THE CARTOON CRYPT: Pete Roleum and His Cousins (1939)

Here is a gorgeusly designed and animated, extremely bizarre stop-motion animation for the petroleum industry from the demented mind of Charley Bowers, the man who made the previously posted and equally bizarre Metal Eating Bird.

Note that you can get a dvd called Charley Bowers: The Rediscovery of an American Comic Genius (1926), which includes all of the Bowers films known to still exist here.

THE CARTOON CRYPT: Who Killed Cock Robin? (1933)

THE CARTOON CRYPT

Here is the last spooky cartoon I’m going to get to before Halloween… check out the expanding Directory of Vintage Spooky Cartoons here. It will continue to be updated as long as I keep finding more… and there are a lot more out there still. This is a Terrytoon called Who Killed Cock Robin! from 1933, discovered courtesy of the Saturday Morning Blog.

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

HEY! KIDS! COMICS! : Floyd Gottfredson’s Mickey Mouse in The Gypsies at Rodney Bowcock’s Comics and Stories : October 29th, 2008

STWALLSKULL'S HEY! KIDS! COMICS!

I haven’t had any time to blog lately, so boy did this list get out of control… way too many treasures to feature this time around (including a ton of Herriman, and even a Segar Herriman parody), so I’ll just feature one of them.

TODAY’S FEATURED ITEM:

Rodney Bowcock’s Comics and Stories brings you the Mickey Mouse comic strip adventure The Gypsies by Floyd Gottfredson (inked by Al Taliaferro) from 1931… with that scoundrel Walt Disney taking all the credit, as usual. Apparently, this one has never been reprinted in the US. Part one here, part two here. He thinks it will be presented on his site in a total of five parts.

INTERESTING LINKS: King Features Syndicate’s 1949 Famous Artists and Writers: October 22nd, 2008

STWALLSKULL'S INTERESTING LINKS

TODAY’S FEATURED ITEM: Golden Age Comic Book Stories brings us 60 pages of the 176 page King Features Syndicate 1949 promotional booklet Famous Artists and Writers, featuring bios and rare art from their many fantastic artists at the time. Interesting to see that Otto Messmer was getting full (and proper) credit for Felix the Cat… I had previously been under the impression he had been anonymous for his whole career as creator and primary artist of Felix the Cat (in animation, comic strips and comic books!), with the sinister Pat Sullivan stealing the credit. Mickey Mouse is, however, (unsurprisingly) still credited to Walt Disney instead of the brilliant Floyd Gottfredson. Disney’s personal lack of artistic skill must have led to an awful lot of awkward situations, I imagine. What a phony. Part one here, part two here.

THE CARTOON CRYPT: Popeye in Shiver Me Timbers (1934)

THE CARTOON CRYPT

Another cartoon for the ongoing Vintage Spooky Cartoons list… the Fleischers’ Popeye versus a ghost ship.

Unfortunately, the only version of this available online that I can find right now is the colorized version. I’m not talking Ted Turner colorized either… bad as that is, this is much worse. My understanding is that at some point (around the time color television came around?) some brilliant entrepreneur decided it would be a good idea to make a buck by remaking some old public domain black and white cartoons in color by tracing cartoons on the cheap, coloring them and re-filming them. The results are poorly traced, and hideously colored, with far less “in-betweening” than the originals… leaving the animation a clunky, jerky, ugly mess… a hollow shell of the original. I imagine that they generally have chunks of the cartoon outright missing as well, judging from the budget-minded nature of this monstrous process (not to mention the sort of censorship that inevitably occurs when dimwits revisit the material of yesteryear and judge it by modern standards). In the very likely event I have any of this information wrong, someone out there please do correct me in the comments. Needless to say, I’ll replace this with a black and white version if it becomes available.

Read more about this cartoon on the Big Cartoon Database.

INTERESTING LINKS: Krazy Kat in the Kolumbia Kartoons at Uncle John’s Crazy Town: October 14th, 2008

STWALLSKULL'S INTERESTING LINKS

TODAY’S FEATURED ITEM: Uncle John’s Crazy Town has been posting a lot of amazing looking stills from old Columbia Krazy Kat cartoons. I have always arbitrarily & stupidly dismissed these cartoons without watching them, as they totally ignored the “source material”… George Herriman’s brilliant Krazy Kat comic strips. It appears that in spite of their apparent disdain for or dismissal of Herriman’s work, their cartoons stand on their own as something werra werra interesting. From seeing the stills he has posted, they look pretty amazing… I’m going to have to see what Columbia Krazy Kats I can hunt down on the internet. Check out the short clip of the devious looking mesmerist doing his thing from the Krazy Kat cartoon Svengarlic by clicking the above image… and then check out the rest of the blog to see Kat stills.