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Frank Tashlin’s VAN BORING (HE NEVER SAYS A WORD)

September 30th, 2008 by Scott Marks

An after work cocktail was never far from Van Boring’s (or Tashlin’s) thoughts.

An article in this morning’s edition of The Stripper’s Guide (a blog dedicated to the history of the American newspaper comic strip) caught my attention. It had been ages since I considered Frank Tashlin’s early work as a comic strip artist and the time seemed right to talk about this chapter in the career of my favorite comedic filmmaker.

Where I come from, Francis Fredrick von Taschlein (no wonder he went by the name Tish-Tash) is a cultural icon. I was with Tash in diapers, watching his Looney Tunes on my parent’s ancient black-and-white Philco. The films he made with Jerry Lewis followed me through adolescence and as a budding young cinephile, and his CinemaScope masterpieces The Girl Can’t Help It! and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? forever changed the way I look at movie comedy. As an adult, nary a day passes where I don’t view some aspect of our modern world through Tashlin-colored glasses.

Tashlin’s strip was so popular that it spawned its own doll!

Everyone knows that Frank Tashlin was a brilliant animator who later went on to apply his squash-and-stretch sensibilities to live-action features. He began his career in animation on Paul Terry’s Aesop’s Film Fables. In 1932, after a brief stint with Amadee Van Beuren, Tashlin moved to Termite Terrace where his rapid ability to crank out drawings made him one of Leon Schlesinger’s star players. What many of you may not know is that while at Warner Bros., Tash started up his own “silent” comic strip in 1934 called Van Boring (He Never Says A Word).

At first glance, the squat, bald-headed Van Boring resembles jazz band leader Paul Whiteman. In a 1971 interview, Tashlin told animation historian Michael Barrier, “We used to make cartoons (of our) bosses all the time, of Van Beuren, around the studio. We were always doing anti-Van Beuren things. We developed a character, which looked something like him. Well, I started using him in magazine cartoons, as a throwaway character, and then when I came out (to L.A.), I developed him as a pantomime comic strip.”

To the best of my knowledge, Tashlin never appeared in any of his live action features, but a fellow named “Tish-Tash” was a regular in the Van Boring strips. According to Michael Barrier, Van Boring’s lanky, stringy-haired accomplice “was a recurring character in Van Boring, especially in the continuity that made up its last few months, when Tish and Van were marooned on a desert island with two children, Nip and Tuck.”

Tashlin was fired from Warner Bros. when he refused to give Schlesinger a piece of his comic strip revenues. “He wanted a cut of it,” Tashlin remembered, “and I said go to hell. So he fired me.” At that time, Tash had his sights set on bigger fish: “The thing that I had in mind then was to have my own cartoon studio. That’s what I wanted.” After leaving Warners in 1934, Tashlin worked for Ub Iwerks’ animation studio and as a gagman for producer Hal Roach. In 1936, after Van Boring had been put to rest, Tashlin returned to Warner Bros. where he went on to direct several comedic masterpieces, most notably the existential antics of Porky Pig’s Feat.

See more Van Boring comic strips here.

Frank Tashlin’s “Porky Pig’s Feat” (1943)

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Notes on Speedy Gonzales & Slowpoke Rodriguez, his half-baked cartoon cousin

July 27th, 2008 by Scott Marks

Last night a Mexican friend came over to watch some cartoons and, being the patronizing gringo that I am, the evening began with a handful of Speedy Gonzales shorts.

Of all the superstars in the Warner Bros. cartoon canon, Speedy Gonzales is probably the most nonessential. Within thirty-six hours of purchasing each of the five Looney Tunes Golden Collections, I had watched every cartoon and most of the supplementary features, including the audio commentaries. Until last night, the Speedy Gonzales disc remained the only virgin in the set.

With the possible exception of Being There, a feature length comedy cannot, nor should not be a one note proposition. (See Arthur. The title character is a drunk. Get it?) Live actors squandering five reels in search of variations to play on a one trick premise seldom works, yet with a little ink and paper and only seven minutes to fill, one joke can work miracles. Everywhere that the Wolf went Droopy was sure to go. No matter how hard he tries, Wile E. Coyote will never dine on Road Runner. Every move Daffy makes leads to a buckshot facial from Elmer’s rifle. In each instance, the comic resourcefulness and precision character response jumps out from the screen.

A grinning Speedy Gonzales yells, “Andale! Andale! Epa, Epa! Arriba! Arriba!” as he zips past El Pussygato, arms burdened with cheese for his impoverished amigos who react to his beneficence by jumping up and down.

Suddenly Little Audrey looks good.

Speedy wasn’t always a cuddlesome, Mexican hat-dancing mouse. In Robert McKimson’s Cat-Tails for Two, the pesos needed in order for Speedy to secure what would eventually become his trademark sombrero were spent on an unappealing gold front tooth. According to Robert McKimson, Jr., the fastest mouse in Mexico (and friend of everybody’s sister) was based on a pair of Mexican brothers his father played polo with. The grimy rodent, pitted opposite a much more appealing pair of John Steinbeck retreads, discharged little audience appeal short of Mel Blanc’s well-seasoned vocalization that he had spent years perfecting on The Jack Benny Program.

The studio had faith in the character so Friz Freleng and his designer Hawley Pratt set about retooling the rodent. Their final solution was a featherless cross between Tweety Pie and the Road Runner. As a Coyote substitute to play opposite Gonzales, Freleng recruited the services of his venerable foil, and Tweety’s arch nemesis, Sylvester the Cat aka Sylvero Gato. Speedy would frequently sneak up behind Sylvester and substitute a couple of “Arriba! Andale’s!” for “Meep Meep’s’” that sent the cat soaring to the stratosphere. Cannibalizing his own creation, Freleng modified Tweety’s “I like him, he’s silly” catchphrase to fit the mouse.

Continue reading Notes on Speedy Gonzales & Slowpoke Rodriguez, his half-baked cartoon cousin

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Dig A Hole: DAVEY AND GOLIATH co-creator Richard Sutcliffe

May 22nd, 2008 by Scott Marks

Gee, Davey, Richard Sutcliffe died.

Along with Gumby creators Art Clokey and Ruth Clokey Goodell, Dick Sutcliffe devised the religious claymation TV show Davey and Goliath. He died May 11in Dallas of complications from a stroke. He was 90.

If it looks like a Gumby and walks like a Gumby, it must be a Gumby, right? Not necessarily. I don’t ever remember Gumby feeding his orange ass Pokey a theological dissertation before mounting him.

Davey and Goliath was a Christian-themed children’s show that creeped the hell out of me. While Gumby was a source of great entertainment, even as a kid I could smell D&G’s religious propaganda a mile away.

In 1959, the United Lutheran Church contracted with Clokey Productions to produce the series. The stop-motion sermon about a suburban boy and his talking dog aired early Sunday mornings on Chicago’s Very Own WGN. The Church provided the show free of charge to any station willing to air them, so no wonder ‘GN took them up on their offer. The shows were aired without commercial interruption.

Sutcliffe launched the series to spread a religious message without losing younger viewers with overly complicated concepts, his daughter, J.T. Sutcliffe, told The Dallas Morning News. By “overly complicated concepts” I assume Ms. Sutcliffe meant character animation, narrative structure and moralist decla(y)mation.

The stories followed a dim formula that was even more rudimentary than it’s brightly lit backgrounds. Each week Davey would encounter a moral obstacle that could only be resolved through inspirational dogma that was generally delivered by a dog.

To a five-year-old Jew, these characters offered more dread than solace. Long before I grasped the concept of Valium, these brainwashed zombies appeared to be self-medicated.

Church leaders approached Sutcliffe about using television to reach young people when he was director of Lutheran radio and television ministry in New York. He chose a format that would offer sound theology while being entertaining, his daughter told the newspaper. One out of two ain’t bad.

Ironically, the voice of Davey’s father was provided by Hal Smith, better know as Otis the Drunk on The Andy Griffith Show.

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Dig A Hole: Ollie Johnston, the last of Disney’s Nine Old Men

April 15th, 2008 by Scott Marks

Ollie Johnston

And then there were none. Ollie Johnston, the last of Walt Disney’s exalted Nine Old Men has died at the age of 95.

The term, a variation on Franklin Roosevelt’s invective for the nine ultra conservative justices of the Supreme Court, referred to an elite core of animators who collaborated on every feature length Disney classic from Snow White through The Rescuers. Disney’s inner circle consisted of Les Clark, Woolie Reitherman, Eric Larson, Ward Kimball, Milt Kahl, John Lounsbery, Marc Davis, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston.

In their gargantuan squash-and-stretch Bible Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life Thomas and Johnston commented on their noble personage: “We never thought of ourselves as some elite group, and the only time it ever crossed our minds was when Walt made a kidding remark about his Nine Old Men being over the hill, or getting too decrepit to work, or losing all their old zip.”

“While no two of us were alike,” they continue, “we still had many traits in common. Foremost among these was the desire to put the finest possible entertainment on the screen…For twenty-five years this remarkable team worked together, dedicated to Walt and the medium and its constant improvement.”

Ollie Johnston was born in Palo Alto, California and later attended Stanford University where he worked on campus humor magazine the Stanford Chaparral. It was here Johnston met his future animation partner and fellow “Old Man,” Frank Thomas. After attending the University of California, Berkeley, and Chouinard Art Institute he accepted a position at Walt Disney Productions where he worked from January 21, 1935 to his retirement on January 31, 1978.

Ollie found romance in the Ink and Paint department and in 1943 married a fellow Disney artist Marie Worthey. Marie Johnston died May 20, 2005.

Around the time of Peter Pan (1951), Uncle Walt was already setting his sights on television in addition to a new type of amusement park he’d been dreaming up. Frank Thomas remembered, “We knew the moment Walt climbed onto a camera boom, we’d lost him.” While Walt still attended storyboard sessions, it dawned on the Nine Old Men and director Norman Ferguson the could no longer have the boss’s undivided attention. “Maybe there was less involvement (by Disney) with Peter Pan, but he was the motivation for the picture, so that didn’t matter much.”

According to Wikipedia, “Ollie’s lifelong hobby was live steam trains. Starting in 1949, he built a 1″ scale backyard railroad, with three 1/12th scale locomotives, now owned by his sons. This railroad was one of the inspirations for Walt Disney to build his own backyard railroad, the Carolwood Pacific Railroad, which again inspired the building of the railroad in Disneyland. In the 1960s Ollie acquired and restored a full-size narrow-gauge Porter steam locomotive, which he named the ‘Marie E.’ In 2005 it ran during a private night event on the Disneyland Railroad. This engine was sold to John Lasseter (of Pixar Studios fame). The engine is fully operational and ran recently at the Santa Margarita Ranch in May of 2007.”

On November 10, 2005, Ollie Johnston was among the recipients of the prestigious National Medal of Arts, presented by President George W. Bush in an Oval Office ceremony.

Animation historian John Canemaker referred to the team as “actors with a pencil.” By giving his staff members a way to animate all the characters in his scene, Disney offered even more control to his artists. In 1995 the studio released Frank and Ollie, an intimate, and profoundly affectionate documentary about how “their friendship changed the face of animation.” It’s as entertaining a story as any Johnston ever animated and next to watching one of the classics, there isn’t a better way to remember the man.

 

 

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New Photos Added: Woody Allen, Bugs Bunny, HATARI!, Betty Boop, Jerry Lewis, Movie Paperbacks

April 12th, 2008 by Scott Marks

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Bugs has Jugs?!?!?

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Filed Under Image Blog, News

New Photos added: Jerry Lewis, TAXI DRIVER, Betty Boop, Jean Arthur, The 3 Stooges and more!

April 5th, 2008 by Scott Marks

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Is nothing sacred?

For the past month, Emulsion Compulsion’s burgeoning Image Vault underwent some minor tweaking to smooth a few kinks in the system. Now it’s back up to speed and better than ever with over 10,000 photos for your entertainment pleasure!

Every weekend, I will post a list of all the pictures added to the Image Gallery during the previous week. It’s a bountiful harvest this week. Enjoy!

  • Cartoon All-Stars - 15 Photos (Betty Boop, Popeye, Bugs Bunny, Felix the Cat, etc.)
  • Signed 1963 LIFE Magazine ad featuring Irv Kupcinet for Meister Brau Beer
  • The 3 Stooges - 19 Photos from Larry Fine’s autobiography Stroke of Luck
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