Happy New Year! Here’s a new year’s strip from 1904, featuring bizarre ball-boy and ball-buster Billy Bounce, drawn here by C.W. Kahles. Note this strip uses a joke in the title I erroneously had attributed in my mind to Wayne’s World… apparently it is much older. A brilliant joke it is- not.
I posted Billy Bounce strip earlier here.
Click the image below to see the full page (warning: contains offensive racial depictions, as is often the case with old comics).
Here’s Ub Iwerks’ Disney Silly Symphony The Skeleton Dance… the first of the Disney Silly Symphonies series. According to Wikipedia, it was the first cartoon to have non-post-sync sound.
My two-year old daughter likes old cartoons as much as I do, I think… we don’t watch much teevee, but we watch about an hour of online cartoons a week. She has different standards for them than I do, though. Usually she asks for Betty Boop or Gumby cartoons (she has good taste), but her other favorite request (since Halloween) is for cartoons with “spookies.”* I know you’re thinking, yeah, sure, obviously the guy with the goofy skull at the top of his website has a daughter who likes creepy cartoons… but she came up with this all on her own, as far as I can tell. So we’ve been watching lots of cartoons with ghosts, skeletons & other spooks… Ub Iwerks’ Disney Silly Symphony Skeleton Dance (which I’ll post after this) and the Fleischer Brothers’ Snow White, Minnie the Moocher, Swing You Sinners and Bimbo’s Initiation were obvious choices… here is a fun Iwerks obscurity featuring the unjustly forgotten Ub Iwerks’ character Flip the Frog. Flip has my favorite cartoon intro sequence of all time (tied with Betty Boop).
Have any favorite cartoons with spookies in them? Are they online? Help! I need more for the kid! Please let me hear about them in the comments.
*We’ve also been devouring John Stanley Little Lulu comics thanks to Dark Horse Comics wonderful cheap reprint books, for which she also requests “let’s read a spooky one!” every time. In this case, a “spooky” one generally is qualified by either having Witch Hazel in it, having ghosts in it, or simply having a pitch dark panel in it with two eyes in the dark.
My 2-year old daughter and I have been watching a whole lot of Betty Boop cartoons lately. Here’s a fun one. Homeland security is going to be all over Betty and Koko after this…
Here’s a fantastic link for you. Over at Jimland, someone is posting a ton of amazing Jimland Novelties made by the one and only Jim Woodring. Most of these handmade wonders were items fantastically and mysteriously described in the back of various Woodring comics (like the one pictured above). I never got around to sending away for any of them, much to my eternal, wailing regret. These regrets are soothed somewhat by this wonderful online treasure trove.
I just wrote a large post talking about five highlights of the first five years of The International Cartoonist Conspiracy… you can read it here.
No holiday season would be complete without the foodog guardians on either side of the chimney… for as we know, a roaring fire does not guarantee protection from rosy-cheeked elf invaders. The moon-born guardians of dreams are now available on mugs in which you can ironically drink caffeine-laden beverages in a vain attempt to avoid their fearsome and inevitable wrath. Click here to purchase the right-facing canine, and here to purchase his left-facing comrade.* These murderous beasts of Morpheus are also available (for a limited time) on a variety of garments that, unfortunately, will offer you no protection at all from them once they have your scent burning in their firey nostrils. Chain mail would really be more appropriate, but we’re all on a budget this time of year, aren’t we? Wear these fine threads and know, at least, that when you are devoured you will have seen them coming. Happy holidays!
*We take no responsibility for any hint of urine under the holiday tree corpse offering.