Couldn’t find this on the Dope, but then again my search skillz may NOT be all that mad today…
Somehow stumbled across some Laurel & Hardy cartoons from the 1960s last night, after watching one I figured it was a Hanna Barbera production (which after some quick research, found it indeed was), because the guys in construction crew that L & H were on had the trademarked color area covering the adult male’s mouth/chin (here’s an example of good old George Jetson w/ family- note he has the color area, but not Jane or Judy or even his boy Elroy - Flintstones had it too among others, but I figured Geoge is a better example since he’d have access to modern shaving technology, not 2 clams shell with a bee in them) - BTW, Laurel & Hardy were NOT drawn with this colored patch, but lots of adult male characters in the shows were.
I remember this from other Hanna Barbera shows, and didn’t find it particular realistic when I was 6, let alone now when I’m…slightly older.
My question is why? I though it might be to make it easier to animate mouth movements, and the women didn’t have such coloration since maybe female supporting characters didn’t have much ‘screen time’, and then I thought that was silly and figured this was as good a place as any to ask this question.
It’s the five-o-clock shadow. Very obvious if you look at Fred and Barney. Shorthand for “masculine” I guess; but because it’s unrealistic they didn’t use it for representational characterization like L&H.
I don’t have a cite, but I’m sure it’s so they can animate the mouth without having to draw a new face every frame. I think for the female and child characters, without the five o’clock shadow border justification, the line would make them look wrinkled or like a creepy marionette.
You now make me want to draw a line around my 5 o’clock shadow to see how it looks.
Female characters (such as Wilma or Betty) seemed to be drawn with much smaller mouths than the male characters, which could be how they avoided the re-draw line issue. (Also, female characters were definitely secondary, supporting characters in those earlier cartoons, ans so had much less screen time than the male characters).
Already answered above. I just wanted to say that it always bothered me. It was the HB house style, but no other cartoons had it (until Matt Groening copied it for his Simpsons), and most guys don’t have a noticeable patch like that, most of the time.
Then there’s the Simpsons episode where we see Homer in the bathroom shaving his face clean. It stays that way for about three seconds, before his five o’clock shadow rematerializes.
It’s the same reason that Wilma and Betty both wore necklaces - this was a breakpoint for “planned animation.” At these points only those things that had to be animated in the scene were changed.
Hanna-Barbara animation relied heavily on storytelling, sound effects and character development with animation quality deemphasized. This was necessary to churn out half-hour weekly animated shows before computers.
Also because they had tiny budgets, producing shorts for about $3000 compared to 1950s Tom and Jerry shorts produced for $35,000. So they had to cut every possible corner, reducing much of their output to the same repeating backgrounds and “animation” comprised primarily of mouths moving.
I don’t know what you’re saying here – certainly the women wore necklaces so that you only had to change the heads. It’s the same reason Yogi Bear and Huckleberry Hound 9and most of the HB animals, for that matter) wore collars and ties – so that there was a place where you could join the static body to the changing head.
But that’s not the reason Fred and Barney have “five o’clock shadow”. Nothing changes there. They’re not simply changing the mouths for every part of a word – they change the entire head. Those five o’clock shadows around the mouths don’t seem to serve any practical animating purpose – they’re just there as a style factor.
This is precisely why I chose George Jetson (disregarding the “Mirror-Mirror” George, of course, as that Star Trek episode aired about 4 years after the Jetson first ended) as an example, as he is clearly supposed to be clean-shaven, and yet he has this ‘discolored’ patch even in the morning (presumably just after his shower and machine shave). If that was supposed to be a short-hand for Masculine, well, I guess it’s a bit too late to call that really lame.
As with obvious animation short cuts like repeating scenery (one in particular I remember was a car-chase in the pet-store reality series “Magilla Gorilla”, where the characters kept passing the same weirdly angled city blocks over and over and over again), I guess I can see how it makes the animator’s life easier, but I wasn’t quite sure how much. The Wilma/Necklace & Betty/Choker details I never thought about as animation motion edges, but that does make sense.
Setting aside the obviously very true reason that it was needed to make animation easier, if I had to guess I would say it’s supposed to represent hardness of features.
A circle represented in 2D without any extra lines is assumed to be spherical (provided it’s a 2D representation of three dimensions, of course). Spherical = curves, softness. Women are supposed to have softer features, so their faces are left as unlined as possible except when you want to show wrinkles to suggest age.
On the flip side, men are supposed to be more angular. I don’t want to say chiseled – nobody could ever claim George or Fred were chiseled – but their features are sharper. So you have the lines near the mouth to suggest angles and flatter features, rather than the smooth roundness a female character would have.
It was just style. Humans hadn’t been depicted much in animation and the designers were looking for a way to make the characters distinctive. There may have been an element of the blue-collar look involved. Guys doing physical labor shower and shave after work, so the 5 o’clock shadow was already a cultural theme in live action (sometimes painted on for actors who couldn’t grow it naturally). HB was perfecting the stock system to reuse as many cels and backgrounds as possible in order to produce the Flintstones, so not much original artwork was done for any show. Adding the shadow would not result in much additional work for a cel that would be used many times.
It’s also the same reason H-B’s animal characters, such as Yogi Bear, Boo Boo, and Huckleberry Hound wore collars and ties, or why Quick Draw McGraw and Baba Looey wore kerchiefs about their necks. Well, I know the kerchiefs made Queekstraw and Baba look “western” but it also made their heads and mouths easier to animate.
