script indicates it was written in 1995 as a potential fourth film, it was later found out that it was actually written some time earlier as a potential *third* film -- you can see some elements in the script which wound up in Last Crusade)

And if you'd prefer that I defended my own culture instead, well, I can do that too. I'm not from the Highlands myself but even I can tell that the supposedly Scottish characters in the opening scenes of Monkey King are not at all like anyone you might find in this country, bearing names such as "Seamus Seagrove" and "Bottomley", using expressions like "truer than an angel's kiss" and "like you've seen a screamin' banshee" and dropping their 'H's all over the place. The only positive thing I can say about these ridiculous Irish stereotypes is that they aren't supposed to be Irish characters...

One Hundred and One Alterations!

2009-06-27T00:02:00.002+01:00

I was looking in the cupboard for something else entirely, and I found a copy of Dodie Smith’s “The Hundred and One Dalmatians”, which was adapted into the animated film “One Hundred and One Dalmatians” … sometimes referred to as “101 Dalmations” … or sometimes misspelled “… Dalmations” … which was read to me as a kid *before* I saw the film!

For a while I’ve been wanting to write close comparisons of animated films and the books they were adapted from, so where better to start than one of the best? According to the extra features on the new DVD, Dodie Smith herself contacted Bill Peet to tell him that the film was even better than her book! (And I bet Bill was doubly thrilled, seeing as he and not Walt was being praised for the adaptation) So in the near future I’ll be comparing the Dalmatians book and film, and hopefully it will be the first in a series.

By the way, a while ago Mark Mayerson posted more of a brief overview of the differences between the two versions of the story, and Hans Perk posted an early script draft of the film which in some ways is closer to the events in the book.

He-animals and she-animals

2009-06-19T09:09:00.004+01:00

I was just thinking of the word "gander" and how there doesn't seem to be a female equivalent, other than "goose" which can be used for either sex. I realised the same was true of ducks -- a male duck is a drake but a female duck is just a duck, which could be either -- and the opposite was true of a bunch of mammals: a "fox" can be male or female, but a female fox is a vixen, a "dog" can be male or female, but a female dog is called something which might mean I need to put an "adult content" warning on this blog.

Looking at those examples, it seems as if birds are female "by default" and that mammals are male "by default" ... but of course, there's more to it than that.

In an episode of The Simpsons, one of the characters (one of Marge's sisters, Patty or Selma) remarks that "There are no lady goats. A lady goat is a sheep." Obviously the writers intended that as a joke, but it's interesting how the *character*, if not the writer, thought of "sheep" as the name for a female creature.

I guess it's a general rule for farm animals: the farmers breed them to produce more of their kind, as well as by-products of reproduction (milk, eggs) and so they find it more profitable to have more females around. Therefore female farm animals have more of a public presence, and so they colour perceptions of the whole species. Specieses. You know.

Take cows. A female cow is a cow, a male cow is a bull. The situations different from the ducks and geese mentioned above, as nobody uses "cows" as a general name for both sexes. But people, if they don't think about it *too* hard, tend to attribute the female name (cow) and characteristics (milk) to the whole species -- remember a character in an advert for some milk drink, called something like "Hugh Heifer", who was very definitely male but looked like a (female) cow, complete with udder? -- and, according to language enthusiast Bill Bryson, prudish Victorians would sometimes call bulls "male cows" or even "gentlemen cows".

And chickens. Well, seems like we've got some equality here. A female is a hen, a male is a cockerel or rooster. And yet... "hen" and "chicken" are sort of treated as synonyms, and once again, the undeniably female charateristic of laying eggs is generally thought of as an activity of "chickens" as a species. Even though Foghorn Leghorn has often identified himself as a chicken -- rooster, that is!

And how about pigs? Seems about the same -- a female is a sow, a male is a boar. But when do we really hear the word "boar" except when referring to a wild one? And, even more so, a wild pig is always a "wild boar". There must be wild sows out there, wherever there are wild boars... else where would all the wild piglets come from (or "wild boar piglets" as they seem to be generally called... is that why there aren't more of them?)?

But I guess wild animals *are* male by default. Both sexes of lion are lions, and a female is also a "lioness". Hmmm... there aren't too many other examples of that. There used to be of course: it used to be more common for a female tiger to be called a "tigress" or the female of other species to be referred to as a "she-" followed by the species name (e.g. she-wolf). I don't think anyone ever spoke of a he-anything, unless it was a "he-cow".

OK, what about domesticated animals then? Not the ones who are bred out of their natural life-cycle or gender ratio, but the pets, the companions? We've already covered dogs at the beginning, but it goes much further than that, as there are people who call all dogs "he" whether they are actually male or female. Curiously, for such people all cats are "she."

So does that mean that cats, as a species, are identified by the same name which distinguishes female cats from the guys? Well... sort of. A male cat has a special name for him, a "tom cat". But a female cat? Some people say "tabby cat" but of course that's ridiculous -- "tabby" refers to the cat's markings, and there are plenty of "tom" cats who are also "tabby". Heck, where I live, we have one, and Tom is actually his *name*, so you really can't argue with that.

So, what's my point in this digression? Nothing really... but I guess it's part of the human trend to put everything into pairs (I remember from English lectures that there's a word for that -- unfortunately I don't remember what the word is. Once I find out I'll edit this post, so it will look like I remembered all along). A dog is male, so a cat must be female.

Raiding memories

2009-06-13T23:47:00.002+01:00

Watched Raiders of the Lost Ark again this evening, and, as I always am when I see it, I was reminded of the massive gap between the first and second time I saw it.

About five years ago I saw all the Indiana Jones films (well, all the Indiana Jones films so far) for the first time in ages. A lot of the details I saw just as I remembered them - for example, I remembered Indy climbing under the van and back in, then throwing the Nazi soldier out of the front, and the soldier trying to copy what Indy did, but failing.

However, a lot of things were different from the way I remembered them... and what's more, they're different from the way I *still* remember seeing them when I first saw the film. When I watched Raiders again in '04, I didn't just say "Oh, yes, of course, that's how it really went", I still remember the other version of the film. The one with different camera angles, some scenes in a different order... and the grand finale, where the villains open the ark and it causes them to melt (you know the scene if you know Indiana Jones) taking place inside a building, overgrown with weeds and creepers, with Indy and Marion nowhere near them.

About five years ago I saw Raiders for the first time in ages. It was great to see it again. But somehow I wish I could see that "other" Raiders again, the one that must only have existed inside my head, for some mysterious and unknown reason.

"Who's got a kiss for the pickety witch, the pickety witch, the pickety witch?"

2009-06-09T11:56:00.005+01:00

On Monday, 21st April 2008 I finished my work for University. Later that same day I took part in a fellow student's film project.

It had been his plan to make a "Sweded" version of Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow to enter into a competition -- he missed the competition but he decided to make the film anyway. And I was cast as the "Town Elder"... so my role was to say there's no such thing as a headless horseman and then be proved 1) wrong and 2) dead when the Horseman removes my own head.

There were a few setbacks during filming -- for example, a *real* horse showed up (although its rider was a woman, and she had a head) who was a bit scared by us all -- and it wasn't even like we had a headless *horse* prop!

But the biggest setback was the fact that it turned out afterwards that the camera we were using no longer worked. So we had to film again a couple of days later. This time the guy who was going to play the Mayor-type person (Katrina's father) dropped out so I became the Mayor instead and someone else became the Town Elder.

However, it turned out that this time the *tape* was faulty, so it had to be filmed all over again... on the following Monday. This time I didn't have enough time to be the Mayor (for some reason I'm not really sure about) so I was back to being the Town Elder again.

Oh well. It's not as if I'm all that familiar with the Sleepy Hollow story, and what I do know about it involves a character named "Brom Bones" who doesn't appear to be in Burton's version.

Oh, note the extra "E" in Sleeepy Hollow, presumably to distinguish it from the original film. I guess it's like the clones in Timothy Zahn's "Heir to the Empire" books.

Cartoon Idiocy!

2009-06-01T17:11:00.001+01:00

In the not-too-distant past, the Golden Age Cartoons (GAC) forums had an annual contest to design an "ugly public domain video cover." If you've ever been to a second-hand place and have at least a passing interest in cartoons you'll have an idea of the sort of thing I'm talking about.

They contain a bunch of cartoons from the 30s and 40s (usually) which have, for some reason or other, fallen into public domain, usually with very bad image and sound quality. The covers invariably have poor attempts at pictures of some of the characters featured in the cartoons, as well as written info which betrays a lack of knowledge about the cartoons and, when the titles are even included, they are often misspelled.

Cartoons which are unfunny, not even intended to be funny, perhaps a little too racist for the more impressionable kids, and not even intended to be watched by kids (such as the WW2-era "Private Snafu" series, originally shown only to the U.S. army) are all thrown together in the name of wholesome children's entertainment.

So, the GAC competition is designed to encourage its members to parody these little quirks by drawing covers of their own, for fictional public domain videos. The results of the contests can be found here: 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007. For the record, I'm The Spectre. Unfortunately, when I submitted my entry to the 2007 contest, I accidentally sent an earlier version of it, which I had since updated.

That was for those of you (yes, I'm assuming some people are actually reading this blog, how egotistical can you get?) who aren't familiar with the Golden Age Cartoons forums.

Now, here is the web debut of the final version of my 2007 Ugly PD Cover, the one I thought I had submitted until the entries were posted online and I discovered, to my shame, that I had actually submitted the earlier, inferior version.

Kids think the darnedest things, part one

2009-05-21T17:00:00.001+01:00

I remember when I was a kid I enjoyed a game of Junior Scrabble. That's the version of Scrabble where the words are already spelled out on the board, helpfully illustrated with pictures, and you just have to cover them over with identical tiles.

For some bizarre reason I thought that the non-junior version of Junior Scrabble was "(A Question of) Scruples". I must, at some point in my kidhood, been told that "Scruples" was a "grown-ups game" or something, and, because the name sounded kind of like "Scrabble" I assumed it was the grown-up version of the same game.

Kids' minds work in weird ways, don't they? Or maybe it's just my mind that works in weird ways.

Saccharine?

2009-05-05T22:10:00.000+01:00

While in general I think that Bryan Talbot's "Alice in Sunderland" is great, there's one claim he makes in it which I take issue with. He says that some people only know the Alice story through "the saccharine Disney version."

It's the use of the word "saccharine" which I object to. The term, when used metaphorically like this, would normally refer to an over-concentration on cuteness or lightness in tone, and when, as in this case, describing an adaptation of another work, suggests that the harsher elements of the original have been downplayed or removed entirely.

Is this really the case with Disney's "Alice in Wonderland"? Well, one of the most famous omissions from the film is the "Pig and Pepper" sequence where a small boy is shaken violently and eventually turns into a pig, but on the other hand, the Disney version does make some of the other scenes a little crueller than Carroll wrote them.

One such scene is where Alice has turned into a giant (one of many times) and is stuck inside the White Rabbit's house. The Rabbit sends a lizard named Bill down the chimney. In the book, Alice gives the chimney a kick and Bill shoots out and lands in the garden, to be promptly nursed to health and appear later in the story. In the film, Alice sneezes, causing Bill to soar into the sky... and never be seen again!

Maybe it's "saccharine" that film-Alice is not intentionally responsible for what she does to Bill, unlike book-Alice? On the other hand, it seems perfectly in-character for book-Alice to behave the way she does in the film, and not desire to cause Bill any harm.

Later in the film, some of the card painters are seen being dragged away to be executed following the Queen of Hearts' famous "OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!" command, and we are to assume that her orders were carried out. Carroll makes it clear that they are not beheaded -- Alice hides them out of harms way, and later is told that the Queen "never executes nobody" (although this double-negative may be one of Carroll's semantic jokes -- she doesn't execute *nobody*, she executes *somebody*.).

One fairly morbid incident occurs in both versions - the story of the Walrus and the Carpenter, who lure oysters away from their homes and eat them. It's a different sort of case though, I guess, as even within the book or film it features as a fictional story, less "real" than the other events.

The animal characters in the film are also distinctly lacking the huge eyes and long eyelashes which characterize many of the studio's animals.

If Disney's Alice film is to be criticized (and it's a film I've always loved since before I can remember) then I don't think "saccharine" is the right criticism to make. Maybe "dumbed-down" might be a little more appropriate... Carroll includes a lot of clever verbal humour which is Disney and his writers leave out, and the book-Alice never, unlike her film counterpart, says that she would rather that books contain "nothing but pictures"!

Although I like the film considerably better than he seems to, I would say a more valid objection would be the one expressed by John Grant in "Masters of Animation", where he uses terms like "wackiness" and "zaniness" to describe what Disney made of the story.

The problem is, though, only an expert can citicize a Disney film for being "wacky" or "zany" -- to the casual person, Disney is never wacky or zany, it is twee and cutesy, while "everyone knows" that Warner Brothers had the racket on madcap humour.

As a general rule, that might well be true, but Talbot isn't talking about talking about general rules, he's talking about Disney's "Alice in Wonderland" film. And it seems like his only reason for calling it "saccharine" is because, well, it's a Disney film. And you don't need to actually watch a Disney film to form an opinion on it.

Kind of a shame really. It's obviously not as big a deal as forming prejudiced opinions about people because of the colour of their skin, the place they come from, their religious beliefs (or lack thereof) etc., but it's still kind of a shame.

Any thoughts or opinions?

First post

2009-04-25T23:09:00.000+01:00

Hi, this is the beginning, I guess. People from VF or VFF might know me as DarmokTheGreen, or from GAC and animation blogs as the spectre. I used to have a livejournal at http://darmok47.livejournal.com/ - you can check that out if you want.

I'm hoping to write in here some thoughts, ideas and opinions about films, often about the way they're different from the works which inspired them, such as books, tv series, even early drafts of the same film. I'm also hoping to use the blog as a way of displaying some of my own creative efforts, and maybe also telling a few anecdotes plus other smaller things which I'll just post because I feel like it and I think other people might like to read them.

Well, that's it for an introduction. Hope to see you around!