I love old cartoons. I’ve located and watched almost every Loony Toon there is, so I was casting about for some other brand of 'toon.
I came across the Terrytoons channel on youtube, and I’ve been bingeing on these. Sheesh, I hadn’t seen these since I was about eight years old. The characters and style are coming back to me - I can pick out and predict gags which I hadn’t seen since the early 60s.
My taste hasn’t changed much since I was a kid. I found Mighty Mouse pretty dull, both then and now. Gandy Goose and Sourpuss are better. But the funniest, of course, are Heckle and Jeckle.
I was playing several H&Js last night, and my husband was watching along and laughing a lot, and said that he had never seen these as a kid. I can’t remember what show I must have watched in the early 60s. I know there was a Mighty Mouse show - was there a Heckle and Jeckle show too?
You can always tell when one particular animator takes over drawing a scene. His style is wild and crazy - stretchy, distorted, and hysterically funny. I think he did a few Popeyes at one point. I’ll have to look him up.
There are hundreds of Terrytoons out there. Paul Terry started in the 1920s, making silent black and white cartoons, and kept making them all the way up to the early 1970s. So there are a lot of them on youtube for me to discover. Loads o’ fun!
I remember watching the Mighty Mouse show Saturday mornings when I was three or four (1958–59). My mother made up a Mighty Mouse costume for me to wear while I was watching it.
I think Heckle and Jeckle were featured on the same show. I definitely remember watching their cartoons in the late '50s, but suspect I missed a lot of the jokes.
I remember being scared of the villain on Mighty Mouse—I think he was kind of wolfish and wore a stovepipe hat? I think he was always kidnapping Mighty Mouse’s girlfriend … Mitzi? Even at my tender age, I thought she was one hot item!
I know I could easily look all this up on the Internet, but I’m curious as to how much I remember without Googling it.
Terry knew he wasn’t Disney or Fleischer or even Walter Lantz, and was content to be the “bargain basement” studio.
There was, indeed, a Heckle and Jeckyll show – I remember it. In fact, according to wikipedia there were several:
Terrytoons eased into the TV era by making small cartoons that showed on things like Captain Kangeroo – Tom Terrific (And the Mighty Manfred) – or in syndication (Deputy Dawg, Sydney the Elephant, Hector Heathcote, Hashimoto Mouse)
I was shocked to learn that Paul terry, the founder, basically screwed his employees by selling the studio to CBS against his promises. Fortunately CBS kept the studio pretty much intact, and Gene Deitch (who did the Captain Kangaroo deals, and who just died last April) and Ralph Bakshi and others kept it going.
Thanks for that. Boy, that Pincushion Man sure was a p…(uh, was that for kids? Because the position of his appendage, and the fact that he kept putting it in his mouth, sure was suggestive.)
For sheer surrealism, it’s hard to beat some of Max Fleischer’s Betty Boop cartoons, especially the ones with Cab Calloway (which mention drug use).
Betty Boop actually started out as a dog, Bimbo’s girlfriend. Eventually her ears evolved into hoop earrings.
And all the Fleischer cartoons, including Koko the Clown and Bimbo, were pretty weird, especially before the Hays Code in 1934 put damper on all the sex, drugs, and jazz music.
I didn’t realize it as a kid, but the song Koko (transmogrified into some kind of ghost thing) in the Betty Boop Snow White cartoon – “St. James Infirmary Blues” - is a lament about the singer’s lover who died, according to one source, of venereal disease.
There are images of skeleton and gambling in the background, and, in one memorable shot, the singer’s head forms into a bottle and pours out a shot as it sings “booze”. All that just washed over my young ignorance and innocence, but it was pretty obvious when I started watching the cartoons in retrospectives as an adult.
Those toons are so WEIRD! Does anyone know of an accessible analysis of why they were made as they were? Just seems so odd that that sort of surrealism would have been widely disseminated as part of mass entertainment.
How did it work? You’d go the movies to see Clark Gable, and beforehand, would be subjected to either a surreal cartoon, or a newsreel? Wild!
When you can spare 78 minutes, watch this full-length animated feature. I saw it at a Sunday morning Kinder Cinema at the University of Wisconsin back in the '80s, and was blown away. (It was advertised as Hoppity Goes to Town, so i was expecting a Hoppity Hooper cartoon. Was I ever wrong!)
As you watch it, pay close attention to all the background details. The creativity of the Fleischer artists is astonishing. It’s also voiced by the legendary Stan Freed.
Surrealism as a movement was popular from the 1920s - 1950s 60s? It prob would have been more familiar to audiences during the cartoon heyday than today.
Surrealism has long been part of cartoons. It comes, I think, from artists doodling things to try and get the most provocative and attention-grabbing things they can. (I’ve seen this sort of thing with newspaper cartoonists and their sketch pads. It explains why you get outrageous and often non-canonical sight gags). All the studios did it at one time or another – Disney had that weird imagery in Fantasia, had Mickey in Wonderland (and later did Alice), and even collaborated with Salvador Dali (talk about surrealism) in an unreleased cartoon. Warner Brothers gave us porky in Wackyland long before Duck Amuck and similar cartoons, and Tex Avery was doing similar cartoons at MGM when he got there. And, of course, there’s the Heckle and Jeckyll Terrytoons cartoon Power of Thought, where they realize that they’re cartoon characters and can do anything. (This was excerpted in the movie The Twilight Zone in the “It’s a GOOD Life” segment).
But the Fleischer brothers got into this in a much bigger way in their 1930s cartoons. I don’t know why. Maybe it was because they were an urban bunch then (this was when their studios were in New York City, before they moved to Florida), whereas a lot of Disney’s crop were graduates of the bucolic Kansas City Film Ad Company. Maybe it was the Fleischer’s wholesale embrace of Jazz and jazz performers (along with the darker undertones of jazz lyrics – see what I say about Snow White anbove), while Disney tended to be more mainstream. Even when they brought in jazz (MusicLand, Donald in Mathemagicland, toot, whistle, Plunk, and Boom) it was instrumental, without those weird lyrics. Warner brothers cartoons with Jazz (I Like to Singa and others) made up their own songs.
Of course, Fleischers didn’t need jazz – they could get plenty weird without that for inspiration. Have a look at Bimbo’s Initiation
Thanks for the analysis, Cal. Just stuck me as different from the middle-of-the-road nature of so much that is intended for general consumption these days.
The closest analogy that comes to mind is when a theater presents trailers that supposedly appeal to the audience that came to see the feature film. Often the trailers cause me to wonder what I’m in for in terms of the film.
Another jazz performer they featured was Louis Armstrong, in some of his earliest footage, as a giant floating head chasing Koko and Bimbo in I’ll Be Glad When You’re Done You Rascal You. (Although the cartoon has racist imagery, this was standard for the time, and the Fleischers supported black musicians by including live footage even though this might get the cartoons banned in the South.)
Fleischer was also a technical innovator. Although other cartoons had mixed animation and live footage earlier, he made it a trademark. And he invented the Rotoscope. In fact, the ghost walrus in Minnie the Moocher is rotoscoped from Cab Calloway’s performance.
