No-one... but Donald Duck!

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)

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.

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

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!

"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

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

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.