Walt Disney and Bob Clampett recycled
April 7th, 2009 by Scott Marks
Former student and current Facebook friend Julie Mynatt sent me this meticulously researched and assembled comparison reel showing how later day Disney raped the bones of Uncle Walt. Go to YouTube and search “Disney Deja Vu.” You’ll be surprised to see just how much of this stuff there is.
The Jungle Book (1967) was Walt’s swan song, the last animated feature he personally oversaw from beginning to end. Disney gave the green light to The Aristocats (1970) which turned out to be the studio’s first animated feature to be released after his death. You’ll notice that none of the reused footage appears in a film that Disney signed off on. He would never let reused animation sully a production he personally supervised. Honestly, I have never seen The Aristocats or Robin Hood (1973). They opened at a time in my upbringing when it was hip to reject cartoons in favor of trying to sneak into R rated pictures. Even with the voices of Phil Harris and Pat Buttram, these clips may have forever scared me off these two pictures.
Legend has it that without Walt to guide them, Robin Hood quickly went over budget and the studio had to cut corners. That is what probably motivated the tracings of cels past. The same can’t be said of Robert Clampett. Clampett was the star student who didn’t apply himself. Instead of spending the entire week on a homework assignment, Clampett wrote seven of the ten assigned pages and the night before it was do plagiarized the rest. While the folks at Disney were working under sudden budget restraints, Clampett was just plain lazy. He’s still my favorite animator in the Warner Bros. stable, but some of what follows is uncalled for.
WARNING: Much of what follows is politically incorrect. It reflects past thinking, not contemporary society. I hope…
Tags: bob clampett, disney cartoons, Looney Tunes, merrie melodies, recycled animation, reused animation, robert clampett, robin hood, the aristocats, the jungle book, Walt Disney, warner bros., warner bros. cartoons, warner brothers cartoonsFiled Under Rants
Cartoon Movie Posters
September 14th, 2008 by Scott Marks
My friend Tomi over at Celebrity City asks, “Did cartoons get billed with the main feature with lobby posters?”
Many cartoons didn’t even have lobby posters. There would be a stock one sheet with a blank space for theatre owners to insert a title card. In the case of the stock Warner Bros. poster pictured above, the short of the week was Friz Freleng’s Tweety Pie (1947). If there was room, exhibitors would frequently stick the names of popular cartoon stars on the marquee.
According to movie poster guru Bruce Hershenson, “The studios never cared very much about making cartoon posters…Perhaps the studios felt that since theatres already had to display two posters for their double feature, they wouldn’t have space for a cartoon poster.
“In the case of cartoons for which individual posters were made, very few survive. For silent cartoons, there are only a few examples known for most series, even though some series lasted many years, and for some series no examples exist. For 1930s cartoons, a greater number of posters are known on each series but still only a small percentage of the total number made. Most of the posters made after 1940 are known to exist, but certainly not all of them.”
All of these scans come from my collection of animation books, most notably Mr. Hershenson’s Cartoon Movie Posters (1994). Just for the record, I would kill for a copy of that Warner Bros. Cartoons poster. More than an original Holiday, hell, even more than The Day the Clown Cried, that’s the one sheet I’d love to wake up to every morning.
From Disney, to Warners to Avery to Terrytoons and many, many more of your animated favorites, visit the Cartoon Movie Poster Gallery here.
And for even more anthropomorphic fun, check out the Cartoon All-Stars Gallery.
Filed Under Image Blog