THE CARTOON CRYPT: Magic Highway USA

THE CARTOON CRYPT

My friend Ken Avidor sent me this hilarious Disney transportation vision of the future from the 1958 Disneyland TV Show episode entitled “Magic Highway USA”. It looks like it was animated by Bruce McCall. Somehow they missed the brilliant modern innovations of talking on the phone and watching movies as you drive, which seem like such obvious good ideas!

THE CARTOON CRYPT: Metal Eating Bird (1930)

THE CARTOON CRYPT

Here is an utterly bizarre short by the largely forgotten animator and actor Charley Bowers. You have to skip over the excessively obnoxious first 40 seconds to get to the film. The fantastic animation isn’t until the last half of the film.

Read more about this film on the Internet Movie Database.

There’s a Charley Bowers DVD that I gotta see one of these days. Here’s the product description for that:

Who is Charley Bowers? The inventor of the no-slipping banana skin, unbreakable eggs, and cat-pushing trees! At the end of the 1920s, this unknown genius created and directed a score of cinematic burlesques filled with surrealist imagination, crammed with fantastic sights and animated puppets, among which the most delicious include “Egged On,” “Fatal Footstep” and “Now You Tell One.” His body of work is unique, though the astonishing course his career took has been chronicled by few and left him as one of the more enigmatic figures of American cinema. After a childhood spent with the circus, he became interested in animated drawing, adapting comic strips for the cinema including the “Mutt and Jeff” series created by Bud Fisher. Advances in animation which developed during this period explain the astonishing illusions which emerged in these comedic shorts. In the 1930s he directed “It#s a Bird,” his first sound film. Bowers returned to animation for advertising films, in particular the first short film by Joseph Losey, the oil-commissioned “Pete Roleum and His Cousins,” while also continuing his puppet films. He died in 1946, completely forgotten. To this day, 11 of the 20 short comedies are still considered lost. At the end of the 1960s, vault discoveries provided more of his story and three of the exhumed films were shown in 1976 at the Annecy Animated Film Festival, where they were met with enthusiasm. After 1992, worldwide research retrieved surviving prints of the missing films with requests to the world#s notable cinema collectors, who allowed access to their original elements. For the first time this extraordinary collection assembles the complete films of Charley Bowers which survive today, magnificently restored from the original elements with the collaboration of ten cinema societies.

THE CARTOON CRYPT: Somewhere in Dreamland (1936)

THE CARTOON CRYPT

Another Fleischer cartoon utilizing the rotograph. They use it very well here, having the mundane “real world” scenes take place in 2d, and the 3d scenes in Dreamland. The content seems atypical for a Fleischer cartoon… a sweet & cute little story, entirely free of violence and mayhem. Adult anxieties are present as usual for Fleischer cartoons, though… in this case an apparently single mother trying to support children in total poverty (from 1936, the depths of the Great Depression).

THE CARTOON CRYPT: Dancing on the Moon (1935)

THE CARTOON CRYPT

Here’s a fun Fleischer Studios cartoon that makes great use of the Max Fleischer invention, the Rotograph… it is an early example of the technique, as the cartoon is from 1935 and the patent wasn’t filed until 1936. The Rotograph was a technique of building a miniature set on a turntable that could be rotated while shooting cels in front of it to make it appear that the 2d drawings were in a 3d space.

Read more about this cartoon on The Big Cartoon Database here.

THE CARTOON CRYPT: Scrappy in Let’s Ring Doorbells (1935)

THE CARTOON CRYPT

I was curious to find some Charles Mintz cartoons, as I haven’t seen many of them. There aren’t a whole lot of them out there on the internets yet… he produced this one for Columbia, and it is directed by Art Davis. Mintz is probably best known these days for screwing Walt Disney out of the character Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. This beautifully animated cartoon starts slow, but boy does it get twisted. Alcoholism, child abduction and endangerment, gunfire, racism… yep, they don’t make ’em like this any more. If you are easily offended, you may not want to watch this one.

Believe it or not, there is a really nice site out there dedicated to Scrappy… SCRAPPYLAND.

The Original Boop-A-Doop Girl… Helen Kane

Betty Boop’s character was actually based by animator Grim Natwick on vaudeville performer Helen Kane. Miss Kane wasn’t pleased… here’s what Wikipedia says about it

In 1930, Fleischer Studios animator Grim Natwick introduced a caricature of Helen Kane, with droopy dog ears and a squeaky singing voice, in the Talkartoons cartoon Dizzy Dishes. “Betty Boop”, as the character was later dubbed, soon became popular and the star of her own cartoons. In 1932, she was changed into a human from a dog, her long ears turning into hoop earrings.

In 1932, Kane filed an unsuccessful $250,000 suit against Paramount and Max Fleischer, charging unfair competition and wrongful appropriation in the Betty Boop cartoons. The trial opened in April 1934 with Helen Kane and Betty Boop films being screened by Judge McGoldrick (no jury was called). Margy Hines, Bonnie Poe, and, most notably, Betty Boop voice-over talent Mae Questel, were all summoned to testify. McGoldrick ruled against Kane in 1934, claiming that Kane’s testimony could not prove that her singing style was unique or not an imitation itself (a little-known black singer known as “Baby Esther” was cited by the defence as “booping” in song).

Surprisingly, there are a lot of Helen Kane videos on the web… here are a few of them.

Here’s Helen Kane in “Dangerous Nan McGrew” (the name being a take off of the Robert Service poem The Shooting of Dan McGrew)

Here she is performing “I Love Myself Because You Love Me”

Here she is performing “He’s So Unusual” and “The Prep Step”

I can’t find any films or recordings of “Baby Esther,” unfortunately… it sounds like she may have been the original original Boop-A-Doop girl.

Musical Doctor (1932)

Ever wonder what Mae Questel (the voice of Betty Boop) looked like in real life? It seems strange that Betty’s wonderful voice could have emitted from anything human. Here are a couple films featuring Miss Questel.

Silver-throated Rudy Vallee (another utterly unique voice) stars with her in this short, Musical Doctor, from 1932.

Here’s another short film with Mae Questel and Bela Lugosi!